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?

Haha. Parent blamers are angry and pathetic, says the guy who posted a long angry article about it.

The public sector is a problem. It isn't efficient compared to private business, it imprisons tens or hundreds of thousands of people unjustly, and has started several small wars recently. It isn't easy to say how problematic its fiscal liabilities are. Large as it is, the federal debt is about a quarter of the domestic credit market. The US economy isn't doing entirely badly. Productivity is high, even with high unemployment. Social welfare programs can't be maintained as they are, but the retirement age will keep getting raised. Some will have their promised benefits reduced, even more so by provincial and municipal gov'ts than by the national, since they have solvency constraint. That isn't a good thing, from their perspective. H/e I'm sure they'd much prefer being poorer in their old age, than being run down by the Huns, or conscripted into the Red Army. Things have gotten better. As much as the core problems remain, I think anyone would take bribes or threats over world wars. People change. They get better.

It's not the state, but you might call it gov't. The state has been getting more peaceful for a long time, so there is reason to think it will eventually transition into a non-coercive organization. By that time it will have shrunken, by the attrition of its ranks, and many of its services will have become private. In a way this has already started. Today most US federal projects are implemented by private contractors. The federal budget doesn't reflect the size of the state, as much as the amount of business being done through the state. That is hardly free market, but it's a step in the right direction.

@ omegahero Have you ever noticed that Elohim is an evil spirit? According to scripture he has committed at least one act of genocide, and many murders besides, and also commanded his people to commit murders. He allowed his own son to be tortured, murdered, and sent to hell, for the benefit of the same people whom he had killed en masse, and abandoned to live with hardship. He cared less for his son than for humans whom he did not like at all. ... If you must worship somebody, why not worship the devil? Scripture never describes the devil committing crimes against humanity, other than tempting Eve. He wants to defeat Elohim, who is evil, and he shows the virtue of courage. Even in the face of tyranny he stands up for himself, to the point of being cast out of heaven. That's more courage than Elohim has ever shown. Revelations says he'll fail, but Norse lore said the same of the Aesir, and you'd still have been wrong to side with their enemies.

Would people who promote non-aggression on this forum, also show restraint if they had power over others? Surely some would, but not all. Abused children can heal through self work, therapy, or beneficent circumstances, and then they will show more restraint than their abusive parents. The few people who actively guide themselves to become much kinder than their parents, are the exception that proves the rule. Those exceptions add up over time, creating the long term trend of increasing restraint, etc. H/e in the present there are never many of them. ... The state only uses force to the extent it is socially approved. If there were no greater influence affecting violent institutions, than their own violent power, the church wouldn't be the toothless organization it is now. Long ago they used force all the time, but not anymore. Violence doesn't have staying power against changes in social mores. Without social approval, the draft you theorize would never happen. That's why there is no US draft anymore. The people got sick of it during the Vietnam War, and they withdrew their support. EDIT: You're right about the exceptions to the determinism of parental treatment. They are real, and worth mentioning. I was annoyed when I saw you bring it up, but I can't say it isn't true. People can and sometimes do better than their parents taught them, and that includes public officials.

I think the amount of restraint someone shows, when he's in power over others, has everything to do with how much restraint his parents showed, when they were in power over him. Public officials have shown progressively more restraint in their dealings with the people, as their parents have shown progressively more restraint, understanding, and patience. ... To answer your most recent question, public officials don't start off that way. They have to be recruited from the public. As the public becomes increasingly less fond of public jobs, such as policeman, etc, the pool of recruits shrinks. The state dissolves, one department at a time. This process is what's making the church slowly vanish from the developed world.

@ OP Over time chiefs, kings, and states became less violent, more humane, and more responsible for those under their power. That answers the question, right? More peaceful gov't is possible. We know that because we see more of it every year. In time the state will probably be phased out, because people will have become so humane they don't want to be soldiers, etc. That is bound to be long time from now. In the meantime, public officials are virtual saints compared to their forebears, and I am glad for that. I won't pardon evil actions, but George Bush invading foreign countries is one thing, and Ben Bernanke propping up the stock market is another. You do the best you can in a world you didn't create, and don't understand perfectly.

The term maternity insurance can make sense. Say you think your kid might have a child beforehe or she can afford to raise one. In the event of a pregnancy, the insurer pays for an abortion, or for pre-natal care, a hospital delivery, a parenting class, and a few years' worth of baby supplies. That's not how the term is used, though. Also that plan probably won't ever exist, because if you are forward-thinking and intelligent enough to buy one, you probably already passed those values on to your child, which would prevent this situation.

They wanted to cover all their bases. That's hilarious.

@ Naer Sorry to knock your example, but Ipads have not replaced pen and paper. Pen and paper still have billions more users than Ipads. ... Dollars continue to be much stabler than bitcoin, which is the most important characteristic of a currency. Until a bond market in Bitcoins emerges, this will remain the case. A bond market stabilizes a currency, because it stabilizes interest rates, and therefore savings rates. The savings rate in Bitcoin is volatile, which is why its purchasing power is volatile. Imagine bond traders think that the purchasing power of the dollar is going to increse, i.e. there is going to be deflation in the dollar. They then buy bonds with the highest interest rate available for acceptable credit risk. This is because they expect the interest payments to buy more goods in the future, than the principal does now. So they bid bond prices upward, to which bond sellers respond by bidding interest rates downward. This includes the rate on savings bonds, which encourages the public consume now, instead of saving for later. More consumption increases the price of goods in dollars, which decreases the deflation expectation, stabilizing the value of the currency. The process plays out in reverse, to stabilize against inflation as well. However, what really happens is that these events occur very quickly, because the traders can anticipate them, and do not need to wait for the public to react. The net effect is that the value of the dollar scarcely changes day-to-day.