tasmlab

How it works out at different ages: M: 16, W: 15 (not bad!) M: 22, W: 18 M: 30, W: 22 M: 40, W: 27 M: 60, W: 37 (now we're getting dicey)

I don't think I would recommend "Human Action" as a starting point. I've had it on my bedside table for about two years and am about half way through it. Slogging through the first 100 pages on defining praxeology was a bit of a chore. There is great stuff in it, but I'm not sure it's going to light a passionate fire for the subject as the first book read. (Personal opinion) I am hoping to read "Man, Economy and State" and I'm assuming that Rothbard will be a bit more fluid in his writing.

I just gave my copy of "Getting Things Done" to a neighbor this morning who was having trouble getting organized. The book is pretty good and very easy/quick to read. Recommended! You'll never read more about manilla folders and paper clips in your life, but the fundamental concepts about creating systems and limiting active brain loops is good stuff.

Hi, sorry for the fish slapping I guess. You needn't feel tasked with my request. I'll google it elsewhere, write my own, or wait for Stef's book. Or maybe I'll draft a starter and post a thread for review. I appreciate your analysis of my request, but it doesn't feel like what I'm looking for. Thanks!

I'm a little rusty here (been married for 15 years) but as a remember you won't get to do a lot of slapping back as playful touching. Being slapped though sounds like a wonderful signal that things are on! Shoot back to her (if you are interested): - Eye expressions and smiles - More jokes - Clink bottles/glasses (not the flesh contact desired, but a connection all the same) - Rub her shoulders for a second when you return from wherever. A compliment or recoil is instant hint - Put hand over her hand or arm when emphasizing a point - Capitalize on hellos and goodbyes with hugs and kisses, you know, like friends do. - Explain the shortcomings of Marx's labor theory of value and fractional reserve banking.

Absolutely study economics! It's wonderful. Classes are only one way to learn something, and for me, usually the most ineffective. There are so many books out there. Pick some up. Peter Schiff's "How an economy grows and why it crashes" is a delight. It takes about two hours to read and is fun. Schiff's radio show is good too for analysis of current events. I actually found FDR through Stef guest hosting. Stef's podcasts on economics are good too. The second book I would read would be either Rothbard's "What has government done to our money" or Hazlitt's "Economics in one lesson", and then the fourth might be Hayek's "Road to Serfdom". Amazon sells used books for pennies and a couple of those listed can be downloaded for free.

While no pro, I dream lucidly quite a bit, sometimes to great delight and other times to frustration. It's hard to keep it going! For me it comes in spits and spats. I'll have a week where I'm good at it and then go months without anything. I also levitate sometimes (so it feels) and do false waking (where you get up from sleeping, but the realize you only dreamt of awakening). I also sometimes dream that I'm asleep sometimes (e.g., feel like you are in a slumber, crack your eyes a bit to see that you are sleeping somewhere weird - and hence dreaming - and then go back to sleep in the dream) Some tips/indicators: - Reality checks are good, if for no other reason than to get use to questioning 'am I dreaming?'. I haven't used a watch or clock as often recommended*, but can usually test gravity by lifting feet up or jumping. In dreams I get more air or fly. - Best time for me is after experience 1-3 hours of insomnia between say 3-5 in the morning. - Best for me: laying on my back - While in insomnia, I keep my eyes closed and try to simulate sleeping. I often try to imagine entering somewhere, like following someone up a flight of stairs. - Sexual imagery can work, and keeping an erection simulates sleep. Men have erections frequently when they sleep. Can't go too far of course and suddenly want to pull the ears off of your mouse, lest you wake the missus and the baby that are co-sleeping with you. :-) - Once I realize I'm dreaming I like to take to the air and fly typically. - Maintaining a lucid state for a long time is hard. I wake up a lot. - When I wake up, I go back to eyes clothes and the imagery that sent me in and can usually string together anywhere from five to 40 lucid dreams in the session. - If you can sleep in, all the better. Personally, I do find I remember lucid dreams better but I don't look to them as gateways into the unconscious or to generate self-awareness. If I'm able to highjack a dream, I usually just fly about wherever the dream is taking place, often some version of my own house. * I had thought of having a batch of those rubber wrist bands people sell for charity printed up that say "Reality Check" on them with a series of numbers. I could sell them to would-be lucid dreamers who could then check them during their waking time. Still might do it.

Hi Bardan, Yea, I've got some skin in the game here! Daughters age 2 and 8 and a five year old boy, all whom I love more than anything. I'm not sure I'd say I'm resisting. I didn't mean to attempt to trivialize or over-simplify the concepts in order to dismiss them. And we're implementing actively nearly everything I've gleaned, with a few exceptions/lapses that have been more situational than fundamental. So I feel like I'm trying to push PP forward in my family by learning more, not resisting. Through the podcasts Stef has made the CASE for peaceful parenting stunningly clear, and he repeats it nicely in the book draft on the donors' board. He doesn't though really give specific prescriptions for what to do, only that it is needed. The list I provide in my post above is what I pulled out and it may be complete. Maybe it's not a code of intellectual rules like the ten commandments but examples of behavior that are specific. If the philosophy behind peaceful parenting is true and easy to understand (I think it is), then some of the sample behaviors and outcomes should be fairly easy to list and probably be applicable to everyone. Hence a synoptic list of some dos and don'ts. His talks on UPB are similar; lots of case building, a lot of talk on their attributes (universal, etc.) but never a list of example UPBs beyond 'don't kill, don't steal, don't rape' (note: I haven't read the book yet). Let me know what you think. Thanks!

Hah! I posted the same thing on another board today. It's nice that the pope is opening up to us Atheists, but I offer no reciprocity. He's still damned to his ignorance!

For me, it often seemed when debating that it was like whomever 'won' would be given instant power after the conversation to fully implement their ideas into the world. Why else would people get so angry over a conversation? We are absolutely powerless to affect anything at the state level. I like to remind people that we are powerless to even make minimum wage 1 cent more or less, so that most of the debate we are having is de facto for fun and a hobby. Which means there is no reason to get angry, raise voices, insult etc., I like to concede points. And I like to find common ground and things people agree with. And say "I don't know" a lot. And be curious. And cheerful.

Can anyone point me to like "the six things you do or don't do in peaceful parenting?" I've heard Stef talk about it for 700 podcasts but never quite hear the specifics of what it entails. From what I can gather: no violence; honesty; respect; no humiliation; no verbal abuse; recognizing personhood; negotiating vs. punishment; no punishment; no threats of abandonment Is there more to it?

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/08/30/what-is-government-elementary-students-taught-its-your-family/ Instead of all of the mental gyrations to understand that government is the family, one school is just coming out and saying it. Stef might have to get his resume in order if the government is just going to come out and say it's the family. At public school no less.

A cold comfort may be that the edge of the cliff or the fateful last step won't just happen in a day. It may be a slow slide for 200 years a gradually increasing scarcity. Or oil exploration and extraction technology just stretches out oil's viability way longer than we can imagine. Another separate point is to look at how quickly other infrastructures can be built. Global cell phone infrastructure has been deployed in a few decades and is upgraded on a cycle of years.

Having to buy a taxi medallion on auction is a famousish libertarian terror tale in licensure. I think Reason writes an article on it every year. Here's the NYC tale: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/10/21/why-taxi-medallions-cost-1-million/ I don't know beans about what goes on in Houston. :-)

Chris Mortenson's 'Crash Course' is very entertaining. Sort of a powerpoint movie about peak energy, government debt and fiat currency and something else. Particularly interesting is his application of exponential growth to these issues. You'll be assured of your certain death by the end of the video. http://www.peakprosperity.com/crashcourse Life without oil does seem pretty desperate if you think about how we grow food and distribute every single consumer product under the sun, not to mention the glut of plastic products we depend on. I think every grocery my family consumes now comes in a ziploc or tupperware. I don't know if peak oil is upon us. "They" have been promising it for forty years. I also do a little work in the industry and they are a pretty crafty and inventive bunch. Besides having the self-sufficient cabin in the woods, I *think* another viable strategy is too keep your income in top fifth percentile or so. Even in a dust-bowl depression the wealthier manage to get their hands on the limited goods. There's probably a case to be made to make connections in the government.

I mostly just used the standard arguments e.g., he doesn't seem to exist, nobody can prove it, here's a bunch of fallacies and horrible things in the bible, how do you account for the other countless religions you believe to be wrong, why has his power diminished over the millenia, do you think the bible could've just been a book invented to control people, prayer doesn't do anything, spaghetti monster type arguments, etc, and their responses/oppositional arguments were fairly ordinary. e.g., well, there must be SOME higher power; you can't prove he doesn't exist; billions of believers can't be wrong; how will people know how to be moral?; to finally 'this is what we enjoy, it's how we make friends' I wouldn't say I presented the case intelligibly one afternoon and they accepted it. It was dozens of conversations that slowly chipped away little bits, a gradual concession. The first chink was just to get them to agree that the bible may not be infallible. Then that maybe god wasn't precisely what the religion said (oh, but a power still exists they'd say). Then making them wonder about the extent of his omnipotence. Etc., I think it was a pretty plain approach. As I describe it, I'm thinking i may have been lucky with some unusually receptive people, esp. given that they were in their 70's at the time.

Hi MCS, You are correct, it was a years-long process and I skipped a bit in my 400 word post. The hardest of the debates were with my septuagenarian in-laws and those were usually at smaller events, dinners with just the four of us. They were extremely active in their church, going weekly for probably 60+ years and both held positions in managing the church (my father-in-law the church comptroller and mother-in-law alter guild). This said, they weren't hard core evangelicals or Tim Tebow types who found Jesus embedded into everything. Dedicated but down to earth Episcopal. I guess what made this easy (relatively) is that they always enjoyed the conversations even when voices were raised. Nobody else in the family ever brought up anything interesting. We always remained cheerful and shut down the conversation if anybody became angry or upset. Copious amounts of alcohol were always involved. I was also viewed as a stand-up and favorite guy in all other regards (good job, nice to their daughter, helpful, etc.) which really helped. It also helped that my in-laws are bonkers nice, respectful and loving people as well. Like, simply magical in their kindness. The generation down, my wives brother and sisters and their spouses also enjoyed the talks and we later relieved to be able to speak their minds. On Christmas eve people started enjoying not having to go to night time church service. As I had set precedent, the others could relax their views. At one dinner, a 10 year old niece finally asked the crowd if Jeff (me) really didn't believe in god and then asked if that was 'allowed'. Since none of the parent group were active church goers and were relaxing their beliefs at least in these forums, the Christianity just sort of fell apart. After about five years in or so, grace wasn't said at meals, passed on relatives weren't said prayers and nobody except the elder in-laws went to church on the holidays. The in-laws wouldn't actually stop going to church at all until about 10 years or so after my introduction. Nobody is a vocal atheist waving their Ayn Rand and Richard Dawkins books around, but the worst of the taboo was released. I do suspect that the in-laws still pine for an immortal soul even though they no longer believe in the bearded sky ghost. (My apologies to the OP for making this all about me!) One more Morse Code: Just so I don't seem like the atheist horse whisperer, I've tried the same tact with hyper-evengelical sister with disastrous results. I think I've been de-fooed because my case against belief was so offensive to her. She goes to a mega church (congregation over over 20,000 people), attends three times a week, tithes by credit card I believe, and is wrapped up in the shit. Impenetrable!

Look up the taxi liscensure stuff in Houston*. It is often famously brutal in many cities. Starting a taxi line, indeed, even a single car, will be loaded with equipment costs (cars) and tons of insurance (think liability). And then your job will be something like a taxi driver or a dispatcher, neither of which are fun or interesting jobs to have. Plus it's a 24x7 business. You'll never sleep until you are major enterprise. At age 24, especially if you went to college, no employer expects you to have a quality job history. You are essentially considered a blank slate. You might be best off looking around and learning new things. If you don't have a crystal clear idea of what you want to be, I would consider trying to get any position at a company that has lots of highly paid and highly intelligent people. Where you start won't make a difference, because if you are identified as a good worker they will eventually bring you up to be one of the highly paid and highly intelligent workers. I would go around the block a few times before starting a business. Not sure how long. I started mine at age 32, probably should've started at 29, and would've been a disaster to start at 24 before I learned how business works. Shoot for hire than middle-class! * A quick google search shows they are not too bad! But they may be limited, meaning you'll have to get one on auction: http://cohapp.cityofhouston.gov/FIN_FeeSchedule/default.aspx Kind of a crazy list of fees. Yay government!

Does child ownership have to be an either/or proposition? When a baby is first born it has many features/characteristics of being owned. E.g., it isn't allowed to leave (nor can it), someone else can't come and take it away from the mother, etc. Perhaps it has 99% of the features of being owned except perhaps for its humanity. Similarly when the child is young it has features of being owned, like the parent can insist on it doing something or the parent is liable for behavior the child has (say, he breaks Mr. Wilson's window) As it grows it continues to lose more and more features that are in common of being owned until it eventually sheds each of them. If this is truish, then a child is never definitionally owned but just carries a lot of the same characteristics. This makes for untidy semantics and a heap of subjectivity, though. My thoughts on abortion are sorta stuck around this right now. It seems that a 1 day old, 2-celled biocyst has most of the features of a blob of meat and almost none of a person. But as time goes on, it sheds the old characteristics and gains the new ones in a graduated process, which, unfortunately, never let's anyone lock on to hard and fast definitions.

This might be ticky tacky, but can anything be presented as 'this is belief only, not fact, you decide'.? Wouldn't beliefs be presented as truth, like the same as facts? So the agreement with your wife would be that you both agreed to present conflicting versions of the truth to your kids and then let them sort it out. Doesn't sound ideal, but a lot better than some of us had it! If I had at least one out of two of my parents advocate for reason, it would've been 50% less BS. I wonder who has the harder to case to make? Religion takes a lot of indoctrination and presenting things that don't seem true. You may have the upper hand. At 8 years old, I don't think your older daughter is beyond hope. She has lots of time. Story about me: After I met my (to be) wife and we were dating/engaged/married, I had to go to her family's house for holidays with usually a dozen adults and dozen children having Christmas or whatever. I cheerfully promoted my atheism to the family, such as when it came time for grace or going to church on the holiday. I didn't try to convert anybody, but the example I set allowed just about all of the children to begin questioning and enabled most of the adults to question too. After about eight years there wasn't a believer in the bunch and now it is a bit of a joke within the family*. Not because of my great ideas, but I showed there was no dreaded consequences to examining the truth here. My advice, for what it is worth: Keep on cheerfully explaining your position and provide an awesome example in yourself. * My now 80-year-old father-in-law stuck out the longest, but finally rejected the idea of a Christian god. Unfortunately, of sorts, he died briefly with a heart attack and he experienced his soul floating around the room until a medical professional resuscitated him. He now believes in 'something out there' and a soul of some sort. To his credit, he has some (unverifiable) sensual evidence on this one.

I think you are referring to the W9 which is the one you sign when first hired. The W2 is what you get in February from your employer. http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw9.pdf The W9 isn't a contract with the government or the employer, nor a promise to pay taxes or do anything. It's an information return to inform the employer what your tax status is. It never goes to the government, but kept on file with the employer or just used to enter withholdings into the accounting/payroll system. It's procedural, not contractual. That might help the first part of your debate. It's not an agreement; it's forced disclosure. You also don't really have to have a tax relationship with your employer, except for the SS and employment taxes they pay on your behalf and your withholdings. The tax relationships are you->govt and employer->govt. Employers don't care if you pay your taxes. The government cares. This is clearer if you own your own business. As owner or self-employed, you don't have a W-9 but are forced to pay taxes all the same. I concede that this all gets pretty conflated especially with large employers. The policy for W9 and tax participation is so procedural that it seems ironclad. I think the clip I isolated is flawed as well (I understand you are putting forth the statist argument). The DRO model would rarely need to be involved in routine employment-at-will situations. Most people wouldn't pre-hire dispute resolution unless your job requires you handling massive amounts of cash. Even then, most companies use purchase order procedures anyways. My own company does about a half million in business with no contracts and I hire three full timers without any contracts. Neither me, my clients nor my employees would ever use the courts to resolve a dispute. People just quit or don't pay. I think the biggest difference is the W9 is needed so the government knows where you are and what you are collecting in revenue so they can force you to pay taxes. The DRO is an optional agency that protects you and your business partner if you want it. (Hopefully I'm helping and not grandstanding! Apologies if so!)

I think you would have to be a masochist to attend church services or even coffee hour afterward as an atheist. The former are uniformly tedious and just imagine the awful conversations to be endured in the later. This said, my atheist family will cherry pick some things related to religion for enjoyment, such as: - celebrating Christmas and Easter (lots of presents and bunnies, no Jesus) and sometimes enjoy the religious music or cartoon. Little drummer boy comes to mind. - I have told them the Christmas christ story and the crucifixion story, but as a curious historian not truth-sayer. My 7-year-old daughter asked "did the government kill Jesus?" which is a rich question to ask an atheist/anarchist! I didn't know whom to chew into more. (my answer "eh, yea, them and the Jews") - Lots of good classical music has religious themes. - I let my in-laws take the kids to a play at the church which they enjoyed. - I sponsored a soup kitchen night a couple years ago as a gift to my father-in-law. Essentially buy dinner for 200 or so indigents. It was through a religious group and they said a prayer. I guess none of this would be considered 'religion as a hobby'. It's more picking a few nice things that they happened to do and, in truth, hope that none of the belief stuff bleeds in while we do it. One might think it would be dicey with kids, but it's pretty easy to navigate.

Wow, that's a courageous moral point of view to throw out their, Ms. Jolie. I wouldn't want to be part of the wave of insult and controversy headed her way. /derp

In this video, Block describes himself as an atheist and an anaracho capitalist. I don't recommend watching the video, I just submit it to show that he at least calls himself both things. And perhaps it's some of his inconsistent actions that made Block embarrassed and angry at Stef for his Dr. Paul criticism.

I noticed that Stef was posted on Lewrockwell.com recently: http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/07/stefan-molyneux/finally-the-truth-about-george-zimmerman-and-trayvon-martin/ I never heard the story of his banishment, but thought it must of been due to his criticism of Christianity or Ron Paul or the family or whatever Walter Block's beef is with him (despite them being world-view twins as they are both atheist an caps). You can see the eight year gap in years in his columnist page: http://www.lewrockwell.com/author/stefan-molyneux/ Although he is still not in the columnist listing. Anyone know the story? Is it gossipy or did Stef redeem his libertarian credentials or was it a mistake by a LRC intern?