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Plans you're not supposed to talk about

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Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#331

Post by opportune »

taraskuzyk wrote: post #188

I would really appreciate it if someone could help me understand what the last few sentences of it meant, it kind of flew over my head: "So I guess this is kind of an argument in favor of humility, or against open-mindedness. If you have high openness to experience (and if you read this without a gun to your head, you probably do) you might wonder why so many people have low openness. Maybe this is part of why." What…

This is part of why - it’s no good for society for too many people to question some of its fundamental precepts

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#332

Post by chii »

rjbwork wrote: post #272
WalterBright wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, nobody understands the free market. (This is likely why there's so much interest in socialism, as the mind yearns for order and predictability.) Yet the free market works well despite this lack of understanding, and even contempt, of it.

The Socialism and Capitalism dichotomy has nothing to do with markets or planners. Socialism is when the workers own the means of production. Capitalism is when there is an owner class that owns the means of production and extracts profit from the workers' labor. Socialism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central planners. Capitalism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central p…

> Capitalism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central planners.

how can there be capitalism when central planners tell the owners of the capital what to do with their capital? that sounds like authoritarianism to me (which is basically why all communist countries must be authoritarian, since without it, the natural tendency of humans is to be capitalistic).

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#334

Post by samatman »

the_doctah wrote: post #174
guidoism wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less about making those people safe and more about making you safe by making those other not spread the disease to you. For example: Go ahead and drive drunk, I don’t care, just do it on your private property so you don’t kill me. Similarly: Go and don’t get vaxed, honestly I don’t care. But viruses don’t respect borders like cars do, so if you are going to do it then make sure you are isolated on a private island wh…

Vaccines don't prevent spread of Covid.

Vaccines didn't prevent the spread of smallpox either, until they finally did.

We're not smallpoxing Covid out of existence without a much better vaccine.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#335

Post by WalterBright »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #326
WalterBright wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how much money should be in the economy? How should it be created or destroyed? Great questions. Money is created when money is loaned out against collateral. Money is destroyed when the loan is repaid and the collateral returned. It's a natural process. The pressure on it is to have the supply of money match the value in the collateral. > whoever has lisense to print money Under a free banking system, anyone can p…

"Money is created when money is loaned out against collateral. Money is destroyed when the loan is repaid and the collateral returned. It's a natural process." But there is nothing natural about it - the limit on money supply is how easy it is to get a loan. Bank could give out mortgages with 0% deposit, they could give out loans equal to 120% of the house value, and they indeed have done so. What regulates the money…

> But there is nothing natural about it

The natural pressures are the law of supply and demand. If the bank creates too much money relative to the collateral, it risks a run on the bank. Too little, and the bank goes out of business because it isn't making money.

> Is having no rules free market?

Yes (other than you cannot force people to do business with you nor can you defraud them).

> The amount of money in the system would stay fixed, right?

Nope. You don't actually loan out the coins. You loan out a receipt for the coins. As long as people don't redeem the receipts, you can loan out a multiple of the coins in the vault. This is called "fractional reserve banking". After a while, instead of trading coins, people trade the receipts. The receipts evolved into bank notes.

It's a fascinating history.

> So then the only 'natural' money supply is your ability to mine gold?

Lots of commodities would work. People in colonial America used tobacco leaves. Today people "mine" bitcoins.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#336

Post by GhettoComputers »

chii wrote: post #327
GhettoComputers wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if its related, but I think of taxes. It may be rational for one person to not pay taxes, but if everyone was "rational" it would be disastrous for society. > (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) Why do you say that? What does it mean? I think of the internet, but not a person, I always thought of him as a free market economist. When I think of individual and socie…

> may be rational for one person to not pay taxes it's rational to pay the lowest tax you can legally get away with, but not to evade taxes illegally especially if the chance of getting caught is high (as would be in a digital world where records of transactions are stored and analyzed). Much easier in a cash based society - case in point the Greek economy has a lot of tax evasion, and thus their gov't revenue shortf…

Hypothetically it’s all cash based. It’s the tragedy of the commons. What is rational in isolation is not overall like pollution.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#337

Post by jollybean »

newaccount74 wrote: post #126
jollybean wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

--- "That's not how triage works." Triage: "the assignment of degrees of urgency to wounds or illnesses to decide the order of treatment of a large number of patients or casualties." Seems exactly like triage. --- "What is this mysterious cure?" Monoclonal Antibodies are a very effective treatment that we would use almost ubiquitously were it not for the cost. If they were $1 and easily administered, they are in some…

> Go ahead and try to get the 'hard data' on exactly where vaccines have materially caused death, good luck, it's hard to find. The Paul Ehrlich institute for example publishes exact numbers of possibly vaccine related deaths. What more do you want? Do you want them to publish names and photos of every person that died after getting vaccinated?

Does it have data on the country in which I live, or just Germany?

But that's besides the point.

The issue is 'Communications'.

How many times has Dr. Fauci gone on TV and talked about all the people have died from vaccines? How often has even even communicated that it's lethal?

How many vignettes has CNN done on the 'terrible tragedy bestowed on the family when their child died of a vaccine?'

Zero.

Because that's a 'Truth' that the public 'Cannot Handle'.

If we focused any amount on the people dying from vaccines, even though it's rare and rationally it would not change policy ... the anti-vaxx movement would have a field day with it and it would cause harm.

Now, they're not lying, but their definitely not going to present us with all the ugly details. They're going to present us with some basic facts, and their recommended policy. If you really want to find the info on the number of dead from vaccines, you can dig, and maybe come up with something.

In a Public Emergency, this issue is even more acute.

Obviously it's a challenge and you need incredible integrity in the system, otherwise, data gets manipulated for naked political reasons (i.e. elections, not health outcome) and we pay the price in lives, which by the way I think has happened to some extent in the US.

'Data' and 'Communications' are separate things.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#338

Post by WalterBright »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #330
WalterBright wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> possible alternatives Asteroids, vulcanism are the usual culprits. There also could be cosmic ray bursts from exploding stars. > the Oxygen Catastrophe There seem to be many hypotheses about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event and it isn't clear to me there was a collapse, but a gradual replacement.

"Asteroid and vulcanism are the usual culprits" That is nature, thats my point - it is brutal and murderous. If you don't want to die from them you don't rely on Darwinism and if you don't want economic collapse and famine every time a new strain of flue evolves you dont wait for 'muh free market' to save you.

You might want to investigate the economic collapses caused by government run monetary systems. Like the Weimar Republic you mentioned - that collapse led to Nazism. Not a ringing endorsement for central banking, amirite?

BTW, are you enjoying the 9% haircut we all got in the last year courtesy of central banking?

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#339

Post by perl4ever »

WalterBright wrote: post #280
rjbwork wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Socialism and Capitalism dichotomy has nothing to do with markets or planners. Socialism is when the workers own the means of production. Capitalism is when there is an owner class that owns the means of production and extracts profit from the workers' labor. Socialism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central planners. Capitalism can be enacted with markets or it can be enacted with central p…

> Capitalism is when there is an owner class that owns the means of production and extracts profit from the workers' labor. That's Marx's explanation, all right. What free markets are, is when people freely decide to make transactions with each other, without using force or fraud. The simplest case is you have an apple tree, I have an orange tree. You have too many apples, and no oranges. I have the reverse problem.…

But we don't "have" trees. Owning a tree is dependent on a highly abstract concept of ownership, enforced by an organized state that monopolizes the use of force.

Saying a transaction is without force or fraud is only begging the question. If it is legal, and someone thinks it is illegitimate, then it logically involves both fraud and force from their perspective. It was fraud to write the rules down, and it is force to use guns to make people comply.

It's too easy to defend "free markets" while ignoring that the usual description is circular.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#340

Post by Jemaclus »

cheschire wrote: post #279
norswap wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big part of "the normal way" things are done is related to subtle (and by-design, unspoken) social reasons. If you are open-minded, you're open to considering that the normal ways things are done might not be the best way -- which it is not along all axes, but it does incur some advantages for reasons that must remain unspoken for the advantages to be incurred. This has two potentially bad consequences: (1) you mig…

I'm fairly certain that not all marriages are based on fear of the potential pain of open relationships. Sure, some folks may be motivated along the lines you speak of, but there's plenty of us who got deep into it because we value the depth that comes from that one forever-friendship that is intimate on a level that can't be experience with the guys from the bar. So, yeah, careful about painting with too broad a bru…

> I'm fairly certain that not all marriages are based on fear of the potential pain of open relationships

I don't think that's what the parent comment was saying. I read it as "being too open-minded can backfire on you, and here's an example of how," and not as "people only get married because they're afraid of open relationships," which is how I read your sentence.

On the other hand, you assert that you "got deep into it because [you] value the depth that comes from that one forever-friendship that is intimate on a level that can't be experience[d] with the guys from the bar."

But can't you have that relationship _without_ marriage?

And so in that case, why marriage at all?

And the obvious answer to that is that now we're back to OP's example of the unspoken plan to get married to bind the other more tightly to you, with the side effect (or perhaps main effect) of making separation painful and difficult, thereby increasing the chances of both of you staying in that forever-relationship.

In other words, you don't _need_ to get married to have an intense forever-relationship with someone, but if you want safety and security and the knowledge that they won't (can't?) leave you, then you get married for all the reasons in OP's blog post.

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