Kaiyou

How is it accessible when you're limiting your audience to people speaking your native language? Also, English is easier to understand than my native language, which lends itself to getting unnecessary convoluted. Especially when studying, I always look first at English resources, since the one in my native language are made more difficult to understand because of the complexity of the language itself. (My first language is German.)

This is silly. I don't write in my native language because I want everyone to understand what I have to say. If you want to be part of the conversation, just learn English. It's really, really easy. I never even spend any effort on learning the language.

Yes, you're on point. I once thought people's life where worth something because they are people, but I came to dispel this illusion. The illusion stems from our natural in-group preference, giving things that are similar to us a higher value. Animals aren't really like us, but the more similar they are to us, the higher we value them. Just look at the different treatment insects, fish and mammals receive from us. Or the different treatment plants and animals receive. Or stones and plants. The more similar something is to us, the higher we value it. It's an ingrained survival strategy, I assume.

Vegetarians extend this in-group preference to animals, but not to plants. I've once watched an interesting series about how a Vampire secretly turned more and more people of a village into his own kind. Most didn't have a problem hunting humans after the change, but there was one character who chose to starve and die instead of drinking the blood of humans. That left a deep impression on me. So now I'm thinking, if you don't sacrifice your own life for your ideals, are your ideals even worth anything? If you want poor people to receive money, but don't want to transfer all your own wealth to them, aren't you just a hypocrite?

It's true that not everyone chases after money, but it's undeniable that lots of money equals power. If you don't partake in the competition, you can't win. You might succeed in deceiving yourself and others, but you won't wield the power of money. There are other forms of power, of course, like religion or other organizations, for example companies or countries. But even then, if you strive for the top of any of those, you'll naturally amass more money than the people at the bottom of the hierarchy. If you don't want the responsibility that comes with wielding such power, all you can really do is live in peace and hope that the powers that be leave you alone. You don't have any initiative and also no right to complain.

There's this saying that power corrupts, but I don't think that's the truth of it. Power only reveals your true character. Like the character from the story I mentioned, who received the power of being a vampire, but chose to starve himself to death.

Everyone can start a small business right now, what's your point?

They were doing okay before, but they cannot grow, since the increase in demand will not be sustained.

What I'm saying is that it would be self-destructive behavior to give people things for free. It is much better to let people starve in the streets, then to give them both food and housing for free. You'd completely destroy the entire country by facilitating this.

You can give them your own money if it pleases you.

I'm observing reality and reaching conclusions.

But I'm not viewing things as fine grained as you are, but more fuzzy. A hundred bucks are basically nothing, but if I'm a doctor and have to decide whether to work for someone paying me a thousand dollar per hour or for someone paying me a thousand dollar per day, who am I going to choose to work for is obvious. If the difference in money isn't big, than things aren't as obvious.

I don't know much about what Nikola Tesla did, but maybe it's similar to someone having failed to negotiate adequate compensation. Which in turn is similar to someone getting killed and having his wealth outright stolen. The outcome is kinda the same: someone who didn't create the wealth reaps the benefits. Here's the thing, though, all said and done it doesn't matter who created the wealth, but who has it. Or let's rephrase that. Between the guy who cured cancer and the one who killed that guy, but got all the research results. Does it really matter to you who sells you the cure as long as you get the cure, if you suffer from cancer? Sure, there's injustice and all that. But does it really matter enough for you to not buy the cure for cancer from the murderer and die instead? And that is my answer. If you can amass wealth you are worth more. Even if you stole the wealth. You might then be hated and persecuted, but with enough wealth, that's not really that much of a problem, as there are few people not willing to buy the cure of cancer from a murderer if their life is on the line with no alternatives.

It's all about benefits in the end and wealth is a form of benefit. If you're good at gaining wealth, you're worth more than people who are bad at gaining wealth.

Buying booze and drinking it isn't an investment.

"Scarcity is the limited availability of a commodity", emphasis on _limited_. Scarcity does not mean shortage. It means you do not have infinite of something.

It's right there in what you have written yourself. 31% is a finite number, that means scarcity. 16 million homes is a finite number, that means scarcity.

In a world without scarcity you'd have infinite food and infinite houses. We do not live in such a world.

You don't give people without the ability to pay for things stuff for free because you don't want to absolutely wreck your economy. If I'd get food and housing for free, I'd be the first one to quit my job and just live the good life of not working ever again. I'm incentivized to work because that isn't the case. And also because it's such a stupid idea, that I can see that it would collapse fast.

Actually, having more money means that your life is more valuable. Just like a sack full of gold is more valuable than a sack full of broken glass. It's just people get all emotional when applying the same concept to humans.

Is it moral to replace broken things instead of trying to fix them, considering that fixing will be more expensive and the thing might just break down again after a while anyway? That's not a question about morality, is it? Except if you replace "things" with "humans". I personally do not understand why this difference exists, however.

Why is it alright to abort babies that might get a disability, but it's completely out of the question to murder someone later in life for the same reason. It doesn't make sense to me. A persons life isn't inherently worth anything. If the economic output is negative and no one is willing to cover, why shouldn't that someone just die? It would be like saving money. There are probably good reasons that I just don't know, otherwise things wouldn't be the way they are or at least that's what I figure.

I've been thinking about this and my conclusion is that paying me money for my time is a good way. If you really have a good reason, it should be worth for you to pay for my time. Price can be decided through bidding, if more people want my time.

I think this is a fair way to go about the problem of being unable to reply to a few million emails every single day, if you're really famous.

If someone isn't willing to put their money where their mouth is, then they can't have a genuinely good reason to reach out to me, I figure.

Buying stuff doesn't facilitate growth. Look at all the toilet paper people buy recently. Where's your growth?

By his ability to earn money, generally speaking. It's not a perfect translation, but it's the method we currently have.

Saving money is better than wasting it away on booze or whatever else the poor person would want to spend it on. Spending money on things you do not need or are expecting a return on is pissing money away.

How you spend money makes a big difference.

If you can't pay, you don't deserve to get things for free. What's so difficult about this concept? Maybe someone else is incentivized to pay for you. But if there isn't, you do not actually deserve anything costing money, without being able to pay that money. Morality has nothing to do with it.

Yes, absolutely sure.

Reasonable.

I'm buying toilet paper about once every five years. Not sure how others manage to go through the stuff so quickly. On the bright side, I bought some last year, so I'm covered for a few years.

Willingness to pay is a pretty good indicator of importance, I think. Where this falls apart is ability to pay.

But that's life. If you can't pay, you won't get what you want, no matter how important it may be. Expecting other people to cover for you is called entitlement.

Not really, individuals may make mistakes, but it's nothing to the insanity a mass of people is capable of. (Source: Mass Psychology, by Gustave LeBon)

Distributing wealth is self-destructive behavior. Generally, you want wealth in capable hands, who can use this wealth to create more wealth. You don't just want to piss it away.

At what percentage would you speak of broadly? 6M cases are 1.5%.

Anyone could die in a car crash, but that doesn't really get people worried. There's a million ways to die at any moment, but people just don't worry about it.

I'm thinking of this as a temporary hysteria. Nothing much you can do to reason with hysterical people. The only thing that sometimes works for hysteria is a good slap in the face.

This only works when you are strictly working with one machine that is your own, instead of many machines, that are not your own. Customizing every machine I touch is more hassle than to just master the tools that are already in place.

Can't argue with that. It's just easier to visualize a complete city with all the houses inside of that city than it is to remember a useless number. At least for me. Text is hard for me to remember, pictures aren't.

Not really. I think "two rooms to go", not "x windows to go". There's no point in counting or adding, so I don't bother. Also, I only clean my windows once a year, if that. There's an hilarious story about a spider family having bred on the other side of a closed window I hadn't opened all year. That must have been at least 500 spiders. It was hard to even look through the window, so I eventually bothered to clean that one early. Maybe a mistake, seeing how half of those spiders than entered into my room, but, whatever. I don't mind spiders.

I can visualize things in front of me. A hallucination would be a visualization that I can touch. I cannot touch my visualizations.

Maybe a more straightforward test: can you watch a movie you've seen again, but in your mind? I can. (But I have trouble to keep the timing straight and will fast forward unintentionally to the parts that were interesting. I'm also constrained by my memory if it's about movies I haven't seen in ages.)

Nobody has proven that it's not trainable, so I'd assume that it is. But what's a good training method? Maybe a visual hobby, like video gaming?

I'm someone who is exceptionally good at visual things. For the apple, I can do way better than the example picture (1) on the Twitter image. I can not only do 2D, but 3D. I can rotate the apple in my mind and slice it and then rotate the slices etc. Found out about this by accident, while watching YouTube videos with visual puzzles, that were completely obvious for me with a single glance.

And I spend most of my free time on visual hobbies, like playing video games or watching movies. But maybe I'm just attracted to those hobbies, because I'm a visual type.

Beethoven is sound, so that's different from sight. Can you hear Beethoven's 5th in your mind?

I'm a visual type, so I can't wrap my head around how one could think without pictures. How do you retrieve the information about windows in your house? I can just walk through my house through my mind, but if you don't see... how else would you retrieve information that you don't have memorized?