Topic: Economic Devastation - page 19. (Read 504782 times)

This exchange lost 1,500 BTC in a hack last year.
http://cointelegraph.com/news/breaking-bitfinex-hot-wallet-hacked-bitcoins-stolen

Interest rate is probably so high out of a concern the company is under capitalized.

I also saw this post a while ago about strange things that go on at that exchange.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.7444557

The combination is enough for me to stay far far away.
 

As I stated in my response to Kraken, none of my other accounts have been compromised (ever). Only Kraken, which makes me think that the rat is to be found under the floorboards of Kraken itself.

Best solution or not I believe that Xester 'solution' is what we are going to see happen going forward. I think I wrote up-thread somewhere how I believe it will play out. Here it is.

No, that is the worst solution possible, the corporations will just move to another country. What you suggest will just escalate what I just described.

Taxes need to be lowered, for everyone. And regulations need to be reduced for everyone. This way the consumer can spend, and  small businesses could reappear.

Escalating this bullshit is just kicking the can down the road, you don't build a forest by cutting down big trees, but by letting small trees grow.

I expect that the rich will be increasingly unable to escape taxation going forward. The wealthy will be tracked and taxed while safe havens and tax shelters are increasingly shut down.
Millionaires will be hit hard and even the billionaires take a small hit. As national sovereignty is ceded there will increasingly be no place for them to go.

This will only stall potential collapse. Down the road we will find ourselves with a massive and inefficient global welfare state that is stagnate and in constant danger of failure. At this point humanity will desperately need a paradigm shift. I believe the knowledge age as outlined by Anonymint in the OP represents such a shift.

My expectation and hope is that the the current system will survive long enough for the knowledge age to really take off and simply grow us out of the morass. As more people transition themselves from the welfare state to the knowledge age the risk of collapse will decline as the overall size and cost of the welfare state declines to an insignificant portion of the economy.

The trend towards future population reduction is already well underway. It seems likely that further population reduction will occur spontaneously as a byproduct of the status quo.    
http://www.economist.com/news/21589151-crashing-fertility-will-transform-asian-family-baby-boom-bust

Wealth will increasingly seek to hide by moving into tax havens in other countries. It will also be increasingly hunted. Pressure applied in the name of shutting down tax havens will be one more tool to drive political consolidation and weaken the nation state. Those running from the tax man will increasingly be identified, caught and punished. Options for legal evasion like you mentioned above will be shut down or restricted to a even narrower elite.

Tax havens that survive will likely be rare and limited to select jurisdictions where citizenship is hard to obtain. These areas are likely to be funded by income taxes (there will likely be no escape for wage earners anywhere) In these havens citizens will likely be exempt from inheritance, capital gains, and wealth taxes. This will allow the billionaire class to safely run their interests from afar.

The lesser wealthy will be increasingly consumed via taxation in their home nations. The coming wave of socialism and public anger will drive most of them back into the ranks of government dependents. This will serve the purpose of sating public rage, destroying potential local opposition, and further undermining the economics of nation states thus increasing the dependence on debt that will soon be issued by bodies and governed by laws under the jurisdiction of those same tax havens.

Rather then spontaneous collapse. I believe the proper model is that of controlled demolition.

The best solution to that is to establish corporate taxes like what our government did. That way there will be balance in the three sectors that have been mentioned.

But the problem arise when corporations don't  declare their income well but at least they pay tax.

So that implies that large parts of the world are in debts already, it's just a matter of time before everything comes crashing down. God help us...

Back to economics, I ran some numbers on the U.S. CPI.  Nominally 1.51% since QE, if I reweight food, fuel, housing and medical to align with medium household income shares, it comes to 3.32%.

Therefore, if anyone tells you the SPX has reached a new high, relative to May 2015, keep in mind that 15 months later a real new high would be over 2223, which has not happened yet.

I am even later to the conversation, and I do believe that your life is better than it was before, but that does not change the fact that it is based on superstition.  If you don't mind that, OK.

Do you believe that the creator of the universe lounges around all day receiving transmissions from the minds of the faithful?  

To hold that God is the Source and Sustainer of moral values is to insist upon an objective status for ethical ideals. They are not the impulsive fabrication of human minds, but are grounded in the very bedrock of creation. Moral laws have objective validity similar to the laws of physics. They are not our invention, but it is for us to discover them. Just as it would be foolish to defy the law of gravity and hope to escape its consequences, so is it perilous to presume that a human infant can grow to emotional maturity without ever being loved or cared for. In both cases the penalty for ignoring the law is a natural consequence of defying the given realities of the universe. The uniqueness of God in this context is the complex but delicate blend of both physical and spiritual reality in a single deity which accounts for the balance, harmony and order of nature within us and without.

Ethical monotheism is not just a way of talking about God. It is a way of understanding human experience; it is a way of organizing the world in which we live. It is a faith that attempts to explain what we do not know by beginning with what we do know. We do know our awareness of this world is rooted in a unity of our own senses. We do know that defiance of moral law invites a disaster as devastating as any contempt for the laws of physics or chemistry or biology. We know, in short, that we cannot fathom it all and that this world is ultimately grounded in mystery. And that singular ethical mystery is what we call God

I am late to this conversation, but I can offer myself as a example in how religion helped me turn my life around.  Without going into details for now, I took a different path (action) at a bad place, later I found that I had misread Christianity all those years...  I tried again.  Prayer turned things around absolutely for me.

My life, no doubt and beyond question, is much better than before.  In my case, I had to "fix my life" (more correctly stated: allow Him to fix it).  I do not feel that I

It might take either fierce persistence/motivation or (in my case) a new way to look at things to have a similar success.

In the Health and Religion thread I looked at the data on correlations between happiness and religion. Most of the benefit is associated with the highly religious. Being nominally or moderately religious had little benefit.

Praying for divine intervention to passively "make your life better" without actively changing anything is an obvious recipe for failure. Praying for improved self discipline to affect change or for insight into how to change is far more likely to be beneficial.

For the devout and observent religious individual the odds of ending up in a situation where it becomes necessary to "fix your life" is probably much lower.  

If you find the consequences of the quoted definition to be absurd, perhaps you should clarify and/or adapt the definition, lest the dissonance overwhelm.

Rational thinking can be irrational, if it is applied outside of its domain.  More importantly, arational and irrational are distinct concepts.  An irrational line of thought is inconsistent with a valid rational line of thought.  In contrast, an arational line of thought is orthogonal to the variational dimensions of reason. 

For that matter, without clarification regarding the criteria of rationality, there will inevitably be possible inconsistent models of rationality.  The postivist cum formalist paradigm is typically treated as the ideal and asymptote of rationality, but there are uncountably many logics, and what is rational in one model may be irrational or arational in another. 

In the Biblical story of Adam and Eve Our ancestors are warned not to eat of the fruit of the “Etz Hadaath,” the “Tree of Knowledge” for as long as They did not eat of it, they were like angels who do only good. The fruit of the “Tree of Knowledge,” however, changed this.

People interpret this story in different ways but I tend to view it as instructive parable. A primitive species in a natural competitive equilibrium can be thought of as living in a garden. Breaching this equilibrium requires knowledge. Sometime around 70,000 years ago our ancient ancestors acquired the knowledge needed to explosively overcome the constraints that had previously kept our numbers and progress in check. We ceased living as a part of nature and began to dominate it.

This breakthrough led to the spread of humanity throughout the world and possibly made inevitable the later agricultural revolution. Having broken our natural constraints we are now compelled to continue our relentless climb up the tree of knowledge until we grow knowledgable enough to voluntarily establish new ones for ourselves.