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Only if you really cherry pick them Isaac Send a noteboard - 23/08/2011 02:48:08 AM
I can't say as I'm surprised but you not only seem to have missed the core of everything I was saying but actually flipped it on it's head, let's review.

Work Ethic: People who are used to the powers that be taking their stuff every time they try to be just a little bit better off than those around them don't have a good work ethic, because it's hard to tell your kids things like "You can achieve anything with hard work and determination" when it's not particularly true where you live. You chose to interpret that as racism I guess. You point out that you ran with it more than it should because it smacked of the classic "only people too good to work want welfare" argument which really only means you blinded yourself to the point I was making because it set off your personal anti-socialism alarms. When your worldview demands that success can only come at someone else's expense I suppose that's necessary, but it doesn't change my point that people are people and that when you observe widespread tendencies to good or bad work ethics there's usually a reason for it. For much of history, and for much of the world, people often have no incentive to try to improve their lot because improvement is not allowed, it is punished by the people on the top and by your own 'equals'. Pull in a harvest that's twice as big as everyone else's and they either decide you had good luck or must have cheated someone and thus aren't really entitled to your gains, or they don't care how you did it and simply figure your bounty means you have extra food and an extra son you don't really need, so they take the extra and your kid for the army. Much of the third world's problem is not exploitation by the west it's because "Why try when you'll just fail?" is endemic to many of those places. I guess that hits a little too close to home philosophically so it's easier for you cast my remarks as some sort of racial or cultural bigotry.

The hammer: The whole repeated point of the $50 and $5 hammers was that they were roughly equal in quality so it's hard for me to see how you aren't cherry-picking my comments when you choose to use them in an analogy about how you'd rather old ladies get hit with the less effective $5 one. The purposes of the hammers is to indicate an imposed falsehood about technology where commerce is concerned. Two people constructing hammers with different available resources and equipment could both construct equally effective hammers and sell them for the same percentage of profit but for $5 and $50 each. Consumerism, through competition, eliminates the sale of equally useful but more expensive equipment, so that people assume higher price equals higher quality when all it really means is that for an object to fetch a higher price it must be perceived as being of higher quality. This does not however mean that a more expensive product is superior, or is even being falsely touted as superior, it just means modern consumers never see products that are effectively identical for large price differences because the more expensive one is not commercially viable. Through out this discussion you've been using the lack of those $50 hammers at Walmart to claim they can not exist, while I have been trying to point out that hammers are useful enough that if material that allows $5 ones is exhausted, the $50 one becomes commercially viable. Economics and industry both tend to follow the Law of the Minimum, but just because a steel screwdriver is cheaper to make and superior to one of bronze does not mean a sudden absence of steel would cause the screwdriver industry to cease to exist.

Entropy and Poverty: Please don't equate a fundamental aspect of the Universe to tricky and relative concepts of wealth amongst humanity. When you say there is less entropy in the west, if you are trying to use that as some sociological or political term, please define it and do not use physical entropy of the Universe in the next sentence as though it were identical. Entropy has a few different meanings just inside science where careless use can cause gross misunderstandings, I have no idea how you are using it context to the 1st vs 3rd world but I'm not familiar with entropy as an economic or political term and I can't think of any scientific versions that would be true in that context.

Scale: One of the most profound remarks I ever heard is "The Sun is much, much bigger than even an Elephant." wrapped up with it was the concept that the human mind does not deal with scale comparisons well, and why math is so important to understanding scientific concepts, why the layman's understanding is always incomplete without it. The Speed of Sound compared to the Speed of Light, planetary models depicting the Earth as a small foam ball a foot away from a grapefruit Sun when it should be a pea a mile away from a beachball, etc. When you cite cases of corporate abuse in the third world, you'll never have problems coming up with real ones, because 6 billion people produce a lot of interaction, same as people can always find cases of police brutality. You remember a year or two back when someone opened up another police abuse case and someone talked about how we had these every few months and something needed to be done? And I pointed out that with hundreds of thousands of cops working for 30 or so years each, that even if there were a hundred times as many incidents as got reported and that if they were evenly spread as opposed to repeat incidents by a bad egg it would still mean less than 1 in 100 cops ever in 30 years had a single incident? This is the same... oh, corps are anything but white knights but even if you filled up a ten volume book series of real incidents of bad behavior, each a page long, the scale of corporate involvement in the third world is so massive that for practical purposes those ten books would get stacked in a corner shelf of an entire library composed mostly of minor bads, neutrals, minor goods, and great successes of mutual benefits. This same concept applies to a lot of human outrage, let's hypothesize a major religion who have about 10,000 incidents of strapping bombs to their chest or child molestation, sounds truly awful, an indictment of that religion with two incidents on the news every week for a decade, but if they've got a billion followers those 10,000 incidents, even if they could be considered 1:1 acts of mainstream members, would indict only 1/10th of 1% of 1% of their membership, the equivalent of claiming a murder spree occurred in a city of Two Hundred Thousand because two murders took place there in a decade. A dozen sweatshops employing a hundred kids each to make sneakers does not in of itself mean much in a country of 100 million, even if one chooses to ignore that those not working for a western corporation or before they even started arriving generally worked just as hard if not harder for the same or less compensation. Scale can not be ignored.
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.
- Albert Einstein

King of Cairhien 20-7-2
Chancellor of the Landsraad, Archduke of Is'Mod
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I know - 19/08/2011 10:36:22 AM 470 Views
You make a fair point - 19/08/2011 11:22:53 AM 444 Views
Re: You make a fair point - 19/08/2011 02:06:05 PM 420 Views
Re: You make a fair point - 19/08/2011 02:10:43 PM 419 Views
It's the other other white meat. - 19/08/2011 07:13:19 PM 474 Views
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You'll welcome to debate that with a biologist, it's not my specialty or interest - 20/08/2011 04:46:43 AM 545 Views
I've seen a lot of mainstream biologists suggest human evolution may be mostly mental now. - 21/08/2011 11:32:48 AM 562 Views
Neither of us are biologists though and it's not really relveant anyway - 21/08/2011 01:21:06 PM 504 Views
I'm not ignoring it, just wondering why over half the planet ignores it and lives in misery. - 21/08/2011 01:55:53 PM 519 Views
If you have occassion to spend time in those places you'll know why - 21/08/2011 02:38:44 PM 450 Views
How does literal mud huts as the norm respresent living standards rising "a lot". - 22/08/2011 12:29:35 AM 570 Views
You seem to have cherry-picked what you wanted to hear out of my comments - 22/08/2011 01:07:10 AM 342 Views
"It's a stability thing, not a Western greed thing" seemed to encapsulate your comments. - 22/08/2011 03:10:17 PM 478 Views
Only if you really cherry pick them - 23/08/2011 02:48:08 AM 492 Views
This seems to have descended into an insoluble partisan debate. - 23/08/2011 07:43:07 PM 553 Views
You're the one who dragged it to that - 23/08/2011 08:10:03 PM 468 Views
Did I? - 25/08/2011 10:18:29 PM 460 Views
*rudely butts in* - 23/08/2011 04:38:33 AM 534 Views
we should abdon the myth of the evolutionary ladder - 20/08/2011 11:49:35 PM 383 Views
Well, for this context I think the use is okay - 21/08/2011 11:59:19 AM 463 Views
yes I was just jumping into the middle of the discussion. - 22/08/2011 03:03:49 PM 422 Views
and we wonder why so many people ignore "scientist" - 19/08/2011 01:17:38 PM 518 Views
Think it's better to ignore "reporters on a slow news day," to be honest *NM* - 19/08/2011 02:38:23 PM 191 Views
Or even acquire a sense of humour. *NM* - 19/08/2011 08:36:07 PM 213 Views
That was the City of Pearl series by Karen Traviss - 19/08/2011 02:04:51 PM 485 Views
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Hypothetical aliens are perfectly wise - 19/08/2011 06:24:13 PM 432 Views
You may be confusing aliens with God. - 19/08/2011 07:08:01 PM 457 Views
Not confused - 19/08/2011 11:41:56 PM 475 Views
It's a an amusing disconnect to watch. - 20/08/2011 12:25:00 AM 471 Views
Naturally. - 19/08/2011 08:36:28 PM 559 Views
So, basically, we're the poor white trash of the universe. - 19/08/2011 07:06:23 PM 518 Views

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