Topic: Economic Devastation - page 35. (Read 504811 times)

Options date back to when farmers sold their crop in the Spring for financing or just to capture a good price .  Come Autumn, they may never have a crop to sell but they've sold it forward anyway (potentially they must buy at market).  Its a valid instrument and it is leveraged and potentially dangerous especially as every farmer could fail in that harvest from bad weather.  Its something dating back hundreds of years, I wouldnt call it a scam.

The opposite could happen also, every farmer has a good crop and the food is vastly over priced so the option is worthless.  This risk has always been there, it was placed solely on the farmer to their profit or ruin and this instrument allows distributed handling and so its useful to society.  Some people specialise in handling that risk just like insurance I guess

Obviously they are based on infinite rehipothycation, it's like selling the same car infinite times.


You have 1 company that generates X $ yearly income, you have a stock that covers that company's income proportional to how much you own.

Then you have 1 stock option that is a claim on the stock pool itself not the income, and can be bet on.

Then you have a derivative on that option, that is a claim on the option pool, and it's bet on that itself.

And so on.


And from the original X income ,you have a claim upon a claim upon a claim , on the same income , infinite times, and with even more complex derivatives that they come up with.

It's obviously a huge scam and when it collapses, they will cause big catastrophe with it.

Not all derivative contracts are payable.  They will be 40 different contracts for Apple December but at that point in time there can only be one price and so one liability to pay out.  The number is big as most will never pay anything, they arent actual assets. 
   I think its comparable to the insurance market, there is a ton of liability but its not likely every house on the whole companies books will burn down in one year and events such a firestorm bomb or a volcano will be excluded

Body count of an Idea as a metric is truly an interesting view but I wouldn't count on it as a metric although it is easier measured that the preferable inverse that really matters ie:"Lives Saved" which is very difficult to measure cause it is in the hypothetical space, this is actually demonstrated in the Trolley Problems.
IE Imagine the Lives Saved by 1bn Chinese missing the Industrial Revolution, and not becoming a consumerism society, does communism now look as bad?
Body count I would use it more as evidence of evil which is funny as most probably the most deadly Idea is "God"

To the point yes I think the crux is that Productivity is in most cases a zero sum game and only certain events increase productivity ie Industrial Revolution, Computer Revolution, Genetic Revolution and in my mind the individuals involved in those events that increase standards of living and total production capacity have a well deserved wealth.
The rest and more common people simply compete over who will take a piece of a fixed amount of productivity, this is showcased by never actually reaching full employment. If total production capacity was not fixed, ie not a zero sum game then there would be no unemployment.
But unbounded Total production capacity "impossible" due to the fact that production must balance Demand and that would be that Demand would be unbounded.
Planned obsolescence, ponzi real estate growth, black holing production are tricks we have played over time to keep Demand and thus Production up but eventually a plateu is reached.
The real argument though that plagues economy discussion and from which all arguments stem is: Demand drives Production? or Production drives Demand?. Me I think its like EM waves, They are entangled in a lockstep and this is why economy behaves in a wavelike pattern. Differential equations have not yet reached the minds of economists, math is too hard I guess.

I think I did correct my myopia in the subsequent reply to him. And I think the points reached sort of a stalemate. I don't dismiss his point, but if that white paper above is our concern, then none of the software we use is trustworthy. Okay I understand the point that doing something once and we all have to rely on that, is different than we all each download our software and run diverse hardware. But is it? Seems we all are running the hardware made by Intel and all the download links run through routers controlled by TPTB.

So all-in-all, I accepted his point. I think anonymity is a clusterfuck. Given the way Zerocash's forum treated me (they removed all my posts after they realized I was explaining serious flaws and challenges), I don't expect any success from them either.

I'd like to move on away from anonymity. Maybe one day in the future we could make some mixers based on Zerocash (long after their effort has faded into the dust) and maybe use it for some few esoteric uses for anonymity. But reliable anonymity on a widescale is unfortunately a delusion that even I had to finally come to grips with. Sad to say.

As for unreliable anonymity, I can do that now with Bitcoin. I just go use an unregistered wireless network connection. Eventually that will be impossible, but for now it is available in some jurisdictions.

If someone could identify a use for ring mixing that applied to businesses who don't mind if the NSA is tracking their privacy, then perhaps I could be convinced there is a market. But as I wrote before, the NSA has employees and those employees can't be trusted to not sell your privacy to your competitors. Corruption is the rule, not the exception. A mouse will always eat the cheese.

I start to comprehend now how it might be true when Martin Armstrong says we might descend into a Dark Age.

The only way I can think to fight back now is go for popularity and control in the hands of the people. Win the political war.

I have to agree with Yakamoto that examining ideas by their body count is certainly an interesting viewpoint. Battles over the right to property undoubtedly have killed many any era of history is full of examples.

However, the the push for individual rights in the Renaissance including property rights facilitated the both the Enlightenment and later Industrial revolutions. Without solid property rights it is unlikely society would have advanced to anywhere near the point is has today. Investment in a factory cannot happen if the investor is not confident his capital will be protected.      


I will concede the point that body count alone is an insufficient metric to judge the merits of an idea. However, it remains a significant data point. For ideas with a known high body counts like communism the onus is on its promoters demonstrably prove some massive society wide benefit that justifies the carnage.

I am not really following your argument thaaanos. You state that productivity is not a virtue that brings entitlements to wealth implying that those who are productive should be taxed and their excess productivity transferred to those who produce less and then you state that those who increase total productivity deserve their wealth. All productive individuals increase total productivity either by reducing the cost of their product or by freeing/pushing less efficient competitors to explore other activities. You stated above that productivity is a zero sum game. This conceptualization appears at least on cursory examination to be false. Perhaps that is the the core of our disagreement?    

That is nonsense, you are talking about fascism , not capitalism.

In capitalism you dont need to wage war to expand, in a real free market you just accodomate your price to your supply.  You expand through success not violence.

If you have little resources, price will go up, just as simple as that. But with technology, you can make things efficient.


Corporations are a fascist tool.

That's actually kind of an interesting way to rank ideas, based on body count, but at the same time they're both very different, as they should be.

I would argue each has the same body count, communism is comprised primarily of enemies of the state and civilians due to the lack of care that occurs in such communist states, using the USSR and Communist China as an example. This can be argued however.

Capitalism's body count is comprised mainly of soldiers (and a small portion civilian deaths) due to the warfare that occurs due to the need to expand or control more resources, due to the influence of corporations on Governments.

I wouldn't take that as the primary way to compare it, but that's just my idea as to how it would hypothetically work.



Personally, I think it all comes down to how much the idea of reward for the amount of work or creativeness is valued. Bill Gates got to where he is because he created an item which has become highly valued, but at the same time he didn't necessarily work as hard as everyone else to get to where he was.

Ah, good. I used it myself to illustrate the scale of them to a couple of relatives who aren't into finance.

Yes that one, thanks you very much.

I was going to show that picture to a friend, because he doesnt believe me that the 1.6 quadrillion derivatives exist

Was this the one?

http://money.visualcapitalist.com/all-of-the-worlds-money-and-markets-in-one-visualization/

For me the only entitlement to wealth goes to the one that increases the total productivity and pushes the pareto boundary further. In that sense Bill Gates fortune is well deserved but it also means that Linus should be equally awarded.

Communism, Fascism, Capitalism they are Ideas. Ideas kill... always  You really want to rate Ideas by body count? How many kills the Right to Property has?

Note I am more on herbals now (curcumim, moringa, bitter melon, and mangosteen) and VitD3 seems to have been addressing the symptoms of my conjectured bile obstruction and not the root cause. Careful with high dose VitD3, there are painful potential outcomes (kidney stones).

I work out 6-7 days a week and take multi-vits twice a day... it keeps you going good and mind sharp.

I`m not sure what this has to do with economics but I agree with you.

If women are bleeding and losing many minerals, they need to reload those minerals into their body.

I`m also taking in magnesium capsules, it absolutely helps relieve stress and gives you a better mood.

I was having a milder relapse yesterday, so I upped my vitamin D3 dosage to 100,000 IU (and copious water intake) then slept a solid 6 hours. All indications are that my symptoms respond to high dose vitamin D3 and none of the other numerous remedies I experimented with since 2012.

Interesting that filipinos are suffering deficiency, not only because of office jobs, but also because they hate to be their natural brown color and want to be white like us (they go so far as to bleach their skin!).

http://manilastandardtoday.com/mobile/2014/05/19/3-out-of-5-filipinos-suffer-from-vitamin-d-deficiency

This sort of self-help health information is an example of the Knowledge Age in action. There are business opportunities right now for someone to market vitamin D3 as a cure for many ailments. I guarantee you it cures menstruation pain. Every time a lady has this pain coming on, I offer her 5000 IU of vitamin D3 and her pain subsides within an hour. Do you know how much women hate that monthly pain?

Hey guys can somebody give me the link again to that article about global derivaties. It was in the economist or london times or some other big newspaper, and it was an illustration that compared stock markets, bitcoin, gold and other markets to the total global derivative market, and it was illustrated in a picture.

Can some1 give me the link again please?

This sounds awfully close to the ideas promoted by Communism. Productivity is not a virtue that brings entitlements to wealth? Enforcing that would seem to require nothing less then the total abolishment of private property along with some form of totalitarian government to enforce the redistribution.


Communism has been tried. In every attempt to date it failed and killed millions.

Productivity is not a virtue that brings entitlements to wealth, productivity is a zero sum game within the pareto boundary, for one to produce more some one else needs to produce less, therefore increasing ones productivity comes with a cost to someone else. so it should be increasingly harder to produce more just in par with the increasing justification of the need to be more productive. Claiming that just because one is productive should be entitled to more, is like claiming that people prefer not to be productive,and also denying that healthy humans have a basic need of self actualization.
If anyone should be entitled to more it should be people having dully boring jobs so that the rest can follow their life's dream or "doing what they love"

Secondary taxation ie VAT, Assets tax, Real estate tax, should be not considered as primary funding channels but as a tool for a state to enforce policy ie like Carbon Tax, ideally those types of taxes would display and cover the hidden costs and risks for the public by the respective economic activity.
The Income tax is imo the primary funding channel and also a redistribution tool in a society in order to cover public infrastructure and the means for the citizens to be able to produce not only money but other non monetized capital, ie human capital, culture, etc. In that sense it should follow a power law, not flat.
Finally public investment should be funded by issuing debt. If the investment is fruitful the debt remains essentially increasing money supply, if investment fails debt should be written off essentially decreasing money supply

A state or any other group cannot be governed by anything else than a top down management, its the decision/policy making that we should demand to be bottom up. Not having a top down management is a vacuum of power.

"Man is the measure of all things" not Algorithms, something crypto designers should start taking into account.