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Trouble is that we live in an ecosystem, and "hoard the maximum you can defend, not the minimum you comfortably need" is an optimal behaviour emergent from the system. An ecosystem…

Voting and broadcasting (and here we are broadcasting) are different things.

Maybe a hot take, but I don't know that "privacy" and "anonymity" are the same thing, or that the latter is worth preserving. I would very much like to live in a world where everyo…

Like most people, I treat people I know with a lot more kindness than people I don't. Whether most of us like to admit it or not, our actions demonstrate that we don't generally ha…

I'm failing to see why any of this is immoral. Taking every (legal, nonviolent) advantage is called "doing business". We live in a competitive ecosystem. Under such conditions cert…

How are we torturing morality so that the median quality of life rising by just about every metric is "Evil"?

It's lonely being an outlier, especially in a trait that's so fundamental to how you see the world. Despite best effort, it's hard to relate to most people, and they especially fin…

> An empire is a network of countries, controlled by and for the benefit of a central country, predominantly taken by force and maintained at least to some extent through the threa…

I don't think you addressed my main point about ecosystems. Following your argument, every major power could be considered imperialistic, which kind of defeats the purpose of the w…

> The US American system is more capitalistic than the german one and the scissor between poor and rich is higher. And yet the US is a dominant player and Germany is not. > And we …

It’s not a capitalism problem, it’s an ecosystem. Wherever living things compete for finite resources and opportunities, certain properties emerge from the system. And make no mist…

I don't think it's fair to compare US foreign policy to actual imperialism as practiced by the Soviets, the British, etc. The US does not maintain colonies, and, as you point out, …

This is absurd. Why is it possible to end up with a majority black, tall, male, NBA team without pre-selecting on basis of race, height, or sex?

I think the demonization comes from people resenting the use of authority to restrict liberty, and from conflating the resentment of authority with bigotry. In this case, let priva…

"leftist subtexts" that treat this as a problem, and not as the single largest driver of growth in human history, to which we owe all of the material comfort we now enjoy.

Many of us don't do what we do for our expertise to be recognized or valued by others, rather that is a pleasant side effect. Many of us do what we do for intrinsic reasons related…

This dodges the moral argument behind "guns don't kill people", which is worth confronting directly. I think people can reasonably disagree about whether second/third/fourth/etc. o…

No, because that would indicate there should be some sort of regulatory standard for what does/does not constitute "lazy engineering". Creating this standard in turn creates regula…

Same way everyone has earned value from the beginning of time: negotiate with others. We are all born naked and without possessions. Everything we get, from the first day of our bi…

I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that my right to choose which children I help is more legitimate than your right to dictate to me. That the voluntary nature of our cooperati…

Slavery was (is) also an agreed upon social contract, enforced by various means. What makes it wrong? You clearly have morally prescriptive beliefs. Why are you so sure that your m…

> This is garbage hypercapitalist/libertarian ideology. Go on then, how do you decide what people deserve? How do you negotiate with others who disagree with you? > examples above …

For something to be deserved, it must be earned. What do these people do to distinguish themselves from The Engineer’s pets? If they are wholly dependant on him for their subsisten…

Who ever said you have the right to a decent a secure life? People don’t universally agree about this. Some of us posit that we will never escape a state of competition for fundame…

Advocating for regulators to step in is already a value judgement. Why is "high profitability" a cause for regulatory scrutiny? The optimal behaviour in any ecosystem (corporate or…