John Larkin perceives John Fields as getting crazier and crazier. That doesn't suggest that John Larkin's on a trajectory that is likely to end well - since John Fields seems to be doing pretty much what he always has done when baiting John Larkin.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Fifty odd years of reading newspapers, meeting occasional politicians and listening to people talking about politicians that they know.
I've even met a few people who were - in retrospect - card-carrying psychopaths. Plausible, but completely untrustworthy.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
There's something in this. Greece is a holiday destination for many, and it became noticeably more expensive after they joined the Euro. Now there are many more 'all inclusive' holidays which benefit the local economy little.
Cheers
-- Syd
In the light of that, would you support compulsory testing for pyschopathy for all persons seeking positions of public trust? I gather there is a reliable test available now that's over 90% accurate. Seems very negligent of us to just take such people who run our governments, banks, industries, media etc at face value!
Sure- if they **want** to run for office, the test is positive. Better than 90% accurate.
-- Best regards, Spehro Pefhany Amazon link for AoE 3rd Edition: http://tinyurl.com/ntrpwu8 Microchip link for 2015 Masters in Phoenix: http://tinyurl.com/l7g2k48
Oh. Good point.
Think about being a politician. The apparent pay is low. You'll spend all your time in council meetings, hearings, dinners, private meetings, and on airplanes. You have to wear a tie *every day*. You have to sincerely express opinions that you don't have or don't understand. Everything dumb that you do will be online the next day. You have to raise money constantly.
Only a crazy person would want to do that.
The word that I question there is "effective."
People are naturally tribal so most people actively seek out leadership. They usually vote for the wrong leaders.
All we can do is navigate as best we can.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
y
Tell us more about the test - which I've never heard of. And does "90% accu rate" refer it its rate of false positives - identifying people as psychopa ths who aren't and thus unfairly keeping them out of politics - or false ne gatives, which is to say letting people become politicians who are - in fac t - psychopaths.
And this does presume that being a psychopath is an all-or-nothing conditio n.
My guess would be that some people are more willing than others to treat ot her people purely as a means to an end, and to lie to them to get them to d o what a psychopath would want them to do, but that there's a continuum bet ween the aimiably bossy and the criminally insane.
The low level politicians I knew tolerably well - a couple of neighbours in Cambridge - did spend most of their time talking about how other people co uld be persuaded to do things for the local branch of the Labour Party, but were thoroughly pleasant people who wouldn't have lied to anybody, and wer e thoroughly responsible about not loading their targets so heavily that it would interfere with their work or their care of their families.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
It's not my field; I can only relay what I've read elsewhere (but I've been able to verify it to my own satisfaction at any rate). Firstly, ignore all that crap on Youtube about 'test yourself for psychopathy' - 'Am I a psychopath?' etc. They're just gimmicks. The test I saw carried out only took a few minutes. It's based on the fact that our eyes react in different ways to different stimuli. Specifically, if we see an image that we find agreeable, the diameter of our pupils increases by a small but measurable amount. And vice versa. So a sequence of hundreds of images is assembled. Most are of neutral subject matter but the minority are split into two categories: 'nice' and 'nasty'. For example, 'nice' might be children playing happily, cute kittens, a group of people enjoying a BBQ and so on. The 'nasty' images would be of the sort you find on sites like
Thanks for telling me about the test. I also asked for it's accuracy - the number of false positives - proportion of non-psychopaths identified as psychopathic - false negative - the proportion of actual psychopaths that it missed.
Without that data, and discussion of actually using the test has to be premature.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
It is due to the citizens of Greece making bad financial decisions.
Living beyond their means.
No sympathy from me.
Andy
In fact it was widespread tax evasion, Socialism and reliance on welfare works fine in Scandinavia, but they do pay their - high - taxes.
More specifically, by a lot of them evading paying their taxes.
If a lot of the tax-payers don't pay their taxes, the government doesn't have the means to pay anybody.
You perhaps could be sympathetic to the plight of those Greeks who did pay their taxes. The tax evaders don't deserve any sympathy.
The situation isn't all that complicated - if more complicated than James Arthur and other right-wing nitwits like to think.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Because obviously there was no "pilot in the Greece plane" at the time and even nowadays !
Assume a bankruptcy of Greece which is more than a probability you will see the real robbers shouting and bouncing ... indeed most of them are Greeks and largely supported by robbers French, Americans, English, Germans ... ECB.
Hab.
As I say, it's not my field and I'm afraid details such as accuracy rates are something I have no info about. Sorry!
There was always a pilot. Nowadays they are elected and, as Jim Thompson always says, elections have consequences. For example, if people want socialism or communism they must brace themselves for the almost guaranteed long term misery that comes with that. A free market economy is not a guarantee that prosperity will follow but the chances that it does are orders of magnitude higher.
When people go into the streets and almost riot because of the "undue" requirement that the retirement age be increased from 61 to 63 while expecting that countries where it has already been raised to around 67 keep paying their bills is sick. Very sick. It will not work in the long run and it shouldn't.
The problems are homemade and were for decades. Centuries, actually.
Does this surprise you?
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Communism hasn't got many advocates these days. When the socialists chucked out the proto-communists (including Marx) back in 1870, they knew what they were doing
was rude about Marx for precisely the right reasons and his comments that Marx's ideas - if put into practice, would lead to a worse dictatorship than any around in his time proved to be distressingly prophetic.
Modern socialism works fine in Germany and Scandinavia - their version is pretty much a minimally regulated free market economy, modified to feed and educate the poor better than happens under more right-wing administrations.
The Greeks are nuts. It shouldn't take much insight to realise that if a lot of people aren't paying their taxes, the government hasn't got the money to pay generous pensions or any of the other features of successful socialist economies.
Sweden works fine, but it collects 55% of the gross national income as taxes, which does cover the costs of an effective welfare state.
the Greek governments seems to have collected about 40%, which - while a lot higher than the US 25% - is low by European standards
What surprises me is that - given the history - the Greeks have been able to borrow so much.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
"Minimally regulated"??? In the EU!!! ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!!!
[...]
Doesn't surprise me at all. If you know when the debtor goes belly-up the tax-payers will be handed the bill for it all, there's no risk to the lenders!
It takes quite a lot to stop a pure free-market economy from having booms a nd busts, and to prevent the bigger players from forming cartels and turnin g the theoretically free market into a monopoly, organised to allow the big ger players to charge whatever prices they think they can get away with.
The EU may look "over-regulated" to you, but the consumer benefits of the r eally free market include Minamata disease - mercury poisoning - and asbest osis
People find it inconvenient to dispose of dangerous wastes, or sub-prime mo rtages, safely and a bit of regulation tends to protect the rest of us.
That's not what history would tell you about lending to the Greek Governmen t. When the Greek tax-payers aren't paying their taxes in the first place, handing them a bill just gives them free toilet paper.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
WTF are you on about?? I'm talking about 27,000 pages of regulations for the sale of citrus fruits alone! And all that useless verbiage and much else besides has to be translated into about 20 different languages! Sheesh!
Mad as a hatter, Slowman, has never heard of "Had Hatter's disease" or Thalidomide. The Eurpoean socialists are just so perfect in his blind eye. Don't feed the troll.
Sadly, it's not useless verbiage. Eventually the Plain Language movement will get around to reducing those 27,000 pages to the three or four that do the job that really does have to be done.
One of my old friends has been doing that job on the University of Melbounre's academic regulations. The EC is something more of an Augean stable, but it's fixable, eventually.
Translation is no big deal - the EC has large squads of translators, and machine translation works remarkably well these days. Look at Google's translations sometime.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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