Pangloss

Do you believe that socialism was discarded for valid reasons? It's just an opinion; I've been clear on that. You want to think differently, I got no beef with that. It isn't, though, it's actually a very new idea, in terms of the kind we're talking about here. It's a very specific definition, I presume you realize -- not a general, vaguely defined thing that someone could liken to, say, a Soviet five-year-plan. Completely different thing. We can explore that further if you like. Ok, I officially put this forward. Show me your counterpoint. I'm interested. Sure, the Roman Republic was not based on the concept of equality. The first time human beings successfully codified that idea was July 4th, 1776. The point being that sometimes old ideas have flaws. I'm not saying old ideas are automatically bad, mind you. I'm saying they're often discarded for a reason. The reasons that led to the discarding of free-market capitalism may not have been fully explored, but they are logical and they are are too-often ignored by its adherents, to the detriment of discussions on the matter. That's my two bits on it, anyway.

Wups, I said earlier "an end to gun control" but I meant "new gun control" (in message #15). He will go after the so-called "assault weapons", because of a campaign promise, but I don't think he'll seek increased gun control legislation on handguns or guns in general. He's already stated opposition to handgun bans, supporting the Supreme Court decision of last year.

(shrug) I agree it's not a unilateral political cause. There are even conservatives who support legalization. This is not particularly relevant. The left-leaning boards (and libertarian-leaning boards like this one) are excited about a non-existent possibility of legalization. The right-leaning boards are dreading it. All are wasting their time, IMO.

Right. Watch for unions to oppose a lot of that, by the way, and they're going to do that through their paid representatives in Congress. They'll want those labor agreements left in place and the focus for change placed squarely on the shoulders of top executives. We're going to need to remember that high wages and benefits are part of the problem here. Not that I think high wages are inherently unfair, mind you. If Detroit was making a superior product then it could command higher wages for its employees. But until it can do that, employees are going to have to settle for less. Insufficiently.

Well they're certainly a good idea for somebody. That's not the same thing as suggesting that they're a good idea for everybody.

So the Dems voted and Lieberman gets to keep not only his position in the caucus but his valuable chairmanship on Homeland Security. The more punitive senators wanted him removed from that position because of its key oversight over the incoming Obama administration, but with Obama himself opposed to Lieberman's removal that became much less likely. Lieberman did lose his position on the Environment and Public Works Committee, giving them something to save face with. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/18/AR2008111800231.html?hpid=topnews Chalk up one key victory for Obama. This is a subtle but significant sign of how politics is going to change in this country, right here.

No, the word I was looking for was liberal, but I'll be happy to add libertarians to the mix. This is actually part of a larger thing that's happening right now that is somewhat interesting sociologically. Since Obama was elected many discussions boards are predicting and end to the war on drugs, and end to gun control, an end to opposition to abortion, and various other "big swing" predictions. The liberal boards are cheering these things, and the conservative boards are screaming in terror. It just isn't going to be like that, folks. It's not that kind of opportunity. But hey, we all have our dreams -- more power to y'all.

We are talking about legalizing marijuana, not ending the war on drugs. Even so this thread is pure liberal fantasy. I'll give you a bankable prediction right now: The idea of legalizing marijuana will not be proposed or supported by the Obama administration. He's in favor of expanding Drug Courts, eliminating sentencing disparities and so forth, but he's also tough on meth and opposed to lowering the legal drinking age. Nor can he politically afford to propose or support it. There is no legalization scenario in the cards.

Mod Note: The posts focusing on Labor Unions have been moved to a new thread (see the link below). A couple of the posts (numbers 25 & 27 above) were copied rather than moved since they pertain to both discussions. http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=36527

I don't buy the "unions are inherently good and some of them are just flawed" argument either. I tolerate them as a necessary evil in a free society -- a special interest group that will always serve its own interests, not society's. I do think they have their advantages and they can protect workers and serve a useful role there, but I don't think they need to be protected or served by government. (I've split this off into a separate thread.)

That's not the motivation here. Clearly people are aware of the drawbacks, and public faith in government is arguably the lowest it's ever been. In short, they're aware of your alternative and they don't want it. This isn't a matter of public ignorance.

I'm not sure we have the expertise for this in Computer Science, so I'm going to pop it over to Applied Mathematics and see if anyone there can do anything with it.

Well yes, and I think it's a good idea to trumpet the horn about what happens if they take the bailout and still fail to turn around the problem. Which is why I lean towards more dramatic internal change with any company that takes a bailout, and not just leaving it as a "bridge loan". If their track record is failure (and it would almost have to be if they're asking for a bailout), they should be replaced by smart, motivated people who have real ideas about turning things around. (Even if that means some layoffs, btw. I don't want to hear any crap from politicians later about we bailed them out to avoid layoffs. Avoiding laying them ALL off was part of the reason, but they need to become profitable, and if that means smaller, then that's what it means. Eat it, Senator from the Great State of Unionland.)

I think it's a dodge, and because it's a dodge it'd be ready fodder for a resurgence in right-wing politics. IMO the decision should be based on whether it's a good idea, not whether we need the money.

I would go a lot farther than Jeffrey Sachs, but it's an interesting article, thanks for passing it along. He's right that it's not about punishing the automakers for building gas-guzzlers and environment-destroyers, but I think we should go farther than guaranteeing no profit sharing after a bailout. I'm leaning towards the idea of removing the entire leadership team automatically. Regarding unions, I really think this next administration is going to be a very mixed bag for labor interests. They'll get a few things to help them out with recruiting and unionizing companies, but they may actually decline in enrollment overall. Everyone's pretty much aware of the fact now that GM and Ford have sky-high costs, and you can't toss that off to the price of overseas labor since Toyota is making money on cars made right here in the US.

It was amusing watching Paul Krugman yesterday try to pretend that he thinks that under normal circumstances GM should be allowed to die. When I realized I agreed with him I had to go and take a shower. ("Unclean! UNCLEAN!!!")

I think your analogy might be more effective if it were forward-looking instead of backward-looking. In my opinion what you're talking about is an old idea that was carefully and thoughtfully considered and discarded for valid reasons, not an insightful new vision that has never been tried. (What about the Roman Republic? It was an old idea that was then ignored for a couple thousand years and then regurgitated. Put that one forward and I'll show you a nice counterpoint to it.) But again, by all means, believe in what you believe. I got no beef with that. In my opinion these different points of view are exactly what produces the kinds of new ideas that we DO need in order to find the right path. We need to remember what's been tried in the past, so that the right parts and pieces of those old ideas can be culled and used in the right way. Of course not. I simply suggested an alternative political outlook; if you're not interested, so be it. But I will say that 'convictions' are not really what we're talking about here. Convictions represent general viewpoints that can be applied to numerous issues. What we're talking about are larger collections of issue positions grouped into a declared political unit. Many people can share many or even all of your convictions without joining your political collective, and many people in a political collective differ in their convictions. I think the fact that people are pressuring the government about the down sides of bailouts is not only beneficial, it's having an impact. That IS about convictions, and the proof of that is the fact that the very argument you described above is coming from MANY quarters, not just those who like Ron Paul. You're standing right alongside people from all over the political spectrum on this conviction, and that's why the issue hasn't fallen along the traditional lines of Democrat and Republican. Where that GOES is a different question. Where your political group wants it to go is complete deregulation (or Ron Paul's not-quite version). Where others want it to go is someplace different. But the pressure is there, it's real, its being recognized by government and independent analysts, and it's having an impact.

Moved to General.

Well as it says at the end, he can ultimately do it if he wants to. The founding fathers certainly wrote a lot of correspondence. I think the problem with legally-discoverable evidence is more about the current political climate than anything else. Maybe he should reject that problem outright and opt for transparency. (As for the physical security issue, the article doesn't seem to really go into that, but if there's an issue there it can surely be addressed with various specific tactics.)

I think government bailouts should happen in some of these cases but they should be extreme penalties and moves of last resort, and that's just not the case at the moment. I saw something over the weekend where a couple of the banks that got bailed out are giving something like $13 billion in profit sharing this year. And of course the AIG thing with the vacations was ridiculous. Bailouts need to be last-resort measures and heralds of vast change in a company's direction, not a way to make the bottom line work out for the year. California wants some of the bailout money. Just a few billion a year for a few years, that's all. Do you think they'll cut back on the massive entitlement programs they instituted that are unlike any other state, which apparently they cannot now afford? Nope. The very next thing they'll do after getting the bailout money is start debating another program that is "desperately needed for the state's poor" or some such. When those "few years" have gone by they'll say "why, you can't take that money away now, we're depending on it!" Anyway, we can't afford to let GM or Ford fail, but we can't afford to give them a straight-up bailout either. They need to be restructured and redirected. All top managers and directors should be asked to resign effective the arrival of the first government dollar. New top management can hire them back based on merit if they believe it's the right way to go.

Well maybe, or at least more clearly delineate sections by their technical comprehension level in some way. Perhaps even call it the "Layman's Summary" or some such (though perhaps a better term could be found). I think this has been debated extensively over at the Wikipedia itself, btw.

We've talked about this before and it's become a bit of a truism. It seems to happen with a lot of Wikipedia articles but particularly the math ones as Cap'n points out above. They need entry-level primers and sometimes they get them, but other times the subject remains very dense and impenetrable to the layman. Here's an interesting example of an article from the world of physics that used to be horribly impenetrable but got totally cleaned up and made to be much more accessible to the layman. I think it could use a little more work but compare it with the earlier version I linked below and you'll see what I mean: Current version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment Version from a couple years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Double-slit_experiment&diff=127267790&oldid=127267646 (Ignore the colored areas at the top and scan down a bit)

You both were doing so well, and you went and threw it away. Oh well, on we go. But some good points raised on both sides in this thread.

Well what happened was this: You: Two men can't have a baby, so that's a clear difference. They: Wrong, they can adopt. (Clearly a logical error in the first word, but surely a reasonable point.) You: Are you saying two men can have a baby? (Clearly you know full well what they said, and you're throwing that first word's technical incorrectness back in their faces in order to prove a point.) That's called making two wrongs a right. It didn't work, we straightened it out, and now we're moving on. If you want to talk about it further, send me a PM.

That's a perfectly reasonable point, but it strikes me as being a bit like debating the effect that instant teleportation might have on the transportation sector of the economy -- it's a "price of tea in china" debate. In my opinion it's not that these ideas don't have their merits, it's that we've made a decision to do things a certain way, and we have established to the satisfaction of the majority that the problem we're currently facing is not (in the main) the fault of the system itself, but rather the imperfect and corrupt application of it. Therefore we owe it to ourselves to stand by our intelligence, our logic, and our resolve, and not throw out the baby with the bathwater here. And perhaps more to the point, those ideas aren't going to be tried. They're simply not in the mainstream discourse. So I think they detract from a debate on the subject of "what can/should/will be done". Mind you, I never object to an interesting discussion. I just think it detracts from this one. But of course that's just my two bits on it, and you're welcome to think otherwise.