Gary Fisher

JUSTICE

" will attempt to explain again.<br><br> Imagine all the known petroleum on planet Earth is in one spot. (Obviously an imaginary scenario; in reality petroleum is all over; it is rare that all of any one resource is in one spot.) Imagine you own that spot. Now you are set up to make a lot of money. Imagine you jack up the price as high as you want.<br><br> I say the price of petroleum would eventually come down. Not immediately but in time. Why?<br><br> The extremely high price of petroleum would be an incentive for businessmen to find other spots with oil. Then they could compete with you by charging a lower price. The price of petroleum goes down.<br><br> The extremely high price of petroleum would be an incentive for businessmen to develop alternatives to petroleum. "<br><br> -jts<br><br> I don't find this argument very convincing. For instance, you are arguing in favor of monopoly by pointing out the benefits of its no longer being a monopoly. And those benefits would have happened anyway, even if the monopoly in question never existed. <br><br> Secondly, no one would seriously argue that a benefit of famines in Mao's China was that it incentivized people to find ways to grow and hunt their own food. Creating a problem may incentivize people to solve it, but maybe it's a better idea not to create the problem in the first place.

<br>"If nobody can afford the prices, then even the businessman with a monopoly must lower his prices to make any money."<br> <br>-jts<br> Obviously, that was an exaggeration. What I meant to say was, that if forming a monopoly and charging "sky high" prices to get rich is an acceptable business practice, then it presumably wouldn't matter if many people (possibly most people) could not afford to buy the products that the economy produces?<br> <br>What I see as the outcome of this, is an economy where the poor people work for bare sustenance, while all of the products they produce are sold, bought, and consumed primarily by rich people.<br> <br>Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the fella who first brought this issue up (it wasn't Marx), and I've forgotten, but I think there was a classical economist (Bastiat? Menger?) who addressed it.<br>

"Under capitalism your sky high prices are a signal to businessmen. The signal is: you can get 'filthy' rich if you find an alternative petroleum spot, maybe by drilling deeper. Or to another person the signal is: you can get 'filthy' rich by developing an alternative to petroleum, maybe solar or wind or nuclear or ocean waves or ocean tides or volcanic heat or zero point or whatever. Another person reads the signal: you can get 'fithy' rich by developing aerogel insulation so houses don't need so much energy to keep warm. Another reads it: you can get 'filthy' rich by developing LED lights that use less electricity and produce better light. All this and more happens under capitalism, I assume more because a free market consists of a multitude of brilliant minds working together in synergy. Synergy means the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. There is no way my own one little imagination can compete with that." So we end up with a bunch of neat stuff that nobody can afford?Honestly, I'd rather just have the cheap petroleum.

Give ISIS a nuke. That should get the ball rolling.

The only surprise here is that those Christians aren't all already dead. And... ISIS is not only on the gold standard but they use actual gold currency!?

I've only heard bad things about windows 10 since it launched, and this surveilance stuff sounds really creepy. Good thing I jumped ship after Vista and got kubuntu.

And for comparison, 19,000 K is 34,724 F. The surface temp of the sun is about 6,000 K, which is only 11,324 F.

@Brant From what I understand, it is the total energy that is absorbed by all of the Earth's landmasses, oceans, and atmosphere, per year.

How exactly is back radiation at odds with thermodynamics? Radiation does not have to obey the laws of thermodynamics, it can travel in any direction (including downwards from colder regions of the atmosphere to hotter ones), regardless of the sources of heat around it.

Maybe so, but the Earth is nowhere near hot enough yet to be in equilibrium with incoming solar energy. Let's calculate how hot the Earth would have to be in order to be in equilibrium with the incoming solar energy. The earth receives 3.85 x 10^24 J of energy from solar radiation per year. Per second, this is 1.22083*10^17 J. Now, according to the Stefan-Boltzmann law, if we divide this number by the surface area of the Earth (4*pi*R^2 = 5.09806*10^14 m^2), and by the Stefan-Boltzmann constant (5.670373 x 10(-8) W/(m^2)/(K^4), and then take the 4th root, we should get the right temperature, which is 19103.4 K! That's ridiculously hot!

<br> <br><br>This article has an obvious logical flaw. By "its own radiation", I don't think that anybody (except the author here) means that the Earth is warming itself through radiation that it produces, but that DOESN'T come from the sun. <br>From what I understand, the Earth receives radiation from the sun. Some of that radiation is absorbed and turned to heat, the rest is re-emitted, and then absorbed by greenhouse gasses, which further heat up the surface.<br> I see more and more problems as the article goes on. Do you seriously believe any of it? <br>

I eat it.

Like I said, it gets hotter and hotter until it fries.

When you leave an egg out in the sun, it gets hotter and hotter (fires even), despite all the air around it.

What, you mean, the sun?

Nothing good will come out of Greece's default.SYRIZA will lose all credibility and Golden Dawn will take its place.

That's wrong. The sequence should be: 1 11 21 1211 111221 102211 11102221 1011010211 11010211011101221 2110111012211010110112211 Guess the next one.

Call me when you turn 118. ;)

You're 113!?

The balance of supply and demand is just fine (and I never said that feudalism was capitalism, just that supply and demand are balanced in both), but the distribution of wealth and income in feudalism is really messed up.

@jts No, but it is a pretty big hint that the minimum wage doesn't cause unemployment. I was also referring to my earlier argument about what DOES cause unemployment but I can see how you might have missed that. I said that: Expanding on this, if we did have a free market without a minimum wage, we would still have unemployment, and a lot of it. In any economy, unemployment will increase so long as jobs are being completed or destroyed faster than new ones are created. An economy which creates new jobs as quickly as it gets rid of old ones, will necessarily have a fixed rate of unemployment, and it will not be able to eliminate it entirely. It often helps to understand our capitalist economy by contrasting it with the subsistence economies of the feudal era. In those economies, no new jobs are ever created or destroyed, but rather, every job is destroyed once a year for the winter. Then, you lived off of the things you produced earlier in the year until spring came around again. If more work than usual needed to be done, then everyone worked a few days out of the year more, or a few hours longer each day (either way it kind of doesn't matter because the economy didn't really grow all that much). Once industry started kicking in, and there were profits to be made, people needed to work all year 'round in order to make as much profit as possible in as short amount of time as possible (since factory and other manufacturing work didn't have to stop on account of winter). This extra work was offset by people being able to earn wages and get a higher standard of living. However, since most people worked more than ever, and since the peasants were no longer bound to the land, not everybody had to be employed simultaneously, and there just weren't enough jobs for everyone. Although the economy grew, the problem was exacerbated by the population explosion that was caused by increased standards of living and urbanization. As industrialization marched on, and machines became more and more efficient, requiring less and less human labor, wages began to decline, and people started having to work longer and longer hours just to support themselves. This is why people had to work sixteen hours a day and send their children to work as well. Not only that, but more people than ever were unemployed. So although industrialization initially improved the lives of most people and raised them out of subsistence, the process ran out of steam and was driving people into worse conditions than before. Because now, people were once again working just to feed themselves. But they were also working impossibly long hours all year round, doing harder and more dangerous work than ever before. This situation led to social unrest and sparked a number of anti-capitalist movements in the 19th century, such as the socialists and the luddites. Thinkers of the time noted the "contradictions" that were "inherent" to the capitalist system. For example, machines produced more than ever, and yet most people still lived in subsistence conditions. Those who were lucky enough to have jobs worked harder and longer than ever, and yet, at the same time, more people than ever had no jobs at all. Eventually, labor reforms, in the form of the 8 hour day and the minimum wage were introduced. The 8 hour day did a lot all on its own. With people working at most 8 hours a day, more people would have to be employed to do the same amount of work. The simultaneous introduction of the minimum wage brought people out of subsistence once again and led to the creation of new industries which required high-skill labor, education, and consumerism, in short, the creation of a middle-class. Without labor market regulations, it is easy to see how this process could reverse itself.

That's not a typo, Selene. "Maths" is how Brits say "math".

@jts Even so, sometimes one's best still isn't good enough. You're not describing how "a free market works" and I'm not misunderstanding it. What you're doing is arguing from Austrian and Neoclassical economic THEORIES of economics. These theories can and should be questioned.

@jts By "pay people too little" I mean that the free market wage itself is lower than what is needed for people to live on, although it can also happen that the free market wage, while being above what is needed for people to live on, is not enough to create demand in less "basic" industries. Raising the minimum wage "by force" does not cause unemployment. As I've pointed out before, there was persistent unemployment even before the minimum wage. furthermore, if working for $5/hr is not enough to live on, then it is definitely better to be "unemployed" at $10/hr by turning to crime (or, better yet, join a communist party and spend all your free time protesting in the streets) because then at least you won't slowly starve to death working for food you can't afford. By definition, productive workers are those who get paid LESS to do the same amount and quality of work, not more. The only reason that workers in industrial societies are paid so much is because they live an expensive lifestyle which, in turn, is necessary to create the demand that industry thrives on.