4 ms·

It would be immoral to redistribute the real property someone worked on. I have no issue with income distribution of a social value store since allowing it to

It would be immoral to redistribute the real property someone worked on. I have no issue with income distribution of a social value store since allowing it to be monopolized to prop up the value of a minority rich, to let millions starve, or die of preventable disease is immoral and violent. I don’t believe Elon Musk is worth billions. I just can’t take his real stuff. Letting our social value store be co-opted by a handful of memes isn’t exactly free agency, speech, or market of ideas. When “get job, buy stuff” is the one true sentence, why believe ideas like freedom matter?

fumar 5y ago
I don’t follow your reasoning. How are memes changing or impacting currency?
- Talanes 5y ago
  I'm not sure exactly which ideas the other commenter was referring to, but of course currency is affected by memes. Currency is a meme: it only has value due to the widespread idea that it should have value.
  - TomSwirly 5y ago
    > Currency is a meme: it only has value due to the widespread idea that it should have value. It would be nice if people spent just a tiny amount of time studying economics before pronouncing on it. A US dollar, for example, is backed by the "full faith and credit of the United States Government", and this has an objectively measurable value (because there are pairs of almost identical securities where one has "full faith and credit" and the other doesn't). Unless your argument is "all securities and currencies are imaginary," of course, which has no practical value. Please note that I'm a far-left socialist and I consider capitalism destructive to the planet. But that doesn't mean I don't believe in economics.
    - chmsky00 5y ago
      Economics are real, but the flow of currency is not economics. The flow of currency is politically influenced and has nothing to do with human trade for humans sake (economics as commonly understood but not actually since it’s conflated with currency movement). What we should realize through the study of economics is just how screwed things are. Anyone with any math sense should see inflation deflates buying power for the public, and has nothing to do with real trade but belief that a billionaire is leveraging real property so well on his own… oh wait all of humanity serves him by not changing the rules to serve themselves. What a convenient self fulfilling prophecy. The math makes it obvious which people are winning and science makes it obvious no one is more than one of seven billion. Somehow it’s miraculously a specific few winning big. Stop listening to it all. People trade. That’s it. There’s no need to speculate and manage the behavior to send billionaires in space on empty promises of humans …magically… becoming the first space faring civ. Sure seems to give Bezos a helluva life. I’m crazy though; humanity has never succumbed to shared fallacy at scale before. Who knows, maybe healthcare and education for all actually empower the kid who goes on to engineer the next big leap, but contemporary political memes filter those break throughs out by miserly tracking currency debts.
- chmsky00 5y ago
  The other commenter summed it up. Money is an abstract distributed ledger conceived of from our old way of imprinting quantity on clay tablets, to track trade. We’re lead around by gossip, fads, trends… memes… where to look for the best paying jobs, sales… by restricting acceptable discourse around not the literal solution to problems, but the expectations we solve them for corporations to own, and leverage for profit with “fair apportionment” dictated by Byzantine economic math not even the experts can penetrate (there was just a story on HN about how no one knows who owns what in any clear way; it’s all ad hoc to fit a narrative; Google Varoufakis) We’re told that’s just how it goes and it’s all correct and politically policed for correctness. Yet last year we saw in the news they just hand out hundreds of millions to those in the political network and make everyone else work for them in return. Relative network effects are the reality of physics and it makes a good concept for understanding society. Adam Smith called for equality of condition to prevent gross inequality and extreme division of labor making for humans dumber than any animal (paraphrasing). Bring on the universal healthcare, and economics that protect the biological well-being of all people first and force austerity on a minority in the form of an aristocracy

fumar 5y ago

I don’t follow your reasoning. How are memes changing or impacting currency?

Talanes 5y ago
I'm not sure exactly which ideas the other commenter was referring to, but of course currency is affected by memes. Currency is a meme: it only has value due to the widespread idea that it should have value.
- TomSwirly 5y ago
  > Currency is a meme: it only has value due to the widespread idea that it should have value. It would be nice if people spent just a tiny amount of time studying economics before pronouncing on it. A US dollar, for example, is backed by the "full faith and credit of the United States Government", and this has an objectively measurable value (because there are pairs of almost identical securities where one has "full faith and credit" and the other doesn't). Unless your argument is "all securities and currencies are imaginary," of course, which has no practical value. Please note that I'm a far-left socialist and I consider capitalism destructive to the planet. But that doesn't mean I don't believe in economics.
  - chmsky00 5y ago
    Economics are real, but the flow of currency is not economics. The flow of currency is politically influenced and has nothing to do with human trade for humans sake (economics as commonly understood but not actually since it’s conflated with currency movement). What we should realize through the study of economics is just how screwed things are. Anyone with any math sense should see inflation deflates buying power for the public, and has nothing to do with real trade but belief that a billionaire is leveraging real property so well on his own… oh wait all of humanity serves him by not changing the rules to serve themselves. What a convenient self fulfilling prophecy. The math makes it obvious which people are winning and science makes it obvious no one is more than one of seven billion. Somehow it’s miraculously a specific few winning big. Stop listening to it all. People trade. That’s it. There’s no need to speculate and manage the behavior to send billionaires in space on empty promises of humans …magically… becoming the first space faring civ. Sure seems to give Bezos a helluva life. I’m crazy though; humanity has never succumbed to shared fallacy at scale before. Who knows, maybe healthcare and education for all actually empower the kid who goes on to engineer the next big leap, but contemporary political memes filter those break throughs out by miserly tracking currency debts.
chmsky00 5y ago
The other commenter summed it up. Money is an abstract distributed ledger conceived of from our old way of imprinting quantity on clay tablets, to track trade. We’re lead around by gossip, fads, trends… memes… where to look for the best paying jobs, sales… by restricting acceptable discourse around not the literal solution to problems, but the expectations we solve them for corporations to own, and leverage for profit with “fair apportionment” dictated by Byzantine economic math not even the experts can penetrate (there was just a story on HN about how no one knows who owns what in any clear way; it’s all ad hoc to fit a narrative; Google Varoufakis) We’re told that’s just how it goes and it’s all correct and politically policed for correctness. Yet last year we saw in the news they just hand out hundreds of millions to those in the political network and make everyone else work for them in return. Relative network effects are the reality of physics and it makes a good concept for understanding society. Adam Smith called for equality of condition to prevent gross inequality and extreme division of labor making for humans dumber than any animal (paraphrasing). Bring on the universal healthcare, and economics that protect the biological well-being of all people first and force austerity on a minority in the form of an aristocracy