This is what's called a "preemptive strike".

They go to the prez & say "we can cut 10% off our budget". He's like "ok, cool". And they get away with only losing 10% of the budget instead of the 25% he had planned on cutting.

*numbers pulled out of ass. Accuracy not guaranteed, or even implied

i wasn't talking about numbers, i was talking about the huge political cover it gives him against republicans calling him soft on defense/terror, when the department of defense's first words are "cut our goddamn budget"

i'm pretty sure obama is a jedi

people i know are blaming bush for deregulating everything

lol

DoD knows its budget is being cut. It's 4 years to the next election, who cares what Republicans say now? They're trying to keep as much money in the coffers as possible, and offering a small cut is much better than being nailed by a large one. Leaves them room to negotiate, too

I agree with Zurvan, it's the standard "new legislation, let's offer them something before they take more" move.
I'd expect the same on smaller scales from folks like the CIA/FBI/NSA.

the theory of justice is a big fail imo

1) It doesnt take into account hard work, do we know if we are going to be people that put an effort, or are we eating cheetos all day?
2) It doesnt specifiy which is the population I can be randed in, why stop at americans, why not include mexicans as well? How about all the world?? Why not only people who live in my nice neighbourhood?

It seriously tilts me that the book has such high aceptance and it doenst even talk about the 2 big flaws I mention.

Eh iirc it assumes that we know nothing about ourselves on planet earth (i.e. we are a random person) and uses this as the premise to construct a society that is maxEV for a random human being to be born into.
So 1: We don't know; 2: It's valid for all of society not just parts (i.e. geographic parts) but it can also be used to work with just parts (i.e. maxEV of being born an American citizen)

Haven't read the original only second hand sources though.

well if bush is to blame, clinton carries equally as much, since the roots of the problem are old enough.

Incidentally, i've come up with a problem to solve the issues in the banking sector. Basically, you stop giving people share based pay, but instead give them the right to receive dividends as if they were shareholders without the actual transferrable shares themselves. This means that their incentives are no longer {build a profitable business now, brings up the share price, sell the shares} but {build a company that will be able to generate income long into the future}, interests become more long term. There are a few wrinkles about people selling the rights to this stream, and obviously this was only one part of what caused the whole mess, but I'll get back to you when i sort out some other bits.

I belive this is the core idea behind "share holder value" which of course has been twisted into some sort of evil-short-term-speculation-metaphor as in "companies are only interested in share holder value"

clown is right in response to Val

the purpose of the v.o.i is so that we don't know our traits, our position in society, or likes/dislikes, etc. and we create an overall maxev for everybody society based on that. It is for the whole planet earth but the v.o.i thought experiment can be utilized for setting up just american society, a society within one single state, or even just a neighborhood.

of course it is the initial idea, but with institutional shareholders often having turnover periods of 6 months or less (i.e. they turn the entire portfolio of shares over twice a year, on average) and management paid in options and shares, the incentives (as per Nich's? linked essay) are tied, not to creating a company of long term sustainable profitability, but to earning a short run high share price (which has some correlation to the long term obviously, but it is far looser than it ought to be) and thus it is not a metaphor of short-termism, it is a real flaw in the way that the markets have developed in the last 20 or so years.

There ought to be no argument that US/UK style markets are 'short-termist' and Japanese-style governance is able to take a longer view (an argument which IS made, fwiw, in a lot of academic literature) since well run markets should be long term oriented. But they haven't been.

If a CEO gets paid in options which vest over 3, 4, 5 years, he is interested in making sure that the share price is high for the next 5 years. If he is going to receive a dividend stream for the rest of his life, he has to make sure that his company is able to pay dividends for the next 20-30-40 years. Different ball game.

There's also other kinds of management governance though. Intercompany competition between managers for top level positions, failure signaling, threat of takeovers etc.
I mean don't get me wrong the capitalist-entrepreneur is the king and the managers are usually the ones using information asymmetry to their advantage but I think it's way less of a problem than you think. It's an issue in bigish corporations but small companies have better oversight (and usually a higher degree of identification with the company).
The easiest fix to the problem is to remove all sorts of work protection shemes and simply allow them to be fired without compensation on a day to day basis imo.

So the v.o.i theory basically doesnt give credit to hard work amirite? Rawls specificly says we should not be awarded by our talents because we dont deserve them however he doesnt say anything on whether we should award hard work, I dont think lazy persons should be awarded and if I understand correctly Rawls doesnt care if you work hard or you dont. Also what I mean on my critique on the v.o.i is where do you put the line as to who should you consider in the experiment, if u only consider ure rich neighbourhood ure cleary going to have something more to the right than if u consider the whole ****ing world. Rawls clearly arbitrarily chooses an american society in his book, sadly he doesnt explain why he arbitrarily choose american people only.

Also you guys are wrong on saying that he chooses somethign to maximise EV, he chooses something that has the poorest people the best off. That means he prefers a society when 5 people earn 10,10,10,10,10 than one when 5 people earn 40,30,25,15,9.
The reason behind that is that in the former system the poor dont have the feeling they are being screwed off, which I kind agree with to be honest, however we once again return to the problem of a group of people doing nothing all day long.

I take it you're against unemployment money?

Iam indeed, I still think they should get some kinda health care but thats about it, at least in Chile redistribution policies are horribly misguided since they just give money to fat women who dont do **** while they abandon poor families who actually try to do something with their lives.

You are misunderstanding the purpose of the original position and the veil of ignorance. It's not to decide how to distribute anything, it's a means of deciding what principles of justice should be. Also, the argument is purposefully limited to a closed hypothetical society for the sake of simplicity.

This does not appear to me to be correct, but I haven't finished the book. The conclusion is not that goods should be distributed to favor the poor, instead the meta-principle is that given a situation in which inequities exist, society should tolerate these only insofar as it is impossible to correct them without doing a harm to the least-advantaged that is greater than the present inequity.

It doesn't follow necessarily from this principle that all goods should be equally distributed, after all, if the state of reality is such that it is impossible to do so without further harming the least-advantaged (say because it destroys society or the economy) than a certain level of inequity would be correct.

The argument is basically one level more abstract than your interpretation.

what??? are u being serious? of course part of the point of the v.o.i is how to distibute wealth.

Its actually society should tolerate inequites as long as those inequlaities favor those who are worse off.


I never said this, change my example to 15,14,13,12,10 instead.
Rawls basically says the best society is the one that is the best for the worst off, he doesnt advocate communism because he thinks the poor are actaully worse off there than in a social democracy.

no he says the best principles of justice are ones such that inequalities are weighted in such a way as to be to the maximal benefit to the least-advantaged.

Edit: Actually, retract that, the second principle as conclusion is sort of along the lines you state, but you are forgetting the first principle: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for others.

Part of equal basic liberties is the presumption of the right to ownership of private property, which precludes the second principle from involving certain kinds of redistribution in fulfillment of the second.

I agree with ure last post, perhaps my wording was poor previosuly

It might be fairer to say that the first two principles don't conclude anything as strongly as what we are concluding. The purpose of the system is, as I said, to systematically examine a method for agreeing on principles of justice, rather than on settling on a certain socio-economic system. I don't think it's correct to say that the formulation is one in which respect for private property or for "work" is automatically excluded.

I disagree with u, the book is clearly pushing a social-democracy agenda imo.

val you are horribly, horribly misinterpreting what Rawls says.

please read the stanford.plato.edu entry on rawls to at at least get an idea of what he writes about.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p....tY&refer=home
Fed Defies Transparency Aim in Refusal to Disclose

"Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve is refusing to identify the recipients of almost $2 trillion of emergency loans from American taxpayers or the troubled assets the central bank is accepting as collateral."

secret loans imo

I think Im confusing the theory of justice with rawls other book.

Re: Fed "emergency" loans

Am I correct in assuming that these are typical Fed loans made under the emergency rate (rather than the usual rate), but not loans being made under authorization from the bailout bill?

Assuming that this is correct, on what basis is there an expectation that those loans would have greater transparency than typical Fed loans. I'm generally in favor of transparency, but I was confused about what i've heard on this because it seems like the loans were being conflated with the bailout programs like TARP and as far as I can tell they aren't really a part of that program, but I'm sketchy on the details.