Screw 'em if they hate us
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Tuesday, July 1, 2008 09:13
VIEWED: 19860
PAGE 18 of 30
Good stuff, Kaneman.
Hey SignyM, on the topic of large corporations not being held accountable for their actions, this should make you smile:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,370521,00.html
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Quote:
Originally posted by Geezer:
So a whole bunch of people just get together randomly and build ...
First they invent and discover: the hammer-rock, language, the bowl, fire, clothes, agriculture, domestication of animals, and so on.
Then they build - huts, walls, water channels, wells. Eventually great cities and civilizations.
All without a corporation in sight.
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"Global warming - it's not just a fact, it's a choice."
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I think that's a little naive Rue. It's easy to create a Hut, certainly in comparison to something modern like an FMRI. Modern technology is too complex for anything other than long term organised institutions to implement, and corporations can fit that need. The problem arises when people forget what corporation are. They're groups of people with the collective power to potentially rail road individuals. It's completely unreasonable for a corporation to have the same protections under law as individuals, because it's already powerful enough to not need protecting.
It also makes no sense how some want to regulate government, a large group of people with the means to supercede the individual, that in a democracy has a vested interest to lookout for the needs of the people, while removing regulation of corporations, large groups of people with the means to supercede the individual, that have a vested interest in screwing everyone else over for the needs of their share holders. Where is the logic in curbing the power of government, but giving free reign to corporations?
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
No one can see their reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see.
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Quote:
Originally posted by rue:
First they invent and discover: the hammer-rock, language, the bowl, fire, clothes, agriculture, domestication of animals, and so on.
Then they build - huts, walls, water channels, wells. Eventually great cities and civilizations.
All without a corporation in sight.
Instead of corporations, things were driven by the ruling aristocracy. Something far worse than corporations in most instances.
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Quote:
Originally posted by BigDamnNobody:
Instead of corporations, things were driven by the ruling aristocracy. Something far worse than corporations in most instances.
Tell that to the OILgarchy
--WhoDied
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Hey Citizen
In some ways I agree. You can't have a modern civilization of individual isolated hut-builders, a point I've made many times on this board.
But capitalism is neither necessary nor sufficient for modern society. For example, you'd have a hard time relating the theory of relativity to capitalism. In fact, much of the research and discovery, and the organizing of society - monetary systems, infrastructure, laws and rules - that make everything possible - take place in a different realm from capitalism altogether.
What capitalism does fairly well is bring capital together. But that can be done through other means.
Anyway, back to work ...
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"Global warming - it's not just a fact, it's a choice."
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Quote:
Originally posted by rue:
What capitalism does fairly well is bring capital together. But that can be done through other means.
And those means are?
"Keep the Shiny side up"
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Does it matter ?
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"Global warming - it's not just a fact, it's a choice."
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Quote:
Originally posted by rue:
Does it matter?
It matters a great deal.
The other, complimentary, thing that capitalism does well is the distribution of goods and services. This is the lesson that Soviet economic planners learned very painfully. It turns out that central planning of an economy is prohibitively difficult. Anticipating the needs and desires of a nation's population is the essential function of any economic system and it's extremely difficult to do effectively. It requires nearly omniscient awareness of the needs of every household in the nation. It's by far more effective to delegate such decisions to a distributed network of entities dedicated to making such forecasts. And the best way to encourage accuracy in such forecasts is to reward accuracy in accordance with it's effectiveness. That's the core function of capitalism.
SergeantX
"Dream a little dream or you can live a little dream. I'd rather live it, cause dreamers always chase but never get it." Aesop Rock
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There are an infinite numbers of ways and rationales to do those things - as many as the human mind can come up with and every shade and multiple combination of them. None is more or less natural law than the other. So it comes down to what you want to end up with.
You see the multiple types of toilet paper in the store and think it's heaven. What you don't acknowledge is how it's paid for - in terms of poverty in the US and abroad: people too poor to have a place to live, too poor to educate their children, too poor to eat.
When I think about the old USSR what I think is that everyone may have had small apartments but there were no homeless, everyone may have been educated in the same system but they all went to school, everyone may have had a small choice in luxury foods but there were no starving.
OTOH you can always support a system with every kind of toilet paper on the shelves.
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"Global warming - it's not just a fact, it's a choice."
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