Lucky i have not said that then. You dont seem to be understating what ive said.

I think you’re saying that some people are hypocrites because they’re for some government programs that could be construed as socialist while being against other proposed government programs that meet the same socialist criteria. I agree with that in a hypothetical sense. Where I disagree is that your hypothetical doesn’t really apply because most people don’t hold the extremist views your hypothetical requires. I think most people understand we’re in a mixed economy that’s highly skewed towards capitalism. And so when people say they’re against socialism, what they’re saying is that they’re against getting rid of capitalism or granting the government significantly more control over the economy—not that they’re against any government involvement in the economy at all. Following your line of reasoning if self-proclaimed capitalists are okay with some government control over the economy, then they’re hypocrites since the stock definition of capitalism renders control to the private sector. I don’t agree. I think that would only apply if they also believe that the entirety of a country’s economy should be free from government. But since very few capitalists actually believe that, it’s a moot point at best or a strawman at worst.

Remember to always stretch before attempting such strenuous gymnastics.

I find it interesting that the average american citizen has no idea how much "Socialist" policies are and have been happening in this country forever.

Its often the very people that benefit from these policies that are screaming bloody murder at "Libs" and "socialists". (Looking at you farmers and coal miners, that get subsidized by the federal government.) Agriculture, transportation, and energy are all subsidized by the government.

We have never, and never will, live in a completely free and open market. As far as I know, its never happened anywhere. Like most ideals, its not actually possible in reality. Even the founding fathers understood this. Thats why there were anti-monopoly laws that were put into place, that could help maintain competition. Unfortunatley, Reagan and Clinton took so much money from big corporations, that most of the anti-monopoly laws have been eroded, hence the rise of the homogenous corportate culture we currently live in.

If anything, we're moving the other way. We've become way less regulated as a whole. Most industries are dominated by large companies. Those companies lobby politicians to help them get even bigger. Then things like the BP oil spill happen and the tax payers have to pay for partial clean-up and environmental effects of the land. Or Flint Michigan, where the water crisis is still going on, again costing the taxpayers money, all in the name of a new pipeline that wasn't needed. But the big money had the puppet politician doing their bidding. Or what about the Big banks getting bailed out? And the auto industry? That all cost the tax payers money, not to mention lost wages, and homes..... This was all due to deregulation. Lack of regulation actually costs more, because the government inevitably has to clean up the mess at the tax payers expense, AND because it allows the capitalist system to actually run less efficiently.

Less regulation, leads to less competition and more money in politics.

This is not a black and white issue. Nothing ever is. Its frustrating to see the dialogue continue to go that way. Its just anti-intellectual talking points spawned by corporate propaganda spread through our news sources and politician's mouths.

Sigh.

It's odd though, our awesome island marshmallow meritocracy of the market has allocated $20,000,000,000 to someone who is described as a "liar, cuck, fraud, idiotic drug addict who may be a pedophile" by a super smart and rich playboy trader that I know. Seems strange that someone with so many obvious flaws would become one of the biggest successes of our amazing meritocratic economic system.

This reasoning is a real staple of deconstructionist social "science". It's intellectual fraud. What they do is quite simple:

Step 1: Have a strong causal relationship you want to debunk
Step 2: Choose something that correlates strongly with the thing you want to debunk
Step 3: Correct for it
Step 4: When the effect is greatly reduced, claim that old results are invalid.

It's pure bull****. I'll demonstrate it for you on global warming:

- There's a claim that CO2 has caused temperature rise
- CO2 is strongly corrected with industrial output
- If I correct for industrial output, CO2 only has a weak relationship to temperature
- Ergo, global warming is disproved

Or even more ridiculous:

- There's a claim that CO2 has caused temperature rise and that the data is strong.
- CO2 is strongly correlated with global midget population
- If I correct for global midget population, CO2 only has a weak relationship to temperature
- Ergo, global warming is disproved.

That's the state of social "science" these days. It's really sad. Even professors like Black Peter are making completely and ridiculously false statements based on such intellectually dishonest research.

So no, two marshmallows isn't disproven. In fact the second study confirms it imo.

The kids that could resist were able to implement attentional strategies that reduced the salience and emotional import of the marshmallow (look away, sing a song, etc). Those that failed lacked 1) sufficient self-awareness to realize they needed a strategy or 2) the attentional control to implement one. I wonder how much of a factor upbringing plays in (1) and intelligence in (2) for those that could not resist gratification.

Piketty is of course in favor of more redistribution, but it's not misrepresenting him to quote him on whether or not higher marginal tax rates on the very wealthy are sufficient.

See for example the conclusion of this essay he co-wrote with Saez:

Although the other point of the first quote John pulled out is that Piketty doesn't think it's enough to raise taxes only on the ultra-wealthy. He think you need to raise them also for the merely wealthy, hence "steeply progressive."

Obviously you can take it with a grain of salt when people who oppose all these ideas argue against a policy like a 70% top marginal rate on incomes over $10m, but regardless of whether that argument is being made in good faith it's correct to point out that you can't really get to where folks like Piketty want to go just by taxing the top 0.1% (or whatever the correct percentage is).

if these things paid for themselves they would happen naturally, so no its not a great investment, otherwise it would be a great investment. solar panels where I live are 25 year payback but the warranty is 20.. electric cars dont perform. it seems celebrities want end to end windows, 3 hot tubs and a swimming pool but park an ev in thier yard and some solar on thier roof and they are officially blessing themselves to criticize ugly tar sands. DEmonizing pollution in 3rd world countries when noone in those third world has enough money to pollute as much as us per capita.

ITs a complete out of touch joke. look around the world. theres about 15 countries that have had uprisings in the last 10 years due to rising energy. IF thats not evidence that the policy makers are out of touch...yet we have people wanting to do the same **** here. out of touch.

its one thing to be passionate about a cause, its another to have a clue how to fix it...but we are still in the mode of supporting the most vocal. and what I see is a bunch of vocal airheads piggybacking failed policy.

I see poison in the water.



To bad heads of companies and boards dont get assault and murder charges when they knowingly harm people.

No, it's not intellectual fraud. It follows basic logic. It isn't denying that the original correlation exists, but testing whether it's the cause of the correlation. It did this by controlling for a variable that is known to have a similar outcome. The correlation should change only if the control and tested input are correlated to each other. In this case they were and they made up for the entire correlation between the marshmallow test and future income. The marshmallow test is still a good predictor of future success, but only because it is correlated with income level.

In your example the correlation between CO2 and temperature isn't just being tested, but also the causes of the correlation. The correlation between CO2 and temperature would still be true and a likely cause is industrial output.

No, it's not intellectual fraud. It follows basic logic. It isn't denying that the original correlation exists, but testing whether it's the cause of the correlation. It did this by controlling for a variable that is known to have a similar outcome. The correlation should change only if the control and tested input are correlated to each other. In this case they were and they made up for the entire correlation between the marshmallow test and future income. The marshmallow test is still a good predictor of future success, but only because it is correlated with income level.

In your example the correlation between CO2 and temperature isn't just being tested, but also the causes of the correlation. The correlation between CO2 and temperature would still be true and a likely cause is industrial output.

You have to stop speaking when you don't know what your'e talking about. First you show shockingly comical ignorance on what the left say about equity (you clearly haven't read any academic scholarship on this topic in a long time), then you even double down on that ignorance, now you're dead wrong about what the study says.

The study strongly validates the original findings if you actually read it. If you actually look at the data and not summaries by people trying to get headlines/push a point, it's clear that a) the effect is really strong, as strong as the original study and b) doesn't disappear even after "correcting" for all three of home environment, income and childhood cognitive ability - it's merely diminished.

The summaries of the study are pure bull****. The marshmallow effect is enormous even when they do it for less than half the time (this study was 7 minutes vs the original 15). It persists through various (inappropriate) "corrections" and data torturing. It's an extremely robust result.

As for why "correcting" for income is inappropriate, impulse control and conscientiousness are a very strong underlying factor in both income and marshmallows. Both are also highly heritable. So correcting for income is just like my global warming "correction".

I also think you missed the point about the midgets.

I did read the paper. The correlation was half what was found in the original paper and that correlation was significantly reduced when correcting for the three factors.

That's just parroting back at me precisely what I just said. Here's what you said before:
That's false statement #1 showing you hadn't read it.

That's false statement #2 showing you hadn't read it. Not entirely your fault as the summaries are deliberately bad to push an agenda/clicks.

The data is really clear. And again, they did it for half the time of the original test in a test where the authors themselves say you gain 1/10th of a standard deviation per minute in improved performance outcomes - yet they did it for less than half the time.

The original test is not debunked in any way - it's strongly confirmed - and in fact it's so strong that even controlling for income, childhood cognitive ability and home environment combined do not bring it to zero, even though these things are not very meaningful to control for (in seeing whether the effect is causal) as they have the same underlying causal mechanism (see my CO2 and industrial output/midgets example).

[QUOTE=piepounder;54929435]if these things paid for themselves they would happen naturally, so no its not a great investment, otherwise it would be a great investment. solar panels where I live are 25 year payback but the warranty is 20.. electric cars dont perform. it seems celebrities want end to end windows, 3 hot tubs and a swimming pool but park an ev in thier yard and some solar on thier roof and they are officially blessing themselves to criticize ugly tar sands. DEmonizing pollution in 3rd world countries when noone in those third world has enough money to pollute as much as us per capita.



ITs a complete out of touch joke. look around the world. theres about 15 countries that have had uprisings in the last 10 years due to rising energy. IF thats not evidence that the policy makers are out of touch...yet we have people wanting to do the same **** here. out of touch.



its one thing to be passionate about a cause, its another to have a clue how to fix it...but we are still in the mode of supporting the most vocal. and what I see is a bunch of vocal airheads piggybacking failed”

Do you have a clue how to fix it?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

LOL

Not really but im not a politician. I'd promote modesty. I'd tax large engines, and new builds of homes over say 2000 sq ft and possibly tax some luxuries like excessive air travel, pleasure boats, hot tubs (there are luxuries you cant tax as people will buy them from other jurisdictions). id use that revenue to subsidize efficiency upgrades (hybrid hot water heaters, woodstoves, heatpumps, insulation, airsealing), subsidize small engines, small homes and efficient appliances. I would make it cheaper to live for someone that makes the right choices.

Policies today like carbon taxes just make things more expensive to live and hurt certain groups like poor and rural while being insignificant incentive to the wealthy. I get the appeal..its simple but if every country that implements it ends up with riots then it should start to become obvious you cant tax poor people. What ive outlined may look like its targeting the rich...its not. I would not have a single tax targeting wealth or income. I'd tax choices and wealthy people are allowed to make the right choices as well..

there is no broad stroke that works...its a very tactical battle and each tactic must balance out cost of living and employment through business competitiveness.

If 2030 is target, i wouldnt subsidize the electric fleet until 2025 because a car susidized today wont be on the road in 2030. Then I'd give each citizen a 1 time rebate on thier first electric car and in 5 years the fleet should be mostly swapped out, considering technology at that time will be fairly appealing anyway

Excessive air travel. Good luck defining that.

yes and thats the difficulty in all of it...making something thats definable and implementable. but thats what it takes because we know already that a broad carbon tax is an aweful solution...so its going to take a myriad of tactical bits and pieces.

In my province the first block of energy is tax free, whether it be a tank of gas or a cord of wood. its only 50 bucks off per household but that matters to a poor household, and people with a big house will use much more and pay full sales tax on it. so thats a pretty good system. Even thats trcky because there is not one bill for all these, so they had to make it that if u buy your first block from each its tax free. so you can get a cord of wood, a tank of gas, a block of electricity and a tank of propane and pay less tax than someone that buys 2 cord of wood.

for flights setting a limit is easy, maybe its 5k miles a year, but how is it enforced/rebated - the system gets complicated. I wouldnt really go after that one first.

for big engined cars its easy...charge off the lot and for out of province or state purchases they would have to show reciepts and pay a tax to get registered. no problems there. or if they bought a small car out of state maybe they could show reciets and get a rebate.

for big homes...there are building permits and inspections so that should be easy. i would give every new home a rebate maybe 10k-20k but once you get over 1k sq feet that rebate starts to go away. at 2k its gone and 3k you are paying

I would be fine calling Norway a socialist country. It is a successful country. It is doing less well than North Dakota and Alaska which have similar economies but doing well. What about most of the rest of Europe which is very poor? https://www.econlib.org/archives/201...ans_are_r.html


What about the one European country that has similar taxes and a smaller welfare state than the US- Switzerland? They are far more successful than the Nordic countries. What about Hong Kong and Singapore? Both have better health care and higher growth.

What if the Nordic countries are successful in spite of their welfare states and it more a product of culture? And there is always this assumption that a country of 330 million could copy an oil rich country of 5 million people and make it work. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.co...ica-be-sweden/

-Norway has oil and gas revenue hard to point to that as success until the oil runs dry.

-switzerland is strange one. they have no capital gains tax...they can load up on american companies and pay nothing on it. thier corporate tax is very optimal if you can get away with it. They are the worlds worst trade cheats but they arent as big as china so they get a pass. They have a wacky system where companies in x industry in this canton pay a low rate so they end up with certain cantons being very tax advantageous to certain trade sensitive industries like pharma and banking, but they crank the hell out of local services that are not subject to international competition. personal taxes are very high but they get good value (according to friends there) so its a system that gets its citizens to borrow at low rates and park a lot of wealth overseas yet encourages big foreign companies to invest. ITs a really interesting country

-Singapore is a natural trade center...its pretty much a guarantee they will fare well given their geography on the strait of malacca - every ship has to pass by there.

hong kong...not sure i guess they just benefit from being the capitalist wing of asia. like singapore almost every bank and insurance company has a headquarters

Sr.: Socialism never works!
Jr.: Norway is socialist and they're doing great!
Sr.: What if they're successful in spite of their welfare states and it's more a product of culture?!