It's Interesting To Note...

#276
#276
braths said:
Powerful stuff, but graduation rates will unfortunately be the SECOND or THIRD or even FOURTH priority in this coaching search. Winning will always come first at UT.
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I think Hat has a good point.

I think this quote tells the truth :)
 
#277
#277
I don't care how many graduate. I pay money to go see them perform well on the football field, not giving them high fives in class for good grades. Plus, somebody has to cook the fries at McDonald's.
 
#279
#279
Rasputin_Vol said:
This was by no means an "Ayn Rand" economy just because Greenspan was the longtime chairman of the Fed. There was a lot that was beyond his control and a lot that runs counter to objectivist philosophy. Congressional spending, the Community Reinvestment Act that was thrust upo lending institutions by Congress before Greenspan even arrived, an essentially unregulated commodities market that allowed oil prices to be driven up to $150/barrel, automakers bending over to some of the UAW's outrageous demands while simultaneously building inferior cars and placing all of their eggs in the gas guzzling SUV market for 15 years or so, and not to mention the fact that the Fed Reserve probably shouldn't be in existance right now to begin with...

All that is Ayn Rand's fault? :crazy:
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I wasn't talking about cars or unions or the Fed or any other aspect of the economy in particular; I was talking about Rand's entire philosophy of money and work and economics. I.e., her shallow and manic obsession with human self-interest as the cure-all for everything. Go look up Greenspan's comments about how he was shocked -- shocked! -- that banks' self-interest wasn't enough to prevent them from making reckless business decisions, and that he was in a state of "shocked disbelief":

Dr. Greenspan:
"I have found a flaw. I don't know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact."

Mr. Waxman:
"In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working."

Dr. Greenspan:
"Absolutely, precisely. You know, that's precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well."
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"Objectivism" isn't a philosophy; it's a cartoon. It's taking lasseiz-faire economics and turning it into a one-variable universe. _Atlas Shrugged_ is a great read when you're 21 years old -- as long as you skip over Galt's speech, that is -- but eventually it's time to grow up and realize that the world isn't quite that simple.
 
#280
#280
hatvol96 said:
that in all 1,888,977 posts about prospective coaching candidates, I can't find a single person that mentions a coach's graduation rate as part of his qualifications. I think that reflects very poorly on our fan base, myself included. We talk about how much we "love the University of Tennessee" when, in fact, our main(in some cases only) concern is how well the teams in the two major sports do on the scoreboard. Personally, I'm a bit angry at myself. I think I'll take the majority of my VASF donation next year and give it to one of the academic programs.
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Would my classroom qualify? :wink2:
 
#281
#281
Vercingetorix said:
I wasn't talking about cars or unions or the Fed or any other aspect of the economy in particular; I was talking about Rand's entire philosophy of money and work and economics. I.e., her shallow and manic obsession with human self-interest as the cure-all for everything. Go look up Greenspan's comments about how he was shocked -- shocked! -- that banks' self-interest wasn't enough to prevent them from making reckless business decisions, and that he was in a state of "shocked disbelief":



"Objectivism" isn't a philosophy; it's a cartoon. It's taking lasseiz-faire economics and turning it into a one-variable universe. _Atlas Shrugged_ is a great read when you're 21 years old -- as long as you skip over Galt's speech, that is -- but eventually it's time to grow up and realize that the world isn't quite that simple.
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Thank you, Vercing....ty....

....I remember how much I liked Atlas Shrugged when I was 17....and how much I hated the fact I liked it later....
 
#282
#282
All Vol 14 said:
I don't care how many graduate. I pay money to go see them perform well on the football field, not giving them high fives in class for good grades. Plus, somebody has to cook the fries at McDonald's.
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Maybe if we recruited smarter players we wouldn't have had a Crompton scenario. Most of our football players wouldn't even get into the university if it wasn't for minimum requirements allowing them to be selected over students who academically should have earned a spot in the increasingly competitive freshman classes.
 
#283
#283
Vercingetorix said:
I wasn't talking about cars or unions or the Fed or any other aspect of the economy in particular; I was talking about Rand's entire philosophy of money and work and economics. I.e., her shallow and manic obsession with human self-interest as the cure-all for everything. Go look up Greenspan's comments about how he was shocked -- shocked! -- that banks' self-interest wasn't enough to prevent them from making reckless business decisions, and that he was in a state of "shocked disbelief":



"Objectivism" isn't a philosophy; it's a cartoon. It's taking lasseiz-faire economics and turning it into a one-variable universe. _Atlas Shrugged_ is a great read when you're 21 years old -- as long as you skip over Galt's speech, that is -- but eventually it's time to grow up and realize that the world isn't quite that simple.
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The general assumption on the left that the free market has failed in general is naive at best; the government deserves more than a share in the blame of the crises, and it's not because we "didn't have enough regulation" either. Quite frankly, it's amazing to me that people are asking for more of what created the problem in the first place. Perhaps Greenspan doesn't understand the results of the half-socialism state we're currently under. I recommend you do some reading into Sarbanes Oxley, and the influence that may have had on the crisis.
Additionally, and I quote the Ayn Rand Center for Indiviudal Rights: "the Fed keeping interest rates below the rate of inflation, thus encouraging people to borrow and providing the impetus for a housing bubble; the Community Reinvestment Act, which forces banks to lend money to low-income and poor-credit households; the creation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with government-guaranteed debt leading to artificially low mortgage rates and the illusion that the financial instruments created by bundling them are low risk; government-licensed rating agencies, which gave AAA ratings to mortgage-backed securities, creating a false sense of confidence; deposit insurance and the “too big to fail” doctrine, whose bailout promises have created huge distortions in incentives and risk-taking throughout the financial system; and so on. In the face of this long list, who can say with a straight face that the housing and financial markets were frontiers of “cowboy capitalism”?
 
#285
#285
Its a great point, kind of swept aside like the hole in the ozone layer and world peace...we can worlk on fixing or maintaing both...in the end...
I want to win...
 
#286
#286
TennTradition said:
Thank you, Vercing....ty....

....I remember how much I liked Atlas Shrugged when I was 17....and how much I hated the fact I liked it later....
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The very fact you were reading Ayn Rand in high school shows how far education has gotten. At some of these leftists liberal arts classes, you would be lucky to get any right wing literature to read. There's a better chance you read about Che, Chomsky, or Abbie Hoffman...

In high school, if they aren't putting rubbers on cucumbers or inluencing kids to get abortions without parental approval, their reading nothing that comes close Ayn Rand.
 
#288
#288
lacrossepro70 said:
The general assumption on the left that the free market has failed in general is naive at best; the government deserves more than a share in the blame of the crises, and it's not because we "didn't have enough regulation" either. Quite frankly, it's amazing to me that people are asking for more of what created the problem in the first place. Perhaps Greenspan doesn't understand the results of the half-socialism state we're currently under. I recommend you do some reading into Sarbanes Oxley, and the influence that may have had on the crisis.
Additionally, and I quote the Ayn Rand Center for Indiviudal Rights: "the Fed keeping interest rates below the rate of inflation, thus encouraging people to borrow and providing the impetus for a housing bubble; the Community Reinvestment Act, which forces banks to lend money to low-income and poor-credit households; the creation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with government-guaranteed debt leading to artificially low mortgage rates and the illusion that the financial instruments created by bundling them are low risk; government-licensed rating agencies, which gave AAA ratings to mortgage-backed securities, creating a false sense of confidence; deposit insurance and the “too big to fail” doctrine, whose bailout promises have created huge distortions in incentives and risk-taking throughout the financial system; and so on. In the face of this long list, who can say with a straight face that the housing and financial markets were frontiers of “cowboy capitalism”?
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Note that I did not say that "free markets" had failed. (I am, in general, an advocate of them.) What was exposed as false (at least to Greenspan, much to his disbelief) was Rand's basic ideology. Human self-interest does NOT always lead people to make rational decisions that are, well, in their own interests, and the amalgamation of many people's disparate self-interests cannot, by itself, act as a sufficient control on the economy. Totally unfettered lasseiz-faire capitalism probably would indeed work great in a small village full of friendly super-genius inventors, as depicted in _Atlas Shrugged_, but real-world markets have all sorts of imbalances -- information inequalities, impediments to labor mobility, externalities, etc. -- that, to some extent, only external regulation can address. What stunned Greenspan wasn't that the financial markets collapsed; it was that his (and Rand's) worldview told him that the banks would be smart enough and rational enough to make decisions in their own self-interest, and that would be enough to prevent a financial crisis. Contrary to what John Galt would have argued, that didn't happen.
 
#289
#289
Vercingetorix said:
Note that I did not say that "free markets" had failed. (I am, in general, an advocate of them.) What was exposed as false (at least to Greenspan, much to his disbelief) was Rand's basic ideology. Human self-interest does NOT always lead people to make rational decisions that are, well, in their own interests, and the amalgamation of many people's disparate self-interests cannot, by itself, act as a sufficient control on the economy. Totally unfettered lasseiz-faire capitalism probably would indeed work great in a small village full of friendly super-genius inventors, as depicted in _Atlas Shrugged_, but real-world markets have all sorts of imbalances -- information inequalities, impediments to labor mobility, externalities, etc. -- that, to some extent, only external regulation can address. What stunned Greenspan wasn't that the financial markets collapsed; it was that his (and Rand's) worldview told him that the banks would be smart enough and rational enough to make decisions in their own self-interest, and that would be enough to prevent a financial crisis. Contrary to what John Galt would have argued, that didn't happen.
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Sadly, the CEO's, CFO's and other upper executive management did, in many cases, make decisions in accordance with their own self-interests, and it succeeded in terms of their "self-interests", because they became wealthy beyond belief. However, these actions were definitely not in the best interest of the stockholders of the companies. This contradiction demonstrates the primary problem with corporate America, that being corporate governance, which has become a very bad joke.
 
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