Justus Ranvier

Imagine you met somebody in a bookstore who declared, "I am Genghis Kahn." Not, "I feel like Genghis Kahn" or, "I wish I was Genghis Kahn" or "I feel anxious about the idea of not being Genghis Kahn". They claim to be, in fact, the historical Genghis Kahn. You'd probably be sceptical about this claim, and you might start to express the basis of your scepticism in terms of biology, chronology, and geography. Then suppose the person declares that biology, chronology, and geography are all social constructs which are used to oppress people and make them feel bad. At some point you'd probably recognize the behaviour of this person as being extremely aggressive. "Genghis Kahn" wants you to ignore all reason and evidence and conform to his narrative, and he justifies this based only on how it effects his feelings, yet doesn't mention or consider how you will feel about being the subject of his non-negotiable demands.

I'm both sorry and glad to hear that. Just out of curiosity, how well does the person described in the OP match your attitude at any point between when you were in the army and now?

I can see that as a valid interpretation of his post. My day job involves trying to bring clarity to economic misconceptions, so that probably results in me having less patience for terminology misuse than I might otherwise posess.

"Scarcity" is the most misunderstood term in economics. A scarce resource is anything that is not infinite. As long as it's not possible for every human to have as much of a resource as they could possibly consume with zero time delay, that resource is scarce and must be allocated. Even if you had self-replicating robots that would dig up sand from the beaches and manufacture i7 CPUs from it without charging a price for their efforts, i7 CPUs would still be scarce. The reason they'd be scarce is that at a price of zero, there would be no limit to the economic demand for them. If those CPUs were free (along with the energy to power them) then suddenly millions of people would want computing clusters the size of cities. If they were free, why not? Unless your self-replicating robots work for free, and also can produce and distribute a truly infinite number of CPUs with zero time delay, then those CPUs will always be scarce and so access to them must be rationed in some way (ideally via price).

Maybe it's not necessary to worry about how to enact societal change, when changing one's personal situation is so much easier. I've spent the last two years changing my lifestyle to one that minimizes the effects of the State on my life. I work remotely, over the 'net, for my job. This means I can live almost anywhere in the world without it affecting my ability to earn a living. I'm paid in bitcoins so that I'm not dependant on the banking system. At the moment, I live in extended-stay hotels rather than renting or buying a house. This makes me a lot more flexible and removes a large number of things I'd otherwise have to worry about, like homeowner's associations. In order to get to this point, I needed to shift from mostly physical property to mostly digital property, but the resulting flexibility has enormously beneficial. It's difficult to worry, except in a very general sense, about what the government is doing, because if conditions appear to be deteriorating I'll just move somewhere else. How is the rest of society going to transition to anarchism? I don't know - it's not my problem to solve.

I'm going to post the mental translations I hear when I think about some of these quotes. I hear him saying that he wants to be killed, and he'll kill other people to punish them for not getting the job done. Here I imagine a father beating his child and then humiliating him further for crying. I also see a child showing all the symptoms of abuse - depression, withdrawn, etc and then being accused of "faking it" to elicit undeserved sympathy. I'd like to hope that somebody this far gone could be saved, but the odds are against it.

This article brings together some of the most important advances in the understanding of money into a single document: http://nakamotoinstitute.org/reciprocal-altruism-in-the-theory-of-money/

I what was a first for me I got the opportunity to have a conversation with Mark Edge along with another listener about obligations and the parent-child relationship for his Edgington Post podcast. If anyone would like to listen and give their thoughts I'd greatly appreciate the feedback.

Here's a case where the presence of an armed bystander was able to stop an attempted mass shooting before anyone was killed, including the perpetuator. A Potential Deadly Aurora Movie Massacre In Texas Is Prevented By Concealed Carry Citizen

Solar power as a widespread form of baseload power generation is a joke. It's a niche technology that works in certain areas geographical areas. Terrestrial solar power will never overcome two hurdles: solar energy is incredibly diffuse and the sun only shines for half the day and not as strongly in the winter as the summer. Right now this means that the best capacity factor that you can achieve is about 20% in an ideal climate like Arizona. If you want to provide baseload power then it means that you've got to build in enough capacity to meet the expected demand even the sun isn't shining in the middle of winter. Concentrated solar power can do this by storing molten salts so that it can produce power at night, which is great but doesn't change the overall capacity factor. So if you consider that in an ideal location 1 GW (peak) of generation requires 6000 acres of mirrors. Multiply that by five to account for the daily capacity factor then double that to account for winter vs summer sunlight availability. Now you need 100 square miles of mirrors to replace a single 1 GW coal power plant in Arizona. Ok, that's great because Arizona has plenty of empty land but not every populated area in the world gets 364.75 sunny days per year nor are they all at favorable latitudes. Are you going to generate all the power in Arizona and build transmission lines to carry it up to Canada? That's going to be quite expensive in terms of manpower and energy losses. Are you going to build CSP plants in Toronto? I'll leave the calculation of how many square miles of mirrors you'd need to produce 1 GW of power in the middle of a blizzard as an exercise for the reader.

I'd like to add to what a previous poster mentioned about LFTR technology. Here are four Google Tech Talks on the subject: The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor: What Fusion Wanted To Be Liquid Fluoride Reactors: A New Beginning for an Old Idea Aim High: Using Thorium Energy to Address Environmental Problems Energy From Thorium: A Nuclear Waste Burning Liquid Salt Thorium Reactor I'm not going to duplicate the information of these videos so please accept for the purposes of the following discussion assume that this technology addresses any reasonable technical objection you have to nuclear power on the grounds of cost, safety, efficiency, waste or proliferation. The story of nuclear power in the US (as well as around the world) is a perfect example of how the first generation of government bureaucracy can accomplish amazing things and then just as rapidly decay. Commercial nuclear power is based on the work of Admiral Rickover's work in producing submarine nuclear power. His group started from scratch and had not one, but two submarines operating successfully at sea with completely different nuclear power plants (pressurized water reactor and molten sodium) in less than a 15 years after the first ever controlled fission by human beings. In the process they had to invent entirely new fields of engineering, chemistry, metallurgy, control system theory and physics. This is one of the most incredible engineering achievements of the 20th century (that you've never heard of). What happened since then? The Navy was busy building submarine reactors and the rest of the MIC was busy primarily building nuclear bombs. All commercial nuclear power plants that have ever been built in the US were able to produce useful bomb-making material.That's one of the reasons that better technologies never got a foothold. The molten salt reactor was developed from an abandoned project to build nuclear-powered long range bombers. While the experiment was highly successful the military never funded it because the material it makes is extremely impractical for building bombs. So after the initial building boom of power plants (based on (1950s and 1960s) technology the entire industry stopped. The bomb building business dried up so the government had no reason to keep building sources of plutonium. The utilities didn't drive any innovation in this area because they build whatever the regulators and subsidies tell them to build and the coal lobby won that battle. The power plant support industry derives most of its profit from the manufacture of expensive solid fuel models that take decades to gain regulatory approval for and require millions of dollars to develop. The last thing they want is to build power plants that can just dump powered thorium into a reactor like coal plants dump powered coal into a furnace. The regulators aren't going to reduce their own job security by pushing for inherently safe reactors that can't melt down and don't require complicated safety systems and procedures. So because all the players with any power are happy with the status quo no technological advancement in this area has been put into operation for the last 50 years. The enormity of the damage inflicted on the economy by the energy industry being centrally planned can not be underestimated. Here is a technology that can take 1 ton of a common metal and safely produce 1 GW-year of energy with it. Thorium is so common that a average cubic yard of soil contains 30 barrels of oil equivalent. The ashes from a coal power plant of typical size (1 GW) contain 13 tons of thorium which currently just gets dumped into the air and landfills - so every coal power plant is throwing away 13 times as much nuclear energy as it produces in electricity. Not only has the economy lost the benefit of 30 years of not using the technology it's also lost all the innovation that would have occurred but didn't because of government interference. The MSR Experiment ended successfully in 1969. Look around at every other type of technology and notice how much it has advanced since 1969. Now consider that currently the government tells us that "fourth generation" technology from the 1960s and 1970s just might get built on a commercial scale somewhere between 2030 and 2050, if we're lucky. To put this in human terms every GW of energy, be that in electrical or chemical form, represents the amount of work 20-50 million human beings can perform via sustained manual labor. When you're compiling the list of crimes of the state be sure to include this reduction in the standard of living of everybody who would have had access to this energy but doesn't.