You can't have 10s of thousands of generations in 10,000 years.
Of course.
That's my point. It got encoded in our genes up to 10,000 years ago when the 'norm' changed.
Human tribes roamed the planet for millions of years - that's 60+ thousand generations per 1 million years.
Even if we restrict our thinking to the homo sapiens species alone then it roamed the planet for hundreds of thousands of years, 6000+ generations per hundred thousand years.
That was plenty of time to get 'social norms' partially encoded in genes.
The last 10,000 (600 generations) was not (nearly) enough to erase hundreds of thousands of years of genetic history, especially when it relates to something as central as efficient reproduction strategy.
Gold cannot simply go up in value due to US being the biggest producer of it. The more of it is produced, the less relative value it has.
That was my point: the (finite) jump in gold production was a hidden stimulus to the economy in essence: money printed 'out of thin air'!
Gold was a money equivalent, so any new gold mined increased the effective money supply.
The price level was not a direct function of the money supply: as I mentioned there was also a heavy influx of new workers (immigrants) and 'more people, more products, for the same amount of money' is an obvious deflationary force.
So the inflationary effect of more gold combined with the deflationary effects of more people working for the same number of dollars, combined with supply/demand shortages in war times created the kind of fluctuating inflation/deflation picture you can see throughout the 19th century, in the graph I linked to.
But doing what you suggest: combining a growing economy while coupling money to a fixed amount of gold, would result in deflation - not good. You need a steadily increasing supply of gold to keep such a system near full productive capacity: that is unfortunately not possible with gold.
And the average per capita income went up even more (and you can buy products were unimaginable or cost a fortune in 1914), so what's your complaint, that the numbers are increasing?:-)
- gold is not wealth, it's money. So as somebody works and makes their money, they re-invest (as again, history proves) to make more money, and this allows businesses to take that loan and invest.
You are wrong here too. Let me show you how.
Gold is a globally largely fixed amount of physical matter, so if you fix the value of a growing, dynamic, ever expanding economy to this fixed amount of matter then necessarily you are giving gold fiat value out of thin air: 10 years down the line, even if you did not do anything productive with that gold, it will be worth a bigger pie of the world economy...
Let me give you a simplified example: lets say we have an economy of 1000 people with 1000 pounds of gold as "money", and at a given point in time one specific person owns 1 pound of gold. Lets observe what happens to this person.
Fair enough model to discuss, right?
Fast forward 10 years. 999 people have worked hard and the economy has done well and it has grown by 7.2% every year. At the end this compounds to 100% of growth over the 10 year period: fantastic result!
Lets go back to the person who has stored 1 pound of gold 10 years ago. That person did nothing productive in those 10 years. But his 1 pound of gold will now still be worth 0.1% of all the wealth of this economy: which has doubled over the past 10 years!
Is this a fair result in your opinion? Someone who has not worked hard during those 10 years, someone who did nothing else but kept money away from productive investments , is rewarded with a 100% return? In those 10 years a sizeable portion of the economy's value was redistributed to this passive owner of gold: this is neither fair (it's a pyramid scheme: the first ones in get most of the benefits) nor productive (it stifles investment).
This is why a fixed money supply and gold in particular is theft from future generations and redistribution of wealth all in one.
The period of 1800-1900 was evidently not "deflation at the time".
The dollar was gaining in value, firstly because almost every other civilized country on the western hemisphere was growing at that time, secondly because it was backed by an inflating supply of gold (the US was one of the biggest gold producers at the time), thirdly because the US had a very rapid influx of population, lots of migrating workers eager to increase the international value of the fixed supply of dollars.
Take away the increasing supply in gold backed by gold mines and take away the increasing value of exports fuelled by cheap immigrants you get a stagnating economy: for example France, the last holdout with the gold standard after the Great Depression, was the slowest to recover from the Great Depression.
(sorry about the messed up paraphrased quote, it was supposed to be "gold is wealth", as you correctly guessed.)
currency that is not backed by any work or something tangible is theft from future generations, because such currency ends up creating enormous inflation
That is almost true, with a very important distinction: enormous inflation is mainly theft from past generations: those who have already earned part of their "wealth" in the official currency and are thus cheated by that currency's purchasing power dropping dramatically.
But I think you are missing the full story here, so let me outline it. There are two extreme outcomes of money supply flow excesses:
To much inflation (hyperinflation), which is mainly theft from past generations
Too little (negative real inflation or deflation), which is mainly theft from future generations: it throttles economic activity and encourages unfair hoarding.
So if you want a fair society, one which rewards hard work fairly, regardless of where and when you were born (do you want one? I have to ask because it's not a given.), then we have to find a middle-of-the-road of value for inflation which neither steals from past (through too high inflation), nor from future generations (through too low inflation).
In a simplified model this 'ideal' value for inflation is roughly at the rate of growth of the economy: this does not let past work devalue (whatever is inflated away is won back by you owning currency of a country that is N percent stronger).
(This all is hard to measure and the definition is subjective, so there's always a lot of arguing about it, but nevertheless this is the fairest outcome.)
Now where does gold stand in this picture? If you argue a classic gold standard, with a fixed monetary base then it's sadly close to the extreme deflation end of it: it causes a real negative inflation rate of the growth of the country. It's not the worst hyper-deflation outcome, but it's close to it: it perpetually steals at least growth% amount of resources from future generations, per year.
Gold is forced redistribution of wealth to those who already have amassed gold...
Also note how historic precedent shows us this concept in action: for example the 19th century 'gilded age' period in the USA was very prosperous, partly because gold production was growing the money supply in a steady fashion. Once this "gold growth" positive effect levelled off, somewhere near the end of the 19th century, the US economy started to stagnate: frequent bank crashes, periods of high unemployment and other signs of economic distress - all resulting in needless human suffering. (This is very simplified: a civil war and boom/bust cycles elsewhere on the globe were significant factors as well)
Today, with a largely constant gold supply (most of the easily extractable gold has already been mined), going back to a gold standard would be disastrous: we'd have deflation hard-coded for eternity, with today's ruling elite hoarding most of the gold, and future generations would have less and less of a chance to have a fair part of the pie.
Note, gold has been used by past ruling elites to maintain their wealth for hundreds of years (with no real work performed after the initial act of acquiring wealth): much of medieval Europe was on the gold standard and as a result of hundreds of years of deflation wealth got concentrated/redistributed into very few hands. Newcomers had almost no chance to acquire sufficient wealth to be players - most of the existing gold was already distributed and new production of gold was very small.
[...] 2. Whether work is done for pay or for other reasons, there is no major difference, again there is some goal that needs to be achieved, so somebody is trying to achieve it and that's work, (which is opposed to leisure, when people's goal is not to achieve any particular goal, but to enjoy some activity, because they like it.)
3. Work has a very rigid connection to creation of products and services.
Your argument is empty, that's why you get no satisfaction.
Well, you err in two main ways here.
Firstly, above you assume that leisure is separate from work, while it's almost always not: work is generally a dynamic trade-off between leisure and survival/compulsion, and humans generally try to find types of work for themselves that serve both purposes.
This alone puts a large hole into your "work creates wealth" argument.
Work is a lot more than about directly measurable material/intellectual output - and you will misanalyse the economy in very significant ways if you do not put them into your mental model.
Secondly, you err in assuming that the only material output of work is 'products and services'.
That is not so, there are major other categories such as human knowledge (of which free software is, incidentally, a significant part of) - which is neither a product, nor a service, it is an intellectual achievement of humanity that can be turned into products or services. (There are other results of work as well, which are neither 'products' nor 'services' and if you want to understand the economy you need to understand those factors as well.)
These two basic mistakes inevitably put you on a rigid, narrow, materialistic pathway (that, funnily enough, is quite similar to how communists have argued some 100 years ago) that both under-recognizes group intellectual achievements and over-credits individual achievements and over-simplifies individual behaviour.
Is it any surprise that you do not seem to understand RMS's arguments?:-)
The quote was nevertheless misleading as presented, it was taken out of fair context. Linking to the full context is not equivalent to quoting fairly. The press does this all the time: quoting people out of context while still linking to the original source. Most of the readers obviously do not double check whether the quote is fair, so this technique is rather efficient at misleading.
Note, I do not claim that you quoted out of context intentionally. (the press does this rather consciously)
The links to past statements you made do not (at all) answer the core statements I made, which were:
'Work' is an activity by humans, and as such it does many things, and often it actually actively destroys total 'business wealth' as you seem to be defining it. (google for 'creative destruction')
Work is an activity of humans who trade time and effort in exchange of some sort of compensation. Sometimes "enjoyment" or "feeling fulfilled" is the only form of compensation: ask charity workers.
It has no forced connection whatsoever to your (rather rigid) views about 'wealth', 'business' and 'money'.
Which I have posted in stark contrast to your statement, which was:
Work creates wealth - products and services
So, because you left my arguments unchallenged I still maintain my position that your statement is false and that you have no basis to lecture others about how human civilization and in particular the economy works.
the man is totally ignorant of the way economy functions
You simply disagree with him. That is not grounds to call someone else with a differing opinion "totally ignorant".
Especially since you show rather basic misunderstandings about how the economy works.
Such as:
Work creates wealth - products and services
Not really. 'Work' is an activity by humans, and as such it does many things, and often it actually actively destroys total 'business wealth' as you seem to be defining it. (google for 'creative destruction')
Work is an activity of humans who trade time and effort in exchange of some sort of compensation. Sometimes "enjoyment" or "feeling fulfilled" is the only form of compensation: ask charity workers.
It has no forced connection whatsoever to your (rather rigid) views about 'wealth', 'business' and 'money'.
So you have absolutely no basis to call someone else ignorant on this topic.
men want to see cheating wife porn, and porn where multiple men share a woman, because that was the norm in our prehistory until about 10,000 years ago
So how does what you say contradict with what the authors of the article say:
men are wired to be sexually jealous but simultaneously they're also sexually aroused so if a man sees a woman — including his partner — with another man, he becomes more aroused
Are you really making the argument that if something is "the norm" for tens of thousands of generations (your words) it will neatly stay out of our genome?
The exception is my country, Australia, which has had a decreasing murder rate, but we already had a decreasing murder rate before the gun laws were introduced. It seems difficult to demonstrate that gun restrictions have actually contributed to the decreased murder rate.
Well, but homicides (not just gun related homicides) are at historic lows in Australia.
You obviously cannot prove that this historic low murder rate was only achieved through gun restrictions (in any complex country there are multiple complex processes going on, you cannot separate them out easily), but it certainly blows a large hole into the "gun restrictions will make crime worse, because criminals will ignore gun restriction laws!" argument, right?
Anything I have seen that claims a reduced murder rate from firearms bans only claims reduced "firearms murders", not murder rates overall, which seems pretty pointless unless you would be distressed at a murder committed with a gun but ok with murder committed in some other way.
It certainly gives us a part of the picture - no argument about that.
But why would it be 'pointless' to point out such outcomes? One of the popular argument against gun restrictions is the "criminals ignore laws, they will just own a gun illegally!".
As it turns out, when guns are banned in general, the number of both legal and illegal firearms goes down and thus the number of firearms related murders (and the number of accidental deaths and injuries) goes (way) down as well.
since you acknowledged that most guns are not used for crime, are you claiming that you want to use your gun to shoot a very likely unarmed person
1. The poster never said that most guns are not used for crime.
He certainly implied it. Look, if most guns are used for crime then the best course of action would be to bring them off the streets, don't you agree?
2. Even assuming the poster did say that, how in the hell do you jump to the conclusion that an intruder is 'very likely unarmed'?
I went to the logical conclusion to combine the "most guns are not used to commit crimes" fact with the "most burglaries are unarmed" fact (a burglar is generally not so stupid to bring a gun with himself and be convicted of robbery and armed assault. The whole rational point of burglary is to avoid having to use a gun. I do not claim that there are never any armed burglars, I just say that they are rare).
3. If someone attempts to break into your house, what is your course of action? Let it happen, and hope that the intruder leaves you and your family alone?
Correct. That's the best course of action even if you have a gun and confront a burglar.
If the intruder is armed then he is likely both better prepared (he planned the burglary in advance, while you learned about it just in that very second) and he is probably better at using arms against a real human (again, if he is in the profession of armed burglaries he is more likely to be trained at this 'using arms at night' business as well - even if you have excellent guns training you probably never shot a real human being, did you?).
Remember, burglars will generally just try to flee when they are discovered. Burglary 101 and stuff.
Put your Chuk Norris male reflexes aside and save your family from the sight of a shot burglar or a shot family member. (Even if the victim survives, both types of incidents will traumatize them a lot more and a lot longer than a few missing items.)
Talk about you being the judge, jury and executioner who decides life and death in one split second, in the middle of the night.
The intruder can avoid this situation by not trying to break into someone's house. The intruder has no one to blame but himself for the outcome.
After a lot of preparation we get to the meat of the argument.
Why do you assume that this split second decision, which seems to correct and obvious to you in the middle of the night, is in fact correct?
How do you know that the 'burglar' is not your teenage daughter, late home from a party? (real story, she died)
How do you know that the 'burglar' is not your neighbour who came in by mistake? (real story, he died)
How do you know that the 'burglar' is not your wife, who was trying not to wake you up? (real story, she died.)
There's a reason human civilization generally tries to put some amount of 'time' between the various steps of accusing someone, finding him guilty and executing him. (Just for the off chance that he didn't do it, you know.)
There's a real human price of your "freedom to shoot suspicious strangers at night", and you do not seem to be even aware of it!
I hadn't seen this article "refuting" Penrose but it's not particularly interesting or that convincing.
No, but it nicely proves what intuition (or rather, common sense) should tell you in the first minute of thinking about Penrose's argument: that it's wishful thinking.
It was wishful thinking in the 1980s that a computer would never be able to beat a human world champion at chess, because the human mind was so "special" and "fundamentally different" from computers.
The human mind is not particularly special and its limitations are not particularly special either.
You may call this 'quibbling' too.
Do you feel threatened by the idea that the human mind is nothing else but ~1.4 kg of physical matter?:-)
No If I shoot some scumbag who is trying to break into my abode, it is NOT murder, it is self defense.
So, since you acknowledged that most guns are not used for crime, are you claiming that you want to use your gun to shoot a very likely unarmed person , whom to you, in the middle of the night, appears to be a 'scumbag trying to break into your abode'?
Wow. Talk about you being the judge, jury and executioner who decides life and death in one split second, in the middle of the night.
Do you accept that others might have a legitimate problem with your concept?
On average, a firearm is legally used every 13 seconds for self defense (based on a 1994 study). I look at this as a life saved.
Why do you look at this as a "life saved"?
There are plenty of countries with virtually no firearms in public hands that have (much) lower homicides per capita than the US.
Couldn't firearms be used every 13 seconds just because people in the US know that lots of other people around them have weapons (including criminals) and thus they fear for their lives more often? I.e. couldn't this just be a self-reinforcing cycle of violence - even if those gun uses are 'legal'?
Go look at Africa to see what happens when there's no control.
Funny thing is, the problems in Africa have absolutely nothing to with the population. Hell, they have a low population for the amount of arable land on that continent. Their problems stem from the thugs and olgiarchs and kleptos running the various governments in Africa, If you could get good leadership, the population on that continent could greatly expand with out harming the land.
Try again with a better arguement
In other words the problems in Africa have everything to do with too weak governments or with no government at all (think Somalia).
A thug running a diamond business, monopolizing a country's institutions is not 'government', it's a thug running a diamond business who managed to kill or control all other thugs and thus managed to monopolize. Dictatorship is the ultimate end game of free-for-all archeo-capitalism: the big fish has eaten all the small fish.
Is that the model of society you envision for America as well?
In reality, they call it confirmation bias. as has been shown many times.
Or (in Greece) it might have to do with the stress caused by thermal expansion of large amounts of sun heated rock surface during extreme hot weather: providing the last straw to the thousands of years build-up of rock layer stress which finally breaks the back of the camel.
Just like a single person can trigger a big avalanche.
Increasing the money supply is what causes inflation, and we're facing a huge uptick very soon.
FYI, that turned out to be a myth not supported by reality.
Huge uptick in inflation 'anytime soon' has been predicted by hard money economists for the past 3 years non stop: they now have an egg on their face (and angry clients who lost tons of money) plus a huge gaping hole in their model as hyperinflaton (or even a huge uptick in inflation) never materialized.
What we got instead was keynesian predictions proven correct: an economy and an inflation rate balancing on the edge of deflation.
It is time for you re-evaluate your assumptions and your models of how you think about large economies I think. No need to politicize it - just make sure your models agree with the data.
Note that even the premise is wrong: it's not even "their wealth" and it's not being "redistributed".
If Warren Buffet was restricted to trading only within Somalia, would he still be able to make billions? Not at all, he needs the vast markets and vast infrastructure of a developed society to 'make money'.
Why pretend that there's no fee for that infrastructure and civilization? Why allow free-loading on the rest of society and turn around and declare the cost collection mechanism that builds and maintains civilization (taxes) somehow 'unfair'? Just because it's not directly usage metered? How do you meter the usage of a 500 million people market? I think metering by "how much money did you make using the rest of us" is as fair and simple as it gets.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't have 10s of thousands of generations in 10,000 years.
Of course.
That's my point. It got encoded in our genes up to 10,000 years ago when the 'norm' changed.
Human tribes roamed the planet for millions of years - that's 60+ thousand generations per 1 million years.
Even if we restrict our thinking to the homo sapiens species alone then it roamed the planet for hundreds of thousands of years, 6000+ generations per hundred thousand years.
That was plenty of time to get 'social norms' partially encoded in genes.
The last 10,000 (600 generations) was not (nearly) enough to erase hundreds of thousands of years of genetic history, especially when it relates to something as central as efficient reproduction strategy.
Gold cannot simply go up in value due to US being the biggest producer of it. The more of it is produced, the less relative value it has.
That was my point: the (finite) jump in gold production was a hidden stimulus to the economy in essence: money printed 'out of thin air'!
Gold was a money equivalent, so any new gold mined increased the effective money supply.
The price level was not a direct function of the money supply: as I mentioned there was also a heavy influx of new workers (immigrants) and 'more people, more products, for the same amount of money' is an obvious deflationary force.
So the inflationary effect of more gold combined with the deflationary effects of more people working for the same number of dollars, combined with supply/demand shortages in war times created the kind of fluctuating inflation/deflation picture you can see throughout the 19th century, in the graph I linked to.
But doing what you suggest: combining a growing economy while coupling money to a fixed amount of gold, would result in deflation - not good. You need a steadily increasing supply of gold to keep such a system near full productive capacity: that is unfortunately not possible with gold.
What cost $1 in 1914 would cost $21.50 in 2010.
And the average per capita income went up even more (and you can buy products were unimaginable or cost a fortune in 1914), so what's your complaint, that the numbers are increasing? :-)
- gold is not wealth, it's money. So as somebody works and makes their money, they re-invest (as again, history proves) to make more money, and this allows businesses to take that loan and invest.
You are wrong here too. Let me show you how.
Gold is a globally largely fixed amount of physical matter, so if you fix the value of a growing, dynamic, ever expanding economy to this fixed amount of matter then necessarily you are giving gold fiat value out of thin air: 10 years down the line, even if you did not do anything productive with that gold, it will be worth a bigger pie of the world economy ...
Let me give you a simplified example: lets say we have an economy of 1000 people with 1000 pounds of gold as "money", and at a given point in time one specific person owns 1 pound of gold. Lets observe what happens to this person.
Fair enough model to discuss, right?
Fast forward 10 years. 999 people have worked hard and the economy has done well and it has grown by 7.2% every year. At the end this compounds to 100% of growth over the 10 year period: fantastic result!
Lets go back to the person who has stored 1 pound of gold 10 years ago. That person did nothing productive in those 10 years. But his 1 pound of gold will now still be worth 0.1% of all the wealth of this economy: which has doubled over the past 10 years!
Is this a fair result in your opinion? Someone who has not worked hard during those 10 years, someone who did nothing else but kept money away from productive investments , is rewarded with a 100% return? In those 10 years a sizeable portion of the economy's value was redistributed to this passive owner of gold: this is neither fair (it's a pyramid scheme: the first ones in get most of the benefits) nor productive (it stifles investment).
This is why a fixed money supply and gold in particular is theft from future generations and redistribution of wealth all in one.
- 19 century USA calls, says you are wrong.
There was deflation at the time, dollar was gaining value, prices were dropping,
You are quite wrong about historic facts. Firstly, even measured in norminal price levels you are wrong: check the historic inflation rate for the US.
The period of 1800-1900 was evidently not "deflation at the time".
The dollar was gaining in value, firstly because almost every other civilized country on the western hemisphere was growing at that time, secondly because it was backed by an inflating supply of gold (the US was one of the biggest gold producers at the time), thirdly because the US had a very rapid influx of population, lots of migrating workers eager to increase the international value of the fixed supply of dollars.
Take away the increasing supply in gold backed by gold mines and take away the increasing value of exports fuelled by cheap immigrants you get a stagnating economy: for example France, the last holdout with the gold standard after the Great Depression, was the slowest to recover from the Great Depression.
(sorry about the messed up paraphrased quote, it was supposed to be "gold is wealth", as you correctly guessed.)
currency that is not backed by any work or something tangible is theft from future generations, because such currency ends up creating enormous inflation
That is almost true, with a very important distinction: enormous inflation is mainly theft from past generations: those who have already earned part of their "wealth" in the official currency and are thus cheated by that currency's purchasing power dropping dramatically.
But I think you are missing the full story here, so let me outline it. There are two extreme outcomes of money supply flow excesses:
To much inflation (hyperinflation), which is mainly theft from past generations
Too little (negative real inflation or deflation), which is mainly theft from future generations: it throttles economic activity and encourages unfair hoarding.
So if you want a fair society, one which rewards hard work fairly, regardless of where and when you were born (do you want one? I have to ask because it's not a given.), then we have to find a middle-of-the-road of value for inflation which neither steals from past (through too high inflation), nor from future generations (through too low inflation).
In a simplified model this 'ideal' value for inflation is roughly at the rate of growth of the economy: this does not let past work devalue (whatever is inflated away is won back by you owning currency of a country that is N percent stronger).
(This all is hard to measure and the definition is subjective, so there's always a lot of arguing about it, but nevertheless this is the fairest outcome.)
Now where does gold stand in this picture? If you argue a classic gold standard, with a fixed monetary base then it's sadly close to the extreme deflation end of it: it causes a real negative inflation rate of the growth of the country. It's not the worst hyper-deflation outcome, but it's close to it: it perpetually steals at least growth% amount of resources from future generations, per year.
Gold is forced redistribution of wealth to those who already have amassed gold...
Also note how historic precedent shows us this concept in action: for example the 19th century 'gilded age' period in the USA was very prosperous, partly because gold production was growing the money supply in a steady fashion. Once this "gold growth" positive effect levelled off, somewhere near the end of the 19th century, the US economy started to stagnate: frequent bank crashes, periods of high unemployment and other signs of economic distress - all resulting in needless human suffering. (This is very simplified: a civil war and boom/bust cycles elsewhere on the globe were significant factors as well)
Today, with a largely constant gold supply (most of the easily extractable gold has already been mined), going back to a gold standard would be disastrous: we'd have deflation hard-coded for eternity, with today's ruling elite hoarding most of the gold, and future generations would have less and less of a chance to have a fair part of the pie.
Note, gold has been used by past ruling elites to maintain their wealth for hundreds of years (with no real work performed after the initial act of acquiring wealth): much of medieval Europe was on the gold standard and as a result of hundreds of years of deflation wealth got concentrated/redistributed into very few hands. Newcomers had almost no chance to acquire sufficient wealth to be players - most of the existing gold was already distributed and new production of gold was very small.
[...]
2. Whether work is done for pay or for other reasons, there is no major difference, again there is some goal that needs to be achieved, so somebody is trying to achieve it and that's work, (which is opposed to leisure, when people's goal is not to achieve any particular goal, but to enjoy some activity, because they like it.)
3. Work has a very rigid connection to creation of products and services.
Your argument is empty, that's why you get no satisfaction.
Well, you err in two main ways here.
Firstly, above you assume that leisure is separate from work, while it's almost always not: work is generally a dynamic trade-off between leisure and survival/compulsion, and humans generally try to find types of work for themselves that serve both purposes.
This alone puts a large hole into your "work creates wealth" argument.
Work is a lot more than about directly measurable material/intellectual output - and you will misanalyse the economy in very significant ways if you do not put them into your mental model.
Secondly, you err in assuming that the only material output of work is 'products and services'.
That is not so, there are major other categories such as human knowledge (of which free software is, incidentally, a significant part of) - which is neither a product, nor a service, it is an intellectual achievement of humanity that can be turned into products or services. (There are other results of work as well, which are neither 'products' nor 'services' and if you want to understand the economy you need to understand those factors as well.)
These two basic mistakes inevitably put you on a rigid, narrow, materialistic pathway (that, funnily enough, is quite similar to how communists have argued some 100 years ago) that both under-recognizes group intellectual achievements and over-credits individual achievements and over-simplifies individual behaviour.
Is it any surprise that you do not seem to understand RMS's arguments? :-)
Another interesting statement you made is that:
"wealth gold"
Do you realize that today a gold backed currency is actually theft from future generations ?
Do you deny that, or do you claim that such theft is justified?
You indeed did not 'try hard'.
The quote was nevertheless misleading as presented, it was taken out of fair context. Linking to the full context is not equivalent to quoting fairly. The press does this all the time: quoting people out of context while still linking to the original source. Most of the readers obviously do not double check whether the quote is fair, so this technique is rather efficient at misleading.
Note, I do not claim that you quoted out of context intentionally. (the press does this rather consciously)
The links to past statements you made do not (at all) answer the core statements I made, which were:
'Work' is an activity by humans, and as such it does many things, and often it actually actively destroys total 'business wealth' as you seem to be defining it. (google for 'creative destruction')
Work is an activity of humans who trade time and effort in exchange of some sort of compensation. Sometimes "enjoyment" or "feeling fulfilled" is the only form of compensation: ask charity workers.
It has no forced connection whatsoever to your (rather rigid) views about 'wealth', 'business' and 'money'.
Which I have posted in stark contrast to your statement, which was:
Work creates wealth - products and services
So, because you left my arguments unchallenged I still maintain my position that your statement is false and that you have no basis to lecture others about how human civilization and in particular the economy works.
Well, you certainly tried hard to hide RMS's distinction between publicly distributed and privately distributed closed source work.
That is a rather important distinction, which becomes clear from the full context quote.
So, while I happen to disagree with RMS on this, I still think you did not quote his opinion fairly.
the man is totally ignorant of the way economy functions
You simply disagree with him. That is not grounds to call someone else with a differing opinion "totally ignorant".
Especially since you show rather basic misunderstandings about how the economy works.
Such as:
Work creates wealth - products and services
Not really. 'Work' is an activity by humans, and as such it does many things, and often it actually actively destroys total 'business wealth' as you seem to be defining it. (google for 'creative destruction')
Work is an activity of humans who trade time and effort in exchange of some sort of compensation. Sometimes "enjoyment" or "feeling fulfilled" is the only form of compensation: ask charity workers.
It has no forced connection whatsoever to your (rather rigid) views about 'wealth', 'business' and 'money'.
So you have absolutely no basis to call someone else ignorant on this topic.
men want to see cheating wife porn, and porn where multiple men share a woman, because that was the norm in our prehistory until about 10,000 years ago
So how does what you say contradict with what the authors of the article say:
men are wired to be sexually jealous but simultaneously they're also sexually aroused so if a man sees a woman — including his partner — with another man, he becomes more aroused
Are you really making the argument that if something is "the norm" for tens of thousands of generations (your words) it will neatly stay out of our genome?
The exception is my country, Australia, which has had a decreasing murder rate, but we already had a decreasing murder rate before the gun laws were introduced. It seems difficult to demonstrate that gun restrictions have actually contributed to the decreased murder rate.
Well, but homicides (not just gun related homicides) are at historic lows in Australia.
You obviously cannot prove that this historic low murder rate was only achieved through gun restrictions (in any complex country there are multiple complex processes going on, you cannot separate them out easily), but it certainly blows a large hole into the "gun restrictions will make crime worse , because criminals will ignore gun restriction laws!" argument, right?
Anything I have seen that claims a reduced murder rate from firearms bans only claims reduced "firearms murders", not murder rates overall, which seems pretty pointless unless you would be distressed at a murder committed with a gun but ok with murder committed in some other way.
It certainly gives us a part of the picture - no argument about that.
But why would it be 'pointless' to point out such outcomes? One of the popular argument against gun restrictions is the "criminals ignore laws, they will just own a gun illegally!".
As it turns out, when guns are banned in general, the number of both legal and illegal firearms goes down and thus the number of firearms related murders (and the number of accidental deaths and injuries) goes (way) down as well.
Which is also a pretty common-sense outcome.
since you acknowledged that most guns are not used for crime, are you claiming that you want to use your gun to shoot a very likely unarmed person
1. The poster never said that most guns are not used for crime.
He certainly implied it. Look, if most guns are used for crime then the best course of action would be to bring them off the streets, don't you agree?
2. Even assuming the poster did say that, how in the hell do you jump to the conclusion that an intruder is 'very likely unarmed'?
I went to the logical conclusion to combine the "most guns are not used to commit crimes" fact with the "most burglaries are unarmed" fact (a burglar is generally not so stupid to bring a gun with himself and be convicted of robbery and armed assault. The whole rational point of burglary is to avoid having to use a gun. I do not claim that there are never any armed burglars, I just say that they are rare).
3. If someone attempts to break into your house, what is your course of action? Let it happen, and hope that the intruder leaves you and your family alone?
Correct. That's the best course of action even if you have a gun and confront a burglar.
If the intruder is armed then he is likely both better prepared (he planned the burglary in advance, while you learned about it just in that very second) and he is probably better at using arms against a real human (again, if he is in the profession of armed burglaries he is more likely to be trained at this 'using arms at night' business as well - even if you have excellent guns training you probably never shot a real human being, did you?).
Remember, burglars will generally just try to flee when they are discovered. Burglary 101 and stuff.
Put your Chuk Norris male reflexes aside and save your family from the sight of a shot burglar or a shot family member. (Even if the victim survives, both types of incidents will traumatize them a lot more and a lot longer than a few missing items.)
Talk about you being the judge, jury and executioner who decides life and death in one split second, in the middle of the night.
The intruder can avoid this situation by not trying to break into someone's house. The intruder has no one to blame but himself for the outcome.
After a lot of preparation we get to the meat of the argument.
Why do you assume that this split second decision, which seems to correct and obvious to you in the middle of the night, is in fact correct?
How do you know that the 'burglar' is not your teenage daughter , late home from a party? (real story, she died)
How do you know that the 'burglar' is not your neighbour who came in by mistake? (real story, he died)
How do you know that the 'burglar' is not your wife , who was trying not to wake you up? (real story, she died.)
There's a reason human civilization generally tries to put some amount of 'time' between the various steps of accusing someone, finding him guilty and executing him. (Just for the off chance that he didn't do it, you know.)
There's a real human price of your "freedom to shoot suspicious strangers at night", and you do not seem to be even aware of it!
I hadn't seen this article "refuting" Penrose but it's not particularly interesting or that convincing.
No, but it nicely proves what intuition (or rather, common sense) should tell you in the first minute of thinking about Penrose's argument: that it's wishful thinking.
It was wishful thinking in the 1980s that a computer would never be able to beat a human world champion at chess, because the human mind was so "special" and "fundamentally different" from computers.
The human mind is not particularly special and its limitations are not particularly special either.
You may call this 'quibbling' too.
Do you feel threatened by the idea that the human mind is nothing else but ~1.4 kg of physical matter? :-)
No If I shoot some scumbag who is trying to break into my abode, it is NOT murder, it is self defense.
So, since you acknowledged that most guns are not used for crime, are you claiming that you want to use your gun to shoot a very likely unarmed person , whom to you, in the middle of the night, appears to be a 'scumbag trying to break into your abode'?
Wow. Talk about you being the judge, jury and executioner who decides life and death in one split second, in the middle of the night.
Do you accept that others might have a legitimate problem with your concept?
On average, a firearm is legally used every 13 seconds for self defense (based on a 1994 study). I look at this as a life saved.
Why do you look at this as a "life saved"?
There are plenty of countries with virtually no firearms in public hands that have (much) lower homicides per capita than the US.
Couldn't firearms be used every 13 seconds just because people in the US know that lots of other people around them have weapons (including criminals) and thus they fear for their lives more often? I.e. couldn't this just be a self-reinforcing cycle of violence - even if those gun uses are 'legal'?
Just replace 'government' with 'democratic government' and you get the distinction you are looking for.
What's wrong with forced sterilization?
Ask any female ...
Go look at Africa to see what happens when there's no control.
Funny thing is, the problems in Africa have absolutely nothing to with the population. Hell, they have a low population for the amount of arable land on that continent. Their problems stem from the thugs and olgiarchs and kleptos running the various governments in Africa, If you could get good leadership, the population on that continent could greatly expand with out harming the land.
Try again with a better arguement
In other words the problems in Africa have everything to do with too weak governments or with no government at all (think Somalia).
A thug running a diamond business, monopolizing a country's institutions is not 'government', it's a thug running a diamond business who managed to kill or control all other thugs and thus managed to monopolize. Dictatorship is the ultimate end game of free-for-all archeo-capitalism: the big fish has eaten all the small fish.
Is that the model of society you envision for America as well?
In reality, they call it confirmation bias. as has been shown many times.
Or (in Greece) it might have to do with the stress caused by thermal expansion of large amounts of sun heated rock surface during extreme hot weather: providing the last straw to the thousands of years build-up of rock layer stress which finally breaks the back of the camel.
Just like a single person can trigger a big avalanche.
Increasing the money supply is what causes inflation, and we're facing a huge uptick very soon.
FYI, that turned out to be a myth not supported by reality.
Huge uptick in inflation 'anytime soon' has been predicted by hard money economists for the past 3 years non stop: they now have an egg on their face (and angry clients who lost tons of money) plus a huge gaping hole in their model as hyperinflaton (or even a huge uptick in inflation) never materialized.
What we got instead was keynesian predictions proven correct: an economy and an inflation rate balancing on the edge of deflation.
It is time for you re-evaluate your assumptions and your models of how you think about large economies I think. No need to politicize it - just make sure your models agree with the data.
Note that even the premise is wrong: it's not even "their wealth" and it's not being "redistributed".
If Warren Buffet was restricted to trading only within Somalia, would he still be able to make billions? Not at all, he needs the vast markets and vast infrastructure of a developed society to 'make money'.
Why pretend that there's no fee for that infrastructure and civilization? Why allow free-loading on the rest of society and turn around and declare the cost collection mechanism that builds and maintains civilization (taxes) somehow 'unfair'? Just because it's not directly usage metered? How do you meter the usage of a 500 million people market? I think metering by "how much money did you make using the rest of us" is as fair and simple as it gets.
There's an even more staggering number: 30% of all US financial wealth is owned by 400 people .
So all those republican tax cuts went in large part to just 400 US citizens who today pay only an around 15% effective tax rate ...