5,213 karma · joined February 22, 2007
I know that there is still room to be a niche player in a market even after someone dominates a space, but I am curious to hear if the AppJet folks have any more ambitious plans for dealing with this.
As for contracts, Wave retains a versioned change history that can be replayed, and certainly has a better guarantee of authenticity than unsigned email.
You can select an insurance policy with rationing and a $10M lifetime benefit, and I can select an insurance policy without rationing but with a flat $1M lifetime benefit. The system we have now is not free because governments dictate what kind of policies medical insurers can offer, preventing consumers from making many of these types of choices.
When we decide that one size fits all, then the only choice is to have politicians and bureaucrats making these decisions for everyone.
When you make a decision about what your life is worth, that seems morally sane. When someone else makes a decision about how much your life is worth, that seems morally objectionable. Only free markets allow us to mostly avoid the latter choice.
As for Rothbard and the Chicago School -- yes, I'm aware of that.
The anger, though, he should release if possible. If not, however, it seems pretty clear that he'll be able to go back to just avoiding the stimuli for another five or ten years.
Also, adolescents turn into adults, but they don't forget what passed before. So if you were evil to someone in high school, the adult thing to do would be to apologize if you're going to contact that person.
People should learn economics like you learn physics [1]. You don't start out with string theory (fortunately). You start with the Greeks, then move to Galileo, Euler, Newton, Laplace, Maxwell, Bohr, Einstein, Feynman, etc.
In macro economics, that might read: Bastiat, Locke, Smith, Mill, Malthus, Marx, Engels, Mussolini (who would typically be expunged, despite his continuing relevance, for obvious political reasons), Mises, Keynes, Hayek, Friedman, Rothbard.
[1] There are obvious differences, of course. Economics has more forks and fewer merges in the tree of thought (which makes knowing the history all the more important). And unlike physics, old, discredited theories get dug back up, polished, and repeated for a new generation (how many times do we have to endure CNN talking about how a hurricane will help the economy before people understand the broken window fallacy that Bastiat articulated in 1850?). And economics also overlaps with both politics and morality. Value-free economics exists only if you consider "you could do X, but more people will starve" to be a value-free argument.
My emphasis was you should be conscious that everyone has an agenda, even those who claim to be 'standard' or 'objective,' particularly when it comes to the dismal science.
I told the commenter to read strong viewpoints and think for himself. Then I suggested my preferred quadrant of the noosphere as a place to start. Why? Because I consider it more generally insightful and intellectually honest than most of the drivel out there. But of course, your mileage may vary.
In retrospect, I should have just suggested PG's essay "How to Make Wealth" [1], as it contains the single most important insight commonly missed in economic discussions.
Epistemology is interesting and complex.
you're wrong to suggest that objectivity of analysis isn't worth considering
I abhor anything but objective analysis, which to me means something very close to "honest analysis." My suggestion above basically boils down to the idea that independent thinkers should read primary documents (while understanding their context).
Go read Marx's manifesto. Read Mussolini's writings on why Marx was wrong and how fascism is a better system. Read Keynes. Read Friedman's deconstructions of Keynes. Read Mises' deconstructions of socialism (particularly the problem of economic calculation). Read Rothbard's deconstructions of monetarism. Et cetera. But skip the false textbook-style 'objectivity' that just randomly assembles the ideas of history into an incongruent mush.
But that doesn't mean all approaches to economics are equally objective
Correct; I would never suggest as much. Some are logically inconsistent, or consist of arguments mired deeply in logical fallacies. Some grossly conflate cause with effect and correlation with causation. Many focus only on the benefits of a policy to a concentrated group while ignoring the diffuse costs to the rest of society. And some advocate policies that never produce the outcome that is promised.
I recommend starting with Murray Rothbard's For a New Liberty, which takes a very bottom-up approach to economic principles:
http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp
There are plenty of other excellent books and materials available freely from the Mises Institute as well:
The real conflict today is between free market supporters (Austrians and most monetarists) and the supporters of big government (Keynesians and the mercantilist-style neoclassicals). Unfortunately the latter have been commanding government policy for some time.
It's also widely thought today that the tulip mania was brought on in part by a parliamentary decree that weakened contractual protections on tulip contracts -- making it easy to speculate on inflated tulip prices without a correspondingly strong fear of loss.
There is also a strong case to be made that, similar to the current situation, the tulip mania was prompted or sustained by a sudden increase in the monetary base. Apparently the balance sheet of the Bank of Amsterdam was surging during this period.
$ wget -i urls.txt
When you can scale delegation, or when you're talking about things outside of your skill set, then there is of course no question.
Then consider that they would come under speech restrictions through no fault of their own. It may be contrived, but they would be standing in a courtroom having committed no bad acts.
Would a judge order them to construct and publish a false statement? That's the question, but can you find case law that shows this ever having happened?
If not, then regardless of how contrived it is, it's still legally novel.
Bailing out AIG (and their contract partners) was the problem. Creating an environment where bailout was even perceived as possible was the problem. Turning the US into a debtor nation via enormous government spending was the problem (in that it kicked off a number of other distortions).
Unsurprisingly, resources get best allocated to what most people actually care about when people get to individually allocate their own resources.
I would not so casually assume that this will happen. The current downturn is in many respects unprecedented, and all of the long-term trend lines are bad.
People tend to look at a limited set of examples that show the US recovering first and leading the world out of the bust. But this is a bit like flipping a coin, seeing four heads in a row, and calling a 'trend.'
The government spending problems in the US are catastrophically bad, getting worse, and there is zero political will to meaningfully address them at the federal level. Demographics is working against us, and we no longer live in that post-WWII world where the US wins by default -- that is to say, for at least a couple of decades after 1950, much of the rest of the world was still 1) recovering from being bombed back into the stone age, 2) had never really gotten out of the stone age to begin with, or 3) was crawling slowly back towards the stone age by virtue of Soviet-style communism.
If the US is going to rise above this time, we're going to have to do it fair and square. We'll need to actually work to be the best place in the world to invest long-term capital.
(That is, unless the rest of the world decides it wants to continue shipping us stuff for free indefinitely. If foreign governments double-down on America, then all (short-term) bets are off.)
The fundamental idea of Seasteading is that land creates bad governments because the cost of changing providers is prohibitively high. So you end up with a monopoly provider over a certain area that generally becomes wildly inefficient and corrupt (in the sense of institutionally violating the rights of individuals).
No one in the libertarian movement denies the need for someone or some group to provide the services of personal and property right protection, "rule of law," contract enforcement, and whatnot, but if you use the same creativity the people here would apply to any other industry, you clearly see that there must be a better way than what we have now.
That's all anyone is looking for.
The reporter would have cut that part out. It's not controversial enough. You could do the same thing with his blog post on homomorphic encryption if you took the phrases, "Gentry’s scheme is completely impractical," and "I think he’s being optimistic with even this most simple of examples," in isolation from "practicality be damned -- this is an amazing piece of work," and "I never expected to see one [a secure fully homomorphic cryptosystem]."
I don't understand this need to pull Schneier down. He's a smart guy, most of his writing is good, and he helped design a cipher that came pretty close to being selected for AES. Anyone who enters the media game is going to end up getting a bit caricatured.