Quoting: Desum

Quoting: Cyril

Quoting: DesumAh, another wall of text. Why am I not surprised?

Yeah, apparently he has some knowledge about this subject and his pseudo contains "Library Guy", so not surprising at all. ^_^
But don't mind me, go on the discussion.

There is a difference between having knowledge and being overly verbose. Eben Moglen comes to mind. The man could get his message across much more effectively with half the breath.

Maybe you should try reading and assimilating the words.

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Quoting: mos

Quoting: Perkeleen_VittupääSoo, could all this be possible to package somehow to a state that even a non-tech-savvy random occasional gamer could then enjoy Unreal Tournament on Linux? :huh:

moving a couple files around and setting an env var or two isn't "tech". nevermind being "savvy" about it.

Ooo, aren't we 'leet?

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Quoting: NeverthelessYou might not want to try science victory with the Aztecs, because they are aggressive militarists

Funny, that's exactly what happened--Aztec science victory. In my experience from other Civ games, who has what bonuses largely ceases to matter once you've conquered half the planet. I actually ended up going for science because I suddenly realized another civ was getting there on science and conquering them might have been too slow a process to stop them, so while I started crushing them I built the ship as insurance.

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Slightly off topic . . . I've played Civ 6 a bit, enough to make a couple of false starts while I got things figured out and then win a game. And I pushed religion moderately hard, because it was a thing I could do. Maybe if I'd pushed religion a bit harder I could have actually won a religious victory, but I felt like if I could be dominant enough to win on religion I could probably have won with something else first (which I did).

But what I was wondering was, has anyone done some evaluating to see if it's worth it? The religious stuff gives you some perks, if you play your cards right the religious district ends up providing a moderate amount of stuff, whatever kind you're going for, and if you do it certain ways you'll get stuff for everyone that worships the religion yadda yadda. But it soaks up a ton of resources building all the holy this and holy that--not just the districts, but the wonders and stuff. Plus, it takes up space you could put other districts in, and picking religious oriented techs and civics might delay getting secular things you also want. And hey, if you skip it your people might end up worshipping someone else's religion but that won't matter after you conquer their ass. At the end I found myself wondering if all those resources poured into religion were on balance rewarding or a money pit. Anyone have any idea?

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Quoting: Solitary

Quoting: LungDrago

Quoting: SolitaryI am not sure you or I understand each other. I think democracy works wonders... because it basically limits the aspect of "people problem" that I mentioned, because nobody is allowed to have too much power. The system is designed to limit, slowdown and prevent any radical changes.

Meanwhile with socialism, where you have strong government you get that problem, because you are governed by people that inherently have more power thanks to stronger standing of the state. People with too much power = abuse of power.

The other side of that coin is that when stuff happens and something needs to be done about it, democracy can be slow to react. Take the Covid situation here in EU. Essentially, Italy had to take the punch for most governments to stop just bickering about the issue and start doing something about it.

The whole Covid situation in Europe is often misconstructed as EU acting late or not doing anything. EU has its limited competency and countries healthcare systems are not part of it, critics often like to bash EU for not doing anything or the opposite accusing them of overstepping their competency. Solving the Covid situation is national problem, so EU really has no say in here. Problem of Italy is that they have oldest population in Europe and they have lower amount of ventilators per capita than other countries. Italy is not a victim that got left behind by bureaucrats in Brussels. Nobody knew what to expect and they were the first that got hit hard, but not the only one (Spain for example).

What EU did and did it well was rescuing citizen from abroad that got stuck thanks to travel bans. What EU can do is to prepare some more coordinated effort in the future, but till then it is up to the countries themselves and that is not EU fault. This whole situation is unprecedented and makes sense there was no master plan for it. No country in the world, democratic or not really knew what to expect and how to prepare themselves. If anybody claims they have the answer (if only they had the power) they are most likely lying, there is no simple solution here. Lot of countries in EU solved the Covid situation fine though.

If anything I would say the migration crisis in 2015 was more of an example where we saw problems of such nature, but even that is not that simple, because it was Germany that initiated that whole mess with invitation and then acted surprised when other countries refused to participate. That whole issue is more political than anything else, because the solutions are already on the table.

I'd agree that the EU as such has a limited amount it can do in terms of the actual medical situation in the present time. The EU as an entity barely has a budget; it does not really act like a national government and cannot be expected to do what national governments do.
But it does bear some responsibility. The EU's impact is, and has for a long time been, mostly fiscal. It has damaged the economies (and health care systems) of Europe via the pernicious effects of the Euro plus the restrictive rules on deficits. The individual countries can't print money, devalue their currencies to encourage exports, do much to stimulate the economy, or build up important public sector things (such as health care, education, or infrastructure). This has caused economic stagnation and, relevant to the current crisis, weakened health care systems. Sooo, a Europe without the EU might actually be weathering Covid a bit better. And going forward, European countries without the EU and the Euro would have had much more leeway to restart their economies than they will unless the EU gets its shit together better to allow for stimulus than the EU track record suggests it is likely to.

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Quoting: DesumYou seem to be taking all of this quite personally.

Funny, I was thinking of saying that to you. No, I'm talking a lot but that's not the same thing. I spend a good deal of time studying and thinking about political economy, so I have things to say about it. But in responding to you I should note that I haven't been spending much time advocating for any particular system, rather clearing up misconceptions about what they are and how they work. Not sure why that's "taking it personally".

If you think a person can own their own business and invest their money and assets however they wish, then you don't have a problem with capitalism. Corporatism, sure.

As I say, I've just been giving some definitions. Incidentally, I don't think your distinction there holds water--if people can invest money and assets however they wish, how exactly do you stop that from being or becoming "corporatism"? I feel like you're trying to make some sort of small business/big business distinction, but to maintain such a distinction you would have to precisely stop people from investing their money however they wish.
But OK, what I think? I think that the notion of it being self-evident that someone should "own their own business" is a creation of a certain kind of social frame. From a different social perspective, it's not "their own" business. It depends on their social environment to exist. It depends on the physical infrastructure, created mainly by the state. It depends on the education they have received. It depends on the web of contacts their social situation (including class/status level) has allowed them to accumulate. It depends on the money they have inherited; the very poor rarely start businesses. It depends on a social environment that has customers well enough off to buy their product. It depends on the existence of a pool of people who lack self-sufficiency and so are forced to work for wages, and have themselves been educated in such a way that they will be useful employees. This pool of people was also largely created by the state.

I think that a more egalitarian, co-operative approach which unleashes everyone's talents instead of subordinating most people would be better for almost everyone than the approach of "This one person owns, everyone else obeys".

>there are no Socialist countries

Mhm, if you say so.

Well, there's Cuba. I can't think of any other country with significant restrictions on people "owning their own business", so by your definition they're all capitalist. Cuba incidentally has done amazingly well in dealing with the virus, and has also helped other countries a great deal considering what a small place it is. Well, medical care has always been a big schtick of theirs.

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Quoting: DesumSo, you are against people owning their own businesses and being free to invest their money and assets however they wish as long as it's legal and ethical?

Take any given firm and I'd much rather see it as a worker-owned, worker-managed co-operative than owned and controlled by one guy exploiting all the others. Then they all collectively are free to make the decisions, instead of one person being free and everyone else being controlled.

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Quoting: LanzSocialism is a cancer to all who are motivated and self-sufficient.

(emphasis mine)
So, nobody.

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Quoting: Nagezahn

Quoting: "Purple Library Guy"This "Homo Economicus" is the basis of most capitalist economics. It obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with actual human nature or evolutionary psychology.

I read about a study where indeed some people acted like "Homo Economicus". However, this kind of actors "demonstrate psychopathic traits". So I, while being a noob when it comes to economics, agree that the market should not be based on this kind of model.

You can read it up here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterubel/2014/12/15/is-homo-economicus-a-psychopath/ [External Link]

True. But at that, even if you have the psychopathy, other things don't match. For instance, real people aren't quantum supercomputers--we actually aren't that good at calculating our ideal course of action for maximum gain. And, people have a systematic bias when it comes to losses vs gains--we mostly dislike loss more than we like gain. In the real world there are strong rational reasons for this; only if you are quite wealthy do the two start to be equivalent. For normal people, a gain could make your life somewhat better but an equivalent loss could put you in the street, so there's no symmetry to the impact--but the math assumes that people treat them the same.

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Quoting: Cyba.Cowboy

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Cyba.CowboyJust like John Cena the person, Bill Gates the person is one of the best things in this world...

Really? How so? Because if it's about all the charity, IMO if you look a bit under the surface of that charity it, too, is somewhat disturbing.

In what way? Both John Cena devotes much of his spare time to charity (especially for the Starlight Foundation), and Bill Gates has given away a significant portion of his wealth in the name of charity... I've not heard anything to suggest this is not the case, with either of them.

Gates does genuinely give away a huge amount of money to charity. But, to be specific, Gates has established a huge charitable fund, which he controls, which doesn't pay taxes because it's a charity. So the process of giving to charity doesn't really reduce the amount of money that he has under his control. I don't know whether he actually gives away more money than he would have paid in taxes.
This charitable fund of course has investments. Some specific areas of heavy investment include pharmaceutical companies and private education. Gates then structures the fund's charitable donations in ways that seek to shape the ways that countries approach relevant issues. So for instance, in terms of public health, Gates donations steer a country's public health emphasis towards buying expensive patented drugs (creating profits for pharmaceutical companies) and away from, say, buying mosquito netting, which might be more cost effective in saving lives. Similarly, in the United States, the Gates foundation lobbies consistently for the privatization of education, which in my opinion is a Bad Thing, so as to increase the profits of the private education companies it has investments in (perhaps Gates himself also has an ideological belief in private education, with which I would disagree). Stuff like that. So I feel Gates' charitable donations are more problematic than one might think at first glance. He wields his charity somewhat the way the IMF wields its loans.

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