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We had a thread on cubaton! This stuff is difficult to get hold of. Thew cuban song-writing tradition is great and sadly underappreciated!

Chan-wook Park's revenge trilogy is amazing: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Check it!

Well, they are not mutually exclusive! moreover, it's a very different way of dancing, ballet avoids overtly sexual hip movements, while street daning emphasises them. On top of that, the music is better and louder in a club, hightening the experience. I find it completely entrancing to see...

I understand that. But markets would not be deemed necessary, unless the self-referential market price had some external function. If price was entirely self-referential, it would be observationally indistinuishabel from randomly chosen prices. (in fact, prices in some markets are seemingly...

You should read what I said! IF the value of a good is only what the market pays for it, then that's tautological and there would be no use for markets. This is a problem with your position, not mine.

first you say: but then: the two are incompatible. If there's no intrinsic value, only what 'the' market wants to pay, then there is no point in using markets for pricing decisions, we may just as well flip coins in deciding what to pay. If however, the market describes "relative scarcity...

From the article: As bad as Imus’s crack is, what’s important about it is that it highlights the real problem facing black Americans today, and more particularly those in the inner city: it is not Imus’s smart-aleck racism but rather the African-American worldview that the rap music Imus quoted...

Re: Dancing in EU vs US vs JP: It is totally my experience that dancing in the US is of a higher standard on average than in the US. Japan has crazily good dancers too. Lots of the clubs in Nagoya and Tokyo that I went to when i worked there had dancing competitions. and you can see crews...

That's exactly my experience. The family next door bought their son a hotel, when they realised that his careers as a DJ, a race-driver and as a party promoter didnt go anywhere. In any case, that's all just anecdotal evidence. The rich developed countries are in fact not so bad when it comes...

I am aware of the chinese economic reforms, and i admire them (i'm in fact quite fond of markets in certain circumstances), but they worked on the basis of other structures like stable goverment, somewhat of a seperation between the economy and the legal system, a critical mass of educated...

Yes, but that's a small precentage, prolly less than 1% and ignored for the sake of keeping the argument managable. If you want you can rewrite all my arguments in probabilistic terms. Then it would be more precise, but also less readable.

I'm mistaking nothing. The shoeshine boy is free to shine as many shoes as he wants, in accordance with supply and demand. The casual economy in the 3rd world countries of my acquaintance is not impeded by government regulations. I looked at the links you posted. I didn't see anything...

No, because childbirth and childrearing take time and energy. I didn't say so. the chinese government (and in HK the UK government before return of the territory) did provide education to sufficient numbers to allow industrialisation. If by "We" you you mean the west, then you are wrong, it...

And this has been pointed out numerous times to Vim as well. (S)He ignores any data that doesn't fit the libertarian credo. I guess the technical term is the confirmation bias for one's own theories.

some people are a bit better than others at running. there is some unfairness in this, but that is not the problem. The problem is that there is no sigificant difference in human in-built abilities, and all the massive differences that we do observe, are mostly the effect of unequal distribution...

which land? the land that the poor don't own? China has a government. The whole point is to get out of the 'cheap labour' rut, because it's not a good place to be in.

They are competing equally in the same sense that a runner in a marathon who has 5 kms headstart competes equally with the others. But the real problem is not the lack of equality (there can never be absolute equality). The real problem is in outcome: a purely capitalistic society will produce...

The reason that poor people have many children are (1) lack of access to contraceptives, (2) a dire need to have children to make old age more bearable. It's the other way round, as countries improve the education of their workforce, they become more interesting global corporations.

This misses the point. of course one wants the best personal for the jobs, but that does not mean that the system is meritocratic, because people from disadvantaged backgrounds are not competing equally. the children of the wealthy have a headstart, no wonder they are doing better. Moreover...

Oh the Heritage foundation says so, so it must be true. The HF was started by ultra conservative Joseph Coors, co-owner of the Coors Brewing Company, who was IIRC in Reagan's cabinet and who was among the wealthy industrialists that benefitted most from that administration's policies. It has...