bokonist

60 ms·

421.
by bokonist 17y ago
If his peer group is in fact white, then it's not racist, just a statement of reality. And as for competition, most people only care about competing within their own peer/status group. And yes, it is bad for the economy if whites are s
422.
by bokonist 17y ago
The problem is that the college/grad school credential is a legal requirement for a vast number of well paying jobs.
423.
by bokonist 17y ago
The problem is that an individual school does not get rewarded based on how well it educates the students (except perhaps for private colleges who make money from alumnae donations). Ideally, you're education tax dollars would forever go b
424.
by bokonist 17y ago
I just wish he would have given someone server access. I second that. The community at NM was starting to become self-sustaining, it sucks that the server is down and no one can do anything about it.
425.
by bokonist 17y ago
I consider taxes to be a decrease in liberty, because I am no longer able to dispose of my income in a way that I please. Instead I am forced to hand some of it over, at pain of imprisonment. I have no actual power to prevent this.
426.
by bokonist 17y ago
The article did not make any "outright fabrications" with regards to Bose, see my comment below.
427.
by bokonist 17y ago
The article says, "He [Gandhi] sang the praises of Subhas Chandra Bose" And indeed, in 1942 Gandhi called Bose "a prince among the patriots". Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_Subhash_Chan... Wikipedia says that th
428.
by bokonist 17y ago
No, Jefferson was wrong, plain and simple. The American Revolution led to a net decrease in liberty. By the 1790's taxes were higher than they had ever been under the British. The war itself force tens thousands of loyalists out of their
429.
by bokonist 17y ago
would have been a better option than killing people for asking for it. The people who died were people who refused to vacate a public area after occupying it for weeks, accumulating automatic weapons, defying orders to disperse, and burni
430.
by bokonist 17y ago
What are the outright fabrications?
431.
by bokonist 17y ago
The misspelling comes from the site mirroring the original article, not the author of the article itself. What specifically about the article do you think is factually incorrect?
432.
by bokonist 17y ago
Our perception of all public figures is a facade. Walter Lipman's book "Public Opinion" comes to mind: Great men, even during their lifetime, are usually known to the public only through a fictitious personality. Hence the modicum of truth
433.
by bokonist 17y ago
Imagine how many millions of lives would be freer and richer if Deng had acted in the same way as Gorbechev, Yeltsin, or even Egon Krenz. Gorbechev was fairly similar to Deng. He liberalized the economy and increased freedom of speech, b
434.
by bokonist 17y ago
Gandhi is not the man you think he is: http://history.eserver.org/ghandi-nobody-knows.txt
435.
by bokonist 17y ago
China has continued to become much more free since 1989. The comparison with Russia or the East European states is particular interesting, because China's growth rates have been much better. As for Tienanmen, every single mob revolution in
436.
by bokonist 17y ago
Hmmm. So imagine tomorrow everyone in the world started acting like Jesus. We all throw away our possessions, and wander around preaching to whoever would listen about being nice to each other. How long before everyone starved?
437.
by bokonist 17y ago
There's a Chinese institution that publishes a comparison of all the world's major universities, based on number of paper citations to its faculty. It's been a while, but US universities held all but 2 positions in the top twenty (Cambridg
438.
by bokonist 17y ago
His biography has been sitting on my shelf for a while, I really need to find time to read it.
439.
by bokonist 17y ago
Deng Xiaoping. In the pure utilitarian sense, he may have had the greatest positive impact of any person in the 20th century. In a century wracked by war between the ideologies, his philosophy was just the tonic the world needed: "Who car
440.
by bokonist 17y ago
As the next figure shows, no variable from 1900 better explains success in 2000 than investment in education. How many other variables did Glasser analyze? And more importantly, how many variables from 1900 can we even quantify? Educati
441.
by bokonist 17y ago
China is not a totalitarian country (or at least not anymore so than post-New Deal U.S.). Authoritarian!=Totalitarian.
442.
by bokonist 17y ago
The business cycle has since the 1970's has been a bit worse than the cycle from '45 to 75. Nothing like the current financial crisis happened during that time. I don't know how the overall growth rates compare. GDP calculations are full
443.
by bokonist 17y ago
So those are Keynes’ prescriptions for a successful economy: low interest rates, government investment, and redistribution to the poor. And, for a time — from around the 1940s to the 1970s — that’s kind of what we did. The results were ma
444.
by bokonist 17y ago
It goes beyond that you can't get rich in China without being a CCP loyalist, it's that you can't function as a Chinese citizen in China without being a CCP loyalist. The idea of an outspoken political antagonist of the CCP even making it
445.
by bokonist 17y ago
I think we'd also agree that they are still destroying wealth. Compared to what? Compared to a system of city-states? Compared to total anarchy? Or anarcho-capitalism?
446.
by bokonist 17y ago
How is this different than typical multi-variable regressions with control variables? The problem with social science is that it tries to be a science but in reality its closest relative is product management. Using even the best statistic
447.
by bokonist 17y ago
Excessively powerful, or excessively intrusive? A government can be very powerful, but choose not to use that power in wealth destroying ways (example: post-Deng China).
448.
by bokonist 17y ago
Then, as I said, fix the competition problem. Don't add some new regulation that doesn't fix the underlying problem, and that causes new problems of its own.
449.
by bokonist 17y ago
While we understand the arguments of the ISPs, the simple truth is that the web will not work if a few Internet providers control what can and cannot be streamed to your computer. Without net neutrality rules, they could decide to shut of
450.
by bokonist 17y ago
Then you should unwind the existing laws and regulations, not add a new regulation that will inevitably favor narrow interests. And if you cannot role back the existing detrimental regulations, what chance of success do you have making new

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