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It says that the guy likely was the smartest guy they had interviewed, and he should have taken the job. He could have been CEO in less than 2 years.
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That just shows that you're stupid.
You could've been loafing and doing nothing all day, but instead you choose to go to work and pay taxes. Efficiency is putting in as little effort as possible to get maximum gain - so quit your job and go collect welfare.
You won't be off worse - or are you of such sub-standard intelligence that any lowlife with no education and no ambition can somehow beat the system, but you can't? Because the way you describe it, they are.
I mean, it's not like you give a shit about the rest of the population, so the excuse that you are a pillar of society propping it up because you have a job is, well, bullshit.
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Actually, as I have heard, the Quartermaster decided how the loot was split.
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Some pirates were actually incredibly smart, and incredibly rational. Some of the booby traps they set would even put IOCCC contest entries to shame.
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Oh, do fuck off.
I think back to one of my acquaintances from a few years back, who was a small-time weed dealer and highly experienced benefits cheat. He'd done about a week's actual work in five years, had his rent and bills and food needs all covered by his benefits and spent the profit from his (short) deals on stuff he liked.
Irritated me quite a lot at the time.
Fast forward a few years. He's still the same. He's living in a shitty house in a shitty down eating the same shitty food. He's still getting the same amount in benefits, somehow... on the other hand, I've got a good job and whilst I work harder than he ever will and he effectively lives off my tax, my life is fucking awesome by comparison.
I live in a decent house in a nice city. I get regular ski, windsurfing and mountain biking holidays. I can afford a decent car and a fancy computer and a fast net connection and I get to eat good food whenever I like. I have enough spare cash to get decent insurance, pension funding and savings and still have more than enough left over to look after my dad.
Am I supposed to go on fucking hunger strike like a three year old having a temper tantrum because I have to work for my lifestyle? Hey, you wanna have a screaming fit about how society has parasites, you go right ahead. I'll be over here with a smug, self-satisfied smile on my face because I can cope with a small proportion of my earnings being wasted on the lazy. Feel free to whine yourself into an early grave.
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Gee, I wonder which president you voted for in the last election.
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It's hard to describe any place where she didn't, frankly. An understanding of the economics of enterprise bypassed her completely.
Atlas Shrugged draws no distinction between "being competent", "being economically important" and "being rich". These are not the same thing, and any theory based on the assumption that they are will fail miserably in real-world economics.
This fallacy does, however, explain why her work is so popular with rich people. (Note how weak, how straw-man, the arguments of her protagonist's opponents are; she couldn't handle writing plausible opposition, because she doesn't have a plausible counterargument.)
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Nah, I just voted for one of the many viable third parties where I live :-)
Politics is so much more reasonable when it's not good versus evil or light versus darkness. The world just isn't that boolean.
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You've missed the bit where most of them work every spare minute but still aren't given enough to survive so they have to take out loans from the richest at extortionate interest.
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He is of course absolutely right. You start for example 1.159155 miles away from the south pole. You walk south one mile and are 0.159155 miles away from the south pole, which happens to be 1 / 2pi miles. Walking one mile to the west covers exactly one round, 360 degrees, and you are back at the same point 0.159155 miles away from the south pole. Walking 1 mile north means you are now 1.159155 miles away, exactly where you started.
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I turned down an offer once because I felt like God told me not to take it. The recruiter was surprisingly understanding and respected me for having the guts to admit that.
She tried to get me another job soon afterward.
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Well, we all know socialism is bad.
Unless of course you are dying and broke, so it's ok then. You're not really getting a handout from the government in that case because, er, um, because, um, just because, ok? Because I paid taxes! Yeah, that's the ticket, just getting back what was mine! I did pay, honest!
But socialism is still bad, ok?
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Paul, in the featured commend you're conflating two unrelated issues, the economics of inflation and a welfare system. Having inflation does not make people lazy by itself, it rather encourages people to spend money instead of hoarding it. In practice, stable governments don't use inflation to finance the welfare system, they use taxes instead.
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But don't let pesky facts get in the way of a good hate-on.
Alternate response: Are you saying poor people shouldn't be allowed any creature comforts whatsoever?
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If you have to have it explained to you...
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Hard to predict the future, but as a new wet-behind-the-ears college grad, I would rather risk the odds of explaining the 6 month job with a full belly and a tank of gas, than explain the 24-30 months of unemployment that I experienced right after college. Bird in the hand, and all that.
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And yet, we're talking about the philosophical rigor of a Hollywood screenwriter...
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There are actually plenty of morons in Google as well.
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Inside jokes are not funny outside.
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In this case I was woefully ignorant. I shudder to think of Rand being treated as a serious philosopher, but TIL.
Either way, I think my argument still stands if you remove the word "only." I think it's silly to expect academic-grade philosophical rigor from what is fundamentally a piece of literary criticism.
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Any time I ask, "What's the flaw in this reasoning?" and get a reply like "Everything!" or "Only morons would believe that!" or "All the experts say it's wrong!", I interpret that to mean "I can't actually give you a rational argument, but it would make me feel uncomfortable if it was true, so I have to believe that it's false."
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Somebody doesn't get that welfare is a way for the government to invest in its citizens. I've had to use food stamps, pell grants, and sundry other Government aid to get through college as a teenage parent. I'm currently working retail, but I'll graduate and find a real job soon enough. Then I'm sure I'll be paying enough in taxes to pay all of it back, and more.
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I didn't say that if you don't follow Ayn Rand's philosophy you must be a socialist. I don't see where you get such an idea from my statement. I was criticizing the practice of "rebutting" a philosophical idea by amateur psychoanalysis of its adherents rather than debating the merits. Thus, I was attempting to show the emptiness of this line of argument by applying it to a competing philosophy. I didn't say that the example I used was the only possible competing philosophy. Ayn Rand's philosophy is generally described as being an extreme form of capitalism. The opposite of capitalism is generally understood to be socialism. Thus I used what most people would consider the opposite for my example. This made a good example, I thought, because the most vocal critics of Ayn Rand are generally socialists. That does not mean that the only critics of Ayn Rand are socialists. I disagree with many of Rand's ideas and I am not a socialist. I suppose I could have made the same point by using as an example a philosophy or theory that has nothing to do with economics or politics. But I was trying to use an example that would describe a large percentage -- though, I reiterate, by no means all -- of the people who would agree with the original attack on Rand.
If someone says that Mr X must be French because he speaks English with an accent, and I say that this conclusion does not follow and note that Mr Y also speaks English with an accent and he is from Germany, this does not mean that I think that Mr X must be from Germany or that I think that France and Germany are the only countries in the world. I am just using two examples.
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I had something similar happen to me in an interview once. I was given a question by the first interviewer (let's call him Dave) that went like "given a set of data with characteristics X, can you create a function to determine fact Y about this data?" When I answered, he added "and can you make it work within constraint Z?" After a few attempts, I couldn't think of a way to satisfy the constraint, and he said that most people couldn't, and here's the answer.
I got invited back for a second interview, this time by Bill. Bill asked me the same question, so I gave him the answer that Dave had given me. He looked amazed and said that I was the first person they'd ever interviewed who could answer that right the first time. I said, "well, that's because Dave went over it with me on my first interview," and we both had a good laugh about it.
He then proceeded to ask me a bunch of other questions about programming, which I was able to answer to his satisfaction. I ended up getting the offer, and I accepted it.
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While I agree that socialism was never going to work because of its underlying essence, I don't agree with your analysis of "its underlying essence." The concept of "From everyone according to their ability, to everyone according to their need" is quite sound, and as has already been pointed out, need is a very different thing from desire. Had this principle actually been implemented by some socialist system, they would have flourished.
The true essential problem is that socialism expects that The People will find it in them to abandon selfishness en masse for the sake of the greater good, while also explicitly denying and condemning the only facet of human nature that has been shown, throughout history, to be strong enough to motivate people to do so: the religious impulse.
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Hmm, so as best as I can figure out, you are saying that you think that living off government benefits is bad for the individual and bad for society, but if someone else says that living off government benefits is bad for the individual and bad for society, they are whiners and screamers and lunatics.
Admin
If you really think this, I can't help but wonder if you have ever read them. What Ayn Rand calls "capitalism" is nothing like the principles that Adam Smith described. If you go around advocating the ideas of Smith's capitalism these days, there's a pretty good chance that modern "free market proponents" (influenced by Rand) would call you a dirty commie.
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I think you may have made a huge mistake...
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How interesting. When I first heard this problem many years ago, I thought of a single circle around the south pole. Namely:
Start 1+pi/2 miles from the south pole. (It's not necessary to say in what direction from the south pole, as the only direction from the south pole is north.) Let's call that point X. Walk south 1 mile. You are now pi/2 miles from the south pole. Let's call that point Y. Walk 1 mile west and you make a complete circle around the south pole -- a circle with radius pi/2 has a circumference of 1 -- bringing you back to point Y. Walk 1 mile north and you are back to X, you're starting point.
But I guess you're saying that if the problem is understood to allow you making multiple laps around a tiny circle -- which I guess isn't ruled out -- then you could start closer to the south pole. If, say, you start 1+pi/4 miles from the pole, then you walk south 1 mile, walk west 1 mile means 2 complete laps around the pole, then 1 mile north to your starting point. So under those rules there would be an infinite number of concentric circles that you could start from. Of course in practice, eventually we are talking about walking in a 2 inch circle many thousands of times, etc. I'd never thought of that before. Who says this web site is just a time waster?
Does it count if you start exactly 1 mile from the south pole, walk 1 mile south, spin on your heals a few thousand times, and then walk 1 mile north?
Admin
Let's consider this post as if it was intended seriously.
I don't know of any advocate of capitalism who condones acquiring wealth by "foul" means. If Bill got rich by breaking into people's houses and stealing their wealth, or by making false representations about what he was selling and so tricking them out of their wealth, etc, then he should be caught and punished and the money returned. Even the most extreme libertarians agree that contracts should be enforced and theft and fraud punished.
So let's assume Bill acquired his wealth legitimately: by his own hard work and ingenuity.
So now, in your scenario, he no longer does work himself, but instead hires others to do the work and then resells the fruit of their labor at a profit. Okay. There are three possibilities here.
One: Bill is managing the operation. That is, he is making plans, dividing up the labor, co-ordinating efforts, etc. While this is not grunt-force labor, it is still a job that needs to be done, and he deserves to be compensated for it.
Two: Bill is assuming risk. No one knows for sure if the venture will be successful or not. So Bill pays people to do the work. If the venture fails, they have still been paid. They lose nothing from the failure. They go on to get other jobs. Bill is out the cash that was paid to them. So it's only fair that if the venture succeeds, Bill should get some profit to compensate him for being willing to take the risk. After all, why is it that most people don't start their own business? Surely it is because they are afraid to take the risk. They know that if the business fails, they could lose everything they own. They'd rather go to work for someone else and let that person take the risk. But why should the business owner be willing to take the risk of losing money unless there is some hope of gaining money?
(Might be a combination of 1 and 2, of course.)
Three: Bill contributes absolutely nothing of value. He just skims x% off the top of everyone else's income.
But in case 3, how does Bill keep this up? Why would anyone go to work for him if he provides no useful service? It doesn't work to say that they have no choice because Bill has all the money. If that was really the case, then to whom does he sell the products that his serfs create? Bill may have more money than anyone else, but he doesn't have all of it. So someone else could start a competing business. If it's really true that Bill hires Fred to work for him, pays Fred 4 gold coins, and then sells the fruit of Fred's work to someone else for 10 gold coins and keeps 6 for himself, then why can't Fred just quit working for Bill and start his own business, selling the same work for, say, 5 gold coins. Now he makes more money than he did before. He can easily win away many of Bill's customers because he's charging half the price for the same product.
The only way Bill can keep this going is if he can use force to prevent people from competing against him. That is, if he can make himself the government or get the government to support him. Then the 6 gold coins that Bill skims off the top are called "taxes" or "subsidies" or "stimulus". But now we're not talking about capitalism any more; we're talking about socialism.
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Of course, I can't read his mind, but I can read what's written (note the quoted paragraph), which seems to be a lost art in these debates ...
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Furthermore, if you are to introduce "pure capitalism" in this real world, you'll start from a distribution of wealth accrued over centuries of often unjst behaviour. So even if the system itself was fair, how would you at least give a fair starting point to everyone? By taking all existing wealth from everybody (and maybe redistribute it), so they all can start the same? (I guess so. :)
Four: He has a monopoly, e.g. on that island he has acquired (even if in a fair way) all drinking water which everyone needs to survive. He now can literally force anyone to pay him whatever he wants or die.Admin
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Simply claiming that "this has nothing to do with selling yourself into slavery" does not make it true. That's essentially what you're proposing. (Technically, it sounds a lot more like indentured servitude, but with one important distinction: indentured servitude was for a fixed period, and then it's over. You propose that the sponsor should have some claim on "all you earn later in life," without any time limit. That sure sounds like slavery to me.)
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No - we'd all be equally poor. The difference is that everything would cost a lot of dollars (e.g. item that costs $1 today would cost $100,000). This is called inflation and it has happened many times in history.
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Can we please get back to being funny?
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If I was the president, I wouldn't discontinue feeding the poor or even those that do not want to work. However, I would not give them a penny. Instead, they would need to drag their ass to a public kitchen and consume their meal there. Sick and disabled could have their friends bring food to them, but proper documentation would have to exist. Those who don't have their houses, I'd provide barracks for. The last essential thing is clothing and basic healthcare. Basically, minimum expenses.
Today's government does similar but with less effect: they issue food stamps and real money, which a large portion of people spend on beer and drugs - and they again don't have a meal, and they go out and beg and steal. My way, they'd at least have a meal every day. Basic life - but if you want more, find a job.
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[quote user="foo"][quote user="JustSomeGuy"]Socialism was never going to work because of its underlying essence: "from everyone according to their ability, to everyone according to their need".
The reason it would never work is because, while resources are limited, desires are not.[/quote]Need != desire.
That doesn't matter. The reason it fails is because most people stop being willing to work more than others around them, which results in less resources to share with those that don't or can't work, which circularly affects those that work hard because they start getting less. At the end, the system collapses to extremely rich (who are mostly criminals or ex-criminals) and extremely poor.
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So, what does that prove? That you found one honest recruiter? Nobody really meant that 100% of recruiters are dicks. Almost 100% of requiters are dicks. Better?
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Yes - poor who depend on gifts (grants) solely because they do not want to work should not be allowed anything else but basic meals (nothing fancy here), basic clothing (again, nothing fancy, second-hand donations), and basic lodging (minor leaks ok). They should in no circumstance receive cash - even if this means creating more jobs to serve those bums. Less cash bums have, less chances they spend it on beer and perhaps that'll result in little less crime (beer and drugs make you feel invincible). And, blah-blah... The point is: no, they shouldn't get any luxury.
Sick and handicapped excluded, with proper proof and rigorous approval process (you better not have a leg then come to me claim disability pretending to have a bad-back problem).