Cool article. I've been organizing my own things lately, and organizing makes you do a lot of thinking about what is of value and what is not of value; about who I am and who I am not; about what I have done, what I have not done, and what I still hope to do. When organizing, dreams are remembered, reminisced,…

Going out on a limb, I'm going to guess that there is a class of people who CANNOT be convinced to blow up other people and that there is a class of people who CAN be convinced to blow up other people. Jail might be the best place for the latter class, IMO.

GSA, the people who spent our money in Vegas, is auctioning it. I wonder if GSA had any awesome parties on board.

So, for communism to work, the exchange of money for goods is necessary on the macro level (between countries) but, somehow, not on the micro level (between citizens)? So communism, in a certain sense, requires capitalism?

Oh my lord... I am well aware of the differences between fascism and communism. Many historians writing about WWII portray fascism and communism as ideas that are radically opposed to each other. However, I, like many other intellectuals, believe fascism and communism are not radically different ideas at all. In fact,…

Bingo! Well said.

No (rational) person who has taken an undergraduate class in macroeconomics would agree that China's recent success has anything to do with communism.

Quit the semantic game. Communism is a political philosophy, a belief about how government should ideally organize society. Communism entails severe economic and social regimentation, a fascist organization of government.

Wrong. China owes all of it's success to it's participation in capitalism. Thirty years ago, China was one of the poorest countries in the entire world. But, hey, at least the extreme poverty was equally distributed. And N. Korea will owe any future success it will have on it's willingness to participate in in…

Communism: "a totalitarian system of government in which a single authoritarian party controls state-owned means of production" (Merriam Webster Dictionary).

So Cuba, the communist country, would be great if it could trade (capitalistically exchanging goods for money) with the USA, the capitalistic country?

Their pudgy leader looks like he is really trying to restrain himself from eating the food on the table.

Communism is a form of fascism that wreaks economic devastation, especially upon the people it claims to help, the poor, in the name of social equality. There are no longer any serious economists who consider communism a serious alternative to market based economies. Furthermore, your equivocation of the United States…

But the real elephant in the room is the Chinese, the assclowns behind the assclowns.

With a GDP per capita (PPP) of $2,400, you would hope the incompetent assclowns would invest in producing food for their desperately poor and starving people, many of whom have resorted to eating grass and tree bark, rather than invest in a fake missile parade. Let's see what their pudgy, baby faced leader has next…

My friend refuses discard his VHS rewind machine, despite not owning a VCR. For some, electronics are perceived to have value regardless of function.

Tasing someone: 6 calories, 12 Nike fuel.

I think you're actually making the same point as him.

Alton Brown says the same thing about vodka. He says the difference between the $60 bottle of vodka and the $20 bottle of vodka is $40 worth of bottle. This makes sense because quality vodka is just distilled more times in order to make the vodka - like you said - odorless and tasteless. Brown also suggests it might…

Hey I meant to reply to your well thought out response a while ago, but I forgot... Anyways, we obviously agree that there are shitty products that exist because a lot of people have shitty taste. I also agree that I have a choice not to buy shitty products and that the market should get what it demands. I have a lot…