Some jobs take a lot of your time, are awesome, and still (maybe) not worth it. How do people not see this? Do you need scapegoats to work at the same place for close to 10 years with very little credit for the sacrifice and value they've dumped into the job; with little self-seeking beyond wanting to maximize your potential and increase the value of a product you feel others are dropping the ball on?

And then to finally make the call that it's not worth it. And to go out in a way that adds value to your life, rather than a flat, depressing thud; the dawning realization that you are now jobless but free...

To be constantly judged by compliance, once radical, ever changing system theory, now turned common place and required for what once was exciting, fresh, and driven by passion...

The passion filter is ON. It's on and it ain't ever turning OFF.

Ahaha! The red one. I feel human. This makes me feel human. Oh thank you robot overlords for granting me an inkling of feeling. Now, continue on your maximizing of profits off of planet earth.

It is NOT government corruption. It is corporations working as intended ie. maximizing profit by lobbying government and paying it to do what it wants.
The problem we have now is unchecked capitalism, which will always treat people and society as mere fodder.

Something that I don't get about Tywin (book or movie version):

He's cold, logical, practical, intelligent, cunning. His relationships with his children mostly make sense given the way he operates.

Cersei advanced his family name by marrying King Robert, which was good. But she makes stupid decisions, takes unnecessary risks, and arrogantly thinks that none of this will catch up with her. Tywin correctly identifies her key weakness being that she thinks she is much more clever than she actually is.

Jamie could be a reasonably useful chess piece in Tywin's arsenal, but by Lannister standards he isn't as cunning and "big picture" intelligent as Tywin is, or even Cersei. I'd say Jamie knows his own limitations in that regard way better than Cersei though. During the Targaryen reign, his position in the Kingsguard would have been potentially useful, but that turns for the worse when he sullies the family name by becoming the "Kingslayer", even if his actions were justified. His Kingsguard position and skillset in general become much less useful during Robert's rule, which further hurts his relationship with Tywin. All still makes sense from a cold, calculating perspective.

Then you get to Tyrion. Tywin has an antagonistic relationship with Tyrion, and seems to refuse to see that Tyrion is the best bet to take over the reins of House Lannister after Tywin himself is gone. I know that it is suggested that Tywin's bias against Tyrion comes from the combination of A) him "killing" his mother in childbirth and B) being born a "freak" dwarf. I have a hard time with that because I see Tywin as being too cold, logical, and pragmatic to let either of those issues cloud his judgement.

So Tyrion "killed" his mother (Tywin's wife). Perhaps that event had a profound effect on Tywin, but considering the way he plays his children as pawns on his chessboard, it seems more in his character for him to have viewed his wife that way also. Especially considering the normal state of noble marriages being primarily chosen to maximize political gain in the setting. Plus, mothers dying during childbirth probably wouldn't be an exceptionally uncommon thing in the setting either.

And Tyrion being a dwarf? So what -- Tywin only cares about what you can do to advance the family name. Tyrion could easily be groomed to take over as family mastermind while keeping Cersei, Jamie, or one of Cersei's children as the public face of the family. Pay no attention to the man, er, dwarf behind the curtain.

I guess I just find Tywin's relationship with Tyrion to be the one thing about his character that feels ... off, at least to me. I feel like Tywin would be more ready to give Tyrion some opportunities to prove himself, and less subjective about judging his performance in those situations.

I would argue that one of the most powerful evolutionary advantages we have as a human species is human potential. By human potential, I mean traits like creativity, motivation, artistic talent, critical thinking, communicative ability, etc. It is a weird and nebulous thing, but we do know that it is not unique to any particular group of humans. It is not unique to men, nor is it unique to aryans, and it is not even unique to particular families.

I think that a decent argument can be made that creating a hospitable and reasonably equitable environment for all of these groups will maximize the percentage of humans who excel at these useful traits, creating a better world for everyone to live in.

So if your system oppresses any significant segment of the population, then there is a good chance that you will be less successful. I think that the Jewish brain drain from Nazi Germany is actually a very good example of this principle in action.

I should note that this is an evolutionary principle that is well established within certain groups. It is a massive evolutionary advantage to look out for people within your own group (tribe), which incidentally is why we have a long history of it being totally ok to kill other people's toddlers but not your own (see the Old Testament for examples). I think that now in these modern times we are realizing the benefits of extending that same principle of tribalism equity to the whole human community.

But yea, it's ultimately just a survival strategy. I have never claimed that my view of human morality has any absolute standard or guarantee of success. I can only be thankful that the society I live in has won out over the other ones.

Mind you, I still think it needs improvement - and leaving my little stamp on it is going to be a hell of a journey by the time it's over.

So why did God seem to think it was OK to murder toddlers and enslave people under certain circumstances? I thought that his absolute gold standard of morality was the only thing that was keeping us from devolving into such chaos.

Laughing at the judge/court is pretty disrespectful and he was ready to access the typical fine, but she threw it in the judges face not once, but twice.

Its like getting pulled over for speeding. Cop says you have to pay me $50 bucks right now for the fine (standard fine fee). You give him $300 and say, "hey here is $300 for my next six!" Of course they are going to maximize the penalty.

Slack will not be given to the disrespectful.

Nothing he espouses is particularly radical in any way. He mostly goes along with the majority of Americans, like how he says we should stop threatening Iran. Or we should accept the two state settlement on the table that the American government and Israel have been denying for almost 40 years now. I can't think of very many stances he takes that are radical at all.

Also you haven't understood any of his talks if you think he subscribes to "Corporate conspiracy theories". He explains it very plainly, if you are the head of GM your best interest is in maximizing your profits in the short term. That's not a conspiracy that's just sanity. In order to do that you lobby to keep wages and restrictions down and work to throw doubt on global warming.

The main point I'm trying to put to you is you have to read the books, you can't "Trust" Chomsky just on your own. He provides the citations, you can look them up. The one book I would suggest you start with is "Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky". That book is a collection of his talks and interviews and it's followed up by research done not by him but by a couple of smart editors who put the book together. He uses it now as reference sometimes because he was surprised at what a good job they did. The best part about the book is that it has a dedicated website that contains the references and you can check it while you read.

The most important thing you can know about Chomsky is that he has a LOT of enemies that look for whatever they can to use against him. Which is why he can't make very many mistakes, so he's quite conservative and careful with his research. I expect you to be too, you shouldn't just trust people, you should do your own work on the subjects that interest you.

How sneaky those corporate Darwinist's Monkey elites have become, Encana is a Canadian Company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encana

If there is ever backlash and finger pointing done in Washington well they can blame foreign entities....or have a good case to exemption of accountability by their monkey lawyers that EnCana is not bind to the same standard as Halliburton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halliburton would be in the United Sates...

Clever Monkeys washing their duty hands...sick



Clever but not very smart..... this is not the type of human values I was tough by my parents...

I even serve my country for those elites Darwinist Monkeys ..... sick

This is evil at its best and pursues of wealth , creed is evil and in today's Universities around the world the Darwinist theories are tough and those of swore to his theories will thrive to the top as monkey's foundations (darwinist ideologies) of evolution and survival of the fetus theories is implanted into human harts....

This is the fruits of ignorance and Inhuman ideologies where Maximizing Shareholders values trump brotherhoods......

No matter what citizen say, do or wish for.....darwinist SS elites have taken over the world to form a super elite club base on Monkey principle....

The world has lost it virtues of human kindness and dignity when JFK was assassinated....

Welcome to the jungle.....

Ex-Gate Keeper of the lost free world....

You need to fix your goalposts son. To start off, the burden of proof is on those that seek to prohibit something. You could never show, for instance, that anything "won't help" anything else. That's asking for proof of a negative. It belies your profound misunderstanding of statistics. We had a nationwide assault weapons ban. It's efficacy was unimpressive. It certainly did not provide any conclusive evidence that the ban was effective which is where the burden should lie for restrictions on liberty.

There are also these things called "priors." For example: "An extremely small proportion of homicides are conducted using assault weapons. Thus, the maximal impact of their ban would similarly be small." If you want to ban anything it should be handguns, but I don't view that as consistent with the second amendment at all. You would (or at least should) need a constitutional amendment to pull that off.

Finally, I view homicide in general as a relatively small problem in comparison to other matters of public health and safety. That is if I look at numbers, as opposed to guessing at probabilities while I'm crying a river over news broadcasts designed to make me feel unsafe.

Sometimes being educated means considering other points of view. I'm a liberal and I don't own (or wish to own, or even really enjoy) guns. You have a fucking gun in your avatar.

Here is a side effect of the limitation on power points, @dag.... Now I am promoting more than I have in a long time. Because if I don't get rid of my power points, I won't get my "earnings."

Isn't that an interesting unintended consequence of the limitation idea?

I am SUCH a lab rat, scurrying around, trying to maximize my pellets. Sigh.

On chrome, the bottom part of the comments on any given video page are hidden below the bottom bar. This makes it impossible to reply. Maximizing and un-maximizing the window fixes the layout.

>> ^bobknight33:

Single payer system will drive up costs and inefficiencies. What these guys are doing is a good thing. Putting up prices and letting you decide.

If Coke was the only drink in to have then they would no no issue to set the price high. As soon as a competitor shows up and delivers a comparable product at a lesser price the true price of the product will be discovered.

>> ^Yogi:

>> ^bobknight33:
Obamacare is not driving out the cost of healthcare for this group. Capitalism is.
from the text above:
The major cause of exploding U.S. heath care costs is the third-party payer system, a text-book concept in which A buys goods or services from B that are paid for by C. Because private insurance companies or the government generally pick up most of the tab for medical services, patients don't have the normal incentive to seek out value.
The Government gave us the third party payer system during WWII. Government is at fault.

Patients shouldn't have to "Seek out value." They're busy, usually being sick, or trying to work while being sick. It shouldn't be a for profit industry, everyone should have healthcare it should be a single payer system.



sorry i live in a "single payer system"

i know people who work in multiple departments/sectors of healthcare...everything from doctors, to home care, to IT

and i can say with full knowledge and satisfaction, that your statement that a single payer system drives up costs/inefficiencies is either ill informed, or completely full of bs...

the notion of competition as being the great equalizer is moronic, in a system where insurance companies spend 100s of millions of dollars lobbying to get the game rules changed in their favor... insurance companies main goal is to make profit... they do that by minimizing cost/quality of service while maximizing return... if you can't see how that contradicts the purpose of health care, you are either naive or morally bankrupt

the arguement that businesses are held to be more financially responsible than government is also a lie... a business only has the financial obligation to report accurate numbers while being fiscally sound... the government has that exact same obligation, but further more has to show VALUE for what it is doing

your argument about Coke mystically assumes Coke is the only drink, thus they could set the price at whatever they want... I assume you are making the arguement that Coke is healthcare? but a company who's goal is to sell coke to make profit... that's an insurance company.... a company who has to be accountable to the people giving it money while making sure that the MOST people have cheap and easy access to coke... that'd be the government

you can either argue that government operates the same as business (as you are trying to do with your horrible coke analogy), or you can argue that they operate differently (as most people who back the business produces better financial results than government argue)... but you don't get to argue both in the space of 2 paragraphs

you, sir or madam, have taken a big old swig of the kool-aid

>> ^hpqp:

Oh please, this is just bad science. It's barely even worth cheap sci-fi. Where do you get the energy to run the replicator, eh? Does entropy ring a bell? Even without replicators humans are draining the earth of it's energetic resources (including the "sustainable" ones)...
Nice philosophical mindgame, like all utopias for that matter, but nowhere near hard science.
philosophy


Our world is full of achievements that were once beyond the ability of hard science.
How can humans possibly communicate over hundrends of miles? We're already yelling as loud as we can.
How can we possibly run faster than cheetahs? Our legs can't move any faster!
How can I kill Og standing all the way over there? Rock not throw farther!!!

Ultimately, all life shares one common goal; the quest for energy. From single cell creatures harvesting light, heat or chemical reactions to survive...all the way to modern humans with their agriculture, technology and complex social structures; the journey of evolution has been the race for more efficient means of acquiring and managing energy.
Our economies are elaborate means of trading energy.
Our societies organized to maximize the collection of energy.
Our governments created to ensure equitable distribution or energy.

The result of millenia of advancement is that we now expend much less energy to acquire a larger return of energy. And all that excess energy creates the complex world we live in.

But there is the potential, in the future, for technological advancements in science that will create a massive paradigm shift. There is the potential for accessible energy to become inexhaustable. And when the cost, in terms of human effort, of energy approaches Zero....everything changes.

Will the end of human need result in a utopia?
LOL...never. Because we'll always have griefers.

@rottenseed
you make some good points buckaroo but your post is ignoring the giant pink elephant in the room.
@Sagemind 's most excellent post gave that elephant a nod but i think it prudent to point directly at that giant hulking pustulent piece of pink elephant flesh.

shall we?
1.corporate america is NOT based on true capitalism (actual free market) but rather state-run capitalism.this translates to lower or non-existent tax revenue,government subsidies and outright bailouts.
in other words=socialism.

2.you state that a corporation has a "duty" to maximize profits.i would agree if you changed "duty" to "legal obligation".

3.this legal obligation to maximize profits has led to all kinds of inventive and clever ways to defraud the public and local municipalities,from having them pay for infrastructure to waste clean-up.the amount of money spent by public,tax-payer funds is staggering which of course=socialism.

4.corporate america has a literal army of 35,000 lobbyists in washington whose sole purpose is to manipulate legislatures to pass favorable laws (de-regulation).85% of ALL laws passed are actually written by corporate lobbyists.

5.since the abomination ruling of citizens united (fuck you alito) corporate america now has the unlimited access to our lawmakers.walmart spent tens of millions on the last election cycle,how much did you give? and who do you think those legislators are going to be listening to?
money=speech in this country.

6.a corporation is considered a person but this person has no empathy,remorse nor feelings of solidarity with fellow humans due to its very nature written into law.
otherwise known as a sociopath.

seewhatimsaying?
the corporate charter needs to be re-examined and/or re-written because what we have now is corporate welfare/socialism with all the benefits going to the top while the working class foots the bill.

vote with your wallet? sure.that would work to a point but many people are limited concerning options and walmart is the only place these folks can afford.
sometimes this economic situation is due to bad choices but more often it is just life kicking these people in the balls.

buck up and go grab some higher education?
sure...and that works how often?
im not kidding.go check the statistics.they are pathetic.
i bartend part time and there are 4 masters degrees and 8 bachelors where i work,all in different fields.ask them how their "higher education" paid off for them.
$100,000 in student debt loans all to be able to ask "would you like some cracked pepper sir"?

now lets punch that pink elephant straight in the balls shall we?
the suggestion that somehow if labor becomes organized and demands..and receives..a more viable living wage with some humane and decent benefits will somehow automatically translate into higher priced goods and eventual job loss is just corporate propaganda which originates from the reagan years.

this is absolute and utter bullshit all fed to us by the very corporations seeking to dominate and oppress its work force.

remember,it is the legal obligation of the corporate board of directors to "maximize profit" not "shoot itself in the foot".
the suggestion that somehow paying its employees a living wage translates to the destruction of the company is apocalyptic propaganda.

what has been done to the american worker is perverse.over the past thirty years we have seen the creation of either wage-slaves or debt slaves..or both.
any way you wish to look at it.we are slaves in one form or another.

i mean..just go check the numbers.
worker pay has stagnated for the past thirty years,while corporate profits have continually broken records.
do you seriously think that a unionized labor force will kill walmart?
not a chance and to suggest otherwise just indicates that the corporate propaganda has been quite effective.

walmart could pay a living wage AND offer affordable benefits and STILL would have cheap goods.
and every step of the way they would be "maximizing profits".

welcome to the united states of corporate america!
will that be cash or credit?