Omar

Is planned obsolescence an example of market failure? Markets are supposed to incentivize competition, but if everyone just decides to sell products that are quickly useless, consumers are [bleep]ed if they're sort of forced to use them anyway.

It might seem silly, but smiling to people walking in the opposite direction is how I started out getting comfortable with strangers (not that I'm done). From experience, I've found Donnie's ideas helpful.

Well, if they're always significantly more drunk than you are you, you'll never take them seriously. Not to make a stab, but expecting you to be drinking and up for it as well is a reasonable assumption to make in that environment.

Beer goggles, and the general loose atmosphere helps to get comfortable.

You kick ass, Muggi.

I know how you feel, I've been there before. As I'm sure you've realized by now, your feelings don't respond well when you try to manually change/remove them. So you've just gotta accept the fact that you're going to feel bad for a while. Nothing wrong with that. That's life. The best solution is also the hardest. You're going to have to cut off all contact with her. Permanently. The longer you go without any sort of contact with her, the less affected by her you will become. The moment you succumb to your feelings and shoot her a text or anything along the lines of that, you will soon notice that your feelings will flare up again and you'll be back to square one-- regardless of how "carefree" towards her you had become. At this point, your mind has associated her presence with pleasure and hope. It takes a long time for those connections to die. If I were you, I would read this right now. After reading that, I would listen to this, and then get to work! Most people fall into your situation because they don't have much going on in their lives and so it's easy to get fixated on that "one girl." So you need to create something to take your mind off of her and give your life new purpose. Is an outline of the audio book available somewhere? I listened to the whole thing but I think it would be much more practical to have it printed out on one sheet of paper rather than have them in an hour-long video.

I find the last few posts very amusing.

Yeah, I was mostly wondering whether the experience was worth it.

^Agreed reluctantly.

I know. The article's point towards the end is that if there's going to be fair representation, the Democrats need to win a bunch and threaten to gerrymander if an independent redistricting committee isn't appointed. My point was that the Democrats would probably just gerrymander in their own favour, which wouldn't really fix the problem.

You make it sound like the drunkenness just happened without your being able to control it :lol:

On that topic: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/11/congressional-representation-0?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/callvotersuppression I'm unsure I understand the part about reform not being desirable, and I don't see why Democrats would not decide to gerrymander to their advantage in 2020.

What do you think of these two points? http://uneasymoney.com/2012/10/03/two-problems-with-austrian-business-cycle-theory/

Keynes wrote The General Theory in 1936, i.e. long after the crash. Not to mention Hawtrey and Cassel predicted the GD a decade before it hit. http://uneasymoney.com/2011/12/12/keynes-v-hayek-enough-already/

Well, thanks for telling us about your enlightening discussion obfuscator. :lol:

What kind of regulations?

Go on... Name specifics.

sees_all, remember that argument you made for less taxes to reduce the deficit because of the Laffer curve? You really think we're past its maximum? US tax revenue/GDP is about 11% according to the World Bank. 27% according to the Heritage Foundation though.

According to that video Donnie posted, you could say money is a good. Its price is the interest rate. Subprime lending is subsidized lending financed through an inflation tax.

http://cafehayek.com/2012/11/walter-williams-on-the-morality-of-free-markets.html Williams touches on that.

I've been looking for ages, but I can't find any commercials. For some reason, they're referenced by a lot of articles, but impossible to find. Maybe they don't exist.

I'm sorry, what?

Nope, the batter is listed separately. Included in those 38 ingredients, but still only about half. Wheat starch doesn't count as chicken. Neither does autolyzed yeast extract

McDonalds have been advertising their chicken nuggets as 100% chicken forever, even though they contain something like 38 ingredients. The FDA doesn't do anything about this. I don't know if it's corrupt, but the more food safety rating businesses McD try to bribe, the more there is to gain for a single business to tell the truth (ridicules the competition and gets them business). If no corruption occurs, then businesses will pounce to make a profit. There may be flaws in this, but I don't see how they can compare to the fallibility of a government-sponsored inspector. What does everyone think about minimum wage? Neoclassical economics argue that real wages equilibrate so that labour supply and demand are equal, and that labours pushing for higher wages are hogging wealth for some workers and causing unemployment for others. Progressives (I guess that's what you call the heterodox view) disagree: http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2011/02/22/the-non-simple-economics-of-the-minimum-wage/

Communism is extremely wasteful even if people cooperate. The government simply can't accurately estimate how much of each good will be demanded. The way it works in capitalism is that prices signal what supply and demand are like. But in a communist system the prices are not dependent on supply and demand. Central planners can't figure out what is needed, so they supply whatever they think is useful. Growth is production of what people demand. That's why entrepreneurship is so much more efficient.