I would like to stop expending effort writing. So if there are not suitable challenges after this, I will try my best to bow out so I can save my time for some real work.
Anonymity does enable the productive to keep wealth from being stolen (by tax, legislation, regulation, and confiscation) but it also facilitates, theft, abuse, murder, fear
Governments have murdered 200+ million over the past century. This was a figure reiterated by former UK Prime minister Margaret Thatcher:
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/01/29/cycles-obamas-tax-free-bonds/http://armstrongeconomics.com/conferences-2/thatcher-address-or-1996-conference/For example, China killed 57 million in its Cultural Revolution. USA and its allies or surrogates has killed on the order of 10 million in the Middle east.
The killing fields have been temporarily kept subdued within the western nations since WW2, by expanding debt to keep the populace preoccupied. You will see the murderous nature of humans return in the western nations as their debt spigot is turned off.
The police are always the last people to arrive on the crime scene. The lack of anonymity doesn't prevent crime. What prevents crime is when people protect themselves individually, i.e. individual responsibility. Nanny States don't have any positive attributes or outcomes.
Theft is extremely high with taxation, i.e. without anonymity. Don't you see people in government stealing it all in every nation on earth today. This is what the very violent riots in the Ukraine are about now.
Armstrong's solution can't work long-term because of the
Iron Law of Political Economics.
Armstrong's solution can only work to increase debt into the developing world as we come out of this crisis 2033. It can only drive us to the final 666 result of complete destruction when the entire developing world has been brought to the same state as the western world today.
Lets look at the distinction between the chaos of aggression and the chaos of productivity. The former is often pure destructive chaos while the latter is the controlled harvesting of entropy to achieve a higher order state.
This is the fundamental bedrock of life itself which has mastered the deadly dance of harvesting entropy. Absorb too much entropy and the species succumbs so mutation tumors and death. Absorb too little and the species stagnates eventually succumbing to competition from other more entropic/evolved species. Life walks the edge of a razor maximizing the harvesting of entropy.
You haven't defined "harvesting" mathematically. And it appears to have no meaning.
The unoptimal fitness outcomes from the assassination of a political leader is a very low entropy result. This meant the economy and political system was highly dependent on a central top-down authority. And the economy did not anneal towards individual responsibility and fitness, rather headed towards greater centralization with Communism.
Not doing the assassination would not have improved the matter, because obviously the political and economic system over there was very dependent on one event, i.e. very low entropy. That
dead weight had been created over a long period of time leading up to that, i.e. the people were depending on top-down rule and organization. They were not individually self-sufficient. Note in a high tech anonymous economy there can be simultaneously self-sufficiency with individual responsibility while also maximizing the division-of-labor to attain greatest efficiencies.
Anonymity allows uncontrolled destructive chaos. It can be thought of as a form of chemotherapy.
And who are you to judge that individual freedom and responsibility produces destructive outcomes?
I entirely disagree. You fear precisely individual annealing and optimization of the economy.
You fear the optimal. I don't because I trust the math.
Anonymity is the antithesis of chemotherapy, rather as far as I can see it is the only possible cure. But it will feel like chemotherapy to all those dead weight cancer.
Yes it may achieve the goal of limiting the cancer of collectivism but it does so only at great cost to the greater host (humanity)
Giving the youth a pathway to survive in the most humane thing I can do at this late stage in my life.
Consider the alternative with no anonymity and the cancer of socialism will do a megadeath outcome. With an competitive anonymous pathway for people to avail of, the cancer might just collapse rather harmlessly as did the Berlin wall. The dead weight will be destitute, but their offspring will have opportunities and they can probably still eat and have hope for the future (of their children). Boomers might be so selfish many of them may put a gun to their head instead. I can't really judge their lives for them. It is up to them.
For this reason anonymity cannot last. No matter how well designed its very nature will destroy it. Once the acute need for it subsides and tumor of collectivism is contained the majority of the IT community will turn on it. No form of anonymity however well designed will survive that.
I very much doubt that. Once the IT community tastes the freedom, they will defend it vehemently to their last drop of blood of effort.
Do you see how passionate programmers are about ideals of open source.
P.S. We have the technology now to do in vitro fertilization (IVF) where one could design their babies by choosing a mother and father separately and them a surrogate mother to bear the child. We even have the ability to select eye color by fertilizing numerous embryos and doing DNA tests on the 10 cell baby before implantation. Also include stem cell treatments and research.
But some (most) governments restrict these activities. These are the sort of technologies that can flourish in a free market anonymous economy. I am looking forward to such things being readily available to anyone with money to spend.
Maybe what scares you is the loss of top-down control? You fear that people can make and defend their own individual choices? This is the typical comfort blanket of the socialist, that they believe they are somehow protected by some top-down control. But the fact is there are no positive atttributes of the collective, only delayed grotesque outcomes. Who are you (any of you) to tell me what my morals should be? Are you God?
As for quality assurance, that is what private rating agencies did quite well, e.g. United Laboratories (UL) before government took over the role.
I am an anarchist. I believe in the math of optimal fitness.
P.S. I see Eric Raymond wrote something today about the decadent dead weight socialism creates.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5220Actually, in a way it would it would be nice to think the wife-beater hypothesis is true and real feminists are off doing something healthier and more useful. Alas, I doubt this is the case; I suspect what we see here is what we get. So, under that depressing premise, what does it look like down the rabbit hole?
The most conspicuous thing is that these women ooze “privilege” from every pore. All of them, not just the white upper-middle-class academics but the putatively “oppressed” blacks and transsexuals and what have you. It’s the privilege of living in a society so wealthy and so indulgent that they can go years – even decades – without facing a reality check.
And yet, these women think they are oppressed, by patriarchy and neoliberalism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and there’s a continuous arms race to come up with new oppression modalities du jour and how many intersectional categories each player can claim.
While these children of privilege are filling out their victimological bingo cards…elsewhere, women are treated like chattels. Raped under color of law. Genitally mutilated. But none of this enters the charmed circle of modern American feminism. So much safer to rage at the Amerikkan phallocracy that provides them with cushy jobs writing about their outrage for audiences almost as insulated from reality as they are. Not to mention all those obliging men who will grow their food, fix their plumbing, mow their lawns, and know their place.
There were pictures. Such pictures! They all look alike, from the cutesy white chicks with hipster glasses to the black WOCs with dreadlocks. It took me a while to figure out why, but I got it eventually. It was like browsing some Renaissance painter’s gallery of fin-de-race noblemen. Such arrogance, such entitlement, all those faces suffused with a a bland and unimpeachable conviction of their own superiority and righteousness. No wonder they fight each other like cats in a sack!
I cannot do justice to the sheer, pluripotent absurdity revealed by these twitter wars; it would take the powers of a Jonathan Swift to do that. I think I may have some light to shed on how it got so hilariously you can’t-make-this-stuff-up awful, though.
Years ago, I wrote about kafkatrapping, and uttered this warning: “At the extreme, such causes frequently become epistemically closed, with a jargon and discourse so tightly wrapped around the logical fallacies in the kafkatraps that their doctrine is largely unintelligible to outsiders.”
I think that is almost exactly what has happened here. While I had certain varieties of feminism in mind when I wrote that, it now appears that I grossly underestimated the degree to which closure had taken hold or would do so. While I wasn’t looking, they went from incestuous to plain ridiculous.
Ah well. This too shall pass. The university system and establishment journalism are both in the process of collapsing under their own weight. With them will go most of the ecological niches that support these precious, precious creatures in their luxury. Massive reality check a’coming.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5220&cpage=1#comment-422859>You work on gun rights in the US even though there are people who are desperate for weapons in Syria.
To be analogous to an American feminist I’d have to (a) argue that we shouldn’t arm anyone because violence is bad, or (b) deny that their desperation points at a real problem, or (c) deny that that it’s a problem anyone but other little brown foreigners. In fact I’ve always been in favor of sending weapons to people who want to kill Communists, Islamists, and other enemies of civilization, and said so.
As much as I admire Eric S Raymond's prose and intellect, he rubs me the wrong way (as I do him also) because he as far as I can see he is an inconsistent hypocrite. He spouts off about being an anarchist yet he wants to rescue women in other cultures. Fuck man, I am not going to waste my resources top-down "fixing" other people's culture unless I get some booty for my efforts to conquer their men. And I frankly don't find Middle Eastern women that enticing. I get plenty of booty for a lot less effort.
Let people have their own cultures. Eric fundamentally doesn't understand the concepts of entropy I've been explaining. He didn't understand it when I tried to explain on this blog, and he still doesn't grasp it. If their culture is really inferior and can't compete, then it will go extinct. If their women aren't happy, then eventually their culture will collapse in terms of being competitive in the knowledge age. There is no utility for Eric to pretend he is a God, although I see his ego needs it contrary to
his claim. He is welcome to spend his own money on guns and ship them to the Middle East. Or he can go over there himself and fight if he wants. Yet he implies that I should pay for it via taxation.
So yeah really smart guys can still be really emotionally inconsistent sometimes. He basically derives his value as man from his "do good, community gift culture" image of himself and of positive society. Fuck that. I am X-gen. We only got what we competed to get on our own. I will go rescue their women not as a collective USA but by myself if I see one that is worth expending my resources on. For me life is all about competition. Love is about making children (and Eric only has a cat!), and be appreciated because you can compete really well. Westerners have all these silly fantasy emotions about "good".
One thing that really boils my blood are the "do good" westerners trying to fix everyone's life except their own (e.g. paying off their $150 trillion in debt to start with). Fuck man. Matthew 7.
And then he judges others. He fundamentally doesn't understand the inconsistencies of emotions are one of the ways humans anneal in decentralized trial & error fitness to unknown metrics. If I had a period of my life where I was exploring the concepts that basically no human on earth can explain (e.g. God, infinity, existence), then I have know there is nothing irrational (contrary to his razor tongued comments) about exploring it and having fuzzy emotional reactions, because fitness is not all about perfect testability at all times (because as we explained upthread, there is no global metric and even the Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem admits that we can't sample reality without aliasing error unless we sample infinitely, i.e. the signal can't be both band-limited and time-limited).
This guy is smart, but his mirror needs some polishing.
P.S. the typical excuse of someone like Eric is that religions have caused megadeaths, e.g. Inquisition, but again fuck that man! We have technology. Use it! Every man has to compete to protect himself and win. This is nature! It is about as realistic to think about eliminating or fighting religion as eliminating or fighting hurricanes and tornados. And atheists have religions too, e.g. feminism, idolizing democracy, science as an absolute truth, etc..
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