[Animal_Mother (Banned)]

Originally Posted by quakcer

I've seen tons of muslims eat bacon, that doesn't mean it's not haraam.

meh, I suppose it's like Catholics eatting meat on Fridays during Lent. They're not supposed to, but a lot say **** it and do it anyway. There's varying degrees of devotion in every religion.

[Tin-Man]

Originally Posted by Animal_Mother

meh, I suppose it's like Catholics eatting meat on Fridays during Lent. They're not supposed to, but a lot say **** it and do it anyway. There's varying degrees of devotion in every religion.

Same thing. Just like Leviticus says I can have slaves from neighbouring countries, but I think having a gaggle of Mexicans following me around would be in bad taste

[Rampager2000]

Hrmm..

My old skating rink didn't ever spray the skates down, even though we were legally supposed to. When I brought it up, I was told the disinfectant spray costs too much. Reusing mop heads for months, serving food that shouldn't have been served, etc. That was small scale ****, though. I hate to imagine what all is in my McDonalds food and **** that they cheapened up on.

[Rapier7]

Originally Posted by StellarKnight

How do you reconcile these two ideas?

Minimal regulation doesn't mean no regulation. Things like copyright, trademark, and (proper) patent protection are part of a minimal regulatory framework. They are the earliest and most basic forms of government regulation. You might as well ask how I can reconcile contract enforcement with my belief that we have too much regulation.

You can't honestly look at me with a straight face and say that we need every regulation we have in the 80,000 page Federal Register. At the same time, I'm not going to pretend that we should have zero regulation. It's about finding the optimal amount of regulation. Think of a Laffer curve for public policy. The economy grows fastest at a certain amount of regulation. I posit that we're on the right half of the regulatory Laffer curve. That means we need less regulation than what we currently have.

[marcozombie]

Originally Posted by Animal_Mother

meh, I suppose it's like Catholics eatting meat on Fridays during Lent. They're not supposed to, but a lot say **** it and do it anyway. There's varying degrees of devotion in every religion.

Or like the majority of Catholics using condoms and other forms of birth control even though we are told we need to create more catholics in hopes of getting a couple of more preists out of it.

[rT159]

Originally Posted by Animal_Mother

It's haraam, and no. I've seen tons of Muslims wearing jewelry.

Originally Posted by quakcer

I've seen tons of muslims eat bacon, that doesn't mean it's not haraam.

I've seen Muslims kill good people in the name of their god.

[drgonzo]

Originally Posted by Rampager2000

Hrmm..

My old skating rink didn't ever spray the skates down, even though we were legally supposed to. When I brought it up, I was told the disinfectant spray costs too much. Reusing mop heads for months, serving food that shouldn't have been served, etc. That was small scale ****, though. I hate to imagine what all is in my McDonalds food and **** that they cheapened up on.

You hear this kind of stuff so much and it just makes you wonder. How much is a can of disinfectant? How can a company have such callous disregard over just a few bucks? That's just evil.

[scienceguy]

If you want to observe the difference between the regulated and unregulated look at the pharma and neutraceutical industry.

Pharmaceuticals are highly regulated. So much so that many of you call for deregulation so that small companies have a chance to compete and thus lower drug costs. Currently, the industry claims that The cost to bring a new drug to market is around $1billion and a decade of time. Most of that cost is due to clinical trials and time dealing with regulatory. I agree its a slow process. However, I've seen some crazy stuff that makes me believe that the regulation is a good thing.

The most glaring example i have: At one very large pharma company, we were doing standard preclinical testing on rats. We would implant tumors and measure how much they shrink with the drug exposure. The drug worked pretty well, but The problem was that we were running into major tox issues. The manager was under a tight deadline so we were ordered to lie and remove dead animals from the study (as if they never existed) to change the results. This is a big no no both ethically and legally. Many of us left because we disnt like the prospect of ending up in court. The drug was eventually killed due to other testing required by the FDA prior to first in human. The manager couldn't fake that because it was outside their department. Score 1 for regulation.

Compare that to the unregulated neutraceutical companies that read a news story then start selling a plant extract or drug to cure aging, obesity, fatigue ED, cancer, AIDS etc. It's a good thing their products are usually fake because of they were real they might actually kill someone.

[Tuff]

Rofl @ everything in this thread.

[barrel roll]

Originally Posted by Tin-Man

Same thing. Just like Leviticus says I can have slaves from neighboring countries, but I think having a gaggle of Mexicans following me around would be in bad taste

Then how does it say to treat them?

[chodeyg]

Originally Posted by Frank112916

I don't know, on one hand I agree - plenty of things happen that the market does not at all correct for and therefore you need regulation. One might argue, however, that these things that happen - they aren't truly detrimental to society and don't substantially reduce the value of the service or good being provided so long as the dissonance doesn't grow too large and the problem is exposed. This asymmetry in information will always happen. The reason may be is that the cost of obtaining such information is extremely high, especially in a world where we are over saturated with it. It certainly causes inequitable wealth transfers/rent taking which is definitely an undesirable outcome.

I think of the duel between the "free market" and regulation at best a linear regression, it's a best-fit-line, and it is never perfect. You hope to have a high adjusted R^2 value, but if you don't, adding complexity through the use of higher order polynomial regression (i.e. more complex regulation), while having a better fit given your current data, it may inaccurately forecast the future and does not leave enough flexibility given the risks (and opportunities) posed by Knightian uncertainty (the unknown unknown).

With any regulation, we must weigh the costs and benefits of enforcing each rule. We must also realize that, who is telling the "true" side of the story is incredibly difficult, which is why I shy away from anecdotes.

This is a great post.

People love to worship the free market as if it were a perfect entity when in reality it is just a collection of choices that determine the allocation of resources, nothing more.

People have a disdain for direct democracy because of the huge potential for mob rule. Direct democracy is to politics as the unfettered free market is to economics.

The average consumer does not care if an iPod is made by solar energy or the blood of children. They want an iPod. Therefore it shouldn't be up to the government to form a command economy in which it is determined what an iPod should be by an government entity. However, how that iPod is made should be regulated to keep the environment and workers safe to a reasonable degree.

Sorry for all the metaphors.

[Murph1329]

[barrel roll]

Why post a picture of that ****ty phone?

[StellarKnight]

Originally Posted by Rapier7

Minimal regulation doesn't mean no regulation. Things like copyright, trademark, and (proper) patent protection are part of a minimal regulatory framework. They are the earliest and most basic forms of government regulation. You might as well ask how I can reconcile contract enforcement with my belief that we have too much regulation.

I personally have a difficult time drawing parallels between enforcement of contract between consenting parties and government enforced monopoly, but I understand what you're saying.

I guess what I was intending to ask was more along the lines of "where's the appropriate balance between strong patent laws and dynamic innovation?" Strong patent laws have the tendency to stifle innovation in markets after a certain point, but no patent protection in certain industries (ex. pharmaceutical) could very well result in little to no innovation.

[drgonzo]

Originally Posted by barrel roll

Why post a picture of that ****ty phone?

+1

[SupraSuper]

Originally Posted by LOL Renegade

Isn't wearing gold haram?

It's not in the Qur'an but there is Hadith that say it's forbidden. Since the Qur'an say's nothing about it I interpret it as meaning not to be overly extravagant, since the only Arabs who wore it during Muhammad's time were super rich and flashy. I take Hadith relating to menial subjects like this with a grain of salt.

I don't wear gold because I think it looks ridiculous on a guy, and I'm not saying I have a gold ring, but that if I did have a 24k Gold ring either for my wife/daughter or for the value I'd be mad if a repair shop added 10k gold.

Originally Posted by Overbear

*clue* they use 10k gold to weld in extra metal because its really the only way to keep its form and keep the patch from streching/falling out/not bonding properly. They don't use it for the whole ring, just when you need a extra tiny bit put in to strech the ring bigger, or to fix weld points (like settings and such)...

You really didn't think they use 24k gold for every bit of a ring did you?

I'm not sure how jewelry repair works, but if I had a ring that was not equal to 24k gold weight that I believed it to be, I'd be pissed.

[F1VENOM]

Throwing away the parts of religion that don't suit you. Why can't you just throw the whole damn thing out?

[barrel roll]

Originally Posted by F1VENOM

Throwing away the parts of religion that don't suit you. Why can't you just throw the whole damn thing out?

You mischaracterize the argument.

[licence2kill]

Originally Posted by SupraSuper

It's not in the Qur'an but there is Hadith that say it's forbidden. Since the Qur'an say's nothing about it I interpret it as meaning not to be overly extravagant, since the only Arabs who wore it during Muhammad's time were super rich and flashy. I take Hadith relating to menial subjects like this with a grain of salt.

I don't wear gold because I think it looks ridiculous on a guy, and I'm not saying I have a gold ring, but that if I did have a 24k Gold ring either for my wife/daughter or for the value I'd be mad if a repair shop added 10k gold.

too bad the quran doesnt say anything about wearing ed hardy t shirts and driving range rovers

/every arab and persian person in orange county

[barrel roll]

Didnt they make a movie about how worthless and empty Orange County is?

[SupraSuper]

Originally Posted by F1VENOM

Throwing away the parts of religion that don't suit you. Why can't you just throw the whole damn thing out?

wtf?