unreality

izzy: you're not getting what UtF was saying. It's definitely possible that a billionaire could hire some people to dig a pointless hole and refill it. Also possible that a billionaire could hire someone to sit in a cage for 40 hours a week paid at 1000 dollars an hour... with no scientists observing, nothing with a point. Entirely pointless. That's what UtF is trying to say. You were trying to attach a purpose to the prototypical purposeless job he was describing, which misses the point entirely. That doesn't mean the point is correct though; if I'm a billionaire I should have the right to hire someone to sit in a cage. It's my money. I'm sure I could find someone to "supply" the "production" (aka sitting in a cage for me) if I paid good enough cash, which of course I could if I wanted to. We could agree on a price, a price that I think is appropriate value for me funding this pointless task. The *point* is that even a *pointless* task has a *point* if someone is financing it. If I'm a billionaire and pay Izzy 7 million dollars to spin around in a circle until she gets so dizzy she throws up, I can do that if I want to, regardless of whether this is "productive for society". If I was a shady conspiracy mastermind and hired assassins to take down major world leaders, I could do it because money is a universal exchange, even if it was extremely unproductive for society. We agree though that we don't want our government to do such pointless things with our money, hence the existence of this topic in the first place I don't really know why we're arguing about this anymore. And regarding the TV/farmer/builder thing, let's make a new scenario that's hopefully a lot simpler: [read this whole scenario before responding, i actually agree with UtF in one respect but not another] A post-plane-crash island society. 20 seashells were found but they ended up distributed like this: Mrs. Peabody - 10 seashells Mr. One, Mr. Two, Mr. Three, Mr Four, Mr Five - 2 seashells each but everyone wants a shelter from the monsoon rains! Only Mr. Three (a professional shelter builder) knows how to build shelters. Mrs. Peabody pays him 3 seashells to make an amazing shelter for her. But Mr. Five wants a shelter too now, and Mr. Three takes pity and agrees to build Mr. Five a shelter for 1 seashell (if it's kept on the DL). So Mr. Five gives Mr. Three his seashell and in return is built a shelter. Mr. Three now has 4 seashells, Mr. Ten has 1, and Mr. Ten has a shelter which is valued at 1 seashell. There's still a total of 20 seashells in circulation, but Mr. Three could build as many shelters as time and resources allow (assume we've got plenty of trees and time on this island, and that the seashell price of tree wood is currently negligible on the market). He could build one for himself. He could build a communal shelter. If he was real nice he could build everyone shelters. He could build no shelters. He could charge exorbitant rates for shelters, or whatever. He's got a shelter monopoly. So Mr. Five drank too much coconut milk and is feeling a little reckless. He wants to destroy something: now he has a seashell and a shelter. He knows that if he burns his shelter down, society would lose a shelter and he would lose a shelter. He could pay his 1 seashell to Mr. Three to build another though - then the same number of seashells (20) would exist, and the shelter has been rebuilt (minus the labor, resources, time of equal value, charged to Mr. Three, who makes up for it with the 1 seashell he receives). < That's *IF* Mr. Three decides to rebuild it (see last few paragraphs). But if Mr. Five decides instead to smash the seashell, now he only has his shelter, and there are only 19 seashells in circulation, reducing everyone's collective purchashing power and the society's net worth. He could probably sell his shelter but he can't get the seashell back into society, just personally for himself. The only validity UtF's point has is for items that are too priceless to have a proper price or to be re-made with any amount of money. For example, the Mona Lisa. Would you rather burn 10 million dollars or the Mona Lisa? In this case, the Mona Lisa is not reparable nor re-make-able with the cash. It would be a similar situation if there was no more wood left on the island and Mr. Three no longer had the ability to make shelters. That would make them more precious to burn than money. But while an item is still "non-priceless" aka reproducible then it can be valued and is equivalent to currency (just that actual currency is more universal and stabilizes the barter system as dawh has said). edit for typo

no, you have a different illusion of how money works It's ironic but it seems from your definition of money that you would be a socialist. But that's not the case. If you really were a libertarian you would know that someone can spend money on whatever they want to. If I was a billionaire, I could hire hole-diggers to build a hole for 500 million and then close it up for the 500 million if I want to. I can do that if I wanted to because I have the money to pay for it and the supply of workers willing to work. And yes the billion does go into the economy because (no matter how "worthless" you personally think digging a hole is) the workers were paid for their work at the rate agreed upon. newsflash: http://www.usdebtclock.org/ yes but you missed MY point - I said I agree with this, IF we knew that the money WAS going to those people, instead of elsewhere we didn't want it. Really? Could you really if the time came? If some government spooks came to your door and said they need to either destroy you or the buildings of NYC, would you comply with that? And if you couldn't bring yourself to kill yourself for a bunch of structures, how can you expect anyone else to? If you decided that JarZe was worth 3 thousand and 4 dollars, what happens if there's a surgery to save him that's 3 thousand and 5? [edit = nevermind, just saw the post above mine. I'm glad you at least recognize that valuing a human exactly is stupid] Would you personally authorize letting him die? Would you stake human lives on the idea that your economic ideals are correct? I do disagree; that's how it is. You're missing the point of money: exchange. Exchanging goods and services for a currency that is mutually trusted to be usable elsewhere for roughly equally market-valued goods and services, etc. Let's break down your paragraph: "By burning it you're not actually burning work and effort." This directly contradicts what you just told dawh: "Do you still not understand the concept of an amount of money representing an amount of work?" Moving on, "that person can say, "Hey, I want that mansion," and will be able to get that mansion by giving away the money" This is where your money=debt idea doesn't hold up; nobody is actually in actual debt and thus nobody is "required" in some way to sell their mansion. Even if I offer them 10 trillion dollars they could decide to keep their mansion. "Thus, by burning that money he acted very selflessly" No, just stupidly because now he has nothing that others want. It doesn't somehow help the others; it just hurts himself. It could even hurt the others because if they couldn't barter for something they wanted because the person with the stuff they wanted didn't want their stuff then they would have to exchange their goods with the money because the money was something the person with the goods they wanted did want. But now they can't because it's gone. By the way, if you ever feel the need to act selflessly and burn your money, just hand it over to me and I'll say I burned it for you Onto your final attempt: " the farmer used his 9 dollars to pay the other 9 people to build him some houses. They build the houses and then he burns them down. Now what? The money is distributed back evenly to those 9 people and the farmer is broke (same as burning the money scenario), except that now everybody in society spent their time and energy and efforts working many hours to build houses for this farmer. Yet, the farmer destroyed the houses that they created. " This is incorrect. You're not realizing the net sum of value is the same. The builder still got paid 9 dollars for his labor. After that, he could care less whether the farmer destroys his new house. If he had just burned the money the scenario would be like this: Notice any similarities with the previous spoiler? Of course you do. Once the builder's labor has been valued at 9 dollars, it becomes as meaningful as the currency, at least in the scope of this exchange. If the farmer burns his money instead of hiring the builder, the builder can take his time and effort elsewhere and still make 9 dollars. You agree with that because that was your point. Yet in the first case the end result is exactly the same (9 dollars to the builder, nothing to the farmer). ~~~~~~~~~~ Again you're not realizing that in a true capitalist society, if I have a billion dollars I can spend it how I want. I can have people dig a hole then fill it in, and be damned if anyone like you thinks there was no value in that. I obviously thought there was value in it because I paid for it to happen. It doesn't matter that Use the Force didn't think so; what mattered was that I valued the task at 1 billion dollars so I paid 1 billion dollars for it.

nobody has yet pointed out how ridiculous this scenario is, so I will. Your main justification for not spending the billion on the operation was that the billion could be spent on saving thousands or millions of lives (say, by feeding the hungry). However, in scenario B, you save the human lives (and Izzy mistook your scenario by thinking about it practically in terms of "refugees" and things, so she missed the point too) but demolish the buildings. So what? Let's say that the buildings amassed to a billion dollars worth of building-ness (for comparison's sake). So in scenario B, all humans are saved, and a billion dollars worth of damage happens. In scenario A, a human is *randomly* chosen (again Izzy missed that part too, another factor leading her to fall into your trap and choose A over B) and killed. And the buildings survive - a billion dollars worth of buildings. But this isn't the same as saving thousands or millions of lives of hungry people!!!! This just means buildings fall or don't fall. You might react by saying "well if the buildings dont fall it frees up a billion dollars to be used on hungry people, but if they do fall, they have to repair them, thus costing a billion dollars to save the person" but with your scenario this is erroneous. It would probably cost much MUCH more than the original cost/value to rebuild. And/or they may not even attempt to attempt to rebuild... which means there's a billion right there to go to 'hungry people' as you say it would (but human greed probably trumps that anyway). My point is that buildings are not the same thing as other lives being saved. They don't translate directly. So that was a ridiculous scenario. A much better scenario was your original one, with the operation. Save someone for a billion dollars; or use that to save thousands of people. I have a few points to add on that issue: (1) a billion dollars paid for the operation is not like wasting the money. The money goes into the hospital system and that large an amount of cash will flow around a lot, refinancing costs of the surgery and causing a backwards domino effect, a positive effect. It's not just like "alright take out a suitcase of 1 billion dollars and BURN it then we'll get started on the operation". It's paying back for services rendered. That's really not relevant though, it's a side point; (2) it's not likely nor realistic to have such a clear-cut choice. If it's really the government controlling health care here and they tax everyone to get a billion dollars for the operation; but 'we the people' (with Use the Force as their leader) rise up and make an outcry and tell the government to not spend the billion on the dying person; this does not make it likely that now the government will use that billion to save a bunch of hungry displaced people in Africa. They'll use it somewhere else in some other program that's probably not doing as good as saving a life, or it will get swallowed into big-government-beaurocracy and never really be seen again by the circulatory economy. Who knows. (3) but if (highly unrealistically) it really did come down between saving person or ten thousand people, it's a problem of the lesser of two evils. Most people would save the 10,000 people. We agree here. So what point are you trying to make? The real mistake you make is assigning a dollar value to human life. That's what allows you to take a certain amount of money and compare like that. But in real life it's never so clear cut. You can't take a billion dollars and say "alright am i gonna save one person or ten thousand people with this money?" that makes no sense at all, I'm sorry

SLEEK

LOCUS LURID

basically less extreme me You are slightly to the "left" economically, believing the government should run and regulate some aspects of the otherwise free market. You are like thirdway moderate-ish libertarian, meaning you seek personal freedom, making your own choices, and finding your own happiness - you prefer individuality over commonality, even if that means sometimes you fail or sometimes others do better than you in various ways for various reasons. You are pacifist but not extremely, you probably believe that sometimes it's necessary to go to war. You are culturally liberal so you are in favor of society's progression into a new/better future with things like gay rights, technology rights, etc.

about me, according to said quiz: "You are a center-left social libertarian. Left: 2.06, Libertarian: 7.65" Foreign Policy -8.72 (pacifist / non interventionalist) Culture -8.75 (culturally liberal)

yeah t8t8t8 should get +5 for that because we agreed that linguistics don't apply, just logic: (in other words, logically you have to assume that even sykzr could be a word unless PROVEN otherwise) Izzy - 381 Glycereine – 288 Unreality - 284 t8t8t8 - 190 Plainglazed - 185 Framm - 177 Vineetrika - 154 Dawh - 97 woon - 94 NickFleming- 89 golfjunkie - 72 Cherry Lane - 40 blahblah99 - 28 yuiop - 21 Abhisk - 20 PVRoot - 20 JarZe - 20 Filly - 19 Prince Marth - 15 DudleyDude - 15 and if no one else wants to host, i will, but if someone else wants to, please take it

BLACK (if 1, the third letter is A because BLOCK had 0, but if 0, third letter is NOT a, so because TOAST cant be T (twist) or ST (twist) or middle A (black) that would leave the second O) in other words: if BLACK is 1, third letter is A or if BLACK is 0, second letter is O

agreeing with phillip's request for clarification

IDIOT IMAGE

RAVEN

has there been a consensus yet on whether to accept the kinds of conditional statements that nickfleming is saying?

what are you talking about? He never said that the name "reverse mafia" implies a reversal in rules or game structure, just in the way we perceive who the bad/good guys are. As far as I understand it's a basic mafia game with the FBI being the smaller baddie faction infiltrating the larger Mafia 'goodies'. What wouldn't work about that? I think it's a great idea and when NickFleming gets more experience and equipped enough to host it, he should do so

it's not a paradox as I said earlier because while he intuits that x will win, he logics that z will win. He's fighting his gut feeling with statistical analysis

we can never be completely rational and objective, it's impossible to separate our higher level mind from our lower level mind entirely.

his intuition still matters because his logical prediction is a metacognition based on his own intuition

what do you mean by cancel? no not without defining prediction. his BELIEF/INTUITION/GUT/etc tells him x his PREDICTION/REASONING/etc tells him z his "prediction" is only verified in the event of z winning. If x wins then he needs to consider this datum in the future for future predictions but nevertheless his prediction was wrong (though his instinct was correct in that instance). In other words I think his "prediction" is only what he actually predicts, eg what he logically overrode his intuition with, aka, Z

There are at least two ways to look at information: "intuitively" based on evolutionary/instinctual/early-learned shortcuts about the practical world we grow up and survive in. Intuition can lead us to believe both correct and incorrect things - a lot of times the incorrect beliefs happen when we apply intuition to something not originally covered by intuition or in any other situation where something might be "non-intuitive" or where having correct intuition about that subject was not advantageous for our survival. Intuition is tied in a lot with emotion as well. We'll say that our main character's decisions were mostly based on intuition about the teams and his previous memories of games all kind of loosely pooled into binary decisions. That's what you implied anyway. Now realizing with logic that he's been consistently INCORRECT, we can look at the second way to look at information: logic, reasoning, etc - a higher-order evaluation of what we perceive, striving to be independent of biological wetware and instead find truth not just convenience. So with this logic he can now invert his intuitions. So intuitively he still feels that one team will win. But with logic he can (if he's strong-willed enough) override this intuition to do what in the past gave him a more statistical likelihood of guessing correctly, even if it goes against what he might feel

I hope that comes true for you. And seeing as sleep and dreams are still scientifically unexplained (at least not completely) I suppose that's a valid assumption, although your individual assumption here can't really be correct because of brain activity experienced during dreams in REM sleep. Ironically last night (while I couldn't sleep) I read a lot of national geographic articles on sleep as well as a short book about sleep, dreams and biological rhythms. Brain activity lights up like crazy during REM sleep (which is when we dream mostly) as opposed to the gentle calm of deep wave sleep. The suggestion is that in dreams, the brain is attempting to understand/categorize/etc the experiences it's had during the day. Because of the nature of going limp and unaware of surroundings for many hours, sleep - and all that time required for the sleep - has to be extremely advantageous and necessary for survival otherwise evolution would have quickly weeded it out. And we do know (from sleep-awakeness studies with rats and to a lesser extent with humans; and from studying human patients with FFI (fatal familial insomnia)) that if we don't sleep we die. It probably serves all kinds of functions among them: revitalizing, resting certain organs, processing chemicals, understanding and categorizing information, etc. But as to how exactly dreams happen well a chemical is secreted during the REM that paralyzes our muscles. I don't know if a study has been done to counteract this to see what would happen but the assumption at least is that we would act out our dreams if we weren't paralyzed. There is some evidence that this may be what's happening with sleepwalkers. Studies like this could have the potential of directly disproving your theory that the mind is elsewhere while dreaming. Not to mention that we've linked certain areas of the brain to certain thoughts, emotions, desires, needs, personality traits, etc. And many of these light up during our dream experiences. One part of the brain (the thalamus maybe?) blocks incoming sensory data during sleep so as to not distract our minds from things it's doing. Also not to not-mention but a chemical tryptamine called DMT excreted during sleep may be the cause or catalyst (or something) of the visual/audial/etc simulation of our dreams. There are other chemicals that can influence the brain into thinking it's "out of itself" as well while all the while just altering the senses of vision, hearing, sensation, even taste, etc and the kinesthetic/vestibular ("where are my body parts in relation to me") sense. I never said it wasn't good; i said it was Dan Brown's worst. Although all of his books are highly formulaic and not very original (as well as full of misleading "facts"), i'd have to say that 'Digital Fortress' or 'Angels & Demons' are his best. He's a really good suspense writer.

that was his worst book by far but not because of that

UtF you lament the stealing of money from the rich in the form of taxes - I understand this. But you can never have an evil-free government, so what's the lesser of two evils: taking some money from the rich (that most rich people are willing to give anyway as you've said) and redistributing it OR letting millions starve and die. Sure taxes are stealing, just with a lot of beaurocracy around it. But in my opinion stealing is less of an evil than killing