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[MrBogosity]

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An oldie but a goodie!

On a related note, one more reason Daniel "Harry Potter" Radcliffe is made of awesome:

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EDIT: And for more awesomeness, his appearance on QI:

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[AnCap Dave]

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[evensgrey]

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Up here in Canada, the long-running CBC Radio 1 show Ideas made a documentary about a group of Peruvian academics who explored this problem of bad and excessive laws on the books getting in the way of people operating businesses.

They got interested when Peru tried to sell of the public telephone monopoly for something like $100 million, and nobody would touch it.  When the government investigated why, they found out that Peru's property laws were so screwed up it was impossible to tell what, exactly, was for sale (and no deal of this scale where the actual thing for sale is poorly defined will ever pass Due Diligence).  Peru cleaned up the relevant parts of their property laws, and sold it for over $1 billion.

The worst example they had was trying to build a house in Egypt, on an empty patch of desert with no historical or archeological significance whatsoever, and literally no value to anyone except the person who wants to build the house.  Working 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year (what we in the developed world consider a full-time job level of effort) they calculated it would take more than 10 years to go through all the paperwork to do it legally and get official government documentation on it.  This is simply not worth the effort for most people under any circumstances, so more than 80$ of all buildings in Egypt have no official paperwork, and on a good many of the rest the official paperwork is off in fantasy land as far as what actually exists.  (Many other countries that have failed to develop have similar, if less severe, situations.)

The consequences of this are indeed dire:  With no accurate, official paperwork on most properties, it is impossible for their to be a functional system of property law, which makes it impossible for people to get things like mortgages.  In the developed world, you can buy a home using a mortgage, which is just a loan secured by the value of the home itself.  If you have equity (that is, the home is worth more than any mortgages against it) you can get a mortgage on that difference to pay for things like renovations, or to finance a business start up or expansion.  None of this is possible in places like Egypt, which is an important factor in places like Egypt (which is practically carpeted in small business people, some of whom are clearly going to have the skill, drive, and luck to build up their businesses to become quite wealthy, and many more who are quite able to make a nice living from expanded businesses, and others whom would probably prefer the greater security that comes with working for someone else in a larger business or have skill sets better suited to that) simply fail to develop.

[Goaticus]

[Ibrahim90]

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srsly though, TJ is stupid, if he cannot get his priorities straight.

[evensgrey]

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srsly though, TJ is stupid, if he cannot get his priorities straight.

And if he thinks that there's something wrong with Ron Paul on the basis of what the cleric he gets sermons from says, how much worse is Obama for the sermons HIS cleric gives?

[Ibrahim90]

And if he thinks that there's something wrong with Ron Paul on the basis of what the cleric he gets sermons from says, how much worse is Obama for the sermons HIS cleric gives?

exactly.

of course, good luck getting TJ to say anything about that.

[AnCap Dave]

Made this myself but I'll be damned if it isn't accurate.

[Goaticus]

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srsly though, TJ is stupid, if he cannot get his priorities straight.

The sad thing is that isn't in my top ten of reasons I think TJ is stupid.

[Ibrahim90]

Made this myself but I'll be damned if it isn't accurate.

ok, because you did this, I expect on election day that you video tape a MK 1 match--complete with a fatality--uploaded on YT, with the politicians' names replacing the originals. Scorpion is prefered, though Kano is acceptable.

EDIT: yes, you are accurate in this assessment. and whenever I start making videos again, I'll make sure this somehow gets into one. and come to think of it, MK2 is acceptable too, with Baraka being perfect for your purposes

The sad thing is that isn't in my top ten of reasons I think TJ is stupid.

that sounds scary. there is no way around it.

[AnCap Dave]

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[evensgrey]

Here's a dandy document, chock full of the kind of historical goodness that would make a Roosevelt apologist's eye spin...IF you can get them to actually read the damn thing.

(Went looking to see just how hard it is to turn up non-false unemployment statistics for 1929-1946, and rapidly turned this gem up.  WildwoodClaire1 doesn't know anything about history or economics, but correcting her can turn up some nifty stuff.)

http://fee.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/greatmythsdepression2008feemcppfinalweb.pdf

[Ibrahim90]

my friend Kyle the other day posted this lovely gem--about ou universty's "shortages":



I think Surho might recall what this refers to; I mentioned it in a conversation XD

[Goaticus]

"Let me clear up some confusion people are having about the word "skeptic." Being a skeptic doesn't mean "disbelieving everything [fill in the blank] says." It means that you critically evaluate claims, assume nothing until the null hypothesis has been rejected, and derive conclusions using reason and evidence. Just "not buying" the "official story" does not make you a skeptic."

Dan Bier

[AnCap Dave]