aminok

28 ms·

211.
by aminok 10y ago
A tax break is not government intervention.. And no, it hasn't been all 'right-wing' intervention, though I'd certainly agree that there has been a lot of that. There's been a ton of new 'left-wing' interv
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by aminok 10y ago
Picketty's theory is that there's something inherent to market economies that leads to capital's share of income increasing. The evidence suggests it's due to peculiarities related to how advanced economies treat propert
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by aminok 10y ago
Compelling counter-evidence to Picketty's C21: https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/a-26-year-old-mit-gra...
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by aminok 10y ago
"Information Superhighway"?
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by aminok 10y ago
>Unless it has a monopoly, or is too-big-to-fail, or for some other reason. Yes, but that is the exception, not the rule. In contrast, central economic planning is power without market validation, by definition. >The what now? "W
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by aminok 10y ago
>Sorry, what do you mean by "individual control"? Most companies I know are already controlled by a cabal of James Bond villains sitting in a room sipping stuff. It's called the board of directors, although usually they&#x
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by aminok 10y ago
That should be: in the Norse colonies in Greenland, not Finland.
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by aminok 10y ago
That's fascinating, thanks for the link. Just to provide a little more support for the admittedly weaker argument I made earlier: the knowledge of the lands discovered by the Norse was extensively recorded by Catholic priests, and thei
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by aminok 10y ago
There's some evidence that Christopher Columbus ventured to the New World based on Norsemen knowledge of Vinland that had reached the Catholic Church. Catholic historian mentioning Vinland: https://www.britannica.com/bi
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Descendants of Newfoundland’s “extinct” Beothuk Live on in Iceland (2011)(blogs.canoe.com)
63 points by aminok 10y ago|8 comments
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by aminok 10y ago
>You have to acknowledge it, and then a) provide some form of solution (kinda contradicts its principles) or b) argue that it isn't as important compared to potential benefits of Bitcoin. There is no solution to the specific problem
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by aminok 10y ago
Organisations that want to maintain control over society. Case in point is the International Cyber Security Protection Alliance: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1h43ez/chilling_ar... . This orga
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by aminok 10y ago
Once upon a time the majority of people were farmers or herders. 150 years ago the majority of non-farm workers in the advanced economies were doing menial manufacturing work. Machinery that automates work allows individuals to produce more
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by aminok 10y ago
Drug abuse is far less common in Singapore, to take one example, than Western countries. That would suggest low activity.
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by aminok 10y ago
People earning below US minimum wage (in purchasing power terms) are not slaves. Those at the margins would benefit from being employed. It teaches them valuable skills that improve their position for the future.
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by aminok 10y ago
Given the world is analog, with states never reaching a state of absolute zero (e.g. there is no distance from a nucleus at which there is zero probability that an orbiting electron will be found), I think consciousness does not ever dimini
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by aminok 10y ago
Repealing zoning and building restrictions would go a long way to making the West the same. Land titles enforcement would still put up impediments to construction of makeshift housing, but making it so anyone with land can build a structure
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by aminok 10y ago
No we disagree on whether throwing a person in prison for refusing to hand over something they receive in private trade is a human rights violation. It goes beyond even this. Income and sales tax laws require a person to surrender their pri
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by aminok 10y ago
Cryptocurrency is the only way to circumvent the prohibitionist laws against free exchange of money. The biggest source of inefficiency in the global economy is the organized censorship of human economic activity via state intervention, and
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by aminok 10y ago
No, we disagree on whether it's okay to throw someone in prison for not handing over their money to you, and whether it's okay to rationalize this form of authoritarianism, while admonishing the much more sensible authoritarian po
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by aminok 10y ago
Here come the rationalizations for your favored brand of authoritarianism. Human rights violators always think that their particular authoritarianism is justified. It wouldn't be so bad if you didn't simultaneously admonish those
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by aminok 10y ago
The interests of 'people as a whole' can be used to justify both (compulsory treatment leads to less drug abuse and fewer homeless, compulsory income redistribution leads to more funding for the homeless, respectively), so really
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by aminok 10y ago
Refraining from throwing people who have not violated anyone's rights in prison makes sense if you care about human rights. You seem to throw all concern for human rights out the window when the object is to take someone's money f
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by aminok 10y ago
Human rights is subjectively defined. You and your fellow social democrats define it as forcing a drug addict into treatment. You use terms like "human rights" to stigmatize those who don't share your beliefs. A sensible pers
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by aminok 10y ago
"People who in any other nation would be taken care of." The US actually spends far more than almost any other country in the world on programs for the poor. In many of the countries with less homelessness/drug-addiction, the
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by aminok 10y ago
Then America should stop throwing people in prison for refusing to hand over a share of the currency they receive in private trade to pay for the goods and services the homeless receive from government organizations. You can't impose a
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by aminok 10y ago
Why does Thailand have so fewer mentally ill and drug addicted homeless, despite its government spending so much less on social programs for the homeless?
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by aminok 10y ago
>It seems a terrible statement about my home country that my children will encounter homelessness and mental illness much more vividly in the wealthiest nation in the world than they did in Thailand, where we previously lived. >During
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by aminok 10y ago
Firefox was a significant improvement over the status quo in browsers when it was released.
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by aminok 10y ago
Ironically Firefox was produced as a result of the code created from the Netscape rewrite he criticised.

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