jason_

I didn't find the point of the video to be "we should all grow grapes," or "we should all become farmers." I think what was to be taken away from this discussion was a reexamination of wealth. Today there are many people who are considered wealthy because they have money. For example, think of the tech companies that have billions in market capitalization, but don't provide an anywhere near equivalent value to society. "On February 19, 2014, months after a venture capital financing round at a $1.5 billion valuation, Facebook announced it was acquiring WhatsApp for US$19 billion" "Private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management has offered to buy Safeway, Inc., the nation's second-largest grocery chain, for a reported $9.4 billion." Look at the two quotes above. Think of the balance sheets of these two companies. What makes anyone believe that WhatsApp is 10 billion dollars more than a grocery chain that owns food, trucks, stores, etc. and employs hundreds or even thousands of people? To me, the conversation provoked a question of what would our economy look like and what would be considered wealth in a truly free market? I don't think there was any point made that counters division of labor or the value of securing capital. I picked up "An Economic History of Bengal" while at the library yesterday. In the first chapter the author described the value of social relationships in the agricultural sector in times of need. When crop yields were low, or farmers didn't have the capital to hire the labor to develop their lands arrangements of reciprocation were made to meet the needs of community members -- much like early American society. "And a kind of insurance developed in these nights. A man with food fed a hungry man, and thus insured himself against hunger. And when a baby died a pile of silver coins grew at the door flap, for a baby must be well buried, since it has had nothing else of life. An old man may be left in a potter's field, but not baby." - John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath Just as they're are different types of insurance not widely considered our current social paradigm, there are different types of wealth. I think it's incumbent upon anyone who wants to live in a free society to consider these concepts, otherwise it's easy for socialist and the like to compete in the idea-sphere and win because they rely on prevailing attitudes towards these concepts (e.g. wealth is for the greedy; you need government to protect you from the dangers of the world).

My IT business is looking to serve clients with custom Web services. Looking for someone with an eye for design and is comfortable working in a production-based compensation environment (basically, the more we can offer a client, the more we can get paid). Knowledge, skills, and, abilities sought: (Technical - these will need to be known or learned) * CSS3 * HTML5 * User Friendly Interface (Usability) * Jquery/Jquery UI * JavaScript * Bootstrap (Personal) * Meets deadlines * Dependable * Good communication * Competitive * Driven to do your best If you have questions, please feel free to reply by email. Thank you, Jason [email protected] IT Specialist/App Developer Lakona Computers Kaneohe, HI

Have you ever grown any food, or worked on a farm? Are you aware of the damage that industrial farming has on the soil? While you may pay a small monetary cost for those grapes there are lots of trade offs that molest the economy and compromise the health of the ecosystem in order to have our supermarkets. I think destroying long term productive capacity of the earth for short term gain is immoral. The agribusiness that makes these 'wonders' possible is not subject to full market discipline because it is one of the primary industries involved in government favoritism. Check out what the CATO Institute has to say about it: http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/subsidies Your supermarket grapes are more a result of central planning than free market capitalism. Believe it or not, it's actually in your best interest to have locally grown agriculture and free trade (not government controlled trade). This keeps the interests of the farmers in line with what's best for the environment (because they are not shielded from the risks from destroying the land) including the folks eating the food. Here's a book written by a self described "Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic-Farmer" who wants to do work outside of government control: http://www.polyfacefarms.com/2011/07/25/everything-i-want-to-do-is-illegal-war-stories-from-the-local-food-front/ I'm not familiar with Mr. Eisenstein's work, but I didn't hear him suggest communist control in this video. Calling him anti-human and anti-life without any examples seems to be attempting to "poison the well".

From the Peak Prosperity Podcast: Published on Sep 28, 2015 Recently, author and "de-growth activist" Charles Eisenstein stopped by the Martenson homestead while traveling on business. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Chris sat him down to record an impromptu discussion on the nature of wealth. As should come as little surprise to Peak Prosperity readers, financial wealth ("money") is just one component -- and given society's current over-fixation with it, its pursuit oftentimes limits our ability to be truly wealthy.

Hi Terk, Welcome. What attracted you to FDR?

When it comes to fundamentals, I think it's hard to argue with this. I think by definition fractional reserve banking requires this condition. There always needs to be more debt in the world than money to pay it back so people keep taking loans and working to pay them off. If that sounds ridiculous, that's because it is and it's even more so to think people allow this to go on. The interest rates (on loans) controlled by central banks, and are part of the central authority's power to control the market and by extension the nation.

Hi OOtie, I'm sorry to hear about this situation and I feel your pain. From experience, I advise you that the acuteness with which you're feeling it will subside. From what you've stated in your post, I think you handled the 'love triangle' in a mature fashion. In retrospect -- which is often the only way in which we can tell what's best with sorts of things -- you probably should have dissolved in your mind any possibility of getting involved with this woman once you realized her lack of concern for your's and your friend's long time relationship. I'd guess that there was a part of you holding on to this possibility and it is at the source of the emotional trauma apparent in your post. Of course, also the weight of a 10+ year friendship. What else is apparent to me, is that you are an intelligent person, and if it were not for the emotion involved it would be easier to see what to do in this situation. I think it's good that you reached out to others because of this, but you have the most intimate knowledge of the characters involved, and you are the best qualified to know how to handle it. Figuring from your profile page I'm 9 years your senior. I have dealt with betrayal (real and perceived) by 'friends.' I hope I can help. As a member of this community, I will assume that you are keen on self reflection. I'm guessing that you have noticed there are certain realizations that one (if paying attention in life) has simply as a byproduct of living longer. For example, one can see the payoff from time and energy invested in projects they worked on when younger, and more generally, the eventual consequences of one's decisions. So, I think it's important to ask yourself what can you reasonably expect from a person who you were up front with and open to and they disregarded your feelings? What could be the consequences of keeping that person close? Remember the saying, "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." There was something about you that prompted you to give up what you wanted (namely 'Beth', or at least say that you would) in order to maintain the friendship. Evidently, this quality is not pronounced in your friend. It's really a shame that he does not share reverence for your long standing friendship, but you're still young and you have time to build relationships with others. Although it is harder to get close to people as adults, you are also hopefully wiser and better able to discern whom to confide in anf whom not to. Whether or not you keep this person in your life, it appears that recent events have proved to defining of your friendship. However you proceed, it is unreasonable to expect you could trust him whenever women are involved. Best of luck and feel free to let us know how it goes.

Thanks for sharing. I just got home from work at 2am and I think that was the perfect time to come upon you video. Very soothing. How long have you been doing a/v art? Why do you call it Fun Guys From Space?

I don't think the speaker did a good job of tying the history of philosophy to development of the free software movement. She took a too broad approach for the time she had for her presentation. But it was clear enough so that the listener could connect many of the presented ideas with the free software. I think Nietzsche is hard for a lot of people to sympathize with. Much of the aversion could come from denial or fear of what he points out, but in a society that does all it can to ignore suffering I think a lot of people just are not familiar enough with 'real' life to know what Nietzsche is going on about.

I'd second that any serious privacy minded application should be open source. Without the ability to verify the encryption/decryption process I don't see how one can judge the privacy value of the application. Encryption is notoriously easy to screw up and even if the message is deleted from a user's phone, there are computers between sender and receiver that could intercept and store the message (albeit encrypted and therefore useless IF the encryption is done properly).

Thanks Carl for sharing. I enjoyed two lectures from Prof. Roderick on youtube and plan to watch more.

The natural beauty of this place is striking and I try to find the time to enjoy it, but unless you were born here it's hard not to find it much like any other place. And in that way it's worse that other places because it is so expensive to live here. The biggest industries are government, lots and lots of military, and tourism. The local and state government seems to be primarily funded by the tourism industry and that's were the bulk of the jobs are for working class people. The other powerful force on Oahu is the union who's jobs depend on building tourist attractions, public works, and other large scale projects. Many 'regular' people hope to work for the government or unions because they offer the best wages; the university has a school of travel industry management, some of the population ends up as executives in the industry but I don't imagine it's that much, and lots become front end managers, and other low paying jobs. I run a small IT business and my clients are mostly government or military personnel -- I don't live in a tourist spot. One of my largest clients right now is a property management company. It's interesting, because the military, government, and unions create a situation -- by providing non-market based wages -- where if you're not in those industries it's extremely hard to find affordable housing. So this local company exists largely to maintain property (mostly houses) the workers at the company can't even afford to rent! It's great to come to visit, but I'd suggest the neighbor islands. They're more rural. Oahu has a lot of people, lots of tourist. It's hard to find a place without a crowd. I've been to Kauai, and it is beautiful there. Not a lot to do, but if you enjoy nature it's great. It gets unbelievably dark at night! I'd like to go to the Big Island. From what I hear, it doesn't have big tourist areas and the beaches aren't as nice, but I'm attracted to the vastness -- It's bigger than all the other islands combined -- and what I imaging the sky looks like at night. Let me know if you are planning on being in this part of the planet, maybe we could check out some of that Big Island together!

Alain De Botton has a project on YouTube called the School of Life: "At The School of Life, we're fascinated by the sort of questions we're never taught enough about at school or college: How can relationships go well? What is meaningful work? How can love last? How can one find calm? What's gone wrong (and right) with capitalism? We love the humanities, especially philosophy, psychotherapy, literature and art - always going to them in search of ideas that are thought-provoking, useful and consoling. We're all about wisdom, emotional intelligence and self-understanding." Here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7IcJI8PUf5Z3zKxnZvTBog On the channel, they present philosophical ideas of notable historical philosophers as well as ideas on what they mean for us in our daily lives. Philosophy is not only about learning what others have thought, but developing our own powers of reason. For this I recommend starting with a study of logic. The first chapter or two of this book introduce logic for computer science, but the rules of inference apply to philosophical arguments as well.

I think Peter has a great understanding of market fundamentals and economy. As I have come to be more aware of these things, I've become convinced the system of fractional reserve banking is doomed. That that remained from me was 'when?'. I figured as long as the military wasn't touched this system would continue. As of late, soldiers and sailors, the little people in the military industrial complex, have been effected by the weaknesses in our monetary system with job cuts (Perform to Serve in the Navy, etc) and the situation with the V.A.. To me these are clear signals that the system is in trouble. Peter talks about things with a tone of immediacy, and indeed the developments in the market lately (the Fed with it's back against the wall to raise rates even though the real economy is still week, market distortions caused by QE, the derivatives bubble, China slow down, etc) send the same sorts of troubling signals. But, who's to say how day to day life will be impacted over the next 6mos, year, 5 years, etc? What do you think?

Hello iuliuspro, I'm also a new member of the FDR community, but a long time follower (my introduction is in this same message board). "I discover that I am ignorant in the core," said every wise man on the beginning of his journey. If you're interested in logic, checkout 'Necessity and Sufficiency' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_and_sufficiency I was just thinking about how useful the distinction is. Nice to meet you,

Hello Everybody, I'm Jason. I'm a 32 year old man. I'm been following Stefan and helping out when I could for about six years now. I'm living on Oahu in the Hawaii Island, although I was born on the Mainland in the Great Lakes Region. I spent the first 12 years of my life there and moved to Florida in the middle of middle school (actually from private school into public middle school -- public school was horrible by comparison). When people starting getting laid-off due to the recession, a friend in the Military offered me a place to stay in Hawaii. I started and now operate an IT business and I'm working on a Degree in Computer Science at the University of Hawaii. Software and philosophy require the much of the same sort of mental engagement, and I always find Stefan's productions a welcome dose of reason. Once the brain is trained to think logically, bullshit is much easier to recognize. I hope to meet people within the FDR community and hopefully contribute to it. Aloha!