Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Plans you're not supposed to talk about
501–510 of 675 posts
Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not talking about forcing anyone to do anything. I talked about carbon taxes to make people pay the true price of their consumption so the market forces can find the right equilibrium, which they can’t when the price doesn’t include all the information.
> I’m not talking about forcing anyone to do anything. What's your plan for folks who refuse to pay the carbon tax? Remember, Eric Garner was killed as part of enforcing NYC's cigarette tax. (He was selling "loosies".)
Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about
#503Some 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…
Society traditionally is overall a mechanism of farming slaves, so that elites don't have to work. If you don't know the reason for something in society, it's usually that. (You aren't going to find democratic or moral reasons for things in society, but exploitative strategies.)
Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not talking literally about how marriage came to be. It is just laying out a set of incentives that probably play a role in the success of marriage as an institution.
yes I realize it is not literal, but the structure of that part of the text as you progress from two people in love come up with a plan to always stay together ends up a just so story about how marriage was created. Does it work as a list of incentives for how marriage came to be a successful institution? Well since it structures it as an origin story of marriage that you realize is an origin story of marriage at the…
It's phrased as an origin story purely for narrative purpose.
Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine you have a close relative (parent, sibling or child) that you love very much and don't want them to die or get very sick but they are refusing to get vaccinated. You could either keep pestering them about getting the shot, tell them they are stupid for not getting the shot, etc. Or you could sit down with them and listen carefully to their reasons and talk to them about why you decided to get the vaccinated.…
I don't need to imagine. You sit them down and you learn that they inhabit a completely different reality from your own. You try to describe your reality, and they dismiss it because it disagrees with their "reality". You try to anchor them in factual reality by pointing to people you both know who died of covid, but not before infecting others... who then also died of covid, etc., but they always have a way to dismi…
Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about
#506The 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…
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.
Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about
#507Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#508Earlier quoted context omitted.
Society traditionally is overall a mechanism of farming slaves, so that elites don't have to work. If you don't know the reason for something in society, it's usually that. (You aren't going to find democratic or moral reasons for things in society, but exploitative strategies.)
So I'm guessing you don't see a connection between your comment and point 5 of the author, nor the closing paragraph at the end?
Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about
#509Neal Stephenson's latest novel Termination Shock , is largely related to point number two -- Geoengineering the atmosphere using sulfur filled bullets fired from really big guns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Termination_Shock_(novel)
Re: Plans you're not supposed to talk about
#510The 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…
Lets look at a recent real world scenario. The eastern block countries, experienced the fall of the USSR as an event that forced all of them to attempt to change their culture. Some tried “the prudent” approach - change as little as possible, wait until you understand what the diff between west and east is, don’t rock the boat too much. Some were collectively so disgusted that attempted to change as much as possible…
At least from the outside, it looks like the bigger country to the east just handed out private ownership to the upper echelon, because surely that's what made west economically successful.
Not sure how accurate that description is, of course. Their economies were vastly different from the start. The Baltic region also has historical and cultural ties to the Nordic region. But at least there are different viewpoints here.