The Glade 4.0

So you can look at individual children and determine if they will be Hitler or Einstein? If a particular child is in serious danger, you'd ignore it on the off chance they'll start a nationalist political party bent on world conquest, or be a depraved serial killer?

Don't bring up memes as examples. "Derp" is rapidly becoming the default appeal to ridicule for people that have no reasonable argument.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Why are you looking at a child and projecting a future net benefit to society?

I am sorry when I said "what about derp", what I meant to imply is that you are being ridiculous and when people post bald-assertions like that I picture them looking like this:

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The average child will be of some productive value to society, therefore in the absence of other information, that is the smart way to bet. The assertion that the average adult doesn't contribute is beyond absurd. Many adults don't contribute as much as they should, but most still do contribute.



Oh, so you were just generally trying to say I was being ridiculous for pretty much no reason whatsoever because you can't exercise basic reasoning skills. Got it. If you don't think it is wiser to prject that a child is more likely to be of some value to society than no value at all, then how you imagine we arrived at a 21st-century level of technology is a mystery.

Accusing me of being ridiculous after citing Hitler and Dahmer in that fashion is the height of hypocrisy. Try to be a little less blatant in grasping at straws.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

You don't need to project a benefit to society to demonstrate that society values children.

Come on, what's your argument here, that society really has placed no value on children? Aside from future economic potential, society is comprised of individuals biologically programmed to protect, love, and care for children. To suggest otherwise requires one to ignore a tremendous amount of evidence. Further, bringing up individual examples of bad people is completely irrelevant. They weren't bad when they were children, and there's no way to predict such in the future.

Derp, indeed.

Ok, so apparently the value society at large places on a child is somewhere ABOVE $291,570.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/08/04/us-child-costs-idUSTRE57367220090804

If the value of each child was less than the cost, the cost would not be incurred.

You are assuming people are rationale consumers of sex. Your children are a net drain on my resources.

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That's only because the wrong people do most of the breeding. (I weep for the species.)

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

If we're getting into quantitative analysis, that only further pushes me, DFK! from not intervening on behalf of a teenager. Were DFK! to be a bus driver, the quantitative metric might be different, but with items as they are, my remaining QALY are worth more than a random teenager's QALY.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Come on now. You should know that cost /= value.

Children depreciate more rapidly than a 3 day old Maybach.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Using quantitative analysis also shows us that poor people should hold the burden of intervening to save children, probably even mandated to do so, while upper class individuals should not get involved, and should probably be barred from doing so.

It's all in the math.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

And then technically, not intervening because the aggregate value of three children is *way* higher than the single one that was taking a beating.

Unless the value of a black child is only 60% that of a white child... But even then.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I don't know, Monn, I think a MayBach retains its value reasonably well (at least as well as a VolksWagner Beethoven or some other piece-of-Schmidt like that). Trust me, I've done the research. When I was in the market for a car last year, I made a concerted effort to get a Handel on the scores of options available - I did a ton of Chopin around, composed a long Liszt of pros and cons, made sure there were no surprises Haydn in the fine print of the warranties, etc. - and despite a lack of design originality, the MayBach is just a Verdi versatile performer that's excellent in most every category. Sure, all vehicles depreciate over time, and I'm sure it would be Straussful to constantly worry about damaging such an expensive car (I still remember the look on the salesman's face when my friend Mendel's sohn spilled his orange Shubert on the back seat during a test drive!), but I just don't think you can go wrong with a MayBach (or a YurBrahms for that matter). Of course, personally, I'd prefer to get a *****' Mozartcycle for like 10% of the price and pocket the extra $300k, but that's just me.

That was a well tempered response. One for which you shall receive a standing Orffvation.

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Holy shitsnacks!

You were a net drain on everyone else's resources when you were a child. Without children, society dies, and then values nothing at all. Your arguments are absurd.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I am probably still a net drain. And a thing existing is not justification for its continued existenxe.

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We don't need to justify the continued existence of anyone, or anything. There needs to be a justification for changing that situation.

Your personal estimation that you are a net drain is nothing more than you refusing to admit that you're being absurd because you don't want to be wrong on the internet. Even if its true, that says nothing about the average. There is no way society has progressed to its current state of advancement if the average person is a drain. We do not have some elite cadre of supermen producing most of our net value.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The 1%.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Actual sign on Wall Street:

That's pretty much exactly what we have.

That's pretty much exactly what we have.


No, that's not what we have. That is not relevant to what I'm talking about; your graph does not demonstrate anything about people's production, nor demonstrate that we have a small cadre producing anything. That's how much net value people own, not how much they contribute.

A CEO of a major company like Ford, for example, contributes far more than an individual auto worker because he organizes and manages a large operation, and without the coordination and control that occurs at high levels, the lower levels could not effectively work. This does not mean the auto worker is a net drain on society.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Wow. That's... actually pretty clever.

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Holy shitsnacks!

How do you calculate how much of the net value is produced by what percentage of the population?

For example, consider a $1.5 billion gas-fired power plant being built using a financing structure with a 70:30 debt-to-equity ratio. About 2/3 of the debt will be traditional non-recourse loans from major commercial banks in the US, Japan and Europe, with about a quarter of that backed by US DOE guarantees, and the remaining 1/3 of the debt will be funded by public bond offerings in the US securities markets. The equity sponsors are a group of private equity funds from the US and Australia, each with several billion dollars under management. The plant itself will be physically constructed by a joint venture between two US construction companies that are subsidiaries of larger multinationals which, in turn, are majority owned by several publicly-traded institutional shareholders (i.e. millions of shares ultimately owned by the public at large in multiple countries). The construction companies employ thousands of people, about 100 of whom will be working directly on this project at any given time, while the banks employ tens of thousands of people, about 20 of whom will be working on this transaction, and the PE funds only employ about 50-100 people each, no more than 5 of whom will be working on the transaction. Each major party to the transaction will, of course, have a team of outside advisers - lawyers, accountants, technical experts, etc. - representing them throughout the process.

So here we have an asset with an identified cost of $1.5 billion. What is it's "value" to society though - the construction cost, the cost of the power it will ultimately produce, the sum of the employee pay and owner profit it yields...? And how exactly do you figure out what percentage of that value was contributed by each individual involved in this transaction, including all the distant shareholders, investors and depositors providing the money for the equity and the debt, not to mention the taxpayers providing the money for the government loan guarantees?

The theoretical answer (from a capitalist perspective, anyway) is that "the market" works it all out in a bajillion different microtransactions so that the rough equivalent of the "value" contributed by each person is paid to them in the form of monetary compensation. The reality, however, is that there's a shit-ton of asymmetrical bargaining power, information gaps, self-dealing, regulatory capture, monopolistic rent-seeking, political and legal wrangling, a priori positioning, non-monetary value, and pure, dumb luck involved in determining who gets paid what, and the compensation people receive is at best a rough guide to their actual value-contribution and at worst completely divorced from it.

TLDR: It's easy to identify how much net monetary value is captured by a given percentage of the population (just count up the income), but it's really hard to determine how much net value, both monetary and non-monetary, is produced by that percentage.

See my signature Arafys...

And DE existence does not add value. I produce no food, nor any resource of benefit, I do produce pollution and allow a place for bacteria and viruses to reproduce, I consume food and probably am subsidized through others' taxes.

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I didn't claim existence added value.

Value is not added solely by the production of material goods. In our current tax system, it is practically impossible to avoid being subsidized by taxes in some way, and if no one was around who was subsidized by them, there would be practically no one at all.

You're being ridiculous, and you are not even framing your responses to me in terms of what I actually said. You're arguing for the sake of arguing. RD explained things perfectly. You're simply assuming that you don't contribute value to society by listing negatives, and furthermore, you are totally ignoring that value is not measured totally in material terms. A person's value to family and friends is a contribution. People are not measured solely by their tangible utility.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

No, you are annoyed you got caught in a bare assertion that most children will"eventually add value". Most people don't.

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