Anyone can push for anything in our society. If you hate Free Speech as well, just come out and say it. Also, unions are not deep sea monsters, they are groups of people, so claiming that people didn't, but unions did is just more handwaving.

I'm not a big fan of our current political system. But you're a lunatic. Individual people have the right to form these organisations and have them push for legislation. It's how the system works. It's actually a pretty great part of the system, because through unions and other organisations, groups of individually weak people can accumulate enough voice to actually be heard.

Yes, that's their job. It's because total competition is good for the bottom line, and bad for absolutely everything else, including society, freedom, health. Read a history book about when and why unions formed. You want to go back to the times before that, when people worked 16 hour shifts and serious health issues or death were regular results of your work conditions?

This is the first time ever I've heard anyone call the New Deal "horrific". You do realize that even the hardcore Keynesians who argued strongly against it at first later on agreed that it was a success, yes?

You could've said that earlier, it would've saved me a lot of time if you had admitted that you are completely delusional and honestly believe that in the employee/employer relationship, the employers are the weaker party. Now I understand why you're afraid of majorities dominating minorities - you are a member of a very, very tiny minority with that POV that the real world refutes every minute of every day.

And your advise to the wolves one sentence before that is to become sheep. Priceless. :-)

anecdotal evidence isn't, and a single data point is meaningless in any and all statistics.

Sorry, can't answer, I'm laughing too hard.

hogwash. It's a law. Laws are passed by elected representatives, which is the form that we, as society, have agreed upon. Saying "this wasn't society" is the same handwaving as saying "it wasn't me who pulled the trigger, officer, it was my finger".

Which is why it exists in a hundred other countries who don't have the US racism, yes? Try again, maybe with an argument that survives for three seconds.

If you don't like democracy, how about you say it outright? If you have a couple million people, then no matter what you will always find "plenty of people" who disagree. You could pass a law that says the sky is blue and you'd find people who dislike it. That doesn't prove a thing and it's not an argument. We live in a society that has agreed that majority decides which way we go. If you don't like it, at least say you hate democracy. But I'm pretty sure you don't - you only hate it when you're not part of the majority, right?

Yes, but in that case there is an objective, rational reason for it. That's quite a different category from "I and some other people don't like it".

You are entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts. Unless you have actual evidence of economic damage, you're spreading lies here.

Maybe you shouldn't throw cheap ad-hominem attacks on people whose educational background and profession you don't know. There's a real danger it'll make you look like a complete idiot later in the discussion. ;-)

That's true.

It depends. What you basically end up with here is custom fiat money. It's the digital version of IOWs. It is worth what I say it is worth multiplied by your trust in me actually holding up my bargain. It's interesting, but we agree that it goes too far on the customizability end.

Basically: Most of the rich really like having their money in some tax heaven, but they don't want to live there.

No, it is not. You are complaining that people who are "worth" less than X cannot be differentiated out. But that, exactly, is the point. Society says that below X, we do not want to differentiate anymore, because the cost to society for doing it is higher than the benefit. We should probably do the same at the other end of the spectrum, but that's a different discussion.

It works the other way around. If your business needs the job done, it will pay minimum wage. Your decision is not between different people, your decision is whether or not this job is worth hiring someone for at all.

Not really. Lots of people are stuffed into projects, short-term contracts that pay next to nothing, or encouraged to start their own business even though they know nothing about business and will certainly fail - all so they drop out of the statistics.

There's a huge amount of actually unemployed people who don't count, but the exact number is everyones guess.

In everything, there is good and bad. While the past 20 years are largely bad, there are some good things I'd like to keep. For example, privatization is a huge failure at massive costs in most industries, but in telecommunications it worked pretty well and gave us DSL and three mobile networks to choose from. (though I agree right now half of the telcos have become scumbags after realizing their own price wars have driven them to the brink of not being profitable anymore).

I was being intentionally inaccurate to draw attention, in the same way that ads do it. ;-)

Of course it works. But if you don't know how and can't reliably predict when, then for practical purposes it is far, far less useful than the people selling you the advertisement want to make you believe.

Of course, but it's far from scientific. As I said: Controlled tests are difficult. You know that you did your campaign in this week and these are the sales figures for the week, and the weeks before and the weeks after.

But firstly there could be other effects and secondly it's very hard to establish what worked and why. That's why many companies these days simply run image campaigns - they're not promoting a product, they're just pushing a brand name into your brain.

Wrong. It has not centrally defined value, but it has value. If you give me X for this painting on my wall, then X is its value, regardless of what X is. It could be US$ or pieces of cake or a service.

Yes, for the people making and selling it.

For the other 50%, if you follow studies and publications, the exact effect is unclear. Yes, we know that advertisement in general does have an effect, but it is very hard to quantify it and controlled tests are difficult.

I could go into details, but what for? We're talking about ads as pollution here, and if half of what you put out into the environment has no effect except making the place dirty, then that is pollution, plain and simple.

That's why they power a million homes, yes? It's all an illusion, or all those people just pretend that they have light and warm water. I'll tell a friend of mine, she works in the industry, and runs the numbers on wind power generators for a living.

Wind power generators work fucking well. In fact, they cover about 9% of Germanys energy use. Oh wow, 8 GW of new installed coal power plants, that's your argument? You argue with 8 GW as proof that 35 GW of installed wind power capacity somehow "don't work" and nobody has ever noticed?

Of energy, yes - because phrased that way, oil also counts and we don't have much of it. But of electrical energy, which this is all about, nope.

For example, we just broke records:
http://thinkprogress.org/clima...

Germany has so much electrical energy generation, that most days of the year, a considerable part of our power plants are shut down because the grid can't handle it.

Here's an article in german that explains most of your non-questions: http://www.heise.de/tp/artikel...

...except, of course, for the ad companies selling it to companies who try to get sales. I'm not in marketing, but I got some insider information from people who are, and they all say that about 50% of all the money put into advertisement has basically the same effect on sales as burning it would have. The only reason it is wasted this way is that a) many customers don't know it and - more importantly - b) they don't know which 50%.

But, as in so many things, when something stops being effective, the first answer to the problem is to do more of it. The enemy has built bunkers against our bombs? Drop more bombs! The virus is becoming immune to our medicine? Raise the dosage. People have begun to ignore or block advertisement? Throw more ads their way.

Yes, it is pollution, the term is spot on.

A quick scan of TFA is enough to convince me this is fundamentally flawed. Case in point: He doesn't even bother to prevent double-spending, instead relying on an ill-defined concept of "people will notice and devalue you", which is basically handwaving. And that for a problem that's been solved 20 times over.

The idea is cute, but I wouldn't trust his implementation one inch.

This is total hogwash, all of it.

Sun is not always shining in the same location, same for wind. But if you have a whole country, there will be sun somewhere, and wind somewhere. Especially for wind, near the coast (where almost all our wind turbines are located), there is always some wind.

Secondly, this "we had to import power from France" is a media lie. What actually happened was that yes, electricity was brought into Germany from France. However, it was not for Germany, it was transferred on to Switzerland and Austria. In fact, on the very same days that the liars cite, Germany actually produced a surplus of electricity and was a net exporter.

Actually, we've orchestrated the financial crisis as a plot to destroy the french banking sector so we can simply buy them this time.

You think you're alone?

I live in Germany, a country that has spearheaded the move to renewable energy with a law (EEG) so good that 65 countries have copied it.

Our latest government has been busy dismantling it, because the large energy companies cry wolf. They've destroyed thousands of jobs in the solar industry, and we've lost our world leadership in it as a direct result.

Oh yes, they've also given new licenses to build new fucking coal power plants, as if we lived in the 19th century.