Lowe D

I saw this article a few days ago, I think. I found it frightening. H/e we can't even get an electrode on the surface of the brain, without the immune system degrading it. I'm almost certain I will live and die without seeing anything like this technology.

Putin is a Russian patriot. Crimea has for most of modern history been a Russian province, and it's full of ethnic Russians. The change of gov't in Kiev is a pretext for doing what Putin and other Russian nationalists had wanted to do anyway.

I too am interested in hearing about your childhood. Would it be so much of a distraction, in this thread, which already seems so scattered?

@ Mishelle I think it is awesome that you were in the Peace Corps. I am impressed by your adventurousness.

@ Nathan What did Harry Browne have to say on this? Was it in one of his books? It sounds like an interesting statement.

The OP reminds me of the movie Syriana. You guys might check it out, if you haven't. Here is a clip.

Thanks for posting this informative video. I don't know anything about the Venus Project, but I admire anyone willing to expose himself and his ideas to criticism.

You're going to make t-shirts with these images? These are neat. I would buy one.

Haha, oh my god. You guys. How do threads like this even happen.

Good question. The lives of other animals are terrible. They live in a state of perpetual starvation and danger from predators and disease, and are almost always ridden with parasites, like lice, ticks, fleas, flukes, and intestinal worms. Being a modern human is to live in bliss, compared to being any other animal, anywhere. This is because other animals lack the intelligence to turn nature to their advantage, consigning them to lives of misery. They are hardly an example for anyone.

Xelent, calling something dysfunctional isn't the same as calling it wrong. I am not condemning men who patronize prostitutes, nor the prostitutes themselves. However it does revolve around the dysfunction of those men. They are the market. From what I understand, prostitutes tend to be dysfunctional, former abused children. H/e they are not the market. They're the people who are inclined to service the market. This is where these discussions always veer off, in my experience. Even Stefan, in his podcast series about prostitution, only mentions that johns are typically dysfunctional, but does not go into detail on it. This was several years ago, so I don't know what he'd say now. The abuse of boys by their mothers is the key factor, and that's why it's so disgusting for me to read tirades against the male patrons of prostitutes. It's victim blaming.

@ NeoEclectic That's not how business works. Supply meets existing demand, not vice versa. Prostitution occurs because of the abusive parents of the men who fund it. Johns are either afraid or otherwise avoidant of intimacy, or they are addicted to sex. Those things only come from bad parents. There's nothing wrong with consensual sex trade, and I would never shame anyone involved. But it's clearly the demand of abused men, which creates prostitution. Otherwise the women would engage in some other business.

@ Reason Tarantino movies are great compared to what? Maybe you can give a couple great movies, apart from Tarantino ones, and explain briefly why you think they're great. That way your standard of greatness will be clearer.

Taxes won't necessarily rise. That's a function of the private economy, as much as the public sector. The only constraint on federal budgets is that they can't be so high as to cause excessive price inflation. The national debt number is the base money the Treasury has created through its debt issuance. It doesn't mean, this much must be collected in taxes. National debt issuance is inflationary because the bonds tend to end up being bought by banks, which create money by adding deposits (debts) to their balance sheets, in order to buy the bonds... either from the Treasury or from whoever bought them from the Treasury originally. Inflationary events don't guarantee price inflation, though, since there may be other events occurring which are deflationary. The expansion or contraction of private credit has more to do with whether there will be price inflation, because the private credit market is larger than the national debt. The national gov'ts of developed nations don't even have to collect taxes. They have a guaranteed market in their debt, with the large banks holding accounts at in the central banks. National taxes are an anachronism.

@ Alan If that always happened, you'd have a great point. But it doesn't. Real rates have been positive for over a year, which is why gold has declined since then. @ Falsarius The permanent portfolio is not based on measured correlations between the asset classes. Correlations change. It's based on the theory that at least one of the classes will outperform the others enough to give a positive return, no matter what the economy is doing. So far it's done that. The only serious disadvantage to it, is its large tracking error against stocks. I don't understand your reasoning. Rebalancing is based on the weight of an asset in the portfolio, not on the asset's price. I don't see how the price points would be the same. Will you explain this to me?