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Cash Cows

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Re: Cash Cows

#61
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trade is generally not zero-sum, but trade implies transaction between relative-peers. Nation states. Corporations. Groups that have similar amounts of power (Or that can lean on friends.) Many transactions that happen in a capitalist society are very much not transactions between peers. And those can absolutely be, and often are zero-sum, or negative-sum.

Can you give examples where transactions result in negative sum due to asymmetrical power, and what the proposed solution is? From my limited perspective, unless you actually do get rid of private ownership imbalances will exist and Power imbalances will exist regardless of the economic system.

> Can you give examples where transactions result in negative sum due to asymmetrical power, and what the proposed solution is?

Start by reading literally anything in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_labor_law_in_the_Un... and observe that most of the implemented solutions largely consisted of curtailing the rights of capital holders to do whatever they please in the employer-employee relationship. Weekends, sick leave, overtime pay, company scrip, employer responsibility for worker safety, fair employment, the right to free association, the right to work without harassment... Capitalism didn't produce any of those things - it is incapable of producing them - but has fought tooth and nail, sometimes with batons and bullets against them.

Power imbalances continue to exist, the purpose of all these work-arounds to them is mitigating the harm that someone with power can inflict on someone without.

Re: Cash Cows

#62
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with attempting to apply this to humans is that humans take an extraordinary amount of time to develop into their prime (~30 years each gen). You might at most get 2 generations of data if you began to run this experiment in your early 20s.

We need to get an AI to run this experiment at a large scale for a long time. Although at that point, do we even need the people?

[dead]

Re: Cash Cows

#63
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give examples where transactions result in negative sum due to asymmetrical power, and what the proposed solution is? From my limited perspective, unless you actually do get rid of private ownership imbalances will exist and Power imbalances will exist regardless of the economic system.

> Can you give examples where transactions result in negative sum due to asymmetrical power, and what the proposed solution is? Start by reading literally anything in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_labor_law_in_the_Un... and observe that most of the implemented solutions largely consisted of curtailing the rights of capital holders to do whatever they please in the employer-employee relationship. Weekends,…

It's a false equivalency to expect Capitalism to produce specific laws or outcomes as it's an economic system and not a government.

Both Sweden and USA are Capitalist but have very different views. You're critiquing an economic system as not self-fixing the flaws without proposing an alternative you would expect to do so.

I agree capitalism has flaws, but feel history has shown the flaws to be manageable.

Re: Cash Cows

#64
post #58
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone ever applied this process to humans? If you breed two entrepreneurs, are you more likely to get another entrepreneur?

The only case I am aware of is that of the "Potsdam Giants" [1]. Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia was so obsessed with tall men he created a regiment of them, and pushed these soldiers to marry tall women. It apparently worked in producing even taller offspring. As for entrepreneurship, I don't think there's a gene that encodes that :). Although heredity isn't only genetic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…

The population-level version of this is the Dutch, who only relatively recently became the tallest people on Earth through natural selection.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2015.021...

Re: Cash Cows

#65
post #51

One interesting fact is that Darwin directly referred to Bakewell in the first chapter of On the Origin of Species: “a kind of Selection, which may be called Unconscious, and which results from every one trying to possess and breed from the best individual animals, is more important. Thus, a man who intends keeping pointers naturally tries to get as good dogs as he can, and afterwards breeds from his own best dogs, b…

Has anyone ever applied this process to humans? If you breed two entrepreneurs, are you more likely to get another entrepreneur?

Entrepreneurs are boring. Try programmers.

Re: Cash Cows

#66

Off-topic: I'm looking to read more old books and the genre of travel diaries from the eighteenth century that the author mentioned seems very interesting. Does anyone have recommendations for those kinds of books?

OP here: I'd recommend Daniel Defoe's travels through Britain as a good place to start, written in the 1720s. You might also like Celia Fiennes's travels in the 1690s. The travel diaries of the brothers Rochefoucauld, whom I cited, can all be easily cited - their travel through Suffolk (which is more interesting than it sounds, as it contains their general early impressions of England) can be found in its entirety online. All can be found with a little googling.

Re: Cash Cows

#67
post #44

> Bakewell ended up doing similar for his sheep, “so plump that we have measured several of them and found them broader than they are tall … having on each side a great lump of fat which the farmer called cloven flank”. Downside: they can get stuck on their backs and die https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guEyxTpevFo

It's no wonder he supervised them so closely then!
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