The president chooses the Chair and the board, so ultimately he's more powerful. In practice the president can act on his authority without needing the approval of a board.

Just seems like an unnecessary regression to be honest, especially given the reciprocal power of the Chair to influence presidential elections.

If I give you a gun out of a line-up of people, I may have bestowed that power upon you but, ultimately, it still leaves you in a position of more power relative to me.

Not you guys, too.

There are obviously feminist cheerleaders, just like there are feminist strippers and nudist. Their body "empowers" them.

Much to the distaste of the uptight feminists, who want nothing more for women to engage in the same careerism that men do.

Fuck them all.

This thread is just asking for a certain happy merchant man to appear >_>

Eh?

It's not rigged.

It's just pre-determined.

But watch actual spam threads not get locked.

Apply cream to burned area

isn't the ability to choose free will?

Some compatibilists would say so, but I don't think that's a very significant definition. Free will, properly defined, is the ability to choose without constraint. This is fundamentally undermined when you realise you aren't in control of your capacity to choose.

Think of it like this: you can choose to act on your will, but you can't choose your will. The choices you make, and the autonomy you exercise, will always be part of this determined stream.

Does your grandmother use the N word?

she just said nig nog

restricted free will is still free will. not being god doesn't make us unable to alter our world.

Again, that's not metaphysically significant.

I never said people can't make choices.

TIL: economics has a lot of "great" events.



For those of you that don't know, the Great Moderation was a period from around 1984 to 2007 during which macroeconomic volatility (the business cycle) was practically tamed. There are about three mainstream explanations, and one more heterodox explanation. Since I'm biased, I'll outline all four and then let you choose.

The first is simply luck, which essentially says that any shocks to the economy were simply less severe by chance.

The second is the structure of the economy, which states the nature of the economy (improved technology, shift to service-based employment) was better at absorbing any shocks which did occur.

These two explanations have been largely been discarded, however, and there remains just a single mainstream one which is truly considered viable (by economists) any more. The Taylor Principle, which is that as inflation expectations rose, the Fed raised interest rates more than expectations. For instance, if inflation expectations rise to 1pc above the goal, the Fed would raise the nominal interest rate to >1pc, thus raising the real interest rate. This is essentially how Volcker broke inflation in the 1970s. This works, essentially, by impeding the velocity of money and slowing the creation of money which occurs in the banking system.

The last, less mainstream explanation, is that the Federal Reserve - towards the end of Volcker's tenure and during Greenspan's - was targeting nominal income, which is just the total spending in the economy, or aggregate demand. The idea is that with nominal income stabilised, demand shocks (where nominal income/total spending falls sharply) didn't occur and thus recessions (like that in 1991) were a lot milder. This seems to be supported by this quote by Greenspan: "I’m basically arguing that we are really in a sense using [unintelligible] a nominal GDP goal of which the money supply relationships are technical mechanisms to achieve that."

So, based on those explanations, which do you think?

But we're still choosing aren't we?

Yes, you merely can't choose to choose. Choice is a necessary part of human life, as lying in bed all day doing fuck all is still a choice. It's merely that your choices are necessarily part of this determined stream.

So what you're saying is that I only though of New York because I was reminded of it?

I didn't actually go through a list of all cities and pick it?

Pls be gentle I'm just trying to understand.

Not that you were reminded of it, per se, as that would imply something exogenous was there to remind you (which could very well have been the case), merely that you could only choose to pick it because it occurred to you, essentially, by chance. It throws free will up into the air when the only options we can ever access are there, oftentimes, by mechanisms beyond our conscious control.

I'm not sure what this has to do with free will...

In order to have free will, you quite literally need to think of something before you think of it. The nature of consciousness means you are not free to choose that which didn't happen to occur to you.

When you pay attention to how thoughts, desires and intentions arise in consciousness, it becomes patently clear that choice is incredibly restricted and not in one's own control. You're not controlling the storm, and you're not lost in it - you are the storm.

Mind explaining it?

Think of a city, and then tell me the name of the city you thought of.

City-soul analogy?

Isn't that to do with morality?