Lurker > red sox 777

That's um.......well.......freedom above all?

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It's also efficient to kill all of the old people because they drain on society's resources

efficiency is not the be all end all

It might be, but you'll never be able to show that it is with economic theory. Let's call the gain to each non-old people +100 utiles. The loss to each old person could be -200 utiles, or -2000 utiles, or -6.673x10^11 utiles, or -72 megaparsecs*kilometers^(-1)*hertz*hours utiles. It can be arbitrarily high, so we could never determine if it was efficient or not.

However, if we find a case A where every single person is at least just as well off as with B, and at least 1 person is better off, then we can say that A is more efficient than B.

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And who gets to decide what the standards should be? The majority, speaking through Congress? Government bureaucrats?

Better to let adoption agencies choose their own standards. No one is forcing people to use agencies with which they disagree. And yes, if you force adoption agencies to adopt standards that are abhorrent enough to them, many of them will close. People will act according to their conscience.

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Right, because those 17 year-olds likely will not meet the standards for a healthy, stable home that orphaned kids need to be placed into.

But in your mind its disgusting that an adoption agency should be forced to consider gay couples as potential families for kids with no home, and be forced to actually approve them if they pass the same level of standards?

That's just...I'll be generous and say that it's just a severe case of misplaced priorities.

They obviously don't meet the adoption agency's standards, because the adoption agency wants a healthy, stable, heterosexual, home. It's disgusting because orphans will not be placed with a family at all if you shut down adoption agencies for acting according to conscience.

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Also, adoptions agencies already can discriminate based on other things. If two 17-year-olds want to adopt a child, the adoption agency will probably say no. And they will win if they are sued for age discrimination.

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there are currently laws that prohibit discrimination based on race and age in hiring practices, and someone that is more versed in law would probably be able to cite exactly the precedence here, but it would not be a stretch to assume that those laws would then apply to this agency and the agency would violating the law by discrimination of orientation.

These laws (or the federal ones at any rate) are based on the Commerce Clause. Supposedly, Congress thinks discrimination hurts the national economy. For decades the Supreme Court let Congress get away with virtually any legislation by filing it under the Commerce Clause, regardless of how flimsy the link to interstate commerce was. In the last 2 decades, the Supreme Court has finally started applying the 10th Amendment and slightly limiting Congress's power under the Commerce Clause.

Practically speaking, yeah, Congress could probably get away with saying that adoption discrimination based on sexual orientation hurts interstate commerce.

Then what? Do you believe it is appropriate to force adoption agencies that are philosophically opposed to gay marriage to comply?

Personally, my answer is absolutely not. Such a policy would be nothing less than disgusting.

Yes. It would be no different from an adoption agency that is philosophically opposed to allowing children into black households. That place would be shuttered so fast it would make your head spin.

Probably, but I don't think it's that clear cut. The WBC, for example, can easily exclude non-Christians from their church. The KKK can exclude black people from their membership. Why couldn't a charity exclude blacks from their membership, and then only facilitate adoptions between members?

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The most efficient allocation is the one that makes the most people better off by the most amount. Now, it can be difficult to say which allocation is most efficient, because we cannot tell how much better off a person is under one allocation or another, just that he is better off.

However, if we have 2 allocations, A and B, and every single person is equal or better off under A than under B, then we can say that A is more efficient than B. Game Theory, as discussed in the examples that have been cited to you, shows exactly such possible scenarios.

learn2economics

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You have no right to spend my money.

Then you are saying that government action is immoral, not that it is inefficient. That's fine, but it is not true that all government action must be inefficient in 100% of situations.

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You're not getting it. Read his link. Closely.

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Barring some sort of mental illness or insanity, I fail to see how this is possible. The fact that human action exists means that people have preferences. To act in any way is to express a preference. Let's say I have $60 and someone offers to sell me Skyrim or Arkham City for $60. If I choose to purchase Skyrim, that is what I prefer. If I choose to purchase Arkham City, that is what I prefer. If I choose to purchase neither, I prefer the $60. Those are my only three options and I must choose one of them. Even if I decide by flipping a coin or something, I am then taking action to prefer leaving my decision to a coin flip. In any possible case, a preference is selected.

Have you considered that people are insane?

Or as I like to call it, the "Brawl > Melee complex"

The fools.

And there's the proof! (Don't take this seriously; of course it's not solid, definitive, proof, Smuffin.)

You can't use math to model human behavior. Economics is not a science because it is the result of human action, therefore you cannot subject it to repeatable and measureable experimentation.

But if that's true, then we can subject it to math, and better than with science. With science, experiemental data can never be as precise as mathematical theory, but if in economics, as you say, we don't need empirical data, and we know that people are rational, then math is extremely powerful.

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[This message was deleted at the request of the original poster]

And to remind you, a person is irrational if:

1. Given A and B, they do not know which they prefer (they also do not know that they prefer them equally).
OR
2. They prefer A > B > C > A.

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Nah, people are pretty irrational. They really don't know what they want. Or they base their thinking on logical fallacies, like, "I already paid for it, so I have to use whatever I bought, even though I don't want to use it anymore and would not pay a cent for it at this time. I don't want to lose what I already paid."

Alternatively, if you prefer, people are rational, but the model that says rational people will act in such a way as to produce zero unemployment is wrong.

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If Paul can actually win a state, that'll be impressive. If he loses tonight, his best shot is libertarian New Hampshire, and he's got a good shot.

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Thinking that an unhampered (meaning no government) market would lead to zero unemployment is about as idealistic as believing in the Communist Manifesto. If unhampered means also unhampered by practical reality, then okay. What practical reality? The reality that people don't go into the marketplace thinking, if I'm offered x dollars, I'll choose to work y hours. People don't generally get to set their hours with any level of precision.

Maybe it's rational for people to all act this way, but..........people are stupid.

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There is no involuntary unemployment in an unhampered market? What?

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I seriously doubt 75% though. I doubt you could get to 75% even not including Hispanics and other races.

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Not necessarily. States like Iowa may have very low percentages of people on unemployment overall. If most of the people on welfare nationally come from a few states with a high black population (say, New York, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, California, Michigan), you could get to a much higher percentage by doing the tripling calculation in each state rather than just tripling nationally.

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We've never done this. Embrace the capitalist utopia. We will finally attain that crown jewel of civilization: the ultra rich class.

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Well, Iowa is like 95%+ white, isn't it?

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I think a lot of people in the Republican Party really don't want to settle for Romney. That's why these other candidates keep surging and then falling in the polls. I think they're supported by the same people, the people who want anyone but Romney. But all their other choices suck, so they keep changing their favorite.

Ron Paul gives this country a chance at an honest debate with real differences for the first time in a long time. The country can finally be asked what it really wants on important, non-fluff, questions.

Also, I'm thinking many Republicans aren't really worried about beating Obama at this point. The economy is just too bad for him to win. Plus, the smear campaign the Republicans, especially their members in Congress, have run against him since the day he took office has been too effective.

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I'm okay with this. Eventually we'll move to a system where 90% of the country is permanently unemployed and receiving welfare from the 10%. 9% of that will eke out a bare minimum lifestyle that's no better than the 90% on welfare except for prestige. The bottom half of the top 1% will be rich, just as they are now. And the top half of the top 1%, the super rich of today, will be able to advance to being ultra rich. The middle class will finally be destroyed.

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It sounds okay for all of two seconds until you actually think about it and realize he's really saying "I want to cut taxes on the rich and pay for them by cutting social programs that help poor people."

What if this sounds reasonable but the other statement you gave doesn't?

But anyway, if you want to cut spending, you have to cut the things we actually spend lots of money on. Bailouts to large banks. Social Security. The Military. Medicare.

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I don't like the scapegoating of welfare recipients. Welfare recipients receive a tiny percentage of the country's funds. Our problems will not go away if you cut them off. There may very well be no economic gains at all.

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Let's hope for Romney and Paul to finish 1 and 2 so that the rest of the candidates can just go ahead and quit.

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I'm pretty convinced SS beats WW, not because of any poll data, but because it just seems better liked than WW.

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How about the time Paul wouldn't use the bathroom of a gay person?

He has limited control over his personal feelings, and in any case it is irrelevant. What is relevant are his political positions, over which he has full control.

Or his support of Abortion laws?

Good.

Or the fact that if Japan had not bombed us he wouldn't have joined the war?

That puts him in line with FDR and most of America in 1941, so it's not really controversial.

Or him being against sexual harassment laws at work?

This sounds bad, but what exactly are these sexual harassment laws? Are they fair laws that protect people without capriciously punishing others? Congress passes bad laws that sound good all the time. It's very hard to oppose them because they sound good, and that's why Congress has put us in such a bad position today. I don't know if I favor these particular laws that Paul is against without further research, but I would not be surprised if I agreed with him here.

Or his opposition to the Voting Rights Act or Civil Rights act?

Probably on uber strict construction states rights grounds.

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And I wonder, exactly how substantial are Paul's holdings in Gold? Let's say the Gold standard somehow completely collapses the currency and makes dollars worth zero. Provided his holdings in PMs are anything less than half of his entire portfolio, he still loses more than he gains.

I mean, I have 5% of my net worth invested in PMs. If the currency collapses, that's absolutely great news for my 5% investment.... and it also means that 95% of my net worth is now worthless, so I'm not exactly hoping for hyperinflation here...

That's not exactly true. If you have 5% of your net worth in gold, and we get hyperinflation, the value in gold in dollars will go up 100x, 1000x, 1 million times, who knows. As long as it goes up more than 20x, you win, even if the other 95% of your investments go to zero. And if they do go to zero because of hyperinflation, you bet gold is going to skyrocket massively.

Also, I'm guessing a large part of the other 95% is held in stocks, which will inflate with hyperinflation, so they won't do anything like lose all their value. If you have extensive dollar or fixed income investments, well, inflation is the risk you take when you buy those things. But you and RP probably don't have much of those given your opinions on the dollar.

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If I'm not mistaken, Ron Paul has said that we've never seen how a completely unregulated market works because it's never existed. Do you disagree with him?

We were close enough from roughly 1800 to 1929. It was a huge success.

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If we're not going to give the free market credit where it is due, we may as well blame the whole subprime crisis on excessive government regulation while we're at it.

Also, this whole perspective is wrong. Growth requires up and down periods. If you eliminate down periods, you must pay the price- eliminating up periods too. Macroeconomists thought they had succeeded in sharply reducing the shock of down periods over the period of roughly 1980-2007, but 2008 proved they had not done so.

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Look at the market's role in the subprime mortgage crisis. You want that controlling monetary policy?

Yes. The market also brought us the 1990s, the 1980s, the 1960s, 1950s, 1920s, etc. I sure want all those good times.

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Didn't the supreme court already rule that you can't detain american citizens without cause and all that? So even if this law did have "hey guys we're going to criminally imprison you with the military and also you can't have abortions anymore and black people need to go into separate schools now" it wouldn't mean anything because supreme court trumps all

It's up to lower courts to interpret and apply what the Supreme Court says. With something like this, it could very well take years before it gets back up to the Supreme Court and they strike it down. There are many many procedural hurdles.

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The gold standard is inherently flawed. Gold's value is every bit as made up as fiat currency, except with gold you have no control over your monetary policy.

Monetary policy is the problem then. I mean, the gold standard worked for thousands of years, so I wouldn't call it inherently flawed. Maybe slightly inferior (in that we might not to reach quite as good a world as we theoretically can with credit based currency) at best.

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In 2012 alone, the dollar is on track to devalue by 40%.

How much gold/other currencies/dollar short funds/etc. have you bought? If you think it's so certain that the dollar will devalue by that much in 2012 I'd expect a lot.

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N64 > SNES would be a really sad day, and a good signal to leave the site (if this last contest wasn't enough). My gut feeling is that SNES may have some trouble getting the 60/40 in a direct 1v1 poll, even if it can still double or worse N64 in a favorite Nintendo console poll.

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Oh good, pjbasis saying he'd take the N64 to win makes me feel better that it wouldn't actually happen.

Thanks, man.

However, our Oracle champ saying the N64 could win ought to concern you.

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Quick Bracket

(1) SNES
(8) Xbox
(4) PS3
(5) DS
(3) 360
(6) Wii
(2) Genesis
(7) GC

(1) PS2
(8) GBA
(4) NES
(5) Dreamcast
(3) PS1
(6) GBC
(2) N64
(7) PSP

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NES
SNES
N64
GC
Wii
PS
PS2
PS3
Xbox
360
Genesis
Dreamcast
GBC
GBA
DS
PSP

16 entrants, all we need. I wanted to throw N-Gage against SNES in round 1 to see if we can beat LoZ's record against Adventure, but it doesn't look like there's any room in a 16-entrant bracket.

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Gah, maybe Nintendo should start using its $10 billion dollar cash reserves to take over other companies. At this point they have $10B in cash and $5B in other assets, and $19B market cap, (0 debt of course) so the market is valuing the entire company at $4B, which is less than they made in 2008 and 2009 alone. Which is absurdly low IMO.

Also, their market cap is now only about 6% above Sony's, so they're in danger of falling behind Sony for the first time since they surpassed them in 2007.

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I know Zelda isn't popular in Japan (Chrono Trigger > any Zelda game in sales in Japan) but getting half of Wind Waker's sales is pathetic.

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Less than 200k first week in Japan? Didn't Wind Waker get around double that?

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It sold less than Dragon Age 2, Uncharted 3, Batman: Arkham City, and Portal 2?

No way...........

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I'm a little bit scared even of N64 beating SNES- not really scared, since the favorite Nintendo console polls are very decisive, but N64 with an OOT/SM64 pic just looks powerful.

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Also, I think we could well be looking at a SNES/N64 final in a series contest, which would not be very welcome at this point, but eh......one more feather in the cap for the hero.

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I'm talking about a 16-entrant bracket.

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Games and maybe fictional characters are the only ways to go that have been suggested. I'd be interested in a systems contest too, but not until after we get a full length contest.

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Long posts about contests that aren't crew write-ups or PCAs are awful. There are no exceptions.

That's completely false. Those make up most of the best posts in this topic. (I'm not talking about LMS ramblings on VG magazine rankings)

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Fallout 3 got pretty close to Brawl. If Skyrim is stronger........does that mean it can hang with MM and FFX? That would really be something. Of course, if it can beat SS, then it should be in that range, so perhaps it isn't so strange.

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I probably care more about roleplaying a kingdom when playing TW than anything else. I actually autoresolve most battles, except for ones I think I'll lose with autoresolve but would probably win playing, because otherwise the campaign would take too long to finish (it takes quite a long time as is).

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