Attempted firebomb of times squareFollow

Clearly the SUV was the target.

Buy Lucent!

Isn't this pretty much the same profile you did of the sniper(s) a couple years back? How'd that work out for ya?

Nope, I was certain it was one actor. But dead wrong for sure. This obviously doesn't make me any less in error, but I was close to the consensus profile there. Again, being wrong when lots of people were wrong is a highly overvalued proposition in my book.


Buy Lucent!

I totally did. I forget what I lost on that trade, but it was a cars worth at least. Fortunately for me, I'm not usually that disastrously wrong. More fortunately, probably, I'm fine with failing periodically. It's been my anecdotal experience that if one had to err in one's personality with a flaw either towards more or less risk aversion, less would more beneficial long term. I do make bad calls on occasion, I'm rarely paralyzed into doing nothing, which seems to be where the death spiral starts for most traders.

Cest la vie.

Is it impossible now to believe that something that is fine for an individual doesn't necessarily scale up well? Especially since I suspect part of why Smash doesn't mind failing periodically is that he has a significant cushion against failure and thus doesn't suffer much from it except in pride, whereas the capitalist society failing results in quite a bit of misery.

This would be the part where I said that some things don't necessarily scale up well. Something which is good for individuals doesn't have to be good for society as a whole. Of course, your selective reading completely skipped over that and you immediately resorted to talking about your years of experience writing about such things.

Interesting that you take the exact opposite position when it's other people's money though. Your arguments against capitalism are specifically because they are "designed to fail occasionally", and thus we must have the same sort of "paralyzed into doing nothing" approach that socialism enforces. Just an interesting observation how contradictory your personal choices are compared to what you want the government to impose on everyone else.

I don't find interesting, honestly, or even a valid criticism. The entire premise of socialism is to aggregate risk over a society to prevent the *guaranteed* failure of some segment of that society. Not because of merit, mind you, or bad decisions, but because luck plays such a gigantic role in the human experience. Capitalism relies on the myth, and it's provably a myth, that wealth in an efficient market is distributed to those who make the best decisions, who are the most talented, etc. It clearly doesn't.

This is the framework I have to work with, however, one that rewards the ability to calculate risk pretty much exclusively. Most people who do well in the market, including those who do well for a fairly long time are simply *lucky*. If, at birth, everyone participated in a lottery where 1 in 100,000 were granted 1000 times the wealth of the average, the makeup of the current US class structure at the upper level would be largely unchanged in terms of ability.

It's a terrible system, and I find the framework idiotic. I don't get to decide the rules of the game, though, but I'm pretty much forced to play. So, as such, I'm going to play to win. Understanding how something functions and exploiting it for personal gain isn't an endorsement of the system itself.

I'd rather live in a world where suffering were minimized, I don't particularly believe that would require my life to change radically, but if it did, I'd be willing to make that sacrifice. This is the primary difference between us, I find. Your self image seems to rely on the ability to measure yourself as "more successful" than some segment of the population, and then to attribute that almost exclusively to your personal ability/work ethic/whatever. Your psyche pretty much depends on it and drives out every other possibility, regardless of how obviously accurate it might be. I, on the other hand recognize that I've been EXTREMELY fortunate (Fuck, I get to wake up next to Nexa every morning!) in many ways. Which is great, good for me.

Pretending that this luck conveys some superiority is idiotic, though. I was born into the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, probably at it's zenith. I was born with the right skin color, in basically the right place, to parents who cared a lot about the opportunities their children had. All luck. My weaknesses lie in areas this society largely doesn't care about, my strengths are almost tailor made to excel in it. I don't try harder than you. I rarely try particularly hard at anything. I'm attracted to women who find me attractive, which it turns out, is most women. Lucky me, the right sexual orientation, the right body type for the society I was born into. People pay me idiotic amounts of money to do things that are mind numbingly easy for me. Fortunately for me, I wasn't born into a society where 5'3 gay men with great talent in the visual arts were revered. That's all it is, though, good fortune.

That it comes at the cost of the suffering of less lucky people bothers me a great deal. It's the primary argument for the fundamental meaninglessness of the human experience, to me, and obviates the no-existence of any sort of interested "higher power". I get pretty much everything I want, personally, and I'm sure this probably makes me superficially, and maybe fundamentally, a jaded arrogant elitist ***hole "out of touch" with the struggles of "common people". Probably. I legitimately don't understand what makes otherwise rational people prone to transparently cynical manipulation like religion or nationalism. I understand the pathology, mind you, the way I understand the pathology of a ***** fetishist, but I don't really "get it" on a fundamental level. I can't imagine your personal experience, or see your point of view on most things. I can't simulate the kind of blind fear that's at play, the complete lack of self awareness that drives you to argue that other people should literally just die instead of be guaranteed medical care because of the SLIGHT CHANCE your life may be marginally harder, for instance, or that where the guy who picks your grapes was born is a really, really, important factor in the success or failure of the nation's economy, or your bizarre fear of being manipulated by "intellectuals"; people "telling you what to believe" all the while parroting almost verbatim mass market talking points assembled with the sophistication of an Archie comic.

I've come the conclusion, and it's a personal one, not a learned behavior or a testable hypothesis, that all that really matters to me is the happiness of people I care about, and then the aggregate happiness of everyone else, in that order. Now, don't get me wrong, the second place on that list takes a far, far, far, backseat to the first, but it's not insignificant. Capitalism just doesn't work to increase aggregate happiness. That's not the goal. The goal is the illusion of class mobility as cover for almost complete class stratification. It's a bad idea, and even people who happen to fall into the upper end of the class spectrum should be able to arrive at that conclusion with even the tiniest bit of critical thinking. And I think most probably do, and don't care that much. I probably care, slightly more than average, but I'm still going to work tomorrow instead of selling my house and buying rice for the starving children who I know will die because of that choice.

I still care more about Hannah's schools than I do about schools in West Virginia or Mississippi, and I'll still send her to private school if I don't find the public system good enough. I have the ability to separate my personal experience from the abstract "best case for all", though, and I don't require the illusion that what I do will ever match my idea of what the "best thing" to do is. It doesn't really bother me much, and maybe that makes me broken in some way. I'm not particularly bothered when I read a news story about some child I don't know dying in a horrible way. I'm not particularly bothered when I do things for personal gain that hurt other people, and frankly, I'm not particularly bothered by hurting other people. In a reasonable society that should probably make me seek help. In our society it makes incredibly effective and a great success.

Lucky me.

Awesome post Smash.

It's horrifying to buy the other kind by mistake.

The results would be kind of catasstrophic.

Smashed,



Clearly it does. If you remove govn interference (fannie/freddie) from the market the economy would be roaring right now as opposed to sputtering. Getting p*ssed at large companies for playing by the poorly conceived rules the Democrat congress, and president when he was in congress, serves only as great example of just how f*cked up the market can get when left in the hands of politicians who've never had to work a day in their spoiled little lifes.




B*llsh*t...most who do well in the market are diversified enough not take major hits while the economy is in a downturn.




It's only allowed for the creation of the most wealthy nation in the history of the world. Besides that what has it given us ? <end sarcasm>




Well they're doing a good job in their deception. Tell me are you more financially secure/stable than your parents were at your age?





So me growing acres of vegetables and basically giving some of it away to my neighbors makes me better person than you. Who knew.


Despite Smashes white mans guilt the USA has the most oppurtunity for financial success of any nation on this planet for someone of modest means. If you work hard, smart, and make good decisions you will succeed. On the other hand if you make poor decisions your bad decisions shouldn't be used as an excuse to steal from those who made the right choices. It's all about personal responsibility; people like Smash don't think people should be held accountable for the decisions they've made. What's more is he's willing to steal from a class who he feels are only where they are because of luck. However one justifies it to themselves stealing is stealing, unless of course you don't believe in the individual property rights of the US citizenry then it's ok to steal. The ends do justify the means right?

Says the guy who periodically froths at the mouth about gold being the only sure thing.

Jophed,

What we're not talking about giving away free food?

Only in a most general sense. More specifically, we were talking about selling all you own to buy rice for starving children who will otherwise die.

I suppose you hang out at race tracks and tell people "Look! I have a car too!"