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100 years of whatever this will be

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Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#881

Post by CRConrad »

generalizations wrote: post #240
nouveaux wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's another word for "require everyone else to agree": Tyranny." I think this is often thrown out there to push back on liberals and socialism but this is the wrong point. We as a global society _need_ to agree to be productive. We need to work together to find the best solutions for as many people as possible. Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from s…

> Everyone needs to agree that starting a nuclear war is bad. You would likely want to stop China from shooting nuclear missiles at San Francisco. Yet I doubt that when you insist on this narrative, you would think of yourself as being tyrannical. Extreme examples work, because you can actually count on the people reading your comment to agree with you. But you can't extrapolate towards less universally held examples…

> Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish

WTF does that have to do with anything? The vast majority of humanity doesn't, as you so astutely observed, live anywhere near nature. So nature being "nasty and brutish" is absolutely irrelevant to most people. This deep insight you seem to think rural people have is not so much insight as delusion.

> That's an experience which tends to create what they would consider (IMHO) a much more pragmatic idea of what it takes to survive in the world.

Sure, if you're a Real Outdoorsman™ you have a better chance of surviving being plonked down naked and alone in the middle of the jungle. But who lives in a world where that's relevant in any way? (A: Conservatives, in their fantasy world.)

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#882

Post by CRConrad »

generalizations wrote: post #448
guntars wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rather, it has seemed to me that rural folks live closer to nature than urban folks, and have often had firsthand experience that mother nature tends to be nasty and brutish. That's an interesting interpretation. To me, what's more nasty and brutish than a fellow man? I always thought the divide was explained by how in the country everyone knows everyone and have repeated interactions with the same people. It's pri…

> Who needs rules when you can all punish somebody for an offense (like being gay)? That's a...fairly prejudiced generalization you've made there.

Yeah, well...

1) At least they didn't choose that very word for their user id.

2) Old proverb about echoes: "As you call into the woods, so they answer back". All you've written so far sums up to pretty much exactly that generalisation.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#883

Post by preseinger »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #229
notpachet wrote: post #49

All of the current histrionics that we hear from DeFi advocates regarding escaping the evil centralized Banks and Regulators and what not -- you know what they remind me of? They remind me of what I hear from junior developers when they're tasked with fixing an antiquated, broken software system. These developers typically lack the experience and the patience necessary to fix the system incrementally from within, so…

The difference here is that the existing codebase isn't just broken, it's structurally resistant to being fixed. Fixing your old legacy software takes time, but probably less time than starting over from scratch. Fixing the legacy financial system doesn't just take the time to fix that system; first you have to fix the system of politics and corruption that makes that system what it is. And fight all of the people wi…

The "legacy financial system" exists in the way it does for specific reasons. Do you understand those reasons? It's a Chesterfields Fence situation: unless you can elucidate those things, you're not qualified to propose an alternative.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#884

Post by kleer001 »

firebones wrote: post #819
kleer001 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people are ok with being wealthy. Yup. 100%. I doubt you'll find an organism on Earth that's not ok with having access to more resources than it needs. Can you describe an environment where this wouldn't occur? What would happen if an organism in that environment was able to hoard resources? Sounds like you might want to also consider as well the iterative prisoners dilemma and the tragedy of the commons with respe…

>> Can you describe an environment where this wouldn't occur? One in which any amount of self-awareness of the negative effects of gluttony (see: Willy Wonka) temper the urge to accumulate and consume more resources above a certain point. There is only so much French silk pie I can consume after Thanksgiving.

Ok. How exactly would you implement that? How can we get there from where we are now? What are the incentives? Why would people do that? What happens to people that don't do that?

The devil's in the details.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#885

Post by preseinger »

moffkalast wrote: post #362
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference here is that the existing codebase isn't just broken, it's structurally resistant to being fixed. Fixing your old legacy software takes time, but probably less time than starting over from scratch. Fixing the legacy financial system doesn't just take the time to fix that system; first you have to fix the system of politics and corruption that makes that system what it is. And fight all of the people wi…

> Fixing your old legacy software takes time, but probably less time than starting over from scratch. Is it though? The current system is the equivalent of some old unmaintainable shit written in COBOL by a guy who quit after 30 years while making the codebase as terrible as possible to maintain job security.

> The current system is the equivalent of some old unmaintainable shit written in COBOL . . .

It just isn't! It really isn't. It is the way it is for good and historically motivated reasons. Can you elucidate those things? If you don't understand the rationale for the system as it exists, you can't propose an alternative that has any chance of success.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#886

Post by CRConrad »

JanisL wrote: post #34
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debt is >50% of advanced economies, and it's price fixed. Why bother with setting the price of bananas and everything else, when you can set one price and have a greater effect?

It would seem that the temptation to set the price of everything is increased when there are impediments to setting the interest rate (since this removes an important monetary policy lever). I think this has been seen lately as the zero-lower-bound on nominal interest rates has started to come into play in many places.

> the price of everything

Heh, looks familiar. Usually goes between "Some people know..." and "...but the value of nothing".

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#887

Post by CRConrad »

2nd_principles wrote: post #854
JanisL wrote: post #4

I strongly believe that money itself has been corrupted lately, this then causes all number of bad flow on effects to happen. A massive shift happened when central banks started getting involved in direct purchases of various asset types and we started to see a major distortion happen in monetary policy that which has distorted the functioning of money itself. For example who would care if their business is completel…

I really don’t get why so many smart people come up with every possible theoretical solution and yet they fail to observe that Bitcoin was engineered to solve this exact problem

> Bitcoin was engineered

To actually have wasting energy as the base of a system must be the very definition of shitty engineering.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#888

Post by CRConrad »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #288
robotresearcher wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like anything we could ever hope to try is already accounted for and defeated before the effort even begins. Gay marriage, the fall of communism, civil rights, universal health care (in every rich country but one), women's rights. Don't forget about the very important real progress being made.

I've never understood the reason we even have marriage defined in government at all, and thusly would include "gay" marriage (all marriage is marriage if it's undefined)... We don't have a government definition of prayer or baptism, but for some reason we have have codified that one religious practice into our government? Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Also why do they get varyingly get tax incentives or disincen…

> I've never understood the reason we even have marriage defined in government at all

Then you haven't understood anything -- at least not about marriage -- at all.

> we have have codified that one religious practice into our government

It's the exact other way around: Marriage is a social / societal thing, i.e. exactly what government is all about. Religion -- perhaps particularly Christianity -- has co-opted it, but certainly didn't invent it.

> libertarian

Yeah, that explains it.

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#889

Post by CRConrad »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #441
kube-system wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marriage is a contract. Governments regulate the enforcement of contracts. That's why they're involved. The religious part of marriage is entirely optional.

But the government doesn't get involved at the outset of new contracts between businesses. I get that government, via the courts, has involvement when there's a dispute, but it's not like two companies wanting a contractural relationship have to file the contract with the government when it's created.

> But the government doesn't get involved at the outset of new contracts between businesses.

Sure it does, depending on what the contract is about, even between individuals -- at least in most countries: A sale of real estate isn't really done until the deed is properly registered with the appropriate authorities. (I'm guessing this goes even for [at least most of] the otherwise so often wildly different USA.)

Marriage works the exact same way (again, at least in most of the world), and for the exact same reason(s): It only comes into force once properly registered, because it affects not only the parties and the relationship between them, but their relationship to government and the rest of society. For married people, taxation may change if the authorities know they're married; for property owners, they're the ones that can have others arrested for trespassing instead of themselves being arrested for it if the authorities know they're the owner.

That's pretty much how it has to work, otherwise it can't work at all. Isn't that rather obvious?

Re: 100 years of whatever this will be

#890

Post by CRConrad »

eadmund wrote: post #690
maerF0x0 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood the reason we even have marriage defined in government at all, and thusly would include "gay" marriage (all marriage is marriage if it's undefined)... We don't have a government definition of prayer or baptism, but for some reason we have have codified that one religious practice into our government? Doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Also why do they get varyingly get tax incentives or disincen…

The reason that the State has historically cared about marriage is family formation. That's all. Given that 'marriage' nowadays has nothing to do with family formation, it makes sense for the State to get out of that business.

> ...marriage is family formation.

Or just look at it the other (and IMO more correct) way around: It's actually family formation that is "marriage".

This truth used to be recognised by governments too, as witnessed by the ancient legal term "common law marriage".

If it's time for anyone to "get out of that business", it's everyone but the state.

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