On the short run, outcomes look arbitrary and heavily influenced by the environment. On the long run, however, there is probably a real pattern to it. The common denominator is probably yourself.
You will not be able to change anything to that phenomenon. Even if you change the hierarchy, the same crowd is going to sink to the bottom, and the same crowd is going to rise to the top. The wealthy datsha bureaucracy of the Soviet Union were obviously the former factory owners, while the factory workers themselves became even worse off than before.
I am suggesting while that yes there is definitely uniqueness to each person, if given the right education, diet, and living in a society which is safe and contains opportunity for them, they will be dramatically different, and for the better. — rlclauer
I view humans as acting out their behavior which was determined since childhood, which is why I emphasized education as a means to assist people in realizing their potential. — rlclauer
I would point to capital, and the drive of the wealthy to increase their share of capital, on the backs of workers. — rlclauer
I understand you are critical of the state and the type of education on offer at the moment, but do you agree with this one point? To put it even simpler: good conditions generally improve outcomes and vice versa. In my opinion that is not controversial. In fact there is a mountain of evidence to support that claim. — rlclauer
And now you also know where Ernest Hemingway got the title for his novel, "For Whom The Bell Tolls". — Bitter Crank
O death where is thy sting?" — Bitter Crank
Presumably they do, though I am not that familiar with the psychological machinations of insects and fish. Why wouldn't it count as desire? — Tzeentch
The funny thing about our current system is when you consider what are called "externalities," if these were actually factored into a companies cost to do business, many of the companies that are currently profitable, (often through accounting voodoo) would no longer be profitable. — rlclauer
My John Donne never saw a film and never wrote a screenplay. He died in 1631, London; he was 59. He is considered one of the greatest love poets in English. He was a poet and a clergyman, Church of England. What my Donne and your Dunne have in common is that they are both dead. — Bitter Crank
well it looks like our world views are in stark contrast. let's just agree to disagree because I don't think anything can be gained through continuing to engage. — rlclauer
I couldn't find, despite going back through the discussion, the reason you brought up Fukishima, but since you did I must add the following: this was no Chernobyl. But that I mean, some accident the responsibility for which one can fob off on communism. Apart from Japan being utterly first world and capitalist, the reactors were US corporation made. And the engineers who built, installed, helped with maintenance and so on, had to have known before, during and after installation, the location of the site, the seismic history of Japan, including tsunamis and how that might relate to future accidents. I have not heard any come forward and say they warned the Japanese government or how their security and safety protocols included concern for tsumanis and why they are not also culpable. IOW while it happened 'over there' for the 'West' it is also a Western accident to the core, puns intended.I do not desire to get the job of hosing cold water on yet another Fukushima. Have you ever seen footage of how the naked nuclear cores keep glowing in the open air over there in tsunami land? What a bunch of idiots! — alcontali
Apart from Japan being utterly first world and capitalist, the reactors were US corporation made. And the engineers who built, installed, helped with maintenance and so on, had to have known before, during and after installation, the location of the site, the seismic history of Japan, including tsunamis and how that might relate to future accidents. I have not heard any come forward and say they warned the Japanese government or how their security and safety protocols included concern for tsumanis and why they are not also culpable. — Coben
I don't think they really care, often. I don't mean they necessarily consciously know and decide not to weigh the consequences, though I do think this is true in many individual cases. I mean, that they don't care and this affects safety issues in a wide range of fields, because this not caring skews, unconsciously or not, how they weigh threats, what they consider possible threats, how much they listen to dissenters and whisteblowers, what they will consider as causal and so on. IOW for egotistical reasons they end up very far away from the precautionary principle with regularity. And now this is no longer a local issue. They will play fast and loose with the planet as a whole. Even Fukushima is local - though less local than many realize - compared to the 'matches' these children are playing with now.To cut a long story short, the likelihood of black swans is dramatically underestimated pretty much everywhere in security calculations, through the abuse of the Gaussian probability distribution which is simply not applicable to the likelihood of black-swan events. — alcontali
I don't think they really care, often. I don't mean they necessarily consciously know and decide not to weigh the consequences, though I do think this. — Coben
And then we have to deal with the waste for thousands of years, and the security around that waste. Which means government and likely outsourced private security or monitoring passed on for generations or until some safe more complete technological solution is found. So, current profits paid for by random masses of future people. And that's all fi it goes well, where the measures work. If they don't, well, that also will have various kinds of costs.Furthermore, the budget for decommissioning is gigantic, and probably also still underestimated by at least an order of magnitude. — alcontali
I agree with everything you said, except I do not even think the price mechanism as a means of making distribution more efficient is a strength of capitalism. There are so many distortions in the market, what the price mechanism purports to accomplish is undermined. — rlclauer
Hmmm, well first, desire is an emotion (correct me if wrong). Do all living things have emotion? I don't know...it seems it depends on definitions, but I would lean toward needing a certain level of mental complexity before it seems like the same type of emotion we humans understand? Does a dog experience some emotions similar to humans...seems VERY likely. Fish don't demonstrate behaviors that make their emotions obvious, but I can imagine they exist. As I keep moving down the food chain toward less complex organisms, it seems I am less convinced of their emotional capacity. — ZhouBoTong
Colloquially, I also feel that 'desire' STRONGLY implies "more than need". I get that by definition, we can desire the things we need...but we don't usually say things like "I desire to breath". In this sense, an ant and a fish would not (seemingly) have desires. — ZhouBoTong
In the same way (to try to get back to thread topic, haha), I am not sure a human desires life. We live life. So I would struggle to follow that slave owners get their power from slaves desire to live? Their power comes from guns, germs and steel (so to speak) right? — ZhouBoTong
Economic mobility has decreased since the middle class has begun to diminish, which is directly related to the adoption of neoliberal economic policies. This exploits working populations by expropriating would be benefits to them in the form of tax cuts for the rich. Exploitation, and this generates massive wealth at the top. — removedmembershiprc
I wonder why you called this movement "neoliberal". — god must be atheist
Neoliberalism or neo-liberalism[1] is the 20th-century resurgence of 19th-century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism and free market capitalism,[2]:7[3] which constituted a paradigm shift away from the post-war Keynesian consensus that had lasted from 1945 to 1980.[4][5]
When the term entered into common use in the 1980s in connection with Augusto Pinochet's economic reforms in Chile, it quickly took on negative connotations and was employed principally by critics of market reform and laissez-faire capitalism. Scholars tended to associate it with the theories of Mont Pelerin Society economists Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James M. Buchanan, along with politicians and policy-makers such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan.[8][27] Once the new meaning of neoliberalism became established as a common usage among Spanish-speaking scholars, it diffused into the English-language study of political economy.[8] By 1994, with the passage of NAFTA and with the Zapatistas' reaction to this development in Chiapas, the term entered global circulation.[7] Scholarship on the phenomenon of neoliberalism has been growing over the last few decades.[19][28]
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