alanwatts

31 ms·

91.
by alanwatts 10y ago
>I think it's a pretty good heuristic though, the innocent pay a (hopefully) small price from time to time, in exchange more "bad guys" get caught. The architects of our legal framework thought otherwise: >it’s of more
92.
by alanwatts 10y ago
Compromised endpoints is the elephant in the room in the crypto debate.
93.
by alanwatts 10y ago
>We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Some one was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she sp
94.
by alanwatts 10y ago
>why do you have the right to do that? A free human being should have the right to choose the information that goes into their mind, without that right, how can we make free decisions? If it's an all or nothing deal, then your infor
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by alanwatts 10y ago
>So we shouldn't have done anything..? Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So, I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything , though that might would be better than repeating o
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by alanwatts 10y ago
Killing someone because they killed someone is an infinite loop.
97.
by alanwatts 10y ago
Could you define what you mean by "markets"? It seems like a very abstract, ambiguous term
98.
by alanwatts 10y ago
Well, it's on his wiki[1], but most information about this part of the Iran-Contra is questionable, and Ross is very cagey about what he says in his interviews. The last person[2] to really take a deep look into this part of the story
99.
by alanwatts 10y ago
Which one is worse?
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by alanwatts 10y ago
>In the rare cases when corruption was masked by military secrets, e.g. the Iran Contra affair, the profits were small (in the tens of thousands Where did you get that figure? Ricky Ross made billions personally on that racket
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by alanwatts 10y ago
>I'd hypothesize that most of what's important in the world is accomplished and has been accomplished by large institutions. Teams of people are good at solving problems that individuals could not do by themselves, nothing new
102.
by alanwatts 10y ago
Most votes are already bought and manipulated by the handful of people who own the television coverage of the election, by tilting that coverage in favor of their favorite candidate.
103.
by alanwatts 10y ago
>Whilst standard paper voting may also be subject to fraud, it takes the manipulation of thousands of people in order to alter ballots across a whole country. Computers just need the one hack. And yet it remains far easier to hack a huma
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by alanwatts 10y ago
Violence and waging war is/was commonly considered an honorable deed by many tribal cultures. Pathological inequality is not. >laws are there to enforce our human understanding of fairness against our human nature of selfishness and
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by alanwatts 10y ago
>Rules are necessary to create a level playing field when power distributions are asymmetric. It's a Catch-22 when the rules (laws written on paper) were what made the power distributions so greatly asymmetric in the first place. Th
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by alanwatts 10y ago
>However if you're not my friend, I have no reason to take financial risks for you however small. Technically that's not true. In the cases of con men, social engineers, and manipulators "giving free stuff" is a commo
107.
by alanwatts 10y ago
When you have a choice, yes. Although when taxes are autodeducted from your paycheck you don't have much of a choice but to cooperate, unless you want to quit your job. Thoreau was famous for his non cooperative "civil disobedienc
108.
by alanwatts 10y ago
"Racial segregation as a way of life did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War. There were no laws segregating the races then. And as the noted historian, C. Vann Woodward, in hi
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by alanwatts 10y ago
Please reread the first sentence.
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by alanwatts 10y ago
Knowing that what you say will be private(ish) and not be kept on historical record (at least not in public -- I assume Snapchat saves everything) can lead one to be more open, honest, and up-front in their communication. Whereas writing so
111.
by alanwatts 10y ago
>You can post pretty shamelessly the little things you're up to all day to your story, knowing it will be gone in 24 hours, keeping your feed really clean. Snapchat is ephemeral and more private, like the spoken word, and unlike pre
112.
by alanwatts 10y ago
The magic of Facebook is the billion+ users on it. Do those people use Facebook because it offers some unique service which no one else can or does, or because it went viral and everyone jumped on the bandwagon?
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by alanwatts 10y ago
I read the first bit of Mises theory, which is full of fallacy from the start: >The problem referred to is that of how to distribute resources rationally in an economy. The free market solution is the price mechanism, wherein people indi
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by alanwatts 10y ago
>There's no way to efficiently allocate resources absent a price mechanism Obviously math and science would be involved. However, the dollar is not created based on a mathematical or scientific standard, it is created by a handful o
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by alanwatts 10y ago
This was the biggest move which Dr. King was calling for in his fight for civil rights, a year before he was assassinated. >We must rapidly begin [applause], we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-orien
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by alanwatts 10y ago
The reason Comcast is a monopoly is because if it wasn't, 21rst century networks would be like 19th century networks? Nice try, Comcast.
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by alanwatts 10y ago
The current US Secretary of the Treasury is the most influential member of the IMF, with 16.66% of the total voting power (Jacob Lew) [1]. He was promoted to his current posts shortly after banking on the 2008 economic collapse with Citi. [
118.
by alanwatts 10y ago
>Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited. -RFK, "Value of Dissent" (21 March 1968) The problem is
119.
by alanwatts 10y ago
Let's follow that logic: the internet infrastructure is owned by private companies (i.e. Comcast), so shouldn't Comcast be able to censor and throttle anything that goes over their network?
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by alanwatts 10y ago
>If they aren't giving an education and people can still get jobs "for years" what exactly is the point of $200k education again? Its purpose is more symbolic than realistic. Symbols are easily faked. An example of this is

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