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[Drunken]

Just noting that there can't really be a Super-Ebola. Even regular Ebola is so deadly that whenever outbreaks happen they halt fairly quickly because the disease burns out all of its carriers before they can spread the infection farther. There is a hard limit on the axises of deadliness and infectiveness, hence why Ebola is strictly regional, Influenza effects large areas of the word, and Rhinovirus is global.

Viruses are difficult to quantify, ebola may not be the best example but it has the hysteria factor in people's minds to get the point across. There is a potential for a virus with a very long incubation time to decimate the human population. Bioengineered viruses are also a real concern. While it is true that it is virtually impossible for a virus to wipe out every person in the world, they can still cause epic amounts of damage, and could potentially roll back civilisation and technology hundreds of years.

Sorry to add to the derailment, this is not an issue in the current election, the nasa budget is an issue, as are health care, gay rights, gun control, taxes, financial regulation, electoral reform...

My two cents: increase it, single payer, let them marry, at least control fully automatic weapons, increase them, reinstate glass steagall and then go much further than that, direct democracy and sweeping campaign finance reform...

Yes I am a lefty.

Carry on.

[Kogan Loloklam]

For those who don't think a virus could kill us all, let me explain something...

You don't have to kill every living human to wipe out humanity. If you kill enough that humanity is down to 1% but scattered across the globe, we will probably have no viable population growth. Something to think about next time you are planning to go on a clensing spree to reduce genetic diversity.

I'm looking at you, makers of migrant magma machines!

[Frumple]

Heeheehee, no. We were at (way) less than 1% of our current population (remember, that's around 70 million.) for most of our history as a species, most of that scattered to the seven winds. We got by just fine, if a little inbred here and there.

Now, maybe .001% (and some change) and we'd be talking lack of sufficient breeding stock. More worrisome and likely to off us would be the societal shocks and logistics issues (like dealing with the corpses) involved with suddenly losing massive percentile points worth of total population.

[RedKing]

But hey, there would be plenty of job openings in the hunter/gatherer/scavenger sectors of the economy!

[GreatJustice]

The second. The smaller overall pool of money would cause massive deflation and prices would fall locally. (Assuming that's not in an existing preset currency.) Then you have 50% of people living on 1/5th of what the richest live on, not a bad deal. In the first one, you would have ridiculous hyperinflation (A la Zimbabwe a few years back or the papiermark, which had to be converted to reichsmark at 1,000,000,000,000:1 odds after the first world war.) and the bottom 50% would be absolutely screwed.

Inflation is obviously a problem in the first country, but that's beside the point of my post, though it is also a problem I'll admit

Alright. Assume me and you are doing our jobs and stuff. I have 2,000 bucks and you have 2,100. After a year of working/selling/buying I have 2,500 and you have 4,000. Am I any worse off because you're richer? No. If you made that money by robbing me then there is a problem, but it's that you're a thief, not that you have more money.

Seriously, the actual number that the money occupies is not what is important in an economy, it is the value of the money itself. Zimbabwe's money was so inflated that you needed several dozen trillion Zimbabwean dollars to buy a burger at McDonalds. They had to scrap the whole thing and start over.

Money is a means to an end, and that end is the effective establishment of standardized trade based upon a more objective system of value than that which exists with barter alone. Money is nothing but an abstraction of worth that we all mutually agree to use so that our trade will run more smoothly. Coming to believe that money itself is objectively important and serves as an end is a failing, because it forgets the actual purpose of money in our society and replaces it with obsession, which we have historically termed "greed".

It was a hypothetical scenario designed to point out a specific situation, not an explanation as to why hyperinflation is good. But while we're on that topic...

You keep saying these things like you think there's some kind of distinction between "lawless capitalism" and "free market with no government intervention".  It strikes me as demanding to know the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin, and it's really making the rest of your argument hard to take seriously.

Because there IS government intervention, it's just sporadic, heavily centered in specific sectors (there is absolutely nothing capitalistic about the Chinese banking sector, for example), and unpredictable.

Again, Russia could be construed as a "free market with no intervention" if you assume the bureaucrats, local thugs, etc are already paid off and then ignore half the nationalized industries.

And it's still giant ugly quote-ladders.

That's how discussions in which I'm arguing with about 5 people at once on a pile of different topics go. The alternative is ignoring all but one thing or making a pile of double posts. You can tell who I'm talking to at any given point and what I'm specifically talking about, which is about as good as it gets.

That's a red herring argument, you are comparing a richer country to a poorer one.  I could easily turn it around:

Would you rather live in a country where 1% make a 2.5 million a year and everyone else makes tuppence a year or where the top make a 2.5 million still but everyone else makes $50k?

Obviously you'd rather live in the second country because the first one is a country of extreme poverty.  But the second country doesn't just distribute the wealth better there is much more wealth.

So what? Poverty is bad, but their poverty is utterly irrelevant to income disparity.

Whether the richest 1% have a million dollars or ten million or a hundred million, the poorest 1% aren't any better or worse off. Would you rather make 50k or 10k? Claiming the problem is "income disparity" and not "poverty" is seriously messing up priorities.

hey look some sources, they generally conclude that happiness negitivly associates with income inequality, from that I can only assume we would all prefer to live in a more equal society given otherwise identical characteristics (these two aren't behind paywalls, if you have access to an academic database there are quite a few with similar conclusions and results)

So I'm going to say income disparity itself seems to be indicative of bad things at the very least

Yeah, some people are possessed by jealousy and envy when they see other people doing well. Have you ever heard the saying "the grass is greener on the other side of the fence"?

People today insist mankind is immune from extinction, but we sit looking at massive climate change, huge pandemics, and a interconnectivity that makes the distance between any two people in the movie industry connected by less than 7 direct connections. I don't know how it works for people outside the movie industry, but I doubt it's very big given how the furthest I saw of people who knows someone who died in Afghanistan is Friend of a Friend. In this world, we have the ability to follow the evolutionary drive of spreading the species as far as possible, and god's command to spread fourth into his land and be fruitful and multiply. Without spreading into space, we will reach an absolute limit of our ability to do this, assuming we don't all die from super Ebola.

There are people going into space without taking other people's money to do so, and with safety standards far better than those of NASA.

[Drunken]

There are people going into space without taking other people's money to do so, and with safety standards far better than those of NASA.

What is this "other people's money" you refer to. I agree with many of your points but if you have evidence that nasa are guilty of theft you should probably pass it on to the fbi.

Yes I am being facetious, but I find the debate in the US about taxes has really gone off the deep end. I saw a guy on slashdot who had the sig 'taxation is legalised theft, no more no less', and I just found myself needing to throw up. Needless to say I did not read anything he posted. Here are a list of just some of the things that taxes (should) pay for: Education, police, healthcare, justice system, administration, fire brigade, public transport, roads, bridges, dams, communications infrastructure, defence, social welfare, prisons, grants for new businesses... the list goes on. Lets envision a country with none of these things. Then envision a country with all of these things privatised.

If you advocate minimising taxes you are advocating minimising public services and infrastructure. Please defend that position, the position 'I don't want to give my money to the government' is not relevant.

How do you propose to have the above services and infrastructure without taxes, alternatively, how do you propose to have a functioning society without them.

Sorry if I am jumping in a conversation with too little context and saying something stupid, but it is almost 300 pages and I don't even get to vote.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Income disparity isn't a problem, poor people are!

GJ makes me laugh.

[cameron]

hey, way to dismiss published academic papers which in-fact mention that the lessened happiness includes the rich and is a general trend across the population, not just some people get jealous cause they can't succeed.

Also, you should probably explain your graph, it seems to be giving the dollar value of the American dollar over time and the website it comes from is just telling me how to turn the global financial crisis into personal profit.

Anyways, I would say the main point to government intervention is that the redistribution of wealth is absolutely needed at some point regardless of what you want your "capitalistic" system to do, as the whole point behind it is the use of capital as a basis for production is that those with capital will fund and thus benefit from that production. Assuming competent managing of capital, this will exacerbate any inequity already present in a system. I do understand that there is appeal to a system which rewards those who succeed and punishes those who fail with no regard to equality, but unless wealth and advantage can be reset at some point those rewards and punishments will only grow as time goes on which leads to an institutionalization of advantage which benefits those who have only had the good fortune to be born a descendent of someone who succeeded and punish those who are descended from those who fail, regardless of their present capabilities or diligence.

[Nadaka]

@Cameron, that is nearly precisely my POV. The modern perversion of free market rhetoric is merely a means of gaining popular support for reinstating the the institutional inequity of the hereditary class based system. This time it is the invisible hand of the free market rather than the divine right of kings used to justify the concentration of wealth, power and authority.

[scriver]

I seem to remembering this has come up in the thread before.

Oh yeah:

#2 would be awesome. The US would turn into some weird medieval-capitalist hybrid. Cue a game of thrones!

Yay for Feudal Capitalism. It'd kind of be like the Sengoku, where daimyo needed the support of the growing merchant classes to feed and equip their armies. Only instead of samurai fighting it out in awesome katana duels, we'd have spin doctors and pundits yelling at each other on cable TV news programs. Way less cool.

[cameron]

I wouldn't call it a perversion of the free market but more of an unfortunate side effect from the general goal of freedom and personal responsibility

[RedKing]

And the Republican panacea of "tax credits" might as well be the modern-day "Let them eat cake."

People often forget the context of that saying. It was said (apocryphically) by one of the princesses of France (NOT Marie Antoinette, as is often credited) upon being told that the poor had no bread to eat. It's meant to indicate just how incredibly out of touch with the hoi polloi the ruling class had become.

And it's the same level of disconnect you see when Republicans offer poor people financial solutions which work great when you make $5 million a year, not so much when you make $12,000 a year. Or when Mitt Romney tries to relate to...well, anybody.

[palsch]

An interesting analysis of Romney's tax proposals. (.pdf) I strongly recommend you read this one, even if it can be tough going.

I'll start with the bottom line; a tax burden shift of ~$86 billion a year from those earning over $200k onto those earning less than $200k.

Spoiler: Extended details (click to show/hide)

They started from the broad principles of the Romney campaign. These result in a massive tax cut for the rich combined with an actual tax increase for the lowest income levels, along with a massive revenue decrease to be made back up.

    Absent any base broadening, the proposed reductions in individual and estate taxes specified in Governor Romney’s plan would decrease federal tax revenues by $360 billion in 2015. These tax cuts predominantly favor upper-income taxpayers: Taxpayers with incomes over $1 million would see their after-tax income increased by 8.3 percent (an average tax cut of about $175,000), taxpayers with incomes between $75,000 and $100,000 would see somewhat smaller increases of about 2.4 percent (an average tax cut of $1,800), while the after-tax income of taxpayers earning less than $30,000 would actually decrease by about 0.9 percent (an average tax increase of about $130) due to the expiration of the temporary tax cuts enacted in 2009 and extended at the end of 2010.

At this point they look at the proposed expenditure cuts used to pay for these. That mostly means eliminating tax breaks and similar. Under the basic assumptions they found you had to eliminate 65% of such expenditures. Certain expenditures are 'off the table' for political reasons and/or explicitly stated to be so by Romney's campaign. These are mostly those involved in investments and savings (explicitly mentioned), then those that would be political suicide; breaks for military or emergency service members, disabled or injured people - although I'm less convinced workers comp is actually off the table than they are - and foster children.

They attempted the most progressive possible set of such eliminations, removing those that help the rich most first and leaving as many that help the poor as they could. They still found that even this progressive, generous model (not a likely one for a Republican policy) results in a massively regressive shift in tax burden. In full;

    To estimate how average household tax burdens among different income groups would change as a result of this shift, we assume that the available tax expenditures are curtailed “from the top down” in order to make the tax plan as progressive as possible. For instance, Table 3 Column 2 shows that the rate reductions would reduce average tax payments by $175,961 among households earning more than $1,000,000. Column 4 shows that the complete elimination of tax expenditures for this group would increase taxes in this group by an average of $83,594. This means it is impossible offset the tax cuts with revenue raisers within this income group. The same is true for all income groups earning more than $200,000. Even after eliminating all available tax expenditures for households earning more than $200,000, this group still faces a net tax break. Americans making over $1 million would see an increase in after-tax income of 4.1 percent (an $87,000 tax cut), those making between $500,000 and $1 million would see an increase of 3.2 percent (a $17,000 tax cut), and those making between $200,000 and $500,000 would see an increase of 0.8 percent (a $1,800 tax cut).

    Because taxpayers above $200,000 as a group have received a net tax cut, revenue neutrality requires that taxpayers below $200,000—about 95 percent of the population—experience a tax increase. If this increased burden is shared equally among all households earning less than $200,000, after-tax income among individuals in this group would decrease by (on average) 1.2 percent (an average tax increase of $500 per household). Without additional details about how specific tax expenditures below this threshold would be curtailed, it is impossible to say which households and which income groups would experience the tax increase. The results shown in Figure 3 are illustrative based on the assumptions that the tax increase would be distributed in proportion to different income groups’ shares of after-tax income.

So overall it would be a regressive set of tax cuts that are paid for by regressive expenditure cuts.

Now they do offer a not-quite-as-bad model, that reduces that burden shift by a considerable amount (~$53bn) if you allow for massively increased growth due to the tax cuts, but they do also demonstrate that the basic principles behind the Romney plan force this broad regressive structure even under the most generous assumptions. No matter the exact quantitative model, the broad qualitative effect is a burden shift from the >$200k crowd to the <$200k crowd.

[Kilroy the Grand]

at least control fully automatic weapons

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

What doesn’t work?

- Ban certain types of guns (e.g., "assault weapons")

    Doesn't work, because:

bullet   "Assault weapons" are about 1 percent of the guns used in crime
bullet   Criminals want the same guns as law-abiding people—handguns that are small, concealable, reliable, and affordable
bullet   Criminals use whatever guns are available; if one type is banned, criminals will switch to whatever they can get
http://gunsafe.org/position%20statements/Guns%20and%20crime.htm

Besides, everyone knows that criminals are law abiding citizens and would never think of purchasing a banned firearm.

[kaijyuu]

It increases their risk. If they get caught, they have an additional crime on top of whatever their other one was, and there's the chance of getting caught on the illegal gun ownership one prior to actually committing the other crime.


Sure they can get illegal guns, but it's very hard to argue it won't inhibit them somewhat from doing so.