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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
A high-salt diet is not only bad for one's blood pressure, but also for the immune system. This is the conclusion of a current study under the leadership of the University Hospital Bonn. Mice fed a high-salt diet were found to suffer from much more severe bacterial infections. Human volunteers who consumed an additional six grams of salt per day also showed pronounced immune deficiencies. This amount corresponds to the salt content of two fast food meals. The results are published in the journal "Science Translational Medicine".
Five grams a day, no more: This is the maximum amount of salt that adults should consume according to the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO). It corresponds approximately to one level teaspoon.
In reality, however, many Germans exceed this limit considerably: Figures from the Robert Koch Institute suggest that on average men consume ten, women more than eight grams a day.
This means that we reach for the salt shaker much more than is good for us. After all, sodium chloride, which is its chemical name, raises blood pressure and thereby increases the risk of heart attack or stroke.
But not only that: "We have now been able to prove for the first time that excessive salt intake also significantly weakens an important arm of the immune system," explains Prof. Dr. Christian Kurts from the Institute of Experimental Immunology at the University of Bonn.
Journal Reference
Katarzyna Jobin, Natascha E. Stumpf, Sebastian Schwab et al. A high-salt diet compromises antibacterial neutrophil responses through hormonal perturbation [$], Science Translational Medicine (DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.aay3850)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 31 2020, @04:52AM (7 children)
The population levels would, organically, probably be quite similar. Here [people-press.org] are some various stats. 55% of Americans have a negative view of socialism, 42% a positive one. 65% have a positive view of capitalism, 33% have a negative view of it.
That said, I would generally keep population as one of the variables. The reason is because it is in large part a reflection of ideology. Open borders, especially when paired with socialism, invites a literally unlimited number of people to leech on the system - yet your inherent resources do not grow. And if you create a sufficient work disincentive, not only do they not grow - but it's likely that you will be exploiting them to far less than an optimal level meaning you effectively have fewer resources. There's also some irony in that those who tend to want to adopt socialism tend to be those with no experience in the fields most are put to work in in socialism - agriculture, construction, and so on. This [verdantlabs.com] page did an interesting experiment and looking at the political leanings of various professions based on FEC election data. The stereotypes really are surprisingly accurate.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Tuesday March 31 2020, @03:54PM (6 children)
This is scarcity-focused thinking. We are far from tapping the full potential of our available resources, and we won't be anywhere close to that potential until we are building Dyson spheres.
What you need to be thinking about instead is efficiency. The American economy has gained tremendously in economic efficiency over the last 40 years, but shareholder capitalism has funneled all of those gains to shareholders. Workers and consumers have been left to stagnate while the rich get so much richer that they don't even know what to do with all the money.
The question is how to maintain current levels of growth in efficiency but sharing them equally among everyone. For what it's worth, I share your belief that Soviet-style communism would fail to do this, and we would not be as efficient. But "socialism" means many different things depending on your model.
If your model is Venezuela, then efficiency will suffer. But that's because Venezuela promised that the government would always act in the people's best interest. As a result, corruption ran rampant without sufficient democratic checks. Socializing oil production wasn't the problem. The problem was that they didn't set up a system like Alaska's, where the resources are owned by the state (like Venezuela) and the profits distributed directly to the people (unlike Venezuela, which used them for public infrastructure) but the producers are privately owned and there is free market competition to disincentivize wasteful overhead (unlike Venezuela, where the state operates a monopoly).
If your model is Sweden, then efficiency will not suffer much. But that's because Sweden has a strong sense of civic engagement and community ownership. Let's be honest: this is because they all look the same, so the fascists can't divide people into arbitrary groups and set them against each other. So that model won't work here. And even if it would, Japan has the same civic engagement, community ownership, and lack of ethnic division, but their more free market system is much more economically efficient than Sweden's.
If you model is 50s and 60s America, however, efficiency will not suffer at all. It may even grow faster than current rates. But how was 50s and 60s America socialist?
- It provided to nearly all young men and their families, as a result of conscription, subsidized health care, college education, and home ownership
- It owned or regulated every natural monopoly, taking an active role in building out highways, electricity production, water distribution, and telephone, radio, and broadcast video communication, and funded these public projects well above maintenance levels
- It paid welfare with no work requirements to single mothers so they could be full-time parents
- It took an active role and a heavy hand in the regulation of cornerstone industries, especially banking and finance
- It provided many benefits we still enjoy today and which still contribute to our current growth in economic efficiency, including social security, unemployment insurance, and Medicare and Medicaid
Hardly Soviet Russia, but still a socialist paradise compared to today. Health care, college education, and housing costs keep most young people today locked into wage slavery in what should be the most economically inventive and productive time of their lives. Financiers buy out electricity companies and break the electrical grid to manipulate the market for their personal enrichment [wikipedia.org]. Work requirements and other welfare limitations for single parents sabotage successive generations of children raised by increasingly overcrowded daycares and schools, keeping families locked in poverty with income limits that disincentivize incremental wage growth. Deregulated banks and financiers act more and more like unaccountable governments, making key decisions about society based purely on their own self interest.
Nobody is suggesting America adopt a Soviet or Venezuelan model. Not even Bernie Sanders, who explicitly said he "[doesn't] believe government should own the means of production" [time.com]. The best model is the one that works: New Deal capitalism. But this time, without arbitrary or accidental discrimination.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 31 2020, @08:41PM (5 children)
I have to say this is, by far, one of the most realistic endorsements of "socialism" I have ever read online. So on that account, I have to commend you. If people could only speak as cogently and impartially as you do, the world would be a vastly better place.
And in fact I suspect our mindsets are remarkably similar, but we differ in one particular way. I completely and absolutely agree with just about everything you've said about moneyed interests. However, I think the fundamental issue is not something unique to these groups but a part of humanity in general. This would include governments. To illustrate, consider a simple hypothetical. You clearly genuinely feel strongly about this issue. Imagine I offered to pay you $100k per year to instead go the opposite direction and just constantly bash social economic cooperation and instead advocate just as vociferously for full on laissez-faire dog-eat-dog systems, without ever a peep about social systems again. Would you? If you're being honest, the answer is probably yes. I certainly wouldn't judge you, because the answer for myself would also be yes as would it be for the vast majority of people. And most people's price would be much less.
There's a famous and relevant Churchill joke that, like many of his witticisms, had much to it than just a sharp tongue.
Churchill: "Madam, would you sleep with me for five million pounds?"
Socialite: "My goodness, Mr. Churchill... Well, I suppose... we would have to discuss terms, of course... "
Churchill: "Would you sleep with me for five pounds?"
Socialite: "Mr. Churchill, what kind of woman do you think I am?!"
Churchill: "Madam, we've already established that. Now we are haggling about the price."
We're all whores at one price or another. Most of us simply never end up in situations where that price is ever offered or able to be extracted.
So back to governments, the Alaska Permanent Fund [wikipedia.org], as you allude to, is a perfect example of the issue. I suspect you have not been following what's happened to that fund over the past half decade. For a variety of reasons Alaska's government has been running into monetary issues. And so they responded exactly as any rational (if not cynical) person would expect them to - loot the fund, effectively stealing from every single person in the state. The government did this once, and now it's become normalized. Dividends have been less the past half decade than they were 20 years ago, in spite of exponential growth in the fund. The fund, in terms of its original purpose, is effectively dead.
Is it not an interesting coincidence that as we've granted ever more powers to governments to constraint corporations, that said corporations have only become more powerful? As you mentioned, regulatory capture. But I think this is something *intrinsic* to society. And consequently, you cannot eliminate it by granting ever more powers to governments. As those powers will ultimately only end up being used to further enrich the 'favored' corporations, at the expense of the rest of society. Quite the opposite - start unraveling the tangled web of government power, and corporations would find themselves with a greatly reduced toolset by which to exploit society.
----
I feel this is getting fairly verbose already, but I do want to hit on the housing/education stuff at least since you brought up those specific fields. Why have prices gone stupidly high? In both cases the government tried to improve access to these resources by mandating access to loans. But it's had a predictable side effect. When people are granted effectively unlimited access to loans to pay for something there are far more than enough fiscally irresponsible individuals to result in prices being driven exponentially up with no end in sight. The one and only reason college costs have 'kind of' started to level off is because we reached peak college back in 2010 [statista.com]. Link provided since most people seem to have no idea about this. However, with the housing market there remains a practically unlimited demand and so we're once again starting to inflate a housing bubble and prices rise on loans - many of which will never be paid back.
This is the reason that I think, in our little thought experiment from above, that the capitalist side would win. Capitalism is not fair and it's not pretty. But, it simply works. To give an example of this, consider the current shortage on basic essentials in the US like face masks. One factor that has no doubt contributed to this is the, as usual, well intentioned efforts to combat hoarding and price gouging. Online marketplaces such as eBay have completely banned listings of many essential products including masks. People were selling these products at hefty markups online and this made people freak out. But it's so interesting. I live in Asia and face masks are ubiquitous here ( people already regularly use them for pollution/sickness ). I could easily go to the store and pick up thousands if I wanted. And indeed if I could sell them on eBay for a hefty markup, there's a very real chance I would. But I can't. So I won't. Because people can't stomach others making a profit off of sickness, people will go without these essentials while they sit in boxes gathering dust over here in Asia.
The well intended efforts to try to create a more equitable system instead result in one of scarcity. Capitalism simply taps into our true nature. I do not think we are 'evil', but we care about ourselves and our loved ones far more than anybody else. This self centered nature of humanity is something I think social economic systems tend to try to deny. And I think that is precisely why these systems never end up working out in the longrun. By contrast you could (and indeed many have) write millions of pages on the flaws of capitalism, yet it continues to push society, and humanity, forward. And indeed I think many of the most egregious flaws (such as education and housing) are intrinsically linked to efforts to meddle with the market, even if such meddling was completely well intentioned.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Tuesday March 31 2020, @10:11PM (4 children)
I'll return the favor and thank you for the well-reasoned response. It's always a pleasure to have conversations like this! And I apologize in advance that I am definitely too verbose.
For what it's worth, I like to think that the only way I would take the money to advocate for anarcho-libertarianism is if the money was good enough that I could meaningfully undermine my public message in secret. Or if I had no other choice. I can think of a lot of things I'd like to do with that money, but I don't actually believe they'd make me any happier than I would be otherwise. Not if I knew I was betraying my deeply held principles.
I'd totally take 5 million pounds to bang Churchill though. With some terms, of course.
The common thread here, to me, is that the government is not as accountable as it should be. Accountability is the only thing that entitles government to control our lives ("entitles", not "enables").
In a better functioning system, democracy would act as the counterbalance and prevent or reverse government from acting in the interest of a few over the many.
Our system is not functioning as designed. There are a few key reasons for this:
- Independent journalism is almost entirely gone, replaced by a handful of glorified tabloids controlled by all-powerful oligarchs.
- The moral character of a candidate is no longer anyone's deciding factor in whom to vote for, and only the elite care about capability to actually perform the job.
- People are more predisposed than ever before to agree with everything their own political party wants and demonize the everything the opposing party wants, regardless of the merits.
- Community organizations like churches, clubs, and fraternities are in steep decline, replaced by a loose network of fan clubs chasing corporate products on corporate-controlled social media.
Just as there is a common thread to government looting the Alaska Permanent Fund and enriching corporations, there is a common thread to the decline of the function of our democracy. That common thread is marketing.
The marketing industry has perfected the art of corporate propaganda. They are far more effective than any communist state ever was in psychologically manipulating the general population. And they sell this power to the highest bidder.
Our democracy was founded on the assumption that voters could rationally represent their own self-interest. That assumption is no longer true.
The result? Walter Cronkite replaced with Anderson Cooper. A race to the bottom of moral decrepitude among politicians of both parties. Political propaganda, repurposed from the private sector, so effective that the KGB would soil themselves just thinking about it. Widespread uncontrollable social media addiction.
Government hasn't been granted a whole lot of new authority in a good long time. They didn't need to. Government had all the power it needed to do in the 1950s what they are doing today.
The difference is that voters would have punished whomever was in power for doing it. Community organizations, allowed to discuss amongst themselves without interference, would have formed political blocs behind people they knew and trusted. And if the parties just tried to substitute more lizard people, the free press would have ensured that everyone knew exactly what was going on.
We're not going to solve everything by just voting for a Bernie Sanders. We're going to make progress by engaging with the political process through issue-focused organizations like the Poor People's Campaign. We're going to learn the truth by demanding rational argument and rejecting any attempt to cast our self-interested enemies as mustache-twirling villains.
Above all, we're going to fix democracy by putting down the FaceTube and meditating on what really motivates us. What our foundational moral principles are or should be. Moral principles can inoculate us against propaganda, and they can guide us away from politicians who are good at making false promises. Even if those principles just push the cost-to-bang-Churchill up a few million more pounds.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2020, @08:00PM (3 children)
Again here I think this gets back into our fundamental difference. So I can keep this one brief!
I'd really like to imagine that the differences in society over the ages are just due to marketing or whatever else, but I don't really think this is the case. Why is our little conversation here so rare as to be literally remarkable? Are we somehow privy to some sort of unique information or privilege unavailable to others? I don't really think so. If everybody behaved like this democracy would work perfectly fine. And there is nothing whatsoever external stopping people from behaving in this way. They either are unable to, or choose not to.
It always feels arrogant to say such things, but it does seem to be quantifiably accurate to say that people, as a whole, are simply becoming less intelligent over time. See, for instance, the end of the Flynn Effect [wikipedia.org] in most developed nations. It started in the mid 90s. Incidentally one hypothesis is that that decline has actually been going on for much longer, but environmental gains were helping to mask it. A loss of 1 or 2 points a decade doesn't sound like much until you consider that 86 is considered borderline retarded, with the average IQ being (by definition) 100.
Whatever the reason, this again is just our key question. Are the negative changes in society because of mostly organic changes within society itself, or are they because of orchestrated puppeteering of society? It's probably unanswerable so all we're left with is our biases and inclinations. I tend to strongly suspect it's the former, but I certainly do hope you're right and it's the latter!
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday April 02 2020, @03:39PM (2 children)
It's irrelevant whether "the negative changes in society because of mostly organic changes within society itself, or are they because of orchestrated puppeteering of society". In the philosophical sense, the latter is just an extension of the former. Regardless, that doesn't mean we can't do anything about it.
Constitutional government exists to structure a rational system which neutralizes our human susceptibility to failure and manipulation. I believe it is possible to do so. I believe our constitutional government is imperfect, but I am not aware of any significantly better system. I believe our greatest challenge in improving the functioning of the species is determining safe means of fixing and improving the constitutional structure to better neutralize our human susceptibility to failure and manipulation.
It's not about giving government more power. It's about restricting the powers of government and individuals in exactly the right ways.
The one thing that needs to be fixed, badly, is how to restrict the powers of corporations. These legal entities as they exist now were never considered in the discussions that created the current constitutional structure. Their existence breaks some of the underlying assumptions of that structure, mainly by being explicitly amoral and unaffected by traditional existential threats.
I can't ignore the implication that society would work better if we could just make everybody smarter. That's social darwinism, and it's dangerous. It's dangerous because it is easily co-opted by irrational notions of racial supremacy. It's dangerous because it leads to eugenics and genocide.
More abstractly, it's dangerous because no human is entitled to or capable of justly tinkering with the species as a whole. Everyone has their own "biases and inclinations" that may not reflect the best of society. We can't guarantee the rule of a philosopher-king [wikipedia.org], able to determine why people are getting dumber, able to effectively reverse that trend, and willing to do so solely for the greater good. Even if such a person could exist, the rest of us have no just basis to select them.
We can't just ignore the problem, though. Society has a trajectory of its own, an "invisible hand [wikipedia.org]" that we have no rational basis to assume will move us toward a better world.
Perhaps the only way we can fix this is by recreating the conditions of the original creation of constitutional government. The democracies of the world were all founded during times of existential crisis. Failure to form a cohesive whole would mean collapse of society. The elites of that society, who were best prepared to design a complex political system but also most biased towards entrenching their own interests, were forced to first serve the interests of the whole. But because they were so ferociously divided amongst themselves, they had to serve each others' interests to come together at all.
It is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of our current capitalist situation that there are no essential differences in the interests of the individual elites. They are all pretty well united on what is best for themselves as elites. They are united mostly in their exploitation of the same people.
Imperialism and globalism, like corporations, are also newer than the democratic constitutions of the world. It's another failing of our constitutional structure, that non-citizens are not considered. As a result, non-citizens are a free resource which citizens can exploit to gain unjust influence over the entire system, citizens included.
Perhaps it's not enough to recreate the conditions of the original creation of constitutional government. Such conditions may not be sufficient to restrict the power of government, individuals, and corporations, while providing explicit rights to citizens and non-citizens.
Without such explicit restrictions and protections, however, corporations are free to continue eroding our individual rights and become de facto governments of their own. Little communisms with increasing influence over the entire economy, with decreasing accountability.
We should like our government to have as little power as possible, but we should like no other entity to have more.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 02 2020, @08:06PM (1 child)
I think you've substantially misread what I'm suggesting here. I'm in no way alluding to things like government mandated eugenics or anything of the sort. That, in fact, runs directly contrary to my fundamental view. I do not believe that government can be trusted with substantial power as that power will, sooner or later, come to be abused. Giving them the power to unilaterally judge who can or cannot procreate? That's obviously absolutely unthinkable.
Rather what I am saying is that democracy *requires* exactly what we're doing here. And what is that? I think there are many things: coherent expression of ourselves and our views, willingness to engage with people we disagree with without hostility, and so on. But perhaps there is one requirement more important than any other: the knowledge (or perhaps wisdom?) to understand that somebody can take some group of facts and rationally come to a conclusion that we, ourselves, may disagree with. Yet that disagreement does not mean their view is wrong nor that ours is right; the understanding of uncertainty and that views are not concrete, but something that should be malleable and adjusted over time. There's a rather nice quote from Mark Twain, "That desire which is in us all to better other people’s condition by having them think as we think." It could not be more true, but for a democracy to function we have to understand the implications of all of us sharing this desire.
Yet clearly most people are not capable of behaving in this way. Is this due to choice or inability? If the cause is extrinsic, you *may* be able to change it. If this inability is caused by intrinsic factors, then you simply cannot. And in the latter case a democracy driven by these individuals would simply never be able to function in the longrun. And indeed a democracy of imbeciles is bound to be the most corrupt for you needn't even bother with trying to corrupt those already in power when, instead, you can simply convince the population to put your representatives into power.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday April 02 2020, @10:31PM
In the spirit of understanding that others, presented with the same ideas, may come to different conclusions, it's important to consider what others might do with our ideas. A more arrogant individual may believe, contrary to both of our beliefs, that the government (or some private corporation) can be trusted with the power to directly and intentionally alter the trajectory of the human species for the better. People on the far left and the far right have both done so.
We must not be so quick to dismiss the possibility that this arrogant individual might be ourselves. Imagine a future where the two of us have constructed a grand political theory compelling enough for us both to agree wholeheartedly with each other. That we have solved the fundamental problems of human existence. Do you believe that you or I would be content to simply know, and not apply the theory?
People seem to be generally more distrustful of others than of themselves. If the government properly and completely represented your interests and ideology, I doubt that you would spend much time equivocating over how to restrict its ability to enact the policies you would like to see enacted.
Not that any of that is particularly likely. But the most dangerous people in history got their ideas from exchanges like this. On the off chance that either one of us may go on to become such an influential person, I think it's important to consider the natural conclusions of our arguments.
If it's true that democracy simply cannot survive among imbeciles, then perhaps the only thing that keeps us (or passersby) from eugenics against stupidity is some combination of disempowerment and apathy. That alone gives me cause for concern about the argument in its entirety.
In any case, it's still irrelevant whether the cause is extrinsic or intrinsic. Sure, if some villain is making us dumb, we can go shoot them. But that doesn't mean there are no other solutions.
It also doesn't mean we actually could shoot the villain. The cause I am proposing is a natural consequence of self-motivated capitalists acting to increase their wealth and influence. Would eliminating all the current capitalists solve the problem? Hardly. More self-motivated capitalists would simply emerge in the next generation.
We must seek solutions that would solve extrinsic and intrinsic stupidity. That starts by better defining stupidity.
I think what makes us poor agents within the democratic system is our inherent logical failings as humans. It makes us manipulable. And people have figured out how to manipulate us in ways the system is not designed to protect against.
It's hardly new. Centuries ago, people were manipulated by religious identity. Rationalism solved that problem. Before that, people were manipulated by complex feudal systems of hierarchical loyalty. Mercantilism solved that problem. Before that, people were manipulated by direct threats of violence. Politics solved that problem.
Which is not to say that all of those problems are 100% solved. It's just to say that we can invent social tools to correct for the means of our own manipulation.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?