You still design by NOT designing...
And you still don't seem to be understanding that this is a valid way to do things. I suggest you read a bit about Zen Buddhism or Taoism. Alternatively, Alan Watts can explain how this applies to our current debate. Yes I have heard quite a bit of Alan Watts presentations... Some of you guys may need to read economist richard wolff to get some perspectives on labor history and to get a sense of our modern state of affairs and the exploitation of the people by capitalists (my employment of the word capitalist does NOT mean I am against capitalism). |
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I don't have to have a disdain for the poor to understand that vilifying capitalists is not the way to gain/retain the capital needed for economic growth. The labor theory of value has been discredited. The subjective theory of value and marginal utility have much more explanatory and predictive power. Update your economic model. Yeah. Give them all nice sounding names, and that will help....
NOT....
You need more substance, facts, rather than merely having a nice sounding name and a vision that is NOT based in reality.
I didn't give them nice sounding names, William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Carl Menger did over a hundred years ago. It's weird how several different people can independently and nearly simultaneously discover something so supposedly unbased in reality. The same thing happened with calculus. Maybe that's not based in reality either. If these guys are smart people and they have the mathematical solutions and visions, you surely have NOT done them justice in your summarizing them. or your assertions about the solutions in society. I am NOT going to waste my time and read up on them, unless some of their ideas, if they have any, are presented to me in a more meaningful and practical way. In this regard, I get the sense that you get a lot of modern day facts wrong including the role of unions, the detroit problems and us auto industry and the comparison of german companies and society, so why would I have faith in these other sources that you have supposedly digested into your philosophical outlook. |
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I would hate to live in the experimental society that you would design after the supposed revolution....
You kind missed the point again. He doesn't want to design a society. That's what statists want to do. This time it can happen, history has favored the plunder, now for the first time there is a plunder proof store of wealth if you store it properly, if it is stolen it rewords all others not the plunderers. Bitcoin is NOT going to resolve all of these societal and community questions b/c they are still going to exist; however, bitcoin will likely bring some revolutionary possibilities in the way that we think about our social institutions and how we think about and carry out social interactions. |
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A voluntary society cannot be designed at all. It will be emergent. When a critical mass of people realize that the rules we tell children to live by (namely don't hurt people, don't mess with their stuff, and keep your promises) should be applied across the board, and that no other general rules are necessary, then such a society will form.
There can be no formula for dealing with people in need. As soon as such a formula is known, most of the marginally needy and some of the non-needy attempt to game the system. Subsidizing poverty creates more poverty. The best way to deal with those in need is on an individual case-by-case basis. It's too important of a problem to be left to monopolists. Concrete answers are wrong answers.
Killing and stealing only works until the productive people stop producing, and then everybody starves. The productive people started leaving South Africa in droves when the anti-capitalist Nelson Mendela took over. There's no place on earth with more natural resources per acre than South Africa. If people are starving there, then it's because the government killers and thieves created an environment hostile to peaceful trade. Actual good rebuttal, but this assumes all will be rational and well-adjusted. The killers and stealers won't think like this (or won't care/won't have the skills needed to make it in the world), and people who refuse to live by the sword will not be able to allow themselves to starve if they can help it. If we both turn out to be right, you about killing and stealing losing efficacy over time, and me about killers and stealers doing killing and stealing anyway, that's a potential huge blow for your ideal. Having your reasonable people inevitably starved to death at the hand of greedy murderers and thieves is a likely death knell. Personally, I'd rather people game the system by collecting more food stamps than they are legally allowed, rather then having them just straight up try to blow my brains out and take all my stuff. While I wish we could deal with them on a case by case basis, under the current system I think that would cost more than the money saved by catching fraud. If you think the ability and cost-effectiveness of doing this would be improved in your ideal world, or even if you think there is a way to improve it under the current system, I'd be very interested in hearing about that. Unfortunately I don't think meaningful improvement is possible under the current system. This is one reason why I am a revolutionary. I see a fundamental weakness in monopoly government that cannot be corrected without allowing distributed competitive governance. There is no easy solution to the problems in South Africa. I see the best case scenario a hopefully temporary reversion to tribalism. If I lived there, I would leave if I could and retreat to an area controlled by my tribe if I couldn't, hunker down and ride out the storm. It is likely to get much much worse before it gets better. I would hate to live in the experimental society that you would design after the supposed revolution.... From my reading your various posts on the topic of your vision of what society should be, your society would likely be a very dog eat dog world with a lot of holes and loop holes that do NOT provide for the public to benefit from the public goods.. and probably would NOT adequately protect public goods.... unless of course, after the revolution, your side is able to slim the population down by 80% or more. I simply want to live in a society where all interactions are voluntary and property rights are respected. If that sounds too distopian to you, find comfort in the fact that I am philosophically am opposed to forcing anyone to create such a society, to live there or to stay there. Can you the the same of your society? Those are very nice and lofty principles in theory, and they are NOT even bad things to which to aspire. NONETHELESS, we are likely NOT going to be able to achieve complete voluntaryism, especially your concept of the term, and there are social and public benefit and social and public property that are from time to time going to impinge upon the boundaries and property rights of others that are NOT likely resolvable voluntarily. But, in theory I would like a world that also aspires to those kinds of broad principles, to the extent feasible.. so maybe we kind of agree to the broad principles, but NOT to the absolutism of such broad principles to the detriment of society as a whole. |
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I would hate to live in the experimental society that you would design after the supposed revolution....
You kind missed the point again. He doesn't want to design a society. That's what statists want to do. You still design by NOT designing... So there is NOT some lofty point that you are getting that I am NOT getting. Billyjoeallen has painted several aspects of his vision of society.. which seems scary if it were to be applied... unless, of course, the world population was 10% or less of its current quantity. |
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To me, it appears as if you were misreading my earlier post and my use of the word capitalist. I used the word capitalist to refer to persons holding capital.
Yes. But a person holding capital might also be a machinist putting money into a pension for his later years. So I was NOT specifically criticizing capitalism with my employment of the term capitalist and my description of what seems to have been a major problem in the united states's allowances regarding the capitalists. Also, NOT all capitalists have been able to suck all the surplus value - such as the smaller businesses are stuck attempting to compete and putting up their capital and their risk and then getting screwed by the overall poor business and poor humanity infrastructure in the USA.
IN the USA, you tend to make more money by being a dickhead, rather than by being responsible - even though there are some examples of responsible companies, such as Costco, who treat their workers relatively well, and Costco still is rewarded in the market place. Wallmart is rewarded in the market place, but treat their workers like shit, and deserve to be regulated into a better state of business, humanity and state of responsibility.
So again, it's not really capitalism per se. Just clarifying because I feel it's important. Richy_T... I get the sense that we would agree about a lot of the criticisms of the current system, and surely I am NOT opposed to responsible capitalism nor responsible capitalists. Some of our bones of contention seem to come when we get into describing solutions or if we attempt to paint too broadly with solutions. We also may agree about some of the solutions, if we were to take them one by one. It is much too difficult to get into painting broad solutions in a forum like this and through a variety of short written posts. Though I do tend to agree with one of the points above made by Octaft that removing some of the distractive and corruptive nature of money in politics would likely go a long ways towards moving us in the right direction. I think that movements can be made in that direction, so I would NOT throw my hands up in the air regarding those kinds of potential measures to remove or to lessen the impact of the money in politics matters. |
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Frankly I would not want those people working for me. I think everyone is better off if they are bribed into staying out of the workforce. The reason is the same as the reason why the argument that market-based minimum wage is better than mandated is so bogus: Lots of people have negative productivity. No matter how hard they try, they will do more damage than good. GHWBush, and BObama for example. Would you want either of them making you a coffee? Blech.
Problem is, if you pay them not to work, all there is to do is stay home and breed. And now you have five people to take care of instead of two. People that say stuff like this sound like they subscribe to the Just World fallacy, for this case specifically that every problem someone has stems from themselves, and that you can't possibly be struggling if you're working hard. It's a lie some people tell themselves to make them feel better, usually out of either a fear of it happening to them, believing that it cannot happen to them, or believing that since it has never happened to them, the poor must be doing something wrong. Every ex-CEO probably subscribed to that theory until they had to start delivering pizzas. Either that, or you have a heavy and unwarranted disdain for poor people, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. I don't have to have a disdain for the poor to understand that vilifying capitalists is not the way to gain/retain the capital needed for economic growth. The labor theory of value has been discredited. The subjective theory of value and marginal utility have much more explanatory and predictive power. Update your economic model. Yeah. Give them all nice sounding names, and that will help.... NOT.... You need more substance, facts, rather than merely having a nice sounding name and a vision that is NOT based in reality. |
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A voluntary society cannot be designed at all. It will be emergent. When a critical mass of people realize that the rules we tell children to live by (namely don't hurt people, don't mess with their stuff, and keep your promises) should be applied across the board, and that no other general rules are necessary, then such a society will form.
There can be no formula for dealing with people in need. As soon as such a formula is known, most of the marginally needy and some of the non-needy attempt to game the system. Subsidizing poverty creates more poverty. The best way to deal with those in need is on an individual case-by-case basis. It's too important of a problem to be left to monopolists. Concrete answers are wrong answers.
Killing and stealing only works until the productive people stop producing, and then everybody starves. The productive people started leaving South Africa in droves when the anti-capitalist Nelson Mendela took over. There's no place on earth with more natural resources per acre than South Africa. If people are starving there, then it's because the government killers and thieves created an environment hostile to peaceful trade. Actual good rebuttal, but this assumes all will be rational and well-adjusted. The killers and stealers won't think like this (or won't care/won't have the skills needed to make it in the world), and people who refuse to live by the sword will not be able to allow themselves to starve if they can help it. If we both turn out to be right, you about killing and stealing losing efficacy over time, and me about killers and stealers doing killing and stealing anyway, that's a potential huge blow for your ideal. Having your reasonable people inevitably starved to death at the hand of greedy murderers and thieves is a likely death knell. Personally, I'd rather people game the system by collecting more food stamps than they are legally allowed, rather then having them just straight up try to blow my brains out and take all my stuff. While I wish we could deal with them on a case by case basis, under the current system I think that would cost more than the money saved by catching fraud. If you think the ability and cost-effectiveness of doing this would be improved in your ideal world, or even if you think there is a way to improve it under the current system, I'd be very interested in hearing about that. Unfortunately I don't think meaningful improvement is possible under the current system. This is one reason why I am a revolutionary. I see a fundamental weakness in monopoly government that cannot be corrected without allowing distributed competitive governance. There is no easy solution to the problems in South Africa. I see the best case scenario a hopefully temporary reversion to tribalism. If I lived there, I would leave if I could and retreat to an area controlled by my tribe if I couldn't, hunker down and ride out the storm. It is likely to get much much worse before it gets better. I would hate to live in the experimental society that you would design after the supposed revolution.... From my reading your various posts on the topic of your vision of what society should be, your society would likely be a very dog eat dog world with a lot of holes and loop holes that do NOT provide for the public to benefit from the public goods.. and probably would NOT adequately protect public goods.... unless of course, after the revolution, your side is able to slim the population down by 80% or more. |
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I have NO problem with people making profits... there is a difference between a form of regulated capitalism and forms of vulture capitalism whereby the rrich exploit and pretty much steal from the people in various ways and make their money using trickery and such leverage. small honest businesses are out gunned when these kinds of vulture capitalists are allowed to run free and unfettered.
Yeah, that's more or less my point. Often when people criticize "capitalism", they are actually criticizing something else like corporatism. This leads to incorrect conclusions as to how to deal with these problems. Capitalism really isn't an "ism", it just describes the way that civilization has found efficient to trade. To be anti-capitalist is to be anti-civilization at base. To me, it appears as if you were misreading my earlier post and my use of the word capitalist. I used the word capitalist to refer to persons holding capital. My comment was concerning technology, and the history of recent technological innovations in the USA has disproportionately rewarded the capitalists and NOT workers and NOT other segments of society. This is a dynamic in germany as well, but in germany, labor and the people in general have been more successful to allow for the taking advantage of the technological innovations in order to spread out work and to work less and the rewards of the technological innovations are spread across the people and the society. So I was NOT specifically criticizing capitalism with my employment of the term capitalist and my description of what seems to have been a major problem in the united states's allowances regarding the capitalists. Also, NOT all capitalists have been able to suck all the surplus value - such as the smaller businesses are stuck attempting to compete and putting up their capital and their risk and then getting screwed by the overall poor business and poor humanity infrastructure in the USA. IN the USA, you tend to make more money by being a dickhead, rather than by being responsible - even though there are some examples of responsible companies, such as Costco, who treat their workers relatively well, and Costco still is rewarded in the market place. Wallmart is rewarded in the market place, but treat their workers like shit, and deserve to be regulated into a better state of business, humanity and state of responsibility. |
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Damn, all this philosophy in last 10-15 pages makes this thread boring  I could start talking about religion if you are tired of philosophy.  Yeah, that would be even worse. |
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I
For the last three days in fact ...
You were participating in some of them as well...  |
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Very Funny.... and witty, Billyjoeallen... even though you are missing the point about how the capitalist is able to take all the surplus value from the increased benefits and to put them into his pocket.
You're not a capitalist? You work for free or just to cover living expenses? I have NO problem with people making profits... there is a difference between a form of regulated capitalism and forms of vulture capitalism whereby the rrich exploit and pretty much steal from the people in various ways and make their money using trickery and such leverage. small honest businesses are out gunned when these kinds of vulture capitalists are allowed to run free and unfettered. |
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Does this thread actually contain any bitcoin specific information at all any more? Apart from a half-hearted CCMF here and there, the off-topic discussions seem to have increased by about 10000%. I dare even say that the only thing that has a larger gain percentage-wise over time thant bitcoin itself, is the amount of off-topic discussion in this thread. But I even now predict that off-topic discussions are a bubble. They will have a peak, and then crash towards 0 !!!! So better stop it now, before it's too late! Earlier in the week, I responded to one of the posts about the Mt Gox hacked information, and I said that I could NOT figure out the data b/c dates of the data were NOT contained therein. MY POST WAS REMOVED b/c it was supposedly off topic. |
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Overall, I think it's much cheaper and more permanently effective to just hunt down miners and kill them until you can easily do a 51% attack.
Why is it that the easy/direct solution to so many problems is to kill people?
bc you are a PSYCHO |
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I like this voting stats  We can clearly see our community are rather optimists 700$ will come soon! ♥ BTCI voted yes in part b/c the question is so vague.. will BTC reach $700 "soon?" "Soon" can be widely interpreted... end of the day or within the next six months. ... I think it would have better to specify when that "soon" is, which may change some responses to no. |
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 Billyjoeallen and JayJuanGee keep powering the thread along!!no end in sightThat animation and caption is hilarious!!!! |
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Detroit car designs suck because all the smart engineers moved to Silicone Valley. German engineers didn't have that option. I wouldn't use Germany as a shining example of a worker's paradise if I were you. It's a place where they work year round to bail out Greeks and Italians who take summers off. They gave loans to other countries so that they could buy German cars and other products and now those countries are defaulting. That's not a good business model.
Sure there are going to be some differences between what companies in different places are doing, and the fact remains that the German car companies were strong in spite of unionization, and they are also, engaged in assisting in the bail out of weaker economies. Powerful stuff.
Their is no practical way to stop money from influencing politics. It has never been done anywhere, ever. We can only stop the influence OF politics.
So frequently, you are in the practice of making things up and exaggerating facts, so even if this were true, about inability to remove money influence from politics, I would have difficulties believing it. I am NOT going to waste my time to provide you examples in which money can be taken out or regulated from politics. Logically, you have a losing argument to assert such, so emphatically. I see that you like to be stubborn and stick to your facts, whether based in reality or NOT. Capital is mobile and the rich will always flee to places where their property rights are protected.
Couple of points here: 1) Yes, capital is mobile and labor is NOT. Rules have been made in that direction, and it remains a form of exploitation, the way that it plays out. and 2) yes, some of you anti-governmental fanatics like to cite these kinds of examples in order to suggest and to argue that we should just give up and wave our white flags and allow race to the bottom politics in order that companies can bid down labor and regulations... b/c they will just go somewhere else if we do NOT kiss their asses and suck their dicks. That is bullshit and disempowering to suggest that governments and people have no power over wealthy people or over wealthy corporations... again.. you are probably watching too much Fox News to be blurting out these right wing talking points that are pie in the sky and have only a semblance of reality contained therein. They don't like being slaves anymore than you do, and they have better options.
Yeah.. .try to personalize these guys and try to get me and the rest of your audience to relate. Part of the problem with the poor sympathizing with the rich too often is that they think the rich deserve their earnings and they believe that the rich are people like them... b/c some day, these poor may be rich... .. Again, bullshit.... these rich people need to be paying more taxes and contributing.. and they are a major part of the problem about why the poor is bearing so many burdens and fighting for pie crumbs while the rich are running off with the pie... if the rich paid their fair share then the poor would NOT have to bear so much burden.. Communism used to cover almost half the globe and now it's a backwater. This war has been fought and you lost. You never had a chance.
poor guy.. you figure that your back is against the wall and have to again resort to name calling.. I do NOT need to give dignity to your name calling... to try to label people as communists or socialists... They use those labels on Fox.. all the time to try to work their audience into a frenzy.... People can be responsible capitalists... and regulate companies and regulate the rich and tax the rich without being either communist or socialist. So can you learn at some point to stick to discussions of substance rather than engaging in labeling and name calling? I believe that you are capable of such self-restraint, b/c I had seen such in a few of your posts.. maybe in your more calm moments. |
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What planet are you living on? GM almost went out of business because the United auto-workers drove up input costs to the point that they could make no profits. Not small profits. NO PROFITS.
You're so blinded by your ideology so you even have to make stuff up. In reality, GM went out of business because they made cars nobody wanted to buy.
(My theory here is that it was because they were too late to prioritize fuel economy, in turn because the US has artificially deflated oil prices.)Their European competitors paid their worker higher wages during the same period and they somehow managed to survive. That does not fit your description at all. Actually, I agree with your pointing out the stupidity and the myopic nature of Billyjoeallen's assertions; however, we cannot really be sure of the problems of GM exactly. Kind of a snow job of a situation. GM pretty much had control of its books, the Union was forced to make concession while NOT being allowed to see the books, and the government intervened to bail out GM and to cause workers to take large ass concessions in order to save the company. Surely, some government officials or government trustees may have found out financial circumstance of GM, but the public did NOT find out these matters. IT may be correct that GM was NOT making competitive cars, but also there are a large number of other problems in the USA and maybe even other ways that GM may have been spending and or siphoning off money (quite separate from the expenses of labor - take CEO pay for one thing). |
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You have too many presumptions in your descriptions of events... and you are talking gobbledy gook. First you praise and generalize about capitalists and then you suggest that the solution is to take away regulation. That is all bullshit. The problems that we have been having in recent times can be attributed too much liberty being given to capitalists and labor and government has been either too weak or too chickenshit to challenge the exploitation being carried out by capitalist. Look at the situation created as recently as since 2008 whereby jobs have been removed to bust unions and to make people unemployed and to reintroduce jobs at fractions of the previous rates. It was already bad before 2008, but got worse b/c capitalists (especially the filthy rich ones - NOT talking about the mom and pop capitalists, here) were given too much freedom and NOT taxed and allowed to remove jobs and capital and NOT to reinvest.
What planet are you living on? GM almost went out of business because the United auto-workers drove up input costs to the point that they could make no profits. Not small profits. NO PROFITS. Hummer and Oldsmobile had to be shut down because they just couldn't compete. Detroit is now a third world hellhole. Nonunion car factories are springing all over the south and the grandsons of the southerners who migrated to Detroit are migrating back. You are not doing the laborers of the world any favors by driving their employers out of business. This has played out the same way in every heavily unionized industry on earth except for government workers. I can guess what your solution will be: force every car maker to unionize. So then cars are too expensive to drive, workers get laid off anyway and we all have to ride the fucking bus to work, if we are lucky enough to have jobs at all. Can you even try to see yourself from our perspective? You appear crazy. First of all, it sounds as if you may have been watching too much Fox news, and you have a very narrow view of the situation (including the auto industry) which causes you to resort to personal attacks, and trying to attempt to assert that you have some kind of superior view of what is going on and that you are part of some enlightened group... Unions are NOT to blame for these supposed troubles that you attempt to describe. For example, Germany is highly unionized, but they did NOT suffer the same troubles as the US in 2008 ish and thereafter, in part b/c of the unionization in Germany had input into the direction of the companies in germany and did NOT allow capitalists to vulturize companies to reduce jobs and wages and to paint some kind of fantasy land scenario that you describe.... about competition and that non-union is best and that we gotta be exploited in order to compete.. BS.... YES we already know your solution for nearly everything seems to be to get rid of government and to blame people, in spite of the fact that the wealthy have been extracting wealth from the people and NOT paying taxes and debilitating government in various ways.... which causes regular and poor people to have to bear more of the burden of what the rich should be contributing. And the politicians have been going along with all of this redistribution of wealth towards the rich... both parties have been going along with it... b/c there is too much money influencing politics and reducing the facilitation of democratic input. nah, now you are just plappering the stuff the lobbyists want you to think. gm and co failed because they didn't adapt to the changing market, not because labor was too expensive. in fact, if they pay their workers a good loan, they will buy new cars instead of used ones and will buy them more often instead of driving them until they are worth only the scrap-metal price.
look at countries with real worker unions, eg. germany. didn't got the notion that they are completely inable to deal on an international scale and compete in both, prices and quality.
EXACTLY..... |
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So here is a stupid question to kill time: Suppose the Evil Lords decide to use the bitcoins seized from Silk Road and other places to kill bitcoin by spamming it with billions of tiny transactions, as fast as they can. How would the network defend itself from that attack?
To stop legitimate transactions, they have to be willing to pay more in fees than the legitimate transaction senders. If they are willing to pay more, there isn't much we can do but wait for them to run out of coins. The harm to the network would be less than the cost to the spammers. It would be like fighting you by punching your fist with my face. Great Analogy.... !!!! Even though you do NOT know about politics and the role of government in society, you certainly know about the bitcoin network.  So here is a stupid question to kill time: Suppose the Evil Lords decide to use the bitcoins seized from Silk Road and other places to kill bitcoin by spamming it with billions of tiny transactions, as fast as they can. How would the network defend itself from that attack?
I am guessing, but I thought that the network just processes transactions in the order received, and if there is a fee attached, then those transactions are processed first. Billions is a lot... and I suppose that the problem could be made worse by creating some repetition of the transactions - after the first ones are processed, they are put back into the cue. If there are so many transactions that the network is overwhelmed... the network may go down for a period of time. and then maybe a fork in the code to restart? YES>... I am continuing to guess. You know you have an anti-fragile system when the worst thing your enemies can do is throw money at you. Another good point!!!!!! |
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