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Comment by quijoteuniv | Hacker News Reader

People fish in the ocean and think that the fish is theirs. Huge companies do that and they act and profit as the fish is theirs. But isn’t the (now depleted) fish something that belongs to humanity. For popular music is so much you can pull out of the pond, in my opinion it can hardly be somewhere own property. Maybe a too advanced thought? When the white man landed in America they said this is ours, the aborigines reply. Yes, meaning this belongs to everyone and it is yours too. Can we transcend this ownership thing?

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Why would fish belong to the humanity? They are fish in their own right and belong to no one.

Well …while we figure that out we can make sure the fish does not belong to the guy with the biggest ship!

Because we are the apex predators on this planet

We are just pathetic as a wild animal, and don’t come with the “our brain is our weapon” because 80% (yes i made that number) of the humans cannot even start a fire on the wild let alone build a shelter, pick food that won’t poison them, fabricate tools and weapons out of the environment.

And yet, you will go sleep tonight pretty sure that the only other animal that could possibly get into your home and kill you is another human. Most humans live their whole lives without having felt like being the prey not even once in their lives.

As individuals, most of us are not that impressive, or as you say, we are downright pathetic. But our power is in our societal organization, and our inherited culture.

s/belong/has as much right to as their fellow humans/

Believe or not, ownership system is only applied to humanity.

Try taking dinner away from a bear and find out what it thinks about ownership.

Well that's complicated by the fact that bears are often eating other animals, so I think their general philosophy is, if you're powerful enough to take it and keep it, it belongs to you.

It is the same for humans, just that our rules and ways to determine who is more powerful are quite complicated.

But in the end the only thing that enforces any rule/ownership/law is violence, we just often do not have to go so far as we know it is not worth it.

One can also use ostracism to enforce a rule. I wouldn't classify that as violence.

Eh? That's pretty much the epitome of social violence. The only step further would be exile.

Most people only define violence as kinetic and physical. Mean words are not violence no matter how often sociologists say it.

>Watch yourself around the Jew.

>Don't get Gypped.

>A slave is worth 3/5 of a normal person.

There is a reason the pen is considered mightier than the sword.

A blade kills an enemy while it's wielder is alive, fit, and wielding it in anger.

The pen shapes the very thinking of entire generations. Anyone who says the space of violence is disjunct from the space of words is a downright fool. Hell, politics is just violence in it's Sunday/Friday/Saturday best.

None of those things are violence.

Sounds like it's simplified rather than complicated.

Humans think pretty much the same in this regard.

I'm pretty sure there is nothing in HN rules of engagement about bears, and even so, I'm very happy this comment made it in here. Thank you.

Search for territorial bevahiors in animals.

Well, there is Tree That Owns Itself, and Son of the Tree That Owns Itself. See the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself

The cat pissing on my front porch post this evening would beg to differ.

The cat is the hoMEOWner.

The exact same logic applies to many things that by rights ought to be commons, but are not. Most notably: land.

The idea that, for example, any person claiming sole ownership/usufruct of a piece of land owes to the public a rent for the value of the undeveloped land is called Georgism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism).

So there's no such thing as a fish Thief then? You spend all day in the sun catching fish and anyone can walk into your house and take them?

Maybe the fish should be the property of society and the location of the fish is the catchers right, with safe handling and responsible returns being their responsibility?

Step one and two describe how Society currently works in civilized countries. The fishing territorial Waters belong to the nation, and fisherman are licensed to use it.

I don't know what you mean by responsibility here. In the current system fisherman are incentivized to catch fish by the profit* from selling them, which they pay taxes on. You need incentives because picking people and forcing them to be responsible for fishing would be slavery

"incentivized to catch fish by the *prophet" is a very funny error.

"profit" is a different incentive than divine revelation although both have worked in human history.

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