MispelledToyota

Presumably capital changing ownership will tend towards ownership by those who can deploy it more productively, so it doesn't seem like bits shifting around is positive evidence that it's value neutral or negative in real terms.

Obviously there are lots of ways this pretty story breaks down, but I think the "just moving bits" reason isn't that strong a criticism.

presumably if a transaction is taking place, the parties involved value the state of affairs after the transaction more than they did what came before, so value is being created, even including the transaction cost.

Software Engineers use assembly.

Yes, we will have to see. I think my own attachments to liberal values don't provide much guidance for how humanity will be best served. But I hope whatever emerges or wins out does it somehow by making people live meaningful lives, and not by leading us to something like Derek Parfit's repugnant conclusion.

You're at the mercy of powerful actors regardless of whether you consent to it. A law will affect me the same way regardless of whether I believe in it. A rock blocking my path blocks it whether I consent to it being there. Maybe I can go around, or maybe I need to move it, but my consent isn't really important. By the way, most governments do not forbid dropping out.

Hegel is doing the continental thing of waving hands and converting a collection of individuals into a People who Consent. But if you have 80% of the people not consenting, but 80% of the power supporting the government, consent doesn't matter.

I think you're also leaving out the possibility of a Nash equilibrium, where nobody likes the government, but there is not a way to coordinate a transition to something better without a high likelihood of something worse.

But in the end I don't think we disagree too much, just some quibbling around the edges. Maybe I'm wrong though.

well said

I think this is magical thinking about what a government is.

The social contract theory is a just-so story. It's not real. Governments exist because they are a tool for concentrating power and out-compete other social groupings in terms of economic strength and capacity for violence. But good governments want to incentive happy, productive citizens, so they use pre-existing language, or invent new language, to discuss how to achieve that. "Rights" are an example of this.

Governments don't exist from the consent of the governed, but rather from the lack of force sufficiently strong to dissolve them. Just because I don't have this force doesn't mean I have consented to being governed.

Then yes, rights don't exist at all.

What we do have is something else, let's call it "rights(tm)", which are a social construct used to privilege and protect individuality. We use it as a tool when making decisions about how to treat others and what laws are legitimate. They are contestable, and allow the tradeoff to be adjusted based on circumstances and the priorities of societies.

If rights are unlimited, and only their expression can be limited, then it seems like it is a category that excludes nothing and so is basically vacuous.

The only right that seems even remotely plausible and socially independent was Hobbes's claim that we have a right to defend ourselves from being killed.

Anything else just seems too ontologically and epistemologically suspect.

Rights are only a concept that exists within societies, so it seems like societies will either define rights broadly and then discuss tradeoffs, or they would need to define rights very narrowly so a tradeoff isn't conceivable. But then few things would be bona fide rights. If you define a right as inviolable, then privacy isn't a right by that definition unless you have some extreme individualist/anarchist worldview.

I don't think that's how prototypes work in JavaScript though. The newly created objects refer to a chain of prototype references, and changes to the underlying prototypes will affect already existing objects.

I think Kyle Simpson's You Don't Know JS does a good job about this. But on the other hand, it seems like it's usually safer to keep it simple, treating it more or less as classical and using classes, to make a codebase that others can relate to well.

I think the idea behind it is the parenting approach. A hypothesis about it is that it results in children earning more money, but that's not inherent to the concept.

The question was about how someone should form their opinions, and whether we can tell others how they ought to do that. Lots of our opinions do affect others (e.g., if they should be hired, if one should help them, how we treat their reputations), so it's appropriate to point out what good and bad criteria are.

If an opinion being held doesn't have any practical ramifications for others, it's not really a big deal to have opinions formed on a questionable basis, except that good judgment tends to be a habitual process, so doing it with bad criteria with low stakes could affect how we form them when the stakes are higher.

You can tell someone what good criteria are for wines, why not forming opinions? They're not obligated to listen to you, but I don't get saying that you can't advise.

Beyond that though, when our opinions have consequences, we have an obligation to form them carefully when they affect others. Not being able to force someone to behave well doesn't mean there aren't reasonable criteria available for them.

The whole point of accounting is to force black and white distinctions, especially in ambiguous situations. But in fact there is no ambiguity about this. Owing someone money doesn't earn you money. Owning an asset that you may have acquired with a loan is what earns you money.

Just because a mortgage is a liability doesn't mean it's a bad financial decision to incur a mortgage to own a house, agreed.

I totally agree. I'm making the narrow point that a mortgage is a debt, and classified as a liability. A house is an asset. The benefit of purchasing real estate with leverage vs cash doesn't change how they sit on a balance sheet.

Personally I argue to everyone they should put down as little as possible for the reasons you're stating.

that's a bit confusing. While you can sometimes get away with leaving out dependencies, and then you don't have to useMemo or useCallback as often, it seems like there is a much larger downside to having potentially stale values in your effect. Leaving them out to me would result in the potential for weird future bugs and race conditions.

I think it's questionable whether top-down interventions could ever control the negative externalities associated with greed.

The upside of character is it is a bottom-up limitation on creating negative externalities, placed on those who are best placed and informed to avoid creating them.

Admittedly, this only goes so far. Another issue is that people are so often greedy for status. Being zero-sum, it is inherently a negative externality when one achieves a status increase.

What would be the coordinating factor? Surely its disappearance is the failing of some collection of some individuals?

It literally isn't. It's a liability. Debt being reduced by inflation doesn't change that fact.

And milky ways are assets too (inventory I suppose). Doesn't mean you won't go broke putting all your money into milky ways.

asceticism. I think we can all agree aestheticism is the highest moral accomplishment of all.

Yeah, I'm from the midwest and only would use it somewhat tongue in cheek or to mix things up. But most short-hands for American culture internationally seem to be focused on Southern/Western.

"Howdy" seems like a successful synechdoche for American dialect to me. Seems like what makes something a proper representation is somewhat personal.

doesn't really hold up. If there was one person left alive on Earth they would still speak a language, and there would be observable rules about it all the same.

that would be a fine thing to say. Seems like everything is fine.

if it's tautological then there's no reason to attack it. It's merely uninteresting. If people still think they don't like it than the critique would have to something else.