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Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?

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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by TFLYTSNBN   » Thu Apr 09, 2020 12:30 pm

TFLYTSNBN

The E wrote:
TFLYTSNBN wrote:There you go being a moron again. Yes the testing rate in the US is half the testing rate in Germany. However; your testing rate is only a bit more than 1% of your population. Both countries have high enough testing rates to be reasonably confident in their infection rate. Your suggestion that the US is grossly understating our infection rate because we aren't testing enough is absurd. You are the hate mongering bigot.


Well, no.

See, the thing is, because we have a functional health care system that actively encourages being used, anyone who exhibited serious enough symptoms or symptoms close to covid got tested, which in turn means that the number of people who die to covid without being tested in some way is going to be relatively small. Therefore, the "Total deaths" column in the current data set is reasonably accurate to what the actual death toll is.
Secondly, we've been testing harder for longer. The disease has officially been in Germany and the US for about the same amount of time, plus or minus a few days, but because we were doing more testing earlier, we were able to get a more accurate picture of the situation and isolate people earlier. It seems likely to me that the number of undetected cases, and more importantly undetected deaths, in the US is much higher than it is in Germany because of those factors.

And that leaves aside the completely unavoidable fact that, on a per capita basis, the number of cases that ended in death is almost twice in the US what it is in Germany.

So, in conclusion: Because of mismanagement and structural issues, the raw numbers for the US are not as reliable as european data is.


And let's not lose sight of one very important metric here: Right now, 2349 people in Germany have died to COVID-19, over the entire course of this pandemic thus far; at this point in time, we expect about 150 people to die each day.
In the US, going by the raw data which, as pointed out above, is not really reliable, 7 times as many people have died. Right now, over 1000 people are expected to die today. Your health care system, which some people still, unfathomly, believe to be the best in the world, is failing at its main reason for existance.
Please, TFLY, explain to me how twice the number of deaths per capita, almost 7 times the number of deaths total, shows how you are actually doing great in comparison.



The only mistake that the US made was to wait to long before imposing a travel ban on diseased Eurotrash:

https://dnyuz.com/2020/04/08/most-new-y ... omes-show/
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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by The E   » Thu Apr 09, 2020 12:40 pm

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TFLYTSNBN wrote:The only mistake that the US made was to wait to long before imposing a travel ban on diseased Eurotrash:


Awww, look at you, trying to do a "look over there" maneuver every time you can't actually retort with pertinent facts.
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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by Dilandu   » Thu Apr 09, 2020 1:05 pm

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TFLYTSNBN wrote:

The only mistake that the US made was to wait to long before imposing a travel ban on diseased Eurotrash:



With that last desperate defense of Führerbunker, I think, we could move right to a signing of TFLYTSNBN's capitulation.
------------------------------

Oh well, if shortening the front is what the Germans crave,
Let's shorten it to very end - the length of Fuhrer's grave.

(Red Army lyrics from 1945)
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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by n7axw   » Thu Apr 09, 2020 2:22 pm

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The E wrote:
n7axw wrote:There is much to what you say, but I think you are over simplifying. So here are a few thoughts.


I am writing a post on forums.davidweber.net, not an economics doctoral thesis.

Upward mobility is still possible here. The key to that is education. Skip out on education and upward mobility vanishes. Even a couple of years in a tech school can help a lot. But all too many young people skip out on education for low paying jobs and then end up stuck. And education is expensive. Mitigating this situation somewhat is the growth of online education making it possible to obtain a degree by working at home and supporting a family at the same time.


Upward mobility is real, yes. Education is a path to it, yes.

But it's not an equal-opportunity path. How successful you are is largely determined by how sucessful your parents were; It takes an extraordinary amount of drive and talent to compensate for a lack of money.

Online education, as great as it can be, lacks things that an in-person education can provide: namely, an environment where you interact with others and develop ideas and connections, so even if you have attained a degree from totallynotascamuniversity.com, you won't have the connections someone else may have.

I disagree that public ownership of the means of production is a good goal. You incentivize capable people by encouraging them to get ahead by doing that to which their hand turns and allowing them to enjoy the fruit of their labor.


And this is where you misunderstand what the phrase means.
Let's define some terms. "Means of production" means anything that a worker needs to turn his capacity for work into something useful to others. In the classic industrial sense, that's stuff like a workbench, tools, access to raw materials, anything that allows a person to practice their trade.
Looking further, it also includes things like access to health care, access to housing, access to food, access to education; a worker that can't stay healthy and can't stay up to date will not be able to perform as well as one who can.

In other words, "public ownership of the means of production" does not mean that you can't own a house, or tools, or a car, or have a good meal: It just means that the tools are available to you out of a public fund if you need them. It doesn't mean that you can't sell what you produce to others, you absolutely can.

What public ownership seeks to avoid is create a situation where people are required to sell their labour to someone who holds access to the means of production over them. It seeks to discourage rent-seeking and middle-men, people whose main business model consists of finding a road to put a toll booth on. This is in direct opposition to neoliberal capitalism, which encourages rent-seeking.

There has been no successful society that has not honored that basic law of human nature. Socialist societies place too much attention to how the pie is divided and not enough to growing the pie. And, the only way for socialist societies to do capital formation is through totalitarian forms of control.


And this is why I describe myself as a social democrat, but do continue.

Marx refers to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The old Soviet Union tried that and eventually it collapsed. China eventually had to introduce a private sector to avoid collapse.


No, the Soviet Union did not try that, neither did China. Both of those societies were built around a revolution led by a vanguard party; the idea was that this group of enlightened people would lead the populace through the various stages of the marxist revolution into actual communism, but guess what? They never did. Instead, they turned into oligarchies organized along lines of assumed ideological purity (which, come to think of it, is oddly similar to a theocracy....)

Sooo, what about us? Capitalism does have its flaws. For one thing, It's predicated on pure greed which can devolve into a nasty form of social Darwinism. Capital formation is all very well, but when it progresses to the point where a tiny group of people control roughly half the country's wealth, things have gone too far. And matters get worse when Washington is unwilling to enforce laws put in place to deal with this. Capitalism really works best when it operates in a regulated environment where the laws on trusts and monopoly are enforced and our markets are regulated to keep the high rollers from rolling over everybody else.


I would add to that that it also requires that workers are empowered and confident in their ability to have their demands and requirements taken seriously.

So to conclude, consider the following about a cow. The Capitalist says, "Stay away from my cow!" The Communist and Socialist say, "Let's shoot the Capitalist, butcher the cow and divide up the meat!" The Liberal says, "Let's milk the cow and skim the top enough to share, but leaving enough for the Capitalist to prosper, thus encouraging capital formation and investment." I am a liberal.


See, I think your little simile isn't very well-constructed, mostly because it misrepresents almost everyone in it.
The capitalist would actually say something along the lines of "This is my cow. I am the only one who has any right to its body, its labour or the milk it produces, but I will sell you a limited-time license to look at it standing on the field for a buck. You want a liter of milk? Well, that'll be a tenner."
The communist would (after shooting the capitalist) say "Right then, this is our cow now. Everyone can look at it for free, but we'll have to work out how to divide up the milk amongst us and set up some sort of feeding schedule; so if everyone who needs milk could form an orderly queue over there and everyone who has hay could form up over there, that'll be great".
I, as a social democrat, would say to the Capitalist "Okay, nice offer, but we both know that your prices are ridiculous. So why don't we agree to something where anyone can still afford the milk but you can still make a bit of profit and we do not shoot you."

And as I read your post so are you. We both want enough wealth held back to care for the folks who for whatever reason can't compete, knocking the rougher edges off of Capitalism's heedless ways.


The part where we seemingly differ is that I believe that this is something that, ultimately, needs to be backed by a threat of force. We can't rely on capitalists being reasonable or non-greedy, so we need to make the cost of greed high enough that people who can make rational decisions are discouraged from engaging in it too much.

Perhaps socialism is a term that is ok in Europe. But on this side of the pond it is a poison pill, most wisely avoided,


The stigma that word has in american political discussions is something I consider silly and will poke at whenever I can. After all, it has such a nice triggering effect on people, you can get people like TFLY and Imaginos to make such magnificent fools of themselves, it's quite a sight to see.


I understood what you meant by socialism. I never intended to suggest we couldn't own homes, etc.

You are approaching things from a workers point of view which is valid. It needs to be done. But are you paying sufficient attention to capital formation? Someone needs to build those factories!

I was a bit amused by what you did with my illustration. You criticized it and modified it in a very friendly way. My only additional thought is rather then focusing on dividing the milk, give the Capitalist a tax break if the cow has a calf. That way there is more milk for both the Capitalist and society. That is called capital formation. The truth is that illustration came off the top of my head. I wasn't doing a doing a doctoral dissertation either! :lol:

Threat of force? Humm... sounds counterproductive to me... How about a proper progressive tax code Instead? That is a lot more nuanced than a gun and more productive.

Amen to the American attitude toward that word socialism being silly. But if you run for office, you better take that attitude seriously or you won't get elected or enact a program. Even the word "liberal" is a borderline dirty word around here. But I do live in a very conservative part of the country.

A final thought. I still say that if we talk about a pure socialist system, it won't work without totalitarian ways to implement it. You are right to point out that the elite of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union was very corrupt... kleptocrats, really. What the Russians ended up with was not a pure socialism at all but rigid state control imposed from above. Stalin forced the peasants on to collective farms only to see the productivity of the land decline and end up with less food. A wry Russian proverb... "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work." The sad thing about this is they seem to acquired a new set of kleptocrats, oligarchs enriching themselves at public expense. What you are in the midst of can be described best as a mixed system, an essentially capitalist system with some socialist ideas grafted in to humanize things, preventing the businessmen from regarding their workers as disposable pawns.

Don

-
When any group seeks political power in God's name, both religion and politics are instantly corrupted.
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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by Daryl   » Thu Apr 09, 2020 6:59 pm

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Regarding political systems, an incident that was reported then hushed up was a major traffic accident in Beijing several years ago. About a dozen supercars (Ferraris, lambos, McLarens etc), had a big pile up while street racing. Some of the passengers were naked young actresses, and the drivers were 20 something sons of senior officials, n their personal cars. A totalitarian dictatorship, not really an egalitarian socialist utopia.
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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by The E   » Fri Apr 10, 2020 2:20 am

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n7axw wrote:You are approaching things from a workers point of view which is valid. It needs to be done. But are you paying sufficient attention to capital formation? Someone needs to build those factories!


No factory is ever built by a single person.

I live in a relatively old "Arbeitersiedlung" ("Worker's settlement", as a rough translation). It was built between 1911 and 1930 around a gym built by workers who were unable to gain admittance to the city gyms that were around back then; the workers pooled their skills and ressources to build a number of apartment complexes, all administered by an organization founded and run by the workers.

Similarly, there are now maker spaces, public workshops owned and run by communities, in nearly every major city. Point is, you don't need a single person fronting the money; people can work together to come up with the funds necessary.

Threat of force? Humm... sounds counterproductive to me... How about a proper progressive tax code Instead? That is a lot more nuanced than a gun and more productive.


You can't have taxes without law enforcement, which in turn requires force. By all means, use the carrot instead of the stick, positive reinforcement is better than negative reinforcement in a lot of cases -- but if you unilaterally decide to leave the stick at home and never bring it out, you have already capitulated. Antisocial behaviour like profiteering and rent-seeking needs to be checked and, if necessary, stomped hard.

Amen to the American attitude toward that word socialism being silly. But if you run for office, you better take that attitude seriously or you won't get elected or enact a program. Even the word "liberal" is a borderline dirty word around here. But I do live in a very conservative part of the country.


Good thing I am not running for office in the US then :P

A final thought. I still say that if we talk about a pure socialist system, it won't work without totalitarian ways to implement it. You are right to point out that the elite of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union was very corrupt... kleptocrats, really. What the Russians ended up with was not a pure socialism at all but rigid state control imposed from above. Stalin forced the peasants on to collective farms only to see the productivity of the land decline and end up with less food. A wry Russian proverb... "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work." The sad thing about this is they seem to acquired a new set of kleptocrats, oligarchs enriching themselves at public expense. What you are in the midst of can be described best as a mixed system, an essentially capitalist system with some socialist ideas grafted in to humanize things, preventing the businessmen from regarding their workers as disposable pawns.


Yes, that's what social democracy is.
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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by TFLYTSNBN   » Fri Apr 10, 2020 12:20 pm

TFLYTSNBN

Dilandu wrote:
TFLYTSNBN wrote:

The only mistake that the US made was to wait to long before imposing a travel ban on diseased Eurotrash:



With that last desperate defense of Führerbunker, I think, we could move right to a signing of TFLYTSNBN's capitulation.



According to WorldMeters, the growth rate for the Chinavirus in Russia is now well over ten percent.

The claim that the lethality rate in Germany is extremely low because they have socialized medicine is extremely suspicious. Germany's alleged death rate is an extreme aberration when compared to other European countries that also have socialized medicine. Given the fact that most Coronavirus related deaths are actually the result of complications such as pneumonia, it is reasonable to speculate that the German government is misstating the cause of death for political purposes. It appears that Germany's strategy is to achieve herd immunity by allowing the virus to spread. To achieve herd immunity, about 70% of the population needs to be infected. The PC meme that only 1% of the population, mostly elderly who just cost society money and would likely die from something else anyway, will make this strategy politically acceptable. When the German people finally realize that the true lethality rate is at least 5% and that many people in their 40s, 50s and 60s who remain productive are among the dead, they are not going to be happy about their government enabling 3.5% of the population to die.
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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by clancy688   » Fri Apr 10, 2020 4:55 pm

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TFLYTSNBN wrote:Lots of bullshit


Image

Is everything which doesn't fit your worldview automatically a conspiracy?
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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by Arol   » Fri Apr 10, 2020 6:18 pm

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clancy688 wrote:
TFLYTSNBN wrote:Lots of bullshit


Image

Is everything which doesn't fit your worldview automatically a conspiracy?

Of course he’s a troll!
A more erudite and eloquent writer then most trolls, but still just a troll.
Took me a while to figure it out; hey blame it on a senior-moment, but his constant use of the catchphrase “Eurotrash, in and out of context should have been a dead give-away. I mean really, suddenly he tells us that the first time he heard it was in a TV spy spoof, as if who the F*** cares?
He simply likes to push people’s buttons; it’s how he gets his jollies.
Also when someone equally eloquent and well informed is able to refute his diatribe, it simply rolls of his back like a duck, and he goes off on a different tangent.
So a simple pitiful and malignant troll!
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Re: Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?
Post by TFLYTSNBN   » Fri Apr 10, 2020 8:41 pm

TFLYTSNBN

It is extremely difficult to have a cogent conversation with people who are to stupid to understand that a graph that tracks total number of infections for multiple countries with wildly differing populations does not accurately depict the rate of increase in infection rates in the various countries. The slope of the US infections will be steeper because the population base of the US is higher.

I once again concede that the US is behind on testing. President Trump relied on the CDC career bureaucrats to develop their own test rather than use tests developed by other countries. You might recall that President Trump was having to respond to the impeachment jihad when this was going on?

If you don't appreciate my use of the word "Eurotrash" may be you should consider the insulting language that you use in reference to Americans, particularly conservatives?

In the mean time, you might want to take notice of all of the countries that are now experiencing growth rates of more than 10%. This includes Russia and Eastern​ European countries as well as India and Latin America. Turkey should be of particular interest to you "folks". Tested or not, the Coronavirus is now running rampant in the refugee camps. Expect Edrogen to allow the disease to multiply before unleashing them upon you. What will your precious Nationalized health care system do when you suddenly have a out a million new cases?
Last edited by TFLYTSNBN on Fri Apr 10, 2020 8:56 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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