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Equality 7-2521 View Drop Down
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 10:35
How many times will we have to state our position before you stop misrepresenting it?
"One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall. "
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 10:37
Originally posted by dtguitarfan dtguitarfan wrote:

Originally posted by Equality 7-2521 Equality 7-2521 wrote:

Originally posted by dtguitarfan dtguitarfan wrote:

Originally posted by Epignosis Epignosis wrote:


What strikes me as funny is that we have public roads, yet on many of them you're still required to pay a toll, so what's so challenging to understand about private roads?  Confused

I hate toll roads.  Can you honestly imagine a world in which all roads are toll roads?  The traffic would suck, big time.  When I was still a single man, I used to visit my cousins in Boston.  The one, single toll booth I used to hit would often delay my ride by up to 2 hours.  Just getting through that one toll would do that to me.  Can you honestly imagine what the traffic would be like if all roads were toll roads?  Face it, your Libertarian world sucks, man.


Parking lots are privately owned but do not always require a toll ya know?

I live in Chattanooga, where all parking lots are privately owned and you can't find a free parking spot on the weekend to save your life.  That sucks too.

The private car transport model has become blown way out of proportion.  Millions of little toasters housing single occupants moving around all over the place is bizzarre to anyone with some perspective.  But, I guess nice red wheels gets you a nice blonde cod on the line from time to time.


Edited by Neelus - July 24 2013 at 10:40
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 10:42
Originally posted by Neelus Neelus wrote:


The private car transport model has become blown way out of proportion.  Millions of little toasters housing single occupants moving around all over the place is bizzarre to anyone with some sense of perspective.  But, I guess nice red wheels gets you a nice blonde cod on the line from time to time.

Agreed.  I think it would do many cities a lot of good to have better public transportation.  It would help the environment and reduce costs.  But I'm sure some Libertarian is going to come along and tell me how stupid that is, because it doesn't fit their model of private ownership.  And then I'll point to how completely awful it is to get around Atlanta, while being extremely easy to get around Boston (I used to park at the lot that was on the edge of town and ride the subway in, and for the entire visit we'd walk and use the subway - you could go anywhere in town pretty fast that way).

Like I said, a paradigm you can't see out of.
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Equality 7-2521 View Drop Down
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 10:43
Public transportation doesn't need to be governmentally run...
"One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall. "
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 10:50
Originally posted by dtguitarfan dtguitarfan wrote:

Originally posted by Epignosis Epignosis wrote:

Originally posted by dtguitarfan dtguitarfan wrote:

Originally posted by Epignosis Epignosis wrote:


What strikes me as funny is that we have public roads, yet on many of them you're still required to pay a toll, so what's so challenging to understand about private roads?  Confused

I hate toll roads.  Can you honestly imagine a world in which all roads are toll roads?  The traffic would suck, big time.  When I was still a single man, I used to visit my cousins in Boston.  The one, single toll booth I used to hit would often delay my ride by up to 2 hours.  Just getting through that one toll would do that to me.  Can you honestly imagine what the traffic would be like if all roads were toll roads?  Face it, your Libertarian world sucks, man.


You have public roads in the US and there are still toll booths.  That was my point- not that all private roads would have tolls.

I just don't get this attitude.  I never will.  I just can't understand how someone can have so much hatred and fear of the government, but believe in the benevolence of corporations.  I would think the pessimism towards government would spill over to corporations as well, but you seem to think they are just fine and saintly.

Corporations HATE it when people are able to use anything that they own for free.  They operate on one, single minded goal: make as much money as possible.  If there is any asset you could be making money on but are not, then you need to change that.


Government is not anti-corporation like you seem to think it is.  The US government is the tool of big corporations.  I believe I've been very clear on this point.

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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 10:52
Originally posted by Equality 7-2521 Equality 7-2521 wrote:

Public transportation doesn't need to be governmentally run...


I dont know the actual numbers off the top of my head, but I can imagine that investing in more choo choo lines and buses might be too much for the private sector to bear.  Enough to scare most off anyway. 
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 10:56
Because?
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 11:04
Originally posted by Equality 7-2521 Equality 7-2521 wrote:

Because?


Rail lines and rolling stock takes alot of cash to develop/expand, and the returns on investment wont be quick.  Thats why I think (not sure) that it might be a job for gov, not business. 
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 11:17
Because of the economical crisis, the Spanish government has started closing public transport (mainly train but also bus) lines which where 'not profitable'. As a result, the 'profitable lines' are losing a lot of passengers and are becoming themselves 'not profitable' (think that among travelers going from small town A to small town B, many where in transit to big town C. The line between A and B might not be profitable per se, but it provided customers to the line B to C which was therefore profitable. Stop the line A to B and automatically B to C loses so many customers that it becomes also non-profitable, so candidate to be closed as well).

Follow this line of action and many of the public lines of transport will get closed, you can't think in individual terms of what's profitable or not but only in the whole system. When lines are privately owned, the risk that 'local' interest wins over the overall total interest (unless all of the lines are owned by the same company) is likely to make the system collapse, when there was actually no reason for it (on a total level, the whole of lines could have been profitable).
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 11:29
Originally posted by Epignosis Epignosis wrote:


Government is not anti-corporation like you seem to think it is.  The US government is the tool of big corporations.  I believe I've been very clear on this point.


I absolutely agree.  Which is why I want to put in place the "socialistic" strategy of getting corporate money out of political campaigns.  You go to the extreme and think we should eliminate government.  But I think this way lies madness. 
"Republicans want smaller government for the same reason that crooks want fewer cops: it's easier to get away with murder."  - James Carville
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 11:36
Originally posted by Neelus Neelus wrote:

Originally posted by Equality 7-2521 Equality 7-2521 wrote:

Because?


Rail lines and rolling stock takes alot of cash to develop/expand, and the returns on investment wont be quick.  Thats why I think (not sure) that it might be a job for gov, not business. 


ROI is slow in most industries and capital accumulation is always the biggest non-legal problem. I don't understand the complaint.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 11:38
Originally posted by Gerinski Gerinski wrote:

Because of the economical crisis, the Spanish government has started closing public transport (mainly train but also bus) lines which where 'not profitable'. As a result, the 'profitable lines' are losing a lot of passengers and are becoming themselves 'not profitable' (think that among travelers going from small town A to small town B, many where in transit to big town C. The line between A and B might not be profitable per se, but it provided customers to the line B to C which was therefore profitable. Stop the line A to B and automatically B to C loses so many customers that it becomes also non-profitable, so candidate to be closed as well).

Follow this line of action and many of the public lines of transport will get closed, you can't think in individual terms of what's profitable or not but only in the whole system. When lines are privately owned, the risk that 'local' interest wins over the overall total interest (unless all of the lines are owned by the same company) is likely to make the system collapse, when there was actually no reason for it (on a total level, the whole of lines could have been profitable).


This is just poor management. It's common business practice to leverage loss in a sector for overall profit. Every major retail chain does this. Bureaucrats are under external and internal pressure to cut because they do not understand how businesses operate and the public does not understand how businesses operate. Government has a terrible track record concerning liquidations.
"One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall. "
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 11:54
Originally posted by Equality 7-2521 Equality 7-2521 wrote:

Originally posted by Gerinski Gerinski wrote:

Because of the economical crisis, the Spanish government has started closing public transport (mainly train but also bus) lines which where 'not profitable'. As a result, the 'profitable lines' are losing a lot of passengers and are becoming themselves 'not profitable' (think that among travelers going from small town A to small town B, many where in transit to big town C. The line between A and B might not be profitable per se, but it provided customers to the line B to C which was therefore profitable. Stop the line A to B and automatically B to C loses so many customers that it becomes also non-profitable, so candidate to be closed as well).

Follow this line of action and many of the public lines of transport will get closed, you can't think in individual terms of what's profitable or not but only in the whole system. When lines are privately owned, the risk that 'local' interest wins over the overall total interest (unless all of the lines are owned by the same company) is likely to make the system collapse, when there was actually no reason for it (on a total level, the whole of lines could have been profitable).


This is just poor management. It's common business practice to leverage loss in a sector for overall profit. Every major retail chain does this. Bureaucrats are under external and internal pressure to cut because they do not understand how businesses operate and the public does not understand how businesses operate. Government has a terrible track record concerning liquidations.
I already said, this are the considerations unless all of the lines are owned by the same company.
You may say something like 'no problem, the owner of line B to C will subsidize the line A to B since the existence of line A to B benefits its own interests' but I'm afraid it's not that simple in practice.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 12:06
There's a whole slew of possibilities other than what you mention. Economies are more complex than you make them out to be. This is not the issue.

The issue you non-free market guys should be concerned about would be the development of a natural monopoly.
"One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall. "
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 12:20
Originally posted by Equality 7-2521 Equality 7-2521 wrote:

There's a whole slew of possibilities other than what you mention. Economies are more complex than you make them out to be. This is not the issue.

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." - Albert Einstein
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 12:28
I guess Einstein didn't understand Special/General Relativity then, or Brownian motion, or the Photoelectric effect, or anything that he discovered. 
"One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall. "
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 12:49
Originally posted by Equality 7-2521 Equality 7-2521 wrote:

Economies are more complex than you make them out to be. 
A rather funny reply to my post which precisely just said "but I'm afraid it's not that simple in practice".
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 13:08
Originally posted by Equality 7-2521 Equality 7-2521 wrote:

I guess Einstein didn't understand Special/General Relativity then, or Brownian motion, or the Photoelectric effect, or anything that he discovered. 

In order to explain things in ways that can be used in practice, you often need to get very complicated.  In order to "prove" something to someone who doesn't believe you, you need to get very complicated.  But if you cannot also explain this theory/principle/idea/whatever you wanna call it to a six year old, you don't really understand it.

Sorry to return to the Bible, but it's something I know quite a bit about: what is the point of the Bible?  It's simple: love.  Jesus said that all the law and the prophets are summed up in the commandments to love God and love your neighbor.  Then he told a parable we call the Sheep and the Goats in which he illustrated that by loving people, you are actually showing love to God.  Paul, in Romans 13:10, said that love is the fulfillment of the law.  John, in I John 4:8, said that God is love.  So why don't we just have a stone tablet that says "love" on it and call that "the Bible"?  Because sometimes you have to get complicated before you can reduce things back to simplicity.  But until you can reduce the complexity to something simple, you don't really understand it.
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 13:14
Originally posted by dtguitarfan dtguitarfan wrote:

Originally posted by Equality 7-2521 Equality 7-2521 wrote:

I guess Einstein didn't understand Special/General Relativity then, or Brownian motion, or the Photoelectric effect, or anything that he discovered. 

In order to explain things in ways that can be used in practice, you often need to get very complicated.  In order to "prove" something to someone who doesn't believe you, you need to get very complicated.  But if you cannot also explain this theory/principle/idea/whatever you wanna call it to a six year old, you don't really understand it.


"If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize."

Richard Feynman
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Direct Link To This Post Posted: July 24 2013 at 13:35
Originally posted by dtguitarfan dtguitarfan wrote:

Originally posted by Equality 7-2521 Equality 7-2521 wrote:

I guess Einstein didn't understand Special/General Relativity then, or Brownian motion, or the Photoelectric effect, or anything that he discovered. 

In order to explain things in ways that can be used in practice, you often need to get very complicated.  In order to "prove" something to someone who doesn't believe you, you need to get very complicated.  But if you cannot also explain this theory/principle/idea/whatever you wanna call it to a six year old, you don't really understand it.

Sorry to return to the Bible, but it's something I know quite a bit about: what is the point of the Bible?  It's simple: love.  Jesus said that all the law and the prophets are summed up in the commandments to love God and love your neighbor.  Then he told a parable we call the Sheep and the Goats in which he illustrated that by loving people, you are actually showing love to God.  Paul, in Romans 13:10, said that love is the fulfillment of the law.  John, in I John 4:8, said that God is love.  So why don't we just have a stone tablet that says "love" on it and call that "the Bible"?  Because sometimes you have to get complicated before you can reduce things back to simplicity.  But until you can reduce the complexity to something simple, you don't really understand it.



"One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall. "
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