Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

loc.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

611–620 of 659 posts

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#611

Post by thegrimmest »

joshuamorton wrote: post #602
thegrimmest wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a poor person confined in their home is less free than a rich person confined on their home I disagree. The rich person may be more comfortable, but they are no more free. Confinement is confinement. > Or is fraud prevention unrelated to liberty Fraud is related to securing of property rights, which are a part of liberty. How free are you if people can remove the food from your pantry? Fraud as a criminal offense h…

> I disagree. The rich person may be more comfortable, but they are no more free. Confinement is confinement. Is level of confinement the only thing that defines slavery? Assume the rich person and the poor person want the same thing. The rich person can acquire it. The poor person cannot (or can only do so by risking force in response). All else equal, the rich person can do strictly more things. How are they equall…

> The idea being that while liberalism does a decent job of ensuring that the government doesn't oppress you, it does nothing to ensure that other people don't oppress you.

The government does this by... oppressing you, by limiting your choices and your freedom. Nature itself is oppressive. We are all born naked and hungry and at the mercy of others. This does not constitute oppression by other people, and no amount of governance can change this. All government can do is provide due process to resolve the inevitable conflicts. What is should not do it paternalistically dictate how people should interact peacefully.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#612

Post by Karawebnetwork »

Karawebnetwork wrote: post #316
smcl wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, I didn’t imagine there would be such a noticeable effect. Can I ask what sort of difference do you see if you don’t take it?

I go to work while the sun has yet to rise and when I come back home the sun is already away (at the peak of the winter, the sun is gone around 4pm). If I do go out for a walk, it's behind a heavy coat, scarf and hat. Often with sunglasses to protect against snow blindness and the wind. This means that for about half of the year, my body does not see the sun. Glass windows will prevent vitamin D production so sitting…

I cannot edit this anymore. By 1992, I meant 1922.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#613

Post by thegrimmest »

mcguire wrote: post #488
thegrimmest wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> was not a radical place By what metric? For who? Surely it was good for some and bad for others, much like any other place. How comfortable people are and how happy they are are fundamentally unrelated to how free they are. > how fubar the system was All we basically disagree about is how the general welfare clause is to be interpreted. It had a narrow interpretation for most of US history, and then a broad one sta…

" How comfortable people are and how happy they are are fundamentally unrelated to how free they are. " That would be false. " The US was clearly a good place to live pre-1936, given that so many people immigrated there. " That would be false, too, unless you were very wealthy. Just because it was better than, say, starving in Ireland does not mean it was "good". Source: My father's father was a sharecropper.

I guess we're just disagreeing about definitions then. What word would you use to describe the freedom I'm referring to?

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#614

Post by dahart »

tsol wrote: post #595
dahart wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the immediate question I’d have in response to that hypothesis is: if seeking a mate is what’s leading people to grind, why doesn’t that behavior taper off after marriage?

Because divorce is still a possibility

Wouldn’t you think that’s not enough? (Also note the other two plausible theories in this sub-thread.) Divorce rates aren’t 100%, and marriages typically last many years before a divorce. This means marriage should statistically be a significant drag on the hypothesis that seeing a make is what drives working long hours. (Not to mention the inherent conflict between working long hours and dating / spending time with someone.) Do you find it probable or plausible that mate-seeking is the primary and/or only reason people work hard? Is that why you do it, do you think? Of course I can’t tell why I’ve worked hard over the years, but it doesn’t really feel linked or even related to mate seeking at all. I only started working long hours after starting a long term relationship that eventually turned into a happy stable marriage. It’s highly unlikely divorce is in my future, but I feel many years of hard work left in me.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#615

Post by wbsss4412 »

thegrimmest wrote: post #594
wbsss4412 wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So as long as I write the laws and excite the laws I can do whatever I want. Taxation is lawful because the government duly passes laws asserting such claims. Taxation therefore cannot be theft. Unless there is some definition of “lawful” that exists outside of writing and enforcing the laws. Which begs the question according to who? In this instance that someone seems to be you.

Taxation isn't theft, it's robbery, since it involves the threat of force. The only remaining question is "What services is it ethical to rob people in order to fund?". My answer is "Not nearly as many as most people today suppose".

This doesn’t square with your definitions of legitimate claims on property.

Taxes are “lawful”, therefore under your framework, they are neither theft nor robbery.

Unless, somehow, lawfulness has nothing to do with laws. In which case what you’re saying is just straight up nonsense.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#616

Post by Nbox9 »

sovnade wrote: post #230
Nbox9 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m unsure, unless the author is of especially high renown. If there was two dozen “What life will be like in 100 years” articles published per year in decently sized newspapers we will have 240 such articles to choose from this decade. Surely we would only see the most accurate of these predictions, and that is survival bias. Of course, maybe there was not a large variance between predictions, or everyone is accurat…

It depends if we're judging the overall predictions of everyone, or this specific author's predictions. I always tend to look at it at the author-level, because otherwise the infinite monkeys theorem applies anyway. I think this author should be given credit for the accuracy. He can't control what everyone else is writing and how accurate or inaccurate they were. He can only control his own predictions, and they were…

I don’t think we can look at this at the author level. Imagine if we had 1 million different authors making predictions, certainly some of them in the population will be very accurate and in retrospect they’ll look like geniuses.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#617

Post by wbsss4412 »

kbrisso wrote: post #587
wbsss4412 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> inflationary monetary policy is wealth transfer to the upper class without people realizing it. Going to need some evidence to back up that statement. Without centralized banking you essentially have no set policy one way other the other. I can understand why one would take issue with the current governance structure, but I don’t agree that letting money randomly fluctuate with no mechanisms for intervention to be…

In a nutshell if I have enough assets that generate lets say for example 6% return and can borrow cheaply like at 1% then I can't lose. Money makes money unlike the poor who borrow at 19%. Inflation benefits the wealthy because their assets go up in value and then that "perceived wealth" gives them access to more cheap money as collateral.

Outsized returns on capital happen with or without an inflationary environment.

The phenomenon you are describing has existed since before central banking was established.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#618

Post by VirusNewbie »

Manuel_D wrote: post #583
VirusNewbie wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that the banking system is a little more complicated than I made it out to be, but let's ignore that for now. You agree that the majority of the fortune 50 is holds more debt than credit, right? We don't have to speculate about how much debt rich people have, you can look at what % of equities is owned by the upper class and you can go compare consumer debt to corporate debt. Now as to the banking system…

> You agree that the majority of the fortune 50 is holds more debt than credit, right? No. Not at all. Apple, #3 on the list for example, has hundreds of billions its loaning out because it has nothing better to do with its excess cash [1]. Almost every company on that list has positive total equity, some on them on the orders of hundreds of billions of dollars. > We don't have to speculate about how much debt rich p…

Thanks for the detailed reply, we're really getting into the meat of it here in this debate.

    "has hundreds of billions its loaning out because it has nothing better to do with its excess cash "
That's not really being a creditor if you're investing in something that doesn't cap the upside. Likely apple's fund is investing into companies that will benefit from inflation, and if in my contrived example the money supply doubles their valuation in said company doubles.

It's really fixed rate loans that are 'creditors', not investment firms. Some googling tells me they also have ~230 billion in outstanding debt. So I think it's safe to say in this example they're a net debtor.

     >But how do you interpret this has having more debt?
By proxy through being invested in corporations that themselves take out debt to invest in money making ventures.

     >Sort of? Banks don't get to regulate currency supply, the Fed does.
Banks ARE the Fed! The local federal reserve banks aren't themselves buying assets its nationally chartered banks that are required to be part of the fed that are participating in this dance.

     >If you are a multi-millionaire real estate mogul who's writing mortgage loans, then this not good for you.
Most multi-millionaire real estate moguls who are writing mortgage loans know this, which is why they sell them to the federal government or other government institutions.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#619

Post by VirusNewbie »

vkou wrote: post #600
VirusNewbie wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to stop viewing money in amounts and start viewing it as % of total available money in existence. In our contrived example, now the middle class person owns a bigger slice of the pie after the pie doubled in size due to their leverage.

Your contrived example very conveniently excludes what inflation buys (Infrastructure, public spending)[1], and also who pays for the majority of it (The lender - who happens to be neither of the two people in your example.) So yes, if we have an incorrect contrived example that doesn't even attempt to serve as a proxy the ground facts, and we ignore half the consequences of it, yes, of course, we can draw whatever c…

     >our contrived example very conveniently excludes what inflation buys
Yes I did this on purpose because you seemed to misunderstand some very basics of economics. That poor folks holding cash has wealth indirectly transferred to debtors who are leveraged into assets is not a controversial economic theory. It's fucking basic math.

So once the contrived example made sense to you your first response is to move the goalpost completely and talk about something unrelated?

We're not talking about the necessities of monetary policy we're talking about the effects, please focus on the relevant parts of a debate instead of jumping around to avoid conceding a (very basic) issue.

As an aside, you picked infrastructure as your main deflection point? Do you have any idea what % of US revenue is spent on infrastructure compared to everything else?

You also seem to misunderstand per capita vs. aggregate. Do you think if poor people have as much money in aggregate as one rich person that means they're rich? In the same way, comparing all outstanding consumer debt (of which the vast majority of mortgages) is not helping your argument, you'll have to show me a breakdown that shows on average a poor person is more often a net debtor.

You also need to distinguish debt into assets vs. depreciating assets. Using leverage on stock is not the same as buying nikes with a high interest credit card.

Re: What the world will be like in a hundred years (1922)

#620

Post by joshuamorton »

thegrimmest wrote: post #611
joshuamorton wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I disagree. The rich person may be more comfortable, but they are no more free. Confinement is confinement. Is level of confinement the only thing that defines slavery? Assume the rich person and the poor person want the same thing. The rich person can acquire it. The poor person cannot (or can only do so by risking force in response). All else equal, the rich person can do strictly more things. How are they equall…

> The idea being that while liberalism does a decent job of ensuring that the government doesn't oppress you, it does nothing to ensure that other people don't oppress you. The government does this by... oppressing you, by limiting your choices and your freedom. Nature itself is oppressive. We are all born naked and hungry and at the mercy of others. This does not constitute oppression by other people, and no amount…

Ensuring a minimum standard of living doesn't dictate how people interact peacefully, not does it require oppression, you're attacking a straw man.
Post reply on HN