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The whole apparatus of economic incentives and state enforcement
In We Don’t Want Full Employment, We Want Full Lives! (h/t Jack Saturday) we find a typical statement of the ideas of post-scarcity, full unemployment, etc. This particular essay stands out from the pack, if nothing else, for this gem of a way of stating the obvious (emphasis, as always, mine): In a sane society,…
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Do you prefer to write notes on paper or on an electronic device?
Paper, of course. Doesn’t need batteries. Nonproprietary. Graphological techniques can in principle be used to verify authorship. Machine readability is important to me, but 100 years from now I expect machine transcription of handwritten texts to be more widely available than CD-ROM drives.
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Quotebag #55
“How come the people who say they worry about SS going broke never worry about the US Armed Forces going broke? Because they WANT SS to go broke.”—Bill Wald “You can’t ‘spend’ your way out of public debt but you can’t cut or save your way out of it either.”—Poor Richard “Disobedience, in the eyes…
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Quotebag #54
“We have a two-party, one-ideology system of governance, and the ideology is one of economic growth at all costs.”—JP Hayes “The problem of pimps is a problem of people. The problem is not merely that a few sociopaths exploit others for their own gain; the problem is that human beings come with built-in exploits, honed…
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Another online ideology sorter
My new-found interest in psychometrics finds some nourishment in CBC’s Vote Compass, a purveyor of a two-dimensional political spectrum where respondents can compare themselves with Ontario’s four somewhat recognized political parties, in anticipation of the upcoming provincial election. It’s a 30-item Likert-scale questionnaire. Here’s a graphic of my result: This survey instrument offers a second…
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Guilty as charged
The question of whether we’re living in the best of all possible worlds is a question of optimization. Optimism and optimization are, of course, closely related words. I find the assertion that we’re living in the best of all possible worlds to be cause for extreme pessimism. I’m probably not the only person who feels…
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Update on the Agnostic Ideology Sorter
While far from finished, the project has jelled somewhat. All the pages except survey.php have been validated for XHTML 1.0 Strict, with survey.php validated for Transitional. I’ve prepared the downloadable zip file of the site source code, with some rudimentary installation instructions, copyleft notice, etc. There’s still no pigeonholing, but I’m now studying things like…
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If you could say anything to anyone without consequence, what would you say, and to whom?
Speech without consequences? What on earth would be the point? It would be completely and utterly pointless, would it not?
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Is price discovery lossless?
What exactly is implied by the claim that prices incorporate all information? How strong a claim is strong efficiency? More specifically, are price signals a form of lossless compression? In other words, is there a way to derive its input data from its output data? If so, I’m waiting to see a step-by-step method for…
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Quotebag #53
“I am optimistic that in 100 years the world will find a new economic system. I am optimistic that this system wont resemble capitalism or socialism at all.”—Rohit “While technology offers solutions to resource problems in theory, in practice it also favors greater stratification of wealth and power. If recent trends continue we may be…