Phi for All

Economy stinks! Go to jail, Lloyd C. Blankfein! Occupy Wall Street!

See Corporate Personhood. Mitt Romney also touts this in his campaign. Corporations are already set up to provide a barrier to personal penalties; giving them the rights of people further tilts the balance in their favor. I was struck by that myself. My initial take was negative, but I know the majority are probably not going to read in deep detail without something they can personally relate to. I suppose if the colorful phrasings equate to wider readership, it's completely justified. It just touches a nerve with people who've done a great deal of proposals and other professional writing.

So is it better to have experienced career politicians even though it could lead to cronyism and corruption? Would it simply be easier to implement some measures that would curb the special interest catering? Could those measures be designed to give better representation at the same time?

There would obviously have to be a few changes in the training process. Congressmen have a staff that can help them through the early parts of a freshman term without indoctrinating them the way the old blood probably would. According to this article, last November 35% of the incoming representatives had never held elective office before. I'm not that impressed by what they've accomplished so far, but it shows that it's conceivable to have inexperienced representatives in these positions. Would a system like this allow for better representation? It seems like there might be less party affiliation, which could require a representative to poll his/her constituents more closely. This might not be what most Americans want but if we want a better system we need to be more involved. I don't see a way around that.

I was talking about this "'financial gift' in lieu of wages", just as the title of the thread says. Wages get taxed and written off. I had assumed the "arrangement" was to establish the relationship where a "financial gift" would be appropriate. And I agree. It's not ethical no matter how legal you make it if both parties are neither real friends or family. The intent is to avoid taxes and that makes it wrong. In the first place, to make your relishable argument, you already assume the revenue service knows about the work done. I said it would depend on whether the work in question was observable. And in the second place, you moved the goalpost. Nothing indicated directly that this would be an ongoing arrangement, except perhaps the + after $10K (which I had assumed reflected the increase in the personal gift ceiling for 2011). And I still say that the wealthy person would be much better off with the write-off on taxes than with any reduced liabilities or responsibilities. $10K for a year's work wouldn't even qualify for full-time benefits. The wealthy person could easily pay the amount as contract labor which would require the unemployed friend to file it as miscellaneous income, making him solely responsible for the all taxes, including Social Security and Medicare (self-employment tax). I think your friend is better off. I wish him well in his job search. And you're better off knowing that the wealthy person is not the supposedly very ethical person you thought him to be. Can I ask one final question? What was the relationship between the wealthy person and your unemployed friend? Were they also friends? This doesn't make much sense if they weren't.

I love it when two probable events happen simultaneously to make an improbable event, like when someone kicks a dog and then gets drenched when a passing car hits a puddle. Having gone from vinyl to 8-track to cassettes to CDs, I love my iPod. And I love you, Steve! I love the European way of chaining grocery carts together so you have to put a coin in to get one, then either put the cart back to retrieve your coin or let some kid get the coin for putting it back for you.

I admit I am assuming the arrangement is satisfactory (other than legally or ethically) to both parties, and that the wealthy person isn't getting an unfair amount of work for his $10K, since this was not mentioned in the OP. If this is so, then the work gets done regardless. But the wealthy person pays more by getting the work done without the tax write-off and the unemployed friend gets more by being compensated while not losing his unemployment benefits. Perhaps "selfless" was inaccurate, but I was responding to the idea that "to 'arrange' a financial gift" made the deal "stink" in terms of taking advantage of the unemployed friend.

I hate that we spend so much money and still get abominable roads to drive on. I hate that I can't always tell the difference between market demand and corporate marketing. The first is based on what the consumer wants to buy and the latter is based on what business wants to sell. I hate that, intellectually, we claim to prefer the unedited truth, but our brains seem hard-wired to respond better to sound byte lies.

In most cases, you want people working for you to have experience. In the case of legislative political representatives, experience can also be a bad thing by continuing an ineffective status quo. It can even lead to ugly things like corruption, scamming the system, cronyism and misrepresentation. We often see newcomers throw their hat into the political ring saying that they'll use their "new eyes" to more easily see what's wrong with the system and work to correct it. We know that bringing in fresh viewpoints can often invigorate business. Does that really work in politics though? Term limits are favored by the vast majority. Why? So people don't make a career out of politics, and to sever ties with special interests. But term limits means even those who aren't corrupt abusers have to go also. What does that do for meritocracy? I've always thought the best way to have fair representation was to draw our representatives by lottery, almost like a draft. Four years service and you're out. Plenty of ways to make it attractive to the vast majority (Medicare for life, great wages, a nice bonus on completion of term, probably still save a lot of money over the way it is now, and no campaign financing!). You'd avoid career politicians who don't really care about representation, but would you get the kind of ability to compromise that seems necessary at the legislative level? When the subject came up in another thread, it occurred to me that it might be a good thing to have some representation from some of the young college grads in the Occupy Wall Street movement on Capitol Hill. They have the conviction of mind that could keep them from being seduced by the power and greed, they have the fresh ideas that might clean out the current corruption and they better represent what I would like to see our federal government do for its people. But they have no practical experience in politics. Is that good, bad, ugly or "other"?

It could only be called illegal if there is a direct line between the work and the compensation. A lot depends on the work done, of course. If the work is something that could be observed and documented, then the payment of the "gift" might alert the revenue service and they could argue a case. I would imagine there are plenty of things I could do for an employer (such as writing proposals) that no one would ever know I had a hand in (assuming others could simply put their names to the work). Something like that wouldn't be necessarily prosecutable, but it would still be against my morals. However, I might do this if the employer was also a very good friend. I think I could justify having one of my closest friends give me a gift of $10K, and me saying thanks by doing some pro bono work for him. As long as I knew there was no observable line between his gift and mine so there would be nothing to misconstrue as illegal, my friend would be safe. If I didn't know the employer very well, then it would very obviously be both illegal and immoral. Regardless of whether it's illegal or immoral or both (note the emphasis), the "arrangement" seems rather generous and selfless, actually. It doesn't really benefit your wealthy friend at all. He can't write off the payment if it's a gift, so he's losing a lot more taxwise than he would by paying the wage tax on $10k in compensation. Your unemployed friend is the double winner here. So the word "arrange" seems like it's merely in terms of the paperwork involved.

I think you may have just found jobs for some of those young people in Liberty Park....

I firmly believe this is true.

There's the rub. As long as the expectation exists that work will be performed and paid for by the gift of money, your friends are scamming unemployment AND the IRS. Gifts up to US$13,000 (as of 2011) aren't taxed, but would be considered income if there is an exchange of work, and therefore subject to wage taxes. Similarly, if you're paid for any work you must claim it with unemployment so your rate can be adjusted. If your friends could truly work it out where the money and the work were freely given without any expectations, they might be legally in the right. I still don't see how that would work around their personal morals, but some people are more comfortable with grey areas.

Well, I just call it logical progression, from telepathic robot to saving people from household disaster. Nothing supernatural about that. Yeah, see that's where it becomes suspect. You could do it but instead you set up some impossible scenario we could never fulfill. And how is it cheating? You get a hunch and pick the numbers just like everyone else. You say you could win the lottery but choose not to for ethical reasons. Most people would consider it the epitome of good ethics to win all that money and then use it, not for mansions and fast cars, but to found a charitable organization that helps the world somehow. What's wrong with that? Nobody is going to believe you could really do it unless you do it. Not "dumb". I was basing the joke on "doom", an impending tragic fate. The Roomba goes around vacuuming your house while the Doomba goes around saying, "Warning, warning! Do not run down the stairs! Your shoelace is untied! Warning!"

I think if OWS started out with a clear message and an organized agenda, they wouldn't have created the groundswell of support they have now. I know I probably wouldn't trust its purpose as much. It's probably hindsight, I'll admit, but an immediate sense of clarity would've suggested that they had some puppet-master pulling their strings, a group with a hidden agenda. It's what I think of the Tea Party, so it would have been logical to suspect OWS too, even though they tend to affirm my political stances on various subjects.

I love the fact that, although the economy is hurting, it means that manufacturers need to get rid of inventory and there's a lot of 50-70% off sales, even at the grocery store. I love that people are too busy judging celebrity dancing to judge me. I love people who can't help the funny laugh they have.

I hate that we're losing a more supportive village mentality while sitting in our home fortresses trying to recreate the village with Facebook, smart phones and reality TV. I hate that all the good curse words are tied to our anatomy and bodily functions, so that we end up constantly affirming a negative aspect of our sexuality. I hate that so many people who barely passed high school are convinced they're right.

People can't stand to have deeply held beliefs challenged. It invalidates them somehow to be wrong. And like the revolving door on a creationist sepulchre, they keep resurrecting dead old myths over and over, and calling it compelling evidence.

It's just not gonna happen. According to David McRaney at You Are Not So Smart, psychologically speaking, the Backfire Effect is at work. Briefly, he says that when your deepest convictions are challenged by contrary evidence, your beliefs get stronger. It usually happens when a poster doesn't know enough science to fully understand a concept, so they end up convinced that special relativity is flawed, or that they've created perpetual motion. And since science deals with the natural world, supposedly supernatural phenomena gain that air of mystery that only helps solidify the belief in it.

If you can train the robot to warn people of a specific impending danger, I think you'll get lots of scientific recognition. If the robot just points out random occurrences or produces slips of paper it may or may not have written down a few days ago or runs around calling people fat, then I think you will have wasted a lot of time and money. People will find it very suspicious that you don't want to win the lottery (presumably because of some ethical dilemma or vague fear of corruption). Having wealth like that would let you fund all kinds of research into the paranormal. And the stuff about getting to know people and being able to figure out what will motivate them, that's called marketing. It's very common and not supernatural at all. Is the robot idea a good one? I think the robotics sector will want either money or proof of your capabilities before they invest any time talking to you. If you can come up with something more concrete, I have some connections. If you could program a robot that would run around the house saving people from slipping in the bathtub, leaving the gas on and falling downstairs (or even warn them when family will drop by unexpectedly), I would be happy to introduce you to the Vice President of Marketing, Home Robot Division at iRobot. I can see it now. We'll call it the Doomba.

All the incidents you mention have natural explanations. Good scientific experiments can remove the probability of those explanations being plausible, leaving us with only the supernatural explanation, that you are a telepath. You need to figure out how you can test your ability to make sure it's not just probability (waiting long enough hours until "something" dramatic happens at a certain locale), or subconscious triggering (hearing someone sobbing while you're asleep, then waking up and feeling sad), or simple statistics (the odds of finding someone in a metropolitan newspaper named Agatha who gives birth to a boy are not as large as you might think; alternatively, you might have subliminally seen an announcement of Agatha's baby shower weeks earlier).

Is "how" a person thinks different from "what" a person is thinking? I define "what a person is thinking" using the experiment mississippichem suggested. One simple sentence in English that I can send to mississippichem for verification. You use your telepathy to say exactly what the sentence is, then I reveal my sentence and mississippichem corroborates. If you could do that a few times in a row, we could move on to another experiment that didn't involve the computers you know best. So people couldn't say you hacked our PM system.

And the Republican response: http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/cain-calls-occupy-wall-street-protesters-ant Nice to know Newt is still very much on message about the privatization of American education. Wasn't TARP and the bank bailouts established during the last days of the Bush administration? Did I miss the memo where we're supposed to forget about those eight years? So, since the Tea Party is protesting American taxes, they're basically saying they're anti-American too. I mean, you know, we have to avoid the double standard, right? I think it's sad that these people don't have to work any harder than this to appeal to their base.

Correct. There has never been a successfully reproduced experiment involving telepathy. Even if someone answered 100% correctly, if it can't be reproduced then it must be a random occurrence of a low probability. Feelings are too indeterminate to use for an experiment in telepathy. I don't think many scientists would accept such a subjectively vague criteria. What people are thinking is a different matter. If I picked a sentence from a book I was reading and thought about it very hard, could you tell me what the sentence is, or at least get close to what it's about? If you could do that twenty times in a row, I could almost guarantee some notice from the scientific community. How many times have you personally won the lottery?

Well, maybe he just doesn't want to.