Topic: Economic Devastation - page 34. (Read 504783 times)

Yes this is why I argued that "Lives Saved" is a better metric for Ideas than "Kills", "Kills" is easier measured but lacks insight. "Lives Saved" is impossible to quantify, and everyone assess it at will, which is why Ideas get debated and accepted anyway despite their murderous nature. Its a trolley problem.


Mao was a fool, he hurriedly tried to restructure the Agricultural Industry to divert Productivity to Industry (out of envy) by "innovative" techniques, That's what happens when you skip beta testing and pilot rollout. It was to be expected as the political science of central planning was/is still young. Note however that this failure didn't recur so this failure cannot attributed to communism or central planning but to poor implementation,  in short not a "systemic" failure so I don't award those "kills" to Communism but to Vanity.
Contrast this to "systemic" inequality in capitalism that allegedly kill our children

The argument though that central planning restrained liberal resource consumption in the overpopulated eastern hemisphere I think stands.

If it was a simulation game I would played it as it happened. One sector focused on innovation in a free market and inefficiency in resources allowed, while the larger one focused on sustainability in a central planning and cross transfer resources for tech breakthroughs. Choosing only one or the other I think will lead to either explosive burn-out or slow burn-in

The last statement simply describes unemployment, and there is no sugar coating for it. 50 shoemakers having invested time and resources and will behind a lifetime of making shoes will not feel happy. They will think that Rob has robed them off their profession and stole their income. The last statement simply displays that Bob will not expand the market by his increased productivity, nor increase the Total aggregate productivity of shoes. One could argue that instead the 50 unemployed now shoemakers will exit the shoe market completely! Both as shoe consumers as they will produce shoes for own consumption, as well as shoe producers , making total market worse off. And Bob will be damned as the Bane of Shoetopia. The only remedy is for them to reenter marked with a different role, they might not be happy about that so reeducation camp” may be needed. So what did Bob succeed? a restructuring of the market.

Now if on the other hand Bob's genius instead on focusing on increased productivity was focused on innovation, he could create the "Athletic Footwear". Now Shoetopia will add to the 100 new pair of shoes the Demand of 100 extra athletic shoes, that only Bob provides and his wealth and fame will be well deserved and he will be hailed as Hero of Shoetopia. What did now Bob succeed? The Creation of a New Market.


Toxic as it may sound Bob could be simply under quota and allowed to only produce as much as any other shoemaker, taking full claim to the fruits of his own labor. And protecting him from his self, by allowing him to transform his talents of increased productivity to more leisure time or freeing up 50% of his time to explore new markets or find something more interesting to do.

The permanent ban is due to ban evasion, it's a well known bitcointalk rule. I guess the first ban wasn't a permanent one.

Usually if one post is deleted (for example the pro-Ethereum posts may have been deleted for spamming), then replies that quote the deleted post will also be deleted. As you say, it is likely an example of collateral damage. I have no idea how that turned into a ban though.

...

Hear, hear CoinCube.  + a billion.

I know SQUAT about alt-coins and have no interest in them.  But, TPTB (AnonyMint) is clearly a very smart guy, informed in BTC matters, as well as knowledgeable on a host of other subjects.

They should not ban him, nor delete his posts.  After all, Bitcoin is "the financial equivalent" of free speech.  It's beyond irony that TPTB would be banned for honest (though indelicate) discourse.

If he succeeds at what he is up to, then bitcointalk.org will be lessened by kicking out a revolutionary who saw the future.

It is time for a post on censorship.

Two recent posts from by TPTB_need_war were deleted from this thread by moderators. This is a very unpleasant first.
Until now this thread has been a contentious but censorship free back and forth about economics.

These deleted post appear to be collateral damage.  Yesterday there were several (at least 4) repetitive posts in the altcoin forum promoting Ethereum. TPTB took a contrarian position and posted counterarguments against Ethereum in all of them.

I read these posts which do not interest me as I own no Ethereum. They contain typical Anonymint confrontation but are overall pretty tame. I certainly saw nothing that would explain or justify widespread censorship and mass deletion of posts. I cannot help but wonder if there was a financial interest behind this. It is odd and represents a break from an otherwise laudable and hands off moderation policy.

I am a guest here on this forum. I do not pay the bills or expect to make the rules. However, it is well within my rights as a guest to point out when the host is being inhospitable.

I have sent a private message to our host theymos with a link to this post. I appreciate his hospitality in providing this free space to discuss bitcoin and economics. However, I want to let him know that I would strongly prefer a more hands off and censorship free approach be applied in the future if not forum wide then at least in this thread.

I would invite anyone who feels as I do to send a similar message.

I can't believe you got banned, that's ridiculous, so sad that free speech isn't respected here!!!

Keep up the good fight TPTB

Just ignore those that keep reggurgitating thr same useles information that 16 yr olds tell you today that watched a youtube video like debt is money or zeitgeist.. Instead just focus on the positive things you can change,,, i do agree with anonymint on removing middle men, hence me making a decentralized marketplace in syscoin, if you let two people trade goods and set value without intervention you allow for true prosperity and not fake shadow gdp stats the govt tells you. I just dont understand what took him so lomg to get where the rest of us have realized, while he was clunking away about anon coins being bitcoins killer app, even naming himself anonymint in the process... Seems hes come back full circle and realizes the truth now, decentralization.

Please put a pause on all your well-intended but rather useless (never ending) noise (drivel) about derivatives, what the government should do, evil of central banks, evil of debt, etc and all these superfluous issues that you can neither change nor which will determine the direction global society is headed. Let me have your undivided attention please. (RealBitcoin et al just please STFU for a while please since you won't grasp the relevance of the following)

Getting back to my writings (written in 2010 - 2012) which were the main theme of the OP of this thread back in 2013, and based on a recent paradigm-shift revelation on the markets for the crypto currency I am working on, I have now seen the light of how specifically the Knowledge Age I've been predicting will take form.

And glorious it is our future.

The key insight is that I now see how Knowledge Age producers (workers) will be paid digitally directly by Knowledge Age consumers, and the middle man can't exist (because the competition will be to remove him). I am not yet going to tell you exactly why this is so and all the mechanics because I need to retain this a secret for the time being while I am implementing this.

So what this means is that anonymity was never the way we were going to restructure government and fix society. Instead it is the coming social media metaphorsis of commerce such that there can't be a middle man which the government can expropriate. This is a critical distinction from the game theory in which the world operates now, because when the government can take on debt, promise everything to the masses, and then charge the costs of the taxes and/or end game regulatory capture to the large corporations (rich and upper middle class), then the majority (masses) are in no way incentivized to resist. This game theory is summarized in Some Iron Laws of Political Economics. CoinCube has also discussed this game theory upthread and I have some where in AnonyMint's archives better summarized and justified the Iron Law of Political Economics (I think the Dark Enlightenment thread and/or possibly upthread in this Economic Devastation thread).

So what happens when the majority earn their income and are paid directly by the consumers of the produced Knowledge Age work, is that the government can't charge the cost of the end game collapse of debt to any one! It is when the government can steal from the minority and buy off the majority with debt financed socialism, that the government power grows without bound until the minority is depleted and a Dark Age is entered. Luckily throughout history technology usually (but not always which is why there have been 600 year Dark Ages where only food was money) rescues society and the majority is able to recover its ability to earn income more directly. Examples of such past technological innovations would be soil management technology for agriculture, the spread of knowledge via the printing press, etc..

When the majority is directly earning the lion's share of the income in society, then the government will find it politically implausible to steal from the majority to redistribute, because the majority will refuse. It is only by appeasing the majority making them dependent on socialism and then stealing from those middle men who aggregate the capital, that the elite at the top are able to fool the majority into stealing from the minority and handing all the power to a super-minority elite. Without a minority to expropriate, the governments' debt collapses (this also includes the expectation that crypto currency can be redesigned to remain decentralized and thus the government won't be able to simply turn it into fiat again and print money out of thin air which steals from everyone and this also includes that even if they could, they will no longer be able to use that funny money to aggregate middle man controls... the entire paradigm of the Iron Law of Political Economics hinges on the existence of middle men extracting rents...this was a key epiphany)

Anonymity is entirely unrealistic and doesn't address the political-economic structural issue (that is why I have recently admonished Monero to look at anonymity as a way to make public block chains RELIABLY private, End-to End principled, and efficient but not for the purpose of avoiding taxation and encouraged them to look at making simple scripting private not just currency and thus I assert they need Zerocash/zk-snarks and not Cryptonote nor RingCT). Whereas a new way of thinking about social media and microtransactions does. Stay tuned for the second coming of Satoshi has arrived. And this will be the real deal.

Thanks for this.

Continuing on the subject of derivatives, some of you might be interested to watch the second half of Episode 865 of The Keiser Report https://www.rt.com/shows/keiser-report/329642-episode-max-keiser-865/ (starting at 14:25 in) from a couple of days ago (yeah, I know he can be irritating, but...):  "...Max interviews investor Stephen Kendal and his terrifying derivatives model which shows the debt bubble growing larger and larger before each of the last two financial crises, whilst the markets stay the same size..."

Kendal asserts derivatives are a fifty-fifty bet; that in 2016 blockchain technology will for the first time make the derivatives market accountable, squeezing fraud out of the system (resulting in a crash); that the bubble is pushing one asset up and another down, ultimately levelling everything out; going on to claim that the most underpriced assets at the moment are gold and silver.

(Part One is worth watching too, talking about Mike Hearn's quitting as Bitcoin developer and joining the centralized and opaque R3 consortium.)

Capitalism has already died a long time ago, but the final blow was in the 70 after the removal of the last gold standard, and making fiat currencies tradeable thin air packages.

So i`m not mad at those that bash the current economy, but they really need to get their terminology correct. When most people think about capitalism, they think about huge corporations and shady CEO's, which is not what it's about.

Too bad nobody is alive from the 1800's to tell the real story about how free the economy & society was in that era.

Well said. I'm so tired of mindless drones launching silly attacks on capitalism despite that it brought billions of people out of poverty and into prosperity. Sadly, that era is drawing to close. Capitalism is under a vicious attack.

Ignoring for a moment the fact that you must project forward as well as look back and thus the Mormons cannot be so easily dismissed you also fail to consider the number of lives saved inter-group due to the strictures of religion. Christianity’s influence, in the west, set into motion the belief that man is accountable to God and that the law is the same regardless of status.

http://crossandquill.com/journey/the-influence-of-christianity-on-western-civilization/

Please tell me you are not arguing that the decimation of the Chinese people by Communism was all good because it lowered CO2 emissions. I don’t even know how to reply to that one so I will leave it to Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

I disagree. Events like the industrial revolution are massive strides forward and increase the standard of living in an obvious manner. However, small gains in productivity also increase the standard of living. Your distinction between “types” of productivity is undefined and appears entirely arbitrary.  

Not only is productivity not zero sum misclassifying it as such risks the promotion of terrible public policy. Let’s examine a hypothetical society and try to find these zero sum interactions.

Imaging for a moment the mythical society of Shoetopia. It is a stagnate society with limited technological progress a more or less stable population (ideal setting for zero sum conflicts). In Shoetopia there is a demand for 100 new pairs of shoes a day and each shoemaker requires a full day of labor to make a pair of shoes. Shoetopia therefore has 100 shoemakers working on an average day. Now along comes Bob. Bob is the shoe genius of his time and due to exceptional hand eye coordination and self-discipline Bob can make 2 pairs of shoes in a day.  

Depending on the dynamics of the market one of two things will happen. 1) The price of shoes will drop until the price is low enough to that customers are willing to buy the excess shoes (consumers benefit) or 2) Some of Bobs less of efficient competition with shift their activity to some other market with the end result being less man hours of labor required for the production of the same number of shoes. If Bob is a one hit wonder his benefit to his society will be transient. If his shoe talent breeds true then his descendants will take over the shoe market and soon Shoetopia will only need 50 shoemakers allowing everyone in society more leisure time or freeing up 50 laborers to explore new markets or find something more interesting to do.

The toxic idea that personal productivity does not entitle one to the fruits of one’s own labor is an indirect argument for massive statist intervention in the economy as that is the only way to enforce such a prohibition. In the case of Shoetopia anti Bob laws would need to be passed either selectively taxing him of 50% of his earnings, directly seizing his shoes for “the public good”, or perhaps banning him outright from the shoemaking profession. Bob might not be happy about that so “reeducation camp” may be needed.    

The notion of "God" and the Ideas around it has generated countless heated religion wars since the dawn of time. One may argue that the real reasons for war have been imperialistic but "God" has been used as a vehicle to motivate the masses and instrument the war, so the body count gets awarded to "God". Thankfully as science and the instruments of war advanced in efficiency, the religious passion waned. But if you normalize by total Human population I think it will be number 1.
Mormons are not a representative sample, they are generally a "new" dogma, so they don't provide anything to the discussion

Simple Aggregate CO2 production per capita in China had been consistently lower than in US or Europe, only recently China took the lead.  Had the Chinese followed the US paradigm and drive V8 cars instead of Bikes where would we now be?

"God" as a the most deadly idea? Not at all sure I would agree with that. No doubt many have died in religious wars and in religious disputes but that that is far from the entire picture. Lets look at one of my favorite religious groups the Mormons (Disclaimer: I am not Mormon).

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/22/mormons-more-likely-to-marry-have-more-children-than-other-u-s-religious-groups/




Mormons have twice as many children as secular couples. Mormon couples have 3.4 children compared to 1.7 per secular couple. You can debate if this is a good thing or not but such births must weigh against any deaths caused by religion. Also you will be hard pressed to find many deaths associated with the idea "Mormonism". Indeed rather than a deadly idea Mormonism seems to act almost as a vaccine against several of the dominant and ultimately destructive social trends in our society.

I am not following your logic when you say lives were saved by China missing the Industrial Revolution? It is the authoritarian nature of the Chinese government that enabled it to legislate and enforce the one child policy. The Chinese government itself admits that this policy prevented 400 million births. Therefore my initial take is that the lives saved by China not becoming a liberal consumerist society following WWII now stands somewhere around negative 400 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy
 
Due to time limitations I will reply to your comments on productivity tomorrow.

Here is another take.
http://www.truthistreason.net/a-simple-explanation-of-derivatives

So, a mix of known unknowns and also unknown unknowns, come the day of the great reckoning?

It's hard to define what is a scam and what is not. And we must be consistent otherwise we are dishonest.


We either call the new altcoins:   dishonest devs trying to make a quick buck with scam IPO    or     unlucky innovative devs having bad luck creating a new coin and then giving up.

It's hard to tell, and you can say the same for the derivatives, they are either a scam to get as much money possible, or an unlucky and flawed financial product that will just destroy itself.

Either all of them are a scam, or none of them are a scam. Or perhaps the scale is what dictates it's classification.