NY Times Story on Pilot Population Decline

On Sun, 29 Apr 2007 11:22:35 GMT, "Steven P. McNicoll"
wrote in
et:

Why isn't profit motive sufficient encouragement to produce things?

Because it lacks long-range vision, and encourages sleaze and planned
obsolescence rather than durable, high quality products.

On Sun, 29 Apr 2007 11:27:07 GMT, kontiki
wrote in :

In the first 150 years of this nations history it is what
bread a strong, hearty stock of people that built a country from
nothing to be a world power in just a few generations. Good
decision making and hard work = success.

Weren't we discussing retired workers? Are you suggesting that
survival of the fittest is appropriate treatment for workers who have
contributed their productive years to our nation's GNP, and are no
longer employable?

Or were you referring to cripples? Are you suggesting that they be
left to the wolves by our great nation?

On Sun, 29 Apr 2007 11:28:32 GMT, "Steven P. McNicoll"
wrote in
t:


"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
.. .

That is how I understand it also. However no one is forcing anyone to
support themselves through earning a wage.


Right. People can avoid paying social security simply by not supporting
themselves through earning wages. Why do you suppose most people don't take
that option?

Because they prefer the security of a steady income? Because they
don't find paying SSI sufficient reason to? Because one would have to
think outside the box?



It's not easy, but I'm aware of them and working on changing. How
about you?


I don't have any.


If you are a living organism, and you believe that, you are
delusional:


http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...rejudiced.html
Psychologists have long known of our proclivity to form "in
groups" based on crude markers, ranging from skin colour to clothing
styles. Think of inner-city gangs, Italian football supporters, or any
"cool" group of stylish teenagers. "Our minds seem to be organised in
a way that makes breaking the human world into distinct groups almost
automatic," says psychologist Lawrence Hirschfeld of the University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor. Many experiments confirm this, and show that we
tend to favour our own group, even when that group is just an
arbitrary collection of individuals.

In 1970, for example, a team of researchers led by psychologist
Henri Tajfel of the University of Bristol, UK, randomly divided
teenage boys from the same school into two groups, and gave every boy
the chance to allocate points to two other boys, one from each group.
This could be done in different ways - some increasing the combined
total for both recipients, and others increasing the difference
between the two. The boys consistently chose options of the latter
kind, favouring recipients from their own group. Experiments like
these are enough to convince Tajfel and others that if you put people
into different groups, call them red and blue, north and south, or
whatever, a bias towards one's own group will automatically emerge.

This in itself does not make us racist. In fact it may not be such
a bad thing: research published last year suggests at least one useful
function of our groupist tendencies. Political scientists Ross Hammond
of the Brookings Institute in Washington DC and Robert Axelrod of the
University of Michigan have discovered, perhaps surprisingly, that it
can promote cooperation (Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol 50, p
926). Taking their cue from Tajfel's finding that in-group favouritism
emerges with minimal prompting, Hammond and Axelrod decided to try to
emulate this in a simple computer model. Imagine a population of
individuals, interacting in pairs at random, and engaging in some
activity where both would benefit from cooperation, but each was also
tempted to cheat - getting more for themselves at the other's expense.
With no insight into the likely behaviour of others, individuals in
such a world would have no way - besides pure guesswork - to maximise
the outcome of their interactions. But add one simple element, colour,
and everything changes.

People in Hammond and Axelrod's world come in four colours,
assigned randomly at birth. When interacting with others, they might
now adopt one of several basic strategies. An individual might act
randomly, as before, ignoring colour - which would make sense as the
colours say nothing about how an individual is likely to behave.
Alternatively, a person might always cooperate or always cheat,
regardless of the other's colour. Another option would be to follow a
groupist "ethnocentric" strategy - cooperating with anyone of the same
colour, but always trying to cheat those of another colour. Finally,
agents might be anti-groupist - only cooperating with someone of
another colour. The researchers randomly assigned one of these
strategies to each agent. They also gave all agents the ability to
learn from one another, so that any strategy that did well would tend
to be copied and so spread.

What happened then, they discovered, was that agents of each
particular colour began to gather together. At first, a few groupist
agents of the same colour might find themselves together by chance.
Within such a group, cooperative interactions lead to good outcomes,
causing others nearby to copy their strategy, swelling the group. In
the model, Hammond and Axelrod found that strongly ethnocentric groups
of different colours came to fill the world, at the expense of others.
Anyone who did not follow the groupist strategy tended to suffer. Even
someone ignoring colour - and remember colour initially signified
nothing about an agent's behaviour - would also get wiped out. In
short, once people begin to act on colour, it comes to matter. What's
more, it turns out that the overall level of cooperation is higher in
this world where there is in-group favouritism than in a world where
agents are colourless. "Ethnocentrism is actually a mechanism for
generating cooperation, and one that does not demand much in the way
of cognitive ability," says Hammond.

Axelrod and Hammond are well aware that their model is a far cry
from the complexities of real-world racism. Still, it is interesting
that colour prejudice emerges even though colour has no intrinsic
significance. Modern genetics has dispelled the naive notion that
racial divisions reflect real biological differences. We know that the
genetic variation between individuals within one racial or ethnic
group is generally much larger than the average difference between
such groups. As in the virtual world, race and ethnicity are arbitrary
markers that have acquired meaning. But you won't get far telling
Blacks and Hispanics in the racially charged areas of Los Angeles that
their differences are just "superficial" cultural constructs. "Race
doesn't matter because it is real," says historian Niall Ferguson of
Harvard University, "but because people conceive it to be real."

What's more, this misconception seems to be deeply ingrained in
our psyche. For example, Hirschfeld found that by the age of 3 most
children already attribute significance to skin colour. In 1993, he
showed a group of children a drawing of a chubby black child dressed
up as a policeman, followed by photos of several adults, each of whom
had two of the three traits: being black, chubby and dressed as a
policeman. Asked to decide which person was the boy as a grown-up,
most children chose a black adult even though he was either not
overweight or minus a police uniform. "Kids appear to believe," says
Hirschfeld, "that race is more important than other physical
differences in determining what sort of person one is."

“By the age of 3 most kids already attribute significance to skin
colour”More recent brain imaging studies suggest that even adults who
claim not to be racist register skin colour automatically and
unconsciously. In 2000, a team led by social psychologist Allan Hart
of Amherst College in Massachusetts found that when white and black
subjects viewed faces of the other race both showed increased activity
in the amygdala - a brain region involved in grasping the emotional
significance of stimuli. Yet consciously, these subjects reported
feeling no emotional difference on seeing the different faces. In
another study of white subjects, in the same year, neuroscientist
Elizabeth Phelps of New York University and colleagues found that
those individuals whose amygdala lit up most strongly also scored
highest on a standard test for racial prejudice.

Does this mean that our species has evolved to see the world in
terms of black and white? Not necessarily. After all, our ancestors
would not normally have met people whose skin was a different colour
from their own: neighbouring ethnic groups would have looked pretty
much alike. So, it's possible that our tendency to classify people by
colour might simply be a modern vice, learned early and reinforced
throughout our lives - even, paradoxically, by anti-racist messages.
That seems unlikely, however, when you consider our attitudes to
ethnicity. In fieldwork among Torguud Mongols and Kazakhs,
neighbouring ethic groups living in central Asia, Gil-White
investigated ideas of ethnic identity to find out whether people link
it more with nurture (a child being brought up within a group) or
nature (the ethnicity of biological parents). The majority of both
groups saw ethnicity as a hidden but powerful biological factor,
unaffected by someone being adopted into another group. "They perceive
the underlying nature as some kind of substance that lies inside and
causes the members of an ethnic group to behave the way they do," he
says. Like race, ethnicity has no biological significance, yet this is
exactly how we perceive it.

Many researchers now believe that we have evolved a tendency to
divide the world along ethnic lines. For example, anthropologist Rob
Boyd from the University of California, Los Angeles, argues that our
ancestors, given the rich social context of human life, would have
needed skills for perceiving the important groups to which individuals
belonged. Being attuned to ethnic differences would have allowed
individuals to identify others who shared the same social norms -
people with whom it would have been easiest to interact because of
shared expectations. It would have paid to attend to cultural
differences such as styles of clothing, scarification or manner of
greeting, that marked one group out from another. In the modern world,
colour is simply mistaken as one such marker.

That might explain why we tend to divide the world into groups and
why we use ethnic differences and skin colour as markers to help us do
this. It even gives a rationale for in-group favouritism. But what
about out-group animosity? Is prejudice part of the whole evolved
package? Gil-white believes it is. He argues that within any group of
people sharing social norms, anyone who violates those will attract
moral opprobrium - it is considered "bad" to flout the rules and
benefit at the expense of the group. This response is then easily
transferred to people from other ethnic groups. "We're tempted to
treat others, who are conforming to their local norms, as violating
our own local norms, and we take offence accordingly," says Gil-White.
As a result we may be unconsciously inclined to see people from other
ethnic groups not simply as different, but as cheats, morally corrupt,
bad people.

Natural but not nice
"I think all this work refutes those naive enough to believe that
if it weren't for bad socialising, we would all be nice tolerant
people who accept cultural and ethnic differences easily," says Daniel
Chirot, professor of international studies at the University of
Washington, Seattle. That may sound disturbing, but being biologically
primed for racism does not make it inevitable. For a start, what is
natural and biological needn't be considered moral or legal. "The
sexual attraction that a grown man feels for a 15-year-old female is
perfectly natural," Gil-White points out. But most societies forbid
such relations, and all but a very few men can control their urges.

“Being biologically primed for racism does not make it
inevitable”Besides, if ethnocentrism is an evolved adaptation to
facilitate smooth social interactions, it is a rather crude one. A far
better way to decide who can be trusted and who cannot is to assess an
individual's character and personality rather than to rely on
meaningless markers. In today's world, that is what most of us do,
most of the time. It is only when it becomes difficult to judge
individuals that people may instinctively revert to the more primitive
mechanism. Hammond and Axelrod argue that this is most likely to
happen under harsh social or economic conditions, which may explain
why ethnic divisions seem to be exaggerated when societies break down,
as a consequence of war, for example. "To me this makes perfect
sense," says Chirot. "Especially in times of crisis we tend to fall
back on those with whom we are most familiar, who are most like us."

Knowing all this, it may be possible to find ways to curb our
unacceptable tendencies. Indeed, experiments show how little it can
take to begin breaking down prejudice. Psychologist Susan Fiske from
Princeton University and colleagues got students to view photos of
individuals from a range of social groups, while using functional MRI
to monitor activity in their medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a brain
region known to light up in response to socially significant stimuli.
The researchers were shocked to discover that photos of people
belonging to "extreme" out-groups, such as drug addicts, stimulated no
activity in this region at all, suggesting that the viewers considered
them to be less than human. "It is just what you see with homeless
people or beggars in the street," says Fiske, "people treat them like
piles of garbage." In new experiments, however, she was able to
reverse this response. After replicating the earlier results, the
researchers asked simple, personal questions about the people in the
pictures, such as, "What kind of vegetable do you think this beggar
would like?" Just one such question was enough to significantly raise
activity in the mPFC. "The question has the effect of making the
person back into a person," says Fiske, "and the prejudiced response
is much weaker."

It would appear then that we have a strong tendency to see others
as individuals, which can begin to erode our groupist instincts with
very little prompting. Perhaps this is why, as Chirot points out,
ethnocentrism does not always lead to violence. It might also explain
why in every case of mass ethnic violence it has taken massive
propaganda on the part of specific political figures or parties to
stir passions to levels where violence breaks out.

If the seeds of racism are in our nature, so too are the seeds of
tolerance and empathy. By better understanding what sorts of
situations and environments are conducive to both, we may be able to
promote our better nature.




Just for a moment try to imagine a nation where the poor old folks who
have given the toil of their youth to increasing the GNP (or whatever
its called these days) littering the pavement of your city so thick
that you can't walk down the sidewalk. Isn't that what you're
advocating?


No.



You tell me.


I asked you first.

"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
...

Because it lacks long-range vision, and encourages sleaze and planned
obsolescence rather than durable, high quality products.


It doesn't.

Why isn't profit motive sufficient encouragement to produce things?

It is. It's just not sufficient encouragement to clean up afterwards.
Generalized, that's why we have government in the first place.

Jose
--
Get high on gasoline: fly an airplane.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

While it might take some time for the quality of teachers to improve
in Iowa, it is reasonable to expect, that increasing the salary Iowa
pays teachers may cause fewer better-qualified teachers to overlook
Iowa as a choice for employment.

Did the cost of living stay the same while teacher's salaries were going up?

Jose
--
Get high on gasoline: fly an airplane.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

On Sun, 29 Apr 2007 11:38:15 GMT, kontiki
wrote in :

Larry Dighera wrote:



Are you able to articulate them? How would you address the implicit
mandate in a Capitalistic system, that drives corporations to
continually seek cost reductions to the point of absurdity and


Damm Larry, why doesn't government ever try to do that?

The topic was Capitalism, not government.

corporations have to make a profit... ot they go bankrupt.

That is my point. Today's Capitalism demands that producers meet the
lowest price in the marketplace, or face insolvency. That means that
if one producer is willing to reduce the cost of production through
unethical or immoral means, all the other producers are FORCED to do
the same or go broke. The cost-cutting efficiency of Capitalism is
commendable, but Capitalism's continual dive to the bottom begins to
cause problems after a certain point. That issue should be addressed.
Surely, even you can see the truth in what I'm saying.


_dishonesty_ just to meet the competition's price and remain viable in

Oh, so any business that makes a profit or trims down to be
more successful is _dishonest_ ???

I'm sorry if I failed to make myself clear enough for you to
understand. That is not what I said at all.

I have restated what I said above. Hopefully you'll take the time to
read and COMPREHEND it.


the marketplace? Do you believe outsourcing US jobs is good for our
nation? Do you believe that forcing US corporations to move to other
countries in order to escape income tax liability on income earned in
the US is desirable? Let's see how simple you can make the solutions
of which you speak.


As stated, businesss have to be profitiable or they go OUT of
business.

I for one, would be willing to pay a little more for goods produced in
the USA, wouldn't you? I would be willing to pay a little more for
goods that are produced responsibly, and I think there is a
significant segment of the marketplace that would also. The concept
I'm trying to get across, is that the cost of a product shouldn't be
the sole criterion for purchasing decisions.

The change in consumer's spending decisions is slowly gaining
momentum, such as locally grown produce over supermarket fair supports
local agriculture, and Southern California Edison subscribers are able
to choose "green" sources of power:
http://www.poweryourway.com/pages/greenpower.html

(sort of like Darwin's theory). It is good decisionmaking
to adjust your business (downsize, move manufacturing elsewhere)
to offset increased taxation by government in order to stay
competetive and keep the shareholders happy.

How do you determine at what point the price of lowering the cost of
production further is not worth its non-monitory impact?

Larry Dighera wrote:


Or were you referring to cripples? Are you suggesting that they be
left to the wolves by our great nation?


Basically yes Larry. As has been stated MULTIPLE times here, if
the money stolen from workers were actually _invested_ on their
behalf instead being stolen and used to buy votes there would
be precious few people in _need_ of government assistance when
they retire.

There is plenty of aid for people actually _deserving_ of it
(as you say, 'cripples' or whatever). The problem is that FAR
too many people get paid rather well (with money taken from
other people who worked for and earned it) and who do not
deserve it.

They only real money any person could deservingly receive is
that which they have earned through work or investment. Anything
else is mere income re-distribution (the 'Robin Hood' effect:
i.e. buying votes).

If the money is given freely to those in real need it is called
charity. Charities usually take care to insure those receiving it
are really deserving... and demonstrate behaviors that indicate
they will eventually climb out of their situation. Government
just robs from Peter to buy a vote from Paul.

"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the
support of Paul."

- George Bernard Shaw

Larry Dighera wrote:


Because it lacks long-range vision, and encourages sleaze and planned
obsolescence rather than durable, high quality products.

Oh, I see. If it isn;t something that "government' envisions as
a 'good" thing then it lacks long range vision. You think Hillary
or someone like that *really* cares about people, or that her
"long range thinkin" is about anything other than getting elected?

You have just factually illustrated your irrational thinking.

I rest my case.

Larry Dighera wrote:


That is my point. Today's Capitalism demands that producers meet the
lowest price in the marketplace, or face insolvency.

And that, my friend, is exactly how it is supposed to work. MArxism
see things totally differently... the way you do in fact.