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ofd

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Everything posted by ofd

  1. ofd
    The current situation developed within a free market. Declare natural monopolies public utilities and treat them the same way as phone companies or electricity providers.
  2. ofd
    How much money does the government create compared to private banks?
  3. ofd
    Why would the money creation change if there wasn't a government around? I don't see how that follows.
  4. ofd
    The problem is a bit more nuanced. On the one hand, every stock market needs a market maker. They are officially recognized inside traders, because they provide liquidity by knowing who wants to sell or buy. In stock markets, a transaction only takes place when the price is met with a demand of the same amount. Lets say you want to buy 100 shares of a company, but nobody is willing to sell you any shares at any price. In that case, the market makers enter the scene and sell you the stocks from their portfolio. The government also doesn't mind inside trading when banks do it, using front running. Since banks are not market makers it should be illegal, but nobody seems to care. Front running means that you know about a client's order before and you place an order a few milliseconds before to skim off some profit, cheating your client. Lets say you want to buy 100 shares of a company again, what banks do is to place an option just before your order is executed, so that the rise in stock price that your order will cause benefits the bank. In fact, governments do all they can to protect the banks from that nefarious practice and they come down on you with all their might if you seem to endanger the banks. The case of Sergey Aleynikov is a good example what happens when you get on the wrong side of a bank. All is set in motion to silence you and to bring you in jail. Aleynikov 'stole' the code that did the front running and he was arrested on some airport. An attorney remarked: Which raises the question to anyone with 2 brain cells that if somebody can use that code to manipulate markets then who says that Goldman Sachs itself doesn't manipulate the markets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov https://web.archive.org/web/20121104233157/http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=ajIMch.ErnD4
  5. ofd
    You have touched upon a very interesting topic that is not mentioned in this book, namely the problem of induction. Even if you find a general rule (chocolate tastes great) via induction and you can formulate it, what exactly is the epistemological status of that rule? This very problem of induction has been tackled by many philosophers, including Kant, Karl Popper, the modern Bayesians and CS Peirce (to name a few). The way it is treated in the book is less than optimal and you can learn a lot following its branches. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/formal-epistemology/
  6. ofd
    There are two simple reasons why bitcoin won't replace anytime soon, but other cryptocurrencies might. One is the built in deflationary tendency. If all goes well, and bitcoin rises in prices compared to other forms of money (fiat, gold) only idiots will use bitcoin to make transactions. After all, why pay with one bitcoin if that one bitcoin will be worth more in say one month? You'd rather pay with fiat money that will lose value compared to your btc. The other one is the technical aspect. My understanding is that the number of transcations is limited to 5 per seconds. Unless this changed by some vote or a fork, doing transactions is hazardous when a lot of people use it at the same time. There are about 50 million wallets, you can do the maths and see how long it will take if each of them does one transaction under the current limit. Bitcoin is a great store of money, until people realize it can't subsitute money for transaction then it may become some collector's item.
  7. ofd
    Nope, she is married with three kids. Plus, the previous government would have none of the banking fraud stuff and put some bankers in jail. There are worse governments in Europe for sure.
  8. ofd
    You already have European style socialists at the top of every institution. In Iceland you can study what happens when they arrive.
  9. ofd
    When it comes to biology, teleological reasoning has to be used. The goal of those instincts is it not to present you with an accurate description of reality but to make sure that your genes with those instincts are passed on. Hence it is better to err on the side of caution (assuming there is a danger when there is none) than having an accurate picture of your enviroment that might take a bit longer to process.
  10. ofd
    My understanding is that after some planck time units the elemental forces began to be seperated, while prior to that they were more or less the same or they had the same effects.
  11. ofd
    Saudi Arabia doesn't have an industry to speak off. They have to import everything. Before the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia was on its way to become more liberal. Not my area of expertise, but doesnt the relationship between jarls, karls and thralls resemble feudalism? If you do attempt to read say the American Constitution and the way it came into being, on an economic level, you may find that it was an oligarchic coup right from the beginning. It was all about the elites trying to grab as much power as they can.
  12. ofd
    Political organisations follow the mode of production. Agrarian based societies are feudal, industrial ones are liberal, perhaps post industrial ones will be anarchistic.
  13. ofd
    There are imminent threats and possible threats. An imminent threat is societal upheaval, because expert system will replace more and more bullshit jobs or jobs that can be easily automated. Another one is that some bright fellow will have the idea of replacing human written computer programs with a neural network or worse, have a neural network write code and then use it. The problem will be that you can't understand what goes wrong neither will you have any idea how to fix it. Neural networks are already a big market, unbeknownst to the public. Pharmaceutical research or structural engineering rely heavily on them and in the future we'll see more examples of those at work.
  14. ofd
    If they do, they are stupid. Life follows the laws of thermodynamics just like every other entity. Earth is an open system, getting energy from the sun. This is why life can increase complexity and order while not violating the laws of thermodynamics. As a whole, the sun system follows entropy, while there are local exceptions. This is a textbook example because the entropy increased. The question is whether the second law was violated before the whole shebang got started. An elegant solution to that is the theory of multiverses where our universe is itself an open system and the low entropy could exist locally (pretty much like earth today) since the energy came from another universe.
  15. ofd
    The enviroment heavily influences the lifestyle.
  16. ofd
    Isn't that the official narrative though?
  17. ofd
    Why should it?
  18. ofd
    Xenophon is a good way to start. The Anabasis tells you a great story of some Greek soldiers fighting their way back to Greece from Persia. His account on Socrates is less biased than Plato's, so check these out. Lives by Plutarch is essential reading as is The Pelopennesian War by Thucydides. Read some historical interpretation next to them, since they tell the history from a specific perspective.
  19. ofd
    It would help the cause of the truthers if they came up with one narrative. So far, we have the following explanations: mini nukes, thermite, normal tnt, laser beams from outer space, nano thermite and a few others. Which of those is it?
  20. ofd
    You just described the rise of Islam. The debate about the universality of morals suffers because two different points are not distinguished: 1) Is there an absolute universal morality and 2) Should there be an absolute universal morality? The first point already is in dispute because people argue from different perspectives. Those who (a) claim that there is, for lack of a better word, an idealistic a priori universal morality but not all people follow it and the empiricists who (b) look around notice that not all share the same morality. The people who adhere to 1) a) have to explain why human morality is different from other eusocial animals and what advantage it brings of having one ethical system instead of a plurality that are adapted to different circumstances and enviroments. The people who follow 1) b) have it easier since they simply describes what happens and they also try to come up with theories why it happens that there are different moralistic systems (and why some points are common to all humans).
  21. ofd
    The differences are an effect of the enviroment and evolution which selects for procreation. There is a simple way to verify my thesis. If it is true, then tribes living in different parts of the world which haven't heard from each other but do share a similar enviroment have a similar morality. That is, all nomadic people living in the desert will have the same moral outlook, more or less. The meaning is making it through. In morality anything goes. You can make up any rules you want to. If you get people to follow them and if they pass the test of time is another question. We'd like to use the just world fallacy to assume that morality is universal while in fact that doesn't matter in the large scale of things.
  22. ofd
    How does that follow? Imagine you live in the rain forrest as hunter gatherers, then your morality will be different from people living in the arctic. It takes some training in mindfulness, but then again, you will most likely one of the few people with that ability. We are prone to false negatives.
  23. ofd
    The most likely answer is that alien civilisations wiped each other out before they made it to space travel or self replicating von Neumann spaceships. Keep in mind that there were three events, when nuclear war was abot to begin. Other civilisations may not have had that luck. Add to that other potential technology like nano technology or genetical modifying and you will realize why the universe is empty.
  24. ofd
    Life is a game and evolution is the arbiter. If you have succeeded in passing on your genes you have won. There are no rules, everything is possible. Morality comes into play, when you are an eusocial animal within a group. The kind of morality that gives a group an advantage over other groups of the same species is better. Not much. You can be aware that most heterosexual men prefer women who appear to be fertile over women who don't have those attributes. You can be aware of it, but that doesn't mean that you can get rid off your attraction. The more the biases are connected with survival and sexual attraction, the harder it is to be aware of them and to try to overcome them. The accurate representation of the enviroment in the minds of animal only plays a role within the same species. A cat perceives the enviroment in a different way than a monkey. This difference is due to biological differences which have been selected for. Neither the cat's or the monkey's perception is better, it's an adaption to problems the species have to overcome to procreate. Within the same species, tiny differences within perception may play a huge role when it comes to survival or passing on the genes. That is also the reason why most mammals have a tendency to interpret signals in a false positive way. It's better for survival to err 99 times, to assume that there is a snake in the bushes and to be wrong than to have an accurate interpretation of signals. You may be dying once you have realized that there is indeed a snake in the bushes, while somebody who always assumes the worst case might survive.
  25. ofd
    The socio-economic enviroment changed with the advent of farming. Once you have farming, you have feudalism coming in outcompeting the hapless hunters and gatherers.
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