The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

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Hereandnow
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Hereandnow »

Not whit, but wit. I new it as I wrote it, but ignored it. Ugh!
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Burning ghost
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Burning ghost »

H&N -
It is not rhetoric, you blithering idiot.
Here are some examples:
you need to be hired as a Trump speech writer
Note: Aim to discredit by association.
That great humanitarian Adolf Hitler created a lot of jobs. How is this, the making of jobs, in itself, a measurement of a person's moral standing?
Note: Bring up despot’s is such a blatantly ridiculous move they’ve even found a term for it “reductio ad Hitlerum.”
It's not about eliminating the wealthy class. It's about making quality education available for all.
Note: it actually is if you look at the thread title.

Another was a complaint about people like Gates and Zuckerberg not being “philanthropists” when they actually are. You have a habit of lumping people together and judging them without even bothering to fact check - more laziness than “rhetoric” tbh.

Anyway, let me explain this from my perspective:
I simply do not understand at all why you and others would rush to the defense of a system that looks at such atrocious learning environments and says, lets make things
We don’t. It is just how you want to see it. I’ve been looking at the issue on the global scale (3.5 billion peole in the US don’t have as much as the top 10 wealthiest so I don’t try and make comparisions on a country to country basis - it’d take too long.) It’ll take an economic revolution to change this - no one has any idea what this could look like though. How did it feel being in the top 5% when you were in China? Did you try to distribute your wealth? If so how?

Greta -
Eight men. Half the world's population. Seems a tad unbalanced, eh?
Unbalanced? It’s called a pareto distribution, named after the economist that pointed this out. So “balanced” is probably a misleading way of looking at it. Is it “fair”? Nope. Is there a way to reverse this short of violent revolution? Nope. If there was a violent revolution I’d imagine everything would get even worse for a short period in the aftermath.

Once someone has no money they cannot accumulate negative money. Most people have better things to do than just make money. It’s a huge problem. No one has any answers.

I do look to education like H&N in this respect. Yet, as mentioned already, you cannot BUY good education. The best hope is mass access to free education - this is already happening to some degree through the internet where good passionate teachers can reach billions of people - hopefully in the not too distant future such enterprises will see at least a slight shift in favour of the low end.

All in all until someone can offer up a way to make things fairer I see no reason to blame the top end earners when enough of them are doing some serious good in the world. The tax laws put in place are often there to protect those who cannot help themselves, and sadly this is then taken advantage of ny the super wealthy. Until such acts are made globally illegal nothing will change any time soon in this respect. Given that we’re not exactly close to a global government this is not really something viable - give it 100 years and things may be a lot better; I think they will, and I imagine people will still be complaining then too regardless of any improvements (that seems to be, to me at least, the quality of humanity that has kept our societies afloat.)
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LuckyR
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by LuckyR »

Alias wrote: September 10th, 2018, 10:13 am
LuckyR wrote: September 10th, 2018, 2:27 am [How did the wealthy become wealthy? How did the poor become impoverished?]

How? The highest tax bracket in the US during WW2 was 94%. In the 50s, 60s and 70s it was was never below 70%. Reagan cut it to 50% in 1981 then to 28% in 1986. That's how.
It happened long before that. Daddy Warbucks was rich long before WWII. So was Jefferson rich long before the American revolution.
So was Nebuchadnezzar rich quite a long while before capitalism was invented. Income/power disparity is built into the fiber of civilization; all lawmaking and class structure supports that disparity. Once in a while, usually as a result of scientific/technological change, sometimes as a result of shifting empires, the middle class grows large and powerful and enlightened enough to buffer the working class from the aristocracy. But then the middle class is co-opted or fragmented to impotence. Reagan was just one of the co-opters, as Bush Minor was one of the fragmenters.
While true, your post is misleading. There have always been rich folks, but the pendulum towards a vibrant middle class (into which the poor had an actual chance of joining) has been swinging towards the death of the middle class since Reagan. Hence the dawning of the hyper-rich as Greta mentioned.
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Eduk »

Hereandnow. Personally I would say countereducational factors, as you mentioned, are very important. Education is far from perfect. But it is used far from perfectly. I dare say education would be vastly improved with model students, far beyond what additional funding through current channels would achieve.
I mean if the rich control the government then simply giving the government more money in taxes isn't going to be good enough by half.
There is so so much wrong with the world beyond wage disparity. Besides to fix wage disparity you have to look at the causes not simply take all money and divvy it out. Communism has been well proven to be much less efficient than capalist democracies.
Also no one answered Steve's earlier point. People, even poor people, are better off than they have ever been.
Finally I honestly do not mean to be harsh with anyone. When I say learn how to learn I mean the process of learning. Where do you look. How do you study. How do you tell good information from bad. How to do you tell good teachers from bad. Etc etc. Take for example critical thinking, this arms you with general logic skills which can be applied to many many areas of study. Oh and personally I have never stopped learning, leaving school was not the end of my education.
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by ThomasHobbes »

Eduk wrote: September 11th, 2018, 3:32 am
Also no one answered Steve's earlier point. People, even poor people, are better off than they have ever been.
This is an interesting assumption, which if far from clear from the empirical information.
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Steve3007 »

Eduk wrote:Also no one answered Steve's earlier point. People, even poor people, are better off than they have ever been.
To be clear: In my post I didn't actually assert that that is true. I posed the question: What if it were true? I was trying to explore the idea of the difference between relative wealth and absolute wealth and which of them we, as humans, regard as more important. One aspect of the way that human psychology appears to work is that we tend to judge our personal circumstances relative to our immediate surroundings. So when my kids refuse to eat their dinner and I reel off the old parent cliche "there's children starving in Africa you know!" they understandably aren't impressed by that point.
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Burning ghost »

ThomasHobbes wrote: September 11th, 2018, 5:42 am
Eduk wrote: September 11th, 2018, 3:32 am
Also no one answered Steve's earlier point. People, even poor people, are better off than they have ever been.
This is an interesting assumption, which if far from clear from the empirical information.
Child mortality down, educational access up, health care up, and nutrition up.

Of course these empirical facts don’t necessarily translate into “better” if you choose to define “better” in subjective terms and refer more to opportunity or sense of a lack of opportunity, “happiness” and such. Generally there is more of a chance for people today than before, but because there are more people - due to above points - there are more people in poverty in terms of head counting.

Then the issue is more about what % is deemed “better” when referring to human lives. It’s hardly something easy to determine in a unanimous way. I think someone pointed out this problem earlier in regards to 1000 in 1000000 compared to 10 in 100. We’re not really evolved with the equipment to deal with such numbers not to mention the added problem of emotional attachment to those nearest and dearest rather than some soul on the other side of the world in horrific conditions.

We’re burdened with moral sensibilities and enriched by it in equal measure to - I’d say it’s skewed more toward a positive light if the burden is taken on as best as we can manage. Then we have to ask ourselves, individually, what is it we can reasonably do.

I won’t quote Rousseau again, but he noted how people often said one thing and did another. Better to act out what we believe and entrust in our moral judgement until found wanting.
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Burning ghost
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

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Steve -

Looks like I was fleshign out your point as you posted yeah? ;)
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Steve3007 »

Burning Ghost wrote:Looks like I was fleshign out your point as you posted yeah?
Yes, I think you were making a related point on the same general theme.
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Hereandnow »

BG
We don’t. It is just how you want to see it. I’ve been looking at the issue on the global scale (3.5 billion peole in the US don’t have as much as the top 10 wealthiest so I don’t try and make comparisions on a country to country basis - it’d take too long.) It’ll take an economic revolution to change this - no one has any idea what this could look like though. How did it feel being in the top 5% when you were in China? Did you try to distribute your wealth? If so how?
Yes, you do. It is not about hypocrisy when I was in China which is utterly beside the point, nor a comparison of countries' economics. I never mentioned any of this. These are red herrings, and all that you put out prior to this is a specious justification of not knowing, or forgetting, what this argument is about. It is about the wealthy in ANY given country, but especially in the US, supporting policies that keep the poor, poor.

Reference to Trump/speech writer: This DOES discredit by association, but it also true. Trump is cutting expenditure on public education and the thoughts you present are exactly what HE and fellow conservatives say. That is not rhetoric, nor is the plight of the poor.
Reference to Hitler: It is an illustration pointing out that making jobs is not an inherently ethical accomplishment.
The Gates and Zuckerberg references is a pseudo issue.

The reason why you get lost so easily is because you don't read closely. Rather, you get an impression of something, then let your brain storm. This is not how to handle ideas. It is a way to make a response SEEM as if you are in the game.
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Hereandnow »

BG
you cannot BUY good education
This single statement is the clearest indication that you are really out of touch. This is EXACTLY what money can buy. What do you think schools, books, computers, more and better teachers, better implicit learning environments (home, one the streets), more time in school, more......all of this costs money. It requires massive changes in impoverished worlds. Massively expensive to make a person's education effective because ALL of these have to be addressed. Just one, say, new computers all around, does not remedy large classrooms, drug availability, anti educational race-based indignation (that is a BIG one). Is this ringing a bell? This IS reality, not an argument. You need to say, yes, I see.

Rhetoric? Are you joking?
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Eduk »

This is an interesting assumption
Why do you assume that to be an assumption? What empirical sources do you have to show the opposite? Personally I am basing my 'assumption' on all the published figures I've ever read on life expectancy, literacy, quality of life (hard to pin down of course that one), etc. Not to mention that I can casually look around and compare my surroundings to say pre-war England and cars, washing machines, hoovers, internet etc etc etc, it's a different world. Personally I don't miss dying roughly now, with no education, no health care and working for the King.
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

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Hereandnow, how do you buy a reduction in drug availability? How much would it cost?
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Hereandnow »

EDUK
I mean if the rich control the government then simply giving the government more money in taxes isn't going to be good enough by half.
Supporting higher taxes for the wealthy to fund education is not enough if the rich control government. The rich control government, Therefore, we shouldn't support higher taxes for education. It's like saying the rich will never go along with this, and nothing could be more true. They never will. But I didn't say they would. I do say we need to move into a direction such that it is acknowledged how egregious things are. Ceilingless personal wealth growth is deeply immoral, for what it is and what it does not do.

There is so so much wrong with the world beyond wage disparity. Besides to fix wage disparity you have to look at the causes not simply take all money and divvy it out.

I never, ever, ever said just take the money and divvy it out. I said JUST the opposite: over time, changing tax laws, adressing issues across the board, and so on. I said explicitly NOT do this stupidly. As to what doing it not stupidly is, that is another issue, but one thing is certain, it must be comprehensive regarding all educational and implicit education problems.
Also no one answered Steve's earlier point. People, even poor people, are better off than they have ever been.
Errrr, and so things get better in time, so we must be doing something right? Tell that to the millions who claw and bleed their way through life. Yes, in time perhaps their progeny will fare better. But this is no better than saying we have to sacrifice the poor the make America great again. (A great America here is not far from a Third Reich, as this is precisely the same reasoning. These people get in our way to make this great dream come true). Easy to say if things are going well for someone, you or me, but absolutely miserable for those who live struggling.
Finally I honestly do not mean to be harsh with anyone. When I say learn how to learn I mean the process of learning. Where do you look. How do you study. How do you tell good information from bad. How to do you tell good teachers from bad. Etc etc. Take for example critical thinking, this arms you with general logic skills which can be applied to many many areas of study. Oh and personally I have never stopped learning, leaving school was not the end of my education.
Then you sound like a terrific person. You likely have issues with some of my comments as they are pretty strong assertions. I am very happy to be disabused, if you can. But I only ask that rebuttals be focused, at least at their core.
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Re: The conception of the wealthy "taking from the impoverished" is a ludicrous belief

Post by Burning ghost »

H&N -

I can play this game if you wish.

To begin ...
It is not about hypocrisy when I was in China which is utterly beside the point, nor a comparison of countries' economics.
You brought it up so why is it not important now? You did actually avoid answering my question. How did it feel living in a country where you were comfortably in the top 5%?
These are red herrings, and all that you put out prior to this is a specious justification of not knowing, or forgetting, what this argument is about. It is about the wealthy in ANY given country, but especially in the US, supporting policies that keep the poor, poor.
Yet I cannot mention China when you bring it up, but you can rattle on about the US to your hearts content - fair enough. I merely asked about the global narrative because the OP doesn’t, I repeat DOES NOT, mention any specific country merely a pattern of human behaviour in society at large. That said specific cases are certainly not irrelevant and can help give a snapshot of the worlds problems.
Reference to Trump/speech writer: This DOES discredit by association, but it also true. Trump is cutting expenditure on public education and the thoughts you present are exactly what HE and fellow conservatives say.
You insult me and pretend it’s not bad rhetoric? Maybe you should take up office with Trump as you seem prone to creating “alternative facts” about what I’ve said.
That is not rhetoric, nor is the plight of the poor.
It’s rhetoric because you stringly implied I’d be on Trump’s side - not that this has anything to do with Trump (my points are about other instances and the global state being the thing firmly in my mind.) And again you insist to paint me in a bad light using “bad” rhetoric by making out I am saying the plight of poor people is some kind of lie. You imply lots of things when you have nothing of substance to add or dislike any opposition to points you make. I can easily make a better case than you have, and I believe I have to some extent laid down the foundation of that already.
Reference to Hitler: It is an illustration pointing out that making jobs is not an inherently ethical accomplishment.
And I’ll repeat again ... Reductio ad Hitlerum. Remember what the comparison was? For the benefit of others: you strongly insinuated that Zuckerberg shouldn’t be viewed as virtuous because he’d created jobs for people (which I never made a point of because its dumb - I merely pointed out one bonus of successful business), and this apparently warranted a comparison to Hitler to “illustrate a point?” So yes, “bad rhetoric.”
The Gates and Zuckerberg references is a pseudo issue.
Granted it wasn’t in this thread but it is certainly an instance of more assumptions and attempte to frame anyone rich as the “bad guy.” You cried for more of a philanthropic attitude for the likes of people like them ignorant to the facts of what they do.

From here I mentioned the issue Mr & Mrs Gates found in the sphere of pedagogy. That is where you happily cherry picked this little one from:
BG
you cannot BUY good education
This single statement is the clearest indication that you are really out of touch.
Now let’s look at the actual context you’ve happily plucked this from shall we:
I do look to education like H&N in this respect. Yet, as mentioned already, you cannot BUY good education. The best hope is mass access to free education - this is already happening to some degree through the internet where good passionate teachers can reach billions of people - hopefully in the not too distant future such enterprises will see at least a slight shift in favour of the low end.
Note: this was a reply to Greta’s question. I referred to what I previously mentioned:
The thing is if you give the money to the government to spend they’ll not spend it on education because they have to think about a whole other number of areas to fund. Without billionaires who would actually improve the education system? No one. Sad but true - the only real exception was Finland.

Bill Gates found that punping more money into education did nothing. The issue is having passionate teachers. It doesn’t matter how much money you give someone to do something, if they aren’t interested, they aren’t interested. If teacher wages were to be driven up a little it would make things better I expect - too much and you’re likely to attract the type you dislike (the “only money matters” bunch.)

Throwing money at a problem doesn’t solve it. Frugal natures make the most of everything and see where the money will be best put to use. Mrs. Gates comments about sex ed and general education - money doesn’t help if its not put in the right place. Taxes go the government, and the amount of politiking there makes it hard to get anything done.
So I was saying more than “money doesn’t BUY a good education” right?
Rhetoric? Are you joking?
Absolutely not.

How about listening to these guys:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aSL-iIskEFU

Note: 15:00 what Mrs Gates says about teachers and education, and the closing remarks about their ability to fund things governments simply cannot take a risk trying for fear of public backlash.
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