The Gaming Den

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

K wrote: And I blame the conservatives. They pushed a movement of lies. Like magicians of old, they knew the power of names and choose to exploit it, and now everyone thinks they can just misleadingly label their actions and have no one call foul.

This borders on conspiracy theory, since the people who worked on 4E were also there for 3E and I really don't think that they were knowingly trying to mask a turd. If you listened to all of the blathering that they did on the runup to the edition they were genuinely excited about their work and thought they were doing the Next Big Thing.

A lot of cock ups are thought of as the next big thing while in progress...

The CSIRO is our local government run science research bunch and they do badass stuff like invent wifi. The researchers who did that sure aren't getting mega rich off it because they are scientists and they don't find getting rich to be as important as actually researching stuff.

All you have to do to get R&D teams to do awesome is have several competing groups. The capitalist notion that you have to give massive material rewards to get people to do anything awesome is horseshit.

Lich-Loved wrote:Capitalism decouples one's Economic Worth from their Social Worth. Everyone is equal (socially and under the Law, or should be if things were implemented perfectly) but this social worth has nothing to do with economic worth, which is the individual's utility to the economy. In a capitalistic system, a person's values, opinions and treatment under the law are the same regardless of economic position, but this does not guarantee the individual any economic success.

Dude, what world are you from?

Social worth is totally your economic worth in capitalism. It doesn't say they're decoupled, at all. Capitalism doesn't care if the captains of industry never brush shoulders with the hoi palloi.

And indeed, the US legal system defines crimes, punishment, and investigation based upon commercial worth of a subject. Not some independent amount which is equal. No, that has to do with a different subject entirely...

-Crissa

Cielingcat wrote:To further its aims, Capitalism has created a huge body of pro-Capitalist propaganda.

I have got to stop you right there. Capitalism didn't create "Greed is good." Hollywood created "Greed is good" in the persona of Gordon Gekko in the movie "Wall Street" in 1987.

Boil down capitalism to its base element and you come up with a simple but very odd statement:

Interest is good.

The notion of "competition" is not a notion in support for or against capitalism; it's a notion that is in opposition to monopoly. Competition and monopoly can both occur in a socialist or an capitalist system.

If profit was the only way to measure success, making a winning stock portfolio would be child's play. That's like saying that the only way to measure a politician's success is their percentage victory at the polls.

tzor wrote:If profit was the only way to measure success, making a winning stock portfolio would be child's play.

Wait, what?

Profit is the only measure of success for a stock portfolio, and putting a winning one together is anything but child's play. How about this: I'm only interested in maximum profits and I would like you to put together a portfolio for me that you're willing to guarantee, with dollars, that will return a minimum of 10% this year. Anything less, you make me whole, anything more, you keep.

Are you talking about Socially Responsible or Ethical Investing? Is there some alternate "feel-good" investment criteria that you're using? Is there some sort of goodness points that show up on your financial reports of how your investments are doing? "Well, my investments are monetarily down 13% across the board, but look at all the fairy dust and unicorn farts I'm accumulating!"

It's good of you to not want to invest in Rape&Murder Corporation, but raw performance comparisons don't give you bonus points if you underperform as a result.

I just feel that you picked most wrong thing to demonstrate how profit isn't the sole measure of success in capitalism.

violence in the media wrote:

tzor wrote:If profit was the only way to measure success, making a winning stock portfolio would be child's play.

Wait, what?

Corporate profits (the line on thier annual P/L sheet) does not guarentee a high rate of return for the owner of stock in that corporation. You can't just list all the stocks in order of corporate profits and make a winning portfolio. You just can't.


Edit: Almost forgot: As a holder of stock you don't want "profit" you want "interest." Interest is that revenue obtained from your asset (or capital). Profit is revenue - expense, and unless you are buying or selling a stock there should be no expense whatsoever. You want to maximize your intrest or your "return on investment" (ROI).

There is that and stock buyers are not rational.

Just because a stock has a good profit does not mean that it is known, popular, or trusted (other things) or that investors believe the profits will continue to rise.

It is entirely possible to increase your profits as a company and see your stock price decrease.

Why? Because stock price is determined entirely by how much people want to buy your stock, not any features of your company or stock. They are only tangentially related.

-Crissa

We're talking past each other here. My point was, that as an individual investor in the stock market, I have no incentive to care about anything else other that whether or not my personal fortunes rise. I don't care what happens to a company I'm invested in, provided I get more money out of it than I put into it (and I don't run afoul of the SEC in the process).

That was the point of view I was taking, that of the investor and NOT the business. I was arguing against the notion that that investor uses any metric beyond whether or not he personally made money, and how much money he made or lost, to evaluate the success of his stock portfolio.

violence in the media wrote:We're talking past each other here.

Apparently we are. My comment was directed towards Cielingcat’s assertion that “Profit is the only way to measure success.” Based on this point, it should be easy to find all successful companies; just look for the ones with the largest profits.

Crissa wrote:There is that and stock buyers are not rational.

That’s a good point but even in the rational case there is more to it than that. Profits represent the state of the company (and it doesn’t even do that) at any one point in time. It does not give a state of the company at any future point in time nor does it adequately predict future profits. It is, simply put, a measure of something which has passed. Future profits may determine your future return on investment, but the biggest driver is the dividend. Companies that have large profits may have pitiful dividends and vice versa so even future profit isn’t a good indicator.

Given the lack or a weak dividend for a given stock what then drives the “value” of the stock (assuming you wish to profit off of the sale of the stock at a later date). Welcome to the only legal Ponzi scheme on the planet. The value of the stock is only worth whatever future suckers will pay for this low dividend crap. The really irrational part is why these stocks have any value whatsoever!

Some traders do worship the P/E ratio and thus will buy stocks simply because the price is low compared to earnings; very rational but stupid.

But then again neither Earnings per Share or Dividend Yield will determine in any shape for form whether a company is a success because these numbers are far to easy to manipulate in the short term and success is a long term concept.

Basically, for a personal investor, there are two things you look at: Are big investment companies buying this stock? Will this stock sell for more than I bought it?

The former can be had by watching volume or trade and expansion of that industrial sector. It's a short term glance. The latter can be had by looking at the company's current valuation vs future sales. It's a long term glance.

At no point do investors (who make money) care about the company itself, its profits past their term, or whether the company is even legal.

-Crissa

Crissa wrote:Actually, there are no studies that 'incentives' actually get people to produce according to their abilities, either.

I've seen studies that imply strongly that the reverse is true. People are generally happier doing things they don't get paid for than things they do. Even if those things involve the exact same activity.

tzor wrote: I have got to stop you right there. Capitalism didn't create "Greed is good." Hollywood created "Greed is good" in the persona of Gordon Gekko in the movie "Wall Street" in 1987.

Um, the idea that greed is good predates the movie "Wall Street" by decades. Hell, the case that makes greed legally mandated for publicly held corporations involved Henry Ford and was from somewhere around 1915. It's also the basis for the entire batshit crazy philosophy of Objectivism, which comes primarily from works from the 1930s-1950s. If anything, Hollywood was a very late comer to the idea of greed being a virtue.

Generally, Conservatives say they have the same goals as Liberals in the US, and that the argument is about how to get there. But this is disingenuous. Their methods are clearly, via study of effectiveness, do not reach those stated goals.

So it's actually easier to argue as though conservatives have goals other than that which they state:
Of course, then you have to say these people are lying, but they're already lying about the results their programs have, so what's the real difference?

It certainly does us no good to keep labeling conservatives as dumb rather than the real thing, they have different goals than they state in public.

So, for D&D, their goal was to 'create as much product to sell' and 'for as little money or effort as possible' and you see that the result we got perfectly matches those goals.

-Crissa

Umm... I like to make fun of US conservatives as much as anyone else, but that table is a bunch of ignorant bullshit.

Kobajagrande wrote:Umm... I like to make fun of US conservatives as much as anyone else, but that table is a bunch of ignorant bullshit.

It's really not. As you'll doubtless recall, in a recent and highly hilarious example Conservatives were unable to explain a single rational evidence based line of reasoning for anything they advocated on any issue. Whether the issues were big and abstract like Federalism vs. Confederationalism or tightly compact and susceptible to numbers such as tax schedules or healthcare funding, the Conservatives were unable to come up with one evidence based argument for any of their policies.

And the reason for this is because Conservative policies do not have the outcomes that Conservatives say that they will have. There are, therefore, only two possible alternatives:

• Conservatives are wrong and the demonstrable fact that their policies don't have the advertised outcomes is news to them, and somehow goes on being news to them year after year, generation after generation.
  
  or
• Conservatives actually like the results that their policies have and are straight up lying to people in order to make them more palatable.

But let's face it, even years later th Conservatives are still making these arguments:

• Abstinence is 100 percent effective in preventing teen pregnancy and preventing sexually transmitted diseases. The use of condoms, which sex educators promote because of their effectiveness in preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, are not 100 percent effective, especially when used by young people inexperienced in their proper use.
• Telling teens about sex and how to prevent pregnancy and STDs while also encouraging them to abstain sends mixed signals and downplays the importance of abstinence.
• A “just don’t do it” message is used successfully in campaigns against drunk driving, guns, gangs and other youth issues, and it can be used effectively in abstinence too.
• Abstinence education goes further by teaching teens how to avoid unwanted sexual advances fueled by drugs and alcohol, how to avoid situations that can lead to sex, and the toll an unwanted pregnancy can take on a teen’s life.

The Heritage Foundation is to this day coming out in favor of Abstinence Only Education. And this is not new. Here's their stuff From 2004.

And yet, we know it doesn't work. We've known it doesn't work for a long time. The Bush Administration's own Government Accountability Office released a report that basically said that while we had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the program, there was no evidence that it had actually worked. The studies they reference Are Even More Damning.

So... what the fuck?

The only options are either that despite Abstinence-Until-Marriage-Curriculum being provably faulty and an expensive and negative achievement, the conservatives continue to support because they are retarded; or that they continue to support it because the actual results of more teen pregnancies, less empowered females, and less general knowledge on the subject of sex and disease is and always has been their actual goal.

-Username17

What about the other so-called "goals" though?

Invade countries to throw out dictators => stifle growth of other nations?

C'mon people. It is 2010. Iraq happened almost 7 years ago. Its about time to start watching things rationally. You can make an argument that US tried to instill friendly regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran so that it would gain an upper hand when having to agree on oil price with OPEC. You could argue some other things, but to claim they did it to stiffle the growth of Iraq, a country already economically devastated by decade of UN sanctions is as stupid as arguing that they did it to remove Sadam out of the goodness of their hearts.

Forbidding same-sex marriages leads to male-dominated marriage? It is a problem of discrimination, and to call it anything else is either deceiving, or stupidity.

Insurance industry profits off sick Americans? Err... I'm pretty sure it profits off healthy people.

etc. etc.

Kobajagrande wrote:What about the other so-called "goals" though?

What about them?

None of the Conservative plans do what they say they will do. NONE OF THEM. You can model this as the conservatives being ignorant, or you can model it as the conservatives lying, but there is no option 3. And frankly, option 2 looks a lot more plausible, since if you actually call them on their bullshit and show the relevant data they just go back to saying the same things as if nothing happened.

Kobajagrande wrote:C'mon people. It is 2010. Iraq happened almost 7 years ago

Fuck you. Iraq is happening right now. We are, in fact, still in that war. Right now. And people are dying in it. Right now.

The actual effect of the Iraq war was to spend a huge amount of money and lives to disrupt the political stability of the Middle East and cause supply shocks in the oil supply that made oil prices spike several times. And this was totally predictable, and was predicted, and played out pretty much exactly the way that the "pessimists" said it was going to.

But you know what? The "optimists" - the hawks who actually provided the false intelligence to send us into the war in the first place, made a lot of money off of it! So... since we already know they were lying about the reasons for getting us into the war, why is it such a stretch to think that the plan was simply to cause chaos, ruin civil society throughout the middle east, and steal billions of dollars from the US treasury from the beginning? Why is it paranoid to suspect that someone who lied repeatedly to push through a plan that destroyed several countries and made 10 digits of money for himself and his friends was actually smart enough to have the goal of destroying several countries and making a fuck tonne of money?

---

More generally, the goals that people think they have are completely incorrigible. You can't know what people think their own reasons for doing things are. But you can observe what the results of their actions are. And if people consistently take actions that produce the same results, you can identify those results and use them to predict their future actions.

So the American Conservative Movement always suggests a course of action that concentrates wealth and power. Sometimes it sounds vaguely reasonable like demanding some sort of tax code or another that only on fine inspection appears to give a greater proportional tax cut to rich people than poor ones. Sometimes it's really obviously loathsome like when they try to block legislation that would restrict corporations from allowing their employees to rape women as a perk. But it's always advocating the concentration of wealth and social power. And if you just assume that they'll always come down on the side of any issue that disenfranchises more people or transfers more wealth to people who already have a lot of it, you'll basically never be wrong about what the conservative position is on any subject.

Now, do you know why they think they are supporting those provisions? Of course not. You're not a mind reader. For all you know, their own experience of it could be a complete coincidence where they actually follow the teachings of a leprechaun that only they can see who gives them a list of completely disconnected policy instructions. But an outside observer can simply say that their goal is to disenfranchise people and transfer wealth to the rich and that's good enough to predict their actions in the future.

So from the pragmatic standpoint (and I am using pragmatic in the philosophically rigorous fashion approved of by Dewey), you can say that the reason that they oppose gay marriage is the same as the reason that they oppose abortions and the reason that they oppose restrictions on corporations that want to allow their employees to rape women: they want to strengthen the Patriarchy. If you make the assumption that strengthening and enforcing Patriarchy is a goal of the conservatives, you are able to accurately predict their stated positions on any social issue. So pragmatically, that is and always has been their actual goal. Whatever it is that they say or think their goals are at any point.

-Username17

Kobajagrande wrote:Forbidding same-sex marriages leads to male-dominated marriage? It is a problem of discrimination, and to call it anything else is either deceiving, or stupidity.

In all fairness, she said gay marriage and liberated women. I'm assuming eliminating the second half is what would lead to male-dominated marriage. Getting rid of gay marriage just assures that marriage will always be one man and one woman.

Given those to parts to the argument, I can see what she's saying.

The reason opposing gay marriage is an integral part to dominating women is that gay marriages are by definition marriages that are not subject to the gender roles of "real marriage."

And since those gender roles are something that oppress women and that conservatives support, it's really easy to see that if gay marriages are accepted, there is a lot less reason for anyone to believe that their personal marriage should be subject to those roles.

So in a very real and practical sense, gay marriage actually does hurt "the institution of marriage" because the part of the marriage that Conservatives are protecting as "the institution" is the part where the man is charge, the women stays home and pops out babies.

And the more accepted gay marriage is, the less likely any given woman is to accept that deal where she is inferior to the male in all respects for "the sake of the marriage."

From the people with conservative views I've talked to, they believe that stuff because it fits with what they think has always been true, supported by anecdotes which they trust more than science.

Their leaders may be a different matter, but only a tiny percentage of conservative people are the Dick Cheneys of the world.

Orca wrote:Their leaders may be a different matter, but only a tiny percentage of conservative people are the Dick Cheneys of the world.

Hes a rich white man and makes policies in support of rich white men, it being a different matter for him is effectively certain.

FrankTrollman wrote: None of the Conservative plans do what they say they will do. NONE OF THEM.

Ummm... I'm not disputing that stated goals of conservatives are different then their actual ones. What I'm saying is that this "table" is filled with such overblown claims that it doesn't help anyone's case against them, but using it rather lowers the credibility of the one who used it.

FrankTrollman wrote:Fuck you. Iraq is happening right now. We are, in fact, still in that war. Right now. And people are dying in it. Right now.

Fuck no. War ended in 2003 when Iraqi government capitulated, their army ceased resisting and Sadam Hussein went into hiding.

The current situation in Iraq is a product of much greater failiure of US policy - the fact that they went into the war with absolutely no understanding of ethnical, or any other, issues in Iraq, no idea of the possible consequences of the removal of the Hussein regime, and absolutely no plan of what to do with Iraq to ensure stable and sustainable government after the war is over.

And you know what? THAT is a HUGE failiure, and something that US public should in no way forgive the Bush regime. It means they took the US to war for ultimately no good reason. Every single person who supported or advocated the war should be pointed at and said "You led US into the war without a clear goal what to achieve with it and a plan how to achieve it".

To say that the iraq war is a single, continuous affair gives a wrong impression and indirectly absolves US government of greater mismanagement.

FrankTrollman wrote:More generally, the goals that people think they have are completely incorrigible.

Wait man, seriously, do I need to tell you, a grown man in your 20s/30s the difference between goals and effects (or even better, consequences)?

Sure, you can go through several steps and deduct that the goal of conservatives is to promote patriarchal values. However, unless they gather in their saloons, sip cognac and toasting "To Patriarchy!" you would are wrong.

It is much more realistic, and correct, to say that conservative politicians have strong connections with ideological conservative groups, who provide them with funds, public support, and stable votes. Since they depend heavily on those groups in order to win elections and gain power, they have a goal of not alienating them. And working toward that goal brings, yes, the promotion of patriarchal values.

And once you already have a policy built by such external factors, you cannot simply change it to attract new support without alienating your current supporters - especially in extremists groups, and epecially in a country such as US - so you have to convince others to accept your promoted values. Thus we have those stupid "No sex before marriage" campaigns.

Sure, you can go through several steps and deduct that the goal of conservatives is to promote patriarchal values. However, unless they gather in their saloons, sip cognac and toasting "To Patriarchy!" you would are wrong.

No. You would be pragmatically correct. See, their actual description of why they do what they do is that an invisible leprechaun gives them a completely arbitrary list of unconnected things to do and then they do them. That's not an exaggeration, that's their real claim.

And if you take that at face value, you won't be able to predict their future actions, because the motivations of their imaginary leprechaun are unknowable. And if you can't make predictions about the future, or the predictions you make about the future are wrong, then your explanations are wrong. But if you instead have a different explanation, one that has absolutely nothing to do with their invisible leprechaun and everything to do with patriarchal power structure, you can make predictions. And those predictions come true.

So pragmatically, the patriarchy explanation is right, and the leprechaun explanation is wrong.

John Dewey wrote:Experiment is an arbiter of truth.

-Username17

Koba wrote: To say that the iraq war is a single, continuous affair gives a wrong impression and indirectly absolves US government of greater mismanagement.

Okay, but the way you originally said it was so hairsplitting the definition that it was misleading.

'There is no war going on between the U.S. Army and the western tribes. The war ended after Tecumseh met his end against William Henry Harrison.'
'Say what, bitch?'
'It's more like a slaughter, really, because of the lopsided fighting conditions and the fact that most operations are carried out against civilians.'

So.... everything conservative, in one way or an other, is pro-patriarchy.

Being assholes to IS people (people who are on the border is highly offensive to people who strictly use a line to delineate haves' and have-nots in their society), gay bashing (threatening to a form of social slavery), not being rigorous about say pay equity (I mean, seriously, alarm bells don't ring for this?), or how say the pill is hard to get in Japan, while Viagra is not (srsly, this is wtfbbq territory).

Yeah... I can actually see that. Like, completely.

Frank.... where does matriarchy stand? What are it's goals and what does it advocate? At least, from the way you see it.

Matriarchy? What do you mean?

Like, the only people who ever even mention "matriarchy" are anti-feminists and "radical" feminists. It is not a thing that is in opposition to the patriarchy, it is literally a new version of it.