Apparently, Obama went for the red-blooded-American choice, a Bud Lite. Can you imagine the shitfit the far right would have had if he had chosen something even vaguely fancy, like Crowley's Blue Moon? Or a Red Stripe?
...I do not agree that substituting reason with emotion is categorically irresponsible in matters of life and death. I think that kind of bold statement plays into the notion that reason is inherently superior/preferable/legit compared to emotion!I just want to point out that this is so ENFJ:
Introverted Thinking is least apparent and most enigmatic in this type. In fact, it often appears only when summoned by Feeling. At times only in jest, but in earnest if need be, Thinking entertains as logical only those conclusions which support Feeling's values. Other scenarios can be shown invalid or at best significantly inferior. Such "Thinking in the service of Feeling" has the appearance of logic, but somehow it never quite adds up.Of course, as a classic INTP, I take umbrage to this cavalier dismissal of reason:
Introverted Thinking is frequently the focus of the spiritual quest of ENFJs. David's lengthiest psalm, 119, pays it homage. "Law," "precept," "commandment," "statute:" these essences of inner thinking are the mysteries of Deity for which this great Feeler's soul searched.
Introverted Thinking strives to extract the essence of the Idea from various externals that express it. In the extreme, this conceptual essence wants no form or substance to verify its reality. Knowing the Truth is enough for INTPs....In the end, it doesn't matter to me what your emotions are; you're gonna need a theory.
The idea of an “intelligence explosion” in which smart machines would design even more intelligent machines was proposed by the mathematician I. J. Good in 1965. Later, in lectures and science fiction novels, the computer scientist Vernor Vinge popularized the notion of a moment when humans will create smarter-than-human machines, causing such rapid change that the “human era will be ended.” He called this shift the Singularity.
[T]he researchers collected data from the United States, Europe, and China at a variety of times, and looked at a wide range of characteristics--things such as crime rates, disease transmission, demographics, infrastructure energy consumption, economic activity, and innovation. Sure enough, they found thatThe theory is that the "clustering effect"--the phenomenon of talented, productive people interacting and networking with each other on a daily basis--is not just some side-benefit of lots of people living and working close together, but the principle driving force of economic growth all over the world. Hustle and bustle, in other words, generates a disproportionate amount of wealth and innovation.Social organizations, like biological organisms, consume energy and resources, depend on networks for the flow of information and materials, and produce artifacts and waste.... Cities manifest power-law scaling similar to the economy-of-scale relationships observed in biology: a doubling of population requires less than a doubling of certain resources. The material infrastructure that is analogous to biological transport networks--gas stations, lengths of electrical cable, miles of road surface--consistently exhibits sublinear [less than one] scaling with population.
This might all have been expected. But what the researchers had not expected to see was that the correlation between population growth and characteristics with little analogue to biology--such as innovation, patent activity, number of supercreative people, wages, and GDP--was greater than one. In other words, a doubling of population resulted in more than two times the creative and economic output. Unlike biological organisms, all of which slow down as they grow larger, cities become wealthier and more creative the bigger they get. They called this phenomenon "superlinear" scaling: "By almost any measure, the larger a city's population, the greater the innovation and wealth per person." This increased speed is itself a product of the clustering force, a key component of the productivity improvements generated by the concentration of talented people.
Via Ezra Klein, a pretty good interview with Bruce Bartlett who has the too-rare distinction of being an intellectually honest and perfectly reasonable conservative. Here he is on the benefits of a VAT (value added tax):I think the administration made a mistake approaching the funding of health-care reform how it did and I think Republicans made a mistake refusing to seriously debate the issue or its funding.
The value-added tax would be a very appropriate tax to use for this purpose. One reason is I am disturbed that we have a large percentage of the population that pay no income taxes. And I know many of those people pay payroll taxes. But income taxes fund the general government. According to a study by the Tax Policy Center, 47 percent pay no income tax, or have negative liability. And I think it's bad for democracy when people get into the position when a majority can vote benefits for themselves but not pay for it. And that should disturb liberals as much as conservatives.
The VAT would necessarily be a broad-based tax. It would be a way of getting people to pay for the benefits they themselves receive. People like Len Burman and Rahm Emmanuel's brother [Ezekiel Emmanuel, a health care adviser to Peter Orszag] have supported this for some time. Len argues that if people knew the VAT was dedicated to health-care reform, and the rate rose and fell automatically with the spending of the system, they would have an incentive to hold down taxes. They would have some positive reinforcement we do not now have with Medicare. I hope that's right. You know, every other major developed country has a VAT: The parties of the left in Europe made a deal a long time ago: If conservatives will let us have a welfare state, we'll fund it conservatively. And I think that's still a good deal.
He also makes a good point about how a VAT would give the government an additional tool to stimulate spending in a recession:
And thinking about this from another perspective, suppose we had a VAT right now and we wanted to stimulated consumption. Reducing the VAT rate temporarily would be a wonderful way to stimulate consumption. Suppose you had a 10 percent VAT and we said we weren't going to collect it for the next 10 months. People would buy like crazy. They'd buy toilet paper, they'd buy anything they could get their hands on that they knew they'd need in the future. We're depriving ourselves of a great stimulant tool by ignoring this.
I think I agree with a lot of this. Even if a VAT is regressive, realistically it's the only way you're going to get conservatives on board with funding a welfare state--and it's nice that it has other benefits too, like its ability to work as a stimulus tool, and the fact that it would properly align incentives with regard to keeping the costs of healthcare in check.
Moreover, just generally speaking, I think lots of people agree that at some point we're going to have to shift to a less demand-oriented economy (currently consumer spending accounts for 70% of GDP), so it makes sense to shift the tax burden away from income and more towards consumption.
On a separate point, I think this interview really brings into stark relief how damaging it is for the country that there is no intellectually honest opposition party that offers serious policy alternatives. I understand that conservatives don't want an expanded welfare state and that they view the obstruction of its expansion as a worthy cause, but at some point this behavior takes its toll on the ability of the government to operate: if you relentlessly increase spending while refusing to raise revenue in the long term, the federal government will eventually just stop working (see: California). That's an outcome nobody should want, regardless of ideology.
robbieduncanFeb 28, 2006, 02:50 PMYou cannot cut and paste a file. It simply does not work this way. If you want to move a file then move it. Cut and paste is not move. What happens if you forget to paste? Lost file.
One of the mysteries of the way issues are covered in much of the news media is how certain views get ruled “out of the mainstream” and just don’t get covered — even when many well-informed people hold those views.I think this can pretty easily be explained by the fact that Democrats didn't do a good job of framing the debate.
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...[T]he voices calling for stronger stimulus are, may I say, sorta kinda respectable — several Nobelists in the bunch, plus a large fraction of the prominent economists who predicted the housing crash before it happened.But somehow, the pro-stimulus people are unpersons. Who makes these decisions?
“Two days ago there were very few people calling for his resignation,” said Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), who has not called for Sanford’s resignation. “It came out of that interview.”And:
Another top Republican in the state said of the governor: “His support has collapsed.”So what happened here? Well, I think it's not stretching things to put it this way: at a critical juncture, Sanford--with his odd behavior--spooked the investors. In American politics there are certain norms and rituals--certain scripts--which politicians typically conform to as a sort of kabuki. And while such rituals, in cases like these, inevitably lead to the most painfully inauthentic, glib expressions of human remorse, they also reassure supporters by signaling that they will be embarking on the same scripted set of steps that countless prior adulterous politicians have taken to successfully recover from scandal. It's the predictability of what will unfold that props up supporter confidence during this critical period.
It depicts world income, per capita, since 1000 BC. Pretty neat (although how they managed to piece together per capita income for people living 3000 years ago is beyond me). You can see at the industrial revolution that "incomes rose sharply in many countries after 1800 but declined in others".The two figures actually illustrate slightly different points. What the figure above shows is that over a roughly 3000 year period, during which there was obviously quite a lot of technological progress — iron plows, horse collars, mastering the cultivation of rice, the importation of potatoes into Europe, etc. — living standards basically went nowhere. Why? Because population growth always ate up the gains, pushing living standards back to roughly subsistence.
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This homeostasis only broke down when very rapid technological change finally outstripped population pressure for an extended period.
2 comments:
Unlike the Bush/Wooster engagement with language--with its Bach-like contortions of content and form, its feats of pure imagination, ingenuity, and Dionysian playfulness--the Palin escape from language hints at something that's darker, more subversive, and undeniably absurdist. She seeks not to expand language, but to diminish it as far as possible, to render it alien and meaningless and somehow outside the boundaries of authentic human interaction. She wants to make the audience aware of the limits of language itself, and she wants the awareness to be visceral. Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen is her political credo, but she makes us know it not by remaining silent about that which she cannot speak, but by speaking about that which she cannot speak.
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Words, devoid of meaning, are consequently devoid of force, and their actions cease to cause equal and opposite reactions: words and rationales fly at Palin like bullets but she does not budge, and when she speaks there is no recoil. There can be no laws that govern data because there is but one datum: the fact of the datum. What particular shape that datum takes in any given circumstance is simply the one that most reaffirms itself. Yes. 1. Big. Go. Up. Bright. Fast. We hold on to it for dear life, and steadfastly refuse to accept that it can fail us. This steadfast refusal we call "American exceptionalism", and we have now invested it with so much significance that it keeps us from what ought to be our chief distraction: surviving.
Republican state Sen. Larry Grooms, who describes himself as a longtime Sanford friend and ally, told POLITICO he called the governor following the AP interview to tell him that he would be calling on Sanford to resign.
“Your effectiveness as governor has weakened to such a point ... that we won’t be able to pass any of your legislative agenda,” Grooms said he told Sanford over the phone in explaining why he planned to join those calling on the governor to step down.
“Senator, you need to understand something,” Sanford answered, according to Grooms. “This is a story about true love.”
Grooms then told Sanford that he “was destroying the Republican Party, the party of personal responsibility,” to which the governor did not respond.
Ha! I love this guy. He keeps saying true things even when it's clear that the situation vis-a-vis his political career calls for the not saying of true things.
You know, these free market principles make a lot more sense if you assume everyone has the same amount of money, and hence the dollars they allocate to something represent exactly their 'desire' for that object. So the person who wants it the most gets it, with the least fuss.
Fine, you can say that the people with more money have more entitlement to stuff, that is the idea of capitalism anyway. But when it comes to basic needs, yes, like parking, it's meant to be something everyone can get. So free market can totally screw it. The richest people get it, even if they don't want it that much (a bit of a stretch), and maybe even abuse it.
It's more of an obvious problem with, for example, gas. If there's a limited amount of it, and prices soar, then rich folks can use it to excess, and poor people can get seriously screwed. So price caps as a form of socialism seem necessary, even though it makes the distribution much less efficient.
I don't think what you're saying makes a whole lot of sense. You seem to have slipped into the mindset that goods and services are just magically already there in set amounts, and that what happens on the consuming end has no effect on what happens on the producing end.
But consumption drives production. If gas becomes very scarce, it is in everyone's interest for prices to reflect this (for them to "soar"), not because the rich are "entitled" to anything, but because high profit margins in the gas business will encourage people, in the aggregate, to divert more resources into producing more gas, and so there will be more gas for everyone, and prices will go back down--for everyone. Or, alternatively, if the gas supply cannot be increased any further (if we have reached "peak gas"), then the high cost of driving a gas-powered automobile will start to make non-gas-reliant modes of transportation more competitive, and people will find it profitable to start diverting resources into developing those new industries and technologies.
So I think in this case you are guilty of "shooting the messenger"--you're blaming the price for the problem, when really the price is just indicating the real problem, which is that the tradeoffs of producing this good--gas--are becoming too costly in comparison to other things we could be spending our time and energy on. By introducing price controls you're just "living in denial"--delaying progress by keeping everyone in the same spending pattern on the same products, even as the quality and access to those products steadily declines.
Of course, this free market pricing mechanism can't be applied to everything--sometimes there are extenuating circumstances. For example, with healthcare, we might decide that it's morally unacceptable to deny a poor person medical coverage in an emergency, and then find ourselves on a slippery slope, so that by the time we're giving away ER care for free, it actually is more efficient to give that person access to less costly preventive care that would prevent the costly trip to the ER in the first place. And so--boom--you're on your way to some form of socialized medicine. That's just fine.
But there are no such slippery-slope-inducing moral imperatives regarding parking spaces! Only a child of Los Angeles could believe something so patently absurd as the idea that "free parking" is a "basic need". It reminds me of the Woody Allen quote about LA: "I don't want to move to a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light".