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Messages - More Than Mortal

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6181
Serious / Re: Marco Rubio announces candidacy for president
« on: April 14, 2015, 03:16:16 PM »
I'd like to see a Bush/Rubio ticket.

6182
Serious / Re: The SJW Left strikes again
« on: April 14, 2015, 02:56:24 PM »

6183
The Flood / Re: Why does this site take so long to load sometimes?
« on: April 14, 2015, 02:55:31 PM »
Because you touch yourself at night.

6184
The Flood / Should Kiyo get her rat out?
« on: April 14, 2015, 02:50:04 PM »
T4R

6185
Serious / Re: The SJW Left strikes again
« on: April 14, 2015, 02:46:43 PM »
Lol is that all you do? Come crying to the flood when you get rekt?
How can I get rekt when he didn't even respond to me?

Do us all a favour and nuke your account again.

6186
Serious / Re: The SJW Left strikes again
« on: April 14, 2015, 02:28:35 PM »
i really hope no one dignified this with a response.
I did.

now i would absolutely love to see their response. got a link to the original thread?
They didn't respond.

6187
Serious / Re: The SJW Left strikes again
« on: April 14, 2015, 01:59:51 PM »
i really hope no one dignified this with a response.
I did.

6188
Serious / The SJW Left strikes again
« on: April 14, 2015, 01:54:23 PM »


Some fucking people.

6189
Serious / Re: The Recession from a Neoclassical perspective
« on: April 14, 2015, 01:00:09 PM »
YAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWNNNNNNNN
u wanna go nite nite nigguh?

6190
The Flood / Re: Is this tweet serious?
« on: April 13, 2015, 08:38:31 AM »
Nice fake tweet.

6191
The Flood / oh god, this fucking headline
« on: April 13, 2015, 07:16:52 AM »


it's too much

6192
Serious / Re: Top 20pc of earners pay 84pc of income tax
« on: April 13, 2015, 06:29:34 AM »
Ah yes, #richpeopleproblems

Must be nice to not have to be exposed to all the shit that happens around you.
Do you normally ride rich people's dicks, or is it just today?

6193
The Flood / Re: Who are your sep7agon best friends?
« on: April 13, 2015, 06:19:27 AM »
Turkey, Gats, Challenger, Goji (when he's here).

Y'know, the usuals.

6194
Serious / Re: The Recession from a Neoclassical perspective
« on: April 12, 2015, 07:31:31 PM »
A lot of the policies being blamed in this paper were a direct response to the financial crisis
Which was itself primarily caused by meddling asset requirements, dubious underwriting practices pioneered by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and was worsened by poor capital requirements and a tight monetary regime.


6195
Serious / Re: The Recession from a Neoclassical perspective
« on: April 12, 2015, 05:16:39 PM »
The current trend of shifting blame from the market to policy decisions feels akin to whitewashing.
You'd expect the most serious downturns to be the result of government interference; it's like taking one issue and then having it reproduce across a whole economy.

The worst market actors did in the run-up to the recession is engage in high degrees of leveraging, which put institutions like Lehman Brothers at exceptional risk, but even then that's not incredibly substantial.

6196
Serious / Re: The Recession from a Neoclassical perspective
« on: April 12, 2015, 05:13:43 PM »
Goddamnit you fucking plebs, this is interesting.

6197
Serious / Re: Can somebody tell me exactly what's wrong with Ted Cruz?
« on: April 12, 2015, 02:30:58 PM »
You never know when a mother can miscarry.
I have to admit I don't find this a very compelling argument.

Anybody could drop dead at any point, pretty much. Foetus or not.

6198
Serious / Re: Can somebody tell me exactly what's wrong with Ted Cruz?
« on: April 12, 2015, 02:21:05 PM »
But we're talking about an unborn child.


You're still not making an argument. Funnily enough, by virtue of not yet being born, the net result to aggregate well-being will be marginal.

You've still not yet justified how abortion is, on balance, a net drag on a society's well-being compared to a counter-factual of--say--no abortion at all.

6199
Serious / Re: Can somebody tell me exactly what's wrong with Ted Cruz?
« on: April 12, 2015, 02:17:10 PM »
But it could, right? So killing someone is justified?
It could in the right circumstance. . . Like, killing a meth-head walking through a playground with a knife.

Of course I don't disagree that the killing of other human beings is almost invariably immoral, and I'm probably more pro-life than you'd expect, but my point is that you should actually make a proper argument relevant to the well-being of society instead of just "abortion is killing, and killing is wrong".

Nothing is wrong; there is not a single action which is inherently immoral. The morality of an action is a function of its circumstances.

6200
Serious / The Recession from a Neoclassical perspective
« on: April 12, 2015, 02:11:27 PM »
An old paper from Lee E. Ohanian. Since most of you won't read it, I'll give a simple walk-through.

The theory/models
The Recession in the US over the course of 2007-8 was significant because lower output/income seems to have come almost exclusively from a drop in labour input, whereas most other recessions (and the '08 Recession in other countries) are to do with falls in productivity. I can't copy the graph used in the paper, but it shows an uncharacteristically large drop in hours worked per capita. According to Ohanian, current models which incorporate financial distress are not yet good enough to account for such a large deviation.

And there is evidence that what occurred in the US was different from other high-income countries. The fall in output and consumption (averaged across Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom) is 8.5pc, similar to the US's 7.2pc, and 4.8pc, similar to the US's 5.4pc respectively. But the average per capita employment decline from 2007Q4 to 2009Q3 in those high income countries is just 2pc, to the US's 6.7pc. So there's obviously something interesting happening in the American labour market.

Using a fairly standard neoclassical business cycle model; there is a production function which models inputs and outputs, a household time allocation decision between market time and leisure and a consumption/investment allocation decision. However, when we plug the actual data into the model we will see deviations; output will not be where the production function means it ought to be. The deviations we will see will offer a diagnostic basis with which we can examine the causes of the Recession.

The hours worked during the 2007-8 Recession in the US are much too low relative to the marginal product of labour, meaning something in the economy is acting like a tax on labour and depressing the incentive to work, and it appears this wedge in labour is the biggest factor. The choice that households make to work over leisure time (that is, the marginal rate of substitution between consumption and leisure) should be equal to the marginal product of labour. The average deviation for a post-WWII recession is 2.4pc (meaning the marginal product is exceeding the marginal rate of substitution), whereas the deviation in 2007-8 is 12.9pc. The average labour deviation for other high income countries was just 0.9pc.

There was almost no capital deviation in the US or other high-income countries (at just +0.3pc and +0.1pc respectively). However, there is a significant productivity deviation for non-US countries at no less than 6pc individually, and an average of 7.1pc. There is, however, almost no productivity decline in the US, different from previous post-war recessions like 73-74 and 81-82, which showed decreases in TFP or real output per hour. According to Ohanian, also, the labour market deviation can account for virtually all of the 2007-9 downturn. This is also similar, in some respects, to the Great Depression, which also had an incredibly significant labour deviation.

Explaining the Recession
Ohanian notes that the primary narrative of the Great Recession is the "financial explanation", which states that around mid-2008 the Recession significantly worsened as some asset-backed securities began to decline in value and sub-prime mortgages began to turn toxic, putting stress on the financial system. However, the idea that the financial system (or the capital market) could cause such massive fluctuations in economic well-being is challenged by the idea that in both US and non-US economies the capital deviation was incredibly minor. And, according to Ohanian, it doesn't explain the labour deviation.

Ohanian goes on to note how issues in the financial system aren't necessarily correlated with economic downturn. The 40pc declination in banks between 1929-1933 were mostly the result of mergers and small bank failures, meaning very little disintermediation. He also challenges Milton Friedman's hypothesis of the Great Depression--which is essentially the idea that money contracted too much--by showing how industrial hours worked had declined by 29pc between Jan. 1929 and Oct. 1930.

So instead Ohanian offers a policy-driven explanation, claiming that the 2008 tax rebate, TARP, ARRA, Cash for Clunkers and other policies contributed significantly. Through their design, these policies distorted incentives and led to uncertainty about the underlying shape of the economy. For example, the effect of US Treasury mortgage modifications was to impose a de facto income tax rate of over 100pc on some households, and interest rate spreads as well as domestic and foreign stock prices deteriorated much more quickly following the announcement of TARP than they did at the failure of Lehman Brothers.

However, more research is needed into the labour deviation of 2007-9 to explain just why it occurred. It is thought that the labour deviation of the 1930s occurred because of cartelisation and unionisation policies pushed by Hoover and Roosevelt which raised wages above competitive levels and reduced employment.

In conclusion/TL;DR
Neoclassical economics points to a disequilibrium in the labour market in order to explain the severity of both the Depression and the Recession. Significant labour deviations during 2007-9 only seem to be a function of the US economy, as other high-income countries saw significant productivity deviations but little labour deviation.

6201
Serious / Re: Can somebody tell me exactly what's wrong with Ted Cruz?
« on: April 12, 2015, 02:09:34 PM »
I'll be damned if that isn't the most callous philosophy I've heard in a while.
It's callous to think that the proper moral metric is the general well-being and flourishing of human society?

Quote
How does killing someone save lives in this context?
It doesn't, necessarily. It could just lead to greater aggregate well-being.

6202
Serious / Re: Can somebody tell me exactly what's wrong with Ted Cruz?
« on: April 12, 2015, 02:02:58 PM »
My gosh, this is basic morality.
No, what I'm doing is basic morality. Deontology isn't tenable, and saying "killing people is bad because killing people is bad" is nothing short of lazy on your part. There's no principle of human life, just expediency; should we actively kill one person to passively save five? How about 600? What about passively letting people die?

Consequences matter, and unless you can demonstrate that abortion is always a net negative then you don't have the right to claim the moral high ground.

6203
Serious / Re: Can somebody tell me exactly what's wrong with Ted Cruz?
« on: April 12, 2015, 01:56:45 PM »
An abortion is effectively killing a human being, even if it isn't "alive" yet.
You're still yet to demonstrate why this is bad.

6204
Serious / Re: Can somebody tell me exactly what's wrong with Ted Cruz?
« on: April 12, 2015, 11:49:22 AM »
a life which WILL begin, unless it is prevented from doing so.
What the fuck kind of sentence is that?

"Something will happen, unless it doesn't".

6205
Serious / Re: Can somebody tell me exactly what's wrong with Ted Cruz?
« on: April 12, 2015, 11:47:34 AM »
]Yeah, I'm sure the kid would much rather be fucking dead than be in a poor foster home.
It doesn't have a preference.

There's nothing inherently wrong with the killing of an unborn baby, it's about whether or not the benefits outweigh the costs.

6206
Serious / Re: VICE documentary on IS.
« on: April 12, 2015, 08:30:04 AM »
Hell, Assad even harbored, trained, and armed IS (unofficially, of course) back before 2011.
Source?

Why would an Alawite government with ties to Iran be interested in harbouring what is basically the most brutal Salafist group to walk the planet?

6207
Serious / Re: Can somebody tell me exactly what's wrong with Ted Cruz?
« on: April 12, 2015, 05:54:22 AM »
And don't throw out rape as an example, or when the mother's life is in danger. Those are grey areas.
It's the clearest shade of grey in the whole abortion debate.

Quote
Yeah, screw freedom of religion.
Having religion in the public sphere is not freedom of religion.

Quote
Wanting to stem the flow of ILLEGAL immigrants is not bad.
It kind of is. Do you have any idea how much they contribute to the economy?

6208
Serious / Top 20pc of earners pay 84pc of income tax
« on: April 11, 2015, 02:50:29 PM »

6209
The Flood / Re: I'm on a mission to find out this chicks name
« on: April 11, 2015, 12:07:28 PM »
Oh my.

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