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7801  Economy / Economics / Re: Economic Devastation on: April 11, 2015, 07:43:18 AM
...I got INTP.

I am ENFP, but very close to balanced between T and F. I am very strongly N, 88%. My extroversion is obvious, lol. 50,000 forums posts in past 10 years?

I am a good programmer, perhaps even phenomenal, except my one Achilles heel is isolation makes me mentally unhealthy. I need the extroversion. Btw, I launched my new site (business) today.  Grin

Note I was more introvert in terms of this large scale social group interaction when I was doing my greatest accomplishments in programming from mid-1980s to 2001. It took its toll on me in terms of exploding with losing an eye.

My best balance will probably come from having local, daily social interaction coupled with introversion for 8 hours a day in programming. Need to really jack up my athletics too. Starting to get back to form. Being running daily in the hot tropical sun at midday, also 100s of pushups. Starting to feel more normal and not yet 2 weeks into the high dose vitamin D3. The MS symptoms still return but milder and sometimes I feel phenomenal. Feels to me like gradually healing the brain lesions and neurological function. You can't understand how debilitating headaches and dizziness from the MS. Strange feeling I never could conceive until I had it.

Probably I went into overdrive on posting to a forum because I was countering the MS depression. Extroversion in overdrive. I need to tone it down now. And get back to what made me productive.

P.S. I want to reiterate again that CoinCube is a very respectful and caring person. It pains me to speak frankly about trusting the free market. But if I didn't speak frankly to him, I don't think I would be caring.
7802  Economy / Economics / Re: Economic Devastation on: April 11, 2015, 07:31:13 AM
As for how to accomplish this controlled decline? That is where I am still very much searching for ideas.

See my prior post about the Denninger and Armstrong debate. See also my last rebuttal to Suvy about how fast humans can adapt to technology and the low relative costs of adaptation.

And you need to learn to relax and trust the free market when the free market has the tools to escape the collective coercion. When it doesn't have the tools, then the decline will be a waterfall collapse into the killing fields abyss.

Bottom-up adaptation is geometrically more accelerated than top-down adaptation.

TPTB I will honor your request to stop replying to your posts out of respect for your work and your contribution.

More optimal would be to reform or explain where I had a misunderstanding of your philosophy.

I would point out only that you have erected a strawman. I never said that there are sustainable merits in collective coercion. Please see my reply to aminorex above for my opinion on this matter.  

Your reply to animorex came after my rebuttal to you. And you specifically stated before that you had hope that the repeating outcome of collective coercion end games could be improved. If you are now changing your stance, that is great to hear. But I am still wary because once again in your reply to aminorex, you again don't trust the free market to self-anneal and you are searching for top-down ideas to implement. I assume intellectually selected, large-scale collectivized solution that can be trusted because it is known apriori, not a plurality of competing bottom-up ideas to implement such as multiple anonymous altcoins leaving the outcome to the free market to decide.
7803  Economy / Economics / Re: Economic Devastation on: April 11, 2015, 07:21:01 AM
I am interested how the battle between Armstrong and Denninger will turn out on the One Dollar of Capital debate.

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=229998
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=230006

Someone please send my rebuttal to that obnoxious, pompous, Dunning-Kruger boomer Denninger. I had debated him in email several years ago. Pray inform him Shelby Moore III wrote this.

I explained upthread in more detail that there is no inherent evil in leverage and Armstrong is correct that leverage is absolutely necessary for the economy to expand and contract with maximum acceleration and deceleration in rhythm with the business cycle.

Both of those guys are incorrect! And for different reasons!

Denninger is incorrect because his proposal for no leverage means the speculators can't do price discovery optimally, hedge, and otherwise harmonize the non-linearity in finance to the non-linear (chaos) realities in the real world. Futures and options contracts have existed since 6000 B.C. (as Armstrong documented with the clay slates recording such contracts). Farms could not maximize production of our food if they could not hedge in the commodities options (futures) markets. And you can't have debt and futures if you don't have leverage. Denninger just failed non-linear math, e.g. differential equations and Black-Scholes pricing model (a.k.a. implied leverage). Denninger blames corruption on leverage; whereas, the corruption is an opaque banking system (central bank, hidden mark-to-market, etc).

Armstrong's point is that if we trust the authorities to do their job correctly and honestly, then all fractional reserves are under control of the regulators and thus there is no uncoordinated printing out-of-thin-air. That is bullshit, because top-down collective coercion is always corrupt and more saliently it is always blind.

Because as I explained numerous times that only the free market of autonomous actors can self-anneal because unless the speed-of-light was infinite then a top-down observer would never have perfect proximate information in real-time whereas proximate actors do (both on the time  and the path dependencies divergence domains), but if speed-of-light was infinite then the past and present would collapse into an infinitesimal point in time, i.e. the universe could not exist.

Thus Armstrong's error is that a top-down, collective coercion can not be reliably transparent (over the long-term).

The optimal free market solution in theory is of course the one I already explained.
7804  Economy / Economics / Re: Economic Devastation on: April 11, 2015, 06:22:33 AM
...

There is no doubt that your condition has held true historically. It is also is true regarding our current trajectory in the west. It does not logically follow that it must be true for all future incarnations of the state.

And you claim to be a research scientist? Refusal to accept the predictive power of results of a reproducible experiment repeated ad nausea for the past 6000 years— is delusion.

Any collectivized resource above our actual Dunbar limit at the level of deep scrutiny (which means rougly a dozen or so people) will be corrupt. Thus the only altruistic goal is to eliminate all collectives larger than that.

Your goal is to destroy all collective institutions larger then a dozen people.

You have this perennial habit of conflating orthogonal issues in order to sustain your delusion.

Note I was very careful to distinguish between involuntary and volutary collectives. I would never want to eliminate voluntary trade and cooperation/interaction in communities larger than dozens of people. All the problems arise from the involuntary coercion that removes the self-annealing feedback loop from the free market thus enabling corruption and totalitarianism to grow without bound until the cancer kills the host.

It is a goal that naturally arises from your first premise. It is impossible to achieve...

1) The extinction of humanity
or
2) A return to primitive tribalism

It is not implausible (maybe impractical though) to achieve. We only need technology that makes it possible for all things we need to be achieved via trade instead of involuntary collectives, and also the technology to render collective coercion impotent. In short, individual empowerment technology.

But it will never be absolute for perpetuity, because technology is always changing and the government has access to technology also.

But we must always continue improving and fighting for individual empowerment technology. If we stop, then the human race will go extinct.

...but if it somehow could happen it is synonymous with only two outcomes.

1) The extinction of humanity
or
2) A return to primitive tribalism

Nonsense. Voluntary trade and communion would expand. Prosperity would expand. Happiness would expand. Coercion would decrease. Life would be much improved if not for you delusional Marxist sociopaths who want to use coercion and control us (i.e. enslave yourself and everyone else too). But I am not going to beg you, because my programming fingers are mightier than my english text.

I could never trust you, given your emotional delusion. One day you will snap and go against me.

I would not ask you to trust me. You assume my opposition is due to emotion and cognitive dissonance when it is far more fundamental and profound.  

We are natural ideological opponents united for a time by a shared enemy and mutual revulsion of our current system.

So carry on. Like I said you have my unconditional support....  for the time being anyway  Wink

It is fundamentally insane. And I rescind my request for your support. Stay far away from me and I will do the same, unless you can fix your insanity then we can try explore synergy.

I never trust delusional people who think there are (even delusional hope for) sustainable merits in collective coercion. These are the most dangerous people on the planet. They can't just do individual harm (a serial killer can't kill millions of people), but they are ideological sociopaths that can wreck the lives of millions of people. They often appear to be so caring, similar to Hitler. The most dangerous ones are the ones who believe their principles are profound, e.g. Hitler.

CoinCube, I read your quote of Katz about sticking to principles, noted that you dug in your heels about your delusion, and yes I am attacking your principles as being profoundly insane. This pains me because I know you somewhat personally as a caring person. Unfortunately in my opinion (my logic as expressed above) there is something bipolar-like sociopathy going inside your subconscious rationalizations of your emotional insecurities. As best as I can surmise, it appears you are afraid of losing community or maybe again it is really just a control freak underlying addiction (a la Stockholm Syndrome). It is difficult to pinpoint your motivation for these principles. Perhaps you can figure out your underlying psychological genesis. Sorry to go ad hominem but frankly totalitarianism is driven by key influential ideologues because the pen is mightier than the sword. You were trained in the education system to be an intellectual. Remember you believed in Anthropogenic Global Warming when I first met you on these forums. I opened your eyes on that. Apparently the indoctrination you received is too deeply engrained now. If you forsaked it, you would be throwing away decade or more of your efforts.  Hey I lost 9 years to a neurological illness that could have been cured in a month if not for the BS the corrupt collective coercive medical system did to hide that information from me. I hope you come to your senses, but I know deeply engrained emotionally-based (versus rationally-based) principles are almost impossible to change late in adulthood.

7805  Economy / Economics / Re: Economic Devastation on: April 11, 2015, 05:55:07 AM
http://blog.mpettis.com/2015/02/when-do-we-decide-that-europe-must-restructure-much-of-its-debt/#comment-123301

Quote from: myself
Suvy, if I understand your rebuttal correctly, you are asserting that majority of the cost in the post-Industrial Age is not the mental work that it takes to produce each product per my example of how my fixed investment and personal expenses were insignificant relative to the revenue I generated when I created CoolPage, but rather the long gestation period from my birth to the age where I could do that work.

Thus you appear to be arguing that there is still a huge fixed capital investment in the development of human capital.

I can prove you are wrong in two ways.

1. Illiterate, isolated African children were able to teach themselves how to program Android within 5 months with nothing other than laptops that didn't even need electricity, i.e. they had a hand crank generator.

2. During the time I was programming CoolPage, I was also supporting the gestation of two children born 1996 and 1999, and this expense was an insignificant fraction of the revenue I generated when I created CoolPage.

Sorry, you will just have to accept that mental productivity trumps finance now and thus your models must change. My seminal Rise of Knowledge essay is apropos and will become canonical.

7806  Economy / Economics / Re: Economic Devastation on: April 11, 2015, 04:14:27 AM
Is Armstrong predicting a rise in the dollar and gold simultaneously?

Yes, but realize all the rest of the world's currencies will be falling against the dollar, thus they would see a rising gold price even if gold was constant against the dollar, and this along with the collapse of the rest of world (due to sovereign/shadow banking debt contagion in Europe/Japan/China + from QE the massive short dollar debt position in entire world) will drive the rest of the world into private assets such as gold and Bitcoin after 2015.75. And since Americans will see gold going up, they will buy it too.

Armstrong has often made the point that people form too simple of domestic currency relationships in their mind and they need to factor in the effect of exchange rates and capital flows.

I am already inside of Armstrong's mind (after reading and listening to basically everything he has ever written or spoken that is on the internet) and I can often think as he would about a question.

P.S. see the image of the cat on the stairs I added upthread on this page.

P.S.S. Hillary tweeted that she will announce Presidential candidacy on Sunday. I tell you she will the totalitarian dictator and will be the last "elected" POTUS[1]. Just note some of the things she has said, "what difference does it make" (when she was lying about her coverup of her role in assassinating our diplomat in the Embassy), "we need camps for adults", etc.. Hillary is so deep into corruption[2] that she will have to be totalitarian in order to contain the onslaught of bottom-up (anarchistic) transparency that is going to be coming at her of the coming years. My theme has been that thirty-party activity will rise but be thwarted in the mainstream political and judicial institutions by the powers-that-be and thus it will become increasing break-away activity that fractures the USA.

[1]http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/09/11/will-the-usa-also-break-up-into-regions/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/12/26/224-collapsing-wave-structure-point-to-breakup-of-usa/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/05/29/will-the-usa-break-up/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/04/05/political-dark-side-of-2016-obamas-intent-to-bring-war/
[2]http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/04/02/hillary-commits-a-crime-they-defend-her/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/17/the-majority-are-just-fools/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/11/politicians-are-just-politicians/
http://globalelite.tv/2014/01/10/4-videos-of-politicians-confronted-about-bohemian-grove-that-make-you-say-wtf/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/09/03/john-bolton-v-lindsey-graham/
Quote
The rumor is they used Lindsey Graham threatening him because he is gay and if he did not strip Americans of all rights, he would be exposed.
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/13/lindsey-graham-total-nut-case/
7807  Economy / Economics / Re: Economic Devastation on: April 10, 2015, 04:40:45 PM
---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Armstrong's numerous errors
Date:    Fri, April 10, 2015 12:51 pm
To:      "Armstrong Economics" <armstrongeconomics@gmail.com>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------


http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/04/10/feds-ability-to-create-money-from-thin-air/

Quote from: Armstrong
Consequently, QE1-3 failed to produce inflation because ... the increase in money supply was not confined to the domestic economy.

...

However, that will flip the other way for interest expenditures will exceed defense by 2020 and with a uptick in interest rates, then you will see STAG-inflation.

Inserted "STAG-" to correct Armstrong's thought error or typo.

Actually it will be much worse than stalled economy and we need a new term such as IMPLOSION-FLATION.

It is going to be a sitesight to behold on Marxist (Mr. Georgia Guidestones) Teddy Turner's CNN. My popcorn reserve is stacked.

Btw, the reason the inflation will finally come domestic is several fold (and Armstrong didn't articulate this correctly):

1. Higher taxes will be required to fund the interest payments and businesses pass these costs along as higher prices.

2. The higher interest payments mean more of the national debt will be paid into the domestic economy.

3. When the Fed was buying 30 years Treasuries, the lower interest rates enabled a carry trade borrowing dollars and lending into foreign economies with higher interest rates. This is why most of the QE ended up overseas. When the interest rates reverse direction, so will the carry trade, which will send massive flow of capital into the USA driving inflation. But this will also make a strong dollar, which will choke off the real (such as export) economy.

QE did create inflation abroad, but this was absorbed as an acceptable rate of annual inflation, because there was such incredible untapped productivity increases in the developing world. The powers-that-be had retarded the developing world for decades. It did create a massive dollar-short position for the rest of the world, which is going to collapse the rest of the world as the USA starts raising interest rates.

Edit: Armstrong did write about a shift to more CONFIDENCE in the USA, and sentiment being the overriding factor:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/04/01/inflation-will-begin-with-higher-interest-rates/
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/31/impact-of-higher-rates/
7808  Economy / Economics / Re: Economic Devastation on: April 10, 2015, 03:22:55 PM
Let's rewind back to that upthread example that launched this side discussion several pages upthread, wherein the 28 year old man was sentenced to 18 years in prison for allowing for others to upload repugnant photos, then running another website to offer to take down the photos for a fee.

The justification for the harsh sentence is two-fold:

1. If you did that to my wife or daughter, I would be extremely angry.

2. So many people were harmed, thus the punishment should match the aggregated level of harm.

My rebuttal is:

1. What would you think of your wife or daughter if they were participating in such repugnant acts?

2. Let's employ King Solomon's wisdom. How about every person that claims to have been egregiously harmed must show up to court every entire day for the trial for a period of a month. If they are unwilling to put in that effort, then we can surmise that they were not harmed as much as they claim.

I assert that #1 you would be angry at your wife or daughter. And #2 that those who feigned great harm, would flake out, because they are just making a mountain out-of-a molehill and trying to make the State be a replacement for their irresponsibility, and destroying a young man's life on a stupid (youthful) mistake. I think what he did is borderline free market activity and the extortion allegation is weak, because someone could post the photos again to another site and on and on. The actual flaky behavior began with the victim and they are the most responsible.

I am nearly certain in #2, they would flake out, because they were irresponsible to begin with. People demonstrate a pattern of behavior.

It is always easy to gang up using the State to do it for you. But if you have to do yourself, then suddenly it ain't so easy and reality sets in.

The Europeans (and now the Americans) used the State to obfuscate and do their crime for them (stealing from each other). The level of crime didn't decrease. The State is just an obfuscation for human nature. The powers-that-be know that human nature is inherently a mix of evil and good, so they pitch an obfuscation of perfect good which is inherently also allowing everyone to still do sanctioned (legal) evil. It is no wonder that at the end-game, the perfect love erupts in horrific evil acts.

I don't need a middle man (powers-that-be) ramming his coercive dick up my ass. Let the evil and good into the free market and deal with it more transparently and proximately.

The generative essence paradigm of the problem is we are so quick to react emotionally and not think rationally and critically.

While we humans think we can see everything objectively with some fixed, involuntary rules, we forget that truth is relative. Here follows an example. Is the cat climbing up or trotting down the stairs?

7809  Economy / Economics / Re: Economic Devastation on: April 10, 2015, 02:43:18 PM
What's the optimal Myers-Briggs?

Actually I expected that, and was surprised no one had called my bluff on that.

I was positing that possibly the Judging attribute of Myers-Briggs is correlated with the propensity to accept collectivism for its (false) promise of rendering (fair and effective) judgement on others (a form of Stockholm Syndrome) and not instead rail against with "Give me liberty or death!". Or just in general needing judgement to be rendered by some authority, e.g. even a business collective (you know who I am thinking of Wink). I am not sure if that theory of mine is true. I have only tested it anecdotally.

My hypothesis is that those who test towards Judging instead of Perception, have an emotional need for control. I surmise they feel life just couldn't be fair and meritorious if everyone didn't play by the same rules. What they miss is the fact that life is never going to be the same for any two individuals. Path dependencies of life are divergent and impossible to rationally judge any two paths by any fixed, involuntary common set of rules (one size can't fit all situations, which is why a jury of peers was the closest to "fair" (i.e. optimal outcomes) because they can weigh all the circumstances with more proximate but imperfect knowledge and understanding). What they miss on a deeper level of analysis is that life is inherently never one playing field and thus it is entirely a waste of time worrying about what others do. The goal of life is what you can do with your life. Your concerns about others should be in terms of your actual interactions with specific people, not some abstract rule or concept of people you will never meet and thus have insufficient understanding of and insufficient rationalized incentive for meddling.

I could write a book about this. I could expend a lot of time contemplating this subject matter. There is far too much to cover in forum posts...

...interesting topic.
7810  Economy / Economics / Re: Economic Devastation on: April 10, 2015, 01:45:15 PM
---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Leverage is good; central banking is bad (Armstrong's myopia)
Date:    Fri, April 10, 2015 9:47 am
To:      "Armstrong Economics" <armstrongeconomics@gmail.com>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------


Here follows an example of why the autonomous free market can self-anneal (has a bidirectional feedback loop) but the top-down collective can't and must diverge into totalitarianism every damn time throughout 6000 years of recorded history of man.

Armstrong is writing about the merits of fractional reserve banking:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/04/09/how-absurd-banks-should-not-lend-more-than-liquidating-value-of-an-asset/

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/04/10/thin-air-v-leverage/

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/04/10/fractional-banking-myth-giro-banking/

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/04/10/it-wont-be-the-first-time-they-hang-bankers/


Armstrong is correct that volatility is (non-linearly) proportionally related to leverage (but a complex relationship with other factors), and that there is nothing implicitly wrong (nor unnatural or corrupt) with leverage.

Armstrong's mistake is that the problem is the lack of transparency and the fact that any involuntary collective (i.e. government) will always devolve to corruption and lack of transparency.

You see with a voluntary free market that demands transparency, then the free market will move against corruption as happened in the 1800s when private banks often failed because there wasn't a central bank to backstop them.

But now we can improve upon that. With a crypto-currency, in theory[1] we have much greater transparency so that the banks can't hide how great their fractional reserves are (market won't accept it because it is too easy to provide the information digitally as contrasted against physical verification of gold on deposit in the 1800s), and the free market can anneal sooner so that banking crisises are less egregious (less volatile and more subdued impacts).

You see the Knowledge Age is advancing mankind. Armstrong is a dinosaur that wants to stay with the old system of a government regulating the banks' leverage. Nah fuck that! Let's move forward with the new technology of money.

[1] Serious problems haven't been resolved yet, such as reliable anonymity (i.e. Tor/I2P is probably a honeypot and Monero relies on either Tor or I2P to obscure your IP), decentralization of mining (Bitcoin being controlled by 1 - 4 pools), real-time transactions, fragmentation of the internet or power outages, etc..
7811  Economy / Economics / Re: Economic Devastation on: April 10, 2015, 11:16:43 AM
---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Westerners mired in the Stockholm Syndrome
Date:    Fri, April 10, 2015 8:08 am
To:      "Armstrong Economics" <armstrongeconomics@gmail.com>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

The only possible way they will wake up from collectivism is if a
Knowledge Age gives them irresistible individual empowerment, and this
jars them out of their emotional Stockholm Syndrome. Any way, we only need
the leaders to do this, then the herd follows into the goods and services
economy created.


This will be my last post on this particular issue.

I doubt it Wink

Because I am going to give you a reason that you will feel compelled to reply.

At it's most extreme anarchism degrades into the the extremism and logical fallacies of egoism. You occasionally wander into these waters as you did with your recent defense of coercion. I want to see if I can pull you back into libertarianism Wink

Stirner is correct. But the "might" part should be rephrased as whoever can manage with the most efficacy, i.e. knowledge capital in the Knowledge Age (it was stored monetary capital in the fixed investment Industrial Age).

Your mistake CoinCube, is that you conflate all outcomes which can be altruist with the notion that altruism only results from involuntary (i.e. coercion) collectivized resources (a.k.a. government). The great coercion is the State and the big capitalist owners' dick up our ass. And you believe their bullshit about us supporting them to end human trafficking when they are trafficking all of us every damn day!

In fact, the only true altruism never comes from collectives and only from local relationships, creating new efficiencies (i.e. innovation), and competition for who can manage resources with the most efficacy.

Don't you realize the collectivized governments have always been managed by the Industrial Age owners of capital. Stirner has always been correct about the reality. You are living in some emotional delusion that never existed in the history of mankind.

Your emotions have been polluted with Marxist indoctrination similar to darlidada. At least he can admit it. You are deep into the delusion because you are trying to defend the indefensible with a strawmen conflation.

I am trying to help you rid yourself of that mental disease. You may not appreciate it. Most collectivists don't.

Your support is not rational. It is all emotional.

Perhaps mankind turned to this delusion to deal with (obscure) the depressive reality that they've been owned by the capitalists.

Ah yes, I realize this is a form of indirect Stockholm Syndrome, or capture-bonding, wherein you've come to point of emotionally support the paradigms which empower those who enslave you, because we were all so hopelessly enslaved. You needed to have something to feel good about, because the reality of being enslaved is so depressing. So much better to adopt the emotional ideological (bullshit!) delusion they feed you and support them.

The West is going to crash and burn! The people are emotionally destroyed thus have no capacity to be rational.

I was always fighting. Always looking for ways to be independently powerful. That is why I adopted computers, because I noted from a very early age that they made me more powerful than guys with mansions, and I didn't need a lot of fixed capital investment.

We agree that collectivism is only beneficial when it is impossible or inefficient to otherwise get economies-of-scale. During our prior debate we also agreed that some top down structure is necessary for convergence to optimal outcomes. We appear do disagree substantially over the extent and nature of that structure.

Any collectivized resource above our actual Dunbar limit at the level of deep scrutiny (which means rougly a dozen or so people) will be corrupt. Thus the only altruistic goal is to eliminate all collectives larger than that.

We gather in cities currently because of the technological economies-of-scale do so, so we currently have no choice but to deal with collective issues of the city. But technology may free us from this concentration in the future, e.g. the internet enables virtual employment from a rural location. The Knowledge Age will radically change this further.

Most importantly, note that a plurality of managers of resources competing and trading is free market. And this converges because the most efficacious will aggregate resources until they are competed against by equivalently efficacious. The free market is self-annealing. You don't trust it because the capitalists in the Industrial Age were able to game the Iron Law of Political Economics, and thus you turned to a delusion to console yourself (but your delusion doesn't change the reality). The Knowledge Age gives us hope that the natural order of competition will advance knowledge faster and thus more prosperity for all. That is altruism. There is no other reality of altruism, only your delusional fantasies which have never existed even once.
 
You asked why I used the words "somewhat repulsive" to describe anonymity. It is because true anonymity obscures justice. Anonymity allows for crime without recourse, darkness without light. In blinding government it also blinds justice.

Oh my you have just proven how deep you in that delusional nonsense.

Justice that Katz was writing about is the justice that comes from individual empowerment. You've somehow conflated that in your mind that the State brings justice, when in fact in every instance the State bring oppression and fails horrifically on reducing crime.

In Europe the overt crime was subdued by bribing the people to steal from each other with socialized collectives (a.k.a. socialism, communism, fascism, Marxism, etc). Thus they just moved the human nature into a different form of crime.

The State doesn't help anything. Period.

You've fallen into an emotional delusion.

You may be surprised to know that I completely support you in your goal of establishing a strong anonymous cryptocurrency.  

I could never trust you, given your emotional delusion. One day you will snap and go against me. It is analogous as not being able to trust a woman (to be rational), because they are ruled by their unpredictable emotions.

As I stated above I do not favor anonymity as an optimal solution.

You see.

I am very astute at reading people. I knew from your Myers-Brigg result that I you were danger. And then when I saw you pandering to I3352, it made me realize that you have that same mental state.

 Cry
7812  Economy / Economics / Re: Economic Devastation on: April 10, 2015, 10:40:09 AM
This is principally relevant to the main topic of this thread, technological unemployment. Without your individuality, you can't compete in the Knowledge Age. It is precisely what you can add that is unique that is most valuable in the Knowledge Age.

The only purpose they serve is as a protection against tyrannical force because by conforming yourself you make yourself indistinct from the masses : you become a fungible human being.

Incorrect. It gives the tyrants their power. Individuality and non-fungibility is a friction which is the antithesis of the economies-of-scale the powers-that-be need to control us. Read my essay Rise of Knowledge linked from the opening post of this thread.

Why is the world so hostile? I want to become an individual but it seems so hard to me. Its like I have to fight the whole word and also myself. It's like I have to betray the whole world and also myself. Its like to kill the whole world and also myself. Becoming an individual feels like a sacrilege. Why isnt it easier if thats what enable us to bring our singularity to the world ? Well I'll stop there and go to bed as my brain seems apeased when it realized it was a sacrilege to the group and its rules but not to nature.

How sad the indoctrination has made you feel like breaking away from the herd is doing the herd more harm. They really programmed your mind in the western world. I don't know how I managed to escape that mind programming.

Thanks so much for sharing and being so open. You have exemplified a very important effect of indoctrination through culture, mass media, and state schools.

I rejected TV in my teens. I started to run off into the desert in my 20s, and by 26 I had taken off to Asia without even a hotel reservation. I guess I am just fearless. Must be my Cherokee blood. I find it nearly impossible to back down from a fight. I am like the Chihuahua that yaps ferociously at the Rottweiler never aware that I am smaller and should run away (and I blinded in one eye because of that trait or maybe it is because I hesitated lacking fierceness which gave them a moment to gang up on me). Normally I am very laid back and smiling. But put me into any competitive circumstance and the fierce eyebrows, scowl, and determination come out. I admire men who give me good competition, or who are great teammates; and I am very much into sharing camaraderie amongst my competitors and teammates.

Thus I would say it my extreme competitiveness that caused my independence.

In short, I love competition and challenges.
7813  Economy / Economics / Re: Economic Devastation on: April 09, 2015, 06:03:56 PM
Unfortunately I had gotten confused by various tax protest theories and even though I had seen the following website in the past, I didn't pay careful enough attention.

This method appears to work (doesn't get charged with "frivolous return" or other failures) and the government can't possibly prosecute in court all of the filers. Successful cumulative refunds exceeded $1 million by 2005 and $11 million currently.

http://losthorizons.com/Documents/The16th.htm

Quote
MY FRIEND, ALL YOUR LIFE YOU’VE BEEN TOLD THAT THE 16TH AMENDMENT was a transformational event in the history of the United States Constitution by which an unapportioned direct federal tax on "all that comes in" was authorized. You’ve been told that the amendment reversed the preceding 137-year-old Constitutional tax structure prohibiting such taxes-- under which the American people had grown to be the freest, most prosperous, and most optimistic people in the history of the world-- in favor of a radically-different structure under which the scandal-ridden and deeply-distrusted denizens of Washington, DC were granted carte blanche to reach directly into every wallet, be it that of a Wall Street tycoon or that of the average working stiff.

The 16th Amendment says the Pollock court's conclusion was wrong (or, in any event, is overruled). The amendment provides that Congress can continue to apply the income tax to gains that qualify as "incomes" (that is, the subclass of receipts that had always been subject to the “income” excise due to being the product of an exercise of privilege) without being made to treat the tax as direct and needing apportionment when applied to dividends and rent by virtue of judicial consideration of the source:
 
Quote
"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration."

The amendment doesn't transform the "income tax" into a direct tax, nor modify, repeal, revoke or affect the apportionment requirement for capitations and other direct taxes. It simply prohibits the courts from using the overruled reasoning of the Pollock decision to shield otherwise excisable dividends and rents from the tax. As Treasury Department legislative draftsman F. Morse Hubbard summarizes the amendment’s effect for Congress in hearing testimony in 1943:
 
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"[T]he amendment made it possible to bring investment income within the scope of the general income-tax law, but did not change the character of the tax. It is still fundamentally an excise or duty..."

This isn’t Hubbard’s personal opinion. Almost immediately after the amendment was declared adopted in 1913, and the income tax was revived after its 18-year hiatus since the Pollock decision, the application of the tax was again challenged (in Brushaber v. Union Pacific RR Co., 240 U.S. 1 (1916)). Frank Brushaber, a New Yorker with investments in the Union Pacific Railroad Company, based his suit on a series of contentions about the 16th Amendment. The Supreme Court took the case with the intention of settling all issues regarding the purpose and meaning of the amendment and declaring the ongoing nature of the income tax as affected thereby.
 
The lengthy, detailed and unanimous ruling issued by the court declares that the amendment has no effect on what is and what is not subject to the income tax, and does nothing to limit or diminish the apportionment provisions in the Constitution concerning capitations or other direct taxes. Here are three more good summaries of the Brushaber ruling to add to F. Morse Hubbard’s:
 
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"The Amendment, the [Supreme] court said, judged by the purpose for which it was passed, does not treat income taxes as direct taxes but simply removed the ground which led to their being considered as such in the Pollock case, namely, the source of the income. Therefore, they are again to be classified in the class of indirect taxes to which they by nature belong."
Cornell Law Quarterly, 1 Cornell L. Q. 298 (1915-16)
 
"In Brushaber v. Union Pacific Railroad Co., Mr. C. J. White, upholding the income tax imposed by the Tariff Act of 1913, construed the Amendment as a declaration that an income tax is "indirect," rather than as making an exception to the rule that direct taxes must be apportioned."
Harvard Law Review, 29 Harv. L. Rev. 536 (1915-16)
 
"The Supreme Court, in a decision written by Chief Justice White, first noted that the Sixteenth Amendment did not authorize any new type of tax, nor did it repeal or revoke the tax clauses of Article I of the Constitution, quoted above.  Direct taxes were, notwithstanding the advent of the Sixteenth Amendment, still subject to the rule of apportionment…"
Legislative Attorney of the American Law Division of the Library of Congress Howard M. Zaritsky in his 1979 Report No. 80-19A, entitled 'Some Constitutional Questions Regarding the Federal Income Tax Laws'

So, the class of what qualifies as "income" subject to the tax remains the same after the amendment as it had been before it. The 16th Amendment eliminated the "source" argument, but didn't change the limits on what was subject to the tax. If something didn’t qualify as taxable without apportionment prior to Pollock and the amendment, it still doesn't qualify as taxable without apportionment. The Supreme Court reiterates this in ruling after ruling:
 
Quote
"The Sixteenth Amendment, although referred to in argument, has no real bearing and may be put out of view. As pointed out in recent decisions, it does not extend the taxing power to new or excepted subjects..."
U.S. Supreme Court, Peck v. Lowe, 247 U.S. 165 (1918)
 
"[T]he settled doctrine is that the Sixteenth Amendment confers no power upon Congress to define and tax as income without apportionment something which theretofore could not have been properly regarded as income."
U.S. Supreme Court, Taft v. Bowers, 278 US 470, 481 (1929)
 
"[T]he sole purpose of the Sixteenth Amendment was to remove the apportionment requirement for whichever incomes were otherwise taxable. 45 Cong. Rec. 2245-2246 (1910); id. at 2539; see also Brushaber v. Union Pacific R. Co., 240 U. S. 1, 240 U. S. 17-18 (1916)"
U.S. Supreme Court, So. Carolina v. Baker, 485 U.S. 505 (1988)

Summing it all up, the 16th Amendment comes down to this: The Pollock court had said, "Congress has laid a tax on a big class of excisable objects (which it calls "incomes"), and it's all good. But when the tax is applied to dividend and rent "incomes", it actually functions as a property tax on their sources and therefore, in regard to those two "incomes", the tax has to be apportioned."
 
The 16th Amendment simply says, "Nix to that last bit."

Here is the Supreme Court again declaring the ongoing vitality of the apportionment rule (the 16th Amendment notwithstanding), and specifically distinguishing the income tax as an excise and not a capitation:
 
Quote
"If [a] tax is a direct one, it shall be apportioned according to the census or enumeration. If it is a duty, impost, or excise, it shall be uniform throughout the United States. Together, these classes include every form of tax appropriate to sovereignty. Whether the [income] tax is to be classified as an "excise" is in truth not of critical importance [for this analysis]. If not that, it is an "impost", or a "duty". A capitation or other "direct" tax it certainly is not."
U.S. Supreme Court, Steward Machine Co. v. Collector of Internal Revenue, 301 U.S. 548 (1937) (Emphasis added; citations omitted.)



As the USA economy turns down, if more people begin to demand not to pay FICA and income taxes, the government is going to need to resort to martial law, suspension of elections, and suspension of the rule-of-law, in order to contain a popular revolt. You can see this fuming and closer to exploding:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/04/09/abuse-of-contempt-of-court-far-more-common-than-people-realize/

http://pontiactribune.com/federal-ultimatum-land-innocent-michigan-woman-behind-bars/

Armstrong's political cycle models are pointing to a significant rise in 3rd party political support for 2016 national elections. TPTB are going to have to suspend elections at some point, as they've pushed about as far as they can using Boehmer to stymie the Tea Party:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/19/the-man-destroying-the-republican-party/

Either Obama (2012) or Hillary Clinton (2016) will probably be the last duly elected POTUS:

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/25/state-department-covering-up-for-hillary/
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