WorBlux

I have doubts. It would have to be a very odd structure before it made more sense to print the whole thing rather than bolt-together wall sections. What I could see is a machine that lays bricks with cutouts for conduits and the like, or a machine that can assemble wall sections or trusses from demensinal lumber

There was a company that did mass produce concrete houses, and some foundations are build with pre-cast sections. Trouble is with concrete that it's heavy and it's a finicky process to get really good quality and you need quite a bit of steel reinforcement. It's also not a great material for tropical or arctic climates There are places in the U.S. you can buy a factory build home, which are cheaper and better built than on-site construction. But the economy of scale with homes isn't great because most of the cost is reflected in materials and speciality labor. Beyond that the house has to fit with the culture and environment to really work well and just plain concrete is ugly. What would work better than mass-produced homes, is to mass produce Lego-like home parts, where if following a few basic rules will result in a stable structure. Housing for the worlds poor is just as much of an engineering and design challenge as it is a challenge for basic resources. You need the sort of information that just doesn't travel well vertically up a bueracracy.

And then there's the zerocoin protocol which is likely to be tested and developed in the coming years.

There is such a thing as a vacuum. 1. Filled with nothing is just another way of saying empty of anything. (they are necessary corollaries) 2. Contain is to enclose. 3. Is certainly true. If I walk by a suggestion box and don't put anything in the box, I've put nothing in the box. It's only an issue if you reify "nothing" in an improper way.

Not really. He's brilliant in his analysis of foriegn policy and current events, but mises how the state as an instittuion is essentially corrupting.

1. Welcome to the board fellow traveller. 2. What do you think of seasteading? We don't necessarily need to convert an existing state.

Dude I wish. Last X-ray I had cost me $180 (before insurance) and another $200 (before insurance) for the consult, and a one hour surgery cost me $1700 (after insurance) and another $400 (after insurance) for the anaesthesia specialist.

It looks like EUI is a linear scale, but it's per square foot, not necessarily use intensity. Different uses for buildings can result in radically different EUI's. http://www.energystar.gov/buildings/facility-owners-and-managers/existing-buildings/use-portfolio-manager/understand-metrics/what-energy Additiony LEED certified is the lowest tier of "green" they offer. Platinum rating require almost 2x the points. http://www.usgbc.org/leed/certification

LEED isn't based simply on energy http://www.usgbc.org/leed/rating-systems To show LEED is meaningless, you'd have to show their energy rating system is wrong, or that the other factors they consider are meaningless.

Hardwood forests in the united state have increased in size since the advent of the automobile. Capitalism can work to entirely obsolete old practices that destroys environmental resources. The use of wood as cooking fuel in urban areas is astonishingly destructive to the surrounding countryside. Increased levels of wealth allow us to adopt practices that better preserve natural resources. And as a resource begins to be used up, the price increases, encouraging people to find alternatives and substitutes for that resource, Additionally growth is often measured in GDP, which is simply money*velocity. GDP can increase simply by increasing the average number of trades a unit of money participates in. It's actually a fairly meaningless measure intra-economy.

The true news stuff is pretty good, and has a broader appeal. I would strongly recomend Jim Davies "The online Freedom Academy" as a good introduction for the libertarian leaning to the philosophy of complete liberty.

Cat's out of the bag, there are central point to attack. It could be made less convenient to use bitcoin, but it's not going away.

Double entry accounting (which may be the greatest achievement of mankind after the written language). Money is very useful as a unit of account. If everyone traded entries in a giant clearing house ledger, you'd still want to pick out a common and somewhat stable unit out of it so you can figure out your loss and profit. Even though bill gates doesn't care what an oyster costs (to cheap to ration) he does care what his return on his investments are.

No, http://www.amazon.com/The-Voluntary-City-Community-Society/dp/1598130323 A few acres of land in the middle of nowhere affords far fewer opportunities to ply advance professions and trades, and fewer opportunities of social connection. Sure you could subsistence farm, but that's really, really hard work.

Let's see, the school environment itself. Better responsiveness of teachers and administrators to parent concerns. Better cultivation of soft skills.

Nope, I've heard it if you stuff evenyone in the U,S into texas you can give each about half of an acre.

If your lucky enough to have a portable music player you can install Rockbox on, you can play with speed and pitch, you you can listen fast without that horrible chipmunk effect.

Opus has won just many listening test across the board from high to very low bitrates It beats AAC even as high as 64kbps http://soundexpert.org/news/-/blogs/opus-aac-and-vorbis-in-64-kbit-s-section 32kbps with give you high-quality voice, wheras 32kbps mp3 is like a cat scratching your eardrums. http://www.opus-codec.org/examples/

The full quote from Aquinas is that good is to be done and persued and evil avoided. Generally these might be broad categories. Say coming to know and the overcoming of ignorance, or the participation withing a community. Something that is basic and ingrained in what it means to be human, and such that it is a benefit to most anyone. Another example often giving is marriage and the raising of children. Here I take marriage to mean some formal structure of familial bonds. There are countless variants that might achieve this goal, but it is still something that is central to the human experience. I don't believe that there is particularly any one proof other than intuition, consideration, and reflection upon what it really means to be human. And yes it's an open ended list that is not entirely clear, but part of the process is digging for yourself. Now as far as justice goes, or those principle that are required to keep peace between man and man, we can be fairly certain what they and can be summed up as do no harm to another. Yet this is pretty easy to do and most people follow it to a substantial degree. what then after are the sorts of thing worth persueing and doing. Right that's a very convenient way to veiw the world as you can always know if an act was good or evil, but our experience of action is as means aimed at ends, rather than just a movement and result. This sort of view of the question morality as an accounting of goods ignores the distinction between human action and the action of the sun and rain.

On the contrary those passages are precisely the passages I had in mind with my first use. Am I taking a whiff of sarcasm here? I may have been insuffeciently clear how I meant it, but in which case you'd get further simply asking me what I meant.

This implicitness is absolutely clear if you reference the text.From UPB p.34 Premise 4 Premise 7 And what exactly is the error you are accusing me of? I'm not saying UPB is mostly wrong, it's just that it's a roundabout and incomplete approach to ethics to address an objection that few people ever take seriiously.

Is not economics the science of human action? Does it's core axioms requite empirical data carefully analyzed to support? Even if you were establshed that what Harris means science purley in the sense of empiricism (maybe he does, but being unfamiliar with the spcific work in question, I feel obligated to interpert the argument in the most charitable light possible) then there still remains a certain plausibility to the argument. If something is claimed as a moral good, but in practice has some really horrid results (e.g spanking) then we can reject those claims on empirical grounds as it's absurd to suppose a good act might consistently create bad results. Harris then makes the next claim that all moral claims might in principle be subjected to such tests.. I don't think hard data per se can justify moral claims (and I don't see Harris making that argument in his summary) but that itis often an indepsible tool in dialectial analysis of moral claims. But you unjustifiably go beyond that position and say the empirical has no bearing on the understanding of the moral. The central tenant of morality is that good is to be done and persued. If it turns out when we study an act and it consistently has bad results, then my claim is then such descover should inform our moral theory. And I don't see where Harris makes the claim that empirical data is the best tool to formulate or evaluate moral claims, only that in principle it is competent to inform us about such matters.

In the same way kneading and baking are within the art of breadmaking. According to The Philosophter (Aristotle, not our gracious host Stefan) "Science is the inquiry into the first principles and nature of a thing" (Metaphysics) Descarte, Bayes, et. al, gave us some very formal tools to aid in the inquiry a.k.a. the scientific method, but that sort of empircism is not the whole of science, and is self-defeating if treated as such. I have however repeatedly heard Stef make the claim UPB doesn't make specific moral claims. It was a very hot topic ont he call in show for months after the book was published. I don't like UPB as an approach for a few reasons.. It does argue that there is such a thing as ethics, and that some claims about ethics are not sound on thier face as ethical claims must be universal and about perferability of type of act. A moral theory on the other hand proposes some theory of what is good. UPB kind of implicity slips in non-violence and truth when a person comes to argue against it, but that feels like a trick to me. A good setup in a debate... but as a method of communication ... not so much at least in my experience. Heres an old thread on my topic where I feel like I really nail down my objection. http://board.freedomainradio.com/topic/20721-ethics-upb-natural-law-and-valuation-a-chat/?hl=%2Bnatural+%2Blaw Anyways that's a ways off the topic

It won't fix the problem the the extent that it's a psychological problem. People trying to define themselves by what they do, what they own, and where they are in the hierarchy. (Who is richer, the man who makes 50,000 and spends 35,000 or the man who makes 1,000,000 and spends 1,100,000?, which one wakes up in a cold sweat at the prospect of losing his job?) But the free market offers ways to reduce the concentration of economic power, and reduce barriers of entry to entrepreneurship and competition. (Make a job for yourself). It will enable new and better inventions that increase the effectiveness and efficiency on domestic work done for the household. This would let people drop out of the job market and sustain themselves on their own labour or long periods of time or even indefinitely unless or until they found a job with suitable terms. But if you were an independent contractor being paid per toilet and there are many projects available on which you can submit your bid? Rat race goes away, do as many projects as you need to live, and then go live your life. Or even we go back to the employee situation but stipulate that any one of them were qualified and competent be become and independent contractor and compete with their former employer on terms of price and quality. You might get some friendly competition between workers but you couldn't grind them down with it. Or even if this were an employee cooperative so that employees would have power to appoint new management if work starts to take too much of their personal time.

Logic and reason are within science, and they are forever guiding the interpretation of empirical data. We might differentiate modern science as the systematic application of logic to a systematic framework of observation such that the principles and properties of the thing might be understood in a rigorous and formal way. And note that UPB was not put forth as a moral theory, but as a means sanity-check moral theories. If the data lead to a conclusion that murder is okay, then that result is absurd enough to lead a person to believe that some part of that theory is wrong. Morality can be said because we are one sort of thing and not any thing with contrary principles or properties to that thing. And I do think it's perfectly plausible that empircal data can help to reveal just what sort of thing that is. I don't think his central argument is wrong even though perhaps incomplete. For instance take the early American Christian sects that taught all sexual activity was evil. They pretty much went extinct because they had very low birth rates. Procreation and the raising of children has a big role in what it means to be human. This is not to say everyone must have children, but that cultures that do no place a large value on raising children is a less moral one.