jbooth

54 ms·

541.
by jbooth 13y ago
Not to mention, taking an econ 101 supply and demand graph based on a quote 'widget factory' (actual textbook quote) and applying those ideas about marginal cost to utility economics where you build the grid once and then charge o
542.
by jbooth 13y ago
So your issue wasn't with potential FEC overreach as you argued above, your issue is that you agree with the Citizen's United decision in whole, and are all about the floodgates being opened. We'll just have to disagree on t
543.
by jbooth 13y ago
I'm explaining that calling out "a law against bribing the government" as "more government power to oppress the private sector!" illuminates the silliness of putting everything on a single axis. I'm not trying
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by jbooth 13y ago
Of course not. My whole point was about middle ground, a "well-regulated market".
545.
by jbooth 13y ago
That might be so, but the court still had the option of narrowly allowing the items you point out without opening the floodgates. They went for floodgates.
546.
by jbooth 13y ago
No idea why I'm feeding you. Here's my quote, from above, which you could easily read yourself: 'State-allocated capital without a private finance sector has failed miserably'. I didn't claim that the existence of
547.
by jbooth 13y ago
Can you show me any success stories of absolute communist states with no private sector? Just one, maybe? Who's lying? The spectrum comment referred to the socialism/communism terminology, with socialism generally seen as involv
548.
by jbooth 13y ago
Are you just trolling? My comment made multiple references to the private sector that currently exists in China. You're aware that there's a healthy private sector in China currently, right? The name "Deng Xiaopeng" ri
549.
by jbooth 13y ago
And we passed a bunch of regulations afterwards which reduced the possibility of that happening again.
550.
by jbooth 13y ago
China's a big place, a lot of people, several sets of rules depending on where you are and I don't even know which decade you're asking about. IM-uneducated-O their national decision makers currently do a better job than ours
551.
by jbooth 13y ago
There's a spectrum, obviously, but the post I was responding to, as phrased, seemed to be oversimplifying and basically arguing against letting the invisible hand, defined as a bunch of selfish a-holes creating market forces, work at a
552.
by jbooth 13y ago
So, just to bring the abstracts down to earth for a bit here, you're defending things like the Citizen's United decision here? Let's get rid of the laws against outright bribery of congressmen while we're at it. That&#x
553.
by jbooth 13y ago
And that's as it should be. State-allocated capital without a private finance sector has failed miserably, like in terms of millions of people starving, everywhere it's been tried. There's a middle ground here. "Well-r
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by jbooth 13y ago
Making it hardER is certainly possible. Get rid of the Citizens' United decision, enforce some rules on lobbying and campaign finance, re-institute the split between savings banks and investment banks, as a matter of fact break up a f
555.
by jbooth 13y ago
Predictions aren't magic. They're based on looking at past data and using that to draw conclusions about future data. Weather, being extremely variable even within a day, is a lot harder to predict than, say, "It will be col
556.
by jbooth 13y ago
I guess it all comes down to you not seeing internet conectivity as a utility. Personally, I think it has a lot more in common with sewer/electricity, from the near impossibility of market entrance right down to the sewer/electri
557.
by jbooth 13y ago
So, if which ISP I happen to be a customer of completely dictates which streaming service I wind up using, then the actual merits of the product have become divorced from which product I buy. That's textbook market failure, right? Do
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by jbooth 13y ago
Ok, that's our disagreement then. When I buy internet service, I and 99.999% of customers are trying to buy a dumb pipe. That's what it's marketed as, that's what the provider tells us we're buying. I'd consi
559.
by jbooth 13y ago
I don't understand this argument at all. You're conceding that last-mile extortion is a market failure, then turning around and saying legislating against that last-mile extortion is "imposing ideology" rather than just
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by jbooth 13y ago
Hang on a second, in what way is "last-mile connectivity providers cannot selectively extort content providers based on business considerations" NOT identifying and addressing a market failure? I pay for the pipes on my end, I w
561.
by jbooth 13y ago
It doesn't matter in a moral sense. If someone proves that CO2 emissions don't cause global warming, then yeah, it makes it less effective to focus on CO2 emissions. But we still want to stop warming from happening, so we'd
562.
by jbooth 13y ago
I don't know enough about meteorology to comment on the article, but this quote bugged me: "And if humans are the cause of only, say, 50% of the warming (e.g. our published paper), then there is even less reason to force expensive
563.
by jbooth 13y ago
"There's nothing about capitalism that demands that monopolies of any kind should or must be allowed." It depends on what you mean by capitalism. If by capitalism, you mean a market-based economy, like that adam smith guy, t
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by jbooth 13y ago
It's a reference to the daycare satanism hysteria in the 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_care_sex_abuse_hysteria It's not discriminatory against fans of hair metal, just bringing in some period-specif
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by jbooth 13y ago
Sure, that's entirely valid. However, would you be making the same point if the numbers were different? Fox News would be having a field day. What about this jackass Armstrong's reasoning, in light of the current numbers? How a
566.
by jbooth 13y ago
Why's it have to come out as profits? Couldn't they just be a big lumbering bureaucracy that never gets cut because they never have pricing pressure? Paying a bunch of idiots to run around and generate paperwork isn't profit
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by jbooth 13y ago
Is the national review less biased? http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/353475/slowdown-health-...
568.
by jbooth 13y ago
Apparently the national numbers aren't as bad as I thought, closer to 9%. I've edited my post upthread. Related to the topic of Obamacare, cost inflation has actually slowed down the last few years. So that makes basically every
569.
by jbooth 13y ago
When I was serving my community, for 0 pay for the record, I was not looking for reasons to lay off teachers. We took the money we had coming in, looked at our cost increases for the following year (utterly dominated by healthcare), and la
570.
by jbooth 13y ago
Health insurance costs rose by 131% from 1999-2009[1], which comes out to just under 9% inflation. That's in comparison to an average 2.5% inflation for all goods including healthcare since 2000[2]. 2.5% inflation turns $100 into $12

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