FriendlyHacker

May 14, 2014

So one could develop their human capital so that they are worth more than "minimum wage." And not start a family that they cannot afford to provide for, including time and nurturing directly from the parents.

Freedom can be harmful?

I don't think you've taken the time to denote what you mean by "new kind of economic system" and "your flavor of libertarianism." It means that whatever follows couldn't be an actual conversation. I've listened to a lot of Stef's work and the only thing he's ever advocated in terms of economics, liberty, and every other aspect of life is NOT initiating the use of force against others. If that could be described as a new kind of economic system, it would only be because preceding economic systems involved the initiation of the use of force.

Also, the verbiage, "your flavor of libertarianism" frames the conversation as if the truth can be discarded because it's subjective, which isn't true. I implore you to elaborate on how freedom could be harmful. And of course I'm not talking about something like an unsupervised toddler.

Come here and live as poor person, even if you have the human capital already you will probably not survive.There are other kinds of libertarianism, the one defended here is just one of them, Google it.

I think you're mixing stuff up here. Obviously if the environment is shitty enough being lazy or not has no bearing on being poor or not. We just have to look at the middle ages to know that. So the argument that poor people are lazy is mostly about Western world citizens (which is where the statstics come from anyway).

And the other thing is, that if the environment is so shityy that people don't have enough to eat regardless of how much they work, then the question is "How did such an enivronment come about in the first palce and who/what maintains it?"

I remember hearing something about Economic Hitman which might have somthing to do with it, but ultimately there needs to be some sort of actual violence involved, else how do you explain Brazil developing the way it did over the last 100 years, especially when you can comapre it to countries liek the US?

Brazil is the dumping ground for US technology and the major source of it's natural resources, steel might be imported from China and other places, but ever wonder where all of the minerals come from? What about orange Juice? Oranges are grown here, exported to Germany and juice goes from Germany to the US. Same for coffee and many other things.

We are the sole responsible for the US car makers not going completely bankrupt, they take advantage of Brazil being a growing country and people needing cars to survive, to charge as much as they want for shitty versions of the same car sold in the US. Even though their profit margin is 10x larger, in order to save money some of these cars don't have their roofs properly soldered, which can kill you in the event of a crash.

Try looking into the difference between exploitation based Colonization and development based Colonization, and you will understand why Brazil developed differently from USA the past 500 years, and why now it actually became one of its exploitation colonies.

Also you mention the Economic Hitman, if you haven`t read that already you should. It clearly shows how corporations dominate foreign countries to create a global empire, and how politicians who dare to go against profiting on the exploitation of their people end up dead. Voting does not work and democracy is a joke, politicians who actually want to improve the standards of living are either killed or bribed.

May 14, 2014

While I'm considered middle class here, if you compare my standards of living to the one in rich countries, I'm actually below the poverty line, now imagine what it means to be be poor and you will understand why there are people living on landfills and eating garbage.

So if anyone here wants to argue about the poor being lazy and not taking their opportunities, you can go ahead and try living as a poor person in Brazil. Make sure to tell me how that works for you... if you're still alive after 1 month.

If you want to understand the innate structural violence in a country with low standards of living, you can try to imagine how violent people can be when their basics needs are not being met. You would be surprised to know that deaths by violence in Brazil are 60x larger than in Canada, and actually greater than most war zones (am not even talking totals here but % per 100k inhabitants).

May 14, 2014

If you watch/listen the show, you should be aware of what I'm replying to here.

The only thing I'm arguing for here, is that you can't advocate a new kind of economic system if you are not aware of what actually happens outside of your local environment. It shows that while your flavor of libertarianism might actually work where you live, it might be harmful for the rest of the world.

I don't have any solutions, other than working on the technology to level the playing field, which I find to be a lot more work than I'm probably capable of, while still managing to provide for myself.

May 14, 2014

This is what I mean when I say the financial system is broken to the point of not mattering how many hours a person works. In Brazil, if you receive the minimum wage, you can work 18 hours a day and still not make enough to provide for your family.

If you're born in poverty here, odds are you will never be able to get good education, medical treatment, food, housing and access to bleeding edge technology. There are red herrings, but exceptions are not the rule.

So when I say that Stefan is wrong when applying his experience with poverty to places outside of Canada and the UK, what I mean is that he had access to opportunities that are almost non existent in poor countries, that is, almost non existent for the majority of the worlds population.

And I'm not even mentioning racism, sexism, xenophobia and other issues here, which are used by the dominant classes to ensure the poor can't compete with them, even if some individuals manage to become smarter and more technically capable than the rich, by simply having the wrong color of skin they will have trouble keeping a job or having a similar level of income when compared to the most privileged.

May 13, 2014

Damn Stoyan you know how to use the internet. How much time did it take to get these skills?

Im taking a course in Web Development now and im a complete beginner

Patience, resilience, motivation. If you have that + access to the internet, you have done most of the work already.

You can't be told how to be a good coder, it's a skill that needs to be developed, if you practice enough you're bound to get good at it. You also can't learn it from College/University, so I would advise not wasting time/money with it.

One very important thing I can share: If you understand the logic, you can code in any language, if you only understand the syntax, you can only code in a single language while being bad at it.

May 9, 2014

War on drugs, War on terrorism and now War on Words? I propose we start a War on Wars on abstract concepts.

May 6, 2014

My personal experience with this is that social anxiety, depression, catatonia, poverty of speech, irritability, none of that can be considered a disease, it's not a disease to be afraid of sharks if you were repeatedly bitten by them. Since this is not a disease, no amount of medication can cure it, so be very careful about benzodiazepines and etc...

You will only stop being afraid of sharks if you stop hanging around the shark infested waters and start hanging around people who actually value and love you. It's very important to find those people and stay away from abusers, because this will make you realize you do not need to be afraid, you do not need to be anxious all the time, and this will enable your self-esteem to recover.

If you can't find people who can love and value your feelings, go out and search somewhere else, they usually have the same hiding place, would advise you to even move away if you have to if you can't find them.

April 30, 2014

Yes, should be made clear that nothing or no one is sacred, if you start worshiping people that is when you stop questioning authority, which is against the principles in anarchism, science and philosophy.

April 30, 2014

I would advise more patience and less parallel requests, this has to be done only once so no need to rush it, unless there is an immediate threat of channel going offline.

April 30, 2014

Torrents are always an option but I'm not sure how many people would be interested in them. I wrote the script to make it easy for multiple people to create backups in case YouTube decides to permanently suspend Stef's account. Over the next few days I'll create a user interface for non-techies, add an option to download the available metadata (thumbnails and descriptions) and clean-up the code.

Better not release that to the wild, in the wrong hands its a weapon to take the channel offline for good, it might seen like a DDOS too and that is known to end people in jail for 5 years.

April 29, 2014

You can write a python script that does the job in less than a hundred lines of code using gdata.youtube.com and pytube but I wouldn't post anything publicly since downloading videos from YouTube is a violation of their ToS.

https://www.youtube.com/static?gl=GB&template=terms

Exactly.

April 29, 2014

If you have the files locally, yes you can make as many torrent trackers you want, but first you need to download them, which is a laborious slow process that should be automated, heck even the video descriptions and comments can be saved.

April 29, 2014

What I basically said above, is that any kind of psychology is fundamentally flawed, and not actually a science, when it does not take into account the biology of the brain.Read this book, and you might be surprised by the amount of insight neuroscience has to offer, which never crossed the mind of Freud, Jung or Skinner.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Future-Brain-Tomorrows-Neuroscience/dp/B004JZWYA6

April 29, 2014

Am very busy with the incoming Joomla day event next weekend, but can definetly write a bot to download every single video in the coming weeks, so anyone with enough hard drive space can click the go button and have it downloaded locally.

I would think this needs to be done by a small amount of people though, we don't want to risk causing trouble to google if thousands of people run this software at the same time.

April 28, 2014

Why would being compared to other animals considered degrading? Some alien life form is probably laughing their asses off every time humans call themselves intelligent.

Imagine you're some highly advanced alien life form visiting Earth for the first time, would you be able to tell the difference between a chimp, a bonobo and a human? Would you even dare to say that humans are the dominant life form in the planet, when bacteria is a way more successful life form?

The issue with behaviorism is not that it puts humans and non human animals into the same bag, or that it denies the existence of human nature or consciousness, the major issue with it is that it was invented before neuroimagining was actually possible, so people were trying to measure behavior while having no idea about what is actually going on in the brain. But hey, same can be said about Freud, Jung and co.

April 27, 2014

It probably doesn't matter to your argument, I just wanted to say that this isn't exactly true.

Positive Reinforcement: Give someone something they want for doing an action. ie: Here is a tax break for supporting our political campaign.

Negative Reinforcement: Take something negative away (or the threat of something negative away) for doing an action. ie: I will take away a giant increase on taxes for your firm since you supported our political campaign.

Positive Punishment: Add something negative to discourage the behavior. ie: Since you supported my opponent, I am going to raise the taxes for your business

Negative Punishment: Take away something positive in order to discourage the behavior. ie: Since you supported my opponent, I am going to take away the subsidy from you that the other businesses in your industry enjoy.

Here is a chart from wiki if that helps more:

The vocab terms at the bottom here are the most helpful in discussing this topic, I think.

Thank you for the info.

April 19, 2014

Internet is getting cheaper and cheaper at the same rate it becomes faster, Internet providers will be out of business in a few years, they need to milk that money cow to the bone before it is gone.

I think a free market solution would be to sell wireless routers (layer 2 switches) that also self organize to create an internet backbone (layer 3 TCP IP). Most people already own wireless routers and are paying for electricity to run them, so why not have those devices replace ISP's. I'm still working out the details of this idea.

It's already commercially viable for individuals to put satellites in orbit, if you have 40k usd to spend on that, google is also working on using cheap balloons as internet providers, and other people are working on wireless transfer of both electricity and internet from light bulbs, which again makes internet and electricity distribution much much cheaper.

I for one have ideas about making internet connected devices so cheap, that they can be distributed for free. The business model on that would be to profit from software sales and ads.

In the future the words internet and computer will be meaninglessness, because you automatically assume everything is connected to computers and internet, if a word can mean anything, it becomes useless.

April 19, 2014

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but propaganda will break your mind to the point you will wield a club to defend your enslavement.

April 18, 2014

To know who is really in charge, check who are the people who fund campaigns, and who lobbyists represent. You might find the same people fund competing parties, there is no right or left in politics, the bottom-line is money and laws will represent the will of those who can pay for the laws to be made.

April 18, 2014

Negative reinforcement is modeling behavior by the use of punishment, positive reinforcement is modeling behavior by the use of encouragement, recognition, compliments and other positive attitudes.About the article above, it's just wrong. Don't trust anyone though, read things by yourself. Most people are quite incompetent at their jobs, regardless of titles, and I don't even have a title I can cling to, so don't believe me either.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Science-Human-Behaviour-B-Skinner/dp/0029290406

April 18, 2014

“If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it.” Mark Twain

On the video below, a Brazilian legislator is requested to read the law he is proposing, but is unable to because of functional illiteracy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4EU-NIurIw

But why do people who are unable to even read the laws they propose are allowed to become legislators?They are allowed to because the role of the politician involves no actual power, their role is to be a sufficiently charismatic and polemic person that the focus is taken away from the people with real power, if enough noise is made it actually gives the false impression that the opinion of politicians makes a difference, giving the opportunity for those with real power to wield it with freedom and impunity.

Don't fall into the trap of wasting time on non-relevant subjects, they are there to distract you, if abortion is legal or not, if gay marriage is legal or not, if weed is legal or not, those are controversial topics designed to generate enough passionate discussion, that people will forget about questioning the legitimacy of the State and the illusion of democracy.

April 18, 2014

There is no human conscience without humans, but our conscience is now 100 light years away because of radio and something out there might find it useful, even if the planet explodes.

April 18, 2014

There is no single idea that can fully explain animal behavior, human or otherwise, but if you have been watching Stefan's shows about childhood, that is a good explanation about how school and parents can shape a child's behavior throughout their adult life, and how bad negative reinforcement turns out to be.I highly recommend Skinner's books, might be dated now but are amazingly well written and full of useful information.

What Skinner basically says about negative reinforcement, is that it's very effective... until the person doing the negative reinforcement leaves the room and the curbed behavior is done over and over again out of spite. That is, if you model someone to only respond to negative reinforcement, you're modeling the behavior that it's ok to cheat as long as no one catches you.

Now for answering the original question about how being good in itself is a reinforced behavior, read Dawkins' The selfish Gene and see how good guys actually finish first.