>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:< I've demonstrated you to be factually incorrect in saying a fetus is 'guilty' and 'malicious'.

I have not once use the words guilty or malicious, please don't pretend to quote me when the entire content of our conversation is a simple text search away.

I have made it clear, many times, that malice is not part of my argument. You have rejected, without basis, nearly every argument I have put forth. I suppose you need to make up something to respond to, but please don't pretend I have made arguments which I have repeated said I am not making.

A fetus is both innocent and helpless because it cannot act independantly, and requires the mother to surive.

There, at least you are making an argument, albeit one which applies to all parasites.

It is a standard neolib position to take that all economics is a 'zero sum' game

That is, at least, a reasonably accurate use of the term neo-liberal, but it does not apply to me. I'm not making a zero-sum argument, I'm making a finite resource argument, which you, instead of addressing, are ignoring and throwing up a strawman.

I'm not claiming that anybody has a moral obligation to use their resources to help the helpless/innocent, that's your position. I'm simply pointing out that if that were really your position you would find it more moral to spend resources, which are finite, in ways which are more effective at meeting this moral obligation.

I understand the rhetorical utility of you pretending that a child and a blastocyst are the same thing

It isn't rhetoric. That's what I believe. If left undamaged by abortion then the fetus will be born as a human infant. I'm just telling you what it is. To you, it's a tapeworm. To me, it's a human. I'm not asking you to believe it. I'm explaining my stance, and allowing you to clearly state yours.

Your assertion of innocence and helplessness is built on a mythology which requires that this is not the case

I've demonstrated you to be factually incorrect in saying a fetus is 'guilty' and 'malicious'. The only mythology in the debate is the one you are creating. If you wish to hold to it, then that is your choice. But to discuss it as if it was fact is disingenous. The facts are the facts. A fetus is both innocent and helpless because it cannot act independantly, and requires the mother to surive.

Since you can only spend a dollar once , you have to choose for every cent you handle if, and which, innocents you want to save. Every choice has opportunity cost, claiming it does not is absurd.

It is a standard neolib position to take that all economics is a 'zero sum' game where if you spend money on "A" then it by extension means you are stealing it from "B". I reject that incorrect position. A principled person can choose to spend money to adopt, and ALSO spend money on other worthy causes.

1. Multiple sources including culture, heuristics ingrained by evolution, rational response to non-zero-sum situations, etc.

2. Bollocks. We are not nihilists or solipsists. This myth is equivalent to the myth that Jews have coitus through a hole in a sheet.

3. No.

4. Yes.

Well the gambling occurred simply because all the institutions believed they could get out or arbitrate their risks further down the line and this is the argument that Greenspan put forward that firms essentially got greedy and did not trade honorably within the market and self regulate.

Derivatives like useful in spreading risk around an economy but not when that risk is complied and passed on and on to the point that instead of spreading risk around to several players the the risk takers and issuers become intertwined. This is why regulation is needed in this market. I believe they are useful but not when their value is so overinflated to the value of the underlying assets.

In reply to this comment by jwray:
My point exactly. It's just gambling. It contributes nothing to the economy. So why should banks be allowed to do it?

In reply to this comment by Farhad2000:
There is no tangible production created. Derivatives differ but mostly its betting, you are taking a huge risk for a large pay off, based around performance factors, everything from how well company stock do or not, how currency exchanges do or even how weather will play out, which was part of Enron's strategy when it introduced weather futures.

In reply to this comment by jwray:
to put it another way... what actual, tangible production might derivatives trading promote or facilitate? Can it accomplish anything in the real world that conventional arbitrage cannot, besides sometimes creating the illusion of lower risk?

In reply to this comment by Farhad2000:
Not really since you derive the value from the original financial instrument, so if you are deriving the value off a risky mortgage payment that may or may not complete it stops being a zero sum game. Even more so when toxic debt packages are combined with other debts and financial packages.

In reply to this comment by jwray:
Isn't derivatives trading a zero-sum game?

My point exactly. It's just gambling. It contributes nothing to the economy. So why should banks be allowed to do it?

In reply to this comment by Farhad2000:
There is no tangible production created. Derivatives differ but mostly its betting, you are taking a huge risk for a large pay off, based around performance factors, everything from how well company stock do or not, how currency exchanges do or even how weather will play out, which was part of Enron's strategy when it introduced weather futures.

In reply to this comment by jwray:
to put it another way... what actual, tangible production might derivatives trading promote or facilitate? Can it accomplish anything in the real world that conventional arbitrage cannot, besides sometimes creating the illusion of lower risk?

In reply to this comment by Farhad2000:
Not really since you derive the value from the original financial instrument, so if you are deriving the value off a risky mortgage payment that may or may not complete it stops being a zero sum game. Even more so when toxic debt packages are combined with other debts and financial packages.

In reply to this comment by jwray:
Isn't derivatives trading a zero-sum game?

There is no tangible production created. Derivatives differ but mostly its betting, you are taking a huge risk for a large pay off, based around performance factors, everything from how well company stock do or not, how currency exchanges do or even how weather will play out, which was part of Enron's strategy when it introduced weather futures.

In reply to this comment by jwray:
to put it another way... what actual, tangible production might derivatives trading promote or facilitate? Can it accomplish anything in the real world that conventional arbitrage cannot, besides sometimes creating the illusion of lower risk?

In reply to this comment by Farhad2000:
Not really since you derive the value from the original financial instrument, so if you are deriving the value off a risky mortgage payment that may or may not complete it stops being a zero sum game. Even more so when toxic debt packages are combined with other debts and financial packages.

In reply to this comment by jwray:
Isn't derivatives trading a zero-sum game?

to put it another way... what actual, tangible production might derivatives trading promote or facilitate? Can it accomplish anything in the real world that conventional arbitrage cannot, besides sometimes creating the illusion of lower risk?

In reply to this comment by Farhad2000:
Not really since you derive the value from the original financial instrument, so if you are deriving the value off a risky mortgage payment that may or may not complete it stops being a zero sum game. Even more so when toxic debt packages are combined with other debts and financial packages.

In reply to this comment by jwray:
Isn't derivatives trading a zero-sum game?

Not really since you derive the value from the original financial instrument, so if you are deriving the value off a risky mortgage payment that may or may not complete it stops being a zero sum game. Even more so when toxic debt packages are combined with other debts and financial packages.

In reply to this comment by jwray:
Isn't derivatives trading a zero-sum game?

Isn't derivatives trading a zero-sum game?

One of the best scenes lately, US Office is a fun show, as long as you dont try to compare or equal it to the UK version. Its a different show. If I could only keep one of them, it'd be UK, but fortunately its not a zero-sum game, and I can enjoy both.

Of course, nowadays it is very slightly more complicated, but a basic truth remains: every kind of capitalism makes the rich richer and the poor poorer, in the long run. It's a pyramid. A pure hierarchy.

WRONG. Socialists keep pushing the "zero-sum game" bullplop, which claims that for one person to prosper another must lose. Total bullplop.

Socialists are in complete denial it's the free market system that has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system. You're worried about who is getting what piece of the pie, when the reality is, the pie itself has gotten larger due to an overall increase in wealth.

In other words, as the rich get richer, so do the poor! Most American "poor" own their own homes, 2 cars, 3 TVs. Not to mention "free" college, health care in the emergency room, "free" fire and police protection, etc.

When the rich pay 60% of all federal taxes and the bottom 20% actually make money on the deal, there's inequity all right, against those who work the hardest.

And by the way, in the US, 95% of those considered wealthy didn't start out that way; they earned it. Very little is "old money" and inheritance.

There is no moral argument for liberals' punishment of success. The precious Big Government produces nothing and creates nothing, it's just raw, dumb force.

Educated people who preach total deregulation are being willfully ignorant of externalities, monopolies, contract enforcement, copyright/patent enforcement, eminent domain, ignorance of most consumers, how little success in competition has to do with the price/quality of the product in many cases (advertising FTW), and how food labels could lie and get away with it.

Between two competitors in the same fixed market, advertising is basically a zero-sum game that wastes revenue and increases the price to consumers.

Pharma companies spend half their revenue on advertising to convince people to buy drugs that most of them don't need. If all the money were spent on research instead, all the drugs could be a lot cheaper. The US economy already produces much more than enough to satisfy the real needs of most people, and the rest of the economy revolves around brainwashing people into thinking they need things that they don't need through advertising.

You don't make money by providing the best or cheapest product to your customers, you make money by making them THINK that whether or not it involves actually doing it. Someone has to call advertisers on their bullshit. A typical corporate executive's only imperative is this: make a profit by any means necessary, even if it means lying to shareholders, customers, etc.

Most of the great advances in basic science did NOT come from anybody working for a company. Immediate get-rich schemes do not involve trying to understand the universe for the sake of understanding the universe. Newton was a professor, Darwin was an unemployed med school dropout who went with a ship captain to keep him company, Galileo was on state patronage, Einstein worked for the patent office, etc.

But I digress. The crux of the argument is externalities. Taxing negative externalizes and subsidizing positive externalizes are essential, as you'll see in any modern economics textbook. Otherwise we'd all kill each other with pollution and toxic waste, while neglecting to eradicate polio. If you've studied game theory at all (i.e. the prisoner's dilemma or the pollution game), you'll see that individual self interest often leads to an equilibrium that is bad for everybody. Government can adjust the payoff matrix so that the optimal (utilitarian) outcome is also an equilibrium for self-interested agents.

The reason private companies aren't mass-producing solar and wind power without subsidies is because it's still more expensive than oil and coal. Without government regulation, oil and coal would remain cheaper until we deplete the world's supply of oil and coal. If we deplete the world's entire supply of oil and coal, we'll breathe soot while Miami is underwater. Clinton's statement that massive amounts of wind/solar power would be in the interest of corporations only applies when governments tax fossil fuels or subsidize alternatives. The moral justification for taxation of negative externalities is basically the same as the moral justification for the government punishing somebody for beating up somebody else.

I don't think the t-shirt was necessarily racist. It could refer to Obama's slightly more conciliatory foreign policy. What the fool who wrote the shirt fails to consider is that if jihadists make peace and make friends with the USA, then everybody wins the war on terrorism. It's not a zero-sum game.

Commodities trading is a zero sum game (actually negative sum because of overhead) but in theory it can smooth prices (speculators buy up excess supply in expectation of future shortages, to the benefit of the producers).

Yup, that's right. MG just said he would register as a democrat.


Well, the nice thing about the electoral system in most states is that you only have to declare a party during primary season, and can vote for whomever you please in the fall, so you can hide your secret shame and vote your conscience. I myself a longtime Democrat registered as a Republican (and my, has my junkmail gotten interesting since then) just so I could bump Ron Paul's profile up a smidge. I don't for a second believe in most of his libertarian ideas, but at long last we had a candidate who was forcing us to talk about REAL issues, based on silly little things like, oh, the Constitution.

As for the content of this video--sigh. As someone else said, the difference between racism in the North and South was that in the South, Blacks could live near whites, as long as they didn't get 'uppity', but in the North, Blacks could get uppity, as long as they lived nowhere near whites. What I'm seeing here is people reacting poorly to the unknown, people who believe that life is a zero sum game, that social justice for Blacks and Hispanics means less opportunities for whites. Someone needs to point out to them what Bill Hicks said so many years ago: Poor whites have much more in common with poor Blacks than they do rich whites, and rich whites do everything in their power to make sure neither side sees that. Before there was What's the Matter with Kansas, there was Bill Hicks, getting it right every time.