[Platt] Usefulness" or practicality is a poor standard for judging the advances of science, as Pirsig rightly points out:
[Krimel] But frankly I find your endless posting of Pirsig quotes offensive as I suspect Bob does as well. You twist his statements into something enormously creepy. [Arlo] I'll point out too here that the same "practicality" that Platt blasts science for is the same "practicality" that an unregulated market would offer. The "market", I pointed out, would just as freely sell human child sex slaves to wealthy businessmen as it would bringing me the lastest box set of Dexter. The "market" has no qualms about trading nuclear arms to aggressive dictators any more than it does bringing me my anti-perspirant. [Krimel] I think your point about the "free market" is dead on. In fact Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is nothing more than a probability distribution that describes certain aspects of random interactions in a market. For someone as befuddled about "Oops" as Platt, it is odd to see the faith he places in the "oops market". Really that is all a totally free market would be; an economy completely at the mercy of random forces. Governmental regulation of the market imposes the values of society into the market and says we cannot buy and sell people or nukes. As a side note the penalty for actually possessing a nuclear weapon is the same as for possession 4 grams of LSD (this includes the weight of the blotter paper or pill). To get a higher penalty for having a nuke you have to threaten to use or sell it. I guess this is a comment on what our social values actually are. We know from past experience that when the banking industry is unregulated the economy will run through 10 year cycles of boom and bust. These cycles ended for nearly 50 years after the past great depression as regulations were enacted to smooth them out. It is no coincidence that the Raygun revolution's dismantling of federal regulation has given us a return of the very woes the regulations were designed to prevent. This was explained in terms that even Platt should understand on the Daily Show recently: http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=tarp%20stewart&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa= N&tab=wv# Ok, I doubt that Platt will understand, but he ought to... Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
