Moondira
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Posts posted by Moondira
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19 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:On 7/22/2021 at 11:14 AM, Moondira said:Expand
We (in the States) pay far more for comparable basic services (through taxes AND out-of-pocket expenses) than other 1st world countries pay via their taxes.
Don't forget what we pay for out-of-pocket and at considerably higher prices (like health care), as well as higher fees for a college education, child care, and a whole slew of other services they get for their tax dollar.
That's the "funny" thing about Capitalism. People here feel better about paying out of pocket to private companies, even if there's tax on it, than paying the government for it directly. They don't trust the government to do it, or to do it right. Or they don't trust the government at all.
Not true. The majority (63%), according to Pew research, want a single-payer health system:
Those who don't trust the government to administer costs have been brainwashed to fear socialism and the government, or fear their care would be substandard.
Big Pharma and insurance companies are pulling the strings at our expense. Not to mention all the deaths caused by those who can't afford health insurance.
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3 hours ago, Ayeleeon said:5 hours ago, Sukubia Scarmon said:
I have certain afflictions that require me to keep close tabs on my intake of certain nutrients. How is seeing them not a health benefit?
It is a benefit, and for many products listing them is a good business practice, but it does not follow that it should be required. If you are interested in a product, but want that information before you buy, you will not buy it if the information is not there. The manufacturer will lose a sale. That is enough incentive without getting the state involved making regulations and buracracy to enforce them.
What if Sukibia had no other store in her area to buy what she needed for her diet, and the only item available there is from the manufacturer who did not list ingredients? This is the case in many areas of the country (where choices are limited and there are "food deserts" where fresh, healthy food is unavailable to those without the means to drive distances).
Or what if all businesses stopped providing the information needed by a minority of customers because they deemed the effort too expensive? Then Sukubia or other minorities who needed this information to remain healthy would have no choice at all. It's vital that we protect the minority and not just cater to the majority or whomever business deems should be catered to.As you can see in these cases, missing a sale will not automatically incentivize a business to accommodate anyone when they can skirt around it and still remain profitable. There is no magic, no "invisible hand" that corrects exchanges between businesses and consumers without intervention.
Your solution, repeatedly (and this is why I'm finding your remarks so disturbing), is always to enhance the needs of those with most of the power, the businesses, because you find a government limiting anyone's freedom so repulsive. This colors your perspective and so you're unable to acknowledge areas where the government should indeed intervene for the safety of all. What about the freedom of the customers -- shouldn't their freedom also count?
Libertarian perspectives tend to view all government intervention except the protection of private property unnecessary. But the needs of society go far beyond property value, and the delusion of a magical "invisible hand' fixing problems automatically is preposterous. It's like a religion, this delusional belief in markets self-correcting. Are your fears of losing freedom via the government so great that you'll believe in magic?
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11 minutes ago, Ayeleeon said:
What is naive is believing that the government can improve on the free market
Yeah, the free market is like heaven and the businessmen are saints. They would never inflate prices unnecessarily and make us pay more for goods, or connivingly trounce on their competition. They want fairness and no doubt think making as much money any way they can is a sin. Also, they care about the environment and would never trash it or externalize costs so that we have to pay for environmental degradation.
They would never hide their money overseas so as not to pay taxes, or pay 3rd world workers peanuts so they could reap profits off them.
The free market is wonderful, and we should never regulate it (oh noes, those laws, that control, the lack of freedom!)
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9 minutes ago, Ayeleeon said:28 minutes ago, Moondira said:
This is basically saying that labour isn't worth much but the labourer should be paid more than that. I disagree, I think labour is valuable, and that if the government stopped interfering in the market, the market would reflect that fact.
This religion of the free market (Adam Smith called it "the invisible hand") is a delusion. There is no free market, and there never has been. It's the wealthy (via buying government and slanting laws in their favor) who try to extract as much profit as possible from labor, and that keeps labor's wages as low as possible. They'll squeeze as much as they can from the workerbee to increase profits.
Let's say you work at a job for $15 an hour. They scrape off a percentage of that to send to CEO's and shareholders. So you're really not getting paid for all your labor.
* In the cartoon the wealthy person is insisting the workerbees should not defend their rights with unions, but instead should trust in the free market (the invisible hand). This is a ploy by the wealthy to keep their wealth (to insist the market is fair and should determine economic realities).
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23 hours ago, Ayeleeon said:23 hours ago, Moondira said:
My life situation is beside the point, and this is also an ignorant way to frame your argument.
I champion the poor and dispossessed in our world who deserve better. A minimum wage would be a start, yet the wealthy have frequently opposed providing a living wage to large segments of our population.
The issues facing the poor are not caused by the wealthy but by the government.
As I said before, the wealthy own the government. It is the fault of those with the money (hence the power) to control our government/laws.
We could force the government to do our bidding (the people, the common workerbee), but that takes a lot of effort and organization. In some instances we have been successful, and I do see a little progress now (movements underway that are pressuring gov to install minimum wage laws).
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23 hours ago, Ayeleeon said:23 hours ago, Moondira said:
The wealthy own the government and influence laws to favor themselves
So we need more laws.
What could go wrong?
No, we need to fix the laws we already have so they don't favor the wealthy as much.
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3 hours ago, Paul Hexem said:
The biggest issue is applying socialist style programs to a system that simply was not designed for it. It's easy to say "such and such a country has it!" when said country has had a system in place to support it for the last 500 or more years. Particularly heavy taxes.
Over here, we went to war with the (at the time) dominant superpower partly because they wanted us to pay said taxes. Right or wrong, the very foundation of the USA is built on a system that cannot support socialist programs as they exist in Europe.
We (in the States) pay far more for comparable basic services (through taxes AND out-of-pocket expenses) than other 1st world countries pay via their taxes.
Don't forget what we pay for out-of-pocket and at considerably higher prices (like health care), as well as higher fees for a college education, child care, and a whole slew of other services they get for their tax dollar.
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1 hour ago, Ayeleeon said:
The excesses of Capitalism are do to government interfering in the free market
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22 minutes ago, Ayeleeon said:
Technically Socialism is the ownership of the means of production by the state, as opposed to Capitalism which is ownership of the means of production by private individuals.
nounnoun: socialism-
a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
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1 minute ago, Ayeleeon said:6 minutes ago, Moondira said:
My life situation is beside the point, and this is also an ignorant way to frame your argument.
I champion the poor and dispossessed in our world who deserve better. A minimum wage would be a start, yet the wealthy have frequently opposed providing a living wage to large segments of our population.
The issues facing the poor are not caused by the wealthy but by the government. We don't need more laws, we need to remove regulations that make it harder for individuals to start businesses, and laws that prevent truly affordable housing.
The wealthy own the government and influence laws to favor themselves. At least where I live.
I don't know of any solution other than taxing them at the rate we did during the New Deal so that the poor have more of a share. It seems they don't allow that however unless the country pretty much collapses to a degree that threatens their wealth, as it did during the Great Depression.
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Just now, Innula Zenovka said:16 minutes ago, Moondira said:
True, there are some who did not inherit their wealth. Not sure of the percentage who did.
I would have to add though, that it is the exploitation of the worker-bees that allow their wealth.
I would have said that it's mostly simple good fortune, whether that's the good fortune of having inherited valuable assets from their parents, or of having formed a company the value of which subsequently became huge, or (like Soros and many more of the super rich) of gambling huge sums of their own and their clients' money and making more good bets than bad ones.
An important point -- simple luck. And of course I don't agree that luck for some people should allow others to live in abject poverty.
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1 minute ago, Ayeleeon said:12 minutes ago, Moondira said:
It is the exploitation of the worker-bees that allow their wealth.
Ironic that someone on a personal computer, connected to the internet and the power grid, who no doubt is well fed with food from a grocery store, and had access to reliable transportation plus other comforts of modern life, would be so hard on the people who made those comforts possible.
My life situation is beside the point, and this is also an ignorant way to frame your argument.
I champion the poor and dispossessed in our world who deserve better. A minimum wage would be a start, yet the wealthy have frequently opposed providing a living wage to large segments of our population.
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From studying other countries we often see that wealth disparity is often a precursor to collapse. The disparity in the U.S. is large and steadily growing.
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13 minutes ago, Arielle Popstar said:23 minutes ago, Moondira said:
Disagree. The majority of the wealthy developed a monopoly via ties to those in power, and then passed on that wealth to their offspring.
Then again that is what you get with copyrights, trademarks etc. It was a system put in place to promote people putting the time and effort into developing things for the betterment of society as a whole. In any other context I am sure that most are all in support of those things that give those people a monopoly through copyrights.
Lots of people put in the time and effort into developing things for the betterment of society as a whole though. Teachers come to mind, and in many cases they are paid very little and work much harder than a CEO. I've read some articles about college level teachers who even have to live in their cars as they can't afford rent.
The problem is that we allow members of society to take more than they should. Last time I checked between a fourth and a third of children in the States don't know where their next meal is coming from, and many go to bed hungry each night. If we paid their parents more this wouldn't be happening.
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1 minute ago, Innula Zenovka said:10 minutes ago, Moondira said:
Disagree. The majority of the wealthy developed a monopoly via ties to those in power, and then passed on that wealth to their offspring.
Possibly in general (though I'm not sure what we're calculating here -- "the majority of the wealthy" means … well, what does it mean?) but that's certainly not the case of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos or Richard Branson, none of whom inherited their money (and nor to they owe their current fortunes to their "ties with those in power"). Neither, come to that, is it true of George Soros.
True, there are some who did not inherit their wealth. Not sure of the percentage who did.
I would have to add though, that it is the exploitation of the worker-bees that allow their wealth.
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5 hours ago, Ayeleeon said:8 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:
but then chalk it up to coincidence, good or bad luck, etc.
or to some spiritual reality, which is a far different thing than telepathy.
Under some conceptions of reality telepathy and a spiritual reality would be the same thing, whereas not so in other systems.
So you really need to define what you mean by the word "spirituality" as this is such a loaded word and people mean different things when using this word.
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4 hours ago, Jackson Redstar said:
They have to decide for themselves if it is worth any risks to their selves or not
We live within a community of others we should also care about. We are not isolated individuals with no connection or responsibility to the rest of this planet we call home.
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1 minute ago, Arielle Popstar said:
Majority of the wealthy became that way because they offered a better product or service that we were willing to hand them our money for. If we are going to begrudge them that, then simply stop buying from them.
Disagree. The majority of the wealthy developed a monopoly via ties to those in power, and then passed on that wealth to their offspring.
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21 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:
This is one of my favorite Niel Degrasse Tyson videos..
Mainly because he is so hopped up.. When he finally gets rolling about the birth of NASA and why we went to the moon, he is so into it.. hehehe
I had to lower the volume on that one. My cats headed for the hills 😁
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8 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:
It was, is and always will be so.
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32 minutes ago, Innula Zenovka said:56 minutes ago, Moondira said:
No, a true non-sensory experience might be detectable in the future, or it might not be. I've never separated them but it looks like you separated them in your mind and are imagining I did. I've always allowed a true non-sensory experience the possibility of detection in the future if new measuring devices allowed it.
But what are these measuring devices supposed to measure? We can measure stuff only if it has some effect on the physical world -- that is, it causes some discernible effects on atomic or subatomic activity that can be recorded and quantified.
How does something have an effect on a meter or a recording device other than by interacting with it at the molecular level at least? "Because quantum woo-woo" doesn't work, because quantum woo-woo involves things we can definitely observe and measure doing stuff that doesn't make much sense according to our current understanding of physics, so we revise our ideas in the light of the new data that's definitely there, even though we don't understand it.
You've yet to persuade me there's anything there to detect, let alone how to know when I've found it.
If and when someone can say, "look, if we do this, then that more or less reliably happens, and the best way to explain it is through this testable hypothesis, which may or may not explain much, but should tell us something" then there's some point to the conversation. Otherwise it's just idle speculation.
Well of course it's mainly speculation (in the hard sciences) at this point, just as much of quantum physics is. Theoretical physics is.......theoretical.
You may not be interested in it unless you see a test or a graph proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that it exists (honestly, I think you might be one of those people who, although feeling hunger pains, decides they aren't hungry because the clock doesn't say it's 6pm), but plenty of people are interested in it. And plenty of people have had psychic experiences. They just aren't the type who feel the need to find a lab to verify their experience in order to please someone such as yourself.
These experiences mean something to them, and show them a more complete picture of their world, and so I won't deny them their experience and evaluation of it just because we currently have no lab verification.
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40 minutes ago, Innula Zenovka said:51 minutes ago, Moondira said:
Telepathy is but one facet of a worldview that says we are far more connected than what our measurements currently allow us to see. Telepathy should not automatically be discounted simply because we don't have the measurements to detect it, or because we see the world from a humancentric viewpoint.
Try substituting "the unseelie fey" for "telepathy" in that example and see if you think it makes any more, or less, sense.
Stuff that we can't detect may well exist, but unless you've got at least some reason to suspect it exists and some idea how we'd go about detecting it if it does, so we know if we ever come across it, how does it differ from stuff that, as far as we know, doesn't and can't exist?
It does exist for people, such as myself, who have experienced it. Like I've expressed, I'm more interested in what it says about how our world is structured; our world, our universe, extends far beyond what our human senses and measurements can currently access. I like to know reality, and to maintain an anthropocentric attitude toward reality is as egregious to me as those who maintain racist attitudes toward those who are different from themselves.
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8 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:
I've put McGilchrist on my reading list. Perhaps "The Master and His Emissary" will end up next to "Thinking Fast and Slow". It's been decades since I read Maslow, one of the founders of Transpersonal Psychology. I'd have to reread him to clarify whether he's been widely misinterpreted, or truly crafted his hierarchy of needs from a potentially worrisome western perspective. Self actualization, rightly or wrongly, is often equated with Rugged Individualism.
When the word 'Self' in 'Self actualization' is capitalized, it refers to states of consciousness beyond the ego, and so has nothing to do with rugged individualism.
8 hours ago, Madelaine McMasters said:There is great "wisdom" in the evolutionary wiring of our left brains, but I think there's reason to be concerned about how well it handles the challenges of the modern technical world, where significant advantage can be gained at scale by the application of technology. If the humanities don't cross the bridge to understand science, and its growing understanding of us, your concerns about "Enlightenment" will be well founded. Experiments in psychology are now running, 24/7, around the world, for profit. Facebook is a battleground that sells willing hands to ideological gun manufacturers. Wouldn't you want those hands to understand the neural levers being pulled?
I don't see science literacy as being the primary solution. I see the current emphasis on materialism, which creates the sense that the world is dead and void of any meaning, as the source of our woes. It's the excessive anthropocentric mindset that believes we are special and above or separate from our surroundings causing the problems contributing to our march toward extinction.
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Jeff Bezos Space Tourist
in General Discussion Forum
Posted
This is absurd. People can both hate spending money on wars and hate what Bezos is doing -- one does not preclude the other.