damptowel

There's a lot of decent comments being downvoted. Really mature.

> Taxing mass automation to pay for basic income is just too fragile.

No no no no. Souvereign investment is not income constrained, taxation does not even need to enter the picture.

Not to mention second order effects undercutting first order ones.

So the issue is outdated ethics that no longer apply to the real world? And the solution is to ignore the ethics and somehow fix things? Seems like traditionalism self destructing.

I'm autistic and I personally couldn't care less. In fact I sometimes call some my friends and coworkers that when they're being OCD, which usually gets a chuckle out of them.

> I, for one, also have no idea what you might mean by a "democratic economy".

Co-ops, probably.

Isn't anarchocapitalism a contradiction in terms? Capitalism is perhaps the most statist of all forms of society. It's development coincided with the birth of the nation state. Markets have been a part of human societies since the birth of agriculturalism, but it was the state that created the large scale market systems required for capitalism to flourish. Historically markets were established in conquered areas to support standing armies. The same story for currency, which is introduced alongside the market as a means of tax payment levied upon the population by the conqueror; the army comes with the currency and the population has to acquire it through market transactions with them. Schooling is another big one, the Karolingian expansion first instated it in Europe and around the time of the industrial revolution there was a clear need of schooling the peasantry into the new market driven systems, unifying disparate dialects, teaching basic arithmetics, making sure they can read instructions and do basic record keeping. It's around that time you see the establishment of new public institutions such as prisons and police for enforcing private property law, expansion of courts for arbitrage, the list goes on. Almost all of the foundations of capitalism were created by state power and coercion.

Rigidity of thought when young.

Alternative view on r > g

http://www.notesonthenextbust.com/2015/06/why-was-r-greater-...

Probably because it's written in Elm ...

He could build a mechanical computer :) you can build adders out of marble tracks, use hydrolics or legos, etc.

Story of my life.

The issue as I perceive it (because this may have to do with perception of "elites" and the forms of democracy one ascribes to), is that a global deal of this magnitude should be made public and subject to popular democratic influence, simply because it influences so many people. And apparently they were really trying to keep it all hush hush to avoid exactly those kinds of protest. When the news found a way out, the opposition groups pretty much did the publicity campaign for them, of course in a negative way. But would that publicity campaign have started if it had not not leaked? I'm inclined to think that it wouldn't have, because I think economic self-interest and geopolitics are just much more valued than "public rights" by the parties involved, and in that way it's "undemocratic".

> because it hurts one group (taxi drivers) a lot

That's true, but I think that's only part of the problem. I always interpreted it as a precedent to circumvent existing regulation* in a demand-constrained market.

The market for on-demand-personal-transport-by-car doesn't necessarily equate to taxi companies (it USED to be, pre-disruptive-tech) and in that way it's a competitive advantage to Uber, because it does not (or did not) need to conform to that regulatory context. Had Uber been a taxi startup that launched the app there would be no such problem, though it's unlikely they would have been successful. It's true that taxi companies might try to influence regulation to their benefit and perhaps the Uber model is simply more suited to today's world. But I think it's wrong to state that taxi drivers are simply some small minority trying to stifle innovation because it benefits them, there's more fundamental issues at work in this case. And as a somewhat ambiguous precedent you can see politicians flailing with the idea, not having a ready made response. Uber was not outlawed simply because of taxi drivers.

* I'm blindly assuming that's the case in most countries.

> Elected representatives could not negotiate the deal themselves because it is way too technical.

It really isn't ...

And Kaldor, Kalecki, Sraffa, Minsky, Lavoie, Shumpeter, Hayek, Graziani, Khaleman, Wallerstein, Thaler. And anything systems oriented and lots of history, sociology and anthropology. Economics tends to be highly reductionist.

I only watched the tv series but it's basically "finance according to neoclassical economics" which is about as relevant to the real world as Alice in Wonderland.

Debunking Economics by Steve Keen, though be warned, you might not quite enjoy economic textbooks afterwards.

Debunking Economics by Steve Keen. Though be warned, you might not quite appreciate economic textbooks afterwards.

Might be wrong but I thought Quake's software renderer does proper perspective texture mapping? (Original Half-Life is based on Quake)

> If we duplicate that blindly, we won't have to figure out how that works or have to program it.

...said every failed AI researcher ever.

Venezuelan politics was textbook incompetence, you have idiot savants in every political outlook.

Well, how many fall in the opposite category? Isn't it pretty much a bell curve?

And their debts are so high because they had to bail out a deregulated finance sector, which caused a recession and major spike in unemployment, how is that a fault of a welfare state? You might as well argue the financial sector "stole from the future" by creating a decade long downturn. Quite the opportunity cost there.

I think you misunderstand the magnitude of the problem. Put it another way: will you carry the burden of chronic credit bubbles through decades of reduced economic activity? Everyone, including good financial actors, will share in collateral damage. The resulting unemployment will make existing debt harder to pay off, and there's A LOT of it!

http://i.imgur.com/yU9b1Ta.png

These things really, really shouldn't happen in the first place, but when they do, the systemic effects should be prioritized over individual gains.

It's about motivations, or, in bad cases, necessity. About necessities (like not going bankrupt, or feeding a hungry tribe by claiming the land of your neighbor, etc) I'm not sure much can be done. But I do think it's about profits when it comes to corporations. Shareholders are often relatively passive and in it for the money, they aren't "mission driven" (being the best at one thing in your industry, spearheading a new way of transportation, etc). Their field or artisanship isn't their motivation, the profit is.

When you're designing a new engine, you might decide to use 10% more expensive parts to make it 20% more fuel efficient, but this additional cost might result in 10% lower sales, so the board decides against it since exhaust is just an externality. If those people were considered with ecology they might consider a lower rate of profit but instead take pride in the fact that they're helping humanity combat global warming while maintaining the standard of living.

It's easier to rationalize away "bad things" when making money is at the top of your value scale. I think it resembles the individualism of our age, people used to be more aware that they were a cog in the machinery of history, no one thinks like that anymore, it's all "be the best you can be" rather than "be the best we can be".

Whenever I read articles like this these days, I just throw my hands in the air and sigh, thinking about how tainted IT has become. Any tech can be weaponized, but the scale of it feels utterly demoralizing to me.

What's the way out? Become less connected? Go back to fixed function hardware? Is there even a way out without shedding layers of abstraction? Is there even a way out at all, or is this our new brave new world?

> Requires the government forcibly taking over quite a few large companies. That's a weighty request, and would be exactly the opposite of what we should want to see in the world.

Yet this is exactly what happened in developed countries in the 20th century, now many of these are again privatized with the predictable loss of efficiency and increased bureaucracy (supporting frameworks, arbitrage, watchdogs, etc...).

In my country the privatization of public transit and energy companies has been a total disaster. I remember when I could get things done without being pingponged between 12 different parties, things that used to take a day now take weeks.

Interesting hypothesis, has anything been written about it?

Reminds me of "Oh Dearism" I just watched. http://thoughtmaybe.com/oh-dearism-2/

> I think there's a lot of gold to be mined in the seams between disciplines.

Absolutely, Cybernetics and Systems Theory for instance are founded exactly on that premise. You might enjoy http://www.art-sciencefactory.com/complexity-map_feb09.html