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Plans you're not supposed to talk about

dynomight.net

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Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#351

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…

BTW, this will blow your mind. Let's say you have $300 in your bank checking account. You borrow $1000 from the bank. You bank checking account now has a balance of $1300.

Where did the thousand bucks come from? Where was it moved from?

Nowhere!

The bank just changed the amount in the electronic ledger from 300 to 1300.

Crazy, right?

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#353

Post by imgabe »

Ensorceled wrote: post #342
TimTheTinker wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ^. If the shots are truly protective, I don't understand what the hubbub is all about. Is it really all about protecting those who truly can't get the shot for whatever reason? I doubt it.

The shots are NOT truly protective. The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine has an effectiveness of about 91%. That means in about 9% of cases it is not protective. I'm amazed we are this deep into this pandemic and people still have black and white thinking wrt to vaccinces.

I think most people consider 91% to be “truly” protective. Nothing is 100%. The vaccine is more than effective enough to reduce the risk of Covid to the general background risk level of life in general (things like car accidents, slipping in the shower, eating red meat, contracting a flesh eating amoeba from swimming in a lake etc.)

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#354

Post by LambdaComplex »

chii wrote: post #332
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 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).

> the natural tendency of humans is to be capitalistic

"Commerce" and "capitalism" are not synonyms. The former has existed for ages. The latter is comparatively recent.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#355

Post by imgabe »

noisy_boy wrote: post #348
imgabe wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if you've already gotten the shot, you're protected from the disease. So, what is someone else not getting the shot going to do to you?

What it will do is that when those people who haven't got the shots start to be sick, they will throw their beliefs in the bin and go to the hospital. They will stretch the capacity and then when I need to go for an ailment different from this disease, I'll be queued up behind them and the treatment I get would be subpar. Disclaimer: I don't have the stats on hospitalization rates/capacity in places that have low rat…

That is a concern, and I think we need to be much louder and angrier about why, 2 years into a pandemic, we still haven’t built up additional hospital capacity that we know we need.

There are also other treatments that we know greatly reduce the severity (and thus would decrease the need for hospital capacity) that haven’t been rolled out as widely and aggressively as the vaccine has.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#356

Post by DSMan195276 »

nickpp wrote: post #255
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.

I believe the free market is like Darwinism for economic organisms: unintuitive and little understood by the regular folk, however working just fine nevertheless and able to solve and explain any issue without needing the intervention of an intelligent designer/regulator. People will still look for a planner though…

> I believe the free market is like Darwinism for economic organisms: unintuitive and little understood by the regular folk, however working just fine nevertheless and able to solve and explain any issue without needing the intervention of an intelligent designer/regulator.

I feel like that's a bit of a charitable description considering the whole monopoly problem (and various other regulations in place to make the system actually work). Perhaps we just disagree on what "working just fine" means though :)

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#357

Post by rjbwork »

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.…

You're still comingling the concepts of capitalism and markets. I actually 100% agree with your entire post (as a description, anyway, not as an ideal or with respect to the conceptual foundations of property rights), but is in no way a refutation of what I said or what Marx said. It's somewhat tangential entirely, really.

EDIT: Also, I wouldn't use the word "exploit" in such a simple descriptor of commerce.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#358

Post by starfallg »

tshaddox wrote: post #143
danblick wrote: post #83

The author presents the idea that "you may be born into a culture with social practices that you don't understand but that work for your benefit; they may work better if you don't understand them!" I find this idea a little repellant, but it's something Friedrich Hayek wrote about too. (In my mind Hayek is the person most associated with distributed knowledge.) ~"You may not understand the forces that have led societ…

This sentiment seems completely useless (actually incredibly dangerous) without at least some attempt at explaining how we might distinguish between aspects of society which seem terrible but are actually secretly good even though no one knows why, and aspects of society which seem terrible because they're terrible.

This is exactly the reason why social media is so dangerous.

The strength of Western society was that we had freedoms that were managed by a elaborate social and information architecture that ensures we don't drift too far beyond the bounds (such as ethical failure in public office and being anti-science). Once you remove this it you find that there is a limit to how much 'free' speech can correct itself, and we discover how easy it is to divide and manipulate people with misinformation.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#359

Post by Sebb767 »

WalterBright wrote: post #276
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the free market works well" Unless there is too much inflation like in Weimar Republic, too much corruption like in Russia, too much monopoly like with Standard Oil, too many shenanigans leading to 2008-style meltdown (imagine that without central bank support), given working police and the justice system which is missing in many developing countries, given basic infrastructure like roads and electricity etc, etc.

> Unless there is too much inflation like in Weimar Republic The government money printing press is not free market. > too much corruption like in Russia The government's role in a free market is to prevent corruption. > too much monopoly like with Standard Oil Standard Oil was very good for consumers, as SO brought about something like a 70% reduction in kerosene prices. Besides, SO never was a monopoly. It was accu…

It's definitely fair game to critique capitalism and free matkets based on actual implementations, not theoretical optimized scenarios.

If we're going for perfect scenario, communism is absolutely a great idea. Unfortunately, the real world is a bit different, and it turns out that capitalism and free markets can survive reality and bad actors just a bit better. And that's what counts in the end. Still, we shouldn't dismiss the failures of the system, since this is what shows misaligned incentives.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#360

Post by katmannthree »

jollybean wrote: post #108
jvanderbot wrote: post #26

The underlying issue, and one that bugs the hell out of me, is Policy vs Truth. You can say true things all day, and convince nobody. You can enact policy based completely on Truth (e.g., Trust the Science), and completely fail. People don't care about Truth, they care about what changes they need to make, and who is asking them to make them. Good policy is only partially based on truth, it's more based on easy imple…

There's a term for this and it's called 'Public Communications' sometimes into the domain of propaganda. This is not a 'new' concept it's as old as time and 100% of people with real power have an awareness of this, it's almost a defining feature of an elite class. Policy should obviously be guided by 'Truth' and we need transparency, at the same time, irrespective of how smart individuals are, as crowds, we act with…

I'm guessing that's because both the actual number is very low relative to the number of doses given out and that fewer people have died from the vaccine than would die as a consequence of fearmongering by a particular political party here were there open discussion of that. There are a handful of topics like this where there seems to be near-universal agreement that the best thing for society is to just not poke the bear.
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