bofadeez

Mass murder is about as far as you can get from banal. It's an extremely rare tragedy to experience. But we're talking about two things: one is a violent crime and one is a civil matter involving a squatter.

The building owners do have a right to occupy their own building, right? Or are you proposing we deny them their ownership as some kind of reward to the hero? That would amount to advocating that two wrongs make a right.

Calling the building owners 'assailants' for simply wanting to peacefully occupy their own building is quite insane.

Why not give him cash or a job or something else?

Last sentence went a little insane.

No, just an example of a traditional American capitalist value, as requested. Now you want something that's exclusive to America? Why? I don't think you have a point.

Property rights

Yeah it violates property rights. Fundamental to capitalism, derp

You're presuming they're willing to present themselves to the AI dishonestly for material gain. That's probably a fair assumption.

Value isn’t something society measures or adds up by people’s bank balances; it’s just how much each individual personally wants something, and markets show this only through voluntary choices, not by declaring rich people’s gains more important than poor people’s lives.

Fuel excise taxes (roads) and property taxes (local stuff)

We don't need taxes to pay a UBI.

If "every country" is in debt, who owns the debt exactly? ... (it's not real debt)

Roads should be (and are in many places) paid for with fuel excise taxes only. The more you drive, the more you pay.

No obviously not. Lots of machines replace workers.

Why would taking scarce resources away from productive businesses and allocating to unproductive things be good for anyone other than government bureaucrats?

That's pretty interesting if true. It must be because you're the only one still doing it. Using techniques just for your idiosyncratic inbox doesn't make sense to a spammer. But if every inbox was only doing this, then your experience would be much different. Nothing but unstoppable spam. Exposure = money. Why would they not spam you? They don't like money?

What a bigoted remark. Someone flag it!! (lol)... You're not being gaslit, no no, you're just a crazy person whose perception of reality is flawed. Epstein never existed at all, it's just your imagination, okay? Yes or yes? So do you agree with my opinion - or do you disagree with your opinion? This is not sloppy strategic gaslighting designed for boomers, it's journalism, and you need to let it influence you.

Wow, great point. Video games encourage heterodoxical thinking rather than blindly following the narrative. So you're saying we should develop and promote more Assassin's Creed type games to reduce overall gullibility, as a public service.

E.g. Being skeptical of "facts" reported by Judith Miller in NY Times that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that US troops would be welcomed as liberators in 2003. I'm sure players of Assassin's Creed would not have fallen for that.

That doesn't work alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_poisoning

Bayesian filters are basically just a cheaper / worse version of what an LLM filter would do. Very easy to beat. Especially if the spammer is using an LLM to write a semi-unique email for each recipient.

Maybe it's my WARP connection but it's showing almost no useful info. "Unknown" for almost everything.

You mean like LLM filters? Right now it's all reputation based on IP and domain with a whole ecosystem of anti-spam companies like Spamhaus, SenderScore, ProofPoint, etc.

Using NLP / LLM spam filtering would presumably be either inaccurate or expensive or both. Someone would have to pay for it.

Sure, running a business in kleptocratic hellholes is a nightmare. Confiscation risks kill private investment, especially for big infrastructure that needs stable property rights and enforceable contracts to make sense.

But that's not a bug of decentralized markets; it's the poison of political interference and weak institutions, which state capitalism only doubles down on by swapping entrepreneurial discovery for bureaucratic fiat, still without solving the calculation problem or providing systematic feedback beyond "stuff got built."

Look at Hong Kong in your list: it boomed precisely because of its hands-off, free-market approach with top-tier economic freedom rankings, unlike more interventionist tigers that rode credit-fueled waves but crashed in '97 or stagnated like Japan post-bubble.

Atrocities are the dark side of concentrated power touted as enabling opportunities, jacking up variance with no way to gauge if human welfare gains beat the unseen costs of foregone innovations.

Without prices and profits guiding resources, we're left guessing expectations, but history shows freer systems deliver sustainable abundance when institutions let them, not coerced escapes that often loop back to poverty or worse.

I’m not arguing that centralized or state-capitalist systems “never work” in the sense that nothing gets built, or that output can’t rise. Clearly roads, ports, power plants, and factories were constructed in many of the cases you listed.

The narrower point I’m making is about economic rationality. Without market prices for capital goods generated through profit-and-loss entrepreneurship, there is no way to know whether those projects were the best use of scarce resources, or merely a use that happened to raise output from a very low baseline.

In very poor countries, almost any large capital investment will increase measured output because there are so many unmet needs. That means growth can occur even under badly misallocated investment. The fact that development happened does not tell us whether it happened efficiently, or whether alternative decentralized uses of those same resources would have generated more value.

That’s also why I don’t find higher variance persuasive as a defense. Occasional success doesn’t validate a mechanism that lacks systematic feedback. Without prices and profits, planners can’t distinguish luck from competence, or learning from error. Things such as malinvestment and moral hazard result. You only know concrete and steel were poured, not whether society is richer than it otherwise would have been.

So my claim isn’t state capitalism always fails, nor is it a moral argument about atrocities. It’s that infrastructure success alone doesn’t answer the calculation problem. Growth from scarcity is compatible with irrational allocation, and therefore doesn’t establish a positive expected value for centralized direction as a general development strategy.

Higher variance isn’t a redeeming feature when the mechanism that generates it lacks rational calculation in the first place. Central direction can occasionally coincide with growth in poor countries because initial scarcity leaves many wasteful paths that still raise output, but that doesn’t establish a positive expected value

The fact that infrastructure was built under state capitalism does not demonstrate the superiority of central planning, only that capital accumulation occurred despite intervention, often financed by prior scarcity, foreign savings, or coerced transfers; absent market prices and entrepreneurial profit-and-loss, the state cannot know whether the infrastructure created was the most value-productive use of scarce resources, only that concrete and steel were poured.

State capitalism like you described totally undermines the price system by replacing profit-and-loss–guided entrepreneurial calculation with political allocation of resources, thereby rendering economic calculation increasingly impossible and eroding the coordinating function of the market process.

I know they're supposed to be smarter than a year ago but you could have fooled me

I'm in a loop with Opus 4.5 telling it "be logically consistent" and then it says "you're absolutely right" and proceeded to be logically inconsistent again for the 20th time.

Meanwhile Google does not have to raise money and they're profitable whether AI works or not.

It started that way. I was responding to the assumption that time is the underlying variable of all economics. Then someone said everything reduces to time and they brought up Black-Scholes, a quant tool to price options. I didn't bring it up lol. My point is simply no, time is demonstrably not fundamental at all.

Edit: an LLM thinks I'm overly dismissive of: - Standard economic modeling - Dynamic macroeconomic theory - Agent-based economics - The legitimate uses of time in economics

This is true. I think causal inference in finance and economics is difficult. As Ludwig von Mises argued, mathematical models give spurious precision when applied to purposeful behavior. Academic ideas don't have a built-in feedback loop like in quant finance.

> Although, one can use either discrete or continuous time to simulate a complex economic system.

A very bad model that lacks accuracy and precision, yes. Maybe if you're a PhD quant at Citadel then you can create a very small statistical edge when gambling on an economic system. There's no analytic solution to complex economic systems in practice. It's just noise and various ways of validating efficient market hypothesis.

Also, because of heteroskedasticity and volatility clustering, using time-based bars (e.g. change over a fixed interval of time) is not ideal in modeling. Sampling with entropy bars like volume imbalance bars, instead of time bars, gives you superior statistical properties, since information arrives in the market at irregular times. Sampling by time is never the best way to simulate/gamble on a market. Information is the casual variable, not time. Some periods of time have very little information relative to other periods of time. In modeling, you want to smooth out information independently of time.

They can all be related on a philosophical level but in practice economists treat them as separate factors of production. It's land, labor, and capital classically. Technology/entrepreneurship can be seen as another factor, distinctly separate from labor.

> Time is the underlying variable of all economics

Not quite. It's scarcity, not time. Scarcity of economic inputs (land, labor, capital, and technology). So "time" you mean labor and that's just one input.

Economics is like a constrained optimization problem: how to allocate scarce resources given unlimited desires.

My point is that it's always available whether it's legal or not. It's always available. It's just a question of how much violence, impurity, and price gouging you want to create by making it illegal. That's the only lever of control available. Abuse of prescription drugs is arguably a bigger problem than illegal drugs.