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PoliGAF 2013 |OT1| Never mind, Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

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E

el retorno

Member
Sea Manky said:
No reason to be worried about this, I'm sure those brave RNC workers will all have concealed carry.
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Never thought about that. haha

They're gonna be rudely awaked when they go into these communities and find out they are not "natural conservative" communities likes they pretend they are. The are liberal by a large margin
 
P

PhoenixDark

Banned
Here we go again fellas, Return of the NBPP

Obama to pick Tom Perez for Labor

President Barack Obama will on Monday nominate Tom Perez to be his next Labor secretary, the White House said.

Perez, 51, is the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division. If confirmed by the Senate, he would replace Hilda Solis, who resigned in January.
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Perez’s confirmation hearings are expected to feature more questions about a scathing inspector general’s report released last week that revealed internal racial hostilities in the Civil Rights division and found Perez gave misleading public testimony when he said in 2010 that political appointees did not make the decisions to drop prosecution of the New Black Panther Party members.

Senate Republicans will also likely question Perez about his decision not to join a False Claims Act case against the city of St. Paul, Minn. Republicans have claimed the lawsuit could have won up to $180 million for the federal government.

The 258-page IG’s report, released March 12, said he failed to resolve longstanding tension between elements in his division that pushed cases on behalf of racial minorities and another that felt the department ought to protect rights of white voters.

The report’s most explosive revelation centers around his 2010 claim that political appointees were not involved in the 2009 decision to dismiss most of a civil lawsuit the Justice Department brought in connection with allegations of intimidation by members of the New Black Panther Party at a Philadelphia polling place in November 2008.
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http://www.politico.com/story/2013/03/obama-to-pick-tom-perez-for-labor-88973.html#ixzz2NrNbSqUS
 
R

rocketknight

Member
One wonders if the GOP would be able accept anyone with a civil rights background without finding something to squawk about. What will Rand Paul talk about for this one?
 
Z

Zabka

Member
Fuchsdh said:
They woulda' been better if they'd used period weaponry. Teddy didn't *need* an assault weapon.
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That kinda looks like a BAR. It's not too far off if you assume, as most learned historians would, that a former President would be allowed access to prototype weapons to hunt squatch.
 
I

Incognito

Troll
No one has posted the picture of the History Channel's "Satan" from their bible miniseries and how it bears a striking similarity to a certain president? It's all over twitter, and at buzzfeed. Id post pic but im on my phone..
 
G

Gotchaye

Member
Incognito said:
No one has posted the picture of the History Channel's "Satan" from their bible miniseries and how it bears a striking similarity to a certain president? It's all over twitter, and at buzzfeed. Id post pic but im on my phone..
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Wow, that's pretty striking
enhanced-buzz-26130-1363574867-2.jpg
 
O

Oblivion

Fetishing muscular manly men in skintight hosery
Incognito said:
No one has posted the picture of the History Channel's "Satan" from their bible miniseries and how it bears a striking similarity to a certain president? It's all over twitter, and at buzzfeed. Id post pic but im on my phone..
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You talkin' about this?

ZZ70CABF16.jpg


First, the reality TV show guru Mark Burnett — the man who made Donald Trump a TV star and “you’re fired” a household catch-phrase, who changed the television landscape with “Survivor,” which just debuted its 27th season, and created the ever-popular “Shark Tank” and “The Voice” — is now taking on a project truly biblical in scale.

[…]

“The Bible is the foundation of this nation, of our laws, of our society,” Burnett said. “There wouldn’t have been the Declaration of Independence. President Obama swore his allegiance to all of us not on one Bible, on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Bible and Abraham Lincoln’s bible last month. It’s on our money: ‘In God We Trust.’”
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E

el retorno

Member
Oblivion said:
“The Bible is the foundation of this nation, of our laws, of our society,” Burnett said. “There wouldn’t have been the Declaration of Independence. President Obama swore his allegiance to all of us not on one Bible, on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Bible and Abraham Lincoln’s bible last month. It’s on our money: ‘In God We Trust.’”
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I hate this alternate history these people cook up. Many of our founding fathers were deists not Christians. And we have this statement from one of our founding documents

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims],—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Mohammedan] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
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'

It was submitted to the Senate by President John Adams, receiving ratification unanimously from the U.S. Senate on June 7, 1797 and signed by Adams, taking effect as the law of the land on June 10, 1797.
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E

el retorno

Member
Cyan said:
I thought that was just a historical thing; an acknowledgment of our past culture?
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Came from the Star Spangled Banner and started appearing on money around the civil war as pro-union propaganda

btw Ceremonial deism is bullshit and a violation of the 1st amendment
 
O

Oblivion

Fetishing muscular manly men in skintight hosery
el retorno said:
I hate this alternate history these people cook up. Many of our founding fathers were deists not Christians. And we have this statement from one of our founding documents

'
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Part-time, unaccredited, Christian "historian", David Barton said that Adams definitely meant that the U.S. was a Christian nation, but that it was a "different" Christian nation than the ones in Europe.

el retorno said:
What was it about?
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Peter befriends a muslim who turns out to be a terrorist.

Cyan said:
I thought that was just a historical thing; an acknowledgment of our past culture?
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That and we didn't have that motto on our currency until the 1950s.
 
E

el retorno

Member
Oblivion said:
That and we didn't have that motto on our currency until the 1950s.
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This isn't true. But really besides the point

Oblivion said:
Part-time, unaccredited, Christian "historian", David Barton said that Adams definitely meant that the U.S. was a Christian nation, but that it was a "different" Christian nation than the ones in Europe.
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I'm infuriated that people like Jon Stewart play friendly with this fraud.
 
S

speculawyer

Member
Gotchaye said:
Wow, that's pretty striking
enhanced-buzz-26130-1363574867-2.jpg
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Holy shit! That cannot be an accident. I think that is called 'giving your audience what they want'. Seriously . . . who's gonna sit around and watch that mini-series? Mostly the fundamentalist Christians. Now that is what I call fan-service.
 
S

speculawyer

Member
el retorno said:
I saw glenn beck post this yesterday but he didn't say who it was supposed to look like. I didn't see it before being told what to look for.
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Gotchaye said:
Yeah, I'm not going to say I'd have noticed it or that it must have been intentional, but I certainly can't un-see it now.
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Well I scrolled down and saw that picture before reading any of the words and thought "What the fuck is that picture of an old looking Obama?" Perhaps I had some assumption of Obama because I clicked on PoliGAF but Obama just immediately came to mind after seeing the pic.

“The Bible is the foundation of this nation, of our laws, of our society,” Burnett said. “There wouldn’t have been the Declaration of Independence. President Obama swore his allegiance to all of us not on one Bible, on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Bible and Abraham Lincoln’s bible last month. It’s on our money: ‘In God We Trust.’”
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Again . . . nothing but fan-service. Burnett is such a whore.
 
E

el retorno

Member
speculawyer said:
Holy shit! That cannot be an accident. I think that is called 'giving your audience what they want'. Seriously . . . who's gonna sit around and watch that mini-series? Mostly the fundamentalist Christians. Now that is what I call fan-service.
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I wanna watch it :-(

I just think the bible is easily the best epic fantasy story around, the NT is a bit of a let down in this department because its a bunch of boring letters, the zombie think was cool though . Its like LotR but people live their lives based around it.
 
M

makingmusic476

Member
Friend posted this on Facebook:

529893_508011065909250_1778878204_n.jpg
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I posted this:

Coming from you, I assume this is opposed to unfettered capitalism that inevitably evolves into corporatism.

Let's go with some socialist anarchism, in which people can't dominate others through the consolidation of power that happens through the accumulation of wealth!
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He then posted a piece from his new blog he dedicated just to me:

I created a post on Facebook the other day (the contents of which is irrelevant), and one of the comments in response included the following statement:

“I assume this is opposed to unfettered capitalism that inevitably evolves into corporatism”.

I was heading to bed when this comment came up, so I quickly snapped back:

“Issue one with that statement: corporations are Government chartered organisations. Without the state, you cannot have ‘corporatism’.”

In hindsight, I feel like this response is lazy. Sure, while it is technically true, it’s really just semantics. I knew what he meant wasn’t corporatism as what we see today, what he meant was that in a free market, companies will grow large enough that they will hold a monopoly position.

Prices will dramatically increase, quality of the goods will decrease, working conditions and pay will drop to the ground, because our choice will be between working for one of these few major companies, or starve and go homeless.


Pictured: capitalist

So, that (I assume) was his real argument. And that is the argument I’m going to address today.

Diseconomies of Scale and Profitability

This is something that is covered in most economics courses. I think most people are somewhat aware of “economies of scale”, even if they don’t know the name. Everybody knows that you buy in bulk, it’s cheaper than buying one item at a time. And the reason is fairly apparent: if you build a factory and only produce 1 unit, that was one expensive unit. But if you produce 100 units… you don’t need to build 100 factories, you can use the first factory. So the next 99 units are significantly cheaper than the first one.

I believe this is where most of the scares come in. If a company gets better deals by buying in bulk, then the market is clearly going to favour larger businesses. A supermarket that can buy 100,000 gallons of milk at a time is definitely going to outcompete a small local store than can only purchase 500 gallons at any given time.

But, believe it or not, there is a maximum limit to this. There comes a point where growth reduces profitability. And this is all to do with the nature of economies of scale and diseconomies of scale. You see, with the widget example above, building the first widget was extremely expensive, and the second widget was significantly cheaper. The third widget will be cheaper, still…. but by a vastly reduced margin compared to the difference in cost between the first and second widget. The same will be true for buying milk: while a company could save a large sum of money, per gallon, buying 100,000 gallons versus 500 gallons. The per gallon price won’t change that much at 100,001 gallons. It gets to a point where the savings from increasing order sizes just aren’t significant.

So what about diseconomies of scale? What are these. Take another example: you own a shop, and it’s doing well. So well, in fact, that you decide to expand and open up another shop in the next town over. The issue is: you can’t be in two places at once, so while you’re managing one shop, you need to hire another manager to look after the other. As you continue to expand, you need regional teams, national teams, corporate staff. You need to build a HQ for your corporate staff, and that building needs equipment, cleaning, maintenance, energy. You need to pay taxes on that building. And that building doesn’t generate any new revenues. As you grow further still, you need to start building similar infrastructures around the globe, you will need to deploy computer systems which require IT staff. Those IT staff will need toilets, and seats, and computers, and lighting… and when they build the systems, you need to have a whole host of teams testing them, and then deploying them.

This is what diseconomies of scale are. Every time you expand your business, you will have to incur a slightly larger cost in one area or another. For a while, this doesn’t affect profitability, because the economies of scale offset the diseconomies of scale… but as economies of scale diminish, and diseconomies grow, the profitability of expansion reverse. It starts to cost more pennies to earn the next pound than it did to earn the previous one.

The point at where this cross over occurs will vary depending on the business model, and the industry.

diseconomiesofscale.gif


At output Q, average costs start to increase again

Why does this matter? If you can boost your total profit, why would the profit margin matter? Would a company prefer $10 of profit on a $1 dollar investment, or $1,000 profit from a $10,000 investment? Here’s the thing: if your profit margins decrease, then the firms that did not expand (and thus, have lower diseconomies of scale, and larger profit margins), will be able to lower their prices to outcompete with you. This competition is what would provide the cap on the total size of any given company.

So, why doesn’t this happen today? The answer is that Government interventions have distorted the rules of economies and diseconomies of scale, moving the cross over point so high, that vey few firms ever reach it.

Let’s go back to our scenario where you’re a happy, successful shop keeper, and you want to open up a new shop. For every employee, there’s Government paperwork. Once you’ve bought the land (and paid whatever taxes in the process), you’re going to need to get planning permission and zoning approval, there will be licenses and permits required to open a business, and/or sell various products, the new town may have different health and safety laws that you’ve now got to amend your business model for.

Now, compare this to whatever major supermarket you can think of. First off, they might not even have to buy the land, many major companies will get access to public land for free, or local Governments may use “eminent domain” or “compulsory purchase” laws to force the landowner to hand over the property for cheap, rather than having to pay market price. Oftentimes, rather than paying taxes, they will be given tax breaks or even subsidies to enter the town. While they will still have to comply with local regulations, they would have long ago set up a “compliance” department, and the additional cost of making sure the new outlet is compliant will be minimal.


Tesco

Other diseconomies/economies of scale have also been tampered with: through the socialisation of roads, the cost of having sprawling infrastructure has been minimized. Same goes with energy and water.

Manipulations of the economies of scale aren’t the only things that result in companies being far larger than what they should be. What about the fact that large, Government contracts almost always go to the big corporations? What about IP laws which allow old companies from blocking new ones from coming in? What about certified legal monopolies where a Government decrees that only ISP X or water company B may operate in a certain geographic region? All of these things result in lower competition, fewer firms, and large, monopolistic, “corporations”, as the original commenter correctly labeled them.
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Even our roads are terrible market distortions. =/

I wasn't sure where to begin with most of this (any and all help would be appreciated!), but I posted this on his Facebook post:

Hm, we may be getting our wires crossed here, and I may have been making certain faulty assumptions about your position based on comments you've made long ago, when said positions have no doubt evolved and matured considerably since then.

And I may have been misusing the term corporatism.

Let's start by clarifying terms. I was bringing up the idea that, in democratic societies built around capitalism in which corporations exist, the wealth accumulated by growing corporations (or even mere individuals) can then be used to influence democratic processes and encourage the government to distort markets in favor of said corporations (and individuals). Maybe corporatocracy would have been a better term to use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatocracy

Of course, even in lieu of direct influence on government, corporations can create monopolies, cooperate to fix prices, and so on and so forth, like you mentioned.

As for diseconomies of scale, what you're describing can effect the amount of profit on any given amount of expansion, but it does not prevent you from making some profit on that expansion over and above the profit you're already making. Even if you simply finance the creation of a new business identical to your own that operates autonomously in a new region, while taking home just a small percentage of their revenue in exchange for that provision of capital, it makes you (or your corporation) richer, and that money can then be used to influence the direction of government, through lobbying, marketing, intimidation, or even directly paying people for votes. And if your cash reserves are large enough, you can use them to further entrench your hold over a market, either by buying out new, competing firms or bribing business partners to not work with new firms, strangling them in their crib. Or using said cash reserves to artificially lower prices (loss leading) in a gamble to snuff out competition and return to profitability down the road, as Toshiba failed to do with HD DVD.

In the end, wealth typically correlates strongly with power and influence, unless the person in control of said wealth is completely and utterly inept. Some theoretical perfect free market without any distortions from the state does not change this, and those with wealth will foster the growth of a state that favors and protects that wealth in this stateless power vacuum.

And I don't particularly want to imagine a US in which the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 was never enacted.
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Thoughts?
 
E

el retorno

Member
makingmusic476 said:
Thoughts?
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Doubt any logic will get through to him. That view point more than any other is religion like. The free market is the gospel.

But shit like this makes me mad at the stupidity:

Let’s go back to our scenario where you’re a happy, successful shop keeper, and you want to open up a new shop. For every employee, there’s Government paperwork. Once you’ve bought the land (and paid whatever taxes in the process), you’re going to need to get planning permission and zoning approval, there will be licenses and permits required to open a business, and/or sell various products, the new town may have different health and safety laws that you’ve now got to amend your business model for.
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That's literally a fancy rewording of that noah story.

Oblivion said:
Ah. Well, the point is it wasn't there from the country's founding.
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Yea but the its only 50 years old isn't true either. Its got a long history.
 
B

Black Mamba

Member
el retorno said:
Thanks. I've always been interested in how Christianity formed and droped all the Jewishness in it. Jesus never started a new religion. He was born and died a jew (the last supper was a passover meal)
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People were all "fuck these rules. I want bacon" and thus Christianity was born.
 
B

Black Mamba

Member
el retorno said:
Don't we all?

My biggest faux pas about kosher stuff was asking for a cheeseburger in Israel. I had no idea you couldn't do that. BS rule.
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A big mac without cheese just ain't a big mac (granted McD's sucks balls but you get my point).

And instead of bacon you get pastrami on the burger. I'm a huge pastrami guy, but just no.

Just be glad it wasn't passover.
 
S

Synth_floyd

Banned
I thought they serve a non-dairy cheese-like substance on the hamburgers in Israel.

But yeah Christianity started as a spinoff of Judaism, but they wanted to eat pork, shellfish, milk/meat, didn't want their dicks sliced off, wanted to continue to celebrate pagan holidays (Dec 25, Easter, etc) and wanted to incorporate other facets of their existing religious beliefs.
 
E

el retorno

Member
Synth_floyd said:
I thought they serve a non-dairy cheese-like substance on the hamburgers in Israel.
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There were kosher Mcdonalds and non-kosher. The one I went to didn't even have cheeseburgers on the menu (although it was in hebrew and there could have been a language barrier). Tel-Aviv is the best city in Israel because they don't have all the silly rules. Bacon Cheeseburgers are even available!

Jersualem is the worst because its so beholden to the Haredim. The western wall is like something out of the 1930s with women being segregated into a much smaller area (which ofcourse you don't see in pictures)

western-wall-jerusalem-israel-02.jpg
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Its even worse when you realize the men's area extends further under the wall on the left
 
G

Gotchaye

Member
makingmusic476 said:
Thoughts?
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Looking back, this post got absurdly long, so I PM'd it instead. Much shorter - the fundamental problem with this kind of libertarian argument is that it applies a microeconomic framework to a macroeconomic problem. Your friend just isn't thinking through how the actions of one economic actor might influence others. He's pretending that they all exist independently of each other and don't influence the larger economy. Until he makes at least some effort to grapple with the impact of large firms on the market he's not to be taken seriously.
 
H

Hitokage

Setec Astronomer
Gotchaye said:
Looking back, this post got absurdly long, so I PM'd it instead. Much shorter - the fundamental problem with this kind of libertarian argument is that it applies a microeconomic framework to a macroeconomic problem. Your friend just isn't thinking through how the actions of one economic actor might influence others. He's pretending that they all exist independently of each other and don't influence the larger economy. Until he makes at least some effort to grapple with the impact of large firms on the market he's not to be taken seriously.
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One possible reason for this is the influence of Rand's philosophy, which describes action and causality in terms of the immediate and isolated, prohibiting concepts like a system's environment, externalities, contrasting short/long term effects, emergent behavior, and complex systems. As such, you get statements like wealthy people being more able simply because other factors aren't even allowed to exist.
 
F

Fuchsdh

Member
So on St. Patrick's I took my girlfriend into DC. We ended up grabbing a coffee at a McDonalds, where we just spent about fifteen minutes listening to this old guy yelling into his hands-free. Among the gems:

"I love it when Democrats get shot."

"All criminals are Democrats, all Democrats are criminals."

"Hitler was an okay guy, he was the biggest socialist ever! He guaranteed everyone a job for life, except for the Jews!"

Sad, but also so over the top it was enjoyable.
 
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