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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

#471

Post by DarylZero »

nickpp wrote: post #468
DSMan195276 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

Monopolies (including the so-called "natural monopolies") are not a problem for the free market, but rather opportunities - bounded only by human ingenuity, imagination and capacity to innovate. In reality most monopolies we encountered were actually created or sustained by governments, through their dear friends patents and regulations which raise the barrier of entry and compliance costs, create unintended second-o…

Markets are also created and sustained by governments.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#472

Post by imgabe »

adrianN wrote: post #467
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.

Just because seatbelts are "truly protective" that doesn't mean that getting into accidents is risk free.

Just because driving a car isn’t risk free doesn’t mean you outlaw cars. You take the sensible precautions that are available and accept that a life worth living involves a certain amount of risk.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#473

Post by DarylZero »

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.…

Free markets are a game with rules set by the government. "Without using force or fraud" just means not breaking the rules of the game set by the government. It's a very deceptive way to describe rule-following. It implies a very idealistic, unrealistic vision of what those rules are and how they are made.

The people who benefit most from the rules control the system, making sure rules don't change.

The benefit they receive from the rules is to be in a parasitic, extractive, predatory relationship to most of humanity.

Why not use "force or fraud" to liberate yourself from predatory relations?

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#474

Post by kkjjkgjjgg »

willob33 wrote: post #80
tshaddox wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider that causing 1% of the group's population to die might not weaken the group and in fact might make the group stronger.

He’s effectively describing Trump’s leaked plan to let covid ravage blue urban areas before the election, but here framing it as a liberal plot as a narrative device Maybe he’s a Republican astroturfer Someone just learned the root language of real human economics taught to us as abstractions through story and pie chart.

People laughing about people believing in conspiracy theories spreading conspiracy theories. No useful comments come to mind, can only watch in awe.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#475

Post by GhettoComputers »

raxxorrax wrote: post #464
GhettoComputers wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We say that women cannot eat this food, its religion. We don't question it. They study the food and find it is toxic, causes abortions or fetal development issues, but the meaning was lost, its now our religion.

Don't eat pork because it spoils quickly. A rule deprecated by freezers, but still practiced quite often. Don't drink alcohol because... well, luck favors the bold...

I thought pork was just full of worms. I heard in the middle east it was just not as productive as chickens, which would not only give meat but eggs, they used to eat it there.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#476

Post by diordiderot »

WalterBright wrote: post #383
perl4ever wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a little too easy to dismiss arguments by trying to redirect it into a debate about what words mean. You and I both know what the terms mean.

I don't think that's a fair assessment.

You absolutely have hidden assumptions about what the words mean. We all do.

Be open minded towards other interpretations you may take for granted.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#477

Post by Kosirich »

Some people have pointed out that this article makes case for "traditionally" conservative issues and I agree. I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm greatly influenced by Taleb way of summarizing knowledge in his books and how he deals with this issues, so I'll give it my take: - if something existed through out cultures, it was probably tested and it exists for a reason(1,3,4) - word used today in English might not have completely (etymological) different meaning (3) - question of progress is not a yes/no question but "at what speed" (4,6) - high value signals have "value" if there is skin in the game(1) - you don't experiment on complex systems(2) - the idiot-yet-intellectual (5) - it's the outcome that matters (6)

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#478

Post by vkk8 »

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…

Alain de Botton has a book called "Religion for Atheists". His central point is that religions have gone through hundreds or thousands of years of cultural evolution and likely contain rituals and rules that benefit us even if the religion literally isn't true. Discarding religions because we don't literally think there's a bearded guy in the clouds watching over us is throwing away the baby with the bathwater.

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#479

Post by DarylZero »

mjlawson wrote: post #39

This reminds me of a set of poems, Knots, by R.D. Laing, the first of which goes: > They are playing a game > They are playing, at not playing a game > If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. > I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game. It's a lovely collection, and though I haven't thought about it recently, I think there's a lot of value in considering these kinds…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind

Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about

#480

Post by raxxorrax »

GhettoComputers wrote: post #475
raxxorrax wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't eat pork because it spoils quickly. A rule deprecated by freezers, but still practiced quite often. Don't drink alcohol because... well, luck favors the bold...

I thought pork was just full of worms. I heard in the middle east it was just not as productive as chickens, which would not only give meat but eggs, they used to eat it there.

Chicken spoils quickly too, but you aren't usually storing it in large quantities. But maybe it was also worms, just reinforces the point.
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