The Gaming Den

FrankTrollman wrote:

Gelare wrote:Monopolists, natural or otherwise, absolutely have incentive to innovate and improve, because by doing so they can convince more people to buy their products - the same thing that drives innovation even in perfectly competitive markets. Yes, the monopolist is gouging their customers, and we should all hope they get some competition, but to say there's no private incentive for improvement in industries which are monopolies is straight up false.

Wait a minute. You just discounted the entire argument against government economic activity. The entire argument against straight communism is that non-competitive markets are disincentivized towards progress.

But communism isn't a market, it's a government. The objective of a corporation is to maximize profit, which means a monopolist will innovate to whatever level he thinks will most efficiently gouge his customers - it's not the best situation, and it's not the efficient level of innovation, but it's there and it's significant and real. When the government runs things their objectives are more difficult to puzzle out, and I guarantee you it's not to make their citizens as happy as possible. As a working hypothesis, I'm going to go with "remain in power", which means a government running things would need to innovate exactly as much as would be necessary to keep themselves from getting voted out of office, or if it's a non-democratic system, getting shot in the face and then thrown out of office. And since the government is the one that has the guns, they don't really need to do very much innovating at all.

Your East India Company example is interesting and all, but I'm really not defending them at all. I'm not supporting the Shiawase decision, here. I like it much better when the people who have the guns at least pretend to be on your side. But this?

FrankTrollman wrote:You don't want a structurally adversarial relationship with the people who are getting meat or milk to you. That's incredibly dangerous. You want them to be at least theoretically on your side.

I find that difficult to support, because the fact is they're not on your side. They really, sincerely aren't. They're on their own side, and if you try to stop them from acting in their own self-interest, they have no further reason to act.

Adam Smith wrote:It is not from the benevolence of the butcher the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.

Now, then you say this:

FrankTrollman wrote:A risk that in turn can be minimized by putting the government (who is nominally on the side of the consumer) in as a watchdog over all competing food sources.

Which is an argument for a non-zero, non-maximal amount of government intervention. And I don't stand against that at all. There's a big gap between zero and the upper limit; based on past experience, I'm betting I would want less and you would want more, because you think governments are competent and I think they're less so. But I surely wouldn't claim that the answer is some crazy anarcho-capitalist solution.


Now on to something completely different...

PhoneLobster wrote:I've seen plenty of the "useful fools" of various unpalatable and insane political movements preaching the "democracy sucks because everyone is an idiot like me/didn't agree with my insanity" line but this...

Gelare wrote:so instead they vote for the candidate that's taller. And that's fucked up.

...is just plain silly.

[anecdotal evidence]

Umm...oh snap?

Wikipedia wrote:So, of the 47 cases for which we have data, the taller candidate has won the popular vote 32 times (68%), and the shorter candidate only 12 times (26%).

Now, it's possible there were other variables at work, or maybe it was a statistical fluke, but it is really just exceedingly well-documented that people consider taller people more leader-like.

The article itself discusses how the margins are only barely significant and how for some reason the various shorter victories had larger margins of shortness (both being points quite contrary to your trashing of the electorate as a bunch of ignoramuses voting only on height.).

Being tall in our society helps, it doesn't help altogether much. People do not actually "just elect the taller candidate".

John Mccain could have been a record breaking super tall champion professional basket baller, it would not have changed the publics opinion of him, his party, their actions and his policies.

It amazes me that when I say that people have been known to vote based on height, you interpret that as me saying that all voters are ignorant and all voters vote based on height. Honestly, find a better point to argue, this is just ridiculous. There's a lot of things that people vote based on which I imagine you would find irrelevant or based in ignorance. Physical appearance is lots of them: do you seriously think people will react the same way, all other things being equal, to a tall, medium-build fellow compared to a short, fat, bald man? I'll tell you straight up, they don't. People vote on height, and race, and sex, and sexual preference, and sometimes, if we're lucky, actual policy stances. Hell, half of everyone don't vote at all.

Winston Churchill wrote:Democracy is the worst form of government that has ever been tried, except for all the other ones.

Gelare wrote:Physical appearance is lots of them: do you seriously think people will react the same way, all other things being equal, to a tall, medium-build fellow compared to a short, fat, bald man?

First up it is your argument that all other things ARE equal because voters were too ignorant to actually understand policy and stuff. Mine is, they aren't, people actually notice things like wars, and trashed economies and hostile anti public health pro privatization shit, and they care.

Secondly, you saw John Howard, right?

Thirdly, you're the one obsessing over it, I also pointed out you are massively objectively wrong on your zany "empirical evidence is required, does not exist, and probably would support my opinions if it did" argument. You prefer to go the renegotiation of calling the electorate and democracy in general incapable of making informed decisions line.

Also: Paul keating the musical? Hilarious.

cthulhu wrote:Also: Paul keating the musical? Hilarious.

Their biggest fan? Paul Keating.

I bet he especially loves how the audience almost inevitably retroactively elects him instead of Howard.

I certainly do.

cthulhu wrote:Also: Paul keating the musical? Hilarious.

Whoa, that actually exists. And looks pretty awesome, to boot. Politicians + Musicals = I don't even know what

Gelare wrote:But communism isn't a market, it's a government. The objective of a corporation is to maximize profit, which means a monopolist will innovate to whatever level he thinks will most efficiently gouge his customers - it's not the best situation, and it's not the efficient level of innovation, but it's there and it's significant and real.

What the hell are you talking about? Communism is a command economy production and distribution system. Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Apple, Honda, Pepsico, and GM are all also command economy production and distribution systems.

Such as the market does anything, it affects communist and corporate producers just as it affects small businesses and individual workers.

-Username17

PhoneLobster wrote:

cthulhu wrote:Also: Paul keating the musical? Hilarious.

Their biggest fan? Paul Keating.

I bet he especially loves how the audience almost inevitably retroactively elects him instead of Howard.

I certainly do.

mhm, when I saw it we didn't get polled, it was just keating won and they did historical revisionism: The song.

But yeah, great musical.

cthulhu wrote:mhm, when I saw it we didn't get polled

I'll admit I assumed the TV version (which is all over youtube) was the typical routine, and they must be pretty confident with practice to run what I recalled a pretty unanimous show of hands and yells of support, for their live recorded TV event.

Edit: I also am lead to believe Keating himself attended quite a few of the performances, and joined the cast on stage. See him dance, trash Howard, and enjoy the show

But really after as many years of Howard as we had, throw in a upbeat musical that reminds everyone of what was great about Keating and it's pretty easy to rile up a crowd to give him more popular support than he EVER had in office.

FrankTrollman wrote:What the hell are you talking about? Communism is a command economy production and distribution system. Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Apple, Honda, Pepsico, and GM are all also command economy production and distribution systems.

Such as the market does anything, it affects communist and corporate producers just as it affects small businesses and individual workers.

-Username17

Frank, I honestly have no clue what you're talking about. It sounds like what you're saying is that General Motors is like a self-contained communist government, which I guess is alright. It's like pointing at a tree in a forest and saying, "Look! This is a tree!" That's super. But there's also a forest, which consists of GM, Ford, Honda, Toyota, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Renault, Fiat, et al. Whereas in the case of an actual government, like, say, China, there isn't any competition, because they literally own all the land in question and also have pretty much all the guns.

In a monopoly, there aren't any other trees.

You said monopolies still innovate.

Therefore, communist governments still innovate.

IGTN wrote:In a monopoly, there aren't any other trees.

You said monopolies still innovate.

Therefore, communist governments still innovate.

Ah, I see; thanks for the clarification. To which I respond: yes, correct.

Gelare wrote:The objective of a corporation is to maximize profit, which means a monopolist will innovate to whatever level he thinks will most efficiently gouge his customers...a government running things would need to innovate exactly as much as would be necessary to keep themselves from getting voted out of office, or if it's a non-democratic system, getting shot in the face and then thrown out of office. And since the government is the one that has the guns, they don't really need to do very much innovating at all.

However, the incentives and objectives of firms and governments are very, starkly different, and this will affect what actions they take, such as amount of innovation.

Google has a monopoly in online advertising, and yet is based on innovation. What gives? Will they stop innovating when everyone is online?

gelare wrote:However, the incentives and objectives of firms and governments are very, starkly different, and this will affect what actions they take, such as amount of innovation.

This is false.

First of all, firms and governments have no objectives because they do not exist. Corporations do not make decisions - people do. And the objectives of individual people within the corporation are almost universally personal barring tribalistic corporate loyalty. The CEO does not have "make the company as much money as possible" as a goal. His goal is to extract as much money from the corporation as possible. These are similar goals some of the time. But it's important to understand that an individual manager in a corporate branch has as a goal to not get fired and possibly get a promotion. And that doesn't mean maximizing the company's profit or even "benefit" - it means appearing to meet requirements and doing things to get noticed in a positive context by upper managers.

If you try to model corporations as if they cared about things or tried to make money, you'll never be able to predict Enron or Worldcom. Corporations cannot be trusted even to shut up and make money. And for the same reason that you can't leave accountants unsupervised and non-democratic governments always collapse under the weight of corruption. The fact is that the organization, whether it's a corporation or a government has no actual reality. The choices "it" makes are actually the choices made on its behalf by real people with their own interests who are constrained by Leviathan alone.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote: The choices "it" makes are actually the choices made on its behalf by real people with their own interests who are constrained by Leviathan alone.

-Username17

I'm sorry, but, "Leviathan"? What are you talking about?

Are you familiar with Hobbes?

Leviathan was his book that discussed the proper role of government in society, or rather, how it becomes legitimate through the formation of a social contract.

Now, Hobbes was kind of an emo misanthropist so his ideal form of social contract is extremely authoritarian, but the idea of people actually forming an agreement of how they were to be governed was pretty enlightened at the time.

Then again, his discussion of the 'natural state of man' was much closer to the real thing than Locke's or Rosseau's (two comtemporaries he's always being compared to), which is an ongoing source of embarrassment for people who want a more egalitarian form of government. Depending on how you look at things.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Then again, his discussion of the 'natural state of man' was much closer to the real thing than Locke's or Rosseau's (two comtemporaries he's always being compared to), which is an ongoing source of embarrassment for people who want a more egalitarian form of government. Depending on how you look at things.

I disagree sharply with this assessment. A Hobbesian analysis is about the most compelling argument in favor of egalitarianism that there is. If you buy some kind of hippy dippy tripe about how people are inherently good then you have no real answer for why Plato's Philosopher Kings aren't a good idea. And yet, empirically they are not.

Hobbes famously describes life in the absence of civilization as "Nasty, Brutish, and Short." That is, where the law of the jungle prevails it is easier to rob and steal than to produce. Man turns on man, with only the strongest getting the food and mates. With the advent of even simple tools, even that truth gets turned on its head because a sharpened rock to the back of the head will fell a strong man as easily as a weak one. I can defeat you, you can defeat me. The only thing that is decided is that both of us will not live to eat tonight. And honestly, that's fucking horrible.

Hobbes suggests that it is the Leviathan of civilization that protects us from that ghastly and impoverished fate. That the one thing that one cannot prevail against is "everyone." None of us has the strength of all of us, and so it becomes impossible for any one person to triumph over the system in combat. This frees us to do productive labor because it removes the "or kill people and take their stuff" portion of the equation.

Hobbes' dim view of a man suggests that because a man cannot be trusted farther than they are thrown, that it becomes the responsibility of society as a whole to keep them in check. And that's where it starts supporting democracy - or it would have if it wasn't for the fact that he was writing under an authoritarian government that threatened to cut his fucking head off if he pressed that issue. See, a ruler is also a man. And they can't be trusted either. Give a ruler an inch, and they'll take your yard. But rulers can't fight society either. They are just made out of meat, same as you and me. By putting society into a position of oversight over the rulers, we get the same protection from the king as we do from the axe wielding savage.

And that's good. Because we need it at least as much.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:First of all, firms and governments have no objectives because they do not exist. Corporations do not make decisions - people do. And the objectives of individual people within the corporation are almost universally personal barring tribalistic corporate loyalty. The CEO does not have "make the company as much money as possible" as a goal. His goal is to extract as much money from the corporation as possible. These are similar goals some of the time. But it's important to understand that an individual manager in a corporate branch has as a goal to not get fired and possibly get a promotion. And that doesn't mean maximizing the company's profit or even "benefit" - it means appearing to meet requirements and doing things to get noticed in a positive context by upper managers.

That is all important and insightful and I totally agree. As long as we're all throwing philosophers around here, Rousseau says that a democratic government run for and by a smaller group of people (a town, say) will do better and be less corrupt than a government run for and by a larger group of people (ten million square kilometers, for example), and he's right. When politicians in the U.S. have to answer to even a few million constituents, responsibility for oversight and keeping government accountable gets spread around and dropped, people become discouraged and apathetic that their one vote in ten or a hundred million can't possibly make a difference, etc. The CEO's objective, like everyone's objective, is personal gain, no contest. He, on the other hand, is accountable to a very small group of shareholders and directors, who will all eat him alive for failure since they have piles of their own, personal money in the game. That middle manager you talk about also aims to maximize personal gain, not do what is best for the company, but he reports to a small group of higher managers who can do a pretty good job of keeping tabs on him.

People have no clue what the government does. No one knows what the government does. It's sucking in and spewing out dollars with twelve zeroes after them, and no one can keep track of that kind of money - and what's more, very few people even want to. If a shareholder has twenty million dollars invested in a company, you're darn right he wants that money to be turning a profit, and he'll be watching it closely, and he actually has the power to affect things if they aren't being run as he likes. If someone wants to change the direction of their government, they're one voice out of three hundred million - game over, man, game over.

Also, you said that you disagreed with Lago on the natural state of man, but I couldn't quite identify what you actually think the natural state of man is. Could you expound on that?

The natural state of man is small closely related groups rather than individuals as Hobbes' all against all would suggest. People instinctively give up some of their freedom to live with others because we're a social species. I regard that aspect of Hobbes as more of a thought experiment than something we would expect to find in the wild.

Gelare wrote:Also, you said that you disagreed with Lago on the natural state of man, but I couldn't quite identify what you actually think the natural state of man is. Could you expound on that?

Sorry if that was confusing, I was disagreeing with the idea that a Hobbesian Analysis was in any way incompatible with an egalitarian government structure.

Gelare wrote:The CEO's objective, like everyone's objective, is personal gain, no contest. He, on the other hand, is accountable to a very small group of shareholders and directors, who will all eat him alive for failure since they have piles of their own, personal money in the game.

I see where you're going with that idea, but the fact remains that oligarchies have never produced clean or transparent governance of anything. Small groups of powerful people are susceptible to massive infighting because the swap of allegiance of one person is so large.

What actually happens with small groups is that the CEO buys off some portion of the share holders with sacks full of cash. Then he gives himself a sack full of cash, and then he jumps ship while the company crashes and burns. The shareholders who joined up with him have huge stacks of cash and don't care, and the shareholders who didn't have shambles and dirt. That's what happens whenever the mob is a small enough group that you can have a wink/nudge meeting with them in a face to face fashion.

The appalling excesses generated by massive bureaucracies accountable only to a bewildered electorate at distant intervals are indeed offensive, but I have yet to see a system anywhere that is actually less bad. Leviathan functions - and only functions when and because the number of people in it are too vast in number to individually intimidate or bribe.

-Username17