jlawson

26 ms·

271.
by jlawson 5y ago
Even beyond which country, when you were born is huge. Most of us are lucky to be around now instead of 100 (or 1000) years ago. For some reason people like to ignore temporal luck and temporal inequality, but for actual human outcomes th
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by jlawson 5y ago
A major reason the first investor built the building is because he/she knew someone else would buy it later. Otherwise people can only invest things they're ready to run themselves basically forever. This would destroy the economy
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by jlawson 5y ago
Settlers are not immigrants in the normal sense of the word. There's a difference between moving to join a society and moving to land so you can spread your society onto it while ignoring/overruling anyone who might have been ther
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by jlawson 5y ago
We did need a supra-national authority to get rid of slavery. British, Americans, and others historically fought many battles (often naval) and pressured many governments to stop slavery. What do you think ended the barbary slave trade? Why
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by jlawson 5y ago
>Sorry, but somebody is still producing that wealth through their labor. No, not necessarily. E.g. You write a novel. It's selling every day online. Whose labor are you collecting? If you say the customers' labor at their jobs
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by jlawson 5y ago
Naval grew up poor in India.
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by jlawson 5y ago
In both your examples the person laboring is forced to labor for one specific lord/owner. In our economy, you can go work for anyone, or for yourself, or to some degree even not work at all and collect various social benefits. Comparin
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by jlawson 5y ago
When you say, "all opinions are equally valid", what does the word "valid" mean? It seems to be this word is doing a lot of work and if you explore this your position will quickly collapse. Opinions are generally about m
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by jlawson 6y ago
Let's say your spouse is constantly criticizing you. You feel frustrated, so you criticize them as well. Someone stops you and says, "Wait, you should criticize them less. Then they'll feel less frustrated and might also crit
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by jlawson 6y ago
Agreed - it is a minority. By this study it's about 8%: https://hiddentribes.us/
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by jlawson 6y ago
By the same argument, you'd cheat and steal from literally anyone you could get away with cheating and stealing from. Because not doing it to them doesn't stop them from doing it to you. But this isn't really how it works. Fo
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by jlawson 6y ago
No, it's not society . That makes it sound like everyone has a say. It's only a very small minority of people are the ones that decide who gets punished and excluded. It's not society, its the powerful . This is how you hav
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by jlawson 6y ago
It is encoded into law, except instead of sharing just with employees, you share it with everyone through taxes. There's no reason that an employee who just happens to work at a firm that becomes successful should get profits from that
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by jlawson 6y ago
Employees do not take the same risk as owners/founders. If a startup fails: Founder loses two years, his life savings, and gets paid nothing. Employee loses two years, keeps his life savings, and gets paid salary for that time. Complet
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by jlawson 6y ago
Disagree, there is a >0 number of stranger child abductions we should expect with optimal policies. Same as there is a >0 number of car crash deaths with optimal policy. And a >0 amount of rat droppings in our food. And in your per
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by jlawson 6y ago
Took 5 seconds to look up on Wikipedia: "With the highly publicized Army–McCarthy hearings of 1954, and following the suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester C. Hunt that same year,[12] McCarthy's support and popularity faded. On Decemb
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by jlawson 6y ago
You're committing an extremely common mis-representation of what Popper wrote about his paradox. As Popper wrote, his conception of 'intolerance' was not "sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia". In fact, none
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by jlawson 6y ago
Turing wasn't 'canceled' for being gay. He was prosecuted by the government according to the laws of the time, by police. Cancel culture is extra-legal and does not involve the use of laws or police. Cancel culture is also
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by jlawson 6y ago
I didn't say that literally nothing was written during that period. So pointing to one poem doesn't really affect the argument. Same for achievements like silver mining or iron plows. Obviously many individual things happened. It&
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by jlawson 6y ago
"After the conquest of Constantinople, Mehmed II crowned himself the Caesar of the Roman Empire." Well yes, that's how feudal systems work. If you take over a country, you get to have its titles. This is how e.g. an English k
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by jlawson 6y ago
Of course, I'd never suggest a single-cause explanation. And as someone else pointed out, there were lots of advances happening before 1453 as well. I think the sack of Constantiople really threw gas on the coals though. It was an exce
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by jlawson 6y ago
Phoebe Connop, the girl who died, was British so I think it's kind of reasonable to post British papers about it. But here are some non-British ones if you really want. https://au.news.yahoo.com/uk-teenager-phoebe-conno
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by jlawson 6y ago
>I am not the one who set the "expelled from society" standard. Yes you are. I said "serious" and you yourself specifically pulled it back to the literal interpretation of "expelled from society". Another po
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by jlawson 6y ago
You seem a bit confused about the ages. The dark ages is not a synonym for the medieval era. It's a sub-division of the medieval era - one of three. The dark ages is a period after the fall of Rome. It's named for the fact that ve
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by jlawson 6y ago
You mean the influence where they sacked Constantinople in 1453 after centuries of attempts, destroying the Christian Byzantine empire and sending huge numbers of Byzantine writers and intellectuals fleeing to settle in Europe?
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by jlawson 6y ago
You're focusing on a turn of phrase used by an earlier poster in order to ignore the larger discussion. There is no value in litigating the exact phrase "expelled from society". Whatever you want to call it, the point is that
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by jlawson 6y ago
Lots of men and women prefer to be submissive in some or many contexts, whether personal or professional. Our overculture highly values the drive to dominate, win, take control, but make no mistake - this is not the inherent imperative of
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by jlawson 6y ago
So your standard for whether something is serious is whether someone literally dies as a direct result of it? For most of us, losing your career and all or almost all your friends is kind of a big deal. People have committed suicide over th
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by jlawson 6y ago
No, it's not like saving lives, because whether someone is alive or dead is agreed upon by all. This is a positive statement. Whether a view is bad or not is a normative judgment, not an objective fact.
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by jlawson 6y ago
Fair enough, but since about the 90's I don't recall much in the news about "out of control black kids terrorizing whites". COPS isn't even on the air any more, you know. These days it's pretty much wall-to-wal

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