ANC/Mandela supported economic nationalism. He was honored by the Soviet Union for his pro-communist affiliations. ...

Mandela was anti-capitalist. Not as in, "bmajik says so", but as in, Mandela says so.

And? Mandela could have been Satan incarnate. That doesn't justify vetoing anti-apartheid sanctions.

In 61-62 he participated in a _bombing campaign_ to put pressure on the apartheid government.

I like how you sandwich that in the above. It's as if you believe that Mandela was a one dimensional man with specific intentions involving communism. Meanwhile, if he had staged non-violent sanctions, would that have been okay? Because Reagan wasn't even willing to push or enforce for that. And if he managed it, Reagan would have likely called for his own _bombing campaign_.

Reagan and Thatcher were hesitant to cut off South Africa not because they gave a shit about Mandela or because they loved sticking it to black people; they saw SA as a pawn in the cold war. They didn't want a bunch of African Nationalist Parties starting communist and Russia-aligned states all over the untapped African continent.

So, they don't give a shit about Mandela, but it's because of Mandela they weren't willing to piss off the South African government as it could possibly lead to Mandela gaining power... Funny. It also goes against the long-held truth that America has consistently in the past (a) pushed sanctions and (b) simultaneously provided support for a pro-nationalist pawn in the country to form a coup. The only reason Mandela wasn't chosen is he was anti-capitalist. And odds are good no other pro-capitalist was chosen because the South African government was good enough for Reagan as a useful pro-capitalist pawn.

To Manela's credit, while he advocated for nationalizing of banks, gold production, other mining, and the abolition of private property, he didn't enact these policies when he eventually took control of the government. He was smart enough to understand that SA badly needed foreign investment, and nationalizing industry and destroying property doesn't get you investors.

I like how you mixed "nationalizing industry and destroying property". Perhaps if you said "destroying capital" it'd mean something. In fact, nationalizing industry can spur foreign investment if done correctly. The hard part is, of course, convincing foreign investors that you're only going to nationalize those resources that were unreasonably sold to foreign investors in the past. That's the real destroyer, the destroyer of confidence. And there's no real simple way to fix that problem, no matter how unjust a previous government was with previous contracts or grants. The closest thing is to have a slow transition and a strong political party to see it through. The only alternative is to just let things stand and hope that either inequity fixes itself or you can use taxes or something similar to mold the system to solve the problems. In short, there's no simple solutions, and as you state, Mandela was wise to not engage in coarse action.

Mandela is a mixed bag. As terrorists go, he was a pretty pleasant one -- MK (the militant wing he was part of) only attacked infrastructure at night, hoping to minimize civilian losses.

Certainly better than the US government's own various bombing campaigns.

But, he was willing to resort to violence to bring about a communist revolution in Africa.

As above, being peaceful wouldn't have meant the US would have responded in kind.

You think Reagan and Thatcher were against that? You're right.

As you hinted above, Reagan and Thatcher were against any potentially Soviet Union puppet because Reagan and Thatcher wanted to be the puppet masters. You had to be the US or the Soviet's puppet. So, you were right in a way. The US didn't care about Mandela as a person or whether the black people were being killed or not. All they cared about was retaining their puppet and doing nothing to help a potential Soviet puppet. And if Mandela had risen to power, even under a democracy and non-violent means, then the US would violently overthrow that regime and put in its place a democracy or theocracy or aristocracy or whatever it took to have their puppet.

You see, as much as you can potentially condemn Mandela for what he did or might have been, you overlook that Mandela wasn't *the* guaranteed new leader of South Africa. Reagan and ilk were not interested in rocking the boat that was the apartheid South African government because they were uninterested in the foreign policy risk. In essence, the people of South Africa or even the rest of the world didn't matter. All that mattered was the political game. One could argue that such show of strength was necessary, but Carter didn't cause WW3.

The whole notion that any of it was necessary seems as much absurd in hindsight as Mandela creating a communism regime just for the Soviet Union. That's the only point where I'd at least begin to tolerate Reagan's concerns at the time. But even that doesn't justify vetoing sanctions or refusal to enforce them. It only explains why they wouldn't have supported Mandela. Well, the US never had to. And perhaps because they didn't is precisely why Mandela and others like him are so well liked. The US is great at picking losers, perhaps?

I concur very strongly to this. It's funny most of all because the study, if anything, hints less that people are bad at choosing passwords (since given enough password space, a lot of "bad" passwords are inherently obscure by length) as that input constraints result in those "bad" passwords actually becoming bad. But as much as xkcd points it out, I don't think the suggestion of simply four words is enough (or more precisely, I think the entropy numbers are off if one presumes such pass phrases become common and based on dictionary words). The real point would be, of course, that the reason bank pins are so secure is because they can't be brute forced. At that point, it's most often a moot point and the only real issue is sites storing unsalted, unhashed passwords and being hackable.

To wit, the weakest link in the chain is in fact the computer element, not than the human element--baring the pedantic point that all the software is human made.

The alternative is wasting billions of $ on privately created programs that don't do what they should--the exact amount might be lower, but it'd still be in the billions. The real question is, has any government or other organization made OSS payroll systems that are readily modifiable to complex rules? If there was just one decent one, how much would it cost to modify it to work on even some of the more esoteric rule sets? Because once you get to that point, every one of those "billions of $ wasted on programs that don't do what they should" because a rather clear case of fraud or malfeasance. Perhaps that wouldn't really change anything. But, if you one is pessimistic enough to believe that, then the discussion of the waste is all a moot point anyways, as nothing any of us says or does will matter, so arguing over it is itself a waste of your and my time. :/

How would that not be spending tax dollars to compete with private industry?

Compared to the US Army committing theft--BSA terms--of at least $50 million on the private sector, only to later begrudgingly pay some sort of settlement on the part they accidentally outed themselves on? At least direct open source software development could be some sort of honorable route. Btw, why aren't we also hearing about dishonorable discharges and criminal trials leading to prison terms? Because I'm pretty sure anyone else in the same boat--not companies, because they're apparently treated the same with the lack of jail time for officials--would be extradited if necessary and threatened with long jail terms.

What kind of an ass backwards priority system does this poster have?

Probably the kind that says "don't reinvent the wheel" and doesn't suffer too much from "not invented here" syndrome to see the value of open source software and how tax money can be better spent in a more open, transparent system? That it might have a negative effect on the private industry is just a natural side effect of them not sufficiently covering a niche. What next? Are you going to bitch that the US Army doesn't outsource its troops to private contractors and how their in-house work and how it is utilized competes too much with private industry?

Take money away from honest citizens at gun point and give this money to their competition?

99.9999% of people aren't "their competition". And if you're in an industry that can be readily subsumed as a duty of a governmental department, you're inherently on thin ice when it comes to long-term stability of your business. The only major argument you could have is that what the US Army needs isn't per se under the envelope of their duty and should be outsourced to someone. But, that argument calls upon the construction of a federal governmental IT department to construct a lot of the software that can and would be used by federal, state, and local governance over a lot of areas. Why? Precisely because even a horribly budgeted $50 million to have developed the software instead of buying it out from a private company would put the government in a better position: they'd have the software source and in-house developers knowledgeable enough to make requested modifications they particularly want without worrying about a middle-man company that may choose to be wholly uncooperative.

How is this even remotely ethical?

Well, the other major alternative would be to not buy software at all nor pirate it. Because once you starting how it's somehow unethical to take the more cost effective approach because it might deter the private sector, all bets are off on even involving yourself in that sector of the economy. Oh, you're okay with it so long as it involves a company sucking on the government's teet, right? Nothing like that sweet, sweet corporate welfare.

PS - I love the quote in the article: '"Piracy is theft, clean and simple," remarked vice-president Joe Biden at the time [in 2010].' Where's your moral outrage upon that?

Note that I also am not advocating that the US is "Christian" or should be.

Not that I was saying you were, but the majority of Americans profess to be Christians. And I honestly think that exposing the "ugly" truth on just how many people are "supposedly" Christian is probably the best way to avoid either (a) uniting people under a banner as an excuse to persecute others and (b) to avoid internal conflict and purges when people feel out un-"Christian" a lot of people are. Note: I say all this with the presumption that at least the devote are Christian in their own mind--ie, it isn't just a claim to avoid scrutiny--and yet the difference in beliefs is so wide that plenty of people would claim other Christians aren't "true" Christians, which seems to be the foundation of a lot of intra-religion abuse.

Personally, I don't think the government and religion should be crossed. It's a little more questionable when laws based on morality come in to the picture, but I tend to be very much against "moral" laws that can't demonstrate harm to someone other than the person doing it. Religion and politics do not mix well because those who seek power will abuse religion to get what they want. I elude to that in another one of my posts and this is also where much of the infighting has come from.

There is certainly truth to this to some extent, but the other ugly truth is that there are those in power who are so self-righteous in their cause that they believe it is necessary to engage in purgings, from excommunication to banishment to outright death, to avoid somehow tainting "their" religion or otherwise leading "the flock" down the wrong path. Ie, they come to their own justifications upon what is necessary, even if to do such acts is clearly counter to the word of God.

There is no Biblical basis (new testament anyway) for violent acts against someone for being a heretic, so therefore the only way to come to that conclusion is that it is an erosion of your power base and therefore a threat to be attacked.

While that can certainly be true, one need not be a hypocrite to expound upon beliefs that one does not follow. You see, in their own eyes there is "the higher virtue"--see the 0th law in Asimov's 3 laws of robotics for a similar idea--that can be used to justify the "self-sacrifice" of damnation for the greater good. Now, that doesn't mean that the person can't also be doing it for their own power mongering. It's just not as clear as arguing that the two are truly separate and it's all for show.

You even see this today with the "Christian" politicians who fear-monger up followers by saying all sorts of bad things will happen if they don't get their way.

The "best" kind are the ones who seem to believe bad things will happen anyways, eg Job. Certainly, I can't recall hearing them stop for a second to expound upon all the praise now that they're elected or that things are going good and the evidence is all the gay marriages or something. :) It's one place I can see parallels with some AGW proponents who are more devote to the cause than to reality. Thankfully, we don't have to rely upon them to know the truth nor are they basis for what we know. Still, if you want to have some fun, there's nothing quite as enjoyable as joining a random hate group and shouting along and then changing your mind and chanting something other than the party line. Just be sure to have your escape route planned. :)

Ah, but you see, I'm a physicist and I don't really believe in effects without causes.

So I take it you don't believe in the Big Bang? Or is it turtles all the way down?

There is nothing in the definition that suggests that altruism is causeless or random. Altruism is defined to be the performance of good or self-sacrificing acts without the specific cause of some expectation of reward. To quote further:

Well, beyond the fact that you're not actually quoting the link you gave...the notion of self-sacrifice without some expectation of reward is precisely the point being challenged by the article: that a lot of activities spur a reward that, at least subconsciously is expected. Hence it's not a random act nor is it causeless--it's based upon past such behavior causing one to belief that future events will unfold a certain way. That is, after all, what expectations are all about. And hence to lack expectation is to either have no history to base upon, a history that proves a lack of reward, or to have some specific intent to act without a cause. So, perhaps not all altruism need be causeless, but most people have enough experience to see that (a) comparable circumstances operate similarly and so direct experience in one matter need not exist to form an expectation and (b) that generally the lack of reward for an act is a sign it's a "bad" act. But, I'd admit there's leeway in there. Never the less, a large part of the issue is just how much the subconscious plays a part in one's expectations.

According to your definition, only if I decide to give $100 to Unicef if I flip a coin and it comes up heads, then flip the coin (and it comes up heads) is it random, or causally linked to a truly unpredictable event, and hence "altruism".

Nope because then the coin flip caused you to give money to Unicef. :) Now, the decision to flip a coin to give money to Unicef in the first place could be altruism (something you speak of in the next sentence).

[Large winded speech about the body is physical and there's random (that's non-cause but also not intent) or reasoned (and hence has a cause)]

Out of curiosity, did you reason out every word you use? Or do you propose using "sort of things with puppies" instead of "sort of things with kittens" was a quantum fluctuation? Or would you recognize that humans have yet to reach the point of complete self-analysis and that when people speak of "intent" and "thought", they may all originate physically but it's currently impossible (I tend to believe simply impossible) to specify a cause for them all. That it is in some level "random" doesn't take away from intent because, as you argue, you believe you have reason in a physical universe that is founded on randomness. Obviously if you make a distinction at that level, you can make a distinction with altruism.

So no, I don't think altruism is selfless action without cause, any more than random acts of violence are random or my decision to reply to your reply is random, although it is altruistic enough -- I get no direct benefit from you changing your mind, I get only the satisfaction of knowing that I've helped you (perhaps) towards a better/deeper perception of the nature of good and evil.

Is good or evil more random? j/k :)

It's a bit scary -- and both socially and scientifically pointless -- to assert that it is basically random, without cause. If you really want to understand altruism, study the Prisoner's Dilemma, the game Diplomacy, watch the movie Hunger Games.

I'd suggest you watch Battle Royale. It's more entertaining.

A sociopath is basically an individual that lacks the altruistic conditioning necessary to survive in our society, and the societal superorganism has its own rules for identifying and punishing those individuals as they are a profound threat to it.

They make them CEOs of companies and pay them millions of dollars?

Perhaps you should read about Catharism or one of the many other Catholic Cursades? The fact is, the Catholic Church has engaged in plenty of purges and multiple "councils" to discuss matters of the faith, eventually deciding "the one true way" and burning/killing the heretics who kept going. Most Protestants are so far removed from these decisions that once you actually start reading some of the decisions, you start to see how many people you've met in your life are at least partial believers in at least one of the "heretical" ideas.

You see, the point isn't that the Catholic Church is per se some evil organization. It's that people just presume a lot of their own personal beliefs are (a) similar to others or (b) at least tolerable enough if they have the same "core" beliefs--and it's only after they start really talking that the find out differently. Hence, Protestants have had their own purgings--not always any less bloody than the Catholic kind. They've just had fewer years to have a long history of it. So, the very idea that the US is all some sort of happy Christian family, even as a majority, I think is rather ludicrous. And the more that we actually focus on being "Christian", the more only the "true" Christians will be tolerated.

Hence, the very notion of bring up the point is an act of intolerance is the slippery slope to the same inquisitions that supposedly were the foundation of "Freedom of Religion" in the US. No, the truth is that no denomination had the monopoly on power to reign, so everyone agreed to a sort of truce. And for that, I despise any attempt to pretend or grant any religion a consideration as a majority because any group, religious or not, should not reign. Oh, and, yea, that's why I'm against monarchies too. :)

The point is that to explain altruism, one has to -- um -- show that it isn't really altruism.

No, the problem is that "to explain altruism" is taken to mean "altruism is the effect of something else". Yet the very definition of altruism is that it is an act without cause. Trying to explain altruism is like trying to explain random acts of violence. The truth is, a lot of acts aren't altruistic or random. And understanding those situations can help you know how to cause more or less of the desired behavior. But, clearly, there's plenty of altruism (and random acts of violence) in the world. I just find it sad that people are so quick to want people to justify their charity and that people don't respond appropriately: because.

Your first reason is why it should flatten out -- $100 on $5000 can be argued to be much more of a burden than $10,000 on $500,000, but I don't see how $100,000 on $5,000,000 is so much more of a burden than $1,000,000 on $50,000,000.

Probably because you've got it the other way around? Logical converses aren't always true. The point is that a higher tax rate is a lower burden on progressively higher earners. Sometimes a higher tax rate is a lower burner on progressively lower earners as well and sometimes not. So, in the specific case, it might just do as well to increase the tax rate on the highest earners, period. But the more stratification, the safer it is to bump up the highest bracket without but marginal negative effects.

Your second reason, I think, is simply invalid. One can accept that taxes are necessary without assuming that the government is the best spender of money in general.

Apparently you didn't read my note? Regardless of whether the government is the best spender of money in general, obviously the wealthy are not--there's simply no means for the wealthy to carry out such activities as well as the government can. Look no further than JP Morgan's failure to stem the Great Depression vs how the Federal Reserve (technically not a part of the government, but that's mostly a moot point) and Federal Stimulus were able to prevent another Great Depression. Simply put, a cabal of billionaires couldn't borrow trillions of dollars because they aren't in the position to, if necessary, extract that sort of money out of all the other billionaires who would otherwise be unwilling to contribute (and even then, all those billionaries together don't have the money nor the credit to borrow that sort of money). That latter point is a big one, anyways, since clearly a lot of people who earn that sort of money feel it's their money and aren't willing to give it to others.

Your third reason is simply the assumption that CEOs are overpaid and should have their "excess" compensation drained.

That's basic supply and demand. The price of a good isn't determine because of any classical definition of worth but often almost completely by entirely outside factors. Yet it's unreasonable to have some sort of communistic or socialistic system because that fucks up how supply/demand is auto-correcting. At the same time, to argue that actors, sports stars, CEOs, etc "deserve" the money is only accurate in an obtuse sense of the word "deserve". By the same token, it's not that the government "deserves" the money and is extracting it for that reason. The fundamental issue is there's plenty of situations where no one is really responsible for or deserving of circumstance. In the end, society has decided to assign government--in the US, a democratic republic--to handle those sorts of externalities. To that end, the tax code is the basis for it because it's already established from above that government funding has to come from somewhere and the high end earners are the most capable of supplying funds anyways.

I'm pretty sure no one knows what the shape of the Laffer curve is.

Not the exact shape, no. I'm just going on what I recall of a study that examined various places with different tax rates and the basic tipping point at which revenue actually started going down was around the 50% mark. But, yea, maybe that was just a local maximum.

That doesn't really make any sense. Progressive taxation is meant to:

• Shift the burden on to the people most capable of paying it--$100 in taxes on a person making $5,000/year is more of a burden than $100 in taxes on a person making $50,000,000/year
• Stratifies taxation for common use based on diminishing marginal return--a person making $50,000,000/year won't likely put a lot of it to good social use and has a harder and harder time spending it well (see "Brewster's Millions" for some idea of the concept) while government can do good things with it*
• Some sense of justice (what this whole article is about) that uncorrelated reward is a much better target for taxation--that whether you make $1,000,000/year as a CEO or $10,000,000/year as a CEO has more to do with your industry than likely your performance and further CEOs in general earn a disproportion amount relative to their duties (and let's not forget old money that makes money without real work), so if taxation is going to happen anyways, there's reason to focus more and more on higher and higher earners

In short, I see nothing that would indicate that the tax rate has a specific reason to flatten out at higher levels except that at some point you want to make sure it never goes to 100% inherently (effectively with inflation is another matter). Honestly, from what I recall about the Laffer curve, if revenue was the chief concern then one should target a maximum of 50%. That still leaves plenty of room given the current tax brackets.

*This sort of leads into a tangent about exactly what government spends the money on or if it's doing a good job, but that's orthogonal to the type of tax system. Invalid/improper spending only supports a lower tax rate at every level, not a flat or regressive tax system.

So, um, tax them whenever they buy the stock option and later sell the stock (like I said, this presumes getting rid of capital gains)? As for other "non-cash mechanisms", for the most part those are legally income as well and one is legally required to pay taxes on those as well--exceptions being if you itemize your deductions and can claim an expensive item as one of your exemptions or otherwise a related business expense, but that doesn't get you very far. So, I'm not sure how that really counters the point of more income tax brackets.

France's income taxes are pretty comparable to US income taxes and...oh, right, you're talking about "wealth taxes". Well, sorry to break it to you, but the US already has an effective wealth tax*. It's called the Federal Reserve's policy of maintaining a positive inflation rate. Such inherently devalues all wealth. The only way to recoup the effective loss is through further income which will be taxed already on a progressive scale. So, to maintain your wealth you have to not only beat inflation every year but do so after taxes. Ie, it gets harder the more wealth you have. My suggestion just makes it even harder, which hypothetically should spur more risky/profitable investments by the wealth.

*Yes, not all wealth is stored in dollars or some liquid asset, but while most assets will follow inflation, it's a gamble no matter how diversified you are that your total physical assets will average up. Own too much real estate and a mortgage crisis can see your wealth. Same with too many stocks in one industry or any industry if the stock market tanks. In short, there's no safe way to squirrel away 100% of your assets and given the return ratio on a lot of things (after taxes) vs inflation, you'd likely want to invest a significant amount of your assets anyways instead of wholly hedging on consistent inflation in your physical holdings.

In any case, France can't take the same approach since they don't own the Euro mint and it's definitely questionable on taxing all their wealth equally--although one can look at "The Tenant Game" to understand how vast land ownership can be bad as well. And I did note the point about making sure taxes can't go over ~80/90% of income but that's of course based upon a presumed of positive inflation. Perhaps France is just not taking chances?

It seems to me the bigger point is simply that the progressive tax system, which is meant to capture a lot of the diminishing marginal returns on such ridiculous pay, isn't setup to actually scale to the rates discussed. As it stands, the highest US tax bracket is in the 450,000+ range. Yet the pay range being discussed is in the multi-millions. Considering how the tax pay scale currently is setup, it'd seem that tax brackets should automatically extend as pay goes up*. So long as it's eventually an asymptotic at some point (say at 80 or 90%), then it shouldn't really matter too much how much people are paid.

Oh, and yea, this does presume that capital gains are no longer treated special and that money laundering through loans on stock or similar is harshly punished as tax evasion--ie, actually jail time.

*Something like low_bracket(x) = (x == 0) ? 0 : 16000*2^(x-1)+1, high_bracket(x) = 16000*2^x, tax_rate(x) = (x >= 16) ? 90% : 10%*5%*x; and yea, this doesn't consider the complexity of marriage and such so it's obviously not so simple, but for those curious the above reaches 90% at $524 million+. Feel free to play around with the rates if you'd rather see an asymptotic rate at closer to 50% or at different cut off. Never the less, the idea that all rich people are treated the same and yet there's much more effort to sub-divide the upper middle class (the poor and lower middle class seem well grouped) in the current tax code does tell you something.

My hypothesis is that people are primarily interested in promoting their bias, whether that's conscious or based simply in their desire to reproduce what they know.. It's so much easier to dump what's in your head than perform research.

And...so "what they know" is their bias? A businessman that knows and writes about business is biased? He's not, just, oh, experienced? You see, you're mixing up bias, knowledge, experience, etc into a blender and then complaining about certain parts while ignoring the rest. But, all things considered, I'd trust more a person who knows a subject and will devote their time to it than a person who knows a subject and will spam, through money, to have his knowledge put in place. I say this primarily because there are people (and their companies) with insanely disproportionate amounts of money to spam their views.

What do you mean by this? Are you strawmanning or am I missing the point? Paying someone doesn't necessarily exchange one bias on Wikipedia for another - the person being paid might not have written on Wikipedia anyway, or they might have agreed with what they're being paid to write. Paying someone to edit Wikipedia is just separating the task of choosing what to say from the technical job of writing - a skill which most Wikipedia editors sorely lack.

You are missing the point. You argue everyone has a bias and then seem to overlook that the person being paid has a bias. Yet obviously the whole contention is precisely that the person paid is usually not being paid to write on their bias, as most people so interested would be writing in it already or at best are being financial supported for their views--open source developers being supported comes to mind and that sort of patron system is the exception to the rule. But such is obviously a distorting based on money and the vast majority of such financial interests are more about writing in support of things that go against one's own biases--or at least one would otherwise be neutral about. The end result is, of course, precisely to shift the bias to the buyer's position and there's no real reason to believe that because one person has more money they're inherently more right, so there's no real basis to view money as any sort of equalizer--without specific exceptions proven, of course.

Rubbish. Suggesting that people have equal copious free time is as absurd as suggesting that society is egalitarian. ...

I never suggested that at all. I stated everyone has equal, approximately, total time in their life--there are, of course, major exceptions for some people. That one person has "free time" more than another is a choice they make. Hence, it's more fair if not more egalitarian.

Your 25 year old intelligent, unemployed person living at home (please take that as a description, not an insult) has all day to contribute - your full-time office workers with 2 kids might reasonably have half an hour every evening.

And? Your full-time office workers with 2 kids aren't the people who are spamming Wikipedia. It's the full-time office workers's company owners who make 300x the wage of the office worker--and the office worker makes 2-3x what a lot of people make. So, the 1-2% of the population have an effective monetary voice of 300-600x their size, presuming they can find "your 25-year-old intelligent, [now employed] person living at home [who] has all day to contribute". Not only are they now doing nothing more productive than they were before, but they're not allowing for money to distort the discussion way more than "free time" can--just some simple math, but even your simple example only has the unemployed person who never sleeps only being able to distort at a 48:1 ratio.

The "basement dweller" and the "fast writer" can always decide to engage in a war of attrition and win, because their decisions about where to focus fixed units of time either affect them less or have greater impact.

And if you care enough, you too can fight a war of attrition. That's pretty fair. It's a much more doable choice than earning 300x what you currently make to pay a bunch of previous basement dwellers to espouse your views.

I am glad you put this bit in here because this is exactly how I see Wikipedia: as an MMORPG with arbitrary rules. I don't see any problem with people having to play a game by the rules, but they shouldn't then pretend that it's anything more than a game.

Life is a game with permanent death. And playing by the rules, you can still be an asshole. In this case, the rules were instituted to avoid some asshole behavior. It's not perfect because there are invariably going to situations where people have a legitimate reason to want to break the rules, but I'd stand by the point that the rules are a reasonably fair approach to the problems of allowing commercial interests to edit war.

"Notability not truth" and "volunteer democracy" (i.e. truth by consensus of people with the most time to waste) are what undermines Wikipedia as a reliable source of information.

No, it undermines Wikipedia as a complete source of information. Now, one could interject some comment about requiring a "complete picture" to have a reliable source, but the completeness in question is that an article about X is incomplete. It's that article Y just doesn't exist, nor do a lot of articles like Y because they're not "notable". Well, that's life. Anything less than a raw dump of everything involves some sort of filter process, so unless you're asking for that, at some level--and I think Wikipedia mostly gets it right--you want a filtration process of "notable" vs merely "facts". As for "volunteer democracy", well, everything else is some sort of tyranny*.

EVERYONE is biased. If someone pays to express their bias on Wikipedia, all they're doing is paying for the time to compete.

Uh... Everyone is biased. Person A and B are biased. Person A pays person B to express person A's opinion on Wikipedia and..hmm..why exactly is it that person A has any standing to complain/sue if person B just does whatever the fuck they want again in pursuing their bias? Oh, right, somehow you're silently acknowledging that as much as everyone is biased, they can quell their own bias in one area in exchange for bias in another area: money. In short, you rather undermine your implication about Wikipedia having some sort of pre-constructed bias because obviously people can act beyond their innate biases.

This may make things worse, better, or change nothing much at all, depending on whether the paid-for bias is more or less truthy than other bias.

Well, history has shown that it tends to make things worse. Why? Because there's basically three situations: (a) money is used to make good things look bad, but that doesn't tend to have a feedback cycle except with monopolies and even they tend to crumble after a long enough time if they depend on smearing everyone else, (b) money is made to make unrelated things look good/bad/neutral, which just is unrelated and has no real feedback cycle, or (c) money is used to make bad things look good, which can fundamentally change the expectations of people and has a great feedback cycle--it's why ads are still such a major financial investment by companies even though ads so rarely do anything but, directly or indirectly, try to make their product look good (implying it isn't already). But, yea, let's just pretend that feedback cycles don't exist or we don't have a history to base predictions upon or that all situations are equally probable.

*There's a reason I bolded the parts I did and jump off here. You seem to be complaining about one of the few true democracies that exist: one related to the devotion of one's time. Time and money aren't synonymous. Instead of leaving it to the owner of a company to personal have an edit war with one or more people, wasting their "precious" time, they can buy off people to do the work for them. Yet, time is the great equalizer. Everyone has their own and you can't give it to anyone else. But just like votes or "campaign contributions", money can try to buy it from others. In essence, you fundamental complaint is that Wikimedia strives to maintain the one true equalizer that the internet was, in many ways, envisioned to bring by allowing everyone their own voice. And you even complain about "everyone is biased", as if they shouldn't be. Yet you think money can or should be used in some fashion to magical erase that bias. In short, you make no sense.

PS - If you want to compete, use your own time just like everyone else can. Next up you'll be bitching that most MMORPG players are against being able to buy level-up potions and unbalancing weapons and that money is some magic equalizer there too. Make up your mind if you want to compete and play the game or buy your way out of having to play the game.