Viewing profile — ArkyBeagle

And ( to my ear ) the always reliable Dean Baker addresses "the money thing" in "Rigged". Scott Sumner has also written at length on the subject. There are two mandates to the Fed …

New houses are built to what I consider exorbitant prices. People finance 4x annual income or more. The thing being sold is really the debt instrument, not the house itself.

That's mostly housing, which was financed by debt.

It kind-of is magic - that is how money gets created.

I dunno. I think that at least globalization - as in the easily agreed on definition of globalization - is declining. After all, the various China seas seem to be becoming a Chines…

All court proceedings are about finding fault.

An anedcote: my boss was PM for building a new building and his claim was that offices with sheetrock and (steel) studs was cheaper than cubes. We still had cubes. Because you have…

Real professional soldiers come from the Service Academies and while they're different from Gates & Zuckerberg, they are among our nations finest people, at least when hubris doesn…

It's interesting - Johnny Cash was a SIGINT operative in Europe in the 1950s. I mean headsets and notepads. That's probably where he got a taste for amphetamines, at least one biog…

At least in the US, right now, all the hi-tech death machines get maintained by contractors or civilian employees of the services.

The press is being undermined by its economics. Trump just smelled weakness and attacked.

It's not myth, it's narrative. Antebellum slavery and Jim Crow were narratives[1]. Even worse, they're narratives based on phrenological "science". [1] see also a novel "The Klansm…

Can anyone shed light on why so many Stoic societies/clubs seem to be essentially religious? The Stoics I have read do not seem to be particularly religious nor of any particular c…

The important thing to remember is that this caring is anomalous. I personally find Space Does Not Care to be quite liberating.

Those are slowly being identified as artifacts of trauma[1], at least the pathological cases are. SO imagine how prevalent they were in the Classical world. [1]] I don't hold that …

I don't think Judaism has ever been a closed faith. I may have missed some interval of time where it was only by birthright or something. This being said, I don't think conversion …

It's dualistic. On the material plane, I read it as "don't be entropic."

And thank you for your thoughts as well. Your last sentence caps it; what I am saying is that there is a broken tool in the toolbox - we should be able to make profit an ethical va…

All those things are much easier to use as values than profit, since profit may include some fairly innocent or some fairly egregious rent-seeking. There is absolutely nothing wron…

Since we cannot disentangle rents from non-rents profits, I doubt there will ever be a coherent set of ideas on the subject.

I wonder then how we classify a John Muir? Seems "deep green" to me. I think his oeuvre came from the Romantics. I am not doing Curtis' thesis justice; you'd have to see the ( free…

I solved that problem by getting married in my musician phase :)

You have me at a loss- I'd say there are certainly alternatives. If I had to guess, I'd say most go that way, but that's purely a guess. Good point though - neither of them tried t…

Yes. And it was her, her ... calculus of status.

That's why I asked "If". Apparently, based on the existence of this thread, there's interest in that. :) It may also expedite the creation of useful products. Why would we consider…