Some Good News About Aging Populations

Oleg Bach · June 13, 2011

...and inconsistent. FDR's brand of "fascism" apparently was OK.

Long as the facists don't hang you up side down I am okay with them. The Italians love facism - they started the movement when they hung up that Jewish king on a cross...and have been hanging people out to dry ever since.....what was that guys name back in the forties....Mousalini or something....funny about real hard core facist leaders - for some reason they are all retarded..what's that all about?

eyeball · June 13, 2011

You are building an argument on a fallacy. Nature exists. It cannot be destroyed - only changed. It could change in ways that are bad for the economy or change in ways which are good for he economy. These changes are a concern but the judgment on whether they are bad or good is based entirely on the effect on the economy which implies there is only one reference point that matters: the economy.

I can't remember who said it but, there would be a collective cheer from the organisms of Earth if most humans disappeared tomorrow.

eyeball · June 13, 2011

Neither do commercial fisherman.

You're out to lunch. Anyone with even half a brain who relies on a healthy ecosystem for their living gets this.

Faster or slower....it is no matter. Humans are part of the "ecosystem".

Yes, just one of the least indispensable one's is all.

TimG · June 13, 2011

I can't remember who said it but, there would be a collective cheer from the organisms of Earth if most humans disappeared tomorrow.

Not likely given the fact that no other organism on the planet is capable of forming such thought. All that comment really says is the speaker hates humans. Edited June 13, 2011 by TimG

Oleg Bach · June 13, 2011

Not likely given the fact that no other organism on the planet is capable of forming such thought. All that comment really says is the speaker hates humans.

I had a prolonged electronic debate with the gay community in San Francisco a few years ago - the banter went on for a month...what I found out about the more extreme people belonging to this group is that some believe that humanity should totally disappear..There was a hate for woman that bear children and a hate for men who take on the responsiblity of protecting the children. Not that this is on topic - but - some human beings are so bitter that they hope that when they pass away everybody else does also...We are temporal creatures and like the flower we bloom - thrive then wither....

Being older now I am starting to understand what mortality is all about. The duty of the aging population is to disperse their wisdom and love to those who will continue after they are gone - and like all of us I never want to be gone...Earth is a beautiful place and I will never tire of the blue sky and green trees...BUT nature has it that we become more brave and faithful when it comes to death...even old dogs get to the point that they will no longer be bossed about...old age provides freedom...no one can harm you because life itself has done it's best and failed if you still breath.

So once you conquer the fear of death - you can truely live a full and wonderful life. This is the great plus of age...that finally you have some power - at the end of the game..

WIP · June 13, 2011

You have no idea what facism is. You just throw around the label to smear people you dislike.

No, you have no idea what fascism is, otherwise you would be aware that there is no single definition of fascism! A successful fascist movement takes the root elements of: nationalism, religious justification, authoritarianism, and social darwinism, and blends them into a populist mix to attract as many followers as possible, while achieving what are considered their crucial goals. Best definition I've found is by historian - Robert Paxton:

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

And, if you can't see our democratic system devolving into fascism, you are more ideologically blinded on politics than you are on the environment!

eyeball · June 14, 2011

Not likely given the fact that no other organism on the planet is capable of forming such thought. All that comment really says is the speaker hates humans.

OTOH it could also say the speaker has a sense of humour coupled with an altruistic bent towards the whole world and everything that lives it. Aldo Leopold identified this as something he called a land ethic

Leopold states the basic principle of his land ethic as, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

Land Ethic

dre · June 15, 2011

Fannie and Freddie created the bomb. Wall street exploded it. No Fannie and Freddie (or at least one that had proper oversight) and there would have been no explosion.

Thats really quite a load of horse shit. The fact is that prior to the meltdown the ammount of MSB's covered by Fannie and Freddie had sharply declined, and the majority of securitization was completely private.

Explosion of derivitives onto the market place, and the invention of the credit default swap. These instruments allowed the entire world to invest in the US realestate market, and it allowed the risk to be hidden from investors through the use of credit default swaps. The CDS market was a few hundred million dollars in the mid 90's, and now theres over 40 trillion dollars in the game.

The reality is that the majority of the money that flooded into the market had very little to do with Fanny and Freddy.

TimG · June 15, 2011

Explosion of derivitives onto the market place, and the invention of the credit default swap.

The credit default swap was invented to deal with political pressure from democrats and lobby groups like ACORN. i.e. the bomb was created by people who sought to interfer in the markets in order to push their social objectives. Once the concept was created the banks went hog wild. i.e. they expoded the bomb. It is simply delusional to ignore the roots of the crisis.

dre · June 15, 2011

The credit default swap was invented to deal with political pressure from democrats and lobby groups like ACORN. i.e. the bomb was created by people who sought to interfer in the markets in order to push their social objectives. Once the concept was created the banks went hog wild. i.e. they expoded the bomb. It is simply delusional to ignore the roots of the crisis.

No sorry thats just plain giberish. The CDS was invented by the private sector as a vehicle to offset risk. Its simply a hedge against defaults for an entity that holds or bundles loans.

the bomb was created by people who sought to interfer in the markets in order to push their social objectives

Again... thats just flat out false, and all you need to do to see that is follow the money. Take a look at who was doing all the risky lending...

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/may2009/db2009056_672318.htm

Almost all of those companies are realestate trusts, thrifts, or pure mortgage companies. They werent subject to any of the government "interference" youre ranting about, and they didnt accept FDIC insured deposits, were not bound by the CRA etc.

They took money from private investors who wanted to make money by investing in the skyrocketing housing market.

Wall street bundled all these loans into increasingly complex derivitives that youre average investor couldnt even understand, and then bought CDS protection for them, and by doing so hid the real risk from investors. Then they took the exact products they had been pitching to customers and placed a bet that their own products would fail :lol:

The government and its various appendages certain do share some of the blame for this, but not in the way that you think.

jbg · June 16, 2011

The only thing good about aging is that if you are in a good frame of mind...and body - You can still have sex...and that's the only thing good about it.

Despite the unnecessary tangent about sex, I by and large agree with this post.

Oleg Bach · June 16, 2011

Despite the unnecessary tangent about sex, I by and large agree with this post.

Its the last thing that stops working and not the first. Men can enjoy and even breed right to the point of death by old age.....to bad hot super young 35 year olds look at me like I am their dad,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,damn!

bush_cheney2004 · June 16, 2011

Its the last thing that stops working and not the first. Men can enjoy and even breed right to the point of death by old age.....to bad hot super young 35 year olds look at me like I am their dad,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,damn!

You are limiting the available females with such thinking....consider the growing "mature" or "MILF" demographic. There is no substitute for experience!

Wild Bill · June 16, 2011

No, you have no idea what fascism is, otherwise you would be aware that there is no single definition of fascism!

And you Sir have no idea what Ayn Rand is all about!

Did you ever actually read her works, or do you just drag her out as a convenient bogeyman example for your arguments?

Being concerned for one's own interests can encompass many things. Money is hardly the only one. Money is just a convenient method of trade and sometimes a useful yardstick.

One logical interest might be to promote the kind of society in which one would feel most comfortable. When we get older we often find ourselves with the time and resources to promote such ends, since our own immediate family would have grown and flown out to lead their own lives. A rational and self-interested individual might feel it a positive step to support charities, particularly those that provide a hand up instead of giving non-sustaining handouts.

Of course, this sort of thinking pre-supposes doing your own investigation of charities and making your own individual choices as to which to support, as opposed to just letting governments fleece you with taxes and waste the money in the name of charity on projects that don't work and never end, actually supporting an entire industry of those who make a surprisingly good living administering handouts.

The difference of course is that you can take pride in something you've helped create that actually WORKS, as opposed to something you never bother to audit for yourself, content to simply feel "all warm and fuzzy inside."

Bonam · June 16, 2011

And you Sir have no idea what Ayn Rand is all about!

Did you ever actually read her works, or do you just drag her out as a convenient bogeyman example for your arguments?

The reason people like WIP hate Ayn Rand is because her philosophy lets successful people become immune to being guilt tripped by socialist (or any other kind of) do-gooders.

bloodyminded · June 17, 2011

You are limiting the available females with such thinking....consider the growing "mature" or "MILF" demographic. There is no substitute for experience!

True! The "MILF"s are coming into their own.

bloodyminded · June 17, 2011

The reason people like WIP hate Ayn Rand is because her philosophy lets successful people become immune to being guilt tripped by socialist (or any other kind of) do-gooders.

To be fair, some people find her virtually-explicit adherence to what we recognize as sociopathy to be less than a stellar "philosophy" by which to live.

She was modelling a future character from a child-killer, William Edward Hickman. Hickman uttered the phrase, "What is good for me is right." To which Rand responded, "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard."

(Does anyone really think such a banal phrase is actually profound??? I mean, that's "the best" expression of a "real man's psychology"? )

The character she was developing "is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people ... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should."

That's sociopathy; the actual, innate inability to understand the importance of other human beings; to, in fact, actively reject the idea.

It's not that I literally consider Rand a psychopath. I don't. But then, I don't subscibe to outrageous, literalist, nuance-less depictions of humanity as Rand does.

Oleg Bach · June 17, 2011

I like being old - finally I find myself interesting.

WIP · June 17, 2011

To be fair, some people find her virtually-explicit adherence to what we recognize as sociopathy to be less than a stellar "philosophy" by which to live.

She was modelling a future character from a child-killer, William Edward Hickman. Hickman uttered the phrase, "What is good for me is right." To which Rand responded, "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard."

(Does anyone really think such a banal phrase is actually profound??? I mean, that's "the best" expression of a "real man's psychology"? )

The character she was developing "is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people ... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should."

That's sociopathy; the actual, innate inability to understand the importance of other human beings; to, in fact, actively reject the idea.

It's not that I literally consider Rand a psychopath. I don't. But then, I don't subscibe to outrageous, literalist, nuance-less depictions of humanity as Rand does.

I'm going to get into Ayn Rand later, since I found her notions on altruism to be totally ludicrous even back in the time when I considered myself to be a libertarian (for what it's worth Rand hated libertarians and accused them of stealing her ideas). Her basic philosophical stance on free will and altruism are as out of place in a modern understanding of the human mind as the Christian fundamentalists are. And, she was a total, lying hypocrite in her personal life. Her blather about "ethical egoism" was supposed to show us that altruism was unnecessary in a healthy, functioning society, but she was a ruthless, manipulative cult leader who was a drug addict, sexual predator (Nathaniel Brandon affair), and couldn't even live up to her own bullshit philosophy in her later years when she ended up on Medicare! More later....

Sir Bandelot · June 17, 2011

I'm going to get into Ayn Rand later, since I found her notions on altruism to be totally ludicrous even back in the time when I considered myself to be a libertarian (for what it's worth Rand hated libertarians and accused them of stealing her ideas). Her basic philosophical stance on free will and altruism are as out of place in a modern understanding of the human mind as the Christian fundamentalists are. And, she was a total, lying hypocrite in her personal life. Her blather about "ethical egoism" was supposed to show us that altruism was unnecessary in a healthy, functioning society, but she was a ruthless, manipulative cult leader who was a drug addict, sexual predator (Nathaniel Brandon affair), and couldn't even live up to her own bullshit philosophy in her later years when she ended up on Medicare! More later....

I can't think of a more despicalble philosophy. But I love hearing how eventually, one's chickens come home. It gives me a kind of... comfort

WIP · June 18, 2011

The reason people like WIP hate Ayn Rand is because her philosophy lets successful people become immune to being guilt tripped by socialist (or any other kind of) do-gooders.

Which can be inverted to say that the reason why Ayn Rand is so popular is because she allows selfish, greedy people to live guilt-free.

WIP · June 18, 2011

I can't think of a more despicalble philosophy. But I love hearing how eventually, one's chickens come home. It gives me a kind of... comfort

The cozy relationship between the religious right and Ayn Rand followers in the U.S. is the strangest political tagteam of all. If the Democrats are smart...and I'm not putting big odds on it, they would be promoting a couple of mostly liberal evangelical coalitions that are trying to unhinge their churches from the Republican Party. One of them: The American Values Network is running ads specifically targeting Republican politicians like Paul Ryan (the guy who forces his staff to read Atlas Shrugged) for their slavish devotion to the Ayn Rand cult:

Simple message -- you can either be a Christian or be an Objectivist, but you can't be both...so why haven't the Democrats thought of running with this before?

bush_cheney2004 · June 18, 2011

Which can be inverted to say that the reason why Ayn Rand is so popular is because she allows selfish, greedy people to live guilt-free.

She doesn't "allow" anything....her observations are based on people logically acting and living in self interest, regardless of "guilt".

WIP · June 18, 2011

She doesn't "allow" anything....her observations are based on people logically acting and living in self interest, regardless of "guilt".

Our species started with a highly developed capacity for empathy, which was essential for cooperative living in those hunter/gatherer societies that dominated most of human history. As civilization developed, there was still the basic understanding that the needs of society as a whole can overrule personal wants and desires. The problem is today that modern society has become so complex that people feel disconnected from society. In the Information Age of computers and internet, people are more isolated and have less involvement with real people living in their neighbourhoods, so it's easier to call yourself an 'ethical egoist' or some equivalent claptrap than it was during her time, when this sort of thinking was privy to intellectual elites.

My basic thinking on Ayn Rand is that, regardless of how much she has made her philosophy seem complex, it boils down to little more than presenting the opposite approach of Marxism. Marx taught that the good of the collective was the highest value, so an anti-Marxist like Rand, creates an opposite philosophy where individual wants and desires are supreme. Most people realize that the best way to live would be somewhere between two extreme approaches to life...whose proponents served as poor examples of healthy living in their own lives.

bush_cheney2004 · June 18, 2011

...My basic thinking on Ayn Rand is that, regardless of how much she has made her philosophy seem complex, it boils down to little more than presenting the opposite approach of Marxism....

Marxism is only one brand of collectivism....Rand's objectivism pits the individual against collectivists of any stripe.