New Testingstan

Aaron wrote:What the hell is your av?

Victor Crowley. A deformed mass murderer who haunts men and women in New Orleans. It's from a horror comedy called "Hatchet" and "Hatchet II." Check it out.

http://images2.static-bluray.com/review ... _1080p.jpg

so apparently if there's another quake at fukushima the human race is doomed cuz of the thousand spent fuel rods will burn into the jetstream or something

i've decided the best thing we can do to prevent the end of the world is to prevent earth quakes and there's only one way to do that:

prey on god

i've always wondered what god meat tastes like. its prolly heavenly

whatup

Hey man

WHAT'S UP LIZ

Good to see you

Instant Sunrise wrote:whatup

hey

megawhine incoming

Surlethe wrote:If the big country starts making wheat more efficiently, then the island's economy will deteriorate until it can build a factory and start making tractors to trade for wheat, or until it copies the big country's wheat-making techniques and regains a comparative advantage in wheat. The process of specializing isn't always easy, but at the end of the day every nation is wealthier when it has specialized.

Comparative advantage is generally used by pinheads to be fuckers, as this example shows- first of all, if you wait until your economy is in ruins to engage in any development, that would seem unnecessarily cruel. Secondly, comparative advantage only really works when all products are of roughly the same strategic value to nations- nowadays no nation will let its food security be dependent on trade if it can help it, so the rich countries subsidize farming and the poor countries that ought to be forever resource-extractors can't even export their crops. Many of them end up food importers because of how impoverished they are. And any development program is derailed by the sabotage of rich nations through the IMF, WTO, and individual pressures, because they are led by a mix of lunatics who believe in the insanity of free-market economics and megalomaniacs who want to keep large swathes of the world poor and desperate.

In addition, no rich country has ever followed this sort of strategy. The US makes steel, automobiles, airplanes, consumer electronics, industrial equipment... a laundry list of products which we export, some more than others. So do most rich countries. In fact, Germany, the US, Japan, France, South Korea, and the UK all make cars for export. Surely they should have identified their comparative advantages in other fields and stopped making cars to compete against the leader, right? The Swiss didn't get rich on cuckoo clocks, the Swiss Army Knife, and money laundering, either- Switzerland is the most industrialized nation per capita, followed by Japan. So comparative advantage doesn't really end up as the panacea that people like Surlethe say.

So, although I am not an economist, I will say that comparative advantage works in the classroom to explain that trade relations are more complex than they first appear. It doesn't really work in real life. In fact, if it was put to work in real life, Japan would have a monopoly on all economy and midsize car production, the US would have a monopoly on pickup trucks and other heavy vehicles, and Germany would have a monopoly on luxury vehicles. And no car company would ever attempt to break into a new market, because corporations merely swim with the tides of the God-Concept Economy, rather than actually doing anything. In conclusion, fuck capitalism.

PS: LOL that they believe that the USSR should have become a capitalist nation. It already was capitalist under most socialist views, Chinese state capitalism has produced a panoply of horrors, and the capitalist countries would have attempted to devour it anyways. I guess that capitalists really are blind to human suffering and its causes.

From what Stas says, the populace was better off.

So can you explain the IMF? I just thought they were sort of an international bank.

I take those claims/predictions from over there with a grain of salt given that some of Surlethes posts can be so downright gloomy they make Valdemar look cheerful. So depressing.

http://edition.presstv.ir/detail/254909.html

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei says the West’s economic problems stem from the essence of the capitalist system, which is the proclivity for wealth over other matters.

No shit?

Aaron wrote:From what Stas says, the populace was better off.

So can you explain the IMF? I just thought they were sort of an international bank.

The IMF is an organization set up by John Maynard Keynes and a bunch of do-gooder economists in the 1940s as part of a multipart effort to produce a better, more stable world after WWII. Along with using the US dollar, backed by the US gold reserves, as an international benchmark for currency, and the World Bank, which was to provide long-term investment money in poorer countries, the IMF would provide short-term and emergency loans (all members would contribute money to form a pool that they could borrow from and then repay). They did this relatively well for the 1950s and 60s, which were the Keynesian years, but with the rise of free-market policies in most of the world, they started attaching conditions to loan packages. They'd demand that the country privatize everything and run free-market policies that proved disastrous for native industries, in many cases causing deflation and destroying economies. Jeffrey Sachs, a former cheerleader for the IMF, describes many of their packages as prescribing "belt-tightening to people too poor to own belts." So they're basically fuckheads. Many of the people involved have their heads on straight, but the upper management has bought into free-market policies.

I don't know as much about the World Bank, but the currency system fell apart after the US went off gold. This is why so many libertarians want the gold standard back- because it's associated with this period of economic stability. They're mostly crazy so they think gold and silver have inherent value. Keynes himself wanted to peg the currency base to a variety of commodities for greater stability (imagine if we had been on the diamond standard before the discovery of the South African diamond fields, or if we discovered massive, easily-accessed gold deposits on the gold standard).

I wish I knew enough about economics to discuss it.

Man we are total dicks.

Aaron wrote:No shit?

It really can't be pointed out enough. Even if we manage to fix capitalism in the short term, it is in its nature to go right back to the bad.

Take the IMF stuff, or any of the evil banks: it isn't because we're born dicks, it is because the capitalist system with its drive for profits caused it to go there.

We should rename the struggle to reform capitalism to 'Sisyphusism'.

there is so much freedom in the world

Let me know when you find some not spread by the barrel of a gun.

in 1793 the french achieved some freedom with something other than just guns

they used guillotines



“If we accept the proposition that one person can be sacrificed for the happiness of the many, it will soon be demonstrated that two or three or more could also be sacrificed for the happiness of the many. Little by little, we will find reasons for sacrificing the many for the happiness of the many, and we will think it was a bargain.”

Lonestar's 7-11 joke was funny, me and him are cool.

ATTN: simon_jester (if you're reading this)

To me it seems most perverse that we'd say "the only way to be logically consistent and ethical is for nearly all of the only species on the planet that cares about those things to die off." And yet to me, that seems like a predictable conclusion.

i think the mistake here is assuming it is a zero-sum game

it is them or us, not them xor us lol. in other words there's really no reason to believe that man and beast can't coexist; hell we've done it for all of history


now technology can be like win and lose. today so much tech is being used in ways that destroy the environment but i believe it ain't necessarily so; i believe that if we gave a damme, we could use technology to further reduce our environmental impact making it even easier to handle the dilemmas. don't shoot the elephants, just try not to hog all the land, water, food, etc. so there's enough to go around for everybody

Surlethe wrote:Why not? Labor should be as free to move about the world as capital - even more so, because we're talking about people's livelihoods, not about digits on a wealthy person's brokerage account. Of course, labor in wealthy countries does its best to prevent free labor flows because the smelly foreign brown people don't deserve to pursue first-world living standards, since they're poor and lazy and anyway they just come here to steal our jobs.

so do you think that surlethe got beaten up by a uaw member or is he just ideologically convinced that union opposition to nafta is racially motivated? either way fuck him for seeking further economic ruination in my part of the country. but anyways, to effortpost, one of the reasons people oppose free migration of labor is that migrant labor is generally used to drive down wages and living standards and destroy the political and economic power of labor through union-busting. this is the root of all racism in the labor movement- this knowledge that the underclasses, the immigrants and the blacks, will be used to break strikes and nascent unions because they're desperate. the short-sighted response was violence, but the farsighted, including many of the socialists and anarchists, integrated and recruited. labor generally integrated before business did, too. in fact, there are suggestions that union membership makes people more tolerant generally. in conclusion, surlethe is socially blind and deaf, defending an intolerable system, to quote helen keller.

Is there a penalty for using your guys' silly high level pawns?

you get slightly less experience but i don't think it affects your discipline points which are the ones that matter

Then at least for now, thank you to aaron for that enchantress that seems to be mostly about buffs. I was tempted to take Los's 77 guy with the huge spikey thing but I do want *some* challenge.