10-08-2004 17:07									#31
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A real free market would be like the game monopoly, if correct played. Played it much and always ended with one person having all the assets. Don't think small companys are that common in free market since when a small company has to much succes, a big company would buy it. It has happened several times, one i can remember is the nvidia and 3dfx case from a few years ago, but that's only one.

free market would make life more difficult because work will be the most inportant thing. I know in America u have nothing if u don't have work. I live in Belgium, have no work and still get an amount of money (not lots) each month. That would not be possible in a real free market. I dont think free market is such a fun world to live in

	10-08-2004 17:29									#32
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quote: Originally posted by mmontgomery Are you a brainwashed Canadian?

Dude, I have a flag of the EU next to my name; Canada is not in the EU. Need I say more?

quote: There is a reason that millions each year want to come to America; that people worldwide view America as the land of opportunity. It is usually only people who live here, who have bought into the socialist agenda, who refuse to see opportunity staring them in the face, and view themselves as oppressed because they don't get as many handouts as they want.

If people from various underdeveloped dictatorships want to move to America, what does it prove? America is better than those dictatorships, or at least that's what they seem to think. People are easily manipulated by promises of easy life and lots of money.

quote: You are mixing together a lot of things having nothing to do with free market. Subsidizing inefficient industry is definitely ANTI-free market, so this should not be used as an argument that free market is less efficient. Without outside interference, free markets naturally weed out inefficient enterprizes (because they lose money and go out of business).

If corporations are given free hands to do anything they want, eventually they will grow so big (if not already) that they will try to influence government to favour them politically or economically. That's sometimes called "corporate welfare". You can probably find plenty of examples of connections between corporations and politicians from your own nation.

quote: Lower population growth in highly developed nations is not the result of free market. There is plenty of food and money to support population growth. The lower population growth is due to decisions taken by the families to voluntarily reduce the number of children they have, for a variety of complex reasons.

And in poorer nations there are little resources to support population growth, yet the population still increases quickly there, so what does your point prove then?

quote: If you think some of my statements are false, point them out. But of the things you mentioned, NONE of them specifically have anything to do with free market, so if those were your best shots, they all missed.

That's what I'm trying to do, but it is very difficult if you already have heavy prejudices on this subject.

quote: The only one that comes close is pollution. But pollution is not tied to free market either. Most planned economies generate even more pollution per unit of industry produced (i.e, per bar of steel, or per bolt of cloth). Which is why the ideal is probably largely Free Market, with some Green ideas mixed in, in a reasonable compromise. So the Greens are not trying to push industry back to the stone age, but are partnering for economically viable measures to protect the environment, while the Free Market has monetary incentives (i.e. its just good business) to protect the environment.

Okay, think about this carefully before you answer:

In planned economies there are more pollution per unit of industry produced.
The GDP per capita of free market economies is much higher than those of planned economies.
Pollution is related to the efficiency and amount of industry.

What does logically follow from this? The argument that free market is much more efficient than planned economies becomes meaningless. And don't try to tell me that people really need their SUV's, DVD players or whatever is fashion today.

	10-08-2004 17:56									#33
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We have seen that a free market with no regulation doesn't work. However, a society with no regulation doesn't work just the same. The government should exist to enforce contracts, and enforce the will of the people (though many people are stupid and suggestible). A free market with antitrust legislation is still a free market. Don't talk about a "True Free Market" as if it's a concrete concept. Do laws against crime go against the spirit of a free market? How about contracts? And so on.

In the U.S., if you don't work and are poor (as opposed to the situation described below), you still get a little money. I don't know how it compares to other countries, but people rarely starve here.

If you know how to play the free market, you can survive without working, through investment. You need some money to start out, which can be obtained by working. Once you have enough (dependent on how much you want to spend), you can reduce the amount of time you spend working, and possibly eliminate it. On the other hand, this takes away an incentive for the most successful to work, so I'm not sure it's a good trait of free markets, but it does contradict the view that you must work, or have nothing.

	10-08-2004 18:05									#34
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quote: Originally posted by Chaos Theory We have seen that a free market with no regulation doesn't work. However, a society with no regulation doesn't work just the same. The government should exist to enforce contracts, and enforce the will of the people (though many people are stupid and suggestible). A free market with antitrust legislation is still a free market. Don't talk about a "True Free Market" as if it's a concrete concept. Do laws against crime go against the spirit of a free market? How about contracts? And so on.

In several countries there is legislation against the forming of monopolies and cartels. This is the government directly interfering in business practises and the economy in semi-Planned style

There is legislation regulating the amount of pollution factories and the like are allowed to cause. This forces factory owners to adjust to said rules which costs them a lot of money and bites into their profit margins (in the short run, at least).
Again, government interference in the economy according to the principles of the Green economy.

People down on their luck may indeed get social security provided for them by the government.
But again, this is an idea of Planned economies.

No, the capitalist countries of today are mostly Free Market, but the government interferes continuously adding a touch of Planned and Green here and there.
In a Planet Free Market such a thing would not occur.

	10-08-2004 18:14									#35
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A Free Market without such things as monopoly prevention and "social security" (this term has a different meaning than you might expect in the U.S.) can gain them if the government is flexible. If it's inflexible, it can still gain them, through revolution. Keep in mind that ordinary laws against crime interfere with the Mafia, which could be considered business otherwise.

I'm fine living with a mostly-Free Market, however.

	10-08-2004 18:26									#36
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quote: Originally posted by Chaos Theory I'm fine living with a mostly-Free Market, however.

Oh yes, me too. But I'm especially fine with it because it has a couple of Planned and Green influences. Without those, I wouldn't be all that happy, really.

	10-08-2004 18:50									#37
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FM:

Well, do you guys really know what is FM? It's something very like a process in nature called "natural selection" or "survival of the fittest"

FM is not really a system invented by humans, it's a system that has developed itself, out of human behavior or Social Psych if you will.

Therefore there's very little use in comparing it with Planned or Green, for they both are more like restrictions of human nature - FM is what human nature dictates a natural economical system should be, but Planned and Green are rather limitations in this "natural" system, not new systems - Green is a limitation in how human beings should care about the nature and Planned is a limitation based on concept of humanity and democracy, that "all men are created equal", thus they should also receive equal food and goods from production..

Also the result of uncontrolled or absolute FM is what?

Monopoly!

And what is monopoly?
Monopoly is when someone controlls all the economy.
When someone controlls all it's practically same as Planned, because everything's being planned inside companies (they do not have inner-FM).

Thus absolute FM kills itself, that's why governments try to controll it - they try to keep the economical contest as intense as possible to get as much good out of it as possible.

Also after all this you should notice that a smallest cell of FM, whether it's person, family or a company is always Planned, the question only is which one of mentioned is the smallest cell in a particular case.
If there's a monopoly that means that the smallest cell is covering all the economy (or a branch of it), thus FM inevitably becomes Planned in case of monopoly..

As you see FM and Planned are bound together, thus in real life you can only determine how far you are from planned and how close to FM - like a slider!
And that is determined by amount of large companies and monopolies and their role in country's economy..

Green therefore is more like a concept of preventing humans from doing what nature has taught them to do - using nature for self-supplying.
It is obvious that such system is "innatural" as it doesn't follow the simplest and most important rule the nature has taught humanity - "use or be used", therefore a Green society would be something that only Sci-Fi books tell us about - something that humans have invented themselves, not stolen from natures immense laboratories, to protect themselves from extinction..

We can then agree that human progress has come to an end of the first real era - this era begun with humans dying or surviving depending on how good they used nature for themselves, this era will end with humans dying or surviving depending on how efficently they can "NOT use the nature for themselves"..

I don't know what the next era holds, but one thing is sure - as soon as humans learn the most important principles of this 1st era - learn to survive and thrive without using nature, they will be free from all those primitive things nature has given us, and free to expand to far reaches of Universe (if they will still want it)

With "those primitive things nature has given us" I mean all those instincts that are obsolete in the modern world and which come from nature & often make humans be more like animals

	11-08-2004 04:42									#38
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Our socialist friend here is attacking the strawman of degenerate capitalism or plutocracy, which is what you get when the capitalists buy the government. Plutocracy is apparently what the game designers were thinking of when they designed the game* since it results in unrest, but plutocracy is not the optimum state for wealth creation. Wealth creation is highest slightly to the left of plutocracy where you have monopoly controls. Long term quality of life is maximised a little farther to the left where you have consumer protection laws and workplace safety laws. The farthest to the right that you can reasonably call an economy planned is when you get progressive taxation.

The term "planned" doesn't really apply to an economy until you get into full fledged communism or fascism, and the game stats appear to reflect an early communist economy.

On a side note, since communism would actually work efficiently for the cybernetic consciousness and capitalism should not be able to degenerate to plutocracy for them they should have impunity planned and immunity police instead of impunity cybernetic.


* either for balance reasons or because they are socialists at heart

	11-08-2004 11:30									#39
	Re: Re: Free market really rocks! Support Apolyton, buy Civilization 2

quote: Originally posted by WotanAnubis Until they suffer from a hostile take-over from Microsoft because there're no government regulations preventing monopolies or cartels. This is followed, of course, by a bit of mass firing because they don't really need all that surplus workforce bringing their profit margins down.

Are you talking about the U.S.? If so you obviously haven't heard of the Sherman anti-trust (monopolies were called trusts back then) Act of 1890 which was used to break up Standard Oil, American Tobacco and ATT as recently as 1982. In fact it was the U.S. which sued Microsoft first recently for engaging in unfair trade practices. No set of laws or regulations is a panacea, but the U.S. government can wield the big stick when it has the will to. If there is a failing it has more to do with the political system than the economic.

quote: Originally posted by WotanAnubis Unfortunately, some people just can't work, no matter how much they want to. Take me, for example. I suffer from a schizoid personality disorder. There is absolutely no way I coud get employed in any regular business. Fortunately thanks to, well, previous governments (certainly not the current one) there are several programs that set out to employ the otherwise non-employable. You might find programs like this in Planned, or even Green, but not in a true Free Market, because it's not very profitable. I'd be unemployed for life.

You know that Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law by George H.W. Bush over the protests of many within his own party don't you? Most of the criticism on this issue still seems to indicate that people think it is too broad rather than not generous enough. So don't blame the current government for not doing more, there doesn't seem to be enough political demand for anything more than maintaining the status quo, at best.

quote: Originally posted by WotanAnubis OK, name... five major scientific breakthroughs that were directly fueled by the need for profit. And please don't mention the drive-through at the fast food joint. Or, indeed, the invention of the fast food joint.

Profit motive drives the development of technology, not pure research. On the other hand the understanding that pure research lays the framework for the development of technology has lead to a massive interest in the development of pure research. This is why at least 95% of major scientific discoveries have occurred in countries which utilize free market economics (with varying degrees of regulation) over the last century.

quote: Originally posted by WotanAnubis Or, more likely, they raze the forest to the ground and put up some thermal boreholes since they're better for production and energy accumilation.

Only after they manage to lift restrictions. Besides it's easy to get pollution with forests alone, Reagan was right about that. Trees cause pollution.

quote: Originally posted by WotanAnubis Don't know how it works in your country, but over in mine people are employed to keep an eye on things. Every year trees are pruned or cut down just to prevent this. Of course, the people doing it are employed by the government, but still.

We do this a bit, but we have a lot of forest land so we mainly do this in the areas most likely to create a problem for large populations. Still it is not enough, as the fires in California last year show.

quote: Originally posted by WotanAnubis However, you forget to factor in the Free Market's urge for Career and Success. Nowadays, there're lots of people who decide not have kids because it'll interfere with their work. So it kinda balances out, really.

This is simply conservatism. As societies move from those where massive reproduction is key to guard against want, famine, epidemic etc. to those where plenty is almost assured their values change. This has been the case in many places in the last 200 years. More primitive cultures which have been gifted part of the technological legacy of humanity via colonialization / international development etc. have had a much more publicly difficult time trying to adjust to 500 years or more of development in a very short span.

	11-08-2004 11:45									#40
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quote: Originally posted by Chaos Theory Whoever thinks the Vietnam protests were due to communist propaganda should consider causes such as: 1) College students pulled out of studies to fight somewhere seemingly unnecessary and die 2) High body count (relative to the number sent) 3) Protracted war 4) Lies from the administration regarding the motive and the current state of affairs

To ignore the influence of communist groups (including many which were financed directly by Moscow) on the "anti-war movement" would be equally silly. Though support for the war did eventually wither to minority levels it took a long time for that to occur, despite revisionism to the contrary. Richard Nixon won overwhelmingly in 1972 on his "Peace with Honor" platform (basically a return to status quo ante 1954, aka victory) over the "bring the boys home now" George McGovern. Watergate ended the Vietnam War, not the protestors.

The fact that every history of Vietnam or the 1960s is loaded with references to "the summer of love" and "the Tet offensive" just shows how resilient Americans were in this conflict despite the biases (now reflected in the histories mentioned above) of the news media who tended to love to do stories about the hippies and to a lesser extent tended to oppose the war.

	11-08-2004 12:12									#41
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quote: Originally posted by binTravkin FM: Well, do you guys really know what is FM? It's something very like a process in nature called "natural selection" or "survival of the fittest" FM is not really a system invented by humans, it's a system that has developed itself, out of human behavior or Social Psych if you will. Therefore there's very little use in comparing it with Planned or Green, for they both are more like restrictions of human nature - FM is what human nature dictates a natural economical system should be, but Planned and Green are rather limitations in this "natural" system, not new systems - Green is a limitation in how human beings should care about the nature and Planned is a limitation based on concept of humanity and democracy, that "all men are created equal", thus they should also receive equal food and goods from production..

I agree so far.

quote: Originally posted by binTravkin Also the result of uncontrolled or absolute FM is what? Monopoly! And what is monopoly? Monopoly is when someone controlls all the economy. When someone controlls all it's practically same as Planned, because everything's being planned inside companies (they do not have inner-FM). Thus absolute FM kills itself, that's why governments try to controll it - they try to keep the economical contest as intense as possible to get as much good out of it as possible. Also after all this you should notice that a smallest cell of FM, whether it's person, family or a company is always Planned, the question only is which one of mentioned is the smallest cell in a particular case. If there's a monopoly that means that the smallest cell is covering all the economy (or a branch of it), thus FM inevitably becomes Planned in case of monopoly.. As you see FM and Planned are bound together, thus in real life you can only determine how far you are from planned and how close to FM - like a slider! And that is determined by amount of large companies and monopolies and their role in country's economy..

You are correct in that there is a dynamic between absolute freedom and absolute concentration of power in economic as well as other areas. There has never been and I put forward that there will never be complete freedom or the complete lack of it in any sphere, for there are powerful forces that make such a thing impossible beyond the smallest of scales. It's a bit like accelerating something up to the speed of light. It's fairly easy to send a tiny particle off at the speed of light, but it isn't going to happen to planet as a whole and probably won't happen to something as large as a spaceship for a very long time, if it ever does.

quote: Originally posted by binTravkin Green therefore is more like a concept of preventing humans from doing what nature has taught them to do - using nature for self-supplying. It is obvious that such system is "innatural" as it doesn't follow the simplest and most important rule the nature has taught humanity - "use or be used", therefore a Green society would be something that only Sci-Fi books tell us about - something that humans have invented themselves, not stolen from natures immense laboratories, to protect themselves from extinction.. We can then agree that human progress has come to an end of the first real era - this era begun with humans dying or surviving depending on how good they used nature for themselves, this era will end with humans dying or surviving depending on how efficently they can "NOT use the nature for themselves".. I don't know what the next era holds, but one thing is sure - as soon as humans learn the most important principles of this 1st era - learn to survive and thrive without using nature, they will be free from all those primitive things nature has given us, and free to expand to far reaches of Universe (if they will still want it) With "those primitive things nature has given us" I mean all those instincts that are obsolete in the modern world and which come from nature & often make humans be more like animals

I agree that Green is a construct rather than a natural system has revealed itself to observation like FM economics. But biology has a long history of building in self regulation to keep (for instance) predators from overproducing and wiping out the species upon which they depend. And humanity has a shorter but nonetheless measurable history of doing the same thing in much shorter time spans than biological evolution through values and culture. Whether this should be labeled natural or unnatural I leave to others to decide, as I'm of two minds myself on the matter.

Good quality post btw.

	11-08-2004 13:06									#42
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quote: Originally posted by binTravkin Dear Nabvrimn, you must clearly realise that USA hasn't ever got a WAR!!! Are you stupid to not see that if 2 million troops from a 200 million nation is like a teardrop in an ocean??? It was NOT a war for USA!!! It was a minor skirmish for you folks! My nation, the Latvians were around 2 million before WWII, after it, we were only 1.5million.. Russians were 200 million before the war After war there were only ~160 million left THAT IS A WAR And if US government tried to draft 1/10 of US citizens, you'd see what -5 POLICE means! Oh man, you'd see such a hell that you'd think why the hell I was born in USA? And if war went back and forth over USA 3 times as in Latvia, you'd see what destruction means! You, US citizens do not know what a WAR is because the biggest losses you have had was in Civil war - ~0.5 million people (from >50 million population) Thats 1%!!! Latvia lost ~15% pop in the WWII and ~10% were deported or exiled from which the deported ones died wey quickly in Siberian labor camps You should study history a bit more to be able to say what is & what is NOT a WAR The reason why -5 POLICE still had effect on US during Wietnam conflict (that was a WAR only for Wietnam, for US it was just a "conflict" and nothing more) was that Wietnam was really too distant for this -5 not to show up.. For the other "wars" you mentioned 1.Spanish "war" was more a naval campaign/seaborne invasion, not a war. 2.Mexican "war" was a swift walk through unprotected lands, like your droptroops/choppers being able to capture 1/2 of enemy territory in 1 turn thus not receiving the police penalty 3.WWI had only 200k american troops transfered to Europe (while Russia had ~5million) 4.Civil war - riots were more like an unability of still-young US government to create an effective wartime propaganda + instability caused by Civil War. Thus, please don't speak about -5 POLICE effects in US! But you can, of course mention -3 PLANET effects in US - US is the best country to show them (as worlds greatest polluter)

If you are going to define war so that only the most destructive 1% of conflicts in the history of the world (in per capita terms) then we are going to have to rename thousands of historical events by eliminating the word war in substituting the term conflict or some such.

World War 1:

Expenditures Troops
British Empire $23.0 billion 9.5 million
France $9.3 billion 8.2 million
Russia $5.4 billion 13.0 million
U.S. $17.1 billion 3.8 million
Germany $19.9 billion 13.25 million
Austria-Hungary $4.7 billion 9.0 million

source: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/us32.cfm

I'm assuming that these were total expenditures for the entire war, and total men under arms for the entire war rather than peak troop strengths. Considering that the U.S. had 164,000 people in its armed services in 1914 it was a remarkable feat to bring in so many more in such a short period of time, especially as the U.S. didn't enter the war until 1917. Consider also that Russia was a combatant from the beginning of the war and in 1914 had almost twice the population of the U.S. (171,000,000 for Russia, 98,000,000 for the U.S.).

World War 2:

The U.S. had at least 10 million under arms simultaneously in 1944. Half of my mother's family (5 of 10) were in uniform during the war, 3 saw combat (and one was a woman). We lost hundreds of thousands of people in that war, and though we didn't suffer to the same extent as those who were on the front lines at the start, we did nonetheless suffer. My uncle was severely wounded on Okinawa in 1945 and spent 8 months in the hospital recovering. His brother had a nervous breakdown after the war because of his experiences in combat in North Africa, France, Belgium, Germany and Czechoslovakia.

The Mexican-American war was fought from 1846-1848, and was not a walkover in what is now Mexico proper. (As opposed to those lands that were claimed by Mexico after they broke away from Spain, but where Mexican sovereignty was never strongly established like present day Colorado or New Mexico for instance.) U.S. forces fought outnumbered and on the offensive all the way from Vera Cruz to Mexico City, and there were (for the States invloved at the time) major actions in Texas as well.

The U.S. civil war was a major war by any measure, it just doesn't stack up as some sort of a record breaker in terms of world history. But the impact on the South especially, even in demographic terms was immense.

I think we can agree that Latvia, Poland, USSR etc. all suffered terribly in WW2. The magnitude of the suffering in absolute terms is unmatched, and in per capita terms is rare throughout human history. The U.S. experience with suffering in war is more common in statistical terms, though we haven't had major combat on our own soil since the Civil War for which we should count ourselves lucky.

	11-08-2004 13:08									#43
	Re: Re: Re: Free market really rocks! Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

quote: Originally posted by Sikander Are you talking about the U.S.? If so you obviously haven't heard of the Sherman anti-trust (monopolies were called trusts back then) Act of 1890 which was used to break up Standard Oil, American Tobacco and ATT as recently as 1982. In fact it was the U.S. which sued Microsoft first recently for engaging in unfair trade practices. No set of laws or regulations is a panacea, but the U.S. government can wield the big stick when it has the will to. If there is a failing it has more to do with the political system than the economic. You know that Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law by George H.W. Bush over the protests of many within his own party don't you? Most of the criticism on this issue still seems to indicate that people think it is too broad rather than not generous enough. So don't blame the current government for not doing more, there doesn't seem to be enough political demand for anything more than maintaining the status quo, at best.

I said it before, but I'll say it again. This kind of government interference is not Free Market. You know, 'cuz it's government intereference.
These are little touches of Planned thinking injected into the Free Market.

quote: Profit motive drives the development of technology, not pure research. On the other hand the understanding that pure research lays the framework for the development of technology has lead to a massive interest in the development of pure research. This is why at least 95% of major scientific discoveries have occurred in countries which utilize free market economics (with varying degrees of regulation) over the last century.

Personally, I believe this is because of Democracies that people are allowed to do their research, not Free Markets. Most scientists tend to go "Gosh, that's interesting" before making their discoveries rather than "Gosh, maybe I can make money out of that." The practical applications of said discoveries (like the commercial airlines, say) may indeed be profit-driven, but they're hardly inventing anything by themselves.

	11-08-2004 13:39									#44
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quote: U.S. $17.1 billion 3.8 million

You must clearly see that this is the overall count of troops, not the count of troops that were transferred to real battlefields in Europe!

And if you compare the losses of US army with the ones of Russia or Germany, I'd say that was not a real war for US..

In one battle (decisive for the first 2 yrs of war) Russia lost ~200k troops, dont remember the actual name of battle..
There were battles when the elite force of Russian and later Communist Russia - Latvian rifle regiments lost half or even 2/3 of their men while making Germans lose 2 or 3 regiments at the same time

Can you compare it to

quote: Half of my mother's family (5 of 10) were in uniform during the war, 3 saw combat (and one was a woman). We lost hundreds of thousands of people in that war, and though we didn't suffer to the same extent as those who were on the front lines at the start, we did nonetheless suffer.

..?

After WWI & WWII ratio of men/women counts was ~0.7!
Imagine your 200 million nation (at that time) losing 30 millions of people and your mother's family losing half the able (16-50: that was the age span of Latvian Legionnares in WWII) men in it!
Imagine that in your mother's family not only 5 were mobilised & 3 saw combat, but 5 saw combat and 3 died or became invalidity (lost leg or both, arm, ear, fingers etc.).
That's what we call war here!

If Europe had so much help (in military force) by 1917, then by the end of the war Germany would be overrun

Imagine yourself in the SMAC game where you have 3.8 * 10 = 38 units
Imagine you have FM
Imagine you send 2 units to hostile territory (represents those 200k who were in reality transferred)
In that case, would you worry about pacifism drones??

In the end - you must clearly realise that if any of you, americans want to talk about war, war victims or even historical warfare, you should not do it too overconfidently as your nation has saw at leas 10 times less warfare than an average European nation!

And that's why you're so rich also..
Dont believe?
Take look at Sweden - It hasn't expierenced any wars since 1815 and thus it has become more prosperous than most of the rich and colonial countries in 1815..

How I wish I had born in a peaceful (historically) country..

	11-08-2004 13:53									#45
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quote: Considering that the U.S. had 164,000 people in its armed services in 1914 it was a remarkable feat to bring in so many more in such a short period of time

I advise to read you some non-influenced (by US government or patriotism) history - those men were not in reality brought in Europe, in war!
They were just drafted and stayed in the nice peaceful states while those few unhappy who were in Europe lived in trenches full of dirty, stinky water.
They were not able to even properly close their wounds..
And bullets flied overheads each time they rised them to see whether Germans dont employ their "Levee en Masse" (don't remeber the German name)

For me as a boy it was a great fun to run through not-unmined forests (those mines didn't work as they were old, but still could be triggered), dig out the mines, investigate bullet-filled pines, hide in the trenches still not leveled to the ground and search for huge bomb-holes which are found throughout the Latvian forests were great battling was made..

But, I suppose, it was not so much fun to those who were in all that hell..

	11-08-2004 14:06									#46
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quote: But biology has a long history of building in self regulation to keep (for instance) predators from overproducing and wiping out the species upon which they depend.

It's rather not a regulation but an inability of any other species to create (or invent way to take more from nature) new sources of supplies - that's the wonder of consciouness!

..and also the human ability to live in almost any environment by either changing it or making tools to prevent environment from destroying humans (micro-environments such as houses, astronaut suits etc.).

However there are some species in nature that have the ability to replicate so much that they use all the resources in their area, but they can't go on using other resources instead as humans do
Lemmings for example - they have a dempgraphic cycle of 3 years - in 3yrs their numbers reach maximum and die out from starvation.
At the 3rd yr their food species are almost extinct in that area..(the same situation as humans had with game when agriculture was invented)

	11-08-2004 19:44									#47
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BinTravkin, If you Think the US isn't a warlike nation I suggest you check out the Arsenal of Democracy series of books by Tom Gervasi.

We also surpassed GB's GDP and GDP per capita before world war 1, while the two wars certainly hurt Europe a great deal, free trade hurt them more.

	11-08-2004 21:46									#48
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quote: If you Think the US isn't a warlike nation

I didn't say that, I just said that US citizens haven't expierenced much of wars, because most of the US wars are agressions not defensive!

quote: We also surpassed GB's GDP and GDP per capita before world war 1, while the two wars certainly hurt Europe a great deal, free trade hurt them more.

Nope, FM can't hurt anything in such way because that's human nature, GB rather got hit by efforts to keep it's huge empire together and by investing improportional sums in navy and diplomacy, US at the time had no problems on deploying most of the available resources to economical growth!
This is very well illustrated by the standing army of US - only 200k troops for such a big nation both territorically and in population..
Peace is what made US what it is, for there are nations who never thrived so much and the only difference was war - they had all the resources and opportunities that US did have, but they had also dangers while US practically had none!

	11-08-2004 23:04									#49
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There is so many inaccuracies it is mind boggling. Most of them stem from the absurd idea that a free market means a total absence of government regulation. A free market absolutely requires government oversight to ensure that it remains free.

To better understand this, lets look at human freedom. Freedom is definitely NOT the absence of laws or regulations; this is anarchy, and it leads to oppression by the powerful, and very little freedom for the masses. Freedoms require laws and the force of government to protect them, to prevent the powerful from oppressing the weak.

The same is true for economic freedom or free markets. Most of the strawment for free market have actually been anarchy, not economic freedom. It is not "survival of the fittest" or "natural behavior". In SMAC, it is modelled as a Technological Breakthrough that must be researched then implemented.

Just as the government oversees protection of our personal freedoms, in a free market, the government oversees protection of our economic freedom. This means that anti-competitive practices are punished, such as building monopolies and trusts, or engaging in price fixing, or using physical or economic force to bully someone into selling their business, or forcing people to work at jobs they don't want, to name a few.

But on the flip side, for the market to remain free, the government must not itself engage in anti-free market practices, such as requiring excessive fees (or bribes) to start a business, or running government monopolies. For example, many goverments that are largely free market for some reason (perhaps government indoctrination) have a monopoly on education. [I pick this because I consider it the single most damaging example of anti-competive practice in the USA.] Now most people would support public funding of education, but a government monopoly on education is another matter. And test results show that just as you would expect, the free market is vastly superior in education both in the quality of the education (how much the kids learn) and cost effectiveness. Though public schools are funded at an average of over $7,000 per student per year, they average 20% poorer results on standardized tests compared to private schools that average only $5,500 funding per student.

In summary, free market is not anarchy. Just as human freedoms require laws to codify the freedoms and government to enforce them, economic freedoms also must be codified and enforced.

	11-08-2004 23:25									#50
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The Livid Imp Digest:

1. We Americans (other than war vets) have not truly experienced the horrors of war, yet we romanticize it at every opportunity. In Vietnam we lost 57,000 souls which spawned 20 years worth of movies and dialog about the subject. Yet we lose 43,000 Americans every year to auto wrecks and we sweep it under the rug because it just isn't interesting enough to make the evening news. Our perceptions of the world are so skewed in the US by so called "patriotism" that we'll go on and on about our great military accomplishments. Every single life lost to war is a tragedy, but when you look at the raw numbers, America is not the great John Wayne it likes to believe it is. We love to brag how we saved the French in WWI & II. The truth is that we played clean up crew. It would be like two boxers going at it for eight rounds, the French boxer gets knocked out, so then we send in a fresh American boxer against the winded German. Now don't get me wrong, all is fair in love and war, and we did the right thing in WWI & II, but America has lost its humility. When you lose your humility, you will start picking fights like a school yard bully. I'll leave that at that because I am starting to go into another subject.

2. Free Market is a great economic system that is doomed to collapse under its own weight without government regulation. A unregulated free market is economic anarchy, which is about as productive as, well, political anarchy. The entire idea behind the free market system is freedom or choice, what could be more American, right? But if you allow the Microsoft's of the world to stifle all the competition because we refuse to issue regulations, then you end up with one product, the same if you had a socialist government making your software. A vote for unregulated capitalism is a vote for socialism ultimately. The only difference is the source.
And let's not forget that this is a game, not political science. The developers are allowed to take artistic license in order to make the game fun. But in real life, free market and planned economies are not mutually exclusive, but rather degrees of separation.

	12-08-2004 00:19									#51
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quote: Originally posted by mmontgomery There is so many inaccuracies it is mind boggling..... .....Though public schools are funded at an average of over $7,000 per student per year, they average 20% poorer results on standardized tests compared to private schools that average only $5,500 funding per student.

Keep in mind that the students in private schools typically come from middle to upper class families with more involved parents. Public schools have a much higher percentage of unwilling students and teachers which would bring down the test averages of even the richest private schools. It is real easy to brag about your test scores when you can just kick out all the D and F students....public schools don't have that luxury.

For as imperfect a system that it is, the necessities of life (utilities, schools, defense) need to be run by the government, not private enterprise. The last thing we need are a student's education or a soldier's life being sacrificed because it was more economical than doing the right thing.

	12-08-2004 00:54									#52
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quote: Originally posted by mmontgomery There is so many inaccuracies it is mind boggling. Most of them stem from the absurd idea that a free market means a total absence of government regulation. A free market absolutely requires government oversight to ensure that it remains free. To better understand this, lets look at human freedom. Freedom is definitely NOT the absence of laws or regulations; this is anarchy, and it leads to oppression by the powerful, and very little freedom for the masses. Freedoms require laws and the force of government to protect them, to prevent the powerful from oppressing the weak. In summary, free market is not anarchy. Just as human freedoms require laws to codify the freedoms and government to enforce them, economic freedoms also must be codified and enforced.

From the SMAC handbook (bold added for emphasis): "Free Market turns market forces loose in your society. Unfettered market economics can produce great wealth quickly, but in the context of Planet's fragile emerging economies can also lead to extremes of pollution and ecological damage. Also, citizens rendered suddenly poor by the actions of unscrupulous moguls may revolt against their energy-fattened masters."

You see, what this topic is all about is Alpha Centauri social engineering, not USA social engineering. I only mentioned Microsoft because it'd then be instantly obvious what I was talking about. Perhaps I should've involved Morgan Industries or OPEC instead.
Alpha Centauri is a game of extremes, as we all should know by now, and this includes Free Market. This one really is an economic model where the government does not interfere with business practises at all in any way.

So, going back on topic, I do not want to live in this kind of Free Market, preffering instead the extremes of Planned, Green or indeed Simple.
In my current real life I'm pretty pleased that I live in a mostly Free Market economy and am equally happy that there's a bit of Planned in it as well.

So... if you want to go defend the sacred Free Market, please go and defend Alpha Centauri's Free Market.

	12-08-2004 01:52									#53
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quote: Originally posted by livid imp Keep in mind that the students in private schools typically come from middle to upper class families with more involved parents. Public schools have a much higher percentage of unwilling students and teachers which would bring down the test averages of even the richest private schools. It is real easy to brag about your test scores when you can just kick out all the D and F students....public schools don't have that luxury.

This is an interesting theory, but it is not actually true. Most private schools accept anyone. No screening of bad students. And charter schools, which have to accept all students by law, also outperform public schools.

An interesting social experiment was performed in several US cities, including Milwaukee and Cincinatti. Vouchers were given to thousands of the worst performing and poorest public school students to be able to attend private school with public funding. Within two years, these students had gone from being in the bottom 25% of those tested, to averaging in the 60th percentile (10 percent higher than the public school average).

Some states also permit charter schools to be publicly funded. These schools must accept any student, but operate on a free market principle, in that no one is forced to go to a charter school, and the school is funded based on exactly how many students attend. So if the charter school is sub-par, parent won't send their children there, and the school goes out of business. These schools average test results about half way between public schools and private schools.

In US public schools, free market forces are totally suppressed. Parents are not free to send their schools to whichever public school they want; they are forced to send their children to a specific school, whether it is the best school, or even the closest school. Parents have been forces to send their children clear across town in some cases, their only other choices being to pay for private school, or to move their residence. Because of this, for many parents, the schools that their children will have to attend is a major factor in deciding where to live.

It is interesting how when a monopoly becomes entrenched, it is hard to move back to a free market in that area. If the monopoly is threatened, people being serviced by the monopoly are feed gloom and doom stories about what will happen if the monopoly is broken. This is true with telephone service, and with public schools, where the monopolies spread FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about the effects of the monopoly being broken (your children will suffer, your phone bill will go up), and discrediting the motives of those who are trying to break the monopoly, as belief in the superiority of the free market is not reason enough to try to break a monopoly.

	12-08-2004 03:53									#54
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quote: Originally posted by mmontgomery Most private schools accept anyone. No screening of bad students. And charter schools, which have to accept all students by law, also outperform public schools.

It is not an issue that they will accept anyone. The lowest scoring students are also typically the poorest students that would not afford to go to private school. Thus a private school will always have higher test score averages.

quote: Originally posted by mmontgomery An interesting social experiment was performed in several US cities, including Milwaukee and Cincinatti. Vouchers were given to thousands of the worst performing and poorest public school students to be able to attend private school with public funding. Within two years, these students had gone from being in the bottom 25% of those tested, to averaging in the 60th percentile (10 percent higher than the public school average).

Two problems with this. One, Milwaukee and Cincinnati are rather white-bread Midwestern cities. I challenge the same test in the inner city of L.A. or N.Y. The social problems run so deep with the poor in those places I would like to see any level of improvement, public or private.
Two, what are the attrition rates in these studies? Again, they'll mean nothing if all the worst students get kicked out, or leave, or were never able to join the study in the first place. Do you have links or references to these studies?

Another thing is that I never said the private schools couldn't do well, or that public are doing well....cause they're not. My point is solving the public school problem isn't privatization, it is grassroots involvement of the parents to push issues.

quote: Originally posted by mmontgomery If the monopoly is threatened, people being serviced by the monopoly are feed gloom and doom stories about what will happen if the monopoly is broken.

You mean like California's fubar attempt to deregulate energy right? Need I remind you of our energy shortage? That was deregulation at work.

quote: Originally posted by mmontgomery FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt)

That is a bit redundant isn't?

	12-08-2004 06:55									#55
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Ultimately, the Free Market depicted in SMAC is unpractical and unstable, the planned economy is stable but innefficient, and the green economy, while efficient and practical, is not economical...

Any questions?

If you are asking which one I like the best, I would have to say planned. The planned economy depicted in the game is what I would like to live in...

	12-08-2004 13:34									#56
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quote: Originally posted by binTravkin If Europe had so much help (in military force) by 1917, then by the end of the war Germany would be overrun Imagine yourself in the SMAC game where you have 3.8 * 10 = 38 units Imagine you have FM Imagine you send 2 units to hostile territory (represents those 200k who were in reality transferred) In that case, would you worry about pacifism drones??

Enough! The U.S. suffered 300,000 casualties in World War I, in about a year and a half of participation. Much of that time was spent mobilizing, so the casualty rates were pretty high toward the end when the U.S. was making a big difference on the Western Front. How did we manage to sustain 300,000 casualties with a force of 200,000? Only if every man were John Kerry could we have done so.

Here's the link, figures compiled by Al Nofi, who should be known to some of you wargamers and armchair historians alike:

http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/cwc/other/stats/warcost.htm

quote: Originally posted by binTravkin In the end - you must clearly realise that if any of you, americans want to talk about war, war victims or even historical warfare, you should not do it too overconfidently as your nation has saw at leas 10 times less warfare than an average European nation!

That might have some relevance if people were simply the sum of their nation's historical experiences, but that is not the case. The average American has seen a lot more of war first hand than the average European, as we have fought more of them in the last 50 years. This is at least as meaningful, which is to say not very.

	12-08-2004 13:38									#57
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quote: The Livid Imp Digest: 1. We Americans (other than war vets) have not truly experienced the horrors of war, yet we romanticize it at every opportunity. In Vietnam we lost 57,000 souls which spawned 20 years worth of movies and dialog about the subject. Yet we lose 43,000 Americans every year to auto wrecks and we sweep it under the rug because it just isn't interesting enough to make the evening news. Our perceptions of the world are so skewed in the US by so called "patriotism" that we'll go on and on about our great military accomplishments. Every single life lost to war is a tragedy, but when you look at the raw numbers, America is not the great John Wayne it likes to believe it is. We love to brag how we saved the French in WWI & II. The truth is that we played clean up crew. It would be like two boxers going at it for eight rounds, the French boxer gets knocked out, so then we send in a fresh American boxer against the winded German. Now don't get me wrong, all is fair in love and war, and we did the right thing in WWI & II, but America has lost its humility. When you lose your humility, you will start picking fights like a school yard bully. I'll leave that at that because I am starting to go into another subject. 2. Free Market is a great economic system that is doomed to collapse under its own weight without government regulation. A unregulated free market is economic anarchy, which is about as productive as, well, political anarchy. The entire idea behind the free market system is freedom or choice, what could be more American, right? But if you allow the Microsoft's of the world to stifle all the competition because we refuse to issue regulations, then you end up with one product, the same if you had a socialist government making your software. A vote for unregulated capitalism is a vote for socialism ultimately. The only difference is the source. And let's not forget that this is a game, not political science. The developers are allowed to take artistic license in order to make the game fun. But in real life, free market and planned economies are not mutually exclusive, but rather degrees of separation.

Wise words!

I see there are still some americans who don't idealise their nation or US!

	12-08-2004 14:07									#58
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quote: That might have some relevance if people were simply the sum of their nation's historical experiences, but that is not the case. The average American has seen a lot more of war first hand than the average European, as we have fought more of them in the last 50 years. This is at least as meaningful, which is to say not very.

Well, then I'll ask you:

1.did your grandfather died from a snipers bullet while scouting the frontlines (1943)?
2.was your grandgrandfather enrolled in the age of 15(WWI) and lost left leg in the second war(1942)?
3.was your grandgrandmother from the other parent found dead in the ruins of bombed house(1944)?
Mine were!

Those events are not in 50 year span, but close enough to mention!

Was your fathers cousin drafted to fight in Afganistan?
Mine was!

And I didn't mention that all but one of my grandfathers and grandgrandfathers have "seen combat"!

So you should better close your mouth!
Even if you have related people who had seen war that war was not like my ancestors have seen!

quote: wargamers and armchair historians

I attend Latvian University, History catedre, 2nd course and I'm the best student in the course..
What we learned about in the spring was the beginning of the 20th century.

Well, maybe I dont remeber the real number, but your ancestors didn't made any diference in WWI, difference was made by economical sanctions nut a handful of mis-guided americans who therefore got high casualty ratio!

The frontline moved ~100 km in the 1918 when americans came into fight; do you call it big difference?
To make 10km/month..
If the war continued so, Germany was won around 1925 or even later when Allies reached RUR area..

And you should read livid Imp Digest and think about it a bit cause I'm starting to think that you're just another "patriotic" american who believes too much in his government and american "patriotic" historians

It's showinism!

	12-08-2004 14:16									#59
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quote: 16,353.7

or 16 353 700

This is from link you gave:
WW2, enrolled

And you should clearly see that this number is somewhat weird!

Russians had 13 million at the frontline at 1944
Germans had ~ 6 in average in 1940-1944

Your pitiful historian pretends that US had drafted ~1/3 of USSR's amount and ~2/3 of Germany's amount..

Then where the hell that glorious army was??
Why didn't it came and save us, pitiful Europeans who don't know howto fight and what a real war is?!?

	12-08-2004 19:10									#60
	Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

quote: Originally posted by binTravkin Your pitiful historian pretends that US had drafted ~1/3 of USSR's amount and ~2/3 of Germany's amount..

Chill down a little, Travkin, I have already seen those numbers and although I haven't check all of them, those I have cross checked are correct.
This guy is not a 'pitiful historian'.

Now,I can understand your emotion. And to help fixing the minds, here are three maps of the deads causalties (I insist, the deads only, not the wounded).

First, the keys to read the maps: