If Obama is supossed to be for change then why is the stock market lacking confidence in him? It has fallen almost 1,000 points this week since he has won the vote?
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If Obama is supossed to be for change then why is the stock market lacking confidence in him? It has fallen almost 1,000 points this week since he has won the vote?
As if the stock market reacted rationally to ANYTHING. It collapsed before the bailout, and dove again right after it. Unemployment is at a 14 year high, GM stated that they will run out of money by the end of the year, and the banks STILL aren't loosening credit. The market is sinking because the market is ruled by only two emotions: Greed and Fear. Right now, there isn't much greed, but there's a HUGE amount of fear. No election that will change the leadership three months from now, is going to change the facts.
This is a poor argument. One of the biggest strains on the healthcare system right now is morbid obesity. Eating could be argued to be a choice.Quote:
Originally Posted by FunkyDexter
As for cancer not having any element of choice, I smoke cigarettes.
Do you have any cites for your argument that decriminalization has led to higher drug use in those countries? I'm not saying you're wrong -- it certainly sounds plausible -- but I'm also not going to just take your word for it.
Assuming there is a higher incidence of drug use, that's mostly irrelevant. Up until the Bush administration, one of the primary ideals of the American justice system was that it is far better to let 100 criminals go free than to lock up one innocent man. This principle would seem to suggest that a higher incidence of drug use is preferable to having fewer drug users with some behind bars.
Hey Ellis, why don't you provide "cites" for your drivel? You seem to thrive on demanding cites, how about backing up your own liberal rhetoric? Provide a cite or retract your statement that Bush thinks the world is 6000 years old. Pull your head out of your rear end and quit trying to stun everyone with your oh so grown up words. Falling prey to your left wing "woo woo" blogs and coming here to show how enlightened you are is, frankly, laughable. Pomposity and substance are two different things.
All the analysts were watching the market the next day, as you say, there were fears that if McCain won the market would cash and if Obama won that it would have some kind of gain. The market reacts to many influences and presidential elections are just one of them.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker
All the analysts? Every single one? Doggone, and here I follow the financial news every single day and had never heard even one person suggest that the market was going to go one way or the other due to the election. I guess it wasn't "all" the analysts.Quote:
Originally Posted by RobDog888
When I listen to market analysts, I feel greater disgust than I do listening to political rhetoric. When they state that the direction of the market today was due to X (not you Xanith, I'm not blaming you for anything), it's so absurd I tend to make sarcastic comments at the radio, even though there's nobody around to hear me. Nobody could explain what happened for the last few weeks, and finally gave up trying. They should do that more often.
Nobody can tell what is going to happen on any given day in the market. That has never been more true than it is today. There are any number of computer driven buying and selling that is utterly devoid of emotion, yet can drive the market in the first or last hours of the day (perhaps throughout). There are also fund managers doing things for reasons that don't have anything to do with the immediate news. Look at trends rather than single day moves, unless you are doing some kind of day trading.
The general trend has been down, which is a reasonable reaction to the plethora of negative news that is hitting us day after day. The bottom is coming, but why does anybody think that electing a person who will not have any policy impact for three more months will cause some kind of dramatic change. I expected a minor bump from either election (because human traders will hope for something good from the election), but overall I think we'll end up with a DOW in the 7000s, hopefully the upper 7000s. Since we aren't there, then a further decline was reasonable to me.
All analysts <> mean they are all thinking it will go up, only they are all apying attention to it etc.
Well I can see you are passionate about the topic but lets get carried away here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ellis Dee
As to your first cited article, it seems that it all might hinge on a single, extremely politic, statement:
Although I am a republican, and I spent my first 8 years in a catholic school, I am not a supporter of "creationism" as a field of science. However, I certainly think there is room in the sciences for students to be introduced to creationism. Perhaps for five or ten minutes.Quote:
''I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. ''You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."
...
Your second article seems to be a rehash of the first.
...
Your third article, although most distressing, did not point out the following {Found Here }:
If I were to stumble across this book, I would certainly put little merit in something that might be sitting right next to "navel gazing for dummies".Quote:
in 2004, the Grand Canyon National Park bookstore moved the book from the natural science section to the inspirational section as requested by the scientific organizations
Don't be so harsh, I know some navels that are well worth the gazing, whether by dummies...or anyone else.
pfft who cares, we all know the LaLiLuLeLo run the US and is it true that vault tech have floated on the stock market?
Sorry, I should have said provide some credible cites. Fail.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ellis Dee
I'd be interested in seeing a poll as to whether or not anybody actually understood any part of this. I understand most of the words, and it appears to be grammaticly correct. I can also see that there are two parts joined with an AND, yet I can't make sense out of either part.Quote:
Originally Posted by DeanMc
I knew that response was coming, I just didn't know the actual words that would be used. Therefore, as I raked up the bazillion leaves that one tree dumped onto my lawn (it must have had a good year, as there was a layer over six inches thick in some places), I pondered whether or not it would be possible to have a discussion of any political point based on some kind of common truth. My conclusion was that it wasn't possible.Quote:
Originally Posted by demotivater
In science, the only truly valid citations are peer reviewed papers. Even books are considered gray literature. Peer reviewed papers are generally considered to include discreet studies coupled with sufficient methodology information that the study could be independently reproduced. Many studies ARE independently reproduced.
The debates in this forum rarely stray into anything other than fairly recent history (with occasional forays into moden, yet not recent, history). History cannot be reproduced. Worse, every observer filters history to fit into their own particular narrative. No two people can construct events of only a few minutes past in identical fashions. Further, with the avalanche of information available at our fingertips, consuming ALL of the information available on ANY subject is beyond the abilities of any one person. Even if it were possible, the person consuming the information would filter the information based on their own biases and preconceptions. After all, the brain is only good at one task: The recognition of patterns. As a result of this, if we have a pattern that we expect to be true, the brain will amplify signal that matches the pattern, and supress signal that contradicts the pattern. We like to believe that what we perceive is actually truth, but it is nothing more than a version of truth distorted by our filters.
In this case, filtering can happen at the highest level. We can consciously decide that those sources of information that do not conform to our expectations of the world around us are simply false, while those that DO conform to our expectations, even if they do so by saying nothing at all about a subject, are valid. The absence of signal on any given subject in conforming sources is seen as proof of the fallacy of said signal in other sources. This is an utterly absurd, but self-serving, indeed self-supporting, convention.
So how are we able to deal with this? How can we live in a world where half of a population believes one set of truths are valid, while the other half believes that a different set of truths are valid. As far as I can tell, the reason this is functional is that the truths don't really impact the immediate well-being of either side. People are worried that taxes will go up, or that Palin will become president and remove all our personal freedoms, or whatever doom you so choose. None of those actually matter, though, because your cable company is going to raise your rates tomorrow and drive you into bankruptcy, or a bread truck is going to run over your car, while you're driving it, causing you to incurr huge medical bills, or perhaps your weiner dog will choke on a weiner, knock over his water bowl, and simultaneously stick his nose in the socket, causing a fire that burns down your house. The everyday disasters (and successes) that really steer our lives totally dwarf the everyday impact of most political decisions.
We simply can't prove that Trickle Down economics works. We can't prove that a different foreign policy would have prevented 9/11. We can't even prove that there is bias in the press (I recently read an article discussing the attempts at answering this empirically, how and why they have all failed so far, and what attempts are being tried at this time), though various groups have always claimed that the press favored the other side (that particular phenomenon, that pretty nearly every group sees the press as being opposed to them, HAS been studied, and even has a name, though I have forgotten what it is).
With the inability to prove these things, we are free to make up our own opinions, safe in the assurance that we can never be proven wrong. With the inability of these issues to have direct and immediate impact on us, any opinion we form on these subjects will not impact us substantially whether right or wrong, which differentiates these mental models from things like being able to predict the trajectory of a projectile headed in our direction. So there is no penalty for being wrong, nor any substantial reward for being right, and therefore we can argue back and forth over these things incessantly.
Worse, since there is no substantial cost or benefit, the perceived benefit of being RIGHT!!!! is sufficient justification to discount data that doesn't fit the model. When it comes to driving a car, discounting data that doesn't fit the model would be downright tragic. When it comes to politics, discounting data means not needing to admit that you're wrong on ANYTHING. You aren't wrong, the data is.
So what should we do? Figure out what the basis of our opinions are, and explain that basis. If people feel that your basis is correct, they will agree with your opinions. If people feel that your basis is base-less, then they will not agree with you. Nothing more can be achieved than that. However, the basis of your opinion is not so much external facts as it is personal views and experiences. After all, if you are discarding data that doesn't fit your model, external facts are pure garbage, because only the facts that fit the model are included, which is inherently biased. Therefore, the question has to be: What is your model, and how did you come by it? In many cases, people don't even want to know the answer to that. If you were opposed to Obama simply because of his race, would you admit it, or would you find something else you didn't like, and put forward that item? Nobody is the bad guy in their own narrative. So even understanding our own model is a huge hurdle. Forming a model that you can articulate to the world, is higher still.
Thus, I concluded that this debate can never be resolved, nor will any debate on politics. We can't find a common base of truth, and nobody really wants to address their own personal models.
By the way, there is a solution to the previous dissertation which I think is possibly viable, but it would take considerable effort: Accept ALL data as fact until it can be conclusively dismissed. This would necessarily leave most questions unanswered.
More people than you would think shaggy. LaLiLuLeLo
I knew that somebody would understand you, but that person certainly wasn't me, so I decided to say it with hyperbole.
Actually I you had a pretty witty statement there and you know know who the LALILULELO are.