Lurker > red sox 777

Simultaneously invading 25 territories by sea on the same turn = why MTW1 is awesome.

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Is the original Medieval available?

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sox, not you too. Mario's strong performance in the finals flies in the face of the "Zelda drone" argument. Cloud/Seph just turned out weaker than expected; Mario/Bowser could have plausibly given them the ol 55/45. The two classic Nintendo hero/villain rivalries that have had 25 years to cook were just very far ahead of the pack, and it's easy to explain why.

Thanks. Can't give into the Zelda drone arguments, the evidence against it from previous contests is overwhelming.

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Do you really think it's that popular among men from the ages of 13-25 in the 21st century?

I mean, if you have a mixed bracket of VG characters and non-VG characters, I highly, highly, highly doubt that you have enough people who would nominate Jane Eyre to get anywhere close to making a bracket.

It's total nonsense.

Guybrush Threepwood and a bunch of Tales of I don't even know what characters get nominated every year, so why not? Nominations are wonky, I'd expect one or more 19th century British Lit characters to make the bracket, whether or not Jane Eyre specifically makes it, where their fate will be to get 90/10'd by Batman or Vader.

Also, isn't Jane Eyre required reading in high school? At least it was in mine.

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It's classic literature from Victorian England, obviously men liked it at some point, or else it would never have become popular in that era!

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Well, it would be a 1 v. 16 match. I could see Jane Eyre getting enough noms for a 16-seed.

Also, after that disgusting 58/42 beatdown, I'm going to have great difficulty saying that Zelda fans are not drones.

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Link/Tanner winning would actually be funny and good if not for Cloud/Sephiroth's defeat by Link/Ganon. *sobs*

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Ulti wins.

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Possibly to make it a game of skill instead of pure chance.

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And how is this division to take place without state action? I mean, theoretically if literally 100% of the population supported said Communist action it could happen, but once again, that scenario is so unrealistic that it does not even merit serious discussion.

Well, perfect price discrimination is not likely to happen anytime soon, so I'm not too worried about this extreme either. But if everyone did the things you talked about in the first post- it would be achieved. And you asked for opinions about it. My argument is that it is probably inefficient because taken to an extreme, it is definitely inefficient.

Of course, it's possible that in small doses, this actually is efficient, and only when it gets to large doses is it bad. You might also think that government socialist action can be good in small doses and is only destructive in large doses.

Either way, asking whether an act is moral or efficient naturally invites us to generalize. If it's efficient for you to do something, surely it's efficient for me to do the same thing, or for anyone else. And if it's efficient for everyone to do it individually, but everyone doing it leads to disaster- we should question whether it was ever efficient for anyone to do it in the first place.

Also, the entire population just up and embracing Communism is just how Marx envisioned it happening, and how many people continue to envision it today. When you bring up Stalin and Mao, very often, even on this board, people respond by saying that isn't real Communism. So I'd say it's pretty relevant.

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I've only taken Econ 101. I'm curious why communism "cannot" work. Can someone explain this to me?

Communism destroys incentives. People are not motivated to work or especially to innovate, because there is no possible gain from it. All the gains from the fruit of your labor will be shared equally among all members of society, so you will end up with a tiny tiny gain from whatever you do, no matter how great. You get things based on your need, and your need alone, which you cannot change through any work you do.

Thus, people will not work/innovate. And the economy will not grow. Indeed, it will probably shrink pretty fast. The new Communist government will likely express puzzlement at this point and wonder why the people are not producing anything. In desperation, unable to understand that Communism itself is the problem, they will start forcing people to work.

Now, Communism could work with totally selfless people. If you only cared about society and not yourself, you could derive happiness from working/innovating in a Communist country and watching society benefit. But most people are not like that.

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Anyway, nothing I have described in this topic is Communism OR Socialism because I have yet to make any reference to the state compelling any action upon any individual.

The heart of Communism is not state action but dividing resources according to need. The state action is what produces totalitarian governments, but the dividing resources according to need part is also destructive of an economy.

In a free market, there are only two ways that goods or services can sell at a non-market price. The first is philanthropy (knowingly overpaying or undercharging for something) and the second is ignorance of the market (unknowingly overpaying or undercharging for something).

Perfect price discrimination is neither. Under it, there is no market price, because the price is different for each buyer. This should suggest to you that it is not a free market.

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Maybe. Although if people are particularly prideful, they may reject such blatant forms of charity. Knowingly overpaying for a good or service is a great way to give someone a break without damaging their pride quite as much.

Economically speaking, there is no difference here.

Thinking about it, the Communist utopia could work if everyone placed a really really high value on equality. If everyone would rather have a Communist utopia than running water, cars, computers, the internet, enough food to live on, greater lifespans, medical care, space travel, hovercars, and every other material thing people could want- then a Communist utopia could make everyone better off.

If everyone was perfectly charitable (=perfect price discrimination, just think about why), the Communist utopia would be achieved. The difference between this and state-run Communism is that everyone is happy in the charitable utopia because they want this result. But measuring by material wealth, the result would be the same. So the utopia would not work because most people do not really value charity so much more than material wealth.

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It's only Communism/Socialism when the government enforces it with a gun. If I choose to sell my used games to someone on Board 8 for less than the "market value" because I like people on Board 8 and feel like giving them a break, that's not socialism, that's philanthropy. One of the few areas where I diverge from the Rand school of thought is that I don't see philanthropy as morally wrong.

According to Marx and Communist/Socialist apologists, in real communism, eventually the state will wither away. But Communism is not only flawed because it has been corrupted by governments and people like Stalin. Communism is inherently flawed, and cannot work.

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How about this scenario. Instead of the merchant making the first offer to sell a good at a ridiculously over-inflated price, say the tourist makes the first offer to buy at what he knows to be a over-inflated price because he feels sympathy for the poor impoverished foreign shopkeeper. In this case, he is choosing inefficiency by purchasing the psychic good of philanthropy. Can you make a value judgment on that?

The tourist could get the same result by paying a normal price and just giving the merchant money as a gift. Nothing wrong with charity, and it is superior to socialism.

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And given how much you rail against socialism/communism, you should really recognize it better when it appears in front of you!

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Well, what about when a seller gives a particular buyer a special discount. In that case, it increases the consumer surplus. Is that inherently good?

What is particular about the buyer? If the answer is that he is buying more of the product, that's fine and good. He has not revealed any more about himself than any buyer does by buying the product. If the answer is because he is poor and needs the money, that is socialism and that does not work. The problem is not something do with consumer surplus only, it could easily be producer surplus. The problem is that violating anonymity of the buyer leads to inefficiency. This is exactly what socialism does- we could even say this is what real socialism is. From each according to his ability to each according to his need. And it does not work.

You're falling into the trap that I originally started this topic with in the first place, and that even the admitted Communists and trolls didn't fall for. It's the same action either way. Neither is inherently wrong (or right for that matter).

Neither is wrong morally. There's a good argument that both are inefficient.

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The paradox of perfect discriminatory pricing across a whole society is that it also kills the producer's surplus. Why? Sellers get a lot more money now. But the moment they try to buy something with their money- they face a marketplace with perfect discriminatory pricing too. So sellers are left with piles of money that are useless for actually buying anything. The producer's surplus gains are illusory.

Of course, once society realizes this, the whole free market system of prices and trade is likely to break down.* The only way to prop up the illusion will be for the state to fix prices. Which is perhaps one reason why Communism is fundamentally flawed. You can never get to the end-goal of communism- a society with no state and perfect discriminatory pricing.

*Because there is no longer any reason to want more money. From each according to his ability to each according to his need.....

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No doubt, but you are much less happy! And we want people to be as happy as possible.

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And just to clarify, my "100 times" statement was an illustration. It could be 99 times, or 102, or even 200 or 20. It doesn't matter. For 99.99% of people, it's a lot lot bigger.

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Hey, don't tell it to me, tell it to Rothbard. Or his heirs. Whatever.

The Economics community has done so already.

Either form an intelligent and reasonable position or move on.

My position is plenty reasonable, don't accuse me of making basic errors that some liberals may subscribe to but no one who's taken an econ class would.

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We've been through this before. You can't use math in economics that way. The concept of money gives us an approximate way of guessing the "objective worth" of someone's consumer surplus, but it is ultimately a psychic profit that considers non-monetary factors that are ranked on an ordinal and not a numerical scale.

No one is making either of those basic errors. Objects don't have objective worths, and obviously preferences are ordinal only. It doesn't change the analysis on discriminatory pricing, where the seller sets the price as close to the buyer's willingness to pay as possible. This destroys the consumer surplus. If you would pay $100 for an object, you're much happier getting it for $50 than getting it for $99.99.

Also, you have to keep in mind that the odds of exchanges regularly occurring at the exact maximum buying price of the buyer is incredibly low. Most consumers aren't even consciously aware of their own maximum buying prices for various products (quick, tell me the exact amount gas must cost for which you would no longer purchase gas). The odds of an average shopkeeper knowing the exact maximum buying price of any one particular buyer is exceedingly low. That is precisely why barter occurs.

We were discussing the theoretical situation of perfect discriminatory pricing. Obviously this is unattainable, but the closer we get to it, the closer we get to its results.

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Smuffin, I hate to say this, because generally you try to engage in reasonable discussions, unlike most of your critics, but on this case, you have no idea what you are talking about.

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Indifference is after the effort it takes to purchase of course.

Also, there's a world of difference between 1 cent of consumer surplus and 1 dollar of consumer surplus. The latter is 100 times greater. Learn math and economics.

And it's very natural that discriminatory pricing should produce such bad results. Because discriminatory pricing is exactly what socialism does- charge based on who the buyer is.

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Education is not a commodity because it can't be resold. But that's true of lots of things you can buy, namely services.

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So your statement is wrong. An exchange is not by definition mutually beneficial. An exchange by definition hurts neither party. That is not the same thing as saying it helps both parties.

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Wrong. He must gain SOME happiness or the exchange wouldn't take place at all. Exchanging at the very least takes a certain amount of effort. Let's say that there are a buyer and a seller, both value a dozen eggs and one dollar exactly equally. The seller would not expend the effort to sell his eggs for one dollar, and the buyer would not expend the effort to buy eggs for one dollar.

All an exchange needs is indifference. If you're indifferent between the price and the object, you can go ahead and buy it. If indifference isn't enough for you, you can get arbitrarily close to it. Charge 1 cent less. Consumer surplus goes to effectively zero.

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Of course there needs to be an upper class

the problem comes when the upper class takes so much from everyone else that it forces massive hardship on the rest of the country. Not only did they do that, they went and crashed the global economy off of stupid gambling just to make it even better for everyone else.

There can't be an upper class unless they have more wealth than everybody else.

But you know what is really outrageous about these investment banks? Their employees make tons of money, but not their shareholders! Goldman Sachs, the king of all evil huge investment banks, has a market cap of......$46 Billion. McDonald's has a market cap of $102 Billion. What does this mean? Well, what do you call a company that pays its employees more than its shareholders?

That's right, SOCIALIST.

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The problem with discriminatory pricing (not saying it is discriminatory in the derogatory sense but just meaning differentiating between people) is that applied fully, it completely wipes out consumer surplus. You charge everyone exactly how much they are willing to pay. No one can ever gain happiness from a purchase.

Paradoxically, it doesn't help the seller either. He gets a pile of money, but the moment he tries to use that money to buy something he wants- he faces the same discriminatory pricing. So it's good for people who like to hoard money and no one else.

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I'd like to know how lower middle class Americans can afford to travel abroad in the first place.

This was very possible for decades.

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Well, that's not incredibly practical now is it?

For the tourist, no, but for colleges, it's extremely easy and would require less work than is done now. Unfortunately anonymity of the buyer for colleges probably isn't more efficient for society, because we'll lose people who would have come up with great ideas. It's more efficient when considering 99% of people, because the kids who won't be able to afford college will be offset and more by the money saved by people who still can, but of course the vast majority of innovation (= real economic growth = your TV, internet, everything you have and everything you want) comes from 1% of the population.

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Some pet peeves of mine: "need," "can afford," "ripped off."

When people say they need something, what they really mean is they want something badly. Need makes no sense unless you add an or-else phrase at the end of it. For example, I need to study or else I will fail the test. I need to eat this food or else I will starve. I need to make money to buy this big screen TV. When people say they have need without any qualification, what they are saying is: I want this, but I also want to feel morally superior to other people so I will call my want "need."

"Can afford" is more sensible, but it still falls into this same trap much of the time, where people mean not that they really do not have the ability to buy something, but that they do not want to. It's better than "need" because at least here, some of the time, people really and truly cannot afford to buy something.

"Ripped off" is by definition impossible unless there was some misrepresentation or fraud. If you chose to buy it, you chose to be "ripped off." So clearly it wasn't so bad a deal.

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No, but we can make a case that anonymity of the buyer is more efficient.

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They don't get the happiness a true fan gets anyways. You can lie to others, but you can't fool yourself.

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I don't understand why people hate bandwagoners so much. If they want to support a team only because they win, so what? Who cares?

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I'm talking about the subjective beliefs of the jurors, not the witnesses.

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If there is a method that produces the MOST accurate belief given preexisting information, and ALL the jury members have the same information, I don't see how they can disagree.

There is no such method, because the jury's beliefs on the credibility of witnesses are subjective.

Alternatively, someone is being unreasonable, but we, as observers, cannot say who it is with any degree of confidence. In which case, going to the original problem, I'll claim that you are unreasonable and you'll claim that I'm unreasonable.

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We have different definitions of reasonable though. Your definition is smart people who are also respectable, which is a question of signaling and thus social status. My definition of reasonable has to do with who has the most accurate beliefs, given the amount of information present.

Although I doubt either of our definitions would involve someone claiming large swaths of mathematics are invalid. Do we agree that probability theory is valid, and that the point of disagreement is on whether or not it can be applied to "real world problems" ...?

Nah, we have the same definition of reasonable (what you said is yours). The disagreement is not even on whether probability theory can be applied, but only on how it should be applied. Example: 2 witnesses give contradictory testimony. It's reasonable for the jury to believe one, or to believe the other. This is what I mean by a question of fact on which reasonable people can disagree.

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From probability theory of course! And you haven't specified what standards a belief has to meet before you "believe in them"

In that case, it's still a question of fact, on which reasonable people can disagree.

As for what standards need to be met before I believe in them, now that's an interesting question. My first instinct is to say that I don't know what the standards are, and it does not matter, because I have no control over whether I believe something or not. But this is probably not true.

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Which "laws" of reasoning are those and why should I believe in them?

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Yes! There are laws of reasoning that you have to obey and if you violate them you are being unreasonable.

But no laws of reasoning were violated here. Rather, there was a disagreement on the underlying facts.

Because you cannot independently arrive at the conclusion that god exists using any of our evidence gathering tools right now. If you had an agent who could reason using evidence perfectly, it would not be able to derive the existence of any deity. You can only arrive at religion if you made an error in reasoning: A fundamental attribution error if you were a caveman, not changing your mind when new evidence comes in if you were alive during the enlightenment or simply weighing irrelevant evidence such as what you were told when you were young or what simply feels good if you're in a cult.

Prove it. You started with "you cannot" so I seriously doubt you can prove that. It tends to be exceedingly difficult to prove even seemingly obvious statements of the form "you cannot" or "there are none." You can't even prove that there are no vanilla and strawberry ice cream cones orbiting Alpha Centauri.

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Jesus and the NT specifically say that absolutely nothing was retconned. That it would be easier for Heaven and Earth to vanish than for a single word of the OT to be retconned.

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But why would that be the case? Why is eating meat a sin for people 4000 years ago but not today?

For health reasons, and possibly to keep Israel separate from the world. The health reasons are not applicable today because our more advanced science allows us to consume those foods safely. Christianity is a universal message, so there is also no need for Christians to be kept as a nation apart in that way.

Of course, these reasons are speculative. I do not know for sure why God did that.

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Honestly, a lot of people read the Bible more literally than they would any other book or article. Stuff that they would immediately understand for what is actually meant in other venues, using only common sense and basic reading comprehension, people miss in the Bible, because they get fixated on the literal meaning of the individual words.

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The translations these days are all pretty close, and the difference is mostly stylistic. Good translations usually footnote debatable phrases anyway.

The position of most Christians on many of the OT laws (such as dietary restrictions) is that they were only ever meant to apply to the nation of Israel way back then.

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But that's not reasonable. I'm not asserting what thought process goes through their heads, I'm asserting what's not reasonable.

You're saying that answering a question of fact a certain way is unreasonable?

Generally, when we talk about reasonableness, we can take beliefs on facts as given and evaluate the reasoning.

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On translations: it's also not viable as we have the original language versions and there are loads of scholars at universities the world over constantly studying them. And we've got loads of different translations too. A translator could not pull the wool over people's eyes today.

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I don't know how you can claim that religion doesn't take science as is as an enemy though. Or rather, I don't see how you can acknowledge that the discoveries of science (and this is very important here, NOT SCIENCE ITSELF) contradicts Abrahamic religions at the very least and I don't see how anyone can hold religious beliefs, know about what science has discovered and still maintain they are consistently being "reasonable" in that domain. They can be reasonable in OTHER domains of their life, such as relationships, finance and health, but to claim they are reasonable about their religious beliefs would be... impossible.

Because people don't think their religion and scientific discoveries contradict, obviously.

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That sign is treading close to being actionable, though it is not.

But frankly, people need to learn to deal with messages that are offensive or annoying to them. That is the price you must pay to live in a free society.

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Also, the Old Testament is fully canon, has never been retconned, and will never be retconned. To the extent that certain rules from it are not used today, the interpretation is that it was never meant to apply to all people, only to a small group of people, such as the 12 Tribes of Israel, even when it was written.

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