jules

49 ms·

481.
by jules 9y ago
Europe or the US in the 50s didn't guarantee the necessities for people who choose not to work either. I'm not even necessarily opposed to flattening the income distribution by government intervention, but guaranteeing all the nec
482.
by jules 9y ago
Give one example of a communist country that didn't turn totalitarian. Capitalism doesn't imply democracy, but capitalist dictatorships do tend to gravitate in that direction, e.g. Chile.
483.
by jules 9y ago
> What if every employee became a shareholder and reaped rewards for such, making companies employee owned and 'SHARING' everything.. ---it's a more privatized way of running socialism and imho works better... There is not
484.
by jules 9y ago
Or North Korea, or Mao's China, or Pol Pot's Cambodia, or... Until all the necessities are 100% automated there are only two options to motivate people to produce those necessities: through force, or through self-interest. The lis
485.
by jules 9y ago
Because the person paying both the manager and the person reporting to them judges that to work better.
486.
by jules 9y ago
The only reason we have enough is because of that economic system. Take a look at Venezuela. It ought to terrify everyone that so many take what we have for granted.
487.
by jules 9y ago
Or civilisations that reach a certain level go into a slow dysgenic decline because civilisation eliminates natural selection.
488.
by jules 9y ago
> I asked a hiring manager at Google once if they would tell a sales guy "No I don't want the Ferrari at the same price as this Mazda Miata, its more sports car than I need to get around." A car doesn't leave after 2
489.
by jules 9y ago
If you are OK with medieval levels of wealth then you can also take half the year off. In fact, you could probably take 11 months off if you live in a hut and buy a sack of potatoes once a week.
490.
by jules 9y ago
How do you compare the wealth of Crassus us with Bill Gates?
491.
by jules 9y ago
From the same place that the infinite supply of budget is coming from.
492.
by jules 9y ago
If you increase the funding then the supply of scientists will simply grow until funding as again as competitive as it is today. The first order problem is that the funding ends up with mediocre scientists rather than brilliant scientists.
493.
by jules 9y ago
If you are X% less productive you will be able to charge X% less for your work, on average, so you would need to work longer hours for the same pay. You might also be shortening your life by not sleeping enough, perhaps by a larger amount t
494.
by jules 9y ago
Then they should have helped organise a proper referendum, not repress this one with violence.
495.
by jules 9y ago
There have been many attempts at communism and it has had a 100% rate of ending in dictatorship. Which of those dictators would you consider non-evil? Should we want dictatorship, even if the the dictator is non-evil? Given the absurdly bad
496.
by jules 9y ago
The US spends 3.3% of GDP on military whereas France spends 2.3%, so while excluding this makes the delta larger, it won't make a significant dent.
497.
by jules 9y ago
> Are you saying communism cannot exist separately from (evil) dictator? History does seem to bear that out.
498.
by jules 9y ago
That is not what socialism used to mean. European countries are capitalist with a welfare state. This was first set up in Germany by Bismarck, and the socialists were opposed to it. Socialism used to mean that the means of production were i
499.
by jules 9y ago
IQ is defined as relative to your age group, but absolute IQ test scores start to decline in your 40s at a rate of approximately 6 points per decade.
500.
by jules 9y ago
Whether a language is context free depends on how much checking you want to happen in the parsing stage. A variable usage is valid only if that variable is in scope, and this trivially makes almost all languages context sensitive. Almost al
501.
by jules 9y ago
In my experience of telling people these things, there is only a nanosecond between a person saying "that's ridiculous, that can't possibly be true" and saying "of course that's happening, who ever thought othe
502.
by jules 9y ago
That article is about taxpayer funded health care. Are vasectomies taxpayer funded in these places?
503.
by jules 9y ago
You do not need diversity to have a meritocracy in 100m sprint. Diversity may help to get closer to meritocracy in other fields, but in some fields the criteria are so difficult to determine that even with diversity it may be virtually impo
504.
by jules 9y ago
Which localities have made it effectively impossible to obtain hormonal birth control but have unchallenged access to vasectomies?
505.
by jules 9y ago
Historically there was a far greater overlap between socialism and racism, so the historical argument doesn't hold much water. Libertarianism (no govt control over the economy) is the polar opposite of fascism (almost full govt control
506.
by jules 9y ago
Usually it is not a monarch but a law that limits the power of the 51%. In some countries you need a two thirds majority to make constitution changes, for instance.
507.
by jules 9y ago
I've never understood why the fact that striving for communism reliably lead to disaster can be used a defence of communism. Can you explain that line of reasoning? It seems to me that's saying nothing more than "The utopia t
508.
by jules 9y ago
Did individual businesses really pay their workers more because they thought it would prevent the country from becoming communist? Do you have evidence for that claim? I find it hard to believe, because even if it is true that this would pr
509.
by jules 9y ago
Thiel is hardly alone in this view. Many libertarians are in favour of a constitutional republic over a democracy where 51% of the people have absolute power.
510.
by jules 9y ago
One can avoid this problem by calling it the LL^T-decomposition.

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