Monday Open Thread
The Olympics continue to dazzle, with the weekend highlight being Phelps completing his record eight-gold sweep.
The forum on faith provided both Obama and McCain with an opportunity to answer probing but fair questions, and McCain in particular did well. There is some controversy bubbling up over his late arrival .
What's going on this Monday?
Submitted by Brendan on Mon, 2008-08-18 11:04
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Proposed change to handling diaries and the front page
I am unfortunately unable to give SC the time it deserves at the moment, and I believe some of the other admins are in the same boat.
It would be a shame if the quality diaries were to escape notice due to low visibility. So (a) check them out! and (b) I suggest that any diary with a specified number of recommendations be automatically promoted to the front page.
This makes the site a bit more democratic and user-driven, too. Either we can code that in, or for now an admin could take care of it as noticed. Thoughts on the idea, on a reasonable number of recs for promotion, or on any other meta issues?
Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
I think 4 recc's should be enough
for a FP promotion. Perhaps 2 or 3 for a conservative one since they'll have fewer potential voters to give it props.
Of course, arbitrarily choosing good diaries for the FP, regardless of votes, is always on the table as well. But an admin must see it in order to promote it.
That sounds reasonable to me (nt)
Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
Might be tricky to code
but a better way may be to have the number of recs required to vary based on the number of recs total in say the last week. That way the requirement will scale automatically with the site's traffic.
I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
Inside joke for Brutus
I've been taking over minor admin duties as needed. It makes me feel useful.
Just don't be gone for too long otherwise I'll be ruling with an iron fist.
I never broke the law; I am the law! --
George W. BushJudge DreddI'm listening to...
Bloody good show, ol' chap
Count on the sharp British humor to make a humorously brilliant argument
for school choice.
Personally
I don't see where the addition of british accents and a laugh track make the standard libertarian talking points on education either humorous or brilliant.
Maybe that's just me.
I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
Well,
"Maybe that's just me."
Yes. Maybe.
Either way, I do indeed find it humorous and brilliant...not to mention incisive in showing the faux intellectualism and socialistic authoritarianism that lurks beneath the defense of the status quo.
Maybe that's just me. ;)
Not that its an argument that "school choice" is worse.
But, open enrollment could lead to schools nearly exclusively focusing on standardized text or whatever criteria is used to rate schools. ie just like managers focusing on quarterly statements for personal bonuses at the expense of possible long term profits
In our society, people are rewarded for pretending to be certain about things they're clearly not certain about. -- Sam Harris,
I'm not sure your analogy
is going to resonate with pro-business libertarians.
Come, my friends. 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world -- Tennyson
I'm not really it's a matter if resonating, Brendan
It's a question of making sense.
Implicit in any business analogy like the one Brutus gave (and often not considered when making the analogy) is the dynamic that short-sighted and detrimental behavior is normally exposed and addressed lest the company fails.
God, I wish.
Business doesn't really work that way outside of theory classes.
If you aren't political then yeah maybe your bumbling gets you fired. But more likely it gets you promoted because business people (and especially shareholders who view companies as nothing but a money making venture) tend to be unbelievably short sighted.
I can give you any number of examples.
In fact here's one:
We have an analytical tool in the lab that is a serial number 001. This means it was a first of the kind tool from the vendor. That's always a big warning sign. FOK tools invariably have serious bugs in them that the vendor fixes over time. We happen to have a latter model of basically the same tool as well and the latter one works much better (and has less jury rigged fixes in place involving tinfoil).
So said 001 tool is supposed to go to a new fab overseas. In the meantime we still need it to do a few checks and to train the engineer that is also going overseas.
Time comes for renewal of the service contract. Engineer owner and technician put together the numbers and submit the PO. Management says "Why the hell do we need to pay this much for a tool we're giving to some other organization? Make them pay for it." Other organization says "Why the hell should we pay for this PO when the first organization still has the tool and is continuing to run it (at least a little)?"
Net result is that nobody ponies up the cash and the service contract expires. Now here it is a couple months later and surprise of surprises the tool breaks. Hard. Repair costs are going to be severe. In the meantime we have those few jobs which can't be run on the newer tool which we no longer have any capability to do. The engineer who was supposed to go overseas isn't getting any training and the tool he was supposed to go with needs many tens of thousands of dollars of repairs and a new detector (which currently take anywhere from 6-18 months to get repaced because there is an industry wide shortage).
Now who do you think is getting yelled at? The managers who made the &^%$ing stupid decision not to put a FOK critical tool under contract? Of course not. The people getting yelled at are the Engineer and tech who made the right call in the first place. Why? Because management gets to do all the yelling and they don't feel like taking the blame for their own incompetence.
This is not an isolated occurance or rare gaffe. This is life every damn day in any big company.
Here again is why I say that economic theory is a very poor predictor of business reality.
I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
Opt-out and being "good enough"
I think this refers to the notion that a business doesn't have to be the best in their field to survive, they just have to be good enough.
I find this is especially true in markets that are nowhere near free. The most striking example is in cell phone service. I've yet to hear of anyone who is completely satisfied with their carrier. The contracts they require you to sign contain are filled with ridiculous demands and if you so much as change your plan, the contract resets and you're stuck with them for another 2 years. Europeans still can't believe we pay for incoming calls/text messages here.
Credit cards are much the same way, even though there is no dearth of banking institutions. Almost all the contracts say that the company may change the terms of the agreement simply by notifying you of the change. Of course, the idea is that you won't see the notice or won't go through the steps to decline the changes to the contract. This sort of opt-out policy makes the credit card companies millions at the expense of their customers.
You'd figure that there'd be some sort of untapped market for people who want sane contracts for their cell phones and credit cards. I think there is, but no one wants to cater to that market because they know as long as they are "good enough" no one is going to complain. Catering to your customers isn't necessarily the best way to profitability. At least some of the time treating them like crap is.
I never broke the law; I am the law! --
George W. BushJudge DreddI'm listening to...
Glass half empty/half full
rates, plans etc. are changing all the time. If you take a step back and look, you see how much has evolved in a short span of time. Compare that with the snails pace change in centralized land line service and prices over the previous decades.
But in the larger picture, practices are constantly changing. We often dont appreciate or take time to notice the changes. But we do take for granted the practices that trial and error over long periods of time have given us.
You almost make my point for me
Indeed. It's apparently good enough that we can't/shouldn't complain. Never mind that it could be or should be much better.
Anyone who knows the slightest bit about the technical details behind text messages is aghast at the price of them. After all, all bits are essentially equal. The only difference between voice and data is that voice must be delivered in a decent amount of time.
Do you care to comment on why the rest of the civilized world doesn't pay for incoming calls/messages while we do? Is there something unique about Americans that we like paying for incoming data?
I never broke the law; I am the law! --
George W. BushJudge DreddI'm listening to...
stiner
Never mind that it could be or should be much better.
Such thinking is great as a motivator to constantly improve on what we have, what we know and could be near and long term.
However, when used as a reason to coerce business in a dirigiste sense, I become nervous of the implications.
As for how much we pay for texts, I get a truck load free with my AT&T plan. Not sure why that would be rare.
On your last question, I do not know the answer. But again, I have so many minutes for 50 bucks per month that its never an issue. I often consider a lower plan.
There is no such thing as perfect competition.
Only if there is perfect competition and the other companies aren't doing the same, are inefficiencies bound show up. When most companies have incentives that lead managers choose one profitable venture over another possibly better option [with the "drawback" of a longer payback period], then companies are equally worse off.
In our society, people are rewarded for pretending to be certain about things they're clearly not certain about. -- Sam Harris,
There is at least one
The market for corn and other foodstuffs is about as close as it gets to perfect competition.
Most of the big companies operate in oligopoly territory. No wonder free market theory fails in conjunction with such entities.
I never broke the law; I am the law! --
George W. BushJudge DreddI'm listening to...
Uh... Farm Subsidies?
How can corn be a free market when we had virtually every presidential contender tripping over themselves in their rush to promise Iowa more subsidies?
I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
On a local scale
You're right otherwise.
I never broke the law; I am the law! --
George W. BushJudge DreddI'm listening to...
Who said perfect? competition need not be perfect
to do its job. But it must exist. To dwell on the mistakes of business and man is to miss the progress that evolves from them.
In other words
"pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, I am the great and powerful Friedman!"
I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
not really
but hey, to each his own, I suppose.
We all have that choice, when reading the words of others, to seek to understand what they truly mean or to weaken or twist that meaning into something more amenable to our biases.
Heh
You gotta admit that it is a bit self serving, as a free markets guy, to say "Look only at the good parts and ignore all the bad stuff!"
Strangely enough that sounds like a bit of a con job.
I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
delicious zinger
It is the economy, stupid.
Not at all.
I'm not being self-serving.
I'll repeat what I said:
Elaborated, it simply means that progress is the product of trial and error and the knowledge learned therefrom which is passed along. It's constantly in motion. It's not a matter of looking only at the good stuff. It's a matter of appreciating that good and better and better (best is always changing and moving forward) come in the wake of mistakes, errors, miscalculations, human frailty and imperfection. We know what works (or least what works better) based on what doesn't work or work as well. THAT is progress and, yes, it costs. It costs time and money and involves losses and weeding out the bad to be better.
In terms of business and markets for goods services, it's constantly in flux and moving forward in an imperfect way because we are not perfect but than rather learning to be better. And there's only one way to do that: trial and error.
Fair enough
but I'd contest the notion that business and markets for goods" are moving forward at all. It is in constant motion but that motion seems just as often backwards as forwards- mostly because the system is chaotic and incapable of any long term though because nobody is in charge of anything but their own petty greed.
Expecting advancement out of what has all the wisdom of a pig wrestling contest is strange. There's no purpose to free market capitalism but the enrichment of the individual at the expense of all others. Why would you expect that to lead to good for all?
There's no intelligence (in the sense of a guiding mind) to capitalism. It is like the weather. Yes the weather may bring a useful rain to help crops, but it also can bring drought, or tornado, or flood. It simply doesn't care. It will go on its way with no mind of the consequences to the pitiful humans in its way.
I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
well, here's the snag for me
I obviously don't agree. Nor do I have your gloomy outlook on progress and the ability of private, independent men to interact successfully in peaceful and prosperous ways. The proof of success and progress of freely acting people bound by a general respect for and accountability to the rule law is all around you...as are the results where this is less prominent or absent. Perhaps you choose not to see it. We've been over this before and I don't see the point in rehashing it.
It's not that I don't acknowledge the bad and only the good. But rather, I acknowledge the bad as part of the process of the progress. You seem to dwell on the bad and take the good for granted as if it didn't need the bad to happen.
But I will say that the idea of "planning" such activity by the guiding hand of an enlightened man or bureau has been thoroughly debunked in theory as well as in practice. Man is not perfect in any sense. But the more people act freely, the more progress and good results are obtained.
But that's what we're here for
rehashing arguments :)
But they haven't been freely acting, that's part of the point. They've been regulated, guided, influenced, and cajolled. You keep pointing at the progress made in a world where free markets have never existed as if it were proof free markets must work.
True, because the bad is almost always a function of unreasoning greed, which people do not have to exhibit, while the good is almost always the product of intelligent action. The problem is capitalism rewards the former and discourages the latter. It is distinctly anti-intellectual, rewarding our basest natures and assuring us that the vulgar pleasures of materialism are not only valid and worthy but the highest aspiration of all.
I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
No absolutes...
We're talking in relative degrees.
Part 2:
Neither you nor anyone else is going to successfully abolish greed or any negative or destructive tendencies from the dark side of human nature. Both good and bad, intelligence and stupidity are present in all people and always have been. And markets that work more freely than not do the best we can (so far) at mitigating the bad for a net good. There will always be bad. ALWAYS. And I simply will not be seduced by some gray and vague idea that we can consciously plan to eliminate it or control it to the point of irrelevance. Dealing with evil while guarding against the seduction of thinking we can fabricate good by controlling human nature is an ongoing learning process.
On a final note, If all this seems anti-intellectual or hopeless then the idea of free people is necessarily by extension anti-intellectual and hopeless and that the function of competition and consequences of not properly measuring one's own sense of greed is a pointless endeavor in promoting most levels of self-control and limits on one's actions.
In the end, however, I think what most gets to you is that the results do not always reflect your specific expectations and values on the matter and translate that into "bad".
Conflations
Alright, but then you are admitting that every system is merely distinguished by the matter of degree to which it is "not free" with respect to markets. that's a hell of a lot different than the absolutist "Free markets are good" nonsense we get daily from the usual supsects on the right.
All that's left is haggling the details, in the words of Winstoin Churchill.
Possibly true, then again what harm is there in trying? Is there more harm in trying than in choosing a system that gives positive reinforcement for the bad in people?
No doubt greed will not be eliminated so long as we actively celebrate it.
I can't imagine how you say that. Without rigorous oversight capitalists are the meanest, cruelest, most evil bastards imaginable. All of life including their fellow man boil down to a sheet of profits and losses. If they will make more money by slapping you in chains and selling you and your family as chattel then they'll do so, as we proved with the slavery back in the day when capitalists were given entirely too much liberty to ply their vicious trade.
It wasn't capitalists that gave freedom to the slaves, it wa actually the government who forced the issue (for their own self serving reasons of course).
Indeed slavery is entirely too common in current day, including both the sweatshop variety and sex slavery. Those are legacies of capitalism given free reign. that's the result of your systen that supposedly promotes good more than bad.
Seems rather than free trade mitigating bad behavior it actively encourgaes our very worst.
I wouldn't have taken you for an adherent to Original Sin.
No, not at all. the problem is you are conflating property "rights" with freedom. Real freedom has precious little to do with stuff and everything to do with the self, the very thing that property rights debases.
I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
Well,
I've never asserted otherwise. Implicit in free markets is a sense of degrees, IMO. But I think that's obvious when you take what they mean. But perhaps not. I dunno.
No harm necessarily...when taken generally as ways to improve or tweak markets. Devil's in the details. Implications on personal freedom and bad side effects must always weigh heavily however.
I also don't agree with the characterization of the rest of that comment. Greed is not celebrated IMO. It's a gray area of business that can be damaging to everyone when pushed too far. But again, it's tempered by others in competition if not first by reprisal from clients or employees. Again, I'm simply being pragmatic.
I know you can't imagine it. But hey, to each his own. I'm a capitalist and don't fit your mold at all. Most of the oversight you mention does happen through mitigation of passions via competition and free will.
You're right there, Captain Obvious. ;) The government finally fessed up and did its job in defending human freedom...including the economic freedom of demanding to be paid and working as one sees it.
But when you make points like that, it makes me wonder if you're really on the same page.
I refer to the topic of your post: "Conflations". Voila. True slavery is all too common where human freedom is not respected at all. The hyperbolic faux kind you mention after are economic realities of poor, poor people. The "free" aspect of it is not the telling one. It's the poverty, lack of wealth and better alternatives in that society that tell the tale. This of course is not unlike us here in America before and during the Industrial Revolution when we were dirt poor people with the same options to resort to. But we've through this historical lens adjustment already.
I'm assuming that's a joke.
Last paragraph:
"Self" included the stuff: You are the owner of yourself and all you voluntarily exchange with others....whether it's money, goods, services or whatever (even your body for sexual pleasure if you are so inclined IMO). You cannot decouple them.
Ten, four and out...
I also don't agree with the
Given tht it is the fundamental basis of the social order in capitalism that sure seems an awful lot like celebrating the trait.
Would you try to base everything on some facet of humanity you didn't really like?
You are heavily regulated and policed.
To a person with a balance sheet everything looks like property. Everything. Art, science, knowledge, ignorance, poverty, food, human beings themselves. Nothing but commodities.
Now why would you ever trust such a person? Knowing that they have voluntarily sacrificed conscience to instead value profit...
So how can you simultaneously ackniwledge that capitalists are responsible for some of the worst abuses of all time and still claim they represent the best way to prevent "bad"?
That seems hugely contradictory. If capitalism did anything at all to restrain bad actions then you would expect not to find the worst atrocities carried out in its name, and contrary wise if Capitalism is the fuel for the worst of man's evils then you would not expect the philospohy to be much of a brake on that evil.
What you leave out is that this poverty is being artificially maintained by caoitalists who find it advantageous. Just as it was the barrons of industry who fought to keep laborers in America first slaves and then later unsafe, poorly equiped, and disorganized.
The only reason workers are affluent these days in the US is because we fought the capitalists for every inch of ground. They were the retarding force against progress.
Just pointing out how much your position has in common with religious dogma on that particular topic. Whether that disturbs you is the question :)
On the contrary you MUST decouple them. You are you, not your stuff and you only own yourself. That is the only freedom you have or ever should have. Really owning anything outside of yourself leads inexorably to owning people in one form or another.
I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
compelled to respond:
1. Greed is not the fundamental basis. Self-Interest is and no that is not the same thing.
2. Your statement has a lot of conjecture about how people behave minus regulation and police. It also says nothing about what you have in mind with regulation and police. If it's simply defense against infringement of individual freedom, then it's another of those "Captain Obvious" since it's a central component of defending rights in free societies and I have no quarrel with it.
3.
Whoah. Now you're really slipping. You also changed my statement. AGAIN, no one prevents "bad" in business. It is mitigated and learned from. LIKE I SAID. The fact that human rights to self and individual sovereignty were ABUSED and IGNORED under slavery is a separate matter as my previous answer made clear. The framework of law that respects individual rights is integral to everything I stand by. WITHIN this framework, yes, we make progress. And this framework is intrinsically LINKED to it all.
4.
Burden of proof.
last point:
No. I will not decouple them. The conclusions you draw therefrom are preposterous if not simply hyperbole.
Speaking of
Speaking of "Captain Obvious"-style a-HA! type statements, I'm reminded of a great little post by Julian Sanchez on a familiar conversational occurrence which he took the initiative to name and define called "The Outsight
".
Heh
The power of Tlaloc Compells you! I will exorcise the demons.
The difference being what precisely?
You profess to have no quarrel wioth it and yet it is contrary to a professed belief in free markets or even in a "freer is better" for markets. Obviously then you agree that markets can in fact be too free, that they are in their purest form in fact bad since in their purest form they hold no regard for the freedoms you claim to want government to protect.
Again I find the contradictions somewhat glaring.
Mitigated by what exactly? What did business do to learn from and mitigate the evils of slavery?
But that framework is contravened by the very system of social order you espouse! It's like someone saying "Communism is best but only communism grounded in property rights." It is nonsense.
You cannot simultaneously hold up profit as the ultimate good and also call for protection of the individual. They are cross purposes.
Which is why you end up in a position that resembles a pretzel. :)
I came. I saw. I posted.
Veni, Vidi, Bitchy.
It's getting old.
1. The difference is that self-interest is a normal and non-objectionable trait. It's what gets you to go to work, buy the product that you want over the one you don't, turn down a job that you don't like when another you prefer is available. It explains you would leave your job if a better presented one itself. It's explains why you choose to live in a house or apartment instead of cardboard box. It's also as basic as to explain why nobody would ever try to sell filet mignon filled ice cream bars drenched in mustard for 59 cents...or another price for that matter. Basically it's why you choose between alternatives. Greed is another matter. Basic stuff. Very basic.
To another person, this all may qualify as an "outsight". ;)
This, unfortunately IS an "outsight". Even for you and especially in light of previous posts in this thread...not to mention others.
As for the rest, it's all explained already in the preceding posts. It's not very hard to understand. I'll leave to someone else to explain...if they are so inclined.
Some middle ground
Self-interest is normal, but sometimes is objectionable. No one would object to me buying crunchy peanut butter over smooth because this decision doesn't harm anyone in any meaningful way. What is objectionable is when my self-interest does harm someone in a meaningful way.
For instance, I can make the case that it is in my best interest to molest a child. That's still self-interest and it certainly is objectionable. Another less extreme case is in securitizing bad mortgages. This practice, while motivated by self-interest, had severe consequences on people who didn't know the first thing about alt-A or subprime loans.
Essentially, when your choices make a significant impact on my choices, I have the right to complain and receive redress for your actions.
I never broke the law; I am the law! --
George W. BushJudge DreddI'm listening to...
A straw man is not middle ground
Yeah, except for the fact that its a violation of some else's rights. Again, respect and defense of others' individual rights is IMPLICIT in any of these discussions.
Examples where the self interest or freedom involves force on others doesn't speak to what I'm saying for the simple and obvious reason that it's VIOLATION of rights.
This little snag almost seems to disappoint people trying to rebut what I'm saying because they have to rebut a straw man that tries to go around my point.
Indeed. And personally I blame perversions of market incentives for such occurrences. Moral Hazard
is huge factor here:
I couldn't have said it better my self. Devastating perfect prose. Now, I UNDERSTAND why we choose to pass laws that create the risk of moral hazard. Basically, the normal free and LAWFUL market is perhaps too constrained (controlling greed) and not amenable enough for some more lenient tastes. So politicians create programs and institutions to spread risk (or pretend to make it go away) so more people can buy homes by making banks feel easier about writing loans they might not otherwise approve if they more or all of the brunt of failure (because of self-interest).
Now, on a bit a of a tangent, I suppose that's nice and all. We want to see more people get what they want. Fine. BUT...and here's the big BUT...I would feel better, in part, about the whole risky affair if people willfully acknowledged the perversion of market incentives taking place and were prepared to point the finger back at where it started if and when the whole show falls apart. Sure, we can ignore the moral hazard, pretend it's irrelevant and simply blame economic actors and their perverted self-interest (now ironically more "free" in a BAD way because we moved away from the pickle-like grip of a more free-market model...funny, huh?) and start making new laws to deal with the symptoms and not the root problem...but things start getting more sticky and easy to obfuscate.
Absolutely. I agree 100%. And we have plenty of channels for such redressing. However, let's make sure rights are actually violated. If I take the last swedish meatball you were craving from the buffet tray, my choices are affecting your choices...but you won't get very far in a court of law. ;)
Sometimes, we're just SOL.
Unqualified statements are asking for so-called strawmen
Explicitly adding qualifiers to an unqualified argument with vacant "implicit" qualifiers isn't really all that much of a straw man.
In our society, people are rewarded for pretending to be certain about things they're clearly not certain about. -- Sam Harris,
Well,
I'll take from you said that you see they were straw men. Beyond, I'm not sure what else to take.
Well...semantics debate...
I assume you meant "usually non-objectionable" or something similar.
The original phraseology is open to interpretation of not having an implicit qualifier.
The quoted line could be very well be taken literally. Surely, 
bringing up a qualifier to the original quote isn't necessarily a straw man.
In our society, people are rewarded for pretending to be certain about things they're clearly not certain about. -- Sam Harris,
I am going to have to watch
that movie with fresh eyes.
It seems I somehow missed the deeper meaning of this incredibly insightful movie, Airplane
that you use as a valuable resource. :)
It is the economy, stupid.
clarification taken
Thanks. And thanks for "assuming" that that's what I meant. It makes dialog a lot easier. ;)
The perversion of the
markets comes from the humans that participate in them. Without the 'moral hazard', or the humans the markets wouldn't exist.
Your tangent is just another moral take on the definition of what the market means to you. Your definitions are much more about human interaction and moral philosophy than anything else.
It is the economy, stupid.
You're going to have explain that first paragraph
a little better. The first sentence seems to be a misstatement and the second makes no sense at all.
Well said stiney
Essentially, when your choices make a significant impact on my choices, I have the right to complain and receive redress for your actions.
That is why I am for putting an amendment into the constitution outlawing gay marriage. My marriage is threatened by this violation of God's law. <--totally kidding.
It is the economy, stupid.
Not to mention another side issue...
Open enrollment is a myth for the rural poor or even urban poor if there are no reliable public or cheap transportation.
In our society, people are rewarded for pretending to be certain about things they're clearly not certain about. -- Sam Harris,