Economic Devastation

[thaaanos]

I think Hidalgo makes a pretty good job at clearing it out at least in my head the Info Matter Energy trinity interactions
if you havent watch his first talk do so
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cXe8w62_ow

He claims that If you have entities that compute (lifeforms), a way to store Info as in solids or macromoleculles like DNA, and operate out of equilibrium ie in an energy potential that creates a flow you can grow information. and cheat the 2nd law

However he doesn't answer my inner question if this is emergent behaviour. I believe that if an energy flow exists, structures will emerge that will transform energy into information (low entropy), that compete the natural dissipative processes that transform energy to incoherent information (high entropy), It had been shown I think by some researchers.
Otherwise a seed ie a prime computing structure is needed to kickstart the whole process.

Hidalgo reinforces my ideas that computation, life, intelligence, social structures, economic Scapes and so forth are essentially the same thing iterating at greater scale.

To tie back into the original conversation in his second video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuM-AtDjuxg
he argues that much of the resource allocation is hidden behind the Coasian barrier, internally in the firms in a non market way (political), and only a portion that will get smaller and smaller as the Firms barriers expand is left to be handled by market dynamics.
This runs in parallel with before mentioned structures that metabolize energy into internal information production and own growth rather than allow entropic forces to play freely.

So computation and life and social organizations and the higher stratified computational networks as they expand move territory from the Domain of the Hand into the internal Domain of they Internal central planning.

Of course TPTB will cut in here and say (and rightly up to a point), that Knowledge age will carve up the firms barriers into openly interconnected sub-networks networks no longer tied to a single Firm exposing thus their internals into Hand's domain again. I would welcome that situation as that would also mean that Firms will leave their Feudal age and be more Democratic.
However nature has not shown that it favours such a path. Nature seem to prefers monotonic appropriation of Hands Territory behind an ever expanding Coase barrier. Nature doesn't like market operations internally as their entropy production if accumulated is equivalent to death.

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[TPTB_need_war]

I think Hidalgo makes a pretty good job at clearing it out at least in my head the Info Matter Energy trinity interactions
if you havent watch his first talk do so
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cXe8w62_ow

Excellent and I like how he speaks very quickly so I don't get bored. The chart at 20:20 is amazing. The Middle East and Australia need to tumble economically.

However he says that information is order. Whereas, Shannon showed that the information content is the disorder or entropy. A highly ordered set of information has a very small vocabulary and/or a very non-uniform occurrence of terms, thus has low entropy and low information content.

Therefor I think he missed some of the thrust of my prior post and the significance of the entropic force. High entropy is necessary to be more receptive to work and have less resistance to achieve fitness. Highly ordered systems are brittle, inflexible and highly resistant to application of energy to produce work.

He claims that If you have entities that compute (lifeforms), a way to store Info as in solids or macromoleculles like DNA, and operate out of equilibrium ie in an energy potential that creates a flow you can grow information. and cheat the 2nd law

We are not cheating the 2nd law. Increasing information content is increasing entropy. The energy is being dissipated as work in the physical world. The information is always increasing.

However he doesn't answer my inner question if this is emergent behaviour. I believe that if an energy flow exists, structures will emerge that will transform energy into information (low entropy)

Who said information == order == low entropy? That is incorrect.

Energy transfer does not necessary reduce the entropy of a system if the work was applied external to the system where the information content is being measured.

, that compete the natural dissipative processes that transform energy to incoherent information (high entropy),

Incoherent to whom? High entropy has more states and/or more uniform probability of states; thus has more information content. This may be random noise to an observer who does not possess knowledge of the vocabulary of that high entropy system, e.g. an encrypted datum is random except to the holder of the private key who can decrypt it.

Of course TPTB will cut in here and say (and rightly up to a point), that Knowledge age will carve up the firms barriers into openly interconnected sub-networks networks no longer tied to a single Firm exposing thus their internals into Hand's domain again. I would welcome that situation as that would also mean that Firms will leave their Feudal age and be more Democratic.
However nature has not shown that it favours such a path. Nature seem to prefers monotonic appropriation of Hands Territory behind an ever expanding Coase barrier. Nature doesn't like market operations internally as their entropy production if accumulated is equivalent to death.

Coase's Theory of the Firm shows that lowering transactional cost of network links reduces the ability of the Firm as a monolithic structure to maintain a cost advantage.

Nature is governed by the trend of entropy to maximum in the inviolable 2nd law of Thermo. Inertia carries nature to extremes, then the damn bursts and the Coasian barrier falls in a waterfall collapse. We will see from 2017 forward. This is often accompanied by technological innovation will reduces the transactional costs which were sustaining the Coasian barrier such as I hope the new software I am working on will be an example.

he argues that much of the resource allocation is hidden behind the Coasian barrier, internally in the firms in a non market way (political), and only a portion that will get smaller and smaller as the Firms barriers expand is left to be handled by market dynamics.
This runs in parallel with before mentioned structures that metabolize energy into internal information production and own growth rather than allow entropic forces to play freely.

So computation and life and social organizations and the higher stratified computational networks as they expand move territory from the Domain of the Hand into the internal Domain of they Internal central planning.

Yes inertia plays a large role, but the 2nd law never loses and eventually these Coasian barrier collapse because they are uneconomic in the face of new technologies and popular emerging trends.

[thaaanos]

Yes the use of word information needs to be clarified, Cesar uses it as synonymous to orderly complexity as opposed to entropy. He doesnt mean it as the sum of all information accesible or not

[CoinCube]

Entropy is not some vague concept. It has a precise mathematical definition which is the sum of the logarithmic relation of the number and probability of the possible configurations (a.k.a. states) in the system, i.e. it is measure of the granularity and uniformness of possibilities in the system, i.e. the availability to fitness (to receive work) of the system.  Mankind could not have achieved such amazing feats without a much larger scope of capability states and more distributed probabilities within that scope. In other words, if all lifeforms were capable of doing only one thing, mankind can't accomplish many things. If lifeforms can't interact to form higher information content, then their input to evolution can be lost and the information content decreases.

If you only focus on the biological lifeforms, you miss the entropic force. Biological lifeforms considered only physically and in isolation from the network effects (and memory of evolution) is just a zero sum game if without the entropic relationship. It is akin to focusing only on the actors of the system and treating the interaction of lifeforms (not in the physical but in the informational and evolutionary memory perspective) here on earth as a closed thermodynamic system.Thermodynamics tells us that entropy depends not only on the net flow of energy but also the work dissipated external to the system. The information content of evolution is orthogonal to the physical work done on earth, so all the energy being input is also being dissipated out of the open information system of evolution.

TPTB your post above was very good. First time in a while that I had to reread what you wrote a few times. It reminded me in some ways of your initial writings linked in the opening post.

You are arguing that the primary goal of life is to increase its information content which is the functional equivalent of increasing the number and probability of its possible configurations (a.k.a. states). As Entropy is proportional to the logarithm of multiplicity (the number of microstates) the primary goal of life is therefore to increase its internal entropy.

It’s a good argument. However, I would note that from the frame of reference of life not all entropy is the same. There is useful entropy information that facilitates further search and there is useless entropy noise which is either irrelevant or possibly inhibits the formation of higher information content.

Below are two older post from thaaanos that add to the discussion.

Data irrelevant to an actor is noise,  information that cannot be accessed, environment entropy

As i said information is not created it is discovered, or carved out of the entropy of the universe. When 2 actors come together and communicate ultimately  its is done by sharing a state, not flow but entanglement! their later computation based on the new information does not increase the information content simply shifts focus, that is we asume fixed memory, or at least bounded. Now you can argue that actors can record information but still the argument holds because there is not infinite supply of memory, or that actors can coordinate to hold diffrent parts of information so as to maximize total capacity but that just shifts entropy up or down in the network hierarcy

Perhaps life in this context can be envisioned as an energy driven search through entropy with selective retention. Life must protect the integrity of its previously stored information and noise must be evaluated and discarded. Life must simultaneously increase its information content so it can respond to a dynamic environment.

Perhaps this trade off can be thought of as the balance between search and exploitation. The search through entropy is costly and consumes energy. As the energy available to any branch of life is strictly limited the search must also be controlled and limited.

[TPTB_need_war]

TPTB your post above was very good. First time in a while that I had to reread what you wrote a few times. It reminded me in some ways of your initial writings linked in the opening post.

Sincerely thank you. I hope I still have some of that still in me, but I tell you frankly that chronic disease has taken its toll on my energy and mental clarity. In addition to my herbal experiments, I hope to be able to afford a first-world, western diagnosis (hopefully this year if my plans in the area of social networks and crypto currency pan out). Also I've been too frantically overloaded (energy wise) on crypto currency technology and marketing research&development to have any free time whatsoever to reflect on other intellectual interests. Those are the reasons I exited this thread and I don't think I can stay in this thread for the same reasons (so far my health has improved significantly on the high dose curcumin extract but not perfect, yet now I have piled an even more ambitious work load on my plate). Also the quality of my prose and well-focused elucidation declines with the huge volume that I write. But again thank you.

CoinCube I wonder if you as a doctor can even know what your patients feel if you haven't experienced their illness yourself. I have come to the conclusion that no one who hasn't had daily chronic illness could comprehend (the daily feeling of the malaise) how it grinds down even the most determined fighter spirit. As a doctor, you can observe the lethargy and (possibly stoic) grimaces, but this can significantly understate what the patient is feeling inside; OTOH there are other patients who wail and exaggerate. (Also I do understand why you could not comment on my herbal treatments due to liability issues being I presume a licensed doctor or at least your responsibilities in your profession)

Of course in the future one of my missions in retired life will be to help those who have chronic illness. If I can. Right now, I am also thinking about the Zika virus potentially destroying the fertility of females all over world. I don't know if that virus will be self-limiting, e.g. due to community immunity. For example, my gf and I were discussing how her younger sisters can't avoid the mosquitoes and hoping we have the funds to improve their living environment before Zika is widespread in the Philippines. But then the other billions of young ladies in the developing world.    Maybe nature needs to cull the population to drive more competition or otherwise strength the evolutionary path. As you know from upthread discussion, I don't believe there is any overpopulation problem that can't be resolved eventually by the Knowledge Age.

We have to be in awe of this complex system of nature and evolution here on earth. To belittle it claiming our earthy ecosystem is irrelevant on a cosmic scale due to only physical (atoms) interpretation of thermodynamics is a perspective that troubles my intuitive sense of value. Yet it is always best to formalize and quantify so that the those who prioritize Sensing over iNtuition will be convinced.

You are arguing that the primary goal of life is to increase its information content which is the functional equivalent of increasing the number and probability of its possible configurations (a.k.a. states). As Entropy is proportional to the logarithm of multiplicity[probabilistic diversity] (the number of microstates) the primary goal of life is therefore to increase its internal entropy.

Well I reflect on your upthread point and the research you cited, that argues that too many mutations (too much diversity) can diverge from the fitness w.r.t. the current priorities of the system (environment). Since nature can't predict how the environment will morph in the future, it has to balance mutations against repairing them, so as to anneal slowly enough so as to not diverge yet also anneal to environmental change fast enough to avoid extinction during radical environmental shifts (e.g. an Ice Age). Plants have the ability to store their genetic information for 1000s of years in ice and be regenerated (see the recent example from Siberia of an ancient plant discovered in ice and regenerated...yet I forget if the seeds sprouted when thawed or human genetic engineering was involved). But plants don't create literature and other dynamic forms of living human knowledge (the network of connections between living humans) that can't necessarily be encoded and preserved in ice.

So I argue that evolution (nature) is maximizing its balance between near-term and long-term fitness and resiliency. Since nature can't predict if its parameters are correct, it creates a diversity of species with different parameters. This brings me back to my oft-stated point that the universe could not exist without friction, i.e. the speed-of-light can't be infinite, because otherwise past and future would collapse into an infinitesimal point and nothing would exist. So if nature simply wanted to become maximally disordered, then there would be no friction, no game, and past and future would collapse into non-existence.

The logical beauty of the magnificent game of our Universe caused even someone as brilliant as Einstein even pondered whether thus must be some divine inspiration. Note though that Einstein wasn't that awesome in math (although not derelict) and was an intuitive thinker.

It’s a good argument. However, I would note that from the frame of reference of life not all entropy is the same. There is useful entropy information that facilitates further search and there is useless entropy noise which is either irrelevant or possibly inhibits the formation of higher information content.

Agreed as noted above.

Please note (and also in reference to thaaanos' post below) that no one can know what is the noise and what is the data, because in unbounded entropy no one can know a total ordering and predict the future precisely enough to know how to organize the mutations. Without friction and a finite speed-of-light, 0 entropy and infinite entropy would be indistinguishable and the game collapses. Martin Armstrong can find higher dimensions of order (repeating cycle patterns) in the chaotic interaction of a plurality of interacting cycles (Butterfly effects) which has been named the Strange Attractor in Lorentz's famous and widely respected Chaos Theory. So he can determine timings on repeating cycles, but he can't tell nature which mutations which adapt to the future because he can't know all the details about the future. He can see one partial ordering which is more informational than than those who don't compile and multi-dimensionally inspect as much data as he claims.

Below are two older post from thaaanos that add to the discussion.

Data irrelevant to an actor is noise,  information that cannot be accessed, environment entropy

As i said information is not created it is discovered, or carved out of the entropy of the universe. When 2 actors come together and communicate ultimately  its is done by sharing a state, not flow but entanglement! their later computation based on the new information does not increase the information content simply shifts focus, that is we asume fixed memory, or at least bounded. Now you can argue that actors can record information but still the argument holds because there is not infinite supply of memory, or that actors can coordinate to hold diffrent parts of information so as to maximize total capacity but that just shifts entropy up or down in the network hierarcy

Perhaps life in this context can be envisioned as an energy driven search through entropy with selective retention. Life must protect the integrity of its previously stored information and noise must be evaluated and discarded. Life must simultaneously increase its information content so it can respond to a dynamic environment.

Perhaps this trade off can be thought of as the balance between search and exploitation. The search through entropy is costly and consumes energy. As the energy available to any branch of life is strictly limited the search must also be controlled and limited.

Indeed actual information content is relative to the observer's resonance to the signal. This is why pitch forks tuned to the same frequency will resonate across great distances when only one of them is struck. This is why design of microwave transducers (e.g. for mobile phones) involves in metrics such as the Q.

My point to thaaanos is that no one knows which is information and which is signal a priori in a dynamic system where there is no top-down omniscience. Even if the system has no game theory where participants lie, there is still the problem that the speed-of-light is finite, thus omniscience to a centralized point of computation is impossible. Btw, this is what the block chain centralization issue is all about as well and why the CAP theorem is inviolable.

CoinCube, if there were no free market (not balanced, but a competition of experiments) annealing that you allude to then nature would need omniscience to balance costs and optimize convergence. But the beauty of the game of the Universe (i.e. life) is that the method for convergence is to have a plurality of experiments (e.g. species, cosmic structures, etc), which is also a trend to maximum entropy.

One day I hope to have the time and mental clarity to refine all of this and see where it leads when formalized. Or perhaps CoinCube et al will. I am getting a bit old for revolutionary scientific achievements (and having a minor relapse today which affects my mood to degraded expectations). The very significant breakthroughs are typically done before age 40 or thereabouts. I was actually starting to get reinterested in studying more higher math courses and my intellectual pursuits in my mid-40s but illness and more family upheaval overtook me. I did manage to write those essays linked from the OP at the tail end of my 40s. I look back on my life as a lot of time wasted. Starting with a turbulent childhood and attending more elementary schools than I have fingers on one hand, some of them inner-city disasters (e.g. Baton Rouge) where there was no teacher in the classroom! I only sprouted in 8th grade when my father paid for me to attend Ecole Classique, then suddenly I was mastering Algebra 1, Geometry, etc and catching up but then more family problems hit my life in high school. Then ditto college. Then ditto after college. CoinCube is much younger than I.

For anyone with kids, make sure you give them a stable environment to learn in. But not too antiseptically stable (because you can't learn everything from books or as Einstein said, "don't read too much, or you lose your ability to think for yourself"), otherwise they might lose their creative and out-of-the-box instincts. CoinCube I guess one might say I gained a lot of insight and experience from turbulent life, but my experiments were too costly. I overshot the best balance and underachieved. Fortunately nature has a solution for my failures— which is all of you. So I am at peace with it. Everyone's journey has a purpose in the overall scheme of the game of life.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/18299#.Vqpav1MrIyl

Another excellent piece, trollerc.  Thanks for posting it.

Europe is on the edge of becoming a neutered country, incapable of maintaining its society along the norms of "The West".  5 - 10 years after, they will become Islamicized.  It's already starting to happen, yet the Socialist Retards running EVERYTHING over there are hypnotized...

I wonder, trollerc, if the USA and/or Australia will allow their women to be harassed like that.  My guess is "no", but who knows.  At least in the West or South in the USA the Musloids would get an immediate ticket to their heaven, where their 72 goats await them.

Again, while I comprehend the arguments (and agree with some eg the idiocy of the PC movement), the seeming thought process that supposes some kind of preordained muslim plan to over run Europe is myopic[...]

Ahem...

[...]Even those in the past who rebutted me with, "but the miners can be in every country and the USA can't control every country", have had to eat their words now that we've shown that China has monopolized mining and is even lying about their justification for 51% attacking Bitcoin. I was warning about Tragedy of the Commons centralization of control in 2013 and everyone said I was loony[1] and now even Germany is instituting the BigT lie to implement capital controls[2] (why do you think Merkel and the Troika allowed 1.1 million muslims to invade Germany! it was to make the people feel unsafe!). We the masses will never be able to have privacy from the government (from our society) until we all decide that priority is the most important and force our will on the government. That isn't going to happen for the masses until after they suffer through some totalitarianism in the 2017 - 2032 timeframe. Some of the masses are aware enough to perhaps not like NSA snooping (yet some support it as they support the military for their safety, nationalistic pride, and dominance of the USA as the reserve currency), but it isn't the most important priority that they are willing to fight for with all their effort and zeal. The Chinese (not all perhaps but enough do) actually support the single party Communist system, because afaik they think that people need to be disciplined and they think this provides a more harmonious society.

[1]	Transactions Withholding Attack Spiraling Transaction Fees destruction of Bitcoin
[2]	http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_GERMANY_CASH_LIMIT?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-02-03-06-58-46

tabnloz your bleeding heart is understandable and perhaps even admirable, until you understand scientifically that if we allowforce too much change too fast, we destroy resiliency and fitness.

The action in Europe was not driven by a self-annealing free market, but rather by a conniving top-down powers-that-be. And they are leading the world into Dark Age. I am attacking this problem from the angle of social networks and crypto currency.

[CoinCube]

CoinCube I wonder if you as a doctor can even know what your patients feel if you haven't experienced their illness yourself. I have come to the conclusion that no one who hasn't had daily chronic illness could comprehend (the daily feeling of the malaise) how it grinds down even the most determined fighter spirit. As a doctor, you can observe the lethargy and (possibly stoic) grimaces, but this can significantly understate what the patient is feeling inside; OTOH there are other patients who wail and exaggerate. (Also I do understand why you could not comment on my herbal treatments due to liability issues being I presume a licensed doctor or at least your responsibilities in your profession)

No one who does not suffer from chronic illness even those who treat it can ever fully understand. The best that can be achieved is empathy and an abstract generalized idea of what those individuals may be going through.

I have not commented on your herbal therapies not due to liability concerns but because they are outside of my scope of practice. I operate in a specialized niche of the medical world which does not deal with your current challenges. Unfortunately have little to contribute. I sent you a PM with the actions I would take in your position.

[BTCBinary]

The two texts are sure a hell of a good read!

I've like the first one best, I especially enjoyed the evolution explanation the author proposes.

[TPTB_need_war]

[...]

Furthermore, it is disgusting how willing you are to lick the tyrannical boots of governments everywhere.

If you had 3/4 of my IQ, you might comprehend that certain things are impossible because they violate the finite speed-of-light and besides anonymity is not the solution to tyrannical government.

If you had even a clue as to what AnonyMint (myself) wrote since 2006, you would know I am fighting tyranny until my last breath.

Dude you've pushed (your uncontrollable irrationality and emotional outbursts) it too far and now are wasting my scarce time.

WARNING: Do this one time, and you will go on in my Ignore list, which means you will not be able to communicate with me (which will end up being a very big mistake on your part).

Stop this nonsense. I am not everyone's punching bag. I have important work to do.

You[government] cannot enforce patents or trademarks against a decentralized network.

Woefully incorrect and ignorant statement. Make you sure you follow the link to the page/thread which explains in detail.

Don't give me again your oft-repeated, immature and irresponsible excuse that you don't have time to read. That is your problem. (If you don't have time to read, then the responsible action is STFU until you do)

Not only governments, but Corporations will also eventually be greatly effected by decentralized and anonymity technologies.

Corporations will be replaced by direct business between individuals. In this way yes social network and block chain technologies can promote decentralization. But Bitshares/Daniel Larimer's invention of the DAC is idiotic. Robert Coase developed the Theory of the Firm that explains that corporations exist because they have a top-down moat around transaction costs. A corporation by definition and economic raison d'être is hierarchical.

[...]

CoinHoarder has been added to my Ignore list. Instead of responding with technical justification of his claim, he only throws mud.

I tried my best to be cordial and have a productive discussion with CoinHoarder. I've given him numerous chances to keep his discussion on the facts and not on his persistent focus on slaying the reputation of those who disagree with his love of Bitshares. Facts versus personal vendettas. But he doesn't seem to be capable of recognizing the distinction.

Again I believe a viewkey is possible with Zcash and that is why I have asked Zcash in their public forum (and reiterated its importance during Zooko's AMA) whether they are implementing it. Until we have their clarification, then we can't assume that which is not explicitly stated in the white paper. Readers will also note that CoinHoarder has not done the mea culpa acknowledging that he was ignorant of the applicability of Coase's Theory of the Firm to the Bitshares DAC nonsense that he is shrilling.

And he will not also admit the following is why he incorrect about stealing content.

Governments are organizing now around controlling the internet. The illegal activity through Bittorrent (which also steals from ISPs which have higher upload bandwidth allowances) is helping the governments feel they are justified in regulating the internet via Net Neutrality and other measures. You young fellow feel free to pursue theft of music and other content which deprives the millions of artists of income to pay their rent. You are not going to create the new Knowledge Economy with your theft model. And by advocating theft, you are helping the NWO totalitarianism to take form by providing an economic incentive and political support from millions of artists who are violated by piracy. Dumb. But I expect that from you.

[frank2]

anybody could try to predict world situation in 1 to 20 years timeframe?

any guesses?

my raw guess - please evaluate

1. within 12 months : economic devastation spreads globally + everybody will know there is a crisis, nobody will trust anymore ''recovery talk'' by all major media

2. within 20 years: destruction of present civilization :

best environment one can hope for : scenario described in famous book ''The Long Emergency''

obviously it could be much worse than that in 2035


some raw inputs - information to consider:

http://www.dailyreckoning.com.au/the-baltic-dry-index-falls-to-lowest-level-on-record-ever-cw/2016/02/05/

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-04/worlds-biggest-containership-hard-aground-baltic-dry-crashes-below-300-first-time-ev

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/12110415/Fears-of-global-liquidity-crunch-haunt-Davos-elites.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/davos/12108569/World-faces-wave-of-epic-debt-defaults-fears-central-bank-veteran.html

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2008/04/02/ted_turner_we_ll_all_be_cannibals2

http://www.activistpost.com/2015/09/agenda-2030-translator.html


found another thread. similar to my prediction. only my prediction : it will be more slow motion process but 2016 will be a game changer

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1310972.0;all
abs350
Big Crash coming
January 01, 2016, 03:15:43 PM
Just to let you guys know a big crash is coming in 2016 in the economy. There is going to be a huge financial crisis but it will be worse than 2009.
The bitcoin price will skyrocket to over $10,000. However  bitcoin will be banned in all western countries. If you are reading this living in the west you should make preparations to move to Russia or China they are the only places you will be safe owning bitcoins.
The crisis will be so big it will destroy entire countries and in 2017 there will be a civil war in the USA, UK and western europe. After this the world will never be the same again it will change so much by 2020 it will be unrecognizable compared to today.

[RealBitcoin]

What mostly concerns me is Europe.

Europe is predominantly retirees (low or negative birth rates exacerbate this), that own various european country bonds via their retirement plans. If interest rates go up, the bond values decline, and their retirement is toast. The politics is to appease subconscious denial, which is why you see Merkel talking tough and simultaneously making gradual steps towards centralized printing and fiscal controls. The savers want to penalize the non-savers, under some illusion that they can convert the non-savers, but they don’t accept culpability for causing the problem with a collectivist form of saving. If the collectivist non-savers were converted to collectivist savers, then who would borrow? Illogical.

How are you supported to raise a family with 80% taxes and minimal wage, it's crazy. Meanwhile the already old people need pensions so taxes keep rising. Fuck!

The socialist system is suicide.

[hdbuck]

What mostly concerns me is Europe.

Europe is predominantly retirees (low or negative birth rates exacerbate this), that own various european country bonds via their retirement plans. If interest rates go up, the bond values decline, and their retirement is toast. The politics is to appease subconscious denial, which is why you see Merkel talking tough and simultaneously making gradual steps towards centralized printing and fiscal controls. The savers want to penalize the non-savers, under some illusion that they can convert the non-savers, but they don’t accept culpability for causing the problem with a collectivist form of saving. If the collectivist non-savers were converted to collectivist savers, then who would borrow? Illogical.

How are you supported to raise a family with 80% taxes and minimal wage, it's crazy. Meanwhile the already old people need pensions so taxes keep rising. Fuck!

The socialist system is suicide.

Most 'state debt' taxes and pension funds in Europe benefits US retirees.

[jainy25]

The articles are of course very long and complex to read. But it is quite certain that we are on the verge of a collapse.

In simple terms, look around all the economies. Everyone is under a debt. I mean seriously? Who is the winner if all the countries are owning money to each other and the so-called World Bank and what not?

What makes the problem worse is the rapidly diminishing resources. It is quite obvious that as the population continues to increase around the world, so will the demand for resources. And well, we all know how much Mother Nature is able to hold up with us. So if we don't have the resources to buy/sell, how will we get over our debts?

Simply a hole too deep now...

[TPTB_need_war]

You young fellow feel free to pursue theft of music and other content which deprives the millions of artists of income to pay their rent.

I view this in completely different terms.  Before file sharing existed, people would record songs off the radio onto their tape cassettes.  The music was already technically (but not legally) out in the public domain for anyone to hear, you were just bypassing the business model of ad supported revenue.  The music was even being beamed at you via radio waves against your own will, yet there's probably plenty of obscure laws trying to govern whether you can or can't record it and what you can do with it.

We have a similar situation with ad blockers on websites.  Their business model is starting to fail.  To me, the whole situation with music is just the state trying to prop up an invalid business model.  In the old days, entertainers were considered to have the lowest of social status possible.  This is one of the initial reasons Nero was ridiculed as an emperor, because he wanted to be an actor and emperor at the same time.  Even if entertainer's social status was garbage, they could still get paid doing it, they just had to do it through live performance.  There was no "record thyself and make millions".
 
Modern civilization elevates these entertainers from the social status of garbage men, to basically higher than the president of the country in both fame and wealth.  This is not to say they shouldn't get paid, but past history and current technology both point to the idea that they will likely be required to do so only through live performance.  If you're saying it's the government's job to make sure their invalid business model is still able to make them mega-millionaires without even having to do live performance at all, then that would be an extreme left wing view.

I really read your rebuttal with an open mind, because if I am incorrect I will suffer immensely. So I am not writing the following based in what I want to believe, but rather based on my sober analysis of the facts. I am eager to read any rebuttal which can teach me why I am wrong.

First of all, distinguish SUPER STARS from the average indie musician earning couple of $100 a month, or the more successful indie or small label outfit earning just above the poverty line. The former number several dozens to maybe a few hundred (active) whereas the latter number in the 100,000s to millions (and maybe much more if they could earn a bit more).

Depriving indie musicians of a decent income (not even wealth!) to pay their rent and food is not the way to build a new age Knowledge Age economy wherein we creative people create things and sell them direct to each other instead of being slaves to corporations. If you are going to advocate stealing music, and since we are moving into a digital age where all work will be digitized, then let's advocate stealing everything then including 3D printer designs, commercial software, etc.. so that we will be reduced an economy valued only by physical raw materials and energy production so the bankers will own and control all value in economy. Yeah nice.  

Afaik, the reason artists were devalued throughout history was due to two facts:

• Lack of abundance in the ancient economy which is required to produce a gift culture. The artists in a gift culture are on the receiving end of the gifts because they don't directly produce necessities of life that are thus in abundance in a gift culture.
• Economies of yore have been capital intensive, economies-of-scale (e.g. Rome road building, post Dark Age agriculture, Industrial Age factories) thus artists contributed no useful labor to the capitalists. The point being that the capitalists were in control. But I have explained this all changes in Knowledge Age[1]

Why you not want to pay an insignificant tip to indie musicians so they can flourish and you don't have to view ads? We are now in an abundance economy. There is no excuse to not tip the indie artists.

Would you prefer to have massive unemployment and social welfare system that will sink us into a Dark Age?

Do you want all those unemployed artists on welfare to vote to steal your money with capital controls because the economy failed them?

Not everyone wants to be a programmer or what ever.

If you enjoy or listen to a song regularly, then is absolutely no financial reason you can justify for not tipping the creator a penny. You will only destroy society, the Knowledge Age, and yourself by being so selfish and myopic. Perhaps you could justify it for other reasons such as micropayments being a hassle and subscription being a lockin (to one provider) paradigm.

What might be more convincing to me, is to argue that those people who are going to steal (or who won't bother to find the music in official venues) will do it any way (or at least will have been exposed to the music thus potentially being another fan for the musician to sell a T-shirt to), thus arguing there is no economic incentive to prevent bootleg copies from appearing on decentralized file storage systems. And thus to argue that the business model that works is give away free the downloads, and sell the fans trinkets and live performances. Perhaps that is your point?

Afaics, SoundCloud was supposed to be offering that model and the musicians pay SoundCloud to offer the downloads for free. In return musicians could afaics promote their music and gain fans for example on their Facebook page and then sell the fans stuff such as T-shirts. But lately SoundCloud has started to limit apps to 15,000 plays per day, apps that play SoundCloud content aren't allowed to develop social networking type features, and SoundCloud disabled their Facebook embedded player (changed it to a link to SoundCloud's website) so that SoundCloud could drive ad revenues and/or synergies on their own site. Appears SoundCloud was being hammered by the RIAA with DCMA requests and SoundCloud caved in to the major record labels. Now Universal has accesse to delete any song from SoundCloud.

So one could argue that a decentralized file storage could provide the function SoundCloud was supposed to be offering.

Musicians like to get statistics on how many plays their song has. They like to get feedback on their songs. Etc.

If society decides to adopt the decentralized file storage and end copyrights, then I will adjust to it. But for the time being, it is not clear whether that is the best model for the indie artists and for our Knowledge Age future.

For example, it is not clear to me that I need 150 T-shirts, one each from each indie band I like. And then how do I tip them for new music they create if I already bought a T-shirt? I don't have time to go to live concerts and what if the band is not in my area. We are moving to global economy (check out songdew.com for music from India). Wouldn't it make more sense for my music organizer to tip them automatically based on my plays? So I don't have to hassle with it making sure I take care of the artists who provide my music that I love.

So you could argue okay, but no reason to not let others steal it if they really want to. Well maybe true, but in that case the decentralized file storage can coexist with the micropayment model.

Which outcome do you think is realistically the most likely and why?

[1]	https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=355212.msg13761518#msg13761518 (see the "Edit:")

[CoinCube]

So I ran across the two blogs of Bruce Charlton this weekend. He is a professor of theoretical medicine having completed a doctorate
in neuroendocrinology with postgraduate training in psychiatry and public health. They are located here

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/

Fascinating reading. Below is a sample of one of his posts that I felt fit well with this thread.



General properties of Group Selection and the 'group mind' (in relation to the adaptive production of geniuses)

The major function of group selection is presumably directly to promote the sustained reproductive success (lineal survival) of the group, in face of the spontaneous tendency for random change to promote the individual (and other lower level, below group) levels of selection.

For example, group selection would be of value in sustaining the cell in face of the tendency of cell components (for example the nucleus, or of evolvable organelles such as the mitochondria, chloroplast or centriole) to become 'free-riders' or parasites (taking net reproductive benefits from the cell, while contributing less than this to the cell, or nothing, or actively-harming the probability of the survival and ultimately reproduction of the cell).

A more clear cut example is the individual specialized cell in the context of a multicellular organism; there is a tendency for individual cells to evolve towards 'opting out' of the coordinated cooperation of the whole organism  - and taking more than they give. This is termed neoplastic change, and the tendency is what leads to cancers - cancers constitute an internally-generated cellular parasite.

But the main posited role for group selection has been in the context of animal society - especially in social animals (social insects such as ants or bees, and social mammals such as many primates including Man - as well as other mammals with differentiated social roles such as naked mole rats or meerkats).

The problem for the sustained survival of social animals over many generations is that individuals tend to evolve to enhance their personal reproductive success at the expense of the group - taking benefits from social living while avoiding the costs and duties of social living - thereby destroying the social structure.

The fact that social animals are known to have existed over many generations is evidence that his problem has been solved historically - and the underpinning mechanism is usually regarded to be kin selection (aka inclusive fitness) together with reciprocity (the mutual benefits of cooperation).




The difficulty with such individual level mechanisms as kin selection is that they must themselves evolve in a context where the spontaneous tendency is for adaptations to be lost - on top of the spontaneous tendency for kin selection and reciprocity to be damaged by spontaneous mutations. In other words it is very difficult to evolve a high level mechanism of social living on top of all the other layers of cooperation at sub-cellular and cellular levels - all of which are vulnerable to destruction by spontaneous mutations.

This is presumably one reason why social animals have been a late arrival on the evolutionary scene, in the past couple of hundred thousand years - however, once a stable and sustainable adaptation had arisen to enforce sociality, these animals have more-or-less taken over the earth by becoming the dominant species. Thus ants and termites dominate the tropical regions (in terms of biomass) while more recently humans have come to dominate the temperate zones.

Clearly sociality is a tremendous advantage - the difficulties are in evolving it, and sustaining it in the face of continued spontaneous mutations with each generation; and the tendency of sub-lethal deleterious mutations to accumulate generation-upon-generation; plus any environmental change and variety which is itself a consequence of the high adaptiveness of these species.

However, the very success of social animals, their dominance, would be expected to contain the seeds of destruction - since the conditions for free-riding and parasitism are greatly increased by the expansion in numbers and the relative autonomy from environmental constraints such as food supply and predation.

(This can be seen very clearly in modern human society, where the large surplus of modern economies above subsistence allows for unprecedented levels of parasitic behaviour by individuals, and also groups - such as bureaucracies.)




A successful social species can therefore find itself in the situation when the main proximate constraint on reproductive success is competition within the species - and this creates many niches for more-or-less parasitic and exploitative behaviours (the individual profiting at the expense of the group).

In the short-term, the fastest and most secure route to enhanced reproductive success is to exploit other humans (rather than cooperate with them) - and this would tend to destroy the social structure by reproductively favouring the least social individual animals.

Group selection entails that the group has an identity, that this identity must have integrity over time, and that it be transmissible between generations. This group identity must be able to sustain itself and should also be potentially further-adaptive to some extent.

Group identity needs to be of a cognitive and behavioural nature - in other words there must be strategizing knowledge and also some kind of reasoning from this knowledge. In sum, group selection requires a group identity; and group identity requires a teleology, aim or purpose; and that purpose should 'know' (with better than random probability) how to implement itself in individuals within that group.

This is probably the basis of the intense modern suspicion of and hostility to group selection - this idea that group selection entails something like a group purpose, memory and 'mind' - which superficially sounds like a non-biological, maybe even supernatural, kind of thing.




However, social animals are based on communications between networks of individuals, and the idea of conceptualizing the complex interactions of individuals in terms of being a type of 'computational' or 'cognitive' process is actually fairly mainstream - for instance in the theories of complex systems, the mathematics of chaos and complexity and elsewhere.

So, in principle, there is no reason to exclude the possibility that webs of complexly interacting social animals can be considered as higher level, group entities - which have a tendency to sustain and reproduce themselves.

Furthermore, these networks of communications fall into patterns, and these patterns may be self-sustaining and with a tendency to expand - so there is a potential mechanism for non-genetic inter-generation transmission.

In other words, the group-level entity is a pattern of communications which is both influenced by and also influences the communications (and behaviours) of the individual components of that patter: the individual organisms. And this pattern of communications will tend to fall into relatively stable forms, forms that resist change.

(Such a stability of forms is something which has cropped up in many areas of science over more than 2000 years - since at least the time of Aristotle with his elaboration of a finite number of archetypal 'forms' or relatively stable conformations into which all things will tend to 'fall; modern conceptualizations of the same basic idea include 'strange attractors' and 'morphic fields'.)




I do not see any fatal difficulty in supposing that relatively stable and 'cognitive' patterns of inter-individual, group communications would be transmissible between generations of social animals - given that these generations are overlapping (with new group members incrementally arriving and maturing, while others are leaving and dying - but without a break in the continuity of communications).

Such a concept of 'group mind' would have implicit purpose (survival and self-propagation) implemented by problem solving and strategizing properties including memory and intelligent processing.

Therefore, in principle, this group mind entity could identify problems among individuals within the group, and (to a significant extent) suppress selfishness at the individual level - also it could foresee (with better than random probability) the need for (or potential benefits from) certain types of individual which would be useful to the group survival and reproduction. Then individuals of this type might be induced to arise from the group - perhaps by the kind of developmental switching posited by Life History theory.

So, for the putative example of genius - it seems possible that the group mind might detect and appreciate the need for, or potential benefits from, an increase in the production of geniuses (i.e. those individuals characterized by what I have termed an Endogenous personality comprising a triad of high intelligence, intuitive thinking and inner motivation).

Having calculated that such individuals would probably be of value to the group - it seems possible that either the developmental trajectory of individuals might be directed towards becoming a genius - or more fundamentally that suitable pairs of individual parents (especially those characterized by high intelligence - low mutational load) might (perhaps by broadly 'epigenetic' means, by affecting gene switching, activation, suppression etc) lead to the sexual conception of more potential geniuses who are designed to benefit the group survival and reproduction, even when this tends to reduce the probability of reproductive success in the individual geniuses.

So this above scheme could, in broad brush terms, provide a group selection mechanism by which the group benefits of genius might be acquired when the group circumstances require, despite that many or most geniuses have below average reproductive success due to their energies and efforts being directed at non-reproductive, non-social goals.

[RealBitcoin]

Most 'state debt' taxes and pension funds in Europe benefits US retirees.

Most pension funds and taxes benefit the banks and hedgefunds.

How many corrupt pension managers (public or private) allow banks to dump their shitty trades in there? Guess what, all of them.

That is why the pension fund is empty or having problems, becuase it's constantly looted by the elite.



You know the well known phrase:  profits private, losses socialized....


Damn I want the taxpayers too to back my roulette gambling games

[OROBTC]

...

Here's a fun article from Zero Hedge, sketching out a very bad China scenario, it is mostly in fun, but thought provoking too:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-07/2016-year-when-china-put-trump-throne

Chinese risks are greater than most presume, IMO.  The above enlightens with ideas...

[sidhujag]

Most 'state debt' taxes and pension funds in Europe benefits US retirees.

Most pension funds and taxes benefit the banks and hedgefunds.

How many corrupt pension managers (public or private) allow banks to dump their shitty trades in there? Guess what, all of them.

That is why the pension fund is empty or having problems, becuase it's constantly looted by the elite.



You know the well known phrase:  profits private, losses socialized....


Damn I want the taxpayers too to back my roulette gambling games

I highly doubt this is the case and in general. I suspect you overly generalized (and jump to conclusions) this one like many other comments you make. Since I do not know exactly what affects the 801k or whatever they call it in the states I cant comment on it but I do remember they went down ship when the market took a nosedive and many retirees were forced to work, it wasnt because of hedge funds stealing wealth.

I bet those same funds are doimg well right now.

[matrix zion]

What mostly concerns me is Europe.

Europe is predominantly retirees (low or negative birth rates exacerbate this), that own various european country bonds via their retirement plans. If interest rates go up, the bond values decline, and their retirement is toast. The politics is to appease subconscious denial, which is why you see Merkel talking tough and simultaneously making gradual steps towards centralized printing and fiscal controls. The savers want to penalize the non-savers, under some illusion that they can convert the non-savers, but they don’t accept culpability for causing the problem with a collectivist form of saving. If the collectivist non-savers were converted to collectivist savers, then who would borrow? Illogical.

Hmmm... Not sure of who you're talking?
Not all Europe retirees earn their retirement through national bonds.
Some countries like France pay the retirement rents through taxes and solidarity.

[BldSwtTrs]

What mostly concerns me is Europe.

Europe is predominantly retirees (low or negative birth rates exacerbate this), that own various european country bonds via their retirement plans. If interest rates go up, the bond values decline, and their retirement is toast. The politics is to appease subconscious denial, which is why you see Merkel talking tough and simultaneously making gradual steps towards centralized printing and fiscal controls. The savers want to penalize the non-savers, under some illusion that they can convert the non-savers, but they don’t accept culpability for causing the problem with a collectivist form of saving. If the collectivist non-savers were converted to collectivist savers, then who would borrow? Illogical.

Hmmm... Not sure of who you're talking?
Not all Europe retirees earn their retirement through national bonds.
Some countries like France pay the retirement rents through taxes and solidarity.

It's not solidarity. The word solidarity implies some voluntary endeavor. It's NOT voluntary at all.

[TPTB_need_war]

However, the very success of social animals, their dominance, would be expected to contain the seeds of destruction - since the conditions for free-riding and parasitism are greatly increased by the expansion in numbers and the relative autonomy from environmental constraints such as food supply and predation.

(This can be seen very clearly in modern human society, where the large surplus of modern economies above subsistence allows for unprecedented levels of parasitic behaviour by individuals, and also groups - such as bureaucracies.)

....

A successful social species can therefore find itself in the situation when the main proximate constraint on reproductive success is competition within the species - and this creates many niches for more-or-less parasitic and exploitative behaviours (the individual profiting at the expense of the group).

...despite that many or most geniuses have below average reproductive success due to their energies and efforts being directed at non-reproductive, non-social goals.

Overall it is a good read and does remarkably jibe with what we were recently discussing. He introduces some more detailed ways to associate the evolutionary perspective with what you and I were alluding to upthread and in my Knowledge Is Alive! essay.

Note Eric S. Raymond is a genius and is very much into the social game, e.g. he coined the name "open source" and wrote the books on the open source phenomenon.

When he worries about the significance of parasitism, Bruce Charlton seems to make the same mistake as so many others (by not realizing the parasitism is only significant relative to those who don't enter the much higher valued/productive economy of knowledge formation and the entropic force of the Knowledge Age synergies is his social group selection in action, i.e. the entropic force of the Invisible Hand trends to maximum entropy ... and not just from the perspective of heaviness of atoms but encoding information in the genome, culture, and network that out-lives any individual death):

[...]

Nothing is infinite in the quantized (real) world, because the speed-of-light isn't infinite (for it is was the past & future would collapse into an infinitesimal point and we'd all be "proof its gone") and thus the heaviness of atoms isn't as informational (entropic) as human knowledge formation.


[...]

Readers I didn't intend to thread-jack the Zero cash thread with a sociology tangent about copyright, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, maximum-division-of-labor, the heaviness of atoms, and the Knowledge Age, but it just spawned spontaneously due to a debate upthread between CoinHoarder and myself.

Quoting myself:

[...]

Wherein I had pointed out that the entropic force and the Knowledge Age diminishes the relevancy of "the heaviness of atoms". Again I will (in the future) argue is also the essence of what I believe to be a myopia in Jorge Stolfi's stance in the open debate I postponed.

P.S. unfortunately I am lacking the energy to read more of Charlton's work. I barely made it through the last post you provided. Note biology was not my favorite subject in high school.