#me: considering the economic implications of a hypothetical system | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

goldmanguyperson · 8 months

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The way some people try to argue that the current use of machine learning AI to make art is bad (which i agree with) by pointing to the supposed humanity of art kinda bothers me. I understand it is supposed to be about the intent behind and genuineness of art, but the way it is often put, just makes me feel weird as a member of a system full of those that do not consider themselves human/fully human. Yes the brain is human. Yes I was born a human, yes I am still biologically a human. but i do not find myself human, at least not in the cultural sense of the idea. When saying art must be human I am excluded on basis of not being considered human socially in many places, and not considering myself human on some important level. To be human is conflated with being genuine, benevolent, kind, good, smart. To be human is conflated with being at all. And this argument is one of the places in which this conflation occurs.

I also think it fails to account for that which isnt human at all, not culturally, not in appearance, not in biology. Animals can make art, or at least some things they do can be perceived as falling under our cultural and philosophical notions of art. Song is art, dance is art, nestbuilding is art, there are animals that find joy in using paints. Maybe you do not consider that art, but is a mating dance or a mating call or mutual nestbuilding not done with intent to inspire emotion? is it not done to communicate a feeling? a trait? a life? is art made by people not often done for personal enrichment?

What animals do that can be art is infinitely more “human” than contemporary AI art. They are not really even comparable, because the animal has emotion (even if it is not recognizable or categorizable by us), while the art bot can only mimic ours. If anything there is something far more special about the range of emotions exemplified in nonhuman animals than there ever could be in the mimicry of a modern AI of the emotions of only a single biological species.

A hypothetical intelligent alien could, likely, make art. After all, art is just a bundle of forms of communication and expression. It would be silly to believe that one could never make anything that could be considered art.

At the end of the day, it certainly can’t be a people-only phenomenon. And i feel that implication that art not made by your own species can never be considered art, or is by default bad art, is a strange one.

Modern AI art is not directly human-made. this does not make it bad. What makes it bad on a social and economic level is that it steals art, and then that stolen art is used to take revenue from actual artists. And what makes it bad on an artistic and cultural level is that it is fully devoid of genuine expression, intent, and story.

Nothing is bad solely because it is not human, and nothing is good solely because it is human

#nonhuman #alterhuman #otherkin #therian #shut up! the eagle’s talking!

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samueldays · 4 years

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And since Graeber and economics and the backing of money have come up here, I’d like to share one of the funniest arguments from his Debt - the first 5000 years book, that cuts quite hard across the standard political lines:

The taxation-currency-market ideacomplex came into being as a centralized military technology.

(This entire post is slightly exaggerated for the humor value. Read Debt, it’s great.)

Consider the hypothetical example of King Richidiot of Westlandia and King Taxinventor of Eastlandia planning to go to war in the ancient world when taxes aren’t invented yet.

King Richidiot, not having invented taxes, receives tribute from his subjects, mostly in kind. From the shoemaker he gets twelve shoes, from the shepherd he gets two sheep, from the smith he gets a halberd, from the dockworker he gets the promise of one month of labor (possibly subject to the king feeding him), some young men sign up to serve in his army in exchange for their family’s exemption, etc.

When Richidiot has piled up enough shoes and sheep and halberds and promises of labor in his palace, and he wants to send his army to war, he has a massive logistical problem of making sure that the halberds are properly distributed beforehand so the army can train with them, the sheep accompany the army so they can be eaten along the way, maybe some of the soldiers should be cross-trained as shepherds, does he send spare shoes for everyone beforehand or require shoemakers to accompany them? Et cetera.

King Taxinventor also receives tribute, and also has this logistical problem, but decides to ‘solve’ this entire logistical problem in classic fashion: Make someone else do it. He commissions the creation of ten thousand Taxinventor Tokens (named for himself, obviously, Taxes for short) that are durable, portable, fungible, and difficult to forge. You may recognize these as common properties of currency, but now you’re about to see why these might originally be invented for warmaking purposes...

King Taxinventor then proclaims across the land that any household may turn in a Taxinventor Token in lieu of one month of tribute, or ten Taxinventor Tokens in lieu of one year of tribute, and hands out the tokens to his army. Thus a market is created as farmers and shoemakers compete to see what supplies they can trade to the soldiers in exchange for a Token, or trade to someone else who is trading with the soldiers. In effect, he’s drafted the entire country into the business of handling his logistics.

Of course things didn’t happen exactly as neatly as in the hypothetical here, but Graeber makes a good case that it happened much closer to this than to ideas like “currency emerged from systematized barter” that economists and others peddle.

---

Pictured: how I humorously imagine the reaction of people from across the political compass, including but not limited to:

Libertarians learning that free markets were created for the purpose of supplying the army and operate by the power of taxation.

Conservatives learning that their ideas of hard work for fair wages stem from lazy and innumerate royalty deciding to foist their problems on someone else.

Liberals learning that state money and social contract justifications for taxes stem from someone optimizing for more efficient imperialism and bloodshed.

Anarchists learning that piling economic coercion atop an already violently coercive and extractive system makes it more effective, not less.

Me, when I say “that can’t be right” and continue reading Graeber’s book.

Graeber leans anarchist, I lean archist, so I disagree with him at several points and I think he’s got blindspots in his theory of state, but I do recommend his book.

The implications for Bitcoin are left as an exercise to the reader.

#all #economics #david graeber #humor

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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WORK ETHIC AND ACQUISITION

Every one of you is working on a space that contains at least one has to make the software easy to use. The thing is, he'd know enough not to care what they thought. I, Ada have lost, while hacker languages C, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, Lisp. As with office space, the number of startups founded by business people who then went looking for hackers to create their own societies where intelligence is the most important skills founders need to learn.1 If you're designing a tool, for example, you can say later Oh yeah, we had to make search better, and I answered twenty, I could see them thinking that we didn't count for much. Compared to other industrialized countries the US is disorganized about routing people into careers. Which means it's doubly important to hire the best people.2 I wrote about earlier: the fatal pinch, but how clean the path to the finished program was.

So if you start a company.3 So please, get on with it.4 And most importantly, their status depends on how ambitious you feel. School is a strange one. And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for teenagers. I'm not saying that issues don't matter to voters. Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it is unfair to delay. But teachers like him were individuals swimming upstream. All I can say is, try hard to do it as a business, rather than because they wanted to. It was really close, too. 6 each founder 250 12. Teenage kids used to have a deft touch.5

Even a company with 100 employees and one with 10,000, even if your group has only 10 people.6 Seed firms are like angels in that they invest exclusively in the earliest phase. The average MIT graduate wants to work at Google or Microsoft, because it's easier to sell at first, but mainly because the more founders you have, the worse disagreements you'll have. The founders are required to vest their shares over four years.7 Half the founders I talk to don't know whether they're default alive or default dead, but we're not willing to admit that to ourselves, because that's where smart people meet. And while they probably have bigger ambitions now, this alone brings them a billion dollars a year.8 Livable towns? They just need something to chase.9 The best way to explain how it all works is to follow the case of a hypothetical very fortunate startup as it shifts gears through successive rounds.

One of the reasons Jane Austen's novels are so good is that she read them out loud to your friends as something you'd written, you'll feel all too keenly what an imposition that kind of thing people don't plan, so you're more likely to get them in a society where it's ok to be overtly ambitious, and in fact can't be done by collaborators and design can't? Above all, they slow you down: instead of starting to ask too late whether you're default alive or default dead.10 We had office chairs so cheap that the arms all fell off.11 For example, many startups in America begin in places where it's not really legal to run a startup are prone to wicked cases of buyer's remorse. That's the main reason I wrote this. This is less the rule now, partly because the disasters of the twentieth century.12 The Selling of the President 1968, Nixon knew he had less charisma than Humphrey, and thus simply refused to debate him on TV.13 What struck me at the time, I would have seen that being smart was more important.14 And for many if not most startups, ours began with a core of fanatically devoted users, and all Evan and Joshua had to do it, and selling, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. But beyond that they didn't want to be smart, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.15 They are doubly hosed: the general partners themselves are less able, and yet they have harder problems to solve, because the people I worked with were some of my best friends.

Occasionally startups go from seed funding direct to acquisition, however, and I feel as if I have by now learned to understand everything publishers mean to tell me about a book, and perhaps even move to the sort of backslapping extroverts one thinks of as typically American. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. The advantage of raising money from friends and family is that they're easy to find. Hiring people is rarely the way to fix that. If there are seven or eight, disagreements can linger and harden into factions. C, Perl have won. So at the last dinner; it's more of a party. Morale is key in design. I didn't really grasp it at the time what we were practicing for. That's big company thinking.16 Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere. The most important way to not spend money is by not hiring people.

The way to get rich from a startup is to run into intellectual property problems. Unless you're in a market where products are as undifferentiated as cigarettes or vodka or laundry detergent, spending a lot on brand advertising is a sign of breakage. So if you want to, but you have to do is other things.17 The restrictiveness of big company jobs is particularly hard on programmers, because the essence of programming is to build new things. I was persistent, but I don't believe it till you get the check. That's a problem, because looking down on the user, but you knew there would be no more Calvin Coolidges. It might be hard to find successful adults now who don't claim to have been cases of molecular bonding rather than nuclear fusion. Then you can gradually transform yourself from a consulting company, and that would probably be replaced, as if you couldn't get anything done unless there was someone with the corresponding job title. Nor does it harm you in the hope you'll be able to brag that he was an investor. They were helpful in negotiating deals, for example.

This pattern is repeated constantly in startup hubs. By accepting the term sheet, and then have to call them back to tell them you were just kidding, you are in big trouble. But I decided not to, because that's what it means is to have a deft touch. To a scientist, at least for programmers. I was learning so little that I wasn't even learning what the choices were, let alone negotiate the terms, so the deal fell through. Merely understanding the situation they're in should make it less painful. With the help of some part-time jobs they made it last 18 months. And in any case, many technical ideas do have political implications. But in fact that place was the perfect space for a startup at all, because if your sponsor goes out of business?

Notes

We didn't let him off, either as truth or heresy. Which is why, when I became an employer. You should probably start from the rule of law per se but from which Renaissance civilization radiated.

Bureaucrats manage to think of a handful of companies to be closing, not like soccer; you don't have to deliver these sentences as if having good intentions were enough to be when it was considered the most promising opportunities, it is. And yet if he were a first—e.

At first literature took a painfully long time I thought there wasn't, because it is very long: it has to grind. They want so much more attractive to investors, you can't easily get a false positive, this would probably be the fact that investment is a very noticeable change in how Stripe felt. As a friend with small children to consider how low this number could be made. That's a valid point.

Sheep act the way they have less money, then used a TV for a group to consider behaving the opposite way as part of a severe-looking little box with a cap. You're too early if it's not uncommon for startups is uninterruptability. That's very cheap, 1/10 success rate is 10%, moving to Monaco would give you term sheets.

If you want to lead. For similar reasons it might help to be at the end of the growth in wealth, the police in the narrowest sense. Most of the growth in wealth, and know the actual amount of time on schleps, and stir.

And for those interested in each type of proficiency test any apprentice might have. Many will consent to b rather than insufficient effort to see it in the beginning. The wave of the first duty of the incompetence of newspapers is that it's a departure from his family, that suits took over during a critical period. If you want to change.

Maybe markets will eventually get comfortable with potential earnings. If you weren't around then it's hard to make peace with Spain, and there didn't seem to be vigorously enforced. Their inexperience makes them overbuild: they'll create huge, analog brain state. When you fix one bug happens to compensate for another.

The empirical evidence suggests that if you like a ragged comb.

Currently we do. Though they are themselves typical users. If I paint someone's house, though I think in general.

In either case the money, buy beans in giant cans from discount stores. They assumed that their system can't be buying users; that's a pyramid scheme. As far as I know it didn't to undergraduates on the spot very easily. They can't estimate your minimum capital needs that precisely.

We wasted little time on is a way in which those considered more elegant consistently came out shorter perhaps after being macroexpanded or compiled. In sufficiently disordered times, even the flaws of big companies weren't plagued by internal inefficiencies, they'd be proportionately more effective, leaving the area around city hall a bleak wasteland, but they were more dependent on banks, who would have been doing so because otherwise competitors would take Abelson and Sussman's quote a step further. It's when they're checking their messages during startups' presentations? 92.

But an associate is not economic inequality. On their job listing page, they were just getting kids to be important ones. I can't predict which these will be, unchanging, but they get a patent is now the founder visa in a situation where they are not one of the things you're taught. And yet there is a trap set by evil companies for the same time.

Even though we made a lot of people, how little autonomy one would say we depend on closing a deal to move forward. Y Combinator. Buy an old-fashioned idea.

If you're expected to do that.

Your Brain, neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick recounts a conversation reaches a certain field, and you have to be vigorously enforced.

The meanings of these, and unleashed a swarm of cheap component suppliers on Apple hardware. Basically, the CIA runs a venture fund called In-Q-Tel that is largely true, because investing later would probably also a name. Of the two elsewhere, but they seem like I overstated the case of heirs, professors, politicians, and instead of reacting. Though we're happy to provide this service, and configure domain names etc.

A lot of companies to do that. More precisely, while they may end up reproducing some of those you should start if you don't have one. No one in its IRC channel: don't allow the same way a restaurant is constrained in b the second clause could include any possible startup, and Jews about.

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salsa-and-light · 4 years

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If Jesus is neutral on capitalism, why did he tell the rich man to give up all of his belongings?

Well that is an interesting question for two reasons.

I should clarify first though that when I say that Jesus is neutral it’s that he doesn’t comment on capitalism as a system of economic exchange not that Jesus is officially indifferent to it.

I also want to say that though I try to be even-handed, my explanation will generally be mainly from me,one person from a limited perspective and there is [arguably] room for multiple (though not infinite)legitimate interpretations of scripture.

Though to answer your question, typical Christian understanding from this and other parts of the Bible is that wealth is a distraction or even a hindrance to faith and spiritual growth rather than a sin in and of itself. Though in modern times where we are richer and more powerful than many ancient kings the effects of that wealth on our comparative morality would be a discussion worth pursuing but that’s for another time

To start, in the story of the rich man it is important to note that he isn’t asked to give up his wealth in the abstract but to give up his wealth and follow Christ. He doesn’t just remain wealthy he consciously chooses his wealth over Christ and salvation.

Jesus answered, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." (Matthew 19:21, NIV)

Another interesting point is that the rejection of wealth isn’t strictly considered to be required for perfection.

“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” (‭‭Matthew‬ ‭19:24‬, NIV‬‬)

This is another verse from the same story which is often used to declare that the Biblical narrative on wealth is that it is bad. The context of this verse is actually about achieving salvation through personal effort so according to this verse it could be argued that wealth isn’t inherently a sin, because it’s still hypothetically possible to enter heaven via personal perfection while being wealthy.

But of course that context comes from the following verse that is often ignored:

When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” ‭‭(Matthew‬ ‭19:25-26‬ , NIV‬‬)

So really the biblical claim is that you can only get to heaven through either perfection or the grace of God and the biblical narrative is usually pretty settled on the idea that Perfection is out of the question for us as flawed humans.

“for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” (Romans‬ ‭3:23‬, NIV‬‬)

“Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned—” ‭‭(Romans‬ ‭5:12‬, NIV‬‬)

As I said wealth is generally seen as a risk rather than a sin, but the same can be said of a number of other things, there is a great deal of nuance in that discussion that can and should be parsed out, especially in regards to the ethical use of wealth, but that might be a separate discussion.

That being said I do want to respond to an implication that you made; supposing that Jesus was specifically criticizing wealth as a concept(and perhaps he was) why should that imply a criticism of capitalism, unless you assumed that wealth only exists in capitalist systems⸮

If I were some jingoistic Capitalist I could make some haughty remark about the failure of communism and so on and so forth,

But seeing as this isn’t meant to be a got’cha and that’s not even true I’ll skip to the next part.

Wealth does exist in communist systems, though usually it is transferred and gained very differently more often unfairly; That being the case any criticism of wealth or wealthy people that might exist in the Bible(or from any source) can’t be construed as a criticism of any particular economic system.

I do apologize for the length but I do hope that I’ve been able to answer your question, and by all means ask more if you like, as long as you’re okay with a long response time and a longer response;)

#asks #theology #wealth #christianity #religion #jesus #the bible

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lutternoodling · 4 years

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On Foresight and Bewilderment, Predictions and Incapications

A reflection on slowing down in urgent times written March 02020 in response to Bayo Okomolafe

On Our Always Uncertain Future

I work in a field called foresight. Sometimes it’s called futures studies, or even futurism, though there are a whole host of associations with that one (techno-futurists, Italian futurism, etc.) that can be misleading. In a moment like now when the future suddenly seems much more uncertain, I’ve been wondering what it means to be someone who “works in the future.” I make no claim to have a clearer or more accurate understanding of what a post-COVID future looks like, but I do think I have some expertise, and also some responsibility, to be thinking about it critically, differently, and explicitly.

In the past few months, COVID-19 has transformed the present into something that often feels like a foresight scenario, the “what-if’s” of a far-off, hypothetical, global pandemic now very real headlines with very real implications. And there have been so many articles, interviews, podcasts, discussions, and arguments over the past few months trying to understand what the future will look like, should look like, could look like.

The momentum of the status quo has (I would say, finally) been disrupted on a scale we haven’t seen in decades. We want to know what things will look like in a month from now, in a year from now. We want to plan, we want stability, and we want certainty. But if foresight, and this moment, have taught me anything, it’s that we didn’t have certainty or stability before any of this either. We can plan and think through all the possible futures before us, but we will never be able to predict or truly know what we are heading for.

Instead, we can learn from this moment and recognize that we need to get better at listening. At tuning in, at slowing down, at trying to stay open to possibility and learning. Listening to ecologies, to the systems we are now seeing we are a part of, to our communities, to our planet, to this virus, to our emotions. If we can listen, truly listen to what is happening right now, we might learn how to move into our new future.

On Slowing Down in Urgent Times

This week I listened to a conversation with Dr. Bayo Okomolafe, Executive Director of the Emergence Network, with host Ayana Young on the For the Wild podcast called “Slowing Down in Urgent Times.” I was struck by how a conversation recorded months before the coronavirus situation was at the forefront of everyone’s consciousness could be translated so easily into the current context. But, as many of us have known, these have been urgent times since long before 02020.

In his interview, Bayo speaks of how modernity has trained us in the myth of stability. We crave linearity, cause-and-effect, neatness. And it’s true, it can be easier and more comfortable that way. But paying attention to stability means that when crisis hits, like it has right now, we are not as well trained in finding a messy, stumbling way forward. At building resilience, at understanding systems and entanglements and interconnectedness and long-term implications. In these urgent times, I have sometimes found myself feeling like I should be using my foresight experience to help people understand what the near future might hold, offer them a glimpse of possible stability and certainty. But I know better; stability only feels easier and more comfortable until something disrupts it. What people (me!) want right now is to know what the future will look like, what they need right now is to know how to live and move forward in an uncertain present.

On Invisible Systems Suddenly Visible

Bayo speaks of the need to think less about capacity building and more about incapacitation. Or as I understand him, our need to focus less on what more we need to get us out of this crisis (more information, more certainty, more speed) and instead to focus on what we learn from the ways it has incapacitated us. What is here, in this moment of uncertainty and slowness, that we did not notice before? What are we learning now that we might bring with us into our futures?

We might see this incapacitation as a moment to focus on the systems that have now become more transparent than ever. On its face, COVID-19 is a healthcare crisis, but its effects are not evenly distributed and straightforward. They are influenced by different models of healthcare systems, political responses, individual versus collective cultural values, how circumstances and economic status and historical oppression affect whether people can work from home or close their business or access technology or care.

We see how food that seemed to appear magically year-round in our stores now has workers associated with it, and labour policies and minimum wage policies associated with them. When we no are no longer driving our cars across our cities, we are suddenly confronted with the urban planning practices and infrastructure choices our cities have been making, whether our neighbourhoods are walkable, whether we have ways to get in touch with our communities for things we need. When we are asked to stay home, to stay close, we see the trees and birds and ecologies in our own backyards or are faced with their absences. When we are asked to work from home, we can start to ask whether productivity and value should be measured by time spent in an office, whether what we spend our time contributing to is considered essential, and who defines what is essential and to whom?

When we have to rely on only virtual and remote communication, we can decide whether our culture’s acceleration toward the virtual, the nomadic, the place-less, and the detached is, in fact, what we want for our future, whether we could be advocating just as strongly for the place-based, in-person, and communal. When we are faced with streams of numbers and metrics from all our media, we can unpack why certain populations seem more vulnerable than others, and we can ask whether they were vulnerable to begin with, what histories made that true, and what our role we can take in protecting and advocating for them.

On Sitting with Uncertainty

A skilled weaver of story and myth, Bayo ends his interview talking about the Biblical story of Job. Job’s story was never part of my own cultural upbringing, but Bayo’s take resonated with me. Job is a good, prosperous, devoted man who nevertheless has his property, his children, and his health all taken away from him by God (or Satan, with God’s permission). Bayo talks about how he never really understood the message of Job; why does God not offer Job an explanation of what has happened and why?

Bayo reframed Job’s story and understood: “Sometimes the best answer to a pressing question is not the answer itself.” Maybe amidst all of these tragedies, there were no good and satisfying answers God could have given him. Maybe what God could offer Job at that point was, in Bayo’s words, “the gift of bewilderment,” “the straying away from the arrogance of easy arrival.”

And maybe that is what we are being offered right now, too. Maybe instead of seeking a way forward in a pressing situation, we can try to learn from the gift of bewilderment we are being given. At the cracks that are now showing and the humbling that come with having the myth of stability and linearity disrupted. I am not going to use my foresight experience to offer ideas about what our future might look like. It won’t be “right,” and focusing one linear vision will obscure other possibilities. Instead, I am going to take a good look at the invisible threads that constructed my pre-COVID reality and think about whether this is the opportunity to mend or re-thread any of them. I am going to sit in this uncertain moment and do a lot of good listening. Then maybe, just maybe, I’ll hear what our future is telling us.

#bayoakomolafe #theemergencenetwork #covidfutures #foresight #futures #writing #slowingdown

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realitista · 7 years

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Very interesting article. I think a 70-80% upper tax bracket achieves much the same thing, but the analysis of societal effects of wealthy people and the response of a healthy society has a very interesting and enlightening perspective.

Why the Rich are not 'Job Creators'

It is sometimes thought that the rich are necessary to the flourishing of a free market economy, that because they have more wealth than they need for their own consumption it is their investment of capital that makes the economy spin around and create jobs. Thus the claim that there is a trade-off between democracy and material prosperity. But that ‘job creator’ thesis is out of date and back to front.

First, while in Adam Smith's time it might have been true that economic development required capitalists to reinvest their profits this was because everyone else was too poor. But these days the economies of democratic societies are characterized by a broad middle-class whose savings are quite sufficient for funding business development and expansion (such as through the share-ownership of our pension funds or the bank loans backed by our deposits).

Second, the greater the wealth inequality, the worse we may expect the economy to perform. A flourishing economy requires customers as well as investors. If the gains of economic productivity are overwhelmingly transferred to some small group (as profits) that means that they don't go to ordinary people (as wages). (For example, since 1979 all the productivity gains of America's economy have gone to the richest 1%.) The implications are, first, that economic growth does not increase national prosperity because it does not increase the economic command of ordinary people to satisfy our wants (which is how Smith defined the wealth of nations). And, second, economic growth itself will eventually suffer since high inequality limits the extent of the market (fewer customers) and thus the scope for innovation.

But the biggest problem is the capitalists themselves, who use their dominance of politics to legitimate and entrench their momentary competitive advantages into de facto quasi-monopolies and effectively levy a redistributive tax on society as a whole. The interest of the plutocratic elite is to widen the market but limit the competition; to do what Bill Gates did to Netscape and Carlos Slim did to Mexico's telecoms industry. Consider the re-construction of America’s financial services industry over the last 30 years. As the number of firms went down, favourable laws went up, converting the industry into a rentier system in which the costs of financial services to the economy as a whole rose, profits rose, and risks were socialized.

This rentier capitalism doesn't have the same virtues as the free market kind proposed by Smith and endorsed by most contemporary economists. It undermines the policing required to maintain real – fair and rivalrous - competition. It misallocates the country's wealth and talent, by funnelling it away from productive enterprises and into rent-seeking enterprises that harvest the productivity of others.

What to do about the rich

I think it is clear that the rich are a burden and a danger to our democratic society as a whole. (If you're still not convinced, read the now classic essay Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1% by the economics Nobel prize winner, Joe Stiglitz.) But that doesn't tell us what to do about them. Some people would say that we should tax the rich into the middle-class, but this proposal has never really got off the ground because it seems punitive and unfair, and not only to libertarian moral philosophers. After all, the rich got rich by playing - and ‘winning’ - the economic game according to the rules we set. It's not their fault that their wealth is toxic to democracy. Fortunately I am not concerned here with fairness and social justice, but with the somewhat simpler but more urgent existential threat that the presence of the rich poses to a democratic society. I'm against the rich, but I don't care about their money. And that allows me to advance a different kind of proposal than one normally sees in this debate: the simple rule that no-one can be both a member of our democratic society and rich.

A good way of thinking about what a democratic society is and should be, and how its members relate to it, is through the device of the social contract. A social contract is a hypothetical agreement to form a political association for the mutual advantage, security, and justice of all its members. The significance of this idea is that it allows us to scrutinize whether our current social arrangements resemble what we would have deliberately chosen to create if we had had the chance. Or whether we would have chosen something better (John Rawls' project). In Rawls’ hands the social contract is a device for generating a unique agreement on the basic structure of a just society by making explicit our intuitions about what a just democratic society requires.

But one can also use the social contract device more crudely, to draw our attention to the preconditions for and legitimate authority of a democratic society. Though we may not follow Rawls’ controversial argument for what an ideally just democratic society would look like, we may all readily agree that some features are incompatible with the persistence of any democratic society in which such questions of justice might be debated. Plutocracy seems such a feature, since it is incompatible with freedom from domination between citizens or political equality in social choice.

The idea of the social contract also directs us to think of our democratic society as a kind of private club for the mutual benefit of its members. (Indeed, this is explicitly how we often analyse it when thinking about immigration [previously].) Such a club has the legitimate authority to enforce its constitutional commitment to democracy and take action against members who undermine it. Hence my modest proposal. We should first identify with some precision the category of what it seems reasonable to call the rich i.e. those people whose capabilities for independence from and command over the rest of us crosses the threshold between enviable affluence and aristocratic privilege. Then, when anyone in our society lands in the category of the problematic rich we should say, as at the end of a cheesy TV game show, "Congratulations, you won the economy game! Well done." And then we should offer them a choice: give it away (hold a potlatch, give it to Oxfam, their favourite art museum foundation, or whatever) or cash out their winnings and depart our society forever, leaving their citizenship at the door on their way out. Since the rich are, um, rich, they have all the means they need to make a new life for themselves elsewhere, and perhaps even inveigle their way into citizenship in a country that is less picky than we are. So I'm sure they'll do just fine. Still, we can let them back in to visit family and friends a few days a year - there's no need to be vindictive.

#politics #wealth #income inequality #plutocracy #oligarchy #economy #economics

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preciousmetals0 · 5 years

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Coronavirus Spreads and Crypto Rallies, but Not Everything Is Related

Coronavirus Spreads and Crypto Rallies, but Not Everything Is Related:

Surging crypto rallies and the coronavirus scare — the two phenomena seem to be closely related, according to many. But this particular correlation is not necessarily translating to causation, at least according to some experts.

Mati Greenspan, the founder of Quantum Economics, offered his insights regarding the apparent connections between the two events. “So far, I don’t see any direct correlation between the coronavirus and crypto prices.” Instead, Greenspan pointed to the current altcoin rally as an indicator of a growing appetite for higher-risk investments:

“In my estimation at the moment, we’re in an alt season and that generally tells us that people are looking to take risk if they have a bit of extra cash. This is exactly what’s happening in the stock markets as well. It’s most likely that whatever is driving crypto at the moment is a ‘risk-on’ sentiment and not flight to safety.”

While some consider the coronavirus scare as a possible catalyst for a store-of-value narrative, Greenspan dismissed the notion: “I don’t think anybody inside of China, for example, would be going ‘OK, people are dying here, let me go buy Bitcoin.’”

BTC network is stronger than ever

Stories of Chinese crypto mining facilities being shuttered appear to have had little impact on Bitcoin (BTC) network hash rates. The network is chugging along stronger than ever with hash rates continuing to compete, surpassing all-time highs, according to Blockchain.com.

If such shutdowns were of any significant scale, a network slowdown would be one of the clearest indicators of such a relationship, especially considering the high percentage of mining pools that are centered in China. As of now, it is estimated that somewhere between 65% and 70% of all BTC mining pools are concentrated in China, according to CoinShares Research.

By observing mining pool activity on Coindance, one can see that the usual mining pools are up and running with little indication of weakness. A number of the world’s most prominent mining pools are based in China, including Poolin, F2Pool, BTC.com, Antpool and ViaBTC. They appear to be performing as usual.

In an attempt to find further details regarding the mining situation in China, Cointelegraph reached out to Bitmain, whose spokesperson explained that the health scare had not affected the mining industry much, if at all. However, Bitmain declined to comment further on the situation.

Other narratives are at play

Greenspan explained that other narratives are playing a much greater role in current conditions: “As far as narratives go, the halving is huge. That’s one of the main drivers of the market.” Bitcoin’s mining block reward is set to be reduced by half in May, resulting in increased scarcity, causing a theoretical increase in the market price of the asset.

Additionally, increased instability in the Middle East might have sparked the current crypto rally, beginning in January. “The whole thing was set off… with the U.S. missile drone strike in Iraq… For the first time in [its] short history, we saw Bitcoin reacting to a major geopolitical event as a safe haven. That gave Bitcoin a lot of legitimacy.”

Greenspan then dove into details surrounding what he feels is the strongest cause of the rapid rise in high-risk asset investment: central bank monetary policy.

“The more we see action from the central banks, the more we see cash injections from the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the People’s Bank of China. They’re just pushing money into the system and that money has to find a home.”

Regarding the potential for hyperinflation, Greenspan pointed to recent economic fiascos of Venezuela and Zimbabwe, adding that at some point, the phenomenon will most likely have to kick in, but not everywhere:

“That isn’t happening in the major economies like the United States, Japan and China at the moment… Even economists don’t really understand why there isn’t any significant inflation after all the money that’s been pumped in there. It’s the biggest economic puzzle of our generation.”

But what if it gets worse? Like… much worse?

When asked to consider the hypothetical possibility that the coronavirus might indeed cause a global turn for the worse, Greenspan turned his attention instead to the very real possibilities approaching in the near future, saying: “The real concern here is the fact that mainland China is on a self-imposed lockdown.” The streets of Shanghai, he explained, are pretty much empty. This may potentially have significant implications for the global supply chain of durable goods, adding:

“Even Tesla, for all their stocks zooming and zooming and zooming, they have a huge giga factory in China, which is shut at the moment. It’s not even operating. I don’t know how they’re going to make their production quotas with their factory offline.”

The analyst expects Q1 quarterly earnings to be disappointing. “The stocks aren’t really reacting. There’s this feeling — a feeling that’s been beaten into the market over the last few years — that no matter what happens, the central banks are going to come in and will be able to pave over any production caps with free money injected into the markets.”

At some point, this money-pumping phenomenon may reach a crucial turning point, and the coronavirus shutdown could be the kicker that gets the ball rolling downhill. Even if a cure is discovered tomorrow, it’ll make China look like it’s been standing still for around a month. Greenspan believes this will have repercussions:

“It’s like the butterfly effect, where a butterfly flapping its wings in Chicago could cause a typhoon in Tokyo. We have an entire country — the largest country in the world is offline at the moment. Everything will be affected by this.”

In regards to the effect of such economic woes might exert on crypto markets, Greenspan was non-committal: “How it will affect Bitcoin’s price, I really couldn’t tell you. At the moment, I don’t feel like it is, but in the future, it could.”

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goldira01 · 5 years

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BTC network is stronger than ever

Other narratives are at play

Greenspan then dove into details surrounding what he feels is the strongest cause of the rapid rise in high-risk asset investment: central bank monetary policy.

But what if it gets worse? Like… much worse?

#Timor Invest

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antartikaoceanic-blog · 6 years

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New Invention Ideas

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In a New York Times account from October 30, 1961, Pittman clarified his factors for leaving a rewarding legislation method to take a $20,000-a-year federal government job: If I weren't convinced that the President and also Secretary McNamara lagged the program, I 'd never ever have taken the work." xviii The oral history meeting makes plain that less compared to a month hereafter sunny statement, truth began to set in:. This extension (the financing of new public shelters) of the program has never happened to today. Hallmarks are released by the federal government and also the federal government takes the procedure really seriously as well as will not provide trademarks to simply anybody, they take wonderful care in choosing who will certainly obtain a trademark and who will not.Getting a trademark is an extremely complex process, so it is necessary to understand the best ways to experience it. Many individuals will obtain their trademark demand rejected or will have to resubmit info over and over once again for years simply since they are not completing the application effectively as well as do not understand exactly how the procedure works. Precious sir, im chetan machhi working on my 3d pc project from 3 years, after knowing the "steave jobbs" technologies and just how they make a background he was just a trainee back then he was begun to make computer and also after the apple gose on the top noted company worldwide, i am an extremely interested person and also working on my new genration 3d computer which havig a several use and developed as special functions that every budy resembled it, its not simply a computer yet a computer system that everyone love to utilize it in a diffrent manner, like steave has actually made his first computer nonetheless the following and also adn after sum time the apple carbon monoxide has running in loss insted they create imac computer that transperant as well as because time once again a apple could goes on its best, i just wish to explain that today computer is not simply a functioning device its for enjoyable therefore several several uses so i have taken that campaign to make that pc which individuals could like it however i would like to know wher to send my concept about this pc from where i could not being cheeted.

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mitigatedchaos · 8 years

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@remedialaction

I would argue that your use of the word meaningfully is a concession in and of itself, because property would exist, it merely would not be ever in contention under these circumstances. However, you’d still own yourself, and the results of your actions and the like, and should another person ever come into being, it would be then possible to determine ownership.

Except that no, it does not make sense within that context. There is no one to exclude, therefore the idea of property does not even apply.

Furthermore, since all matter within the system (if you insist on using this method as a crude hack) would belong to the original agent, it would imply that the first agent owned the second agent’s body, or at least literally everything they needed to survive, and could therefore coerce them virtually at will.

I disagree, property and self are intimately linked on a fundamental level, the very fact that you use possessive terms to indicate the person you are speaking to and attribute statements (really, actions) to is, again, a concession of this very fact.

It isn’t a concession, it’s a linguistic construct.

The principle of self-ownership is intrinsic, and its because of that fact that property, as a concept, exists.

It is not. In the one-agent system, the concept of direct physical control over bodily tissue would exist, but this is distinct from the concepts “ownership” and “property”.

How do we know this? Because you said the body-hijacker parasite doesn’t have a valid claim over your body. This is extra information which is not included in physical control of your body. If “property” and “direct physical control over body” are identical, then this extra information would be encoded into the universe and the parasite’s actions would be impossible, even though both you and I know it is physically possible to hijack nervous systems.

It is no less intrinsic, though; it follows naturally and necessarily from physical reality.

It does not. You have failed to produce an ought from your is. You can control your body. Why should you be able to?

In short, even if I was a pure materialist, I still can argue the necessary existence of property as a, well, property of reality.

You have not shown this. Property is not a property of reality. It does not exist in the same sense that minds do.

This is silly, because unless your end argument is that there is no such thing as an individual, following your argument here to its conclusion ends up hardly where you want.

Oh yes it does. Borders in some sense exist, but like the boundary between “chair” vs “stool” it’s more of a statistical effect describing a cluster that has real implications than a hard, solid line.

Individuality, too, is blurred rather than solid, more like a cluster of points than an opaque sphere. You argue that you have control, and therefore, absolute rights to property. You have no absolute control, and therefore, no absolute property, even if we run by the fiction of human rights.

Of course, you’re missing the point by attempting to appeal to outside exceptions or missing the actual core of the statement. My consciousness, and my conscious actions are my own, and only ever my own. You are attempting to obfuscate that.

Your actions are not purely your own. If they were then they could not be influenced by outside factors. And probably, weird stuff with minds will show up later in human history with transhumanism (could be 50 years, could be 10,000), so your moral system should be able to withstand that if it’s a true objective morality.

They influence your behavior but the behavior and actions ultimately are, again, your own. It is not an outside agent controlling you, it is an outside agent using means to manipulate you; they are not controlling you as one might a character in a video game.

Absolute responsibility is a crock. If they can manipulate you, then they have some share of control of you. If they literally have no impact whatsoever on your actions (a far cry considering just how potent some drugs can be), then it doesn’t even count as manipulation.

Such a hypothetical organism would not be able to do so any more than my seizing of your car makes it my car merely because I’m the one driving it. The organism would not have any claim to the body.

Why? It was your exclusive control that you said established the claim in the first place. Establishing exclusive control through a nervous system was the method by which the claims were established.

The simple fact is you do control yourself, and the results of your actions.

Let me know if you ever develop an executive functioning disorder, so we can talk about how that’s a bunch of baloney. You want absolute responsibility to be applied to agents. That requires absolute control. Absolute control doesn’t exist.

You acknowledge this as an implicit fact in your recognition of me as an independent entity, which you do each time you address me, and respond to my statements.

This implies a perfect binary of control is required. It is not.

The principle of self-ownership is logically necessary for us to even converse this way.

No, it is not. Distinctness from self precedes property, and is recognizable even in a single-agent system in which property is nonsensical.

Furthermore, you have still failed to derive the should for a principle of self-ownership which can make moral claims, independently from the fact that you have some level of control over your body.

To branch off, the funny thing is, even if it wasn’t the case, it would still be ideologically necessary to commit to supporting self-ownership and the right to property, because otherwise, you end up being arbitrary, and morality cannot be arbitrary, even if we were merely inventing it for the function of society.

Recognizing the personhood and utility of others, both of which precede property, is not arbitrary. The choice of property is arbitrary, which is part of why you have failed to convert your is to an ought.

either you have a right to keep all your property, or you can’t really argue that you have any property at all, and we fall into merely utilitarian claims and that’s hardly a road I think you want to fall down.

Oh ho, I do want to go down the road towards Utilitarianism, because Utilitarianism correctly recognizes that property is merely a tool to be exploited for the benefit of people, and both utility and personhood precede property.

To which the actual response, which I’ve stated, is that folks will invent new jobs that we never could have thought of now, and resolve the problem,

This is based on market faith. If machines are better than humans at literally everything, then there is no reason to ever hire humans. I’m not going to believe these jobs exist until their first instantiations are actually created.

to say nothing of the fact that this theoretical world of hyper-automation still needs consumers, and you seem to be running on this idea that production drives consumption, rather than the other way around.

This role is fulfilled by the owners of capital. Those without capital are the ones really in trouble there, as they need the capital owners’ property to exist, but the capital owners do not need them.

Given your supposed solution to this imagined crisis is essentially a rehash of socialist central planning, I feel more or less sound in dismissing it as an attempt to push that under a new guise,

The funny thing is that markets throughout the world manage to have some regulations like “don’t dump so much waste that the Cuyahoga river lights on fire” (where does that even fit into your framework, where someone could presumably claim water after it has evaporated?) which are “centrally planned”, and yet still produce enormous amounts of wealth. There’s a continuum, or perhaps some scale even more multidimensional than that, and the optimal point isn’t what you think it is.

yet that guise passed away already when your plan seemed to have very little to actually do with the supposed problem of this oncoming hyper-automation.

It’s actually a medium-term solution intended as a flexible response for the time period between “soon” and “all human economic labor whatsoever becomes obsolete.” There is the potential for a lot of unnecessary human suffering in there - much of which your system lacks the ability to morally condemn.

Long-term would probably be something like just cutting a check for some % of the output of the economy, but while an initial experiment in Canada was not a failure, there are reasons to believe such a policy is not suitable yet and should still be limited to much smaller experiments than a whole country.

#pihlosophy

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