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> Have you considered the possibility that you don't read very carefully? No. My philosophy degrees prove quite definitively that I do. > He calls you on the
by lapcat 3y ago
> Have you considered the possibility that you don't read very carefully?
No. My philosophy degrees prove quite definitively that I do.
> He calls you on the phone asking you to donate.
Joe Politician doesn't personally call you on the phone unless you have big money. The vast majority of voters, indeed the vast majority of (small) campaign donors, have no opportunity whatsoever to trade donations for influence, because they can't even get access to Joe Politician. Joe Politician doesn't know me from Adam.
> You don't understand how deception works.
Ok, bud, whatever you say.
> Have you ever played poker?
Of course.
> Bluffing doesn't work if you do it too often.
When I said, "Is everyone in your life just lying to you about everything?" that was intended as a hyperbole and counterfactual. The point is that everyone isn't trying to deceive you, everyone isn't against you, everyone isn't trying to get something out of you all the time. The optimum poker strategy is irrelevant, because we're not all playing poker against each other. It's not always a zero sum game. Only extreme, unhealthy paranoia and cynicism would make one think so.
> Donald Trump is the absolute master of the craft. He is so good at it that he doesn't even have to hide it any more.
He's not. His lies are blatantly obvious to anyone who cares to fact check him. His supporters simply don't care.
> You're the one who introduced the word into the conversation, not me.
Fair enough, but you didn't ask me what I meant either, and nonetheless proceeded to lecture me about whether free, competitive markets exist, claiming the operative word was "free" without knowing what I meant by it.
I actually didn't mean much by it. It's just a common phrase that I borrowed and introduced casually into the conversation, so there's no point in overanalyzing these words, which I never intended to be precise.
> So you made a claim that there is something that distinguishes politics from business, and that this thing has something to do with the words "free and competitive".
It wasn't just "something". What I literally said was, "What differentiates politics, in large part, is that it's not a free, competitive market; rather, it's a duopoly." The contrast is clearly with duopoly.
There are of course some duopolies in business, e.g., Apple and Google in mobile operating systems, Apple and Microsoft in desktop operating systems. But not every market is a duopoly. Anyway, my point in discussing the political duopoly was that politicians usually need to join one of the two major parties in order to be viable. Even Bernie Sanders decided to run for President as a Democrat rather than as an independent Socialist, which only worked in tiny Vermont. And the point of mentioning that politcians have to join one of the two major parties is that in joining a party they have to corrupt themselves, become corrupt, in order to be accepted into those organizations by the party leaders.
The same kind of scenario doesn't have a good analogy in the business world. As an independent businessperson, you don't join Apple or Google per se. That's not even an option. You can join those organizations as an employee, which is not quite the same. And while Apple and Google have a duopoly over operating systems, they don't have a duopoly over employment; one does not, as a software engineer for example, need to work for either Apple or Google. There are many other employment options. To be sure, it's still possible to become "corrupted" by joining Apple or Google as employee, to drink the kool-aid, as it were. But since employees can come and go as they please, the necessity of corruption is not there like it is in the political parties. You could also "join" Apple or Google by publishing apps in their apps stores, but that's not the same as joining a political party either. As long as Apple and Google get their cut, you can come and go as you please and be as ethical or unethical as you like toward your users/customers.
> Name one.
Sure. Off the top of my head: I reside in Wisconsin, and we have a lot of bars and taverns. Practically one every street corner, it often seems. I believe there are more per capita here than in any state in the nation. And they're mostly owned by different people. The industry is not dominated by a few players. Indeed, drinkers often go "bar hopping", which wouldn't make any sense if they were all the same.
- lisper 3y ago> My philosophy degrees prove quite definitively that I do. At best your degree proves that you read carefully at one time (and even that is open to doubt because your degree manifestly did not imbue you with the ability to identify logical fallacies like over-generalization and argument from authority). > Joe Politician doesn't personally call you on the phone unless you have big money. That depends on what you consider "big money". It only takes a few hundred dollars to get a meeting with a congressman. A few thousand will get you an audience with a senator or a governor. And once you start writing checks, your phone will be ringing constantly. It actually gets annoying after a while. > everyone isn't against you I never said they were. The poker analogy was not meant to imply that life is a zero-sum game, it was just meant to illustrate my actual point, which is that deception is not generally effective if you do it constantly. To be an effective deceiver you have to be judicious. You have to appear to be honest. That makes it hard to tell the difference between an honest person and an effective deceiver. And BTW, not all deception is bad. There are "white lies". There are even professions -- magic and acting -- dedicated to honing deception literally to the level of a fine art. In the right circumstances, people actually pay good money to be deceived. > His supporters simply don't care. Some of them don't, but there is a significant contingent who actually believe he is telling the truth. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/21/poll-trump-voters-trust/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/21/poll-trum... (See my point above about people paying good money to be deceived.) > you didn't ask me what I meant either Because it didn't matter, and it still doesn't. Any feature you describe in the non-political market, I can find you an analogy in the political market. For example: > I reside in Wisconsin, and we have a lot of bars and taverns. OK. You also reside on planet earth and you have a lot of national governments to choose from. About 200 in fact. If that's not enough variety for you, or if changing nationalities is too much friction for you, you can just come here to California where we have seven officially registered political parties and God only knows how many different activist organizations and fringe groups. So how is your choice of tavern different from your choice of government? > while Apple and Google have a duopoly over operating systems, they don't have a duopoly over employment Of course they do. If you want to make a living writing mobile apps, you can write for Apple devices or you can write for Android devices. Those are quite literally your only options. This limited choice extends to nearly every part of software development. If you want to write desktop apps, you have two and a half choices: MacOS, Windows, or Linux (that's the half-a-choice because no one is actually making a living writing desktop apps for Linux). If you want to write Web apps it won't be long before your only choice is Chrome. And if you want to write enterprise apps, well, you're pretty much just hosed. Yes, there are lot of different companies for which you can go to work, but this is an illusory choice because one way or another your work will be constrained by one of the (very few) major players. It's kind of like the apparent choice you have of what hotel to stay in. On the surface it looks like there is a lot of choice, dozens of different hotel brands, but in fact they are all the same, just with different signage, because they are all owned either by Hilton or Marriott. It's the same in just about every industry. There are lots of different brands of eyeglasses but they are all owned by Luxottica. There are a lot of different restaurants, but the vast majority of them are chains. This is not to say that there aren't any fragmented industries left -- obviously there are a few (charter private jets, for example). But the overwhelming trend is towards consolidation. And it's easy to see why: once a company starts to dominate in its industry it can use its power and influence to crush competitors even the competitors offer a superior product. That becomes a positive feedback loop and so an established leader becomes nearly impossible to dislodge unless they somehow shoot themselves in the foot or the government (!) intervenes.