@NetRunner

1. Clearly you haven't ever seen any Robin Hood movies...you know...the guy who "steals from the rich and gives to the poor." This is the Robin Hood tax we are talking about after all...

2. You don't think poor people have checking accounts? Car loans? Mortgages? Rent from people with mortgages? Buy goods from small businesses who have business loans? Use credit cards? Maybe .01% sounds like a small increase in APR, but for a lot of people its enough to make a monthly payment just out of reach.

All this tax would do is give yet another person access to the cookie jar. Right now, its just banks, but this tax would expand it to bureaucrats -- you know, the guys who make $100,000 a year in pensions after they retire -- the guys who contribute and produce nothing in society. This "Robin Hood" idea rests on the very naive assumption that if a bank adds a -$100,000,000,000 line to their operating expenses they would just say "oh well" I guess we are all taking pay cuts from now on, and the poor would rejoice with their newfound money. You must be kidding if you think thats what happens in the real world.

The rich will NOT be paying for this tax, not one cent - the poor will because all they are going to do is pass along the expenses; and by getting the oh-so efficient-and-just government involved you can be assured that they will take their cut too. In reality, the banks will raise rates by $100,000,000,000 while the bureaucrats spend money on themselves and their cronies.

Society is like a pyramid...built on the backs of the working class who comprise the base. Nobody at the top cares about the poor - nobody - because the poor must exist for them to be rich. You think this tax gives money to the poor, all this does is give more money to the rich. Get real, who do you think you are talking to? You think I'm the CEO of Citibank or something? Why would I want to make more money for anyone at the top? Why would I want to take money from anyone at the bottom?

I'm all for the intentions of this measure - save the poor etc. but this implementation, formulated with emotion, hate, and ignorance, will ensure that those intentions are never achieved. We don't live in a fantasy world and Robin Hood doesn't save the poor with his merry men. The rich are rich because they are shrewd and calculating, and if you think something like this could possibly have any bearing on the rich you are daydreaming.

Disheartening? Maybe, but you can't change anything if you can't see it for what it really is.

I love those sound effects. This whole thing reminds me of what I daydreamed about as a kid.

I caught one episode soon after it started and a Klingon was standing with the Captain on a high cliff and he actually said, "I can see my house from here.". At least I'm PRETTY sure he did. I did like a triple take trying to determine if I had slipped into some strange daydream or something.

Anyways, I didn't watch it much at all after that.

And yes, the opening theme sucked.

>> ^JiggaJonson:
Every joke in scrubs is as follows:
"Whatever happens I hope JD doesn't do something crazy..."
turns to JD
"BHLAHHHHHHHHHHBLEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEBLAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!"


Wonderful generalization about an otherwise amazing television show that is currently stuck in a lull. The daydream sequences are always hilarious and not tied in any way to what you believe the show is always about.

i was worried about this one.
while my cadence has a charles brukowski rhythm,my themes tend to break into parts.
julie has a knack for pulling images out of my words better than me.
the song is by rockettothesky.
a norwegian folk singer.
i actually was daydreaming playing this song and started writing.
thats what came out..no revisions.
though it seems my spelling is something to be desired.
all in all i am very pleased at julies work.
poor thing,she fretted over this for over a week.
i think she nailed it though.
not too sure about putting my back tattoo picture in there.
i understand her reasons,but i find it a bit self-serving.
thanks for posting this rasch,
i always have mixed feelings when i see my work displayed.
one of elation and of embarrassment.
it is an...odd..sensation.
i hope you all enjoy it though.it was a good collaboration.

>> ^ForgedReality:


Just a guess but I would bet you could get maybe 1 out of 1000 people to admit that driving conditions ARENT worse in the rain. Everybody knows this. I'm not dissing your knowledge of the cracks and the rain and the oil and the what not but its all knowledge that is superflous to the problem.

Just as you burn yourself on an iron or trip on a flat sidewalk or ram your head for the 100th time on a low lying chandelier, people neglect to be vigilant in situations they get used to or when they are distracted. Rain conditions require 100% concentration from everyone on the road not just you as well as up to date maintenace on your car. A sign like that, aside from possibly distracting you in a crucial moment, may stop you from daydreaming or remind you what you need to be doing.

>> ^Memorare:
Ayn Rand is back and playing WoW?!


You should probably re-read it; he's pretty much an anti-Ayn Rand kinda guy.

His conclusion is that government intervention is necessary to keep markets in a state where they really serve the common good, even in World of Warcraft.

Personally, I dunno much about the WoW "Depression", but I think Blizzard probably worked hard to create a deflationary cycle. The game's overwhelming trend is toward inflation, and there's an absolute lower bound on deflation (vendor prices) and no debt at all, so it's probably a "good" deflation (the kind Austrian economists daydream about).

But mostly I'm shocked that such detailed analysis is being done on the WoW economy, and that some of the people doing it have a reasonably unique viewpoint on causes and solutions for the real world's depression that sound dangerously sane.

*dead

replacement: http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/Daydream/video/xn3t4_i-monster-daydream-in-blue_music

This guy is taking CADL at face value, which he probably shouldn't, because clearly, they seem more interested in discouraging people from questioning religion than actually addressing the subject of prejudice-based hate or violence. It's also kind of silly to play victim when you are the reigning champion of your cultural category (you never hear complaints of 'white-bashing', 'rich-bashing' or 'male-bashing').

As Mr. Turgler suggests, most of the present anti-Christian hate and violence resides in the Middle East. Perhaps CADL should relocate.

imsteller,

I know social conservatives have fantastical daydreams about the term 'gay rights', wherein gay people get some kind of special exclusive rights, but in reality, it just means 'equal rights (for gay people)'.

When you hear 'gay rights', just substitute 'equal rights' in your own mind to avoid confusion. You could even print this comment and pin it to your shirt if you are forgetful.

1) I daydream often, but retain full situational awareness
2) There's a 90% chance that I can kill you from 500 yards.
3) I have very little patience for stupid people on the road.
4) I have what are probably the world's flattest feet.
5) I can make farting noises with my neck/shoulder.
6) I can puff my neck out like a bull frog.
7) I can grab my uvula and pull it to the front of my mouth. It grosses people out.
When car alarms go off, I often fantasize about taking my rifle and shooting them.
9) PTSD is a bitch.
10) I'm only 23 and have owned four vehicles.
11) Two of them were/is a Volvo.
12) Children annoy me.
13) Except for my nieces and nephews.
14) I hate big cities.
15) I graduated in the bottom 12 percent of my High School class.
16) I was #9 in my MOS school in the Marine Corps. (Suck on that, Blankfist )
17) I love video games.
18) I'm a huge fan of Star Trek TNG and Voyager.
19) The first internet connection I had in my house as a kid was through freei.net, and I had to hide it from my parents and drag a phone line across the house to use it.
20) I'm a firm believer that all people who regularly buy bottles of water need to be punched in the face.
21) Won 2nd place in a NASA/Nat'l Science teacher's assc. "Design a spacecraft" contest when I was in grade school.
22) Got pissed that I didn't win first to get that trip to space camp.
23) People thought I was going to shoot up the school in High School. It worked to my advantage because the assholes that congregated in the middle of the hallway would part like the Red Sea when I walked down the hall.
24) I often get irritated at people and proclaim that I should be Supreme Chancellor of the World so that I could outlaw fat girls in belly shirts, guys in skin-tight pants with white plastic sunglasses, Emo, cheap beer, bottled water, cigarettes, slow drivers, people that don't pay attention to cyclists and anyone/thing else I am currently pissed at.
25) I didn't know I could count this high.

Dan Gilbert doesn't understand Daniel Bernoulli's theory. He has over simplified it and removed the value of expected utility. Poor people make much better usage out of a lottery winning than rich people do. This utility value has to be factored into any equation placing a value judgment on an investment, even a lottery ticket.

When Dan insults lottery players, from a strictly numbers point of view, he's right, of course, but playing the lottery is not a strictly numbers kind of game; it's about utility. He doesn't take into account the actual value of winning and losing to the people who play.

Here's a demonstration of the difference utility adds to the simplistic equation of expected value:

You bet on a coin toss against an outstandingly wealthy opponent. If you win, your opponent will instantly triple your net worth, including your cash, assets, and salary. If you lose, you lose everything, including your job and employability.

The odds of winning are .5, and the reward is 3. Multiply these together, and you get 1.5, which means that you are getting 2:1 on your money. Looks good on paper. But of course not even economists would play this game --not even if the reward were raised to x10 or x100-- because the consequence of losing everything, though less in monetary value than the reward, is unthinkable, even compared to the relative gains from having x100 your wealth. The expected utility to you of your first "net worth" far exceeds the utility that the second and third would give you, so it's a bad bet.

Back to the lottery: if you lose a dollar, you don't noticeably lose any economic power, even if you play every week and lose $52/year. In other words, you lose a negligible amount of utility. You may even get $52 worth of enjoyment out of waiting for the results to come up, talking about it and bonding with your pool of coworkers, or daydreaming about the good life and getting distraction from the reality of your trailer park McJob life. But if you win something big, it will instantly end all money troubles for you and your whole family, maybe for generations to come. In other words, massive utility. It's not a stupid decision at all to buy a lottery ticket if you factor in utility.

Edit: Oh, and now that I've actually watched to the end, I see that someone in the Q&A made one of my points, but they both still missed the boat on the strictly financial utility of losing $1 to winning millions when you're poor.

good job.

In reply to this comment by brain:
LLAAAAAME. They should had John McCain daydreaming being in a Sarah Palin sandwich.

LLAAAAAME. They should had John McCain daydreaming being in a Sarah Palin sandwich.

I was actually daydreaming the other day of what it would actually take to make people thing that Palin was a nutjob... Frankly, I'm not sure what it would take after thinking through a few scenarios. I bet that she could get caught in those off-air-mike-still-on moments complaining about african amaricans and using racial epithets and the republicans would still explain it away...

Marge: [voice over] The kids at school were even worse.
[young Marge gets on the bus, sits next to a girl]
Girl: [seeing her lunch pail] Ew! You like the Monkees? You know
they don't write their own songs.
Marge: They do so!
Girl: They don't even play their own instruments.
Marge: No...no!
Girl: That's not even Michael Nesmith's real hat.
Marge: Aah!

The Simpsons - Fear of Flying

In reply to this comment by gargoyle:
I beg to differ on the instrument playing...a quick check with wikipedia and at least two of them are well able to:

"Texan Michael Nesmith was a songwriter and guitarist who had recorded for Colpix under the name "Michael Blessing." He was the only Monkee who had come in to audition from seeing the original advertisement.

Peter Tork was recommended to Rafelson and Schneider by friend Stephen Stills.[2] Tork, a skilled multi-instrumentalist, had performed at various Greenwich Village folk clubs before moving west, where he was a dishwasher before becoming a Monkee.[2]"