Oh, they're good.  Downright addictive.

Unless, of course, you're allergic to raspberries.

Not quite, I just don't consider it my duty to convince you or anyone else of my position.

Not entirely incorrect, however.  I'm an INTP, and as such I'm ever capable of reassessing my position based on new information, and suffer little due to cognative dissonance.  As such, an INTP can't remain so flexible unless there is some degree of doubt in the validity of his/her position, and I'm no exception.  I have no problem admitting that I don't consider myself perfect, in thought or action.  I've changed my position on some things over the course of my adult life, including my position on economic theories.  That's why I'm an Austrian now, I used to be much more of a classic monetarist.  Although I can't recall holding positions similar to your own at any point in life.

That is far from true, unfortunately.

Zarathustra is a true believer.  He doesn't come here and make his statements because he needs to convince himself, he comes here because he thinks it's his duty to convince you.  I recommend use of the ignore button to the left.

This has devolved into childish fight.  I've had enough of it.  This thread is now locked.

BTW, Crumbs...

You're a dick, and I've not yet seen another side of you.  If you have any redeeming merit, start clinging to that side of yourself.

Just because you say it, or read it somewhere on the Internet, or listen to some guy who said it in some cute way, doesn't make it so.

I'm finished arguing with idiots about this.  I'm just wasting my time.

Again, you fail.  I said nothing about exponetial population growth.  While that might happen if we manage to get off this rock, it certainly doesn't have to happen.  The natural world all has limits, and humanity isn't really an exception.  If that is "doom" in your eyes, then doom it may be.  But I'm not going to cry over what cannot be avoided, and if we can avoid it (by getting of this rock) nor will I be disappointed to be wrong.


And ham radio operators could never do what they do without a 'stable' oscillation, and a car engine would never go anywhere without it's 'stable' cycles.  An economy is much better compared to a machine in operation than a static construction such as a bridge.

And shock absorbers are not oscillation dampers.  Bumps in the road aren;t oscillations, they don't have a predictable pattern.  Talk about your bad model.


I was giving them the enefit of the doubt, because most certainly some of them are basicly 'simple minded' after a fashion, and are often taken advantage of by others.  It's actually an established rule of politics, often called the rule of the Baptists & Bootleggers.  Feel free to look that one up.

You give him and his like too much credit.  While there is a certain kind of 'smarts' required to obtain and maintain these positions of power, there are many different kinds of 'smarts'.  The kind of 'smart' required to succeed in a social position of power (i.e. politics) is decidedly distinct to the kind of smarts required to analyse a complex economy.  The latter kind of smarts is both rare and humbling, as the end result is usually that, no matter how well you did in school nor how many times your mother told you were so smart, you're not smart enough and you can't be.  And that is the fundamental lesson not taught in economics courses.  Those classes teach the students methods of simplyfying the overal picture, in such a manner as to be able to approximate the massive issue.  But just like chaos theory implies that the choice of direction a butteryfly may take can impact the course of a typhoon halfway around the world and 6 months later, the long tail of data in the economy cannot be rounded off and accurately approximate such a huge and dynamic system for any real timescale.  Oftentimes, the long tail of data isn't even available for analysis.  How do you know what deals that the recycler in Africa makes, if he is not willing to tell you the truth?  What if you never ask?

Degenerating?

Bitcoin was designed to be a tool for 'anarchy'.  Your choice of words exposes your bias.

EDIT:  Oviously, this is a trolling post thread, intended to evoke a response.  It obviously worked.  Well played.

I'm pretty sure you're well aware you're misrepresenting my educational background.

The problem with "stable" is that it is a subjective valuation.  All economies oscillate, it's called the business cycle.  Unfortuantely, there are many people who will make well intended, but ill advised, attempts to suppress that oscillation.  The result of which is that 'forces' become pent up, and create greater havoc when they are finally released 'out of phase'.  Still other people stand to make huge profits from the timing of changes in teh business cycle, and have a perverse incentive to encourage the realses of such 'forces' on their own timescales, thus making things even worse for everyone else.  George Soros famously made an even bigger fortune doing exactly this to England.  To most poeople, 'stable' would mean that an economy grows at or slightly better than the population rate.  By better, most people would say somthing around 2% APR.  The problem is that even 2% annually is an exponential growth rate, and cannot continue forever.  By definition, that which is not sustainable cannot continue indefinately, no matter the best wishes of  anyone.  To myself, and in this context, 'stable' would mean that the natural 'forces' that result in the business cycle be left alone, so that the magnitude of those oscillations don't have the chance to compound.

And that is what I mean by the 'right' economy.  The one that develops naturally from the people and conditions that are present and develop in the future, without influence of well intended politicos and self-interested powers.  It would be possible for some of those oscillations to be particularly harmful, even to the point of severe social strife, but over the truely long term, such oscillations (by definition) balance out.

You've already failed the test.

If by that, you mean real ecological damage, than yes.  In such a case, such 'externalities' do, indeed, negatively effect an economy of any nature or size.  The cavet here is that not all claims of environmental harm are, in fact, harmful.  Burning firewood, for example, isn't actually net harmful, even if human beings in the near environmental space may find it uncomfortable, or even personally harmful.  Inasmuch as fossil fuels are burned for energy, they are not necesarily harmful either.  Burned 'clean' such actions only produce CO2, which itself shouldn't rationally be considered a pollutant.  It's a greenhouse gas, yes, but it's also so difuse in the atmostsphere that it's actuall net contribution to global climate changes is highly debatable on scientific grounds.  But that is a huge tangent.


He can be taught!

"War is the health of the state."

I don't want a progressively increasing economy.  I want the right economy.  The best way to have that is to take a 'hands off' approach, because politicos really don't know as much as they think they do.


I don't deny this either.  I don't know anyone who has besides your claims that someone has.  I just don't find such a society to be ideal.  If you do, why are you still here?  There certainly are groups within the US and elsewhere that prefer the kind of "natural" lifestyle you think is appropriate, and some of them will even accept you.  You just have to find them.  Or create your own.

The obvious answer is that you really don't believe that you would be better off without modern industry and/or the Internet, or you would be doing so.  You certainly are still free enough to do so, despite you claims to the contrary.  It costs you almost nothing to go hiking into the wilderness, and 'camp' in public parks.  There have literally been cases of people that have been found camping in national parks that have been there for years.  Camping isn't illegal, yet.  People have done it in city parks, although that is certainly illegal.  I've even seen a tent that is shaped to resemble a car, put up in a city parking spot.  I've seen people camp in freeway medians; which if you have ever driven though Kentucky, you would realize is not very difficult to do undetected.  Learn to set up trappin snares, there are such books in the public library, and you would never even have to 'hunt' for your food.  There are tribes in Africa that get most of their food from simple snares, because they still use an atlatl (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spear-thrower) instead of the more effective bow and arrow for hunting.

You obviously don't have an accurate understanding as to what actually went wrong with that reactor in Japan.  That reactor was designed with a multiplely redundant emergency cooling system.  It was specificly designed to suffer an earthquake of a power of 9.0 on the Riecther scale within 20 miles or so of the epicenter.  It was desgned to suffer through a tsunami.  It was designed to suffer though a complete failure of grid power support, as well as total failure of all of the AC water pumps.  What was never considered was the incredible odds that all of these things would happen in the same day.  It was a harsh lesson learned, and many heroic engineers and techs working for a private company lost some or all of their remaining lifespans in concerted efforts to save public lives.  It sucks to be that tech, when that crap happens at your plant; but just like joining the military, they knew what they signed up for.  If you don't thik that there are equally heroic corporate employees of every other nuclear powerhouse in the world, then you don't really understand why these men and woman get paid the salaries that they do.  But know that the nuclear industry knows that such a one in ten thousand odds event can happen, they are already reconsidering their own emergency cooling plans because reglatory agencies require them to and because they don't ever want to be the next set of guys to have to die to save humanity.  For that matter, the complete breakdown of civil society is one of the most common emergency scenarios that nuke plant disaster planners have long considered, and one of the easiest for them to plan for.  It's way harder to plan for a 35 foot high tsunami wave.   Fukushima power plant had diesel powered pumps that could run underwater, and generators that could survive an earthquake; but not both at the same time.  And furthermore, none of those failues would have mattered at all, had  Fukushima  not been involved in their once in a three year refueling cycle when the bovine fecal matter made contact with the rotating cooling device.  The other reactors were all automaticly in emergency shutdown stage 60 seconds after the earthquake was detected, and never caused any problems; but that one (number 4, IIRC) was not set for automatic shutdown due to being involved in a fuel rod exchange that very week.  Fresh, hot fuel rods were waiting in the storage pool, while engineers and tech were running all over a damaged and dangerous reactor trying to get the emergency neutron sheild down into the remaining core, and everyone managed to forget about the storage pool.  The water in the storage pool evaporated enough that the tops of the fuel rods were exposed to air, and then they caught on fire due to their own internal heat.  It was not really a 'mealtdown' in any practical sense, but radioactive smoke is no small thing.  To the best of my knowledge, Fukushima could still be in operation today, if the populist government had not halted all nuclear power in the nation, as teh damage to the reactor itself was not really significant.  Nothing like Chernobel for example, or even Three Mile Island (which didn't actually release any radiation BTW, but did damage the reactor)

I'll offer 0.2 BTC, if you're willing to mail it to me before I pay.

This is, almost word for word, Mish's complaint with Schiff and other hyperinflationists today.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2011/05/hyperinflation-nonsense-in-multiple.html
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/08/reader-questions-on-hyperinflation.html

Nope, not a new idea.  The 4S was specificly designed to run unattended for 30 year refueling cycles, and is quite capable of utilizing downgraded weapons fuel.  It can also use a Strirling engine at the surface generator house, although it's actually desinged to use a liquid salt to boiling water heat exchanger.  Stirling engines are more efficient, but they are also more expensive to build, so the 4S can do either.  The early test version, such as may eventually be built for Alaska, assumes that the waste heat is used for municipal hot water distric heating.  This is more commonly called 'cogeneration' and the total energy efficientyc is much greater than that of a Stirling engine producing electrical power alone.  And the 4S is just one example of this style of small, unattended reactor design, other companies have similar designs.  Another design that aims towards similar ends, but uses a classic deep pool unpressurized light water design is the SLOWPOKE (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLOWPOKE_reactor), intended primarily for municipal district heating and is largely incapable of electric power geneartion because it niether operates at a high enough carnot efficiency to use a stirling nor is it designed to biol water for pressure, since it's an open top design exposed to atmostphere at the top and boiling water is used as super-critical limiting feature in the core.  It's literally impossible to 'meltdown' the core in this one, because it depends upon the presence of a precise amount of water in the core space for the proper regulation of neutron flux, and either the presence of steam bubbles, or the pressence of normal air (in the event of pool water boil-off) permits too much neutron flux to escape the core to maintain a critical reaction.

Great kid, very smart.  But that isn't an original idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S

All that federally "owned" land, particularly out west, is the perfect example of the American form of communism.  Undeveloped land is the most basic of resources, required for any form of industrial production I can think of.  By definition, communism is public ownership of the means of production.  There has never been any claim that those resources actually need to be in production to qualify for the definition.

And the past of money.  There is a reason we have the term, "not worth his salt".