|
Curvature of Earth posted:Professional libertarian John Stossel cheats death, and insults the very institution that made that possible, because of course he does. Like all professional libertarians, Stossel has no "off" switch to his dickishness. He is always in rear end in a top hat politics mode. Holy poo poo. How can someone go through loving cancer treatment of all things and not want the full battery of tests to make sure that it's gone from your system for good? I should think even the most layperson of laypeople should know that.
|
#
¿
May 2, 2016 06:37
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 15:32 |
|
|
OwlFancier posted:Why is it the crew chief's fault if the pilot flies it into a power line? Helicopters are almost literally designed to shake themselves apart and need constant maintenance. An accident could easily be pilot error, but could also just as easily be a faulty part. Add in some politics about pilots being awesome...
|
|
#
¿
May 23, 2016 15:53
|
|
|
Libertarian Thread: NAP For All But Me
|
|
#
¿
May 25, 2016 19:22
|
|
|
Grognan posted:What about abortion is morally corrupt? I'm interested in your stance on this one. Eh, as much as I am pro-choice, abortion isn't really a cut and dry issue. A human life, or at least the potential for a human life, is being destroyed. I find it hard to fault someone who has an issue with ending a human life, or at least the potential of a human life. That being said, people who are anti-abortion and also who are against sex education and helping poor families/single parents to raise children are assholes. If you're anti-abortion, you either need to support policies that reduce unwanted pregnancies or policies that help to support the children that your stance brings about. Preferably both.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2016 04:40
|
|
|
fishmech posted:You're suggesting America annex Canada? I think I'd be happier with the reverse. Just promise to preserve the bill of rights and we're golden.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 18, 2016 21:07
|
|
|
Soviet Commubot posted:Suburban white people are just as bad as rural ones, they're just better at dog-whistling. I think what really determines this is how much you live and work around other races. It's hard to be a racist rear end in a top hat in California if you have even an ounce of empathy, just because you have an understanding that not everyone in the country is a WASP. That being said, I've run into plenty of assholes who don't have that ounce of empathy to start with.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 20, 2016 14:52
|
|
|
Goon Danton posted:I'll get to my normal line of questions later, but just as an aside, holy poo poo do not own significant amounts of stock in the company you work for. Don't own significant amounts of stock in the same industry as the company you work for. The same things that would cause their stock (and your portfolio) to tank would also end with you getting laid off, and then you're double-hosed. Diversify your risk. This. Also make absolutely certain that you network and make contacts outside of your preferred industry just in case poo poo goes sideways.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 23, 2016 15:40
|
|
|
Huh. That's a really good way to put it.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 1, 2016 02:07
|
|
|
Rigged Death Trap posted:That would imply there are stories about a libertarian with a heart of gold. Nah, they exist. It's just a heart of literal gold.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 15, 2016 19:50
|
|
|
8-Bit Scholar posted:I prefer time to be on my side. Parsley is usually a better garnish.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 8, 2016 21:17
|
|
|
YF19pilot posted:I'm older than that and it's still more than what I make a year by about half. It's roughly what I made in the previous two years combined. It's more than I made in the three years prior to my moving to another country; again, combined. In the almost decade since I've graduated college, I have yet to have a job that approaches that as an annual salary. Capitalism where your success in a field is based as much on nepotism as it is on knowledge can die in a fire. Holy gently caress. I bitched about making $20 an hour and found that to be a pain in the rear end to live on as a young single dude. How in the bloody blue blazes can you get by on that little? I still find it absolutely horrifying that I make more than about 2/3 of households in the US and I'm not even making 6 figures. Income inequality in this country is seriously out of control and we need a much higher minimum wage a decade ago.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 17, 2016 20:54
|
|
|
Soviet Commubot posted:I would do some awful things to good people for $20 an hour. I made the most I've ever made as a civilian last year, ~15k USD last year (in France so it's a bit easier but not much) but since my fiancée couldn't get a work permit it had to cover the both of us. One year we only brought in about 6k to live on, so after paying rent we only had about $150 to spend on food and necessities like toilet paper and toothpaste. I just moved back to the States for a Fed job which starts next year and even though I'm working two jobs at the moment I doubt I'll clear $15k this year either. If you get the chance, try to get a job as a technician somewhere in a medical company (or other industrial company; my only experience is medical). Generally speaking, there's not much education required, and if you're former military, they'll be happy to hire you (there are tax breaks and incentives to do so!). You won't make as much as an engineer, but you get decent pay and benefits. I was bitching about my pay because I was working as a temp and not able to use my degree. Now I make roughly double what I was making with full benefits and a nice 401k. It really shouldn't be that tough to make good money in this country. How the hell are people so opposed to minimum wage increases? It's maddening. It's not a perfect solution, and I'm in favor of more drastic things like mincome, but it should be politically viable to reward people for hard work!
|
|
#
¿
Aug 18, 2016 06:27
|
|
|
QuarkJets posted:It's going to be pretty funny when we fail to pass a minimum wage increase and all of the fast food workers are replaced with robots anyway Seriously. Even if we don't and can't replace everyone, there are plenty of small tasks that can be automated to reduce the labor force.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 18, 2016 09:04
|
|
|
Who What Now posted:"Nature, well known for being uncaring at best and cruel at worst, is a great metaphors for why the market will take care of the weakest members of society!"- As shown above, nature is excellent at taking care of the weakest members of society!
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2016 20:05
|
|
|
paragon1 posted:They think of their millionaire bosses when they fill in that circle, I'm guessing. Could also be professionals that started out at 60-80k, and then after working in their field for 20-30 years now make well north of 100k. They could see themselves as middle class because they were middle class for the majority of their lives, and only recently have they moved up to a higher position like a director or a VP.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 5, 2016 18:00
|
|
|
Nitrousoxide posted:There are a few. Price is one. That one is pretty certain even without a study just by multiplying the number of adults in the US by the proposed GBI. ~235 million. People here seem to want around a 30k a year GBI which would require 7 trillion dollars. Keep in mind the USA GDP is around 16-17 trillion. That'd mean this one program would require 42% of the entire economic output of the USA to fund -- not including implementation costs. This could obviously be alleviated by reducing the payout. But would people be okay with a 15k GBI at 21% of the GDP. That's not enough live on. You are forgetting, of course, that most GBI proposals come with an attached tax hike on higher earners and also tax away the GBI after a certain threshold so that it primarily benefits low income earners. GBI can also be rolled out in a slowly increasing fashion, the same way that minimum wage increases are rolled out over a period of years; this allows for the benefits of increased spending power for the poorer members of society to start benefiting the economy and helping to offset the cost. But you knew all of this before posting, being intelligent enough to be an attorney who can't afford to waste time and all. I wonder why you didn't mention it? And before you put in some jab about people like me wanting to vote in more income for ourselves, I'm an engineer, and by the time any GBI shows up, I'll likely be making too much money to get anything out of it. The only self-interest voting I can do is mandatory overtime wage laws so that I actually get paid for the 9-11 hours I work each day.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2016 14:39
|
|
|
Nitrousoxide posted:It's not in a vacuum. But if it results in lots of people taking less profitable jobs it undermines the economy and makes funding the project even less feasible. I keep trying to type up a long explanation of exactly why you're a moron, but I can't put it into words. Suffice it to say, you're a moron and this is the stupidest hypothetical that I have ever seen. In no way would this possibly be a reflection of reality.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2016 17:53
|
|
|
Nitrousoxide posted:I think I'm exhibiting exactly as much skepticism as is necessary for such an enormous policy. A 30k GBI would almost equal the entire current US Federal Budget. Imagine the macro economic effects of eliminating or doubling the federal government. This is the order of magnitude we are talking about here. Going on your gut is not the way to go. There's literally never been such a single enormous expenditure in the entire history is the world. Problem: you are bad at math. Not everyone would receive the entire 30k GBI because a good chunk of that would get taxed out after a certain income threshold is reached. It would also necessarily be enacted alongside tax increases and alongside reduction in other types of benefits, as a GBI would replace the majority of such benefits.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2016 19:01
|
|
|
Nitrousoxide posted:I mean a certain amount of economic inefficiency is fine if it's accompanied by a corresponding and similarly sized increase in happiness. It's a question of degrees. Maybe lots of people stop doing what they are better at and the GDP drops enough to make people sufficiently worse off to counteract the benefit. Maybe the happiness is greater than the cost. Maybe they break even, or another approach gives more happiness with lower cost. That's why data is important. You're still wrong about this. If you leave your high paying job to work on something you enjoy more, someone will fill that role who values their money more than their happiness (or who is genuinely fulfilled by that work). High paying jobs aren't a thing that people will just stop doing, and if you want an example of that, just look at something we call recorded loving history. We have a lot of slack in employment right now; what you are saying would only hold true if there were far more open jobs than there were skilled people to work them. Given that automation is increasingly making this no longer the case, your hypothetical is bullshit.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 8, 2016 02:14
|
|
|
Nitrousoxide posted:We're at like 5% unemployment which is considered full employment by economists. There's not an enormous slack of applicants. Some industries may be over saturated sure, attorneys for one, but the economy as a whole is not. Underemployment is the problem right now - there are a great number of college educated people who would be much happier not working retail or other minimum wage labor. There is a reason I specified high paying jobs when I said what I said.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 8, 2016 02:28
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:I think you'll find that you plebs agreed to live with the latent mercury contamination in this area when you signed up to my DRO. Yes, but my DRO can beat up your DRO, so now you owe me money.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 17, 2016 05:09
|
|
|
Ron Jeremy posted:While under an applied voltage. So we could take clean energy and use it to produce fossil fuel which we can then burn! Awesome! It has some really cool implications for energy storage! Instead of needing expensive batteries, just make tanks of fuel and burn that instead. If this really does work as advertised, there's some pretty amazing things that could be done.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 18, 2016 21:05
|
|
|
QuarkJets posted:Star Trek is a show with racist caricatures and ham-fisted social commentary. Pointing that out is neither pretentious nor "intellectually lazy" (lol did you intend for that to be super ironic?) Though, to be fair, it was damned progressive for its time.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 27, 2016 19:07
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:It's hilarious when I go to a party full of liberal people and someone cracks a tasteless joke about West Virginia and I say "Actually, my family's from West Virginia and my aunt and cousin and great aunt just had their home wrecked by a flood..." and watch everyone dry up like Maggie Thatcher's rotting vagina. Eh, I've got family from Virginia. Tasteless jokes about West Virginia (and vice versa, from what I have heard) are their stock in trade.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2017 20:06
|
|
|
I am dissapointed with the amount of Dick in this thread. Richard is a fine name and deserves to be used in full occasionally.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2017 02:06
|
|
|
fishmech posted:I still don't get why people focus on the "you can squeeze it yourself!!" bit. Yeah of course you can, the whole principle of this kind of fake-health-food style of juice is that it must be squeezed only after being diced up into very tiny chunks to preserve the "life force". A toddler can squeeze the juice out of that. The main reason people focused on the "you can squeeze it yourself" bit is that the machine was absolutely beautiful, but completely and impractically overdesigned in such a fashion as to be basically useless. Rather than squeezing the pulp at a single point by putting it through rollers or similar, they had the whole thing smashing two giant plates into each other, which meant that it was throwing around massively more force than it needed to, which further meant that the damned thing had to be overengineered. On top of that, all of the parts were made with multiple machining passes and some really beautiful precision work, none of which helped the price. Basically, they didn't have an actual manufacturing engineer on board and let their R&D team go hog wild without bothering to cut costs at any point. It's pretty much the golden standard for modern startups relying on techbros and disruption and not bothering to get anyone with any experience in launching a product.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 17, 2017 17:13
|
|
|
Stinky_Pete posted:You mean the people I made an appointment with that gave me a simple form to fill out and an eye test and can communicate in Spanish and Tagalog if needed? Yeah, seriously. I'm in and out in less than 15 minutes, everything is super fast and the only thing holding them back from moving faster is that people need their hand held through the process.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2017 22:19
|
|
|
ToxicSlurpee posted:It requires a basic understanding of math in a nation full of people proud of how ignorant they are. It also doesn't help that people don't really calculate the area under a function until they hit calculus, so even though you definitely don't need calculus to understand a marginal tax rate, the idea isn't familiar until you hit that point.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 25, 2018 05:42
|
|
|
BENGHAZI 2 posted:As a tran, I still deeply, truly, want to know his opinions on giving kids puberty blockers Is there a good resource for researching these? I'm personally not necessarily opposed to the idea, but the concept of manipulating hormones, especially at an age where a child is developing, worries me on a general level. I fully admit ignorance on the subject and would like to learn more.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2019 01:52
|
|
|
Who What Now posted:All puberty blockers do is delay puberty. Once you stop taking them you either go through puberty using the hormones your body naturally produces or start HRT, depending on what informed decision you make. Fair enough. Are there any differences to, say, height or growth in other areas as a consequence of delaying puberty? Somfin posted:One aspect of 'em, which is important to keep in mind, is that restricting puberty blockers is also "manipulating hormones;" it's forcing the person to undergo the process caused by the hormones that their body naturally produces during puberty. "Natural" is not "good" or "better." I would put it more on the "side effects" or "unintended consequences" as my concerns, as well as concerns in general with taking medications. Again, I profess my ignorance and my desire to learn; if they are an effective and safe thing to use with minimal consequences, then I have no objections.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2019 03:47
|
|
|
Somfin posted:Worries about those issues are indeed valid, but no more so than any other medication that's already been tested and passed by the FDA and is being administered with careful guidance. Yes. I've had drugs with poor side effects in the past and am familiar with drugs that have long term problematic issues, especially with respect to organ damage. I am glad to hear that these are relatively safe drugs to administer.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2019 00:29
|
|
|
I'm in med device R&D, and this is literally never a question we ask. The only questions are of the efficacy of the product and how quickly we can get to market. I've never worked in pharma, but i would be shocked if the R&D folks over there thought along different lines.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2020 03:02
|
|
|
Ravenfood posted:And how little broad things that we all enjoy like "someone to make sure we all agree what a kilogram is" and "someone to make sure that when someone says there's acetaminophen in this pill that its actually acetaminophen" and "someone to make sure that roads and water and gas arrive to your residence without catastrophe and trash gets removed". Yeah, it's absolutely amazing how many little things we take for granted are taken care of as public services, to the point that we only really remember them when we get angry about them not working. It's everything from the current time, to food being safe (and unsafe food being recalled), to roads, schools, fire services, We consent to be in society and have these things. Not only that, but they enhance our ability to do things like open and run businesses. People educated by the government go and work for people. Businesses are protected from burning down by the fire department, as well as safety standards to reduce the number of accidents that happen in the first place. Our legal system enforces contracts so that businesses can operate with each other and hold each other accountable. The post office enables businesses to advertise, and in some cases is how businesses are able to ship their products to remote buyers across the country for a reasonable rate. There's just so much cooperation that we do that it's absolutely insane to think that any single one of us should ever gain something like a billion dollars. It's worth noting, by the way, that a billion dollars is obscene. It's an amount of wealth that is a literal actual obscenity. Someone saving $500,000/year (with no interest/compounding) would take 2000 years to reach 1 billion dollars. There's a point where we as a society could cap the amount of money that someone can make in a year via taxation. What happens at that point is that people who have maxed out their earnings will simply drop from the labor force and enjoy the fact that they've earned the right to live in luxury for the rest of their lives. They may even enjoy puttering around, tinkering, helping out here and there, but the point is that they've earned their retirement. And guess what? New people will step in to take over the roles that enable someone to retire early. Now instead of one obscenely rich rear end in a top hat, you have thousands of moderately rich assholes, each of whom are buying things that rich assholes buy. Now you have businesses that cater to the thousands of rich assholes, and we have an entire new economic sector where people can profit off of the wealth of those who have retired early and the people who retire early get to enjoy their wealth. Seriously, if you take Bezos's fortune and spread it across 10,000 people, now those 10,000 people are going to eat. Those 10,000 people are going to want a nice car. Those 10,000 people are going to want a nice place to live. Those 10,000 people want a gardener or a maid or whatever else. That's a whole lot more business being generated, and we end up with a healthier economy and a situation where more people make more money and do better. The point of a lot of socialist policies is to take an incredibly and absurdly lopsided income graph where the top percentage point is so off the charts that merely describing it is difficult, and smoothing that graph out. Bring up the minimum, bring up the standard of living, and you generate a whole lot more business and make a whole lot more people more successful. And quite frankly, if your income is capped at 500,000 to 1 million per year, you're doing just fine. Your lifestyle is great, and there's honestly not much more of an improvement that you're going to get by getting more money. And what happens by doing this is that so many more people end up more successful. So many more people have a healthier standard of living. And, frankly, so many more people have so many more business opportunities! The economy flourishes under a system like this because you end up with a lot more people having a lot more money and patronizing a lot more businesses.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2020 16:50
|
|
|
OwlFancier posted:But the private property god will be angry if you do not respect His creation, and then he will curse us with poor growth this fiscal year. To be fair, as flippant as this is, it's not completely wrong. The stock market certainly wouldn't be happy. On the other hand, we'd be shifting from a capital-based income towards a wage-based income. Our GDP would go up, and our stock market would tank. The stock market doesn't actually like sustainable, real growth. It likes sudden shifts in wealth and giant growth spurts or giant crashes, because that's where people make money.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2020 16:59
|
|
|
polymathy posted:If companies are less efficient, then their products will have to cost more and less overall goods and services will be produced in the first place which hurts all of us. Under our current system, efficiency = shareholder profits (and no, joe random who spends 10% of his paycheck on company stock is not a shareholder), not lower prices. Goods are priced at the maximum amount the market can bear, and prices have little to no correlation with what the goods actually cost to make.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 12, 2020 23:26
|
|
|
polymathy posted:Value is subjective so of course prices don't correspond to the value of labor or the cost of capital goods. The only thing you can know is that the consumer price won't be below the cost of labor and capital goods. So, to be clear here, you are saying that you acknowledge that the cost of goods and the cost to produce those goods are largely decoupled, and thus when you said: polymathy posted:If companies are less efficient, then their products will have to cost more and less overall goods and services will be produced in the first place which hurts all of us. You were full of poo poo?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 13, 2020 07:58
|
|
|
VictualSquid posted:But, "if the king dies the realm is dead, everybody should die to protect him" does. It is the same king, just in a new fanfic. In chess, the king never dies. You put him in a situation with no retreat, and then force a surrender, which wins you the battle. It hearkens back to a time when monarchs did lead their troops into battle. But even then, it's an abstract. You don't bring bishops into battle because they're really good at running at an angle, and you don't bring a castle with you because they're motorized and run down the enemy. Armies don't take turns standing there and letting one person move at a time either. You also certainly don't bring the queen into battle and expect her to run across the battlefield and start murdering the enemy side with reckless abandon.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2020 19:04
|
|
|
VictualSquid posted:OK, I see that you all are opposed to overanalysing games for political meaning. I mean, there are explicitly political games. Tammany Hall, Twilight Struggle, Wir Sind Das Volk, etc. They're probably the best starting point if you're trying to set something like this up, but even then the game is usually a game first and a historical simulator second.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2020 03:23
|
|
|
hooman posted:Well not with that attitude you don't. I was inspired this morning to do a quick sketchup of what that might look like: 
|
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2020 19:13
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 15:32 |
|
|
Sephyr posted:Good article. I'm a bit puzzled there weren't more efforts to just machine-gun the bears en masse, given the proclivities of libertarians, but I suspect even that involves a minor level of competence that they lack. There was a section where they organized small groups to go hunt down bears in their dens (which apparently was against state/federal law).
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2020 02:12
|
|