bascule

Was the common ancestor of all mammals 5-toed? Just curious...

I think they did because of word usage by the respective groups. I certainly recognize that morals are to ethics as the cosmos are to cosmology, or as life is to biology, or the universe is to physics. Generally speaking, the right (or at least the religious right in the US) is more apt to be concerned with "morals", "morality", "immorality", etc., whereas liberals are more apt to be perplexed with "ethical dilemmas". On a more subversive level perhaps it means the left scrutinizes their moral code, whereas the right does not and accepts what they are taught about morality (by religion or otherwise) unquestioningly.

Here's why you should use a Mac:

A little more than a year ago, governments and central banks around the world acted to prevent what they foresaw as a global financial meltdown, originating the the US following the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The financial institution folded holding a record $613,000,000,000 in debt. This figure eclipses the GDP of all but the 17 highest producing nations. Lehman Brothers' collapse sent markets around the world into panic mode. Government bailouts took the form of extensive loans to these institutions, often at 0% interest, and in some cases buying failing financial firms outright. The bailouts ended up costing the taxpayers of these respective nations huge amounts of money. Estimates place the net costs of America's Trouble Asset Relief Program at $159,000,000,000. Looking back on the bailout, some people, such as myself, say "disaster averted." Others feel the bailouts weren't worth it, and may have made the situation even worse. What do you think? What would the world be like if governments hadn't passed bailout bills and simply let the market take its course? Would we better or worse off?

Hi abskebabs. Please examine this figure: Would you say its obviously unbalanced structure is due to "moral hazards"? I would say it's due to the free market. The structure evolved organically. There was no meticulous well thought out structure in place. The structure is assembled according to each actor's own self-interest, however there was not enough forethought to analyze the rather complex potential systemic effects that could happen if you pull a block out of this Jenga tower. Perhaps you think this is a suitable distribution of risk. Perhaps you think it's this way because the market isn't free enough. Did "moral hazards" make this structure more unstable than it would be otherwise? I think your fundamentally wrong assumption about how the economy works is that all actors can envision all potential types of risk, including complex systemic risks, and any time they fail to do so you write it off as a "moral hazard" because the system isn't free enough. I say sorry, no. We can't trust all actors in the system to envision all types of risk, and we can't just write off actors taking unnecessary risks as occurring due to the presence of "moral hazards". Sometimes people just don't see it coming, and it has nothing to do with "moral hazards". Or as Greenspan said: You're using "moral hazards" as a sort of "get out of any argument free" card and you're playing it against iNow. I call bullsh!t. Self-interest alone will not prevent the actors in the system from taking excessive risks, because some risks are invisible and result from complex systemic interdependencies.

You are aware that Wine and Crossover are both available for Mac as well, right? And are you seriously going to compare a native build of an app like Photoshop running on Mac versus trying to run the Windows version via WINE/Crossover on Linux? Sorry, that's not a valid comparison. While you "can" run it, the result on Linux is not a desirable one. To get the degree of emulation required to even make this feasible you need Crossover, which is commercial software. You are aware that division by zero does not result in infinity, right?. Division by zero does not have a meaningful answer.

I will always defer to science when shaping my personal beliefs. If a quantum physicist tells me something about quantum physics that disagrees with my beliefs, my beliefs are probably wrong.

Please take it with a grain of salt; I'm pretty sure it was made by liberals who didn't mind their "bias" showing a bit. Other that that I really like it. I ❤ infographics and thought this was pretty interesting. I love the inherent ambiguity of some of the phrases... it claims conservatives are "DON'T TAX AND SPEND" but does that actually mean "DON'T TAX" and "SPEND"? I suppose it's up to the reader to decide. Anyway, thoughts? Does it offend your liberal or conservative sensibilities?

Well, for starters, it doesn't cost infinitely more, it costs tangibly more. If you pirate it, you lose the vertical integration of the platform. That's a price that some people (possibly myself) have been willing to pay. But yes, there is a cost to it compared to open source platforms, particularly in terms of hardware support. That said, for a desktop operating system the platform itself is substantially better. Beyond the technical advantages of the Cocoa/NeXTSTEP API, the user interface is generally thought out a lot better and easier to use. But, all that said, the main advantage is the large amount of proprietary software available for Mac that is not available for Linux. I can run Photoshop natively. Can you? You don't need it, you have the Gimp, right? What about Final Cut Pro? Avid Xpress? Logic? Reason? I guess it just depends what you want to do with your computer. Macs don't have games... but Linux doesn't either.

Is there a genetic link to the self-similarity exhibited by humans? I'm specifically referring to our limbs and our digits. Our hands have four fingers and a thumb. Our bodies have four limbs and a head. We have five toes on each foot, one very different from all the rest. Our hands and feet receive blood through our wrists and ankles. Our bodies once received blood through our umbilical cords. Is this sort of self-similarity a coincidence, or is there a genetic underpinning?

We've bumped heads on this matter on this thread already. If you would like to discuss the matter further I suggest we continue there.

That's quite the backhanded apology, but... thanks, I guess? I'm not sure in what way I'm demonstrating "very little critical reasoning or thought with regard to the concepts under discussion." As far as I can tell there are no matters being discussed here which transcend the realm of opinion. Again, economics is not a science. I would certainly hope you Austrian school people appreciate that more than anyone. Anyway, I'm done, unless someone actually wants to discuss CDOs.

And when those losses are equivalent to the GDP of a small nation? From a SINGLE INSTITUTION? The predicted effect is a cascade failure as the bad debt passes from one institution to another (accumulating as it takes down successive institutions), bankrupting them all. Do you think, had the bailout not happened, there would've been a different outcome? I'm not even talking about that. I'm talking about damage control in the wake of a financial disaster. You want to let the system collapse completely. I think the bailout was an acceptable alternative. You don't. This is just going around in circles at this point. Going back to what I said earlier, economics isn't a science. There are no "right answers". We're just talking past each other because our opinions are rather different. Although your interpretation seems a bit light on facts, and I find your predictions of the future based on a collapse scenario tainted by Austrian rose colored glasses. I'm sure you think they're perfectly realistic. Do you really want to keep discussing this? I don't think we're making any progress. Agree to disagree?

That article claims: Wikipedia claims for the GNP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921_recession#Causes Regarding unemployment figures: Additionally: So a cursory examination of the figures purported by your source show them to be gross overestimates, and the underlying events behind it being substantially, almost diametrically different from our own crisis. I'm not sure why the comparison to our present situation is applicable.

You're in the minority on that opinion and I don't find it particularly defensible. How far would small banks have to leverage themselves to provide the sheer volume of credit needed to power our economy? Why do you think the depression would be short? You're talking about the backbone of our entire finance system vanishing off the face of the earth, leaving massive debts in their wake. Lehman Brothers alone had a debt larger than the GDP of most nations on earth. Had the government not intervened AIG, Goldman Sachs, and many others would've followed: What on earth makes you think such a depression would be short? Where would the new financial industry arise from? How long do you think it would take? Do you seriously expect it to have the volume of credit needed to run the US economy in short order? What makes you think the collapse will be larger? How much larger? I really don't think we're going to reach any common ground here abskebabs. You think I'm swallowing Paulson's turds whole, and I think you're off in theoretical Austrian na na land and have no clue about reality.

And what's your timeline for this? 10 years? 20 years? What happens in the interim?

So just to confirm, your solution would've been "let it collapse"... ...what do you think the effect on the economy and the day-to-day lives of your average person would be were this allowed to happen?

There's two questions I've asked you over and over and over which you've never answered me directly on. You seem to like to go off on tangents. 1) Do you think if no government action was taken following the failure of Lehman Brothers that it would've lead to a collapse of the worldwide financial system? 2) (answer only if "yes" is your answer to #1) Do you think the resulting collapse would be a good thing because it provides the necessary "corrections" to the market? Call me crazy, but I think propping up a corrupt system with government money is preferable to a collapse. I'll call you crazy for preferring a collapse.

We're getting very, very different figures for the volume of the balloon. "Cone shape assumed" - appears to be the key difference. I'm modeling the balloon as an oblate spheroid. Your volume is: 14.83 m2 My volume is: 35.58 m2 My volume is over twice the size of yours. Also I don't think the balloon is best modeled as a cone.

Hi coberst, I'm going to start flagging all your posts as spam. If you want me to stop, just let me know!

No if anything, that's more your solution [...] But for God's sake, don't allow the market or prices to correct! You mean... don't let the economy collapse? That's quite the euphamism there. I mean, honestly, I don't know how you can manage this sort of doublethink. You think TARP is the shoot-the-patient solution, when the alternative you're offering is the complete collapse of the worldwide economy. That is the shoot-the-patient solution. Do you really think that's a good solution?

You don't think such a collapse was warranted? As if there were some choice in the matter? You mean in the weeks between the fall of Lehman Brothers and the passage of TARP? Do you think maybe, just maybe, lending went down after the financial crisis, not TARP. Honestly, getting a direct response out of you is like pulling teeth. You're opinions are thoroughly riddled with Austrian confirmation bias, but you don't see me calling you out on it (whoops) I would, if the alternative were the collapse of the financial sector/economy. That was the case here, unless you're saying otherwise.

What about a complete collapse of the financial system? Does that seem somewhat historically aberrant to you? Do you think maybe, just maybe, CDOs were involved in that?

And your solution is... shoot the patient?

I suppose more to the point: would the bursting of the housing bubble have lead to the worldwide financial crisis without CDOs?