71–80 of 243 posts
Other than the author having the ability to use large words I'm not sure what I was supposed to have come away with from this piece at all, it's just word salad.
If you want wealth, stop renting out your time. Lean towards equity. You need to be able to make money even while sleeping.
Nothing revelatory but it's the truth. Anybody seeking more freedom ought to attempt to build a system that generates revenue without your presence being required. Investing, swing trading and software are the most straightforward paths. Software particularly. A couple thousand hours of sweat, toil and despair and you might just create a perpetual cashflow generating machine.
But who "generates" those assets you are investing in or trading? Will the action of investing or trading generate them? The cycle must start somewhere.
> Software particularly. A couple thousand hours of sweat, toil and despair and you might just create a perpetual cashflow generating machine.
Perpetual may be a strong word no? Your software will need attention, improvement, etc., its value will drop in time, someone will launch a slightly better version of your software in an attempt to capture your success, or even launch a company where people rent their money to produce something you simply can't compete with.
What about the rest of the things the world needs and are beyond the possibilities of an individual but not beyond those of large groups renting their time? Imagine a highway, or a spaceship.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
First time I’ve read that providing clean water on demand to everyone at a sufficient pressure is “minimal effort”. To me, the infrastructure and experimentation and science that leads to all homes having reliable, potable water is miraculous. There’s very large swaths of the planet where you are supposed to drink only bottled water, from a bottle unsealed in front of you.
> There’s very large swaths of the planet where you are supposed to drink only bottled water Is that the "natural" order of things? Certainly it isn't, at least no more than markets or money represent a "natural order." In fact, we can make a convincing case that the tainting of fresh water is the direct consequence of this kind of market-oriented thought.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There’s very large swaths of the planet where you are supposed to drink only bottled water Is that the "natural" order of things? Certainly it isn't, at least no more than markets or money represent a "natural order." In fact, we can make a convincing case that the tainting of fresh water is the direct consequence of this kind of market-oriented thought.
You could make that argument, but there appears to be a positive correlation between robust markets and clean drinking water for everyone.
Given the context of this article, it's then worth asking: were the "markets" of the Magdalenian also "robust"?
Other than the author having the ability to use large words I'm not sure what I was supposed to have come away with from this piece at all, it's just word salad.
This comment says more about your reading comprehension skills than anything else. Maybe try making a more substantive comment once you've had a proper crack at understanding the author's piece?
Pot, kettle, etc.
And I realize the irony in the fact that my pointing this out to you is the main subject of my not-substantive comment.
However, I won’t resort to accusing you of being simple minded, as I wouldn’t call someone who couldn’t make it though an article like this simple minded either.
The concepts and history presented are not terribly complicated, but the organization, length, and unnecessarily complex vocabulary make the article a difficult read.
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Gensis is talking about farmers working the land for food. Modern work is an invention of man built on top of it, it's a degenerate replica in terms of satisifcation, necessity, meaning etc. It's not the same story. Edit: I'd like to see the downvoters argue against the notion that some work is more essential than other work. Hasn't the COVID-19 crisis opened your eyes to this reality?
That is not true. It is a metaphor for generic work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not my favourite style of writing, but it's by no means word salad. That paragraph presents a single coherent line of thought. They could have chosen simpler individual words, but there's nothing difficult in the phrasing or structure.
> They could have chosen simpler individual words And they should have. I can put together a sentence using a lot of words most people won't know. It will be a valid sentence, and it will mean what I want it to mean, but a lot of people won't be able to understand what I intended it to mean.
Government was always supposed to be influenced 'by the people' those people are usually aristocrats. That is fine if there are enough of them with different ideas. What has happened is the consolidation of the artiscroacy and thus the means of influence of government. This is where we are getting our ugly problems from. What is the first step to fixing this? Bring voting into the 21ST century AND NOT HAVE VOTING SOF…
Looks like they need more help: https://sunlightfoundation.com/2020/01/02/farewell-and-thank...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There’s very large swaths of the planet where you are supposed to drink only bottled water Is that the "natural" order of things? Certainly it isn't, at least no more than markets or money represent a "natural order." In fact, we can make a convincing case that the tainting of fresh water is the direct consequence of this kind of market-oriented thought.
People trading 'things' like favours is pretty natural in that it happens easily. And it's not like the waters of the world are pure and safe to drink by default. There's plenty of parasites and diseases out there. How many hunter-gatherers do you think didn't have worms?
The author seems less concerned with what "happens easily" than with what is taken as a kind of natural law. The dominant ideology of the present (for which he is presenting an intellectual history) supposes that market forces are this natural law. It is this supposition that cannot stand up to long term history. We are better off reading anthropology and sociology when trying to understand the origins of money and exchange than we are economists, who simply invent facile notions of their origins seemingly out of thin air
Many on the left seem to deeply in favour of preserving the status quo, and seems to not have the means or methods or vision of changing the very broken systems into something better.