Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress • Hacker News Board

Re: Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress

#251

Post by scrubs » Tue, May 10, 2022, 8:16 PM UTC

mort96 wrote: post #66

throwawaymaths wrote: post #22

> broken perception of risk based on “optimism, underestimation and invincibility" How about artificially low interest rates? An interest rate is exactly the coordination between risk and time, with a low interest rate you're subsidizing stupidity and wastefulness, and with its concommittant inflation you're forcing people into making those investments to stay afloat. Maybe if we weren't goosing the interest rate low…

Your last sentence seems to suggest that if we just let the free market do what it does, everything would be fixed and we wouldn't have any environmental problems. Are you not aware of the concept of externalities? How do you, for example, explain the fact that leaded gasoline was only replaced with non-leaded gasoline when "meddling" made it illegal?

You're right externalities are an issue. However, consider rating agencies in the 2008 housing crisis. By not downgrading junk they made the problem worse. If the market worked like a rational market, we'd be better off. Alas, human organizations are not rational sometimes.

Re: Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress

#252

Post by marssaxman » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:04 PM UTC

lapcat wrote: post #244

marssaxman wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> during which local people decided what they wanted to do was invade other countries and commit mass murder. Perhaps my schooling overlooked some detail of this era, but I had been under the impression that there was at least one megalomaniac fascist dictator involved in the instigation of that process.

One does not simply become a fascist dictator without a large number of fascist followers and sympathizers. It's not like Hitler invented racism. He was charismatic, and thereby became a leader of the movement, but he wasn't a magical pied piper. He told people what they wanted to hear. Anyway, I'm not sure what the argument is supposed to be, because there's always someone instigating. The Hitler example just reinfo…

The previous poster said "I want less government in every way - let local people decide for themselves what they want to do." You replied that "local people decided what they wanted to do was invade other countries and commit mass murder." I pointed out that there was quite a lot of government involved in this decision, referring to the well-known history of certain WWII fascist dictatorships in which the entire society was effectively subjugated under the authority of a single person. Your response is... to... agree? I'm not sure how your argument counters the original poster's plea for less government.

Re: Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress

#253

Post by lapcat » Wed, May 11, 2022, 12:12 AM UTC

marssaxman wrote: post #252

lapcat wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One does not simply become a fascist dictator without a large number of fascist followers and sympathizers. It's not like Hitler invented racism. He was charismatic, and thereby became a leader of the movement, but he wasn't a magical pied piper. He told people what they wanted to hear. Anyway, I'm not sure what the argument is supposed to be, because there's always someone instigating. The Hitler example just reinfo…

The previous poster said "I want less government in every way - let local people decide for themselves what they want to do." You replied that "local people decided what they wanted to do was invade other countries and commit mass murder." I pointed out that there was quite a lot of government involved in this decision, referring to the well-known history of certain WWII fascist dictatorships in which the entire soci…

> I pointed out that there was quite a lot of government involved in this decision, referring to the well-known history of certain WWII fascist dictatorships in which the entire society was effectively subjugated under the authority of a single person.

You're completely ignoring how the dictatorship came to be. Hitler didn't just step off a spaceship from another planet and immediately become leader of Germany. There was a democratic government for many years before he came to power, and the Nazi party spent many years gaining political support during that time. In 1932, they won 37% of the vote, becoming the largest political party in the country. The people who voted for them were going down that path voluntarily. You seem to be taking the existence of a dictatorship for granted, a fact without any need of historical or causal explanation, as if nothing that happened before 1933 mattered.

The Nazi party was explicitly racist, explicitly antisemitic, explicitly anti-immigrant. And they were popular! So yes, this was local people getting together and deciding to form a tribe based on hatred of others.

Re: Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress

#254

Post by Infernal » Wed, May 11, 2022, 2:03 AM UTC

inawarminister wrote: post #91

phkahler wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. One of the fudges is saying that a computer based on today's technology is more valuable than on from a couple years ago. I forget what this is called. But it's stupid and could be really abused to say a cellphone is a trillion dollar device, since that's what the processing power would have cost in 1980. Maybe we should measure GDP via wages. Since all spending has to come from that anyway... not sure how to c…

There were proposals for labor-backed currency, where the basic unit is one hourly work of the worker. So B2B transactions will be valued from the man-hours that went to it. Of course this approach breaks when the gigantic corpocracies are able to bloat into larger and larger sizes. But it might be an interesting research topic.

I think a lot of the sibling comments here misunderstand the concept of labor-backed money (rather than debt-backed money, which we have in the United States today).

First - currency is the physical note, coin, IOU, etc. Money is the concept.

With debt-backed money like the US dollar, the money is created by a private bank (the Federal Reserve) in exchange for US Treasury bonds - debt.

The currency supply is controlled by the US Treasury, but the money supply is controlled by the Federal Reserve.

Labor-backed money as I understand it, would be created by the Treasury in exchange for labor. The Treasury would control the supply of both money and currency. Crucially, to create money, labor must be performed. Similar to debt-based money, where debt is created by the government as the basis of money - in this case, labor would be "created" by the price (in new money) offered for it.

There is no need to have some centrally-planned, mandated valuation of a certain tradesman's time vs another trade or profession - the government puts out lots of contracts for bid today with no such mechanism in place, and it wouldn't need to change.

Re: Humanity’s broken risk perception is reversing global progress

#255

Post by renewiltord » Wed, May 11, 2022, 4:28 AM UTC

lapcat wrote: post #250

renewiltord wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This was my point in mentioning the prices of health care, education, and housing... I'll ignore the rest of what you're saying to that because that sentence by me was intended to concede the point. No need to argue. > In general, politicians of both parties are held in very low esteem by voters. Voters often plug their noses and reluctantly choose the lesser of evils, rarely getting exactly what they want. Ah! Thi…

> Ah! This I have evidence against. Senators have high approval ratings! https://morningconsult.com/senator-rankings/ Your evidence seems to show the opposite of your conclusion. According to this data, only 14 out of 100 senators have an approval rating of higher than 50%. Mostly small state senators. It looks like the data is 2 years old, but I doubt that voters are much more approving now. > All I have to do is av…

Haha! Fair enough on the senators! It didn't always read that way!