Magnus

It almost brings me to tears, actually. One of my weird hobbies is collecting old mail-order house ephemera. Sears, Aladdin, a few others -- you used to be able to buy a whole house of out a catalog. They'd send it to you in a boxcar, and you'd go get it with a truck. Boards, paint, nails, the whole shebang. Even a 75-page instruction manual. They were extremely popular until 1940 or so. War rationing ended it once and for all, but the real death knell was building codes. There wasn't a particularly big safety problem. It's just that they cut into the niche carved out by developers and town planners. Here's one from 1912 (just before the Federal Reserve was created). I dream of building one. Just me and a hammer. Imagine what could be done nowadays, with factories churning out all of the modern construction materials, with boards in the kit cut to precise length (measured by lasers), and each piece counted by computerized scanners. A whole house-in-a-box. They started making them after Katrina. They were called Katrina Cottages. I'd live in one now if I could. The government shut them down, though. (You can buy the plans, and build one, just not in any urban area.)

The development of all good stories is in the characters. The plot (external action) is merely a driver, or means of expression, of inner development. I find the Walking Dead show to lack coherence and direction in the development of its main characters. Even if the show were going to opt for the Soap Opera format (of endless conflict without resolution), the show lacks a core intractable conflict (and thus constant tension) between main characters and the ideals they represent (the way that even Lost, which was not a good show, had ideological tension between Locke (mysticism) and that doctor guy from Party of Five (rationality)). The climax, or catharsis, occurs when the main character(s) reaches a catharsis and completion of his arc. I have no sense of where this show is heading toward such a resolution, which makes it less successful and somewhat boring, even though I generally enjoy post-apocalyptic fiction quite a lot.

They spend the first 15 minutes tearing down the image of the 19th century libertarian paradise. The problem is that no libertarian/anarchist I follow argues that the 19th century was an ideal era of non-Statism. We anarcho-capitalists regularly point out the central role of the State in creating and enabling chattel slavery. Murray Rothbard wrote some excellent books on the history of banking, and it's been Statism through and through since the 1500s at least. Also, one of Stefan's main points on the history of the State and economics is that the State is always as large as it can possibly be, because any larger and it would kill its host. The State in the USA of the 19th century was smaller than it is now, but that's because it had to be smaller, because the economy was smaller, because technology enabled only a tiny fraction of today's economic productivity. Also, speaking of technology, remember that a huge amount of hardship in the 19th century and earlier was due to technological limitations and a lack of scientific knowledge that is commonplace today. The best example I can think of is the germ theory of disease (i.e., infectious microorganisms), which was not widely known or accepted until the end of the 19th century. By way of comparison, we've understood microorganisms for about 5 years longer than city dwellers have had access to electric lights. Straight-up Marxist Communism predates the common, accepted scientific knowledge of bacteria, for crying out loud, by over 20 years. If you want to blame the difficulties of life 150+ years ago on any single cause, it was not a lack of government. Blame it on our ignorance of microbiology. And don't forget that there was the omnipresent threat of rampant starvation, which was not solved until the invention of nitrogen-fixing synthetic fertilizer in the Haber-Bosch process in 1915. Pointing to the difficulties of life before then, for the vast majority of people, and blaming it on the lack of welfare statism, is either ignorant of technological history, or just dishonest. Leftists like these two clowns always love to give credit to massive State intrusions for anything good in life. They are expert credit-thieves. Take feminism, for example. They love to tout how huge social equality improvements were achieved through feminist legislation. Well, it wasn't legislation that freed women. It was electrical devices -- vacuum cleaners, mixers, clothes washers, sewing machines and dish washers. Before Mr. Hoover and Mr. Singer made their devices available to almost every home, housework required 14+ hours a day of labor. Widespread female leisure was the result of technological advances that are not much older than a few senior citizens who are still alive today. So, I couldn't get past that first 15 minutes of strawman-bashing. He's really had enough abuse, I think.

1. There are no public goods. The concept was invented, as an artificial means of justifying the involuntary extraction of payment for them. States take over industries, then force everyone to pay for them, all on the proposition that the good is somehow in a special category ("public"), in a similar linguistic trick to the way the State pretends that taxes aren't just systematic armed robbery. 2. It's only voluntary if you're not attacked (or threatened) if you decline the deal. No nation-state on earth does that, as far as I know. Because States do not own all of the territory they claim to be the "country," they cannot legitimately kick people off of their own land, or incarcerate them, or deny them the freedom to travel, merely because they refuse the "contract." That Voluntary State situation exists nowhere. But, hypothetically, if one could opt out of the "goods" that States offer, and NOT BE ATTACKED for merely refusing to enter into a contract with them, then it would be voluntary, I suppose.

I would call that "buying things," not a State. Why would you lock yourself into buying a whole class of goods from one monopolistic source, anyway? Wouldn't you expect to get better goods and services at better prices if you could comparison shop?

I watch it, but not very enthusiastically. Like all dystopic fiction, it's not about a horrible possible future. It's about the horrible world as it exists today. Zombies are metaphors for the vast majority of people who live as if they are dead. Mostly harmless, except in large numbers. Easily aroused by meaningless noise. Zombie fiction is America's anxiety about entering a new age of collectivism. The problem with the Walking Dead is that the show has no direction. They clearly have no end-goal. People come and go, locations change, but there isn't any real development. The story is not progressing toward anything, no climax, no catharsis. They are making it up as they go along. That lack of narrative coherence causes people to lose interest. It was the same problem that LOST had, although that show did a better job of hiding the fact that they had no ending in mind.

In common usage, I'd say that people are accountable because they are responsible. "Responsible" means you have the capacity for choice -- you can predict the consequences of your actions, but chose to RESPOND to something by doing X instead of Y, which caused some result (usually harmful, since those are the type of results people try to disavow). Accountable means that "some harm has been caused due to your bad choice, so now you're gonna pay." The "account" metaphor arises from the idea that everything can be represented in terms of money. The metaphor of the scales (I.e., of justice) also comes from commerce, since it represents the measurement of traded goods. I think it's a strained metaphor when we're talking about righting wrongs. The idea of value as something that can be determined objectively is archaic, and inaccurate, as Mises and Hayek showed. It can't be determined without reference to an actual buyer. And, of course, when punishment is being imposed, it has no market value. So, for example, fining someone a million dollars for committing an assault (balancing the accounts) is a completely arbitrary assignment of value. I don't think accounting works outside the context of physical goods, like commodities. I guess what I'm saying is that I've become skeptical of the idea of retributive justice to the point of assuming it's bunk (until someone can convince me otherwise). I think we're better off either ostracizing the people who can't be trusted, or killing the ones who pose existential threats. This idea that some measured punishment (a balancing of accounts) is able to solve the social problem of wrongs and crimes is fatally flawed. The real turning point in my thinking came from a friend of mine who was dying of cancer. He had 3 sons in grade school. He had no time to fuck around. One of his employees embezzled about $10,000 from his business. His other employees urged him to prosecute the thief. He said no. He said a better way to solve this problem was to admit that it was up to him to design a business system that prevented embezzlement. So he fired the thief, made a new accounting protocol, and moved on with his life. He was dying, but in the grand scheme of things, we're all dying. I think about him every time I start thinking about matters of wrongs and punishments.

Less ... coffee ... Not sure I understand the words you're using.

When the USSR collapsed and East Germany opened up for the first time in a couple of generations, people said it was like walking into a technology museum.

The wireless telecommunications (i.e., radio) industry (until deregulation in the 1990s) was stuck in 1928. Federal licensing of frequencies began in 1928, but the technology that existed then only allowed differentiating between competing transmissions down to only a single decimal place. That's why the radio dial in your car defines channels as 121.3, or 99.5 (and even then, only on odd-numbered frequencies). That meant that only about a dozen transmitters could operate in any area at once. But technology that was developed as early as 1941 allowed radios to hop around to avoid each other, not to mention transmitting on micro-frequencies defined 5, 6 or 7 decimal places. That's how cell phones work, and why so many can opearate near each other at the same time without interference. The federal licensing scheme doled out parcels of bandwidth as they were usable in 1928, thereby freezing the use of radio as it existed then. The entire electrical grid is stuck in the 1910s, for similar reasons.

It would be like a battle of the Hulk versus Captain America versus Professor Xavier.

Arrest? I think she's ready for a promotion!

I like your answers, Daniel. On the subject of motivation, I think psychologists did the world a disservice with the Intrinsic/Extrinsic dichotomy. It makes no sense. Some people are highly motivated by money and status, which are extrinsic, to do jobs that are difficult and costly, and thus have low intrinsic value. The whole intrinsic/extrinsic theory was derived from the observation that school kids would work on projects with great enthusiasm when self-directed, but would lose interest when a teacher would dole out gold stars for the very same projects. As an anarchist, my explanation for this phenomenon is simple -- a system of gold stars communicates to the kids that the adult in the room is in control of them. Being the gold-star-dispenser is a way of wordlessly establishing that the teacher controls the kids' status and favor and approval and success and failure. Gold stars = social dominance. Instead of intrinsic or extrinsic, I prefer to think of the two main classes of motivation as Organic and Artificial. For example, an entertainer will work very hard to obtain the approval of an audience. That reward is extrinsic to the tasks of training, practicing and all the 10,000 hours of work that it takes to be a world-class performer, which are intrinsically unpleasant. But the popularity that follows is organic. It's natural. You entertain people; they like being entertained. Performers are highly motivated to seek this reward, even though it's extrinsic. But compare that experience to the same performer dealing with a gatekeeper in the entertainment industry -- someone who is not looking to be entertained, but who controls the choice of what to produce and who will produce it (studios, movie directors, book publishers, music executives, etc.). The approval or disapproval of that person is artificial. He's not deciding if he's entertained; he's deciding if he predicts other people will be entertained. Creative people HATE dealing with that kind of artificial selection process. The casting director is just the teacher handing out gold stars. What they love above all else is creative self-control (which they use to seek extrinsic, but organic, rewards). I suspect that the doctor who wrote this piece is actually reacting to the same things that a lot of people resent -- control and social dominance. People naturally like helping others, but resent being forced into a redistribution system. The problem isn't that medicine is a business. The de-motivator is that doctors are now just another type of government contractor.

Adult relationships are voluntary.

That's a tough situation. Those are emergency weather conditions. The people of Moscow or Helsinki would consider that to be Freaking Cold, officially. I has a job like that a few years ago. I commuted 40 miles each way. I'd been there less than a month when TWO hurricanes hit our area. There was no power to our house for 3 weeks, and spotty power in the commercial areas for over 1 week. No power = no gas stations = no commute. I left my family on Day 2 after the storms to drive to work, out of loyalty and committment. On Day 3 I called my new boss and said there's no gas for me to get to work, and even if I barely made it there, there's no gas to buy near the office to get me back home. He was furious. It was completely irrational. Even the police and fire and hospitals all had tremendous difficulty doing their work because there wasn't enough gas for their cars and generators. Even the POWER COMPANY had trouble getting enough gasoline for all the trucks they needed to send crews out to fix the power to turn on the gas stations. A real Catch-22! My point is that some employers are just bad managers. I have no idea if you could have handled the conversation with her any better than you did, but one thing is certain -- a skilled manager would not push employees to travel when it's 25 below. That's about as reasonable as Napoleon and/or Hitler invading Russia in the wintertime. A lot of people didn't make it.

The defining features of a contract are (a) mutual agreement to (b) specific terms. The "social contract" has neither feature. No one ever agreed to anything, and its terms keep changing all the time whenever the State declares new ones. The State is, of course, something of a trading partner with the public -- a small amount of what it provides consist of the traditional governmental services (police, military, courts, mail), it added some more in the 19th century (roads, schools), a few more from the Progressive Era (labor laws, utilities, central banking), which paved the way for the mid-20th century governmental functions (massive wealth-redistribution payments, plus all the price-fixing and "regulatory" controls left over from the New Deal and Great Society). It's this superficial relationship of exchange (tax money for government services) that leads people to believe there is some kind of "contract" between people and the State, because superficially, it is similar to your relationship with your cell phone company. So, from the perspective of the person who acquiesces in this relationship, and agrees to pay taxes, and wants to receive these services, it feels as though there is a kind of contract in place. Of course, the illusion of a contract disappears the instant you disagree, or want to be released from the bargain. Then, you see the true nature of the relationship is more like livestock and plantation owner. If they decide they want to record all of your telecommunications without a warrant, they will. They will send you to die in a war, without a second thought. The true believer in the State can't accept these facts, so he feels the need to hide behind a twisted definition of "agreement" in order to rationalize his support of the State. The idea that "you agreed by breathing" exists nowhere else in the law or daily life. The idea that you accepted the benefit of these "services" is not equivalent to agreement. If someone gives you services you don't want, you have the right to decline them. You have the right to opt out. But with the State, if you choose not to pay, they won't just shut off your services. They will literally kill you. As for specific terms, the true believer will point to the stautes and regulations and the case law. But no one can actually read all of that. And the State rarely follows its own rules anyway, even the most fundaental ones. For example, one of the main structural features, in the Constitution, was that the federal government had no power to control commercial activities inside a state, and only had authority when goods crossed state lines. The purpose of this rule was to make the USA a free trade zone, and prevent any particular state from collecting import taxes on goods entering a state. But the modern US government rubber-stamped itself a completely new, broad power, in the 1930s, to basically enact any legislation on any economic or commercial topic, if it concerns anything that touches or affects interstate commerce (which is everything). A generation earlier, it created a central bank, for crying out loud! Based on no authority at all! (By the way, the power to "regulate the value of money" is not the power to charter a central bank. It's the power to set standards for the weight and metallic purity of coins.) The terms of this "social contract" can clearly be changed unilaterally. No real contract does that. To call the State a "contract" is an attempt to co-opt the moral and economic credibility of the idea of contracts. But it's just a label.

Very good observations -- the State embodies the worst aspects of both racketeers and cults. The State is a corporation with two lines of production -- slavery and lies. The Lying Department is extremely important. In Medieval Europe, the Church was a kind of parallel government. It owned huge tracts of land, had courts, its own body of law, a corporate hierarchy, imposed taxes, etc. Since the late 1800s, the Lying Department's functions have been taken over by schooling and the "news" media. They are the new version of the monasteries and the priestly caste of old. But the main enterprise has always been the Slavery Department -- a caste of armed parasites directing and siphoning off the productivity of others.

I think the Lost writers/producers were satisfied with "it's all magical so we don't have to explain it." Again, that's just bad. It's lazy and insulting to the audience. Doctor Who has been on TV for 50 years. A lot of it has sucked, but if anything, the writing has gotten better the longer the show has been on. It's silly stuff, perfectly suitable to my 10 year-old son, but there's a thread running through 50 years of episodes -- that it doesn't matter who, where or when you are, just do good, all the time. The protagonist has no weapons, just a magic screwdriver. Because the protagonist can go anywhere in time and space in his magic box, the specific enemy, timeline and location of each episode are trivial. The core of every episode is just doing the right thing to prevent murder and genocide. It could be set as a western, or a variant like the old TV show Kung Fu, or as a police procedural -- the core is the same. Restore order in a chaotic world. Neither Lost nor Battlestar Gallactica had anywhere near a coherent theme like that. Not a consistent one, anyway.

I disagree with most of what you wrote here. I don't know much about ancient Hawaiians in particular, but the myth of the Noble Savage is just false. Also, there's nothing wrong with money. It's an extraordinarily useful trading tool. It enables people to keep track of exchange ratios of an infinite variety of goods, rather than trying to assign trading rates for pigs to chickens, boots to pigs, hammers to chickens, and a million other trading pairs. A universal trading unit simplifies things immensely. Money also enables people to trade with a much wider multi-party circle. In a moneyless system, you can trade among people you know, because the mutual debts of incomplete trades with people like your brother-in-law will be settled later. A larger society needs to use money as a universal proxy good, because it's tradable for anything with anyone. The problem is not with money. It's with a small, self-interested corporation controlling the issuance of all money and commanding everyone's use of the official money and the value thereof. It's an old problem. The Code of Hammurabi is just about the world's oldest written text, and about a third of it is devoted to price-fixing.

I think the Internet is the frontier where all the opportunities are. Or combining Old Economy practices with online opportunities. For example, I met a guy a little while ago who was selling a motorcycle I was thinking of buying. His regular business was to buy junk motorcycles off of Craigslist and other low-end sources (some of the bikes were practically donated to him), then disassembling them and selling the parts on eBay or Amazon. It takes very little mechanical skill to do that -- a few simple tools, a little knowledge about what the parts are all called, and the ability to prepare good eBay listings. After a while, he was selling whole bikes that he'd find and clean up. Another guy I know finds large-lot items he can buy on sale at discount centers -- vitamins and protein powder seem to be popular. Then he lists them on Amazon at a markup. If they sell on Amazon, only then he'll go and buy them from the store. If the product is no longer available, he cancels the Amazon order. No risk, just legwork and an eye for bargains. I know of a few women who do the same thing with furniture, housewares and artwork they find at thrift stores. Buy low (locally), sell high (nationally). Another pair of friends of mine had a collections business that made plenty of money solely by collecting debts that were owed by personal injury lawyers to doctors. Lawyers send their clients to doctors for evaluations and treatment, with a deal where the doctor works on credit, getting paid when the case settles months or years later. But the lawyers will often settle the cases, collect the settlement money, and never pay the doctors. My friends' business was just taking the list of cases that the lawyers claimed were still pending, and verify the case status by checking court records and calling the insurance companies. Then they'd call the lawyer back with the verified facts, and payment was usually immediate. They'd get a cut of everything collected. Personally, I like the idea of writing e-books.

Both Lost and Battlestar Gallactica were the biggest disappointments in fiction in the last 10 years. It was obvious from the first episode what Lost was about. I won't give it away, but they make it clear early on that they're not in the ordinary world. The writers had nowhere to go, so the storylines just got progressively more ridiculous, culminating in a finale that was Seinfeldian levels of bad. Battlestar Gallactica started with a bang. The Cylons looked human. How amazing is that? The ships all had to use retro technology as an anti-Cylon countermeasure. Then the show was a huge hit, and the show runner clearly had some kind of crisis about where to take the story. So he disappeared and started listening to Jimi Hendrix records and decided to weave "All Along the Watchtower" DIRECTLY into the sci-fi storyline. I'm sorry, but that's about as subtle as a ton of bricks. I get that the Late Boomer generation revered Bob Dylan as some kind of god, but come on -- inserting your teen music tastes into a space drama is just bad writing. The Cylon prison camp was good, but every other aspect of the second half of that series was unwatchable.

Money is debt. It's not a good. It's a claim for goods. It's a debt that someone owes to the holder of the money. I recommend a book -- Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber. He's a total loon when it comes to the modern economy (typical academic leftoid), but his history on money is eye- opening. Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money is very highly recommended. And of course Rothbard's books on money. The gist is that money is a symbolic token of a debt. When someone gives you some good or benefit, and you don't reciprocate, you owe a debt. It's an abstraction -- the obligation to reciprocate. In a village where everyone knows everyone (and is related to most of them), these debts are just remembered. Or tracked as ledger notes. There's no need for money. People can get together at the Reckoning Festival and figure out that the mutual debts all cancel each other out, for the most part. If someone has been a mooch that year, and gotten more than he's given, then the net debtor can give someone a pig and square his accounts. Money is just a token representing this debt. It's what you give to someone you don't trust or expect to see again, instead of just remembering and settling up later. Money is a symbolic proxy for goods you have given, but you've not yet received reciprocal goods. It's a symbol of a debt you are owed. Paper money is (was) just a proxy for metal money. It's lighter and more portable. The whole point of metal money is that its supply was fixed. When you were given a coin, it couldn't be given to someone else! That limitation on supply was a limit on how far into debt one could get before finally reciprocating. That's why fractional reserve banking was so powerful (and fraudulent) -- it was pledging the same coin to ten different people. The purpose and effect of making money out of paper, severing its connection to physical matter, and then having monopoly control over the issuance of that paper money, is to enable limitless money, and thus limitless debt.

I would open a new track, then set your levels. You want the microphone sensitivity set so that you are peaking out around -6db, and never to the point that it goes to that zero-line. That's called clipping, and makes it sound terrible. I would record this audio track while watching the video. That way your commentary syncs with the images. Then save the audio file, and edit it as necessary. Audacity has noise filters, or you can normalize it, which is where the software evens out the loud and soft parts. You can cut out gaps and coughs and pops. (Just highlight and delete the offending parts.) Be sure to turn off all your other computer sounds while recording. Audacity will record those along with your voice. Then, in your video software, open both the video file and cleaned-up audio file, and line them up.

Some occupations are more feasible in an urban environment. There were some short-lived pockets of freedom in Europe throughout the medieval and early modern period, and they resulted in quickly-built cities. With modern technology, urban life is far easier. I don't see why a city wouldn't be economically viable in a freer society. Urban physical space would look far different, of course, and be more livable.

Without the developers, road construction companies and utilities conspiring (under the guise of the State) to control the layout of urban spaces, cities would certainly still exist, and probably be a lot more dense. They would most likely resemble the kind of walkable configurations we see in what's left of medieval and early modern cities. I'm not sure about skyscrapers, since they are virtually a completely statist phenomenon. Modern antiseptic practices and technology, the removal of beasts of burden, and clean lighting/heating fuels would solve about 98% of the problems that occurred in the pre-industrial cities.