Re:Slashdot becoming fascist?
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 1
(i.e. one race superior to others--guess which one is supposed to be superior?)
The VDARE articles on race are pretty much in tune with Rushton's thesis that holds east Asians as the race with the highest IQ. Have you seen a preponderance of Asians writing stories on VDARE? Are they North Korean fascists or something?
Let's say you are some guy who can change the rate of interest people pay -- someone like, oh, I don't know -- Greenspan let's say. Now all you have to do to turn a positive gain situation into a zero gain situation is raise the real rate of interest high enough and the net present value calculation brings the capital gains to zero.
Whether you like it or not there _are_ people who are better at acquiring than at creating wealth. Call them what you want.
While it is true a lot of fools were being separated from their money during the last half of the 1990s, the real reason the stockmarket crashed was Alan Greenspan's departure from his own policy of pegging the Fed Funds rate to the price of gold. From 1997 through 2000, even as the ratio of Fed Funds rate to gold was skyrocketing, Greenspan put the screws down on the economy until things did collapse.
There was plenty of high value in the network revolution and still is. It's just that so many con men showed up, that when Greenspan put the screws down trying to make it a zero-sum game, the positive-sum players got eaten alive by the zero-sum players.
What I want to hear about is Linspire to Windows migrations.
The problem with Linux as a desktop environment is the system administration including application installation as well as self-configuration of devices. No one has taken on the problem of administration of installation and configuration of applications in a serious way until Linspire came along.
So this article talking about disillusionment with Linux as a desktop box is a yawner for me. Wake me up when the corps who have adopted Linspire abandon it for Windows.
$50M is almost too much
on
After the X Prize
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It would be a shame to award the prize to some old technology that doesn't build on the inherent economies of the reusable first stages being developed by the Ansari X-Prize contenstants.
As Robert Truax told me, people keep studying what the optimal number of stages for an orbital launch vehicle should be and they keep discovering the answer is "2". The first stage is always lower exhaust velocity and cheap per kg. The second stage is always higher exhaust velocity and more expensive per kg.
The ideal first stage derived from the Ansari X-Prize entrants would be one that is cheap to:
scale up
refuel
relaunch
Rutan's technology doesn't really fill the bill here because fabricating hybrid rockeet motors is expensive compared to refueling. Also its unlikely his aerodynamic body scales up as cheaply as does simple tankage with vertical takeoff.
This could be the really big deal -- not just for manned spaceflight but for cheap access to space generally.
Virgin is going suborbital, not orbital.
on
After the X Prize
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· Score: 2, Informative
The technology Virgin has licensed is the Ansari X-Prize entry of Burt Rutan/Paul Allen which is suborbital.
Orbital is going to take some serious doing beyond what Rutan et al have come up with.
Armadillo has a lot better shot at it than Virgin.
Re:Where have you been for the last 30 years?
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 1
First, you're presuming that there is some sort of inseparable link between the Japanese strategy of automation as replacement for importation of grunt workers, and the deficits of Japanese society as a whole.
That said, I'll help you with your argument:
If the Japenese are so smart, why don't they automate their jobs so can have a life and not have to work 76 hrs. a week?
Perhaps it is because it is the only way they know how to automate their society. It's called "sweat equity". Now this isn't the only way to automate their society but its the only way they know how.
The proper way to do it is to replace the tax system (taxing productivity such as income, capital gains, sales, value added) with a property rights reinsurance system which amounts to net asset taxation (perhaps adjusted for risk behaviors of owners). Since you can't do much to mitigate risk of being screwed over by single points of failure in international specialization, make sure you have tariffs set so you can mitigate those risks domestically. The revenues thereby raised are then disbursed as citizen dividends to drive the demand side in the correct direction for society. They'll start having more children very rapidly and they'll be paying a lot more attention to their rearing.
Now, I'm not saying the fat cats will do anything this rational -- but thinking you can solve things by importing a slave class to replace your children is just crazy. If you are going to pursue some sort of insurrectionist agenda why not just kill the rich and reform the tax system to remove taxation on productivity?
Your Own Personal Shuttle!
on
NYT On Flying Cars
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Remember when NASA was telling us space shuttles were going to bridge us from the rockets of the Apollo program to the commercial space liners of 2001?
In my town the rationale was to keep weekend tourists staying around during the week if they could swing it with our public access mesh. Tourist dollars pay for it and the mesh was really cheap so long as local businesses donated space for the mesh boxes. This requires someone integrated into the community to head up the project of course. You can't just walk up to a random small business in a place you aren't known and ask for the use of their attic and the inevitable visits to cycle power.
Of course government pays out settlements when things go wrong. The guys who go off to die around the world aren't the guys who owned the World Trade Center for example, but the government did step in and act as reinsurer of last resort not only in response to that event but for the reinsurance industry itself.
The government steps in and bails out the big boys all the time.
Blithering about how horrible it is for old people to be cared for by robots is so shallow as to be silly. There will still be children around even without immigration. The old people should be socially interacting with their descendants -- not with some imported grunt workers.
The south lost the war between the states because of their reliance on low productivity human labor as compared to the northern states which were vigorously industrializing. The southern states were opposed to trade tariffs for all the same reasons modern slave holders are.
The cost of that protection is born by those who produce -- via taxes on income, capital gains, sales, value added, etc -- not by those who own the rights protected by the government.
Huh? Everybody enjoys property rights. I don't know what "those who own the rights protected by the government" means.
Ask any property insurance company to ignore the value of the property they insure and they'll laugh in your face. Call property insurance premiums "communist redistribution of wealth" and you'll get the same reaction.
The concept is easy to understand.
Hell, even Lysander Spooner said that government is legitimate when it is considered as a mutual insurance organization.
"self-employment" doesn't mean income
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 1, Informative
Speaking as someone who has been self employed for nearly all of his professional life, I can state unequivocally that this is a red herring.
"Self employment" means I am ineligible for unemployment benefits even though I may be experiencing zero income for a year or more and paying more taxes than "other employed" people when I do make money.
"Self employment" is the second to last resort of the socially sadistic. The last resort is to actually imprison people -- and that is exactly what the article points out is happening. This takes things from being socially sadistic to being sexually sadistic.
Don't be surprised if one day you find yourself skinned and rolled in salt.
The data is in. Immigration doesn't work.
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 1
If immigration were so great for the economy, you'd expect those states in which it is most heavily employed to have subsequent increases in their long-term state bond ratings. The data shows exactly the opposite.
You can cry "correlation doesn't imply causation" all you want but you have to measure something or you are preaching theocracy -- not economic theory.
Again, how many coincidences like that do you need before your cries of "racism", "xenophobia", "protectionism", "loser", just sound like so much religious cant?
Japan is automating like crazy.
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Your "prediction" about Japan ignores Japan's high investment rates in automation.
You sound like a southern plantation slave owner arguing against a northern industrialist prior to the civil war.
You're immoral and an idiot.
Black Protectionism
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 2, Interesting
A majority of the Detroit City Council wants to implement an economic development plan it commissioned for $112,000 that preaches racial isolation and rails against immigration in its bid to gain economic success for poor blacks.
The crux of the plan is the creation of a business district -- dubbed African Town -- that would be funded in part with city money and made up of black-owned businesses catering to a black clientele.
The report also complains that immigrants from Mexico, Asia and the Middle East are stealing resources, jobs and other opportunities from blacks and calls on city leaders to stop the economic shift.
...
"Unemployment" is a red herring
on
The Jobs Crunch
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· Score: 1
W. D. Hamilton, widely recognized as the seminal theorist in altruism theory, wrote an essay "Innate Social Aptitudes of Man: an Approach from Evolutionary Genetics in which he describes the probable source of social decline as the result of inadequate maintanence of "barbarian pastoralist" input to panmictic societies:
The incursions of barbaric pastoralists seem to do civilizations less harm in the long run than one might expect. Indeed, two dark ages and renaissances in Europe suggest a recurring pattern in which a renaissance follows an incursion by about 800 years. It may even be suggested that certain genes or traditions of pastoralists revitalize the conquered people with an ingredient of progress which tends to die out in a large panmictic population for the reasons already discussed. I have in mind altruism itself, or the part of the altruism which is perhaps better described as self-sacrificial daring. By the time of the renaissance it may be that the mixing of genes and cultures (or of cultures alone if these are the only vehicles, which I doubt) has continued long enough to bring the old mercantile thoughtfulness and the infused daring into conjunction in a few individuals who then find courage for all kinds of inventive innovation against the resistance of established thought and practice. Often, however, the cost in fitness of such altruism and sublimated pugnacity to the individuals concerned is by no means metaphorical, and the benefits to fitness, such as they are, go to a mass of individuals whose genetic correlation with the innovator must be slight indeed. Thus civilization probably slowly reduces its altruism of all kinds, including the kinds needed for cultural creativity (see also Eshel 1972).
The incursions of which he speaks are those of the Dorians leading to the Golden Age and of the Goths, leading to the Renaissance.
It appears that Western Civilization is in its final stages of Empire and has imported all manner of slaves to prop up its increasingly untenable practice of paying for the costs of protection of legal rights through taxation of productivity (income, capital gains, value added, sales, etc.)
The problem is this time around all of the barbarian pastoralists have been domesticated.
We say that the redistribution of wealth by the state is (a) immoral and (b) unconstitutional.
I call bullshit.
The government protects legal rights. Wealth is a legal right. The cost of that protection is born by those who produce -- via taxes on income, capital gains, sales, value added, etc -- not by those who own the rights protected by the government.
That's what is immoral.
Redeploying ownership rights based on correction of this situation would radically change society for the better.
What value would be placed on a citizen's life, which the government would also ostensibly be protecting with the same defense system? If it is very large, each citizen would essentially owe the same amount.
What each citizen "owes" is their able-bodied male relatives in time of emergency. By the same token, the vital assets that went into creating those assets to the State would be exempt -- assets like a house and subsistence acreage and/or tools of the trade. This is why bankruptcy protection doesn't allow subsistence assets to be confiscated.This isn't the libertarian ideal of "individualistic" treatment of people but then if libertarians can't start to respect the role of families in society they are going to have a very hard time becoming relevant.
You mention that hated skyscrapers would have a higher cost of insurance--which is true--but being hated wouldn't increase their value. I imagine there are many assets which have a cost of insurance that doesn't line up well with their value.
Yes, as I said, this is where actuaries make their money. However, there is something of a culture gap between people who are used to paying taxes and the soft of anarcho-capitalistic system we're discussing so, yes, I do resort to the heuristic from time to time when discussing these issues with people who cannot think in anarcho-capitalistic terms.
Add to that the influx of foreign workers and you're looking at a very bleak picture for the people who built the computer industry when everyone else was just looking at how they could rip off a piece of the pie.
Major media are carrying the story that the UN is blaming much of the spread of drug resistant TB on the prevalence of AIDS/HIV-infection. This is due to the susceptibility of those populations to become infected and spread the disease to others.
Slashdot Mirror
The VDARE articles on race are pretty much in tune with Rushton's thesis that holds east Asians as the race with the highest IQ. Have you seen a preponderance of Asians writing stories on VDARE? Are they North Korean fascists or something?
Whether you like it or not there _are_ people who are better at acquiring than at creating wealth. Call them what you want.
There was plenty of high value in the network revolution and still is. It's just that so many con men showed up, that when Greenspan put the screws down trying to make it a zero-sum game, the positive-sum players got eaten alive by the zero-sum players.
The problem with Linux as a desktop environment is the system administration including application installation as well as self-configuration of devices. No one has taken on the problem of administration of installation and configuration of applications in a serious way until Linspire came along.
So this article talking about disillusionment with Linux as a desktop box is a yawner for me. Wake me up when the corps who have adopted Linspire abandon it for Windows.
It would be a shame to award the prize to some old technology that doesn't build on the inherent economies of the reusable first stages being developed by the Ansari X-Prize contenstants.
As Robert Truax told me, people keep studying what the optimal number of stages for an orbital launch vehicle should be and they keep discovering the answer is "2". The first stage is always lower exhaust velocity and cheap per kg. The second stage is always higher exhaust velocity and more expensive per kg.
The ideal first stage derived from the Ansari X-Prize entrants would be one that is cheap to:
Rutan's technology doesn't really fill the bill here because fabricating hybrid rockeet motors is expensive compared to refueling. Also its unlikely his aerodynamic body scales up as cheaply as does simple tankage with vertical takeoff.
As it turns out, John Carmack just reported his team has reached probably the most critical milestone for such a first stage by demonstrating a scaled up version of their methanol/H2O2(50%) mixed monoprop engine.
This could be the really big deal -- not just for manned spaceflight but for cheap access to space generally.
Orbital is going to take some serious doing beyond what Rutan et al have come up with.
Armadillo has a lot better shot at it than Virgin.
That said, I'll help you with your argument:
If the Japenese are so smart, why don't they automate their jobs so can have a life and not have to work 76 hrs. a week?
Perhaps it is because it is the only way they know how to automate their society. It's called "sweat equity". Now this isn't the only way to automate their society but its the only way they know how.
The proper way to do it is to replace the tax system (taxing productivity such as income, capital gains, sales, value added) with a property rights reinsurance system which amounts to net asset taxation (perhaps adjusted for risk behaviors of owners). Since you can't do much to mitigate risk of being screwed over by single points of failure in international specialization, make sure you have tariffs set so you can mitigate those risks domestically. The revenues thereby raised are then disbursed as citizen dividends to drive the demand side in the correct direction for society. They'll start having more children very rapidly and they'll be paying a lot more attention to their rearing.
Now, I'm not saying the fat cats will do anything this rational -- but thinking you can solve things by importing a slave class to replace your children is just crazy. If you are going to pursue some sort of insurrectionist agenda why not just kill the rich and reform the tax system to remove taxation on productivity?
It's one thing to turn a grade school teacher to hamburger, live, before the expectant eyes of millions of children, with "the most complex machine ever built by man". It's another to have those children themselves turned to hamburger.
The labor force participation rate is as a percentage of workforce, not of total population.
In my town the rationale was to keep weekend tourists staying around during the week if they could swing it with our public access mesh. Tourist dollars pay for it and the mesh was really cheap so long as local businesses donated space for the mesh boxes. This requires someone integrated into the community to head up the project of course. You can't just walk up to a random small business in a place you aren't known and ask for the use of their attic and the inevitable visits to cycle power.
The government steps in and bails out the big boys all the time.
You can reduce your wage costs to zero by hiring no one.
Alternatively, you can just hire those who are willing to work for nothing.
Blithering about how horrible it is for old people to be cared for by robots is so shallow as to be silly. There will still be children around even without immigration. The old people should be socially interacting with their descendants -- not with some imported grunt workers.
The south lost the war between the states because of their reliance on low productivity human labor as compared to the northern states which were vigorously industrializing. The southern states were opposed to trade tariffs for all the same reasons modern slave holders are.
Huh? Everybody enjoys property rights. I don't know what "those who own the rights protected by the government" means.
Ask any property insurance company to ignore the value of the property they insure and they'll laugh in your face. Call property insurance premiums "communist redistribution of wealth" and you'll get the same reaction.
The concept is easy to understand.
Hell, even Lysander Spooner said that government is legitimate when it is considered as a mutual insurance organization.
"Self employment" means I am ineligible for unemployment benefits even though I may be experiencing zero income for a year or more and paying more taxes than "other employed" people when I do make money.
"Self employment" is the second to last resort of the socially sadistic. The last resort is to actually imprison people -- and that is exactly what the article points out is happening. This takes things from being socially sadistic to being sexually sadistic.
Don't be surprised if one day you find yourself skinned and rolled in salt.
You can cry "correlation doesn't imply causation" all you want but you have to measure something or you are preaching theocracy -- not economic theory.
So what else might we measure? How about the "success" of companies that most heavily lobbied for and used guest workers like Sun Corporation?
Again, how many coincidences like that do you need before your cries of "racism", "xenophobia", "protectionism", "loser", just sound like so much religious cant?
You sound like a southern plantation slave owner arguing against a northern industrialist prior to the civil war.
You're immoral and an idiot.
September 21, 2004
BY MARISOL BELLO
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
A majority of the Detroit City Council wants to implement an economic development plan it commissioned for $112,000 that preaches racial isolation and rails against immigration in its bid to gain economic success for poor blacks.
The crux of the plan is the creation of a business district -- dubbed African Town -- that would be funded in part with city money and made up of black-owned businesses catering to a black clientele.
The report also complains that immigrants from Mexico, Asia and the Middle East are stealing resources, jobs and other opportunities from blacks and calls on city leaders to stop the economic shift.
...
Clue: This is not due to the population precipitously joining the ranks of the independently wealthy.
The incursions of which he speaks are those of the Dorians leading to the Golden Age and of the Goths, leading to the Renaissance.
It appears that Western Civilization is in its final stages of Empire and has imported all manner of slaves to prop up its increasingly untenable practice of paying for the costs of protection of legal rights through taxation of productivity (income, capital gains, value added, sales, etc.)
The problem is this time around all of the barbarian pastoralists have been domesticated.
I call bullshit.
The government protects legal rights. Wealth is a legal right. The cost of that protection is born by those who produce -- via taxes on income, capital gains, sales, value added, etc -- not by those who own the rights protected by the government.
That's what is immoral.
Redeploying ownership rights based on correction of this situation would radically change society for the better.
What each citizen "owes" is their able-bodied male relatives in time of emergency. By the same token, the vital assets that went into creating those assets to the State would be exempt -- assets like a house and subsistence acreage and/or tools of the trade. This is why bankruptcy protection doesn't allow subsistence assets to be confiscated.This isn't the libertarian ideal of "individualistic" treatment of people but then if libertarians can't start to respect the role of families in society they are going to have a very hard time becoming relevant.
You mention that hated skyscrapers would have a higher cost of insurance--which is true--but being hated wouldn't increase their value. I imagine there are many assets which have a cost of insurance that doesn't line up well with their value.
Yes, as I said, this is where actuaries make their money. However, there is something of a culture gap between people who are used to paying taxes and the soft of anarcho-capitalistic system we're discussing so, yes, I do resort to the heuristic from time to time when discussing these issues with people who cannot think in anarcho-capitalistic terms.
Add to that the influx of foreign workers and you're looking at a very bleak picture for the people who built the computer industry when everyone else was just looking at how they could rip off a piece of the pie.
Unix? What's that? Is that a takeoff of Linux? What did the Unix guys do that can't be done with Java-Struts!?
Major media are carrying the story that the UN is blaming much of the spread of drug resistant TB on the prevalence of AIDS/HIV-infection. This is due to the susceptibility of those populations to become infected and spread the disease to others.