The Glade 4.0

No, I have not. I have said there are Constitutional questions that needed to be answered. They still need to be answered. I have never once argued that he is not eligible. I have pointed out that there are vagueries in the laws and statutes that need clarification. You seem to think that because I see valid constitutional questions that I must support the notion he is ineligible. That is absolutely incorrect. So, please, do try again without lying this time. It grows tiresome that you continue to tell the rest of us what we think/believe because the truth is inconvenient for your ideology.I have no ideological devotion to anything. The IPCC Conclusions are based on the CRU Baseline Data with has both been destroyed and withheld from verification. How can you claim valid science when the experiments, extrapolations, and data construction tied to this information are not repeatable? There is no valid scientific evidence because we can't verify the basis for their claims. I am standing on the side of good science here, not ideology.No, money is not currency. Currency is a marker for real money. Even fiat currencies, which have no tangible backing, are merely markers for real money in any given economy. The Monetarist and Keynesian notion that currency is money, and therefore capital, is demonstrably false, as Argentina and Zimbabwe prove with their currency meltdowns in the last decade. Indeed, all instances of hyper-inflation disprove the money/currency equivalence you argue exists.If currency is not real, then it cannot be money. You have contradicted yourself quite soundly. Money is real in that it exacts actual economic force on an economy. It equates or ties itself to something tangible and of value, but rarely, if ever, to a scarce resource. Currency backed by scarce commodities only has value insomuch as you can regulate (through government or private force) the scarcity of that resource. It opens up currency to arbitrary manipulation. Hence, in the cases of precious metal standards, actual exchange and money rates are set by dominant agricultural commodities such as grains. Resource bartering sets dollar values long before gold in a gold standard. (Note, this isn't to deny the validity of gold standard or precious metal standard currencies, because money and currency are not synonymous).How many U.S. Dollars can you make in the time it takes you to clean your swords? What's the valuation of that time in current average earnings per wage hour? That's a starting point to prove that you're actually spending money or losing money by cleaning your swords. Next, you need to figure out how much value that the action generates for you. The fiat currency commoditizes the human being and turns their labor into real money. Currency becomes a marker for labor units, which are mostly abstract, and consequently loses in any impact on the market or economy except denoting how much labor resources can be consumed or put in trade at any given time. The labor units themselves are the actual money, because the basis for all exchange becomes the barter of labor. How much time does it take for you to earn/acquire the currency to purchase a car? Your time represents the real money value of that object, not the absolute amount of dollars used. And, curiously enough, because labor has different currency valuations, the fiat currency demands an inordinately imbalanced money system. Why is my labor worth more than yours in currency terms? Why does my labor generate more dollars per unit measure of time than yours? These are the fundamental problems of the fiat currency. Because fiat currency reduces the individual human being to a commodity and ties their economic force to the fluctuating value of their time, it reduces economic mobility and economic equality. Hard work ceases to be a viable means of achieving economic stability. You must be smarter, faster, stronger than your competitors.

Incidentally, the fiat currency and consequent commoditization of human beings is the entire reason wealth becomes infinite. Wealth is the ability to exact exchange. Because currency is now tied to labor and various individuals have different values per unit time, the money supply is neither naturally regulated nor naturally limited by the current availability of resources. Hence, paper markets emerge. Because we're bartering time and speculative production capability, there's no end to the amount of currency that can be generated/claimed by a unit of time of one person. Bill Gates still generates millions of dollars (currency) in value a second, while you make (some currency value that doesn't really matter but is orders of magnitude less). And, yet, labor is neither scarce nor limited in any real means.

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You either are too lazy to look at what you just wrote, a liar or possess a very selective short term memory. The fact that you don't "think" whether or not you used the word makes this evident: you should know.





Except you (apparently) don't know jack **** about something called "Conservation of Enery and Mass" apparently. Resources don't get used up, they take different forms once used. The Second Law of Thermodynamics may be more to your liking, but even with that being the case, as long as the sun continues to induce a radiative flux on the surface of the Earth, we have energy available.


Quit lying



Scarcity of resources has nothing to do with the way you combine or utilize resources.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Did you drink an extra glass of "gotta be a dick to Monte" today?

You continue to make **** up about my arguments, and I'm not sure why. You're right, I did say static in relation to the pie. My meaning was not communicated well. No reason to call me a liar.

Look, there is a finite number of things we can do with a finite number of resources. Again, are you arguing that wealth is like the universe - ever expanding and without any limit what so ever? That *IS* the definition of infinite. I find that to be absolutely preposterous.

Edit -

Khross, it seems to me you are talking about opportunity cost, which is of course based on scarcity. If i do this thing, I cannot do this other thing. There is a cost to everything we do. I would not dispute that.

My argument about money and currency is that it's all the same, weather it's based on gold, silver, puppies, grain, alcahol, or internet posts. We all arbitrarily agree that this thing (a dollar, a gold coin, or a dollar representing an amount of gold, or just a dollar) has value. Gold is no more or less arbitrary than any other form. It is, in effect, just another fiat currency. It's subject to inflation and other economic problems.

So, I'm with you on opportunity costs.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

What do you expect me to say? You are outright fabricating things about you what you said, do you expect me to show your handwaving arguments any respect? Especially when they generally call for tax money that I work my *** off for in an heavily regulated industry where our primary commodity sold is supposedly so vaulable that the price is capped by government, but apparently they can't pay the people enough to retain them.

I'm all for helping out for the majority of society but when I hear people who benefit all the tax subsidized programs working people pay for complain about their 7.5 hour shift, it quite frankly (no offense to you personally), makes me want to knee people who push these inane ideas right in the bridge of the nose. If my industry wasn't constrained by price caps and capital controls, I'd have a golden horseshoe so far up my *** I'd have a better grill than Nelly. Well, maybe not, but at least there might be some incentive and competition so people could get reasoanble energy prices *and* we could get paid commensuerate with all the work we do.

No, there's an infinite number of things you can do with limited resources. You can combine them anyway you wish. Some of them are more destructive than others. I'm not sure what your "ever expanding universe" parabole has to do with anything, other than trying to smear the simple statement I'm making into a strawman you can burn to the ground. It doesn't mean those resources are infinite in capacity, but infinite in the ways they can be combined.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Is that really a result of the fiat currency system, though? Even in a pure barter system, the amount of labor/time it takes to produce something won't be the sole determinant of its exchange value. Scarcity will obviously have an impact. Smarter, faster, stronger people will be able to produce larger quantities of a good in a given amount of time and/or develop more desirable goods. Varying tastes and passing fashions will cause goods' exchange values to fluctuate over time. And so on.

Also, economics is a behavioral science, not a physical one, so it's laws are only valid to the extent they accurately describe and predict human behavior. So, even if one believes that "economically rational" people should think of value as a function of how much labor/time it costs them, if real people don't think that way, the value = labor "law" is invalid.

* Side note: I'm not really arguing this because it's what I believe, but rather because I don't have a solid opinion one way or another, and debate helps to clarify things for me. I'm sympathetic to the idea that real value is a measure of time/labor (since time really is the only unalterably finite thing for a mortal), but I'm skeptical as to whether that fact truly drives/governs actual economic exchange.

Economics is a social science, really. Behavioral, I think, is too specific. It has to do with ideology as much as anything else.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

There is no need to direct your hatred of your situation at me. I didn't put you in that situation. You did. If you want to take your anger out on someone, direct it towards yourself.



So much ignorance and whining. First, that anyone who benefits from infrastructure investment are obviously not "working people". Whining that you chose to work in an industry that involves more government intervention than another. I guess you probably look at poor people and tell them to quit whining because they chose their lot, and yet you refuse to hold yourself to the same standard. You are, apparently, entitled to golden horseshoe enemas because you don't like how the industry you have chosen to work for is regulated. Color me unimpressed.

The market fails. When the market fails, government intervenes. Infrastructure actually benefits the wealthy more than it benefits the poor. The wealthy enjoy the benefits of such investment in a compound fashion. Your opposition to it shoots yourself in the foot.



That is contradictory.




No, you can't. The ways in which you can use coal are not, in fact, limitless. The ways you can combine coal and another resource are also not, in fact, limitless. There is a *limit* to what we can do with the resources at hand. Infinite implies something humanity can barely, if at all, even comprehend.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

I don't think Khross's sentiment is constrained to that point that: units of labor (whether it be a service rendered or contracted labor in the form of a job) being representative of real money does not preclude commodities from being money also. But in reality, all commodities are the result of labor: steel takes iron ore to be mined, smelted and refined, then processed with carbon in a metallurgically sensitive process before it can become useful as steel.



How is that different from a physical science? Newtonian mechanics did not (fully) describe motion because (as Coro often points out), the higher order terms of the Taylor Series expansion for simple dynamic laws become negligible at significantly sub-light speed. Physical science is also based on observation, hypothesis, empericism and testing.

Regardless, to address your point, the current economic laws such as Theory of Marginal Costs and Revenues are based on observation. Austrian schools just base their philosophy essentially that the greater economy is ultimately dictated by the sum of every exchange, and that these exchanges are based on human behavior. I'm not sure exactly what case you are stating, but the obsevartions economic schools of thought have made are not dependent on the constiuents of various economic systems being aware of those observations in order for those observations to be valid.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Hey, hey, hey! This is a family board. I don't want hear about you polishing your sword!

But let me, in a Zen-like fashion, answer your query with another query.

Which had more value: your sword before it was polished or your sword after it was polished?

Which has more value: a car that has been repaired and cleaned or a fixer-upper?

If you were to sell the aforementioned cars, which would result in a higher sale price, and thus ultimately more cash in your hand (or digits in your bank account)?

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I'm not directing anything at you. I'm explaining why I'm curt about such things, and why you need to make a substantial and quantitative case for the arguments you are making.



You might be right: the government is here (in this industry) mainly to hamper us. However, the same cannot be said of poor people. Therefore, this is (in your own words) a false equivalence. Of course, that being said, it's expected you'd argue against cheaper, more effecient energy for everyone. Yes I did choose to work here, however I did not choose for government regulation. That's a short skirt rape fallacy.



No it doesn't, there is no "compound" benefit. That's just a logical fallacy you constructed and continue to use. Anyone with any ambition is entitled to use public works to their benefit as much as they can within stated limits (speed limits, types of vehicles that may operate etc.) It is not anyone's fault that so called underachievers fail to do so but their own. Morever, the market doesn't "fail" because the market provides punishment and incentive not to rip of others, create products under unethical methods etc: failure, bankruptcy and losing money.

Likewise, if you are so against rich people exploiting public works, why are you in so in favor of "empowering" them by allocating more resources to something they supposedly get "compound" benefits from? Your internal logic fails.



Negative. How many different things could you do with a cardboard paper-towel tube? You could do an infinite number of things with it.



The ways you can use coal are, in fac,t limitless. Some of those uses are not beneficial: coal is not a very good structural material, but could be used as such. What you are (incorrectly) arguing is there are only so many "useful" uses for a given resource. However, there can be ways to use coal in which we are currently unaware that are more beneficial than it's current most "useful" use.

It is when someone discovers this new, hereto unknown more useful use for coal that they expand the "wealth" pie.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

I guess what I'm saying is that physical laws exist and function independent of any human knowledge, agency, or action (leaving aside the esoteric "observer" questions that come up in some physics theories) whereas economic "laws" are purely a function of human behavior. For instance, an "economically rational" person should be risk neutral, but in reality, most people are risk averse. So, any economic theory that assumes risk neutral actors will be invalid. Likewise, I understood Khross to be saying that real money is labor/time (e.g. Monte polishing his swords has a real money value), but if people don't actually think that way or make economic decisions based on that concept (either consciously or subconsciously), then it's an invalid principle and any theory based on it will be flawed.

RangerDave:

People act that way all the time, whether they know it or not. Most importantly, the majority of people on this planet have no idea what the real money system has devolved into because of fiat currency. "Time is money" is more accurately stated as "Labor is money."

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I'd argue that's not the case at all. Humans do not have to be aware of economic theory and "law" for those theories to be valid.

How are you concluding people are "risk averese"? I would argue, given the current situation with the bond market, interest rates and the cavalier attitude of the average American, "people" (at least here) are very comfortable with risk. They just aren't aware of the risks they are engaging in.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

Raf - There is compound benefit. Just because that **** with your ideology does not make it a fallacy.

You work for a company. That company presumably uses publicly funded roads to ship goods and or resources. That company likely uses the internet, a government funded and subsidized infrastrucutre, to more easily do business. Your company likely employs people that were publicly educated. Again, more public infrastructure privately benefiting you and your company.

In addition to public investment in land, labor, and capital, you enjoy the compound benefit of what those investments do for other companies that you and your company invest in.

You enjoy a greater benefit than a poor person, even if you don't ever get a single food stamp. We haven't even gone into the relative value national security has for your company in comparison to say, a person who lives in a shack.

If the number of uses for coal are without any limit, we can than do anything with coal. Coal has a finite number of uses.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Without us, there is no economy. People are the core of the economy.



Which means they aren't comfortable with risk, they are ignorant of the risks they are taking. An excellent example of market failure.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

None of that precludes a poor person from doing the same thing.

Yes, there are an infinite number of things that can be done with coal - that doesn't mean coal is capable of doing anything. The domain of uses for coal is infinite. The domain for functions that are to be fulfilled are infinite. Though the domains have areas of overlap, that doesn't preclude one domain from occupying space the other does not.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

... That doesn't even contradict with what I wrote. If you disbelieved in economic theory, would that invalidate it from being true? Would that alter it?

Atoms don't have to believe in electromagnetic theory in order be subject to electromagnetic forces.



How is that the market failing? That's the people failing to understand risk. That the risk is still present (as opposed to mitigated by government) is evidence the market is functioning. The market isn't there to force people to succeed.

That's like saying the laws of physics are failing because they are preventing us from teleporting. It makes no sense.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

That's exactly what it means. Infinite is "without limit".



No, it really isn't. There are only so many things you can do with coal.



Which has nothing to do with what I am arguing. If you can think of a single thing that coal cannot be used for, your theory falls apart. Remember, infinite means without limit. That means you can use coal for *anything*. This is clearly not the case.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

I realize people do act that way to some extent, but I'm not sure they do so consistently. For instance, if Group A is told to expect a 1 minute wait, and Group B is told to expect a 100 minute wait, and both are delayed an extra 5 minutes, Group A is going to be more upset and expend greater effort to complain. Why? It's the same 5 minutes in both cases. Even more interesting, do the same experiment in the US and in Japan, and you'll find very different reactions.

My point, of course, is that the "value" people place on a given unit of time is based on a variety of factors - expectations, beliefs about fairness, cultural attitudes, etc. - that change from situation to situation. So, it seems to me that any economic theory that assumes an intrinsic real money value to time/labor would have to account for that kind of variation.

Right, the uses for coal are without limit. That doesn't mean it has to fulfill every role you can think of. Basically, you are saying, if you take infinity - 1, you end up with a finite number. Is that the case? Because there are an infinite number of things that can be done, coal doesn't have to fulfill all of them to have infinite uses.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

RangerDave:

That's a terribly poor example, because the majority of people don't know that their labor is actually money. It operates well below active cognition in most cases. Your dollar bills are nothing more than markers for labor expenditure. Hell, look at your billing practices at work.

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Make it gleam!!



Monitarily speaking? After. To me? depends. I like it when it's shiny, but I don't need it to be shiny to play with it. Take that however you like.



Who is shopping?



of course. But value has a subjective element as well. It is not the same thing as price.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Oh I agree that people don't have to be aware of a theory for it to be valid. I'm just saying that if people don't actually behave the way a theory says they do (or should), then the theory is flawed. So, if the theory is that the value of a good is a function of labor/time, but observational evidence shows that labor/time actually isn't a very good predictor of value, then the theory is flawed.



Risk averse in the sense that they are more motivated to avoid losing $1 than they are to try gaining $1. Most studies have shown this pretty clearly, actually. The recent financial crisis was more a product of lousy risk estimates than deliberately risky behavior.



But that's exactly my point. If most people don't know their labor is money, and most people don't act like their labor is money, then their labor isn't money. There's no physical law that says labor is money. There is only a theory that says humans behave as though labor is money, and if the evidence shows otherwise, then the theory is wrong.

Yeh, I need a pack of smokes and a mountain dew.
Ok, that'll be 2 chihuahuas and a boston terrier.
Ooh... ****, I only have a great dane and a st bernard.
I'm sorry sir, we don't accept denominations that large. But there's a pound right on the corner there.

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Holy shitsnacks!

In the context of this thread, economically speaking. "Monetarily" if you wish, but I was trying to avoid that term since that's exactly what we're trying to clarify.


It doesn't really matter. Just the average case -- I think we all understand that there are price fluctuations in any commodity. And, of course, assume that we're talking about the same make and model of car, etc., etc. That is, all other things being equal if you have broken down car, will it sell for a higher price if you fix it up to running condition first, or just sell it "as-is"?


In a manner of speaking, yes. The buyer and seller must agree on a price, but that price -- representing the car -- may have different value to each of them. Adam Smith defined the value of a thing as the amount of work that you can make a man do in exchange for it. This is essentially what it is meant by the value of the car. Because they each value their own and each other's labor differently, neither of them may agree, strictly speaking, on the value of the car. The price of the car actually represents an "exchange rate", if you will, between their labor value. The car and the currency exchanged are just manifestations (physical in the case of car, but perhaps not in the case of the currency) of that work.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.