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#77 Jul 03 2014 at 8:14 PM Rating: Excellent
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Friar Bijou wrote:
also: Abortion
He's always been okay with abortion, what he's against is the use of money to pay for lightbulbs in clinics that exist in buildings that may have possibly could have performed an abortion somewhere within. Maybe.
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#78 Jul 03 2014 at 8:18 PM Rating: Good
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Market forces will respond to any action people make. It's not about "best outcomes", it's about "correct outcomes". If you allow the market to react to people's decisions, then poor decisions will result in poor outcomes, which in turn acts as a natural deterrent to making poor decisions


No, 'market forces' are very good at getting the market to prey upon people who make bad decisions. You have three solutions to this. You can either decide that is fine, or you can restrict the actions of the market in some way to prevent that, or restrict the actions of the poor decision makers.
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#79 Jul 03 2014 at 8:29 PM Rating: Decent
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lolgaxe wrote:
Friar Bijou wrote:
also: Abortion
He's always been okay with abortion, what he's against is the use of money to pay for lightbulbs in clinics that exist in buildings that may have possibly could have performed an abortion somewhere within. Maybe.


I'm pretty consistent with my position that public money should not be spent on something merely because we think it's ok for it to be legal. That and I have this strange idea that we should not use the power of the government to intentionally take actions designed to violate the beliefs of others, even if we don't share those beliefs. Let's be honest here. If there weren't a bunch of people opposed to abortion on religious grounds, there would be close to zero support for political actions involving funding for say planned parenthood.

That political push exists *because* the other "side" will oppose it, and there's value in highlighting the conflict. The sooner people realize that most of the political issues they're told to focus on are of this sort, the sooner they can look past the BS and see the actual issues going on around them. It's not about abortion. It's not about gay marriage. It's not about health care.

The political battle of our age is about the role of government in our lives. Period. It's the same battle that we've been fighting for the last century (more or less). In the US, this is specifically a fight between social liberalism and classical liberalism. All of those other political conflicts are just window dressing, in most cases designed to push the social liberalism agenda forward without people realizing that this is the cause they are really supporting. It's why, in every one of these issue, I always attempt to tie it back to the one thing they all have in common: The need for a more authoritarian government to "solve" the problem at hand.

That "solution" is the objective. All those political issues? Just means to that end.
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#80 Jul 03 2014 at 8:33 PM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:
I'm pretty consistent with my position
That consistency being "Anything vaguely Democrat bad."
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#81 Jul 03 2014 at 8:37 PM Rating: Decent
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Timelordwho wrote:
Quote:
Market forces will respond to any action people make. It's not about "best outcomes", it's about "correct outcomes". If you allow the market to react to people's decisions, then poor decisions will result in poor outcomes, which in turn acts as a natural deterrent to making poor decisions


No, 'market forces' are very good at getting the market to prey upon people who make bad decisions.


That's kind of a circular statement though. The Market forces *are* what punish people who make bad decisions. You choose to spend your money on booze instead of paying the water bill and you have your water shut off and have to carry water to your home instead of having it come right out of the tap. The word "prey" implies some kind of malevolence, but that's simply not the case here. This is about natural consequences. You put your hand in the fire. It burns you. The fire didn't "prey" on you. It did what fire does. It's up to you to learn the lesson and not make the same mistake next time.

Quote:
You have three solutions to this. You can either decide that is fine, or you can restrict the actions of the market in some way to prevent that, or restrict the actions of the poor decision makers.


In most cases, we should decide that it's fine. On very rare occasions, we can restrict the actions of the market (really the players of the market). Under more or less zero cases should we restrict the actions of the poor decision makers though. Other than actions which are illegal (which should be illegal because of the effect on others, not the potential for poor consequences to you), you should be free to take any action at all and suffer the consequences or reap the benefits thereof. To do otherwise represents an undo infringement on our liberty.
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#82 Jul 03 2014 at 8:41 PM Rating: Decent
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lolgaxe wrote:
gbaji wrote:
I'm pretty consistent with my position
That consistency being "Anything vaguely Democrat bad."


In exact proportion to the degree to which Democratic party policies conflict with my own ideology, yes. Why is that surprising? I'm not a Republican because I picked a party out of a hat, you know.
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#83 Jul 03 2014 at 8:43 PM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:
I'm not a Republican because I picked a party out of a hat, you know.
Of course you didn't randomly pick a party. You picked it because you noticed this site was mostly Democratic and you've got a severe attention seeking personality.
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#84 Jul 03 2014 at 8:50 PM Rating: Excellent
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The fire didn't "prey" on you. It did what fire does. It's up to you to learn the lesson and not make the same mistake next time.
Market forces look for people who have a tendency to stick their hand into a fire, and then do everything they can to both encourage this behavior and profit from that. This is preying, and is certainly one of the things the market does. There is a huge amount of profit in exploiting the behavior of stupid people.
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#85 Jul 03 2014 at 8:55 PM Rating: Decent
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Oh. And let me reiterate TLW, that by allowing those market forces to negatively effect those who make poor decisions, it will logically decrease the number of people who make those poor decisions. There will always be some who do, anyway, but it's reasonable to assume that everything else being the same, if you reduce or eliminate the negative consequences for poor choices, people will make poor choices more often. What people often forget is that at the time of the choice, the person making that poor choice had some reason for making it. At that moment, buying that bottle of booze right in front of him was more important than setting that money aside to pay the water bill (for example).

The mistake people make when looking at choices is that they assume that someone must choose to have the negative consequence affect them, and since that's silly, it must not really have been a choice at all. They had no choice. It was inevitable. Whatever. But that's not how poor choices happen. Usually people choose something "good" that's right in front of them, and either ignore the potential negative consequences, or just hope that somehow something will intervene to prevent anything bad from happening. No one plans to get arrested for robbing a store, for example. But they do choose to commit the robbery. In most cases, they just hope/assume they wont get caught.

The point being that anything which minimizes the awareness of consequences (or perceived probability of those consequences occurring) will affect that choice. If, for example, the would be robber knew that there was a 100% chance that he'd get caught, he would be far less likely to try to commit the crime than if he believed there was a good chance he'd get away with it. So for that reason, acting to reduce or eliminate the consequences of poor choices will absolutely increase the rate at which they will be made. It can't *not* do so.

So unless you actually believe that 100% of all those people who failed to pay their water bills did so because they had absolutely zero dollars at all, and no choices about what to spend those dollars on, and thus had no possibility to pay that bill instead of spending the money on something else, then all we're doing by "helping" them, is enabling them in their poor choices. Are there certainly *some* people who are so poor they can't pay the water bill no matter how well they make their choices? Sure. But those people presumably also require more help than just with their water bills, so maybe that's a whole separate issue we should address. Most of those people made choices. And they should have to deal with the consequences of those choices.
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#86 Jul 03 2014 at 9:00 PM Rating: Decent
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Sir Xsarus wrote:
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The fire didn't "prey" on you. It did what fire does. It's up to you to learn the lesson and not make the same mistake next time.
Market forces look for people who have a tendency to stick their hand into a fire, and then do everything they can to both encourage this behavior and profit from that. This is preying, and is certainly one of the things the market does. There is a huge amount of profit in exploiting the behavior of stupid people.


Market forces do nothing of the sort. You're confusing "market forces" with "players in the market". Yes, there are people who operate within the market who may encourage people to make poor choices for their own profit. Those are people though, not forces. That's an entirely different conversation. We could blame the casino for tempting people into gambling away their rent money, but ultimately we still have to blame the people for gambling away their rent money, right?

Again though, that's a whole different issue. The fact that if you don't pay your water bill, you don't get water out of your tap isn't about predatory business practices at all though. You choose not to pay for something. It's unreasonable to then expect to get the thing you didn't pay for, isn't it?
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#87 Jul 03 2014 at 9:00 PM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:
Oh. And let me reiterate
Because if you say the same thing multiple times, it gains experience and eventually can digivolve to Ultimate Form.
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#88 Jul 03 2014 at 9:03 PM Rating: Excellent
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Sure players in the market, the point is that there is a role needed to stop explicitly predatory behavior if it goes over a line, because market forces reward this behavior with profits.
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#89 Jul 04 2014 at 1:10 AM Rating: Good
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Oh. And let me reiterate TLW, that by allowing those market forces to negatively effect those who make poor decisions, it will logically decrease the number of people who make those poor decisions.

Please don't ever use the word "logically" again. It took me two hours to stop laughing. Just use "end out" instead. Don't worry about verb tense, you never get it right, anyway.

Of course you didn't randomly pick a party. You picked it because you noticed this site was mostly Democratic and you've got a severe attention seeking personality.

Nah, it's the party of lucky idiots who want to feel they accomplished things with hard work. Also: homophobes ans racists. So, you know, pretty much a lock there for G.

The funniest part of watching him fail in trying to describe how markets work is that without regulation he'd be working for 20 cents a day and explaining how the people who work for 10 cents a day just aren't good enough decision makers. There's literally nothing the guy has done in his life that isn't reliant on government.
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#90 Jul 04 2014 at 8:06 AM Rating: Good
Triremelordwho wrote:
Exactly. It's not the market's job to do those things. It's some other entities job, some entity which can cause the markets to adjust their behavior.


Oh, fine. But don't say I never do anything for you.
#91 Jul 07 2014 at 6:30 PM Rating: Decent
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Sir Xsarus wrote:
Sure players in the market, the point is that there is a role needed to stop explicitly predatory behavior if it goes over a line, because market forces reward this behavior with profits.


Sure. I never said this doesn't exist, nor that regulation shouldn't exist to counter it. But it's not the case here. Unless you're actually arguing that the water service in Detroit is run in some kind of predatory manner? A quick google indicates that they charge about the same for their water/sewer services as other cities, so I'm not sure how this applies. The fact that there are some predatory players in the market out there doesn't change the fact that in this case, with the exception of the rare few (like one of the women highlighted in the article) for whom the billing is a mistake or there's some other odd thing happening with their water, there's nothing nefarious about the city shutting off their water. It's not a violation of their rights. It's not unfair. It's not the result of any sort of predatory practice. It's them choosing not to pay for a service, and therefore not getting that service.


I'm familiar with the concept of a market failure. This isn't one of those though.
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#92 Jul 07 2014 at 6:33 PM Rating: Decent
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lolgaxe wrote:
gbaji wrote:
I'm not a Republican because I picked a party out of a hat, you know.
Of course you didn't randomly pick a party. You picked it because you noticed this site was mostly Democratic and you've got a severe attention seeking personality.


This site didn't used to be mostly Democratic. That doesn't preclude me staying here because I've got an attention seeking personality, but that wasn't why I started posting here. Smiley: tongue
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#93 Jul 07 2014 at 6:37 PM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
I'm not a Republican because I picked a party out of a hat, you know.
You picked the party that aligned with your person views: mysoginist, racist and homophobic.





******* DUH!
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#94 Jul 07 2014 at 9:42 PM Rating: Excellent
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gbaji wrote:
Sir Xsarus wrote:
Sure players in the market, the point is that there is a role needed to stop explicitly predatory behavior if it goes over a line, because market forces reward this behavior with profits.


Sure. I never said this doesn't exist, nor that regulation shouldn't exist to counter it. But it's not the case here. Unless you're actually arguing that the water service in Detroit is run in some kind of predatory manner? A quick google indicates that they charge about the same for their water/sewer services as other cities, so I'm not sure how this applies. The fact that there are some predatory players in the market out there doesn't change the fact that in this case, with the exception of the rare few (like one of the women highlighted in the article) for whom the billing is a mistake or there's some other odd thing happening with their water, there's nothing nefarious about the city shutting off their water. It's not a violation of their rights. It's not unfair. It's not the result of any sort of predatory practice. It's them choosing not to pay for a service, and therefore not getting that service.


I'm familiar with the concept of a market failure. This isn't one of those though.

I think it's clear the conversation had turned more general, but way to dodge the point.
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#95 Jul 08 2014 at 12:32 AM Rating: Excellent
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It isn't just bad decisions. Poverty isn't just self perpetuating, it grows exponentially. It costs more to be poor.

If you're poor you'll probably have bad credit, which means you'll pay more for a hunk of sh*t car than someone with good credit pays for a nice car.
Because your car is a hunk-o-shibbett, it will break down.. a lot. If you don't know how or can't afford the tools to fix it, you'll have to pay a mechanic.
There goes a huge chunk of what little money you do have, unless you put it on a card, but then again, your poor credit is expensive.
And this is going to keep happening because your car ain't gettin' nothin' but older.


You'll also have to pay more for sh*tty housing ( maybe even a pay by the week dump). This housing will also have crappy insulation so your
utility bills will also be obscene. Eventually something bad will happen and you won't have the funds. At this point you will have to prioritize
and credit cards and medical bills will always come after basic survival (food, clothing, shelter, crack rock).

Now your credit will take even more hits and everything is going to cost you even more.
Poverty is a sucking black hole and it's almost impossible to claw your way out.

My point is, this can happen to you even if you don't make a multitude of poor decisions.
Time and chance happeneth to us all.

Edited, Jul 8th 2014 2:37am by CoalHeart
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#96 Jul 08 2014 at 7:51 AM Rating: Good
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gbaji wrote:
but that wasn't why I started posting here.
You started posting on a video game site for reasons other than political contrarianism? That is a world view shifting discovery.
Sir Xsarus wrote:
I think it's clear the conversation had turned more general, but way to dodge the point.
I tried to explain conversation progression once. It went about as well as you'd expect.

Edited, Jul 8th 2014 9:53am by lolgaxe
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#97 Jul 09 2014 at 9:41 AM Rating: Good
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Whether you call it God-given right.. or you call it Natural Law.. Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of happiness..
I think that the "Life" part of that kinda MUST include water.. so to say that access to water isn't a right is just absurd and barbaric.

The entire issue just sheds light on the conflict of interest between people trying to make money and doing what is humane. It certainly would be nice if everyone was on an equal playing field of financial responsibility but that simply isn't the reality.. and we can continue pretending that situations like these are just an anomaly but it isn't. It's the way it actually is.

It's the same argument that I have had countless times with conservatives ******** about entitlements.. ***** ***** *****.. hand-outs, welfare, disincentives... and I say "Well what is your answer, then? Let people rot and die in the street?" <crickets>

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#98 Jul 09 2014 at 10:07 AM Rating: Good
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You can purify water yourself by boiling it, using purification tablets, or creating a filter of your own with tree bark, charcoal, and sand.
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#99 Jul 09 2014 at 10:30 AM Rating: Excellent
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All those sound like science, and we don't allow that kind of deviant behavior in our schools. Smiley: disappointed
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#100 Jul 09 2014 at 10:33 AM Rating: Excellent
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I bought my family a 50lb bag of tree bark on sale which allows me to purify water for .02¢ a liter.
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#101 Jul 09 2014 at 10:45 AM Rating: Excellent
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Just try steal your neighbor's landscaping. 5 years on and they're still blaming the squirrels.

Edited, Jul 9th 2014 9:45am by someproteinguy
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