You mean like how we STILL have a GDP that is triple China's, despite them having quadruple the population? (Comparing per-capita GDP is REALLY telling).
If you want an economic system that creates a utopia, youre gonna need to replace the human race. If you want an economic system that deals withe the realities of the world we live in, thats moderated capitalism.
The point is that you have now introduced a subjective element ("dense enough intrinsic value") into what was supposed to be an "intrinsic" (and thus objective) attribute of the substance.
I am merely half-trolling, half pointing out that illusions of gold as intrinsically currency-worthy are just that-- illusions. There are reasons for it, but none that make it in and of itself better than several other alternatives out there.
If lead were scarce enough, I have no doubt it could be used as a currency, as it is highly useful.
You say that philosiphers beleiving in god proves that a lack of logic isn't required - that's simply not true. Just because a person is smart, says great things, is great in any regard, does not mean that they are perfect, or always think logically.
Once again, lacking logic is not something one would usually blame Descartes, Pascal, Aquinas, Lewis, Kierkegaard, etc of. The first two were mathematical thinkers in their own right, Im sure they are well acquainted with logical thinking and fallacies. They may have made errors in their thought, there is no doubt of that, but their arguments are nevertheless based on logic.
Pascal is a terrible example - he was very clearly logically flawed - Pascal's Wager is an argument for religion - that beleiving in a religion is worth it 'just in case' - this argument is terrible
That is a misconception, and is not what his wager states. You would have to read the full wager, which is longer (several pages, I believe), but to summarize quickly he is saying that it is illogical not to give more weight to the issue of God's existence. His reasoning isnt quite that "you should believe just in case". I would recommend you read it for yourself.
And if you read his other Pensees, you see a man who not only has a firm grasp on logic, but on the sad state of humanity (for example, his Pensee talking about how "it is right that I kill you because you came from that side of the river, rather than mine; if you had come from my side, it would have been a terrible crime"; or his Pensee showing how most of our lives are spent running away from the terrible state of boredom, from the richest of us to the poorest-- how THAT is the prime motivator in our lives).
Mainly, it implies there are no downsides at all to living in a religious way.
Which would be an odd claim by Pascal, as the texts he claimed to believe affirm that there is a downside if it is false: "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men." (1 Corinthians 15:19) He was saying that there is no downside to considering its claims, IIRC.
There is no observable event or repeatable experiment to show a God is likely - it's just a well known story without any backing.
Lewis had an excellent remark on this in his book "miracles". Simply put, there is the historical evidence, which in all cases (religious and secular) is not "reproduceable", but can only be evaluated on the strength of its evidence. I would claim that there is historical evidence for miracles occuring. But if you do not believe in miracles, then no matter what evidence I would show you, you would simply claim either an alternative (even if less likely), or that the evidence I gave is unreliable because miracles are impossible and thus my source is lying.
You can see this principle in action with the dating of certain books of the bible which make predictive prophesy: there may be evidence that they were written before the event they predict, but very very often you will see them labeled as having been written after the fact, because, as we know, "theres no such thing as predictive prophesy and the author could not have known about an event before it occurred." Look in the wikipedia article on Habakkuk: the implication is that the events predicted must have happened already when the book was written, and that Habakkuk must himself have been aware of the Babylonians cruelty, since obviously the Lord could not have made these statements. There are other examples, such as the dating of Israel's campaign into Canaan, which is again based on the presumption that the Bible's accounts of miracles must not have been accurate simply because miracles are impossible.
If you are determined not to see a miracle, you never will, I think is how Lewis stated it. He gave this example "In all my life I have
Our society created it, its no more a fantasy day than Thanksgiving. You should tell all your family and friends how Thanksgiving is really a celebration of the subjugation of a native people; im sure that would make you the life of the party.
Thanks for your comment, one of the greatest things that can happen to one of these conversations is when people can put aside biases for the moment and analyze a statement on its own merits, rather than the baggage our society has associated with it.
I do of course disagree with your belief that my ideals are acquired by family traditions, from personal evidence:)
2000 years ago, no one knew what a star was or orbits or DNA.
But they certainly knew what stars werent, and were capable of predicting where they would appear in the skies; and im fairly certain that they had a firm grasp on breeding.
One of the more shameful errors I have seen is to assume a level of ignorance for people 2000 years ago (or more, or less) that is unfounded. It might astound you what the greeks, romans, egyptians, chinese, and phoenicians knew.
I just have a hard time reconciling the fact that there are over 10,000 religions on this planet, and the cultists in each believe that they are right, and want you to convert to their way.
Then you have a problem, because there are 10,001 different beliefs (one being that all of them are wrong), and no matter what you will have to choose among them. The one thing you cannot choose is not to believe in anything including the correctness or incorrectness of other beliefs (unless you wanted to go all nihilist-- thats belief # 10,002).
This is a fake argument you have created. Just because Joe says Sally is lying, and Sally says Jeff is lying, and Jeff says Joe is lying, doesnt mean that ONE of them isnt right.
Aside from my utter bewilderment why parent got a troll moderation (you may think hes crazy and disagree with him, but thats certainly not a troll post), Ill respond, courteously, since you were courteous.
Believing in God does not require intellectual suicide, nor does it require a suspension of logic. There are, if you cared to read up on it, countless philosophers who came from the church-- for example, one of my favorites, Pascal, was very probably either Protestant or Catholic. He isnt exactly someone you would accuse of being daft in regard to logic, not after reading his Pensees.
Why then do there seem to be religious people who ask you to "just believe"? I cannot answer for them, but I can point out that probably 80% of people accept scientific "truths" without having the capability or expertise to vet or judge them for reliability. Truths they may be, but for most people they are "unjustified truths". For some people, this includes everything outside of their particular field. Others have a deeper knowledge, but all of us at the end must accept some of what we are told by others to be true, with no other proof than our trust in their reliability.
As an example, neither I, nor (I would hazard) 90% of slashdot can prove or justify their belief that there is a black hole at the center of the Milky Way. I have a "chain of trust" that leads me to accept it as a "tentative fact", but nothing more-- I certainly have not reviewed the evidence in detail, and would be utterly out of my element attempting to do so without hours, days, or months of study.
Religions can be similar. I personally have a great number of reasons why I accept the claims of christianity. I believe there is an element of "Gods hand" in all of this-- that I believe in part because it was part of his plan-- but my mind is not made so that I can simply leave it at that and quell my curiosity. It demands reasons and justifications for everything I believe-- I sometimes feel like Descartes who wondered how he could justify his belief that he even existed. Yet after all of my questioning, reasoning, and researching, I continually find myself agreeing that my beliefs, for the most part, hold up (and that occasionally, there are parts that are in fact mistaken).
Regarding "being told", I do ask my preacher, and my elders (both in a "church elder", and in an "older, wiser person" sense) questions often; but I have reasons to trust their sincerity, their knowledge in the topics I ask them, and I can always check their statements (which are based on biblical interpretation) on what the bible actually says, and on what reality seems to say. There is a degree of trust, to be sure-- everything I am told when I ask a question, on any topic, will inevitably shape my thought processes to some degree-- but it is not unfounded, and it is unavoidable on any subject where learning is desirable and time is limited. One asks questions ("what causes gravity") because one does not have time to derive the answers to every question on ones own, but you still use your intellect to vet the answers.
I think it is a mistake for someone of any belief to assume that because others believe differently, they must be mentally defective or lack logical capabilities. This is called hubris, and is unfounded: There have been brilliant men throughout the ages of various faiths. The truth is independent of what any of us think about these topics, but that does not mean there are not intelligent people who can be wrong; and it does not mean that you yourself cannot accept that you could be mistaken, if not in your conclusion, at least in your arguments.
Shhh... You're screwing with the religious zealots. They'll start quoting fire and brimstone passages out of their holy books. Then they'll flip through the peaceful and loving parts, and find reasons to kill you in very uncomfortable ways.
Guess its "Strawman and Ridicule" hour. Gather around folks, this is what it looks like.
Christmas was celebrated in Germany with a Christmas tree in the 1500s, and earlier in other parts. The celebration of Christmas itself goes much further back, with references in the 11th century, and even as far back as the 4th century. You are right that Christmas is a semi-new arrival on the scene-- in the last 1500 years or so-- but you should qualify what you mean when you say "a very late hijacking" when "very late" refers to the "within the last 2 millenia or so".
When he uses the term "Agnosticism" to discuss a belief system, it is just as correct to capitalize it as it would be for Stoicism, Hinduism, Platonicism, Nietzscheism, or Pantheism.
If I were a serious Christian, I would be boycotting Christmas. It's a Christianization (and poorly) of an ancient Northern European solstice celebration and fertility orgy. The tree, the Yule log, the lights? None of these things have anything to do with your Christ. You should be embarrassed if you ever thought so.
Thats just not true.
Christmas became a bigger deal in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries (1870s, I believe) when Germans brought the tradition over to the US. In the middle ages in Germany, a "paradise tree" was erected by the church; eventually the tradition expanded to include hanging sweets on the tree for children. Its origins are uncertain, but according to wikipedia came from an older christian tradition.
Im fairly certain that electric multicolored lights arent a pagan tradition.
As a christian, I have no idea what a Yule log is, though I have heard the term before.
And regardless of all of that, regardless of what else is / was / has been celebrated on December 25, or when Christ was actually born (probably September), are you saying it is wrong for me to celebrate Christ's birth with my family and the rest of my church, and with society, on this day? I can recognize that for some people this is a celebration of debauchery, for others it is a celebration of consumerism; but you cant deny that for still others it is either a celebration of family and togetherness, or of Christ's birth.
While you may say it's all rubbish and those writer aren't any good, plenty of people enjoy them. A decade ago I wrote some fan fiction for a fairly unknown piece of fiction and even ten years later I still get a couple of people a year that send me a note about how they found my work and loved it. Heck technically fan fiction is illegal, for or not for profit... Yet it still thrives because people enjoy it.
Fanfictions tend to be short, and dont take months or years to write. I wont disparage them, but a world in which our literature consisted solely in fanfiction type writings would be a world with a shallow literary heritage.
Copper is better for circuits; gold is generally just used for the plating because of its corrosion resistance. Gold is also not necessary for CD reflective layers-- only archival CDs use that, I believe.
I would agree that Bitcoins as well as other things digital probably do not have intrinsic value, unless they communicate non-self-referential information.
Intrinsic value means it has value despite it being a medium of exchange. Your typical US dollar bill has value only because it is a medium of exchange.
Not if theres a nuclear winter, and I need some strong, sturdy piece of paper that I could write a message on.
Everything has intrinsic value on an objective level. Thats why I said "or else theyre waxing philosophical".
Its value is because people have always valued it as a pretty, hard to get, non corroding metal.
Thats it. Take away its history, and people would either not use it as a currency, or would favor something more resilient and hard to obtain like Iridium (which is far more resistant to damage and chemical attack than gold), or more widely useful like copper, or else prettier (which could be any number of things). Titanium, silver, iridium, copper alloys, etc all could be used for currency as well (in their own ways) as gold could; theres nothing unique about gold except its incredibly long history.
those werent misspellings, they were capitalization and punctuation problems caused by a disorder that leaves me unable to care about using my shift and punctuation keys except when absolutely necessary.
If you invent an inexpensive piece of hardware that can push several orders of magnitude more SHA256 hashes per joule, you will successfully capture a disproportionate percentage of those 300 coins per hour. You do not get to generate unlimited coins - you just asymptotically approach 300/hour.
Fair enough, obviously I know little enough about that part of it that I cannot refute that.
Fair enough on the first point, I have reservations about the second, and on this...
Plenty of people around the world think it was a very bad idea to move away from a gold standard.
I would remark, why then should we move to the "prime factors" standard? It doesnt even have the fake intrinsic value that gold has due to its multi-thousand year history as a currency; bitcoins have value only because people in the last 2-3 years have decided they do. That is a REALLY poor standard for gold.
That was my point: Gold standard has benefits and problems, an un-backed currency has benefits and problems, but an unbacked currency with uncontrollable supply has the worst of each.
No, Christmas isnt really an exclusively christian holiday. I dont know if you can set a year when it changed, or if it ever truly has been since it took off in the US (it wasnt a big deal during the revolutionary war, except for the Germans), but Christmas today is a hybrid holiday-- it is for christians a celebration of Christ's birth, and for others a traditional celebration of family, friends, and togetherness.
A very good friend of mine-- an athiest-- is right now celebrating Christmas with his family, because it is a nice thing to do. He every year gives me christmas gifts; that doesnt mean he believes in Christ, it just means hes being a good friend and recognizes what is an american (formerly german) tradition.
Serious counterpoint to your strawman: We have limited resources: paper to print books, time to publish them, shipping to distribute them. For ebooks, its computer time to produce them, writer's time to create them.
Absent the capitalist system of letting the market decide which products are desirable, how do you determine which ebooks deserve to succeed? How do you determine how much to reimburse the author?
These are the fatal flaws with hard-core socialism / communism: you have no reliable, accurate way to determine the best way to allocate resources. Figure that out, and your idea can work. Its less of an issue with ebooks since fewer resources are needed, but theres still the issue of authors expecting to be paid and the folks who digitize their work expecting to be paid in line with the worth of their product.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean like how we STILL have a GDP that is triple China's, despite them having quadruple the population? (Comparing per-capita GDP is REALLY telling).
If you want an economic system that creates a utopia, youre gonna need to replace the human race. If you want an economic system that deals withe the realities of the world we live in, thats moderated capitalism.
Im sure the government's coercion will result in a wonderful cornucopia of literature.
The point is that you have now introduced a subjective element ("dense enough intrinsic value") into what was supposed to be an "intrinsic" (and thus objective) attribute of the substance.
I am merely half-trolling, half pointing out that illusions of gold as intrinsically currency-worthy are just that-- illusions. There are reasons for it, but none that make it in and of itself better than several other alternatives out there.
If lead were scarce enough, I have no doubt it could be used as a currency, as it is highly useful.
You say that philosiphers beleiving in god proves that a lack of logic isn't required - that's simply not true. Just because a person is smart, says great things, is great in any regard, does not mean that they are perfect, or always think logically.
Once again, lacking logic is not something one would usually blame Descartes, Pascal, Aquinas, Lewis, Kierkegaard, etc of. The first two were mathematical thinkers in their own right, Im sure they are well acquainted with logical thinking and fallacies. They may have made errors in their thought, there is no doubt of that, but their arguments are nevertheless based on logic.
Pascal is a terrible example - he was very clearly logically flawed - Pascal's Wager is an argument for religion - that beleiving in a religion is worth it 'just in case' - this argument is terrible
That is a misconception, and is not what his wager states. You would have to read the full wager, which is longer (several pages, I believe), but to summarize quickly he is saying that it is illogical not to give more weight to the issue of God's existence. His reasoning isnt quite that "you should believe just in case". I would recommend you read it for yourself.
And if you read his other Pensees, you see a man who not only has a firm grasp on logic, but on the sad state of humanity (for example, his Pensee talking about how "it is right that I kill you because you came from that side of the river, rather than mine; if you had come from my side, it would have been a terrible crime"; or his Pensee showing how most of our lives are spent running away from the terrible state of boredom, from the richest of us to the poorest-- how THAT is the prime motivator in our lives).
Mainly, it implies there are no downsides at all to living in a religious way.
Which would be an odd claim by Pascal, as the texts he claimed to believe affirm that there is a downside if it is false: "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men." (1 Corinthians 15:19) He was saying that there is no downside to considering its claims, IIRC.
There is no observable event or repeatable experiment to show a God is likely - it's just a well known story without any backing.
Lewis had an excellent remark on this in his book "miracles". Simply put, there is the historical evidence, which in all cases (religious and secular) is not "reproduceable", but can only be evaluated on the strength of its evidence. I would claim that there is historical evidence for miracles occuring. But if you do not believe in miracles, then no matter what evidence I would show you, you would simply claim either an alternative (even if less likely), or that the evidence I gave is unreliable because miracles are impossible and thus my source is lying.
You can see this principle in action with the dating of certain books of the bible which make predictive prophesy: there may be evidence that they were written before the event they predict, but very very often you will see them labeled as having been written after the fact, because, as we know, "theres no such thing as predictive prophesy and the author could not have known about an event before it occurred." Look in the wikipedia article on Habakkuk: the implication is that the events predicted must have happened already when the book was written, and that Habakkuk must himself have been aware of the Babylonians cruelty, since obviously the Lord could not have made these statements. There are other examples, such as the dating of Israel's campaign into Canaan, which is again based on the presumption that the Bible's accounts of miracles must not have been accurate simply because miracles are impossible.
If you are determined not to see a miracle, you never will, I think is how Lewis stated it. He gave this example
"In all my life I have
Our society created it, its no more a fantasy day than Thanksgiving. You should tell all your family and friends how Thanksgiving is really a celebration of the subjugation of a native people; im sure that would make you the life of the party.
Thanks for your comment, one of the greatest things that can happen to one of these conversations is when people can put aside biases for the moment and analyze a statement on its own merits, rather than the baggage our society has associated with it.
I do of course disagree with your belief that my ideals are acquired by family traditions, from personal evidence :)
2000 years ago, no one knew what a star was or orbits or DNA.
But they certainly knew what stars werent, and were capable of predicting where they would appear in the skies; and im fairly certain that they had a firm grasp on breeding.
One of the more shameful errors I have seen is to assume a level of ignorance for people 2000 years ago (or more, or less) that is unfounded. It might astound you what the greeks, romans, egyptians, chinese, and phoenicians knew.
I just have a hard time reconciling the fact that there are over 10,000 religions on this planet, and the cultists in each believe that they are right, and want you to convert to their way.
Then you have a problem, because there are 10,001 different beliefs (one being that all of them are wrong), and no matter what you will have to choose among them. The one thing you cannot choose is not to believe in anything including the correctness or incorrectness of other beliefs (unless you wanted to go all nihilist-- thats belief # 10,002).
This is a fake argument you have created. Just because Joe says Sally is lying, and Sally says Jeff is lying, and Jeff says Joe is lying, doesnt mean that ONE of them isnt right.
Aside from my utter bewilderment why parent got a troll moderation (you may think hes crazy and disagree with him, but thats certainly not a troll post), Ill respond, courteously, since you were courteous.
Believing in God does not require intellectual suicide, nor does it require a suspension of logic. There are, if you cared to read up on it, countless philosophers who came from the church-- for example, one of my favorites, Pascal, was very probably either Protestant or Catholic. He isnt exactly someone you would accuse of being daft in regard to logic, not after reading his Pensees.
Why then do there seem to be religious people who ask you to "just believe"? I cannot answer for them, but I can point out that probably 80% of people accept scientific "truths" without having the capability or expertise to vet or judge them for reliability. Truths they may be, but for most people they are "unjustified truths". For some people, this includes everything outside of their particular field. Others have a deeper knowledge, but all of us at the end must accept some of what we are told by others to be true, with no other proof than our trust in their reliability.
As an example, neither I, nor (I would hazard) 90% of slashdot can prove or justify their belief that there is a black hole at the center of the Milky Way. I have a "chain of trust" that leads me to accept it as a "tentative fact", but nothing more-- I certainly have not reviewed the evidence in detail, and would be utterly out of my element attempting to do so without hours, days, or months of study.
Religions can be similar. I personally have a great number of reasons why I accept the claims of christianity. I believe there is an element of "Gods hand" in all of this-- that I believe in part because it was part of his plan-- but my mind is not made so that I can simply leave it at that and quell my curiosity. It demands reasons and justifications for everything I believe-- I sometimes feel like Descartes who wondered how he could justify his belief that he even existed. Yet after all of my questioning, reasoning, and researching, I continually find myself agreeing that my beliefs, for the most part, hold up (and that occasionally, there are parts that are in fact mistaken).
Regarding "being told", I do ask my preacher, and my elders (both in a "church elder", and in an "older, wiser person" sense) questions often; but I have reasons to trust their sincerity, their knowledge in the topics I ask them, and I can always check their statements (which are based on biblical interpretation) on what the bible actually says, and on what reality seems to say. There is a degree of trust, to be sure-- everything I am told when I ask a question, on any topic, will inevitably shape my thought processes to some degree-- but it is not unfounded, and it is unavoidable on any subject where learning is desirable and time is limited. One asks questions ("what causes gravity") because one does not have time to derive the answers to every question on ones own, but you still use your intellect to vet the answers.
I think it is a mistake for someone of any belief to assume that because others believe differently, they must be mentally defective or lack logical capabilities. This is called hubris, and is unfounded: There have been brilliant men throughout the ages of various faiths. The truth is independent of what any of us think about these topics, but that does not mean there are not intelligent people who can be wrong; and it does not mean that you yourself cannot accept that you could be mistaken, if not in your conclusion, at least in your arguments.
Shhh... You're screwing with the religious zealots. They'll start quoting fire and brimstone passages out of their holy books. Then they'll flip through the peaceful and loving parts, and find reasons to kill you in very uncomfortable ways.
Guess its "Strawman and Ridicule" hour. Gather around folks, this is what it looks like.
Im sure youre a riot at family gatherings. Way to celebrate "goodwill towards all men".
Christmas was celebrated in Germany with a Christmas tree in the 1500s, and earlier in other parts. The celebration of Christmas itself goes much further back, with references in the 11th century, and even as far back as the 4th century. You are right that Christmas is a semi-new arrival on the scene-- in the last 1500 years or so-- but you should qualify what you mean when you say "a very late hijacking" when "very late" refers to the "within the last 2 millenia or so".
When he uses the term "Agnosticism" to discuss a belief system, it is just as correct to capitalize it as it would be for Stoicism, Hinduism, Platonicism, Nietzscheism, or Pantheism.
If I were a serious Christian, I would be boycotting Christmas. It's a Christianization (and poorly) of an ancient Northern European solstice celebration and fertility orgy. The tree, the Yule log, the lights? None of these things have anything to do with your Christ. You should be embarrassed if you ever thought so.
Thats just not true.
Christmas became a bigger deal in the US in the 18th and 19th centuries (1870s, I believe) when Germans brought the tradition over to the US.
In the middle ages in Germany, a "paradise tree" was erected by the church; eventually the tradition expanded to include hanging sweets on the tree for children. Its origins are uncertain, but according to wikipedia came from an older christian tradition.
Im fairly certain that electric multicolored lights arent a pagan tradition.
As a christian, I have no idea what a Yule log is, though I have heard the term before.
And regardless of all of that, regardless of what else is / was / has been celebrated on December 25, or when Christ was actually born (probably September), are you saying it is wrong for me to celebrate Christ's birth with my family and the rest of my church, and with society, on this day? I can recognize that for some people this is a celebration of debauchery, for others it is a celebration of consumerism; but you cant deny that for still others it is either a celebration of family and togetherness, or of Christ's birth.
Somehow you managed to be ignorant of both Satanism and Christianity all in one post. Bravo.
While you may say it's all rubbish and those writer aren't any good, plenty of people enjoy them. A decade ago I wrote some fan fiction for a fairly unknown piece of fiction and even ten years later I still get a couple of people a year that send me a note about how they found my work and loved it. Heck technically fan fiction is illegal, for or not for profit... Yet it still thrives because people enjoy it.
Fanfictions tend to be short, and dont take months or years to write. I wont disparage them, but a world in which our literature consisted solely in fanfiction type writings would be a world with a shallow literary heritage.
Copper is better for circuits; gold is generally just used for the plating because of its corrosion resistance. Gold is also not necessary for CD reflective layers-- only archival CDs use that, I believe.
I would agree that Bitcoins as well as other things digital probably do not have intrinsic value, unless they communicate non-self-referential information.
Intrinsic value means it has value despite it being a medium of exchange. Your typical US dollar bill has value only because it is a medium of exchange.
Not if theres a nuclear winter, and I need some strong, sturdy piece of paper that I could write a message on.
Everything has intrinsic value on an objective level. Thats why I said "or else theyre waxing philosophical".
Its value is because people have always valued it as a pretty, hard to get, non corroding metal.
Thats it. Take away its history, and people would either not use it as a currency, or would favor something more resilient and hard to obtain like Iridium (which is far more resistant to damage and chemical attack than gold), or more widely useful like copper, or else prettier (which could be any number of things). Titanium, silver, iridium, copper alloys, etc all could be used for currency as well (in their own ways) as gold could; theres nothing unique about gold except its incredibly long history.
those werent misspellings, they were capitalization and punctuation problems caused by a disorder that leaves me unable to care about using my shift and punctuation keys except when absolutely necessary.
If you invent an inexpensive piece of hardware that can push several orders of magnitude more SHA256 hashes per joule, you will successfully capture a disproportionate percentage of those 300 coins per hour. You do not get to generate unlimited coins - you just asymptotically approach 300/hour.
Fair enough, obviously I know little enough about that part of it that I cannot refute that.
Fair enough on the first point, I have reservations about the second, and on this...
Plenty of people around the world think it was a very bad idea to move away from a gold standard.
I would remark, why then should we move to the "prime factors" standard? It doesnt even have the fake intrinsic value that gold has due to its multi-thousand year history as a currency; bitcoins have value only because people in the last 2-3 years have decided they do. That is a REALLY poor standard for gold.
That was my point: Gold standard has benefits and problems, an un-backed currency has benefits and problems, but an unbacked currency with uncontrollable supply has the worst of each.
No, Christmas isnt really an exclusively christian holiday. I dont know if you can set a year when it changed, or if it ever truly has been since it took off in the US (it wasnt a big deal during the revolutionary war, except for the Germans), but Christmas today is a hybrid holiday-- it is for christians a celebration of Christ's birth, and for others a traditional celebration of family, friends, and togetherness.
A very good friend of mine-- an athiest-- is right now celebrating Christmas with his family, because it is a nice thing to do. He every year gives me christmas gifts; that doesnt mean he believes in Christ, it just means hes being a good friend and recognizes what is an american (formerly german) tradition.
Problem: is the amount to be paid to authors a static amount? If so, what makes you think all authors are going to agree to those terms?
Serious counterpoint to your strawman:
We have limited resources: paper to print books, time to publish them, shipping to distribute them. For ebooks, its computer time to produce them, writer's time to create them.
Absent the capitalist system of letting the market decide which products are desirable, how do you determine which ebooks deserve to succeed? How do you determine how much to reimburse the author?
These are the fatal flaws with hard-core socialism / communism: you have no reliable, accurate way to determine the best way to allocate resources. Figure that out, and your idea can work. Its less of an issue with ebooks since fewer resources are needed, but theres still the issue of authors expecting to be paid and the folks who digitize their work expecting to be paid in line with the worth of their product.