AJ, I like a lot of your posts and I like a lot of Soggy's posts but these lengthy word salads are making me and others, I suppose, lose interest in the actual point. Being concise instead of verbose is a virtue.
It's only a virtue if you only wish to engage in the subject on a cursory level and not to actually analyze what others have said. The method I generally use is the Socratic method. Socrates, a pretty noted philosopher, didn't think it unwise to discuss at length the meaning of words. Perhaps my target audience are those who actually want to do the work of thinking a thing through and not those who are less inclined to do because we have created a society where memes, mantra's and pithy sayings have been substituted for actual logical and rational discussion.
The real problem her is that I have a lot to say and say it. I am not repetitive very often and while I could probably reduce the word count by about 10-20 percent, what I have to say is said in an organized and systematic fashion -- a hallmark of good rhetoric according the canons of the Romans.
And I might remind everyone that the US was founded by men who though nothing of writing 50 pages of dense text and expected the nation to read what they had written. Truth doesn't always hang low on the tree. Sometimes you have to get the ladders out and climb.
Yeah, but people get that without being told. I've explained to you before, it's not a legal battle. I'm not going to concern myself very much with possible (intentional?) misunderstandings or minor (irrelevant?) exceptions.
Yeah, I could have put out a few pages to be absolutely clear and to address every possible interpretation, but with 99.999% less work I get 99% of the results, and that's fine.
Kinda reminds me of this:
"There are two types of people:
1. Those who can extrapolate data from limited information
2."
I also don't get repeated comments like this:
The analysis I provided was not a misunderstanding. It was an explication of what you said. Simply denying it's accuracy is not proving it to be inaccurate. Does your measure of fairness, as presented, rest on the idea that 1:1 ratio within a tier is "fair?" As I've pointed out, it's a logical equivalency. Denying analysis without pointing out it's flaws is not, therefore, proving it to be wrong.
A few pages? I doubt it. I gave you a version of your statement that avoided the implication that 1:1 trades are always fair. It's only a few words longer than your original. The problem was not that you wrote what you wrote but that you didn't consider the subject well enough to realize the objections and deal with them in an concise and easy manner before you posted. To argue will one has to put themselves int he place of their interlocutor and consider his/her reference point. Once you do that you will find you will have to use a few more words to qualify claims, usually not pages as you imply.
I'm not worried about the .0001 or so legal objections, I'm more concerned with the easily seen problems with using a 1:1 ratio as a measure of fairness. The distinction is not about words but about concepts. You have a concept that says that fairness is based upon the cost of productions, but I argue that fairness is perceived value by the participants. These are not words, but concepts. You seem to think the problem is I didn't get (but should have), your point. I got your point. I analyzed your point. I came to the conclusion that it's wrong. I then presented, with reasons, evidence and examples of how the basis of your definition of fairness is flawed. In other words, I analyzed not your performance but the concepts underlying your ideas. How about we focus not upon my performance but upon the idea that cost of production is a a good measure of fairness in the trade?
AND
Actually, there are four types:
1. Those who can extrapolate data from limited information but have too little information to know if the extrapolated data is valid or not.
2. Those who expect everybody to do the work of extrapolation and thus to repeat the work they could have done for everybody, but didn't.
3. Those who often fail to give enough information and expect everybody to do the work of extrapolating the right data from the limited information and then get upset when they don't.
4. Those who do the extrapolating for you so that the right data is extrapolated from the right information because they took the time to think about what they were saying and word the claim in anticipation of general observations that might not fit the claim they are making.
Many people are in the third category but have a difficult time because everybody wants the fourth category to be easy, short, and full of low hanging fruit. Sadly, knowledge may be a very large tree with the best fruit requiring a lot of good ladders and a lot of hard work.
That depends on your meaning of unfair, there is already an ongoing discussion splitting hairs on that word!
I once had my house painted. I was a dark grey when they finished when I asked them for "off white." Was I "splitting hairs" since neither of us defined what "off white" might have meant? You buy a car and you want "good gas mileage." You get and find it gets 3 gallons to the mile. You take it back and the guy argues that you wanted "good gas mileage," and he gave you a car with "good gas mileage." Is that splitting hairs?
"Unfair" is, as Soggy pointed out, a "moral" measurement. Soggy measures "unfair" trades by their production costs. I measure them by the perceived value of those enacting the trade. Totally different concepts. Not a single hair here to be split. It's not "red apples or less red apples" it's apples and oranges. Trivializing it only shows your own analysis of the question is faulty.
AJ
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