Remember that guy who was a big fan of the Wright Brothers, announced that they did all their work without government funding… then when I linked to him a letter by the Wright Brothers asking the Smithsonian Institution for all their research (and they got it too), he literally flounced out within 30 minutes of my post?
He demonstrated radar as a professor at the Berlin Institute. I don’t think the government gets to take the credit for his work.
Government did invent the Nuclear bomb though.
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LOL. “He WaS gIvEn GoVeRnMeNt FuNdInG aNd EqUiPmEnT… eVeN a GoVeRnMeNt SaLaRy… BuT iT wAs NoT tHe GoVeRnMeNt!”
But again, why the fuck wouldn’t government get credit ? Their lab, their cheques to the professor, their granting freedom of research within their labs… yet somehow this is all Hertz’ gig ? Pulled his science up by its sciency bootstraps he did, 'cuz nobody helped him none ?
My bad.
Hertz is credited with proving a theory postulated by Maxwell concerning the propagation of radio waves. I guess Marconi also gets credit.
But, it was actually invented by Christian Hulsmeyer, entrepreneur with his Telemobiloscope. This is controversial though, because it didn’t do range by triangulation, but he got the first patent.
GPS is also controversial. Apparently Ivan Getting, founding President of the Aerospace Corporation, proposed the idea and showed the science behind it and then the Navy and Air Force And NAVSTAR just stole it from him.
Or, he was just supporting the Navy’s program as a private contractor.
There is some serious disagreement.
Not clear.
So, the real answer is that none of these examples you made are clearly demonstrated to be government inventions.
But I did help you out with “nuclear bomb.’
Will you ? My own government guarantees university access to those who apply. It’s free-ish (you still need to pay token administrative costs, books, and housing. It’s still really cheap… by bougie standards). And yet, and even though France’s university system is starting to get very crowded due to deliberate underfunding by the current, more-money-for-us-fuck-you gvt, not every last person goes to university. Because some can’t spare ~5 idle years, others just don’t care about putting the effort in, yet others would rather go to trade schools, and many don’t hack it past the first few years. Just because you make a resource available and free doesn’t mean everyone will rush to get it, or even value it.
Yes, one of. Not the only.
Enjoying your fucking profits in 5 years ? Pride ? Patriotism ? Empathy ? Friendship with that business’ boss ? Believing their product(s) will make the world better for your children even if they don’t get direct moneyz out of it ? Your failure to imagine any possible benefit from capitalist investment besides your own trough is… kind of sad, really. They say a society’s greatness is measured when old men plant trees they know they will never sit in the shade of. By that standard, your society is petty af.
Why “vanished” ? The business and its assets still exist. They don’t belong to you anymore, they’re not nuked from orbit. Or do you implicitly declare you would nuke it yourself as a final fuck you ? Or that the company cannot possibly exist sans you at its head ? “Sold off” doesn’t mean “obliterated”. Different people investing in it, that’s all. Or, if nobody steps up to the plate, government ownership. It’s not a dirty word, you know ? There’s nothing hallowed or innately efficient about a board of director over a government committee.
I don’t know, dude. NASA, landing on the moon, the hadron collider are all enormously risky, much more so in fact than any private R&D because the base expectation is/was “this won’t make a cent”. And yet, governments fund them. And practical results are derived, and money is made, and life gets a little easier. But again, it’s not an either/or or my saying “capitalism as it exists is THE WORST”. All I’m saying is : the way things are isn’t axiomatically the only, nevermind the absolute best socio-economic construct. I’m just an idiot napkin-drawing and I gave you one hasty example. I’m sure plenty of people spend plenty of time pondering more realistic alternatives. Maybe even on a government salary, the pigs !
I posited the “take away upon death” utopia (wait, what the word for a -topia that is neither u- nor dys- ?) features no taxation whatsoever.
nod
They don’t start at zero : I posited a starting bunch of cash. You can use it to fund your way through unproductive college, or 420 smoke weed erry day, or scrimp and scrape in dead end jobs waiting for your opportunity to make it count, or pool it with other people to invest and bank and so forth. Just as you would a precious inheritance.
Nope. They still get the same share in the company. Hell, maybe your share is just substracted from the company but they keep theirs and shit goes on.
Yup. When you think about it, what exact moral or philosophical principle entitles the fruit of your loins (or the set of loins you spurted said fruit into) to your money ? We accept they do, because we’ve always done it this way and because emotions. But it’s not coldly rational, much less the most sound/efficient use for your money because your kid’s a lazy entitled idiot.
(no, not *your *your kid, if you have any. I’m not making this personal. I mean the Platonic ideal of your rich dad’s kid, y’ken ?)
It’s none of that. It’s a thought experiment, man.
You say that like it’s a good thing.
Not better in absolute. Better than everyone else’s. And thereby reinforcing and perpetuating systems to ensure other people’s children are worse. Go unbridled capitalism !
Again, why does your kid deserve a better start or life than mine ? I may be a lazy, low IQ, war-wounded layabout while you’re a powerful captain of industry ; but neither of our kids deserved to be born to such asshole dads, are implicitly or innately more worthy than each other and so on. You want your kid to have a stacked deck from the word go, either because you love him or because he falsely represents to you the continuation of You. But that’s just arbitrary, and emotions. It’s absolutely not an implicit guarantee that such is the most perfect, most efficient, most fair system. It’s not even the only conceivable human system (e.g. pre-agriculture HG tribe children being considered “the tribe’s” rather than “dad’s very own”, raised by everyone, taught by everyone etc…)
Again, I never claimed to support such a system, or hope it came to pass. It’s simply a conceivable organization of society.
Yeah, 'cause repressive government crackdowns to preserve an unjust status quo are unheard of in capitalist societies :rolleyes:. But then again, maybe you’ve actually never heard of them. Might we talk about a man they called Robert E. Lee ? 
Those who choose to do so, and spend their own accrued capital to do so. How is that different from now ? Except that now it’s most often based on grand-grand-grand-daddy’s capital ?
Do you honestly believe the sons and daughters of politicians don’t get special access now, under your “best of the best” system ?
Some do, but it’s hardly the only reason to build a business. Personal greed, prideful ambition are suffocatingly common.
Again, and the libertarian free market free-for-all isn’t, doesn’t ? You might want to take a look at income distribution curves.
Funny - I started a business in the mid 2010s myself, and while I did have an accountant handle all that administrative bullshit (and explain it to me at tiresome lengths) it ultimately was a dozen pages of paperwork and done.
I also fail to see what, if anything, that has to do with the thought experiment.
:rolleyes:. Just :rolleyes:.
I don’t give a fuck that some people are rich. I give a fuck that 1 family out of ten struggles to feed itself in the richest, most productive, most food-wasteful economies in the world. I give a fuck that Jamal can’t get a job because his name isn’t John. I give a fuck that Jamal can’t learn engineering because his dad’s name is Abdul and *he *can’t get a job. I give a fuck that John works three jobs and makes under minimum wage, his work generates millions in benefits and it all goes to the the guys who “invested”. I give a fuck because the retarded, bigoted, pig ignorant and generally awful son of a rich cunt gets to become president on the moral virtue of “having inherited money” alone, and being good at stealing more without producing any value whatsoever. I give a fuck that Deborah also has trouble securing a job, and when she does is paid less than John because c’mon, love, you’re going to drop out and have kids won’t you ? I give a fuck because Walmart can afford to sink John’s entire business without batting an eyelid. I give a fuck because Amazon can afford to sink entire countries at this point.
It’s really, deathly simple : capitalism is a spiral. Over time it **always **concentrates wealth among smaller and smaller numbers of people while more and more have to live in squalor and are forcefully kept there. There hasn’t been a single capitalist or proto-capitalist system where that hasn’t been the case.
Now tell me again why we should all accept that as “just how life be” ?
No, this is just wrong. A capitalist economy is not the result of ANY ‘planning’. It is emergent. It is more like an ecosystem than a machine.
Tell me - do you think ‘scientific’ planners could manage an ecosystem as well as how nature does it? Two attempts to create even a very limited ecology (Biosphere I and II) utterly failed. Attempts to ‘scientifically’ manage species populations leads to constant failure due to unintended consequences.
If you don’t understand complexity theory you probably won’t get this. But it’s true. And it’s the reason why central planning of complex systems always fails. I already posted two long messages describing this, along with links to two relatively short but seminal documents - Nobel prize winning economic concepts. Central authorities simply do not have the information required to make effective choices. The information to do so just isn’t available at all to central planners, because it doesn’t exist until people are forced to evaluate their own hierarchy of values in a marketplace.
This doesn’t just apply to government. Large companies succumb to the centralization myth as well. My own company just laid off/retired thousands of engineers around North America and centralized their engineering in a ‘center of excellence’ under the theory that one location full of very smart people could make better decisions than myriad local offices with handfuls of engineers each. But the local offices had the engineers that were close to the customers and came out of the customer’s industries, and therefore understood what they needed. The ‘center of excellence’ had generic computer engineers that just had good credentials. Guess what happened? It failed. Miserably. The people in the central offices could only guess at what our customers really needed, and were subject to all sorts of local biases. They destroyed our entire product line, and now we are all out of work and the company as a whole is currently failing. And we were the market leaders before this madness started.
Anyone who has ever participated in requirements gathering or building software to those requirements can tell you how wrong they can be with only one or two levels of intermediaries in the mix. The company disconnected decision-making from the information required to make those decisions, with disastrous results. And this is in a vertical market that is just one tiny sliver of the hellishly complex overall economy.
Oh my. Your contention is that government provides higher quality goods and services than the private sector? That’s a good one. And no, companies are not short-sighted and focused on near-term cost. Companies engage in decadal projects all the time. SpaceX is currently building a giant rocket that currently has no real customers, and which won’t turn a profit for maybe a decade or more. They’re planning to go to Mars, and there’s not even a known path to profitability for that.
In the meantime, it’s government that can’t see beyond the next election cycle. NASA hasn’t built a manned rocket since the Space Shuttle in the 1970’s. They keep trying, but because these projects span multiple presidencies, they always get canceled or delayed when there’s a change in power. The Superconducting Supercollider was killed by government after billions were spent on it. Climate Change legislation gets re-done with every election, and nothing has happened. High Speed Rail is dead in California. Yay for forward-looking, long-range thinking government.
Cites? You’re going to have to look hard to find private social damage equal to the destruction govoernments have wreaked on inner cities, or the gigantic clusterfuck that is government in California. Major cities are now facing outbreaks of typhus and other 3rd world diseases because of human feces on the streets and huge numbers of homeless people. Hanford was a government failure. Yucca Mountain is a government failure. I could go on, and on.
I can’t argue with this. Because it’s not even a parsable sentence.
Are you saying you don’t need to care about people who might want to harm you? If so, why do you believe that? Do you feel your indifference is a shield?
The system protects you, Will, even when you don’t believe in it or understand it.
That’s not the stuff I’m talking about. I’ll put down personal responsibility and equal treatment as the good things conservatives believe in.
I’m talking about things like “grab them by the pussy” and “shithole countries” and “go back to where you came from”. What’s you take on these things? Are you saying they’re not evidence of bigotry? And when crowds shout their approval, aren’t they supporting and encouraging bigotry? Do you feel that conservatives need to work with bigots in order to get other good things done? Or do you feel that bigotry itself is a cause that should be supported?
I didn’t say that (assuming that quote was supposed to be from me). In this thread, I specifically listed some conservative values which I explicitly said were not based on bigotry.
So my question is if conservatism has a mixture of good and bad, why aren’t conservatives working on separating the two and promoting the good while getting rid of the bad?
Look, any group of smart people can invent something. There are government offices that have done good work. The Manhattan project worked. If you know exactly what you need, and you have unlimited funds, you can figure out a way to build that thing if it’s feasible at all.
That’s a far cry from managing an economy. I mentioned that a single company can easily have 5,000 businesses in its supply chain. And each one of those businesses has hundreds to thousands of businesses in its own. The tail of production is incredibly long, and unmanageable.
Let’s say you are a central planner, and you decide that people need more cars. So you order more cars to be built. But that requires more steel, rubber, etc. So you order more steel refining. But that takes more energy. So you order more energy sources to be built. But they require steel and other things. Also, they need turbines, which means more copper and other resources. So you order more copper mining, but the equipment for that has been re-tasked to build more mines for the steel you need. Then you can add in the need to order up more wires, cables, ball-bearings, etc. Now you have a rubber shortage. And so it goes, through hundreds of thousands of parts, transactions, etc. Just for one decision to increase car production. Millions of people are effected, and unintended consequences abound.
Markets solve this problem computationally. People want more cars, so the price of cars goes up. This drives up the price of steel, which stimulates more steel production. In the meantime, the higher price of steel moderates demand for other steel products, creates substitutions for those products, etc. If auto workers are in short supply, salaries go up, which stimulates more people to work in the auto industry. Everything constantly recalculates as underlying factors change. It’s a massively parallel engine for solving complex economic problems.
All of this happens without any planning - which is a good thing, because it’s impossible to plan it.
A government office can design an internet protocol - especially when it is the customer for it and knows exactly what it needs. What a government CAN’T do is make sure that the thousands of goods in the local grocery store are available when its customers need them, without excess inventory and at competitive prices and high quality. Because that problem is complex.
It’s exactly the same reason why governments, no matter how many scientists they employ, can not tell you what the optimum mix of plants and animals in an ecosystem should be. It has no way of knowing, and attempts to do so lead to unintended consequences and failure. But the animals and plants themselves can work it out without planning, if you just leave them alone.
:dubious: Okay, but by that rationale there is not and can’t be any example of a genuine capitalist economy actually in existence. As soon as a system involves any planning, hey presto, it ceases to meet the criteria for being “capitalist”. Which means that supporters of anti-planning ideologies can always claim that a truly capitalist system would be optimal, without the inconvenience of ever having to evaluate its performance in practice.
There’s no realistic way to have any human social system that doesn’t involve some planning. Using abstract ideals of a nonexistent entirely planning-free system, which in theory works optimally, to try to justify opposition to any particular instance of planning in a real-world human society is not a convincing argument.
Nature isn’t “managing” anything, and there is no intrinsic metric by which to determine whether natural systems are evolving “well” or “badly”. Any evaluation of outcomes as “good” or “bad” requires imposing a specific purpose or perspective: “good” or “bad” with respect to what?
Cherry-picking certain complex natural phenomena that we consider desirable, and trying to extrapolate from them the claim that uncontrolled nature intrinsically “manages” an ecosystem “better” than human planning could do it, is also not a convincing argument.
“Optimum” for what purpose? Maximizing species diversity? Averting disasters, extinctions, population crashes, etc.? Unplanned, un-managed nature is “good” at some of those objectives and “bad” at others. Saying that whatever outcome unplanned, un-managed nature comes up with is by definition “optimum” is circular reasoning.
Conservatism does have positive and negative elements, just like every other ethos. The disconnect is that the things you identify are not conservative in nature. Grab them by the pussy is not conservatism. Etc.
Well, it was said by a conservative politician. In fact, it was the leader of America’s conservative party. So it’s not something conservatives can just ignore. They need to either explicitly denounce these statements or they’ll be assumed to be in support of them.
The Wright Brothers weren’t the only people building airplanes. If they hadn’t succeeded, within a year or two someone else would have.
In fact, if you look at the history of invention, they come along very soon after the pre-requisites for them are available, if they are valuable. Stuart Kaufmann calls this “the adjacent possible”. Every time there is a new invention, it creates an adjacent possible for things that can now be invented because the first one exists. But the adjacent possible is full of unknown unknowns, and it requires MANY people to explore it, in many different ways. You need to try out ideas found in the adjacent possible to see if people want or need them. That’s the value of real diversity. And in fact, the evidence shows that inventions that are useful tend to appear almost immediately after they are possible, and sometimes are invented in many places at the same time.
In the case of the airplane, the enabling invention was an engine of a high enough power to weight ratio that it could loft itself, an airplane, its fuel, and a passenger into the air. Once that became available, powered flight began emerging all over the world.
So innovation requires random exploration by many, many people. It requires that people try outlandish things, and conservative things. It requires people of many different backgrounds and experiences to work on exploring the adjacent possible.
This is why the U.S. and other western nations have been far more innovative than planned economies. It’s why China has to steal its tech, and why Russia couldn’t compete against the U.S. in the cold war.
This is also the way nature operates. Look at how ant hills evolved. If there had been comparative advantage to having very smart ants control dumber ones and plan for them, we’d see that. But instead, we see rules-based emergent properties directed by the ants on the bottom.
When ants are short of food, they start exploring the adjacent possible by milling around in stochastic search patterns. Each ant has a very tiny brain with a few rules, but when they all act on those rules order emerges. Ants are very efficient at finding food. When they find it, they emit pheromones which tell other ants where to find the food. If there are many food sources, there will be many pheromone trails, which will ebb and flow in strength in proportion to the amount of food available at each. It’s a computational process of incredibly complexity.
If an anthill floods, the ants will form a raft out of their bodies and float away. If food is on the other side of a chasm, the ants will form a bridge with their bodies. Ant colonies fight wars, capture slaves, and use them to maintain their nurseries by hauling in just the right amount of vegetation so that the heat given off by the decaying vegetation maintains the right temperature in the nursery. But if they bring too many slaves into the anthill, they may revolt and take over and kill their hosts. Ants fight complex wars with fronts and tactics and all the rest.
And No ants plan this. They can’t, because they have very tiny brains. They are in essence simple state machines. All of these complex patterns and behaviors emerge out of simple rules. The same is true for bird flocks, dog packs, you name it. No central planning whatsoever, yet lots of order and efficiency.
This is how nature works, and it’s how capitalism works. And it can’t be planned. It’s too complex.
Same problem here. Trump is far from conservative. The rest of your calculus fails because of that.
But supporting powerful men in the face of changing social norms is conservative, in my understanding of the word.
Nobody plans how many cars there should be, or what the right mix of cars and trucks is, or how many engineers vs doctors we need. At the societal level, those details emerge. Individuals can plan. Businesses can plan. But this is all at the micro level, just as individual birds or dogs or ants have agency and can make certain plans within the constraints of the rules they evolved to obey. The higher level structures like dog packs or anthills or entire ecosystem emerge from all of those individual choices. There is no central planner dog or ant that makes choices for the others. It’s all emergent.
Again, we are talking about planning at a macro level. Planning society, not just individual’s plans for what college to apply to or where to go on vacation or whether to open a business.
The beauty of capitalism is that the rules set (property rights, free communications, etc) is what allows for emergent order that works. Adam Smith called it the ‘invisible hand’, because at his time complexity science and information theory didn’t exist. What we’ve learning since then has only strengthened the value of this model of organization.
It’s managing things by good or bad as determined by natural selection and evolution. It’s not a MORAL system, for sure. But it is stable and very efficient at utilizing available resources.
Now, humans have morals, and that’s why I don’t argue for some kind of anarchic utopia. Capitalism is highly efficient, but there are definitely winners and losers, and there are people who, through accident of birth, ancestry, physical trauma, or poor opportunity cannot compete in that system. Compassion dictates that we help them, and I support a social safety net. But if we want to also maximize growth, we have to be very careful how we do it, lest we kill the system that creates the wealth we use to help them in the first place.
What we cannot do, however, is decide that capitalism is the problem and dump it in favor of some managed system. Because if we do, all we’ll accomplish is to bring everyone down to the level of the poorest.
Language is fluid, dontchaknow.
Are the Republicans planning on having somebody else be their nominee in 2020? If not, guess what; he represents conservatism.