Wesley
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Days Won
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Posts posted by Wesley
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'COULD' wipe out 90% of the population. Reasonable speculation on my part...
How do you know?
If you could find a few credentialed experts (or even one to start) who think that that is a possibility, then I may consider it more reasonable to think that this situation may happen.
Do such sources exist?
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Didn't have a "Self Knowledge" topic category. So bump in case anyone felt like deleting and then re-entering their vote to add that as an option. If nothing changes, then no worries.
Plus, maybe a few more votes will be cast in the poll.
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It produces just as good results as worshiping gods!
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A few weeks ago, I posted a thread with some early ideas as to how we could foster art creation in the FDR community. If anyone would like to see some of the early ideas and support we had for it, you can look at this thread: http://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/38991-fdr-artists/
Since then, the idea has progressed several stages and the current idea is to create a new site that can house FDR member's artistic creations.
We have drawn up our concept and created a list of what needs to get done. There are many things on the list we need to get this accomplished in order for this project to succeed. You may be able to help with one or many of them.
If you have any interest in helping out on the project, then feel free to put a response in this post or send me a message. I would like it if your post or message contained what some of your skills were that might be helpful and a google mail address so I can include you in on the shared documents.
It could be web design, graphic design, marketing help, and several other things. Even if you don't have any of these specific skills, there may be some grunt work or generic feedback you could provide as different stages are completed and we look for feedback on the design or the usability.
Thanks in advance for any help you are able to provide and I look forward to hearing from you!
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Apparently there are no good short video introductions to the most famous of all characters; there are a ton of academic lectures that speak for 1 hour about a single Bible verse, but those aren't very practical for the average curious guy, and of course the 'Jesus is your saviour' videos that don't help either.
On the other hand, I have devoted hundreds of hours to study world religions and Jesus in particular, so I could fit mainstream scholarship in a 10 minutes compact video presenting the historical Jesus, his environment, what came to be of his history afterwards... And in fact, I have already written a script, so whoever likes drawing, or animation, and feels curious can just ask me for it: I'll hand it over and we'll see if we can take the collaboration up to a the next YouTube hit.
Regards,
Withanametocome
What is your goal with this presentation?
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I would like to share a method I have used on several occasions in order to get out of jury duty. Usually--at least in my state--one will receive an initial notice in the mail which you are supposed to return. On that notice will be a section allowing you to list some reason why you should be excused from "duty." I have on multiple occasions written that it would be inappropriate for me to serve on a jury on account of my psychic abilities, which would interfere with the ordinary legal procedures.
Sounds stupid, right? Well, previous to adopting this strategy I would receive these notices almost every single year. After having returned 2 or so notices with this comment, I have COMPLETELY stopped receiving notices for jury duty. It has been approximately 7 years since I have last received a notice.
Your mileage, of course, may vary.
When I got the "pre-screening" form for NY, there were no free form questions. There was only "are you a felon" and basic things like that. Which, of course, I had to answer correctly or I would be guilty of felony perjury or something. So, no option for any of that.
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If I were in court and on the stand I would pray that there was an anarchist in the jury. That being said if I was summoned for jury duty I would certainly go. Though, I do hear there is a screening for jury members and if you bring up anything like jury nullification or even appear morally sane they simply won't let you on, that's how sadistic the system is.
I am able to pretend to be one of the herd. I did it for most of my life.
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I have been summoned!
While I am sure it is annoying for most people, it is a particular kind of annoyance to an anarchist. I get a letter in a sense that tells me that I must perform my duty as a member of a criminal jury and if I do not, they will fine me $1,000 (or I can reschedule so they can summon me again in a few months, which is just delaying the pain). Of course, these are the "good guys". The "bad guy" might be a kid who had the wrong vegetable in his pocket and never threatened me with a fine or jail.
Regardless, I will have to call a number to see if I have to go to jury duty in a week and a half. I am planning on trying to get on the jury and then voting "not guilty" to any non-crimes that may be brought against the defendant and "guilty" to anything that is actually wrong that they can be proven reasonably guilty of. It could be an interesting form of civil disobedience, but we will have to see what happens.
I am a low number, so it is pretty likely I will have to go in for at least a day. After that, it depends if I get placed on a jury or not.
I just wanted to post here and see if anyone had any words of encouragement, or a similar example and what they did, or to tell me not to do this if at all possible because a judge could hold me in contempt or something.
I will try to remember and post back here what my experience was when it is all over, if anything interesting ends coming out of this.
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I think you missed an important part of that story:
As for what governments should do to prevent social unrest in the wake of mass unemployment, the Microsoft cofounder said that they should basically get on their knees and beg businesses to keep employing humans over algorithms. This means perhaps eliminating payroll and corporate income taxes while also not raising the minimum wage so that businesses will feel comfortable employing people at dirt-cheap wages instead of outsourcing their jobs to an iPad.
Namely, that without these various regulations, taxes, and work in order to hire people, automation would not happen near to the extent that it is now. This is not a result of the free market, but a result of fascism and the state making hiring people incredibly expensive relative to automation.
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Consciousness is not meaningless. It was considered a meaningful feature to the aliens who engineered us, even though I am aware that most people reject this. I believe that this is getting away from the topic though.
Couldn't resist:
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Upvoting and downvoting is a privilege of all of the donation levels. It is somewhat assumed that people who donate are interested in seeing FDR succeed (as they have donated money to help FDR succeed) which is why voting is available to them.
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That was just a pun, felt like posting it.
It is basically how i see a totally free market ending up in.
Ok, great. I just wanted to make sure that you and others realized that the image says nothing about the realities of the world and everything about how you view the world. As long as we were on the same page, then its all good.
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Buy n Large (BnL) is a fictional company of the WALL•E universe.[1]WALL•E himself is a Buy n Large product. In preparation for marketing the movie, Disney purchased a domain called Buy n Large in order to create a viral Buy n Large website for promotional purposes. Now, the domain re-directs visitors to the official WALL•E website.
So yea, not sure what the point of this picture is.
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Peter Lanza, the father of the man who killed 20 children and six educators in an elementary school in Connecticut, wishes his son, Adam, had never been born because the massacre was an act that “couldn't get any more evil.”
http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-father-of-conn-massacre-shooter-says-he-wishes-son-was-never-born-20140310,0,4991278.story#ixzz2vfXlGp6jIn a series of interviews with the magazine the New Yorker, Peter Lanza broke his silence on the 2012 rampage at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., that stunned the nation and resumed a debate about gun control. Lanza said he hadn't seen his son for two years at the time of shooting and he constantly thinks about what he could have done differently.
“Any variation on what I did and how my relationship was had to be good, because no outcome could be worse,” Lanza told the magazine in an article dated March 17. “You can't get any more evil. … How much do I beat up on myself about the fact that he's my son? A lot.”
Adam Lanza, 20, began his killing spree on Dec. 14, 2012, by fatally shooting his mother, Nancy, Peter's former wife. Adam Lanza then drove to the school where he opened fire, killing 20 pupils, each between 6 and 7 years old, and six adults before killing himself.
Peter Lanza has not commented publicly on the shooting, but according to the magazine contacted reporter Andrew Solomon in September, months before the first anniversary of the shooting. Solomon writes that he met six times with Lanza, an accountant who is vice president for taxes at General Electric subsidiary GE Energy Financial Services.
Lanza has said he will not talk to other media.
Peter and Nancy Lanza separated in 2001 and divorced in 2009. He said he last saw Adam in October 2010. He said he wanted to maintain contact, but Nancy Lanza wrote to say that Adam didn't want to see his father.
Peter Lanza said Adam was 13 when a psychiatrist diagnosed him with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism not associated with violence. But he believes the syndrome “veiled a contaminant” that wasn't Asperger's. “I was thinking it could mask schizophrenia,” Lanza said.
Peter Lanza told the magazine that his son as a young child was “just a normal little weird kid” who used to spend hours with his father playing with Legos.
But as he grew older, Adam's mental health problems worsened, according to Connecticut State Police documents. A Yale University professor diagnosed Lanza in 2006 with profound autism spectrum disorder, “with rigidity, isolation, and a lack of comprehension of ordinary social interaction and communications,” while also displaying symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, the released documents show.
Peter Lanza said his and Nancy Lanza's concerns about Adam increased when he began middle school.“It was crystal clear something was wrong,” he said. “The social awkwardness, the uncomfortable anxiety, unable to sleep, stress, unable to concentrate, having a hard time learning, the awkward walk, reduced eye contact. You could see the changes occurring.”
Peter Lanza believes his son had no affection for him at the time of the shootings.
“With hindsight, I know Adam would have killed me in a heartbeat, if he'd had the chance. I don't question that for a minute,” he told the magazine.
He said he wished Adam had never been born.
“That didn't come right away,” Peter Lanza said about the statement. “That's not a natural thing, when you're thinking about your kid. But, God, there's no question. There can only be one conclusion, when you finally get there. That's fairly recent, too, but that's totally where I am.”
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I know very little about Flickr and I have concerns that if an external site is created, then people may forget about it over time (as either content creators or as consumers). If someone could walk me through how this could be solved with an external site, then I would appreciate it.
Also, I would prefer postings to be user-done. If an external account is used I wouldn't want to create the work for a mod to have to make postings all of the time. Maybe there is a solution for that as well that I would be interested to hear.
Finally, Flickr seems to me to be for photo sharing and I would not want to limit people who may write poems or songs or stories or some other forms of art that could not be put easily into a photo. This one makes me especially wary of Flickr particularly, however another external site that allows more media could be ok.
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Yea, I have also heard the charges are somewhat silly. Obviously, you have a better source of information than I did, but I heard that the money laundering was that he had exchanged money on his exchange who had exchanged money with some people, some of whom might be buying drugs and that by this standard every banker in the world should be in jail.
I also really hope that this garbage doesn't stick.
Talking about a possible loophole in a regulation doesn't seem illegal to me either.
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How can someone sign up an account here and still be retarded enough to not know why capitalism is advocated by FDR? It's not about efficiency.
It is free and easy to sign up and people are introduced to the site from Joe Rogan or Peter Schiff or Noam Chomsky or Peter Joseph or from an appearance on RT America or from the Bitcoin community.
People may not know everything about the topics or definitions of terms that we use as a community. As long as Stef and Mike keeps growing the show, there will always be a stream of people who are coming in with different experiences and preconceived notions as to what things mean. It took me years to develop to the understanding that I have now, and I am certainly still learning.
I do know that comments like this will turn away new people who may be interested in the relationship stuff or the bitcoin stuff and not know exactly what is going on with capitalism or why it is advocated.
This post makes me feel angry and sad as you criticize people for not knowing why capitalism is argued for in FDR when I think the information about empathy and abuse is much more important information (if even not to the OP, but to the average new person or guest who may stumble upon this thread).
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While I fully agree with you, how would this ever come to be?, this is what i mean.
How would we change those incentives, if the people keep voting for the people who will never implement it?
You put great points on the table, but I cannot seem to find the answer to the root of the question.
This is the part that this community is unique from other libertarian and ancap sites. The argument is that irrationality, statism, violent crime, mental disorders, drug abuse, suicide, poverty, and more can all be linked to adverse childhood experiences.
When we make the moral case that children are people to be treated with the highest moral standards that you would ever hold your behavior to, then the language of violence, force, and threats of the state will seem absurd and other solutions will be found through negotiation. Also, all of the excuses for state power of the variety of social and criminal ills will vastly decrease making the excuses for government also negligible.
This is the argument for how a peaceful society can be achieved, and it already is becoming less and less acceptable for parents to use any form of abuse against children. Once we have a society of whom the vast majority speak the language of peace, negotiation, and voluntary interactions then reasoning and educating people will be easy.
For more on this, there is a video series at www.fdrurl.com/bib you may wish to check out. I think it has very valuable information in it.
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Great point, you make a lot of sense.
This leads us to the heart of the problem though.
Seeing as people have the tendency to always want things in the short term, it becomes obvious that we (I say we for ease of use) have to educate/teach a critical mass of people about these things.
As long as the majority stays oblivious of these points and keeps going for the things that work in the short term, we can not (or at least hardly) make the change we need to make, in order to get there.
This is one of the main reasons, I personally don't see this ever happening.
If we merely look at popularity alone, just popularity nothing else (for the sake of the argument), we can clearly see that Zeitgeist thinking and/or socialist/communist thinking is in the vast majority.
Whether it is a good thing or not being beside the point, that which is most popular, has the biggest chance of succeeding (succeeding as in being implemented or at least being tried).
The vast majority of people do not need to be educated on it. The only reason the current system is the way it is is because the state uses inflation to erode savings, 401K plans in order to herd money into the stock market, and a variety of other taxes and subsidies to herd money into the pockets of them and their friends.
Once the incentives change, people will automatically find new methods of operating very, very quickly.
Finally, I do not care what framework is the most popular. If we use that standard, then the current statist paradigm is by far the most popular. My goal is to figure out what is correct and then work towards that.
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Hmmmm, yes, i guess that could be true in the long run, in fact, it is true for the long run.
But how about the short run? i think one of the reasons things are going down the drain, is exactly because people don't like to think long term, if it doesn't do good in the short term, people don't do it.
In an inflationary system, you are incentivezed heavily to spend now for saving money leads to it losing value.
In a deflationary money system people will be much more incentivized to save money, rather than spend it quickly. This will lead to a change in people's thinking and planning processes.
Of course there will be growing pains, but sometimes the medicine to moving to a better system tastes bad. That doesn't mean the disease is better than the medicine.
Finally, I would also like to point out that Doge will (in the very long term) probably become deflationary as well. When the inflation is not a percentage of the total, but a fixed number and the coin usage and loss increases exponentially with time (or at least at a much faster rate), it is very likely that eventually Doge will also be deflationary. It may take a few years longer than it would with bitcoin, but it does not solve the problem unless the currency programs in a specific percentage inflation per year.
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I myself own some Bitcoins and quite a lot of Dogecoins, so it's not that i don't like them or anything.
However i do want to hear some opinions on the following.
At the moment, Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) are subject to huge price-swings.
It is believed that the value of these coin will become less volatile sooner or later and i think this might very well be true.
But there is an issue (I think).
Deflation vs inflation.
In a world where money is subject to inflation, i can buy a house today at 100.000 Dollars (for example) and pay it back over 30 years.
In those 30 years, every Dollar in itself will have less value, therefore the house I bought will go up in price (but not necessarily value), this means that, over time, i pay less relative Dollars for my house.
In a world where money is subject to deflation, i can buy a house today at 100.000 Dollars and pay it back over 30 years.
In those 30 years, every Dollar becomes more valuable, therefore, the house I bought will go down in price.
This means that, over time, i pay more relative Dollars for my house than the amount i bought it for in the first place.
In short:
Value of Dollar goes up = I pay to much for my mortgage.
Value of Dollar goes down = I pay less for my mortgage, in relation to the average value of the house in the long term.
Now here Bitcoin comes in.
Bitcoin is worth x amount of Dollars right now, however as soon as Bitcoin becomes a mainstream currency, while their cap remains at 21 million Bitcoins, it will more than likely be subject to deflation.
It is for this reason, that i think Dogecoin does a better job, at least in terms of being/becoming a useful real-life mainstream currency.
Its cap is increased by 5 billion each year (perhaps that is to much, perhaps not, only time will tell), meaning that as usage increases, so does the supply, making it far less scarce a resource and therefore less likely to deflate.
Your opinions please.
For a mortgage currently, there is a positive interest rate that always means you end up paying more for the mortgage than the inflation rate.
In a deflationary system, the interest rate could be very close to zero in order to compensate for the difference.
Not to mention that saving money will be massively easier, so the need to get a mortgage for the average person is greatly diminished as if you can eve save a little bit over many years, house prices will drop and you will be able to buy a house outright.
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Capitalism does not require 3% growth, or any growth at all to "work"
Agreed, if this were the case, there would be no problem at all.
However, this is freedomainradio.
Freedomainradio is the forum/message board that is founded on the principles of a man called Stefan Molyneux.
I have regularly heard Stefan Molyneux say growth is a good thing.
What am I missing here?
An individual's preference for growth says nothing about a system as a whole or even about the sum total of preferences of the people who make up the system.
There are many areas of the economy that would contract or stay stagnant in a capitalist system. On net, it is impossible to determine what would happen.
Also, most growth in output would come from higher efficient use of inputs, not from needing more inputs. Therefore, your entire code is meaningless as growth in output doesn't directly correlate with growth in inputs.
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The argument is not (to me at least), which is a better model and which isn't.
The argument is only that reductionism isn't a correct way to describe the entire economy.
I don't believe you can compare scientific reasoning (the way atoms behave under certain circumstances etc etc) with anything that involves something as complex as a human being, let alone millions or billions of human beings interacting with each other.
I am also not trying to offer a "better" method/model, however, a more communistic view makes just that bit more sense to me than a capitalistic one.
For example:
I live next to a forest.
In this forest i usually pick wood for my stove.
Now someone with more money than me (obviously), buys the forest.
Now i can't go into the forest to pick wood for my stove, because I'd be trespassing on private property, or I'd now have to pay someone for something I've always done for free.
I don't see how this in any way shape or form could be seen as even remotely fair, yet, the wealthy now new forest owner didn't coerce or force me in any way right?
about me being a hypocrite? Well, yes, if you look at it that way, I am a hypocrite, but I pointed out that capitalism does not work because growth does not work and why growth does not work, is scientifically quantifiable, ergo it can be reductionistic.
1. You do not buy unowned things. This is not how it works at all. In fact, the guy collecting wood would have some sort of just claim to have homesteaded the forestry rights within a certain radius of his house.
2. It is not perfect or logically and always true to model human behavior in a model sense, however we still model trends to monitor behavior. Modeling and statistics are imperfect, but they allow future and trends to be predicted and estimated. If you do not have some sort of model or example, then you are just making crap up which doesn't exactly fly with a community that basis a lot of its conclusions on empiricism.
3. Your example is reductionist as well (the forest).
4. You cannot hold others to a standard and then apply arbitrary exceptions for yourself.
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This article was the Federal Reserve's recent response to congressional pressure for the executive branch to regulate or ban bitcoin.
Basically, the state knows that they want to either ban it or claim oversight over it. However, they do not know how to do it or what to do and they don't want to be the one to do it. Currently, there is a perpetual passing the buck for the next department to deal with. It will be interesting to see who ends up making the first attempts at regulation.
Then, unfortunately, we will hit a number of awkward years where governments try to apply decades-old laws and regulations to something they do not understand. Volatility and growth will decrease some (after attempts at regulation are the norm). Slowly, regulations will be shown to be obsolete or silly. Hopefully this awkward period is short-lived.
The IRS plans to TAX Bitcoin, although not as money.
in Libertarianism, Anarchism and Economics
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Those who don't want to pay taxes already know where their Tor browser and favorite mixing service is. Those who are operating more above-board with bitcoin are paying taxes anyway by assessing their value to USD for income, paying capital gains, etc.
In short, I don't think it will change much except make it clear to bitcoin businesses how they should operate which makes things much more predictable when trying to start an entrepreneurial venture.