Kanaye Nagasawa: A samurai who changed California
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism
This notion of freedom resonates with me the most. I want to live in a society where basic needs are met through automation, so that people can spend the majority of their time following their calling and finding meaning. Less than 2 hours per day should be spent working towards survival, or else our tech offers little benefit over living in a hunter-gatherer society.
Concretely, that would look like:
* Robots pay taxes - not people, to be used for UBI
* No taxes on necessary commodities like food, high taxes on luxuries
* Taxes on unearned income would always be higher than on earned income
* Labor performed on process not application, so maintaining the things that make the things
* Profit on another's labor would either be considered inappropriate or taxed highly: at or near 100%
* Unsustainability would be suspect, as it runs counter to the cultural goal of providing for all people forever
* Injustices which impose burdens on people doing the most spiritually significant work would be targeted first: no penalty for being a parent, teacher, nurse or other caregiver
There's probably a lot more to be said about this. I feel that the powers that be seem to be doing everything they can to prevent progress in this direction. Specifically, the wealthy and powerful seem to be doing nothing to help makers and inventors, they just hoard the money and put it towards whatever satisfies their ego.
So we all work longer and longer hours to build bigger houses and buy more expensive vehicles to create profit for billionaires. We don't invest in trusts that would pay the living expenses of self-sufficient communities of tiny homes with hydroponic gardens and solar panels and such.
I am glad that he did comment - and have copied it to dive further into those thoughts.
So then we have to take a step back and ask what is actually innovative about our global culture's technology today? Is the 4k TV really that innovative? IMO not really, you are using more energy now to watch the same movies and TV you might have been watching a decade ago. It's not like the bow and arrow, imparting a novel function that didn't exist before. Its just an iteration on existing ideas, just slightly different enough to market on that difference and convince people to sell thing x that does y for thing z that does y. Even when we do work hard to further the capabilities of these innovations, e.g. computers being so much more powerful than they were 15 years ago, are we really reaping that fruit? Or is everyone still using microsoft word, email, and light web browsing like they were doing 25 years ago with hardware that's at least an order of magnitude less powerful?
Real innovation is scarce imo, since we don't invest in innovation, we invest in profit and innovation comes as a side effect, if it comes at all.
I think they're comparing 4K TVs to earlier HD TVs rather than CRTs, though I don't even know if that would be true given various improvements to power efficiency (LED vs CCFL, for example).
Don't believe it? Look no further than humans landing on the Moon, a feat that was literally just another front of the Cold War. We literally landed men on the Moon in the name of winning wars. Still don't believe it? Consider the internet, originally devised as a communications network to fucking survive nuclear wars.
Let's be clear: Conflicts are bad, wars are unacceptable. But peace has always led to stagnation. Innovations require competition, and there is no better than competition than literally killing your fellow man.
I bought my truck used 30 years ago, and used it daily up until last year when it finally expired. It cost me very little money.
> they just hoard the money and put it towards whatever satisfies their ego.
Your sentence contradicts itself.
BTW, some years ago a luxury tax was placed on yacht building, based on the notion that millionaires were jerks for spending their money on yachts. Then the local economy of one of the yacht building companies collapsed, because the millionaires went elsewhere to spend money building their yachts.
So the tax was rescinded.
But when it comes to: > they just hoard the money and put it towards whatever satisfies their ego.
Not a contradiction. Billionaires have wealth that easily makes both sides of this statement true.
Besides, nobody hoards wealth. It's all invested.
On a holistic level, "but the millionaires will move if we offend them by asking for taxes" is a race to the bottom; a tragedy of the commoners. It's long term utterly and unfathomably destructive.
Also, yacht building is one of the least morally defensible industries on the planet. If the industry crashed to 1% of its current level it would be a net boon to the Earth and humanity.
Your insistence that hoarding money and spending egotistically are mutually exclusive is kinda weird. Can you explain why it's not possible to do both? Are you just being unreasonably pedantic? ...
And here I was thinking it was kind of a free market of governments helping keep politicians honest and competitive. You know, less like the two wolves and a sheep voting what to have for dinner.
> yacht building is one of the least morally defensible industries
Please enlighten us: in what “moral” way do you think people should be allowed to spend their own money?
There is a wonderful little story in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in which an highly productive essential worker kept receiving the smallest salary in the factory because his expenses (music records were his guilty pleasure) were deemed unimportant compared to the other workers' issues - until he just quit and the factory ran out of business.
However they like - if it doesn't harm others.
> There is a wonderful little story in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged
... Ewww.
So, tax-avoiding billionaires spending their ill gotten gains on giant sinkholes of money reminds you of a productive factory worker in a fictional story by a world renowned hypocrite?
I'm very confused why you think there's a connection, but I'd encourage you to think a little deeper and broader.
That's an interesting mindset making you immediately assume that about billionaires.
> Ewww > hypocrite
Again, your mindset. How is it working for you? Are you happy with your life so far?
> I'm very confused why you think there's a connection
If you don't see the connection, it's you who should think deeper and broader.
Yes. I do assume that. It's one of the most clear and unambiguous assumptions that could possibly be made.
Ask Warren Buffett; he'll tell you - it's outright outrageous how little tax he pays.
Ask Trump - he'll tell you all about how he navigates a rigged system, and how the entrenched political types will never allow that to change.
Ask people who study inequality at the highest levels, like Rutger Bregman or Hans Rosling. It's basically impossible to become a billionaire without massive exploitation and damage.
> Again, your mindset. How is it working for you? Are you happy with your life so far?
Ayn Rand being a hypocrite has nothing to do with mindset; it's just a fact. You can look up the details of her life yourself, and how radically it diverged from her written work.
Perhaps you've hung your conscience on her just-so stories, as many of the world's most destructive people have before you.
> If you don't see the connection, it's you who should think deeper and broader.
Happy to - if you can explain to me how underpaying a productive factory worker is like preventing a billionaire buying a yacht.
Because it seems to me that you're making the comparison without accounting for scale, without accounting for negative externalities, and without an ounce of discernment of your own. Please, explain it to me - I can be slow.
Even if I had the time and the talent, still I wouldn't change your mind. If Ayn Rand couldn't, what chance do I have?!
I will just tell you that, as an old(ish) Eastern European I lived under both systems: with and without (official) rich people. And I know which one is better, both for me personally and for the society as whole.
I could tell you that same rules apply for both poor and rich and a system allowing the latter will motivate the former. That all people are selfish and want better and for them and theirs and allowing that desire to work will raise the whole society and benefit us all. That the value created for the society by a successful person is of an order of magnitude larger than the fraction they capture. That the world of plenty we are enjoying right now is owed to people doing everything to get ahead themselves.
But I think it would be better for you to just visit countries like Cuba, Venezuela, China or Russia and see for yourself how the quest for inequality only manages to spread unhappiness and misery equally. See how rich people will still exist but they will get there by illegal means while the society will be poorer in the process. How nature and the poor suffer even worse as the result.
Travel. Visit. See with your own eyes and think with your own brain. Apply those learnings in your own life and only then tell others how to spend their own hard-earned money.
Congratulations on what might be the weakest way to concede a debate I've ever seen.
> I lived under both systems
This isn't an either/or thing. Binary thinking is a terrible trap to fall into.
> Apply those learnings in your own life and only then tell others how to spend their own hard-earned money.
Hard earned? Billionaires?
... Do you think those billionaires are working literally millions of times harder or smarter than nurses, or janitors? Do you think they didn't come from enormous wealth? Do you think they didn't exploit thousands, tens of thousands, or millions of people to grow that wealth? These are answered questions, by the way.
Just fucking tax them. Then tax the yacht industry to pay for the environmental damage. Then they can buy whatever they like, as I've already said.
My (failed) aspiration to become a (b)millionaire has also created quantifiable value in this world, value that wouldn't have existed if I didn't think I have the chance to improve my lot in life.
All work is important, be it from janitors and nurses or billionaires. But the wealthy are already paying most of taxes in US. As they should. We are all benefiting from that. However, a system punishing certain people for their success will simply lead to less success in general.
A device made with minerals mined by slaves. And what role, exactly, did this billionaire have in making phones? Did he buy other people's work and provide capital, or did he actually create anything?
> Posted on a board created by another billionaire.
Mr. Altman didn't invent the tech for boards. And his net worth is more like a quarter billion, afaik.
> a system punishing certain people for their success will simply lead to less success in general.
Who said anything about punishing people.
When the top tax rate was well over 90%, there was still plenty of innovation. Your arguments are tired talking points, crafted and sold by cynical goons.
What role did the seed have in making the tree's fruits?
> Mr. Altman
It's PG who built HN. Wrote the software from scratch, too. And his role, as YC co-founder should have put him well above 1B. On paper, of course, as most billionaires actually are.
> Your arguments are tired talking points, crafted and sold by cynical goons.
Your arguments are crafted and sold by oppressors, dictators and tyrants everywhere. They propped a system that killed more people than nazism: communism.
That's not an appropriate analogy here. Without a tree there would be no fruit - without billionaires, we'd still have phones.
> It's PG who built HN.
I stand corrected.
His net worth is estimated at 50m however. He's far closer in wealth to you and I than he is to a billionaire. ~900 million dollars closer.
Probably because he chose not to exploit his gifts in search of endless profit. He made choices to help people around him, instead of exploiting them to the hilt. He probably even pays something like his fair share of taxes, instead of paying dipshits to find loopholes to hide his money.
> Your arguments are crafted and sold by oppressors, dictators and tyrants everywhere.
Buddy, if oppressors and dictators and tyrants were talking about taxing billionaires and saving the environment then we'd have a very different world today.
No idea what planet you're on, but it seems like there's no getting through to you. Good luck to ye.
That has never happened.
> Your insistence that hoarding money and spending egotistically are mutually exclusive is kinda weird
How do I spend it and yet stuff it in a mattress? That's a neat trick.
Can someone have 20 kids and not raise them because it isn't part of their calling? Would people from other societies be allowed to immigrate in or would it be closed to all migrants?
I don't think it is some orchestrated scam from a power mad global elite that is fighting against your utopian worldview. I don't think it is feasible, barring some kind of sci-fi AI that manages everything for us.
At which point we'd need a Butlerian Jihad.
No: no restrictions or anything like that. I read somewhere that socialism typically requires roughly a daily 6 hour commitment from workers to keep things running. Communism might be spiritually closer to my points, but also suffers from gamification of work where bosses are still produced which maintain authority but don't actually participate in the making of things, so the result is yet another class system dividing rich and poor. Those heavy-handed systems result in the same rat race we have under capitalism.
What I'm suggesting is more like a trust for all citizens. So how wealthy people in the US get mailbox money and enjoy the benefits of large corporations generating steady dividends. The bottom 50-90% of the US is denied that since it wasn't born with generational wealth to invest. We have to work entire lifetimes to barely afford a home.
Short of coming up with $10,000-100,000 of investment capital per person (although that money already exists in the hands of the very wealthy), I'm saying that we could automate basic needs to make them free or nearly free. For example, there's no reason why we couldn't have made something like the Aptera solar electric car 20 years ago, just after lithium iron phosphate batteries were invented (or 40 years ago when solar panels became viable). We could all be driving for free for life right now, but the market prefers to build giant $60,000 trucks that get replaced every 10 years. We could be building $10,000 tiny homes and using 3D printing methods to grow produce robotically in our own neighborhoods.
My experience the last 20 years has been only work. It takes so much effort to make rent that I never got to invest in basic tools that would have made my life a lot easier and more pleasant. The opportunity cost of work is so high that it eclipses all else.
Had it not been for work, I would have done what my ancestors did: build a house in about 2 months from materials on the land, and work the land seasonally for food. My time beyond that would be mine to use for inventing and building things. I actually got to experience a time like that, it was called the 1980s and 90s, but now leisure time is a distant memory. I'm kind of joking, but what we have today is anathema to what I thought the future would bring. More like a libertarian's paradise than a futurist's utopia. And I live in one of the more rural places in the country. I can't imagine being locked into a big city where every second of every day goes towards mere survival.
As far as 20 kids and immigration and all that: the way of this trust system is to provide for basic needs. Meaning that it's self-sufficient and scalable. It would strike at the basic causes of immigration like hunger and wealth inequality so that people could stay where they live. Having 20 kids would certainly put a burden on the system, but I think that people are driven to do that either due to the scarcity mindset of not being able to afford birth control, or from religious indoctrination that tells them to go forth and procreate in the face of environmental devastation, or both. There's also the patriarchy which overrides whatever the mother has to say about all that.
To answer your original question: with basic needs met and a 10 hour workweek, the other 6 days would go towards "real work" that pays dividends beyond survival. For example, I made a shareware game before 9/11 that took me a whole year (about 200-365 days) while living with my dad. Today with Saturdays free only, that would take me 7 years (it ain't gonna happen). I have at least 100 ideas that would generate residual income that ain't gonna happen either. My life is a daily withering of expectation, suppressing the callings I feel in my heart to instead go satisfy whatever obligations are demanded of me. I have no children, so there's a futility to it of sacrificing to a next generation that isn't mine. And even if I had kids, by induction I would question the sacrifice of every generation to the one that follows. Surely we can do better than that.
Since I've never seen any real movement on these things, I think they might require a cultural revolution and grassroots effort to implement an opt-in trust system with UBI in a distributed fashion. I think maybe software co-ops like the Humble Indie Bundle that distribute a win to the losers and funds open source could do it. 3D printing and home automation will help. Better tax policy (keeping capital gains taxes higher than self-employment taxes) could do it. Rather than complaining to the critics like I've been doing, it would be better to create viable alternatives that are compelling enough that the arguments against them become moot.
Absolutely disgusting that it took the United States 50 years from 1942 to acknowledge injustices like this had occurred as well as disburse the funds in an attempt to correct its mistakes. It was $20,000 in the 1990s, yay whoopee... I have friends whose families still, to this day, do not forgive the American government for what it did. A good majority of grandparents/parents were dead by then. Many returnees from the camps systematically tried to erase any cultural heritage they had by purposely hiding it and not passing it on to future generations, as a result of their treatment. Because of that, many Japanese perceive Japanese Americans from that time period as cultureless. Btw, the 442nd Regiment, comprised of Japanese Americans, received the most awards in U.S. history for military service in WW2.
Then you take into account the loss of capital from Nagasawa losing his vineyard, and it gets even worse.
> even such as Noam Chomsky arguing for ostracizing undesirables and withholding food from them.
> Speaking on YouTube’s Primo Radical on Oct. 24, Chomsky said that for the unvaccinated people who are segregated from society, how they obtain groceries should be left up to them. “How can we get food to them?” asked Chomsky. “Well, that’s actually their problem.”
https://www.vox.com/2014/5/23/5741352/six-times-victims-have...
So it does seem that inter-generational reparations are indeed very rare.
>$2.4 million today would be set aside to compensate the 11 or so remaining survivors of the incident, $800,000 to compensate those who were forced to flee the town, and $160,000 would go to college scholarships primarily aimed at descendants.
Inter-generational reparations exist explicitly in two of the six examples in that article.
Japanese interns that didn't collect their payment from the US left it up to their heirs to collect it, so I'll even add that as a technicality of inter-generational reparations.
Also I'm rather sure Israel is still getting payments for what happened in the 1940s... But I could be wrong there.
Inter-generational reparations are indeed rare if you don't look very hard for examples of it happening.
Whether or not there is a statute of limitations is generally dependent on the severity of the offense.
But again, just a nit-pick. To my mind, the mistake is in paying any sort of reparations to anyone, ever. As a nation state, unfortunately, some things you have to go all in on. Not paying reparations is one of those things.
I am OK with forcing state and local governments to pay out for egregious acts taken in explicit contravention of Constitutional rights. But that's because as a nation state we should also go all in on defending the constitutional rights of our citizens. I know that's talking out of both sides of my mouth, but the reality is that nation states can incur far larger obligations than state and local governments can. A nation state could end up with an obligation that realistically simply can't be paid.
There is though ... the lifetime of perpetrator.
Right, but sons aren't held responsible for their father's crimes. And while the Father's estate can be liable for wrongful death, that is generally limited in time. Certainly, you can't just go after all descendants decades later.
It's not just a slippery slope, but fair compensation is essentially impossible to determine. The average Japanese America is far richer than the average American--significantly so. Should you discount for that? Doesn't seem fair to penalize them for being successful. But the other hand, maybe that shows that the lasting harm wasn't that bad.
A lot easier to just let the past be the past and to police our actions going forward.
You want to start toppling statues and changing street names of dead white guys? Start with that one. What a creep.
I mean, imprisoning people for just minding their own business, based mainly on skin color, is something that every president has done since the laws against marijuana were passed. Not sure why you’d single out FDR.
> Trump, who I'm told is a racist and a fascist and so forth, never even tried to do anything close to that.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/immigration-kids-t...
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/04/us/ex-aide-calls-japanese...
> "Mr. McCloy, one of the key Government officials who oversaw the relocation program, said he might again support the wartime resettlement of United States citizens because of their national heritage. The 87-year-old retired diplomat testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which was charted by Congress last year to determine whether the 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were uprooted from their homes on the West Coast and relocated in camps in the East and Middle West in 1942 were entitled to compensation."
McCloy has an interestingly creepy history - head of the World Bank post WWII (1947-1949), High Commissioner of Occupied Germany (1949-1952) (where he released a lot of Nazi industrialists from prison, claiming they were just good anti-communists), Chair of the Council on Foreign Relations (1954-1969), member of the Warren Commission, which buried any real investigation into the Kennedy Assassination in 1963), Board Member of the Ford Foundation (which served in part as cover for CIA activities) then back to a Rockefeller-linked law firm for the rest of his career.
Most historical accounts show him pressing hard for internment, and FDR basically went along, not willing to fight about it. He defended the program up to his dying day:
> "''I don't like the word 'incarcerated,' '' Mr. McCloy replied. ''Well, all right, behind barbed wire fences,'' Mr. Marutani snapped. Mr. McCloy cautioned the commission, which is to report the findings of its inquiry to Congress next year, not to advocate policies that might someday prevent the forcible relocation of other American citizens because of ethnic background."
The "Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics" (KWIA for short) was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Without that funding, it would have closed during the Great Depression.
The eugenics programs of the nazis were inspired by American eugenics programs. The segregationism of the nazis was inspired by Jim Crow. Concentration camps were inspired by Indian reservations. And the list goes on and on.
And among all this shit you have "The blood of the nation, a study of the decay of races through the survival of the unfit" by David Starr Jordan, founding president of Stanford University: https://archive.org/details/bloodofnationstu00jorduoft
What do you think that happened after that book was published? was he criticized? No, the guy was honored by multiple universities in the US.
IBM and other American companies also had their part in facilitating the atrocities of WW2.
America was in many ways a disgusting place in the early 20th century. Especially California, where most of the eugenicists came from, and where at least 20,000 forced sterilizations took place between 1909 and 1979. That's right, fucking 1979.
[1]https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/a9ef5262e76846dfa1074cb...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_Act_of_1937
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/the-racist-history-of-minimu...
> "While the Housing Act of 1937 looked to solve American housing issues, it became marred by inequalities and problems. The main problem that rose from the legislation was the power given to the local governments. The Federal government let the local governments and voters decided on where and how to use the federal funding. This lead to local governments maintaining segregationist housing policies as well as allowing many public housing locations to become neglected."
Do you remember how muslim americans were treated and attacked after 9\11? The animosity of the majority of americans towards them? The point I am making is even now this is how people react but back then modern concepts of human rights and justice were not prevalent.
The war effort then was not like any war effort afterwards. It requires mobilizing the civilian society "lose lips sink ships" for example was a big motto because a lot of people see stuff and if they repeat it, it can make it to the enemy. Combine that with the fact that the japanese emperror was regarded as a god by the japanese, you can see how much paranoia war time president and generals would have about anyone japanese related.
I am not saying what they did was in any way justified but rather if I was in their shoes I would also be susceptible to committing such atrocities. Really, what I am trying to say is how easy it is to do what america did to the Japanese americans then and how we should not be so quick to pass judgement. Their motivation was fear and paranoia in the time of war not hatred like with Germany's camps.
Judging people of the past is easy but learning from history is hard. The lesson I learned from this is you have to be strong (whatever that means) and resist attempts by the government to do these things in the future as well as educate people on history like this.
It may not happen to japanese people but it can happen again. If there is war with China and they start sabotaging, extorting and bombing americans are you sure chinese americans won't be mistreated again? All it takes is 51% of people to agree in a time of war (fear of death and cruelty).
WWI and II were unique in the number of countries involved and the cascading effects. The goal is to not do this anymore and we keep restating the goal as a species but keep failing.
> The goal is to not do this anymore and we keep restating the goal as a species but keep failing.
That's sort of my point. The reason we keep failing is because we are evil by nature and we must learn to do good. I was pointing out how people look at the topic if this thread and speak as if they are morally superior or wouldn't do the same thing in those times. Most of Germany supported hitler and many were complicit in the holocaust. Our failure is not as a species or a group but as individuals. Collective thinking guiding morality is exactly how these terrible things happened, because "everyone is going along with it, how can I resist or do different". You can see on social media how "canceling" people is the norm for example, collective thinking amplified, people hating and attacking others because the mob says so, not calling out their friends and peers to aboid being alienated. It isn't that we are better than americans in the 40s but that we are better off in that wr have better education and access to media as well as a great economy and more powerful military (no worries about China or Russia actually invading us now, remember, back then there was no nuclear detterence either).
I just feel like it is more important to understand and learn why we (not they) are capable of doing horrible things.