This due to that

Various religious scriptures are in its contents, as well as the uttered wisdom of holy men, often boiled down to the slogan ‘do unto others as you would have them do to you’, which is on appearence reasoanle enough.

Did it occur to you that this summation is a good analogue of Axelrod’s game-theoretic strategy of ‘Tit-for-Tat”? This is fascinationg in that the TfT approach to games (i.e. interactions between conscious agents, leading up the ladder to human interaction on a given scale)  is as per current theory, experiment and evidence available, the method of cooperation which in its process is the most stable and as well provides the best results; that is the least conflict.

‘Do unto others…’ may not (seem to) work that well for individuals, but if applied on the larger scale, it is  likely to produce the result of a lasting, low degree of social agression.

The irony of this is of course that successfully applying this on a larger scale is precisely predicated by that of individual adopting it.

Vanquishing the abuser

In re. revenge and injustice: While it is quite normal to feel that you would like to kill a person who have done you harm or a great injustice; keeping in mind the words of the previous post, the most significant way to kill that person is by holding yourself in higher regard than him and by being a greater character of man than him; that way you kill the seed of him that he has implanted in you, when he subjected you to his abuse.

He will die – you will not help his dark seed live on. Is there much grater satisfaction than in knowing this?

You political Bias

Take the test, though do mind that it is US-centric. (As a guideline, I would say that irt. conservative ctr. liberal stances, C. economic opinion would mean lower taxes, curtailed social programs, and less regulation on large companies whereas L. being its oppposite in somewhat higher taxes, more social programs and spending, and more financial regulation. As for social stances, I believe that the C. stance would be less permissiveness of deviance (religion, culture, sexuality, public behavior) and seeking no increase in equality between various specific-identified groups whereas the L. stance would maintain or increase current eqality and permissiveness towards various specific-identidiy groups.)

Enough jabbering, try it out for yourself.

 

Beware your monied relations

You’ve heard not to mix business and pleasure.

That much is true – the degree that you are amicably entangled with customers or clients, this is the potential for that relation to backfire on you the day a deal goes sour. Likewise, the burn will increase in proportion to the amount of money of yours in limbo.

This includes lending money to friends – which I consider moving into the business sphere. If friends are in need money, and you trust them enough to make sensible use of them, give them as a gift, with no strings attached. On the other hand, if they end up spending them idiotically, or being mostly or entirely unable to pay it back as agreed, your mutual friendship takes a hit, unless you are a very patient or rich man. (But if you are rich, why aren’t you giving them as a gift to him? And if you are rich, how many of your friends are really that friends and not sugarcoated leeches? That aside…)

A case where this is especially true, is in your relation to your bank. Never, never, never stray beyond formally courteous relations with your bank advisers or liaisons. The day that you miss a payment or are late in remedying an unexpected overdraft, that is the day that they will be on the spot, charging you a fee, often wildly out of proportion to the ‘infraction’.

You may be a millionaire one day, the day later your fortune is wiped out by a stock ‘correction’ (as they call a drop), market crash, or a leveraged bid gone bad, and you end up with more liabilities than assets. The month after that, the bank is ready to repossess* your house and your car.

Whatever happens, they will be tough as nails, they will not be negotiated with unless you can sell yourself into a repayment plan at an atrocious interest rate. Whatever feel-good you thought you had with your bank guy will be gone like dewdrops in the sun. Ooohhh, the burn.

*(as they call a merciless grab… do we call it to repossess if I do wire fraud or grab a Slaystation at the high-profile games store?)

The Blitz, 75 years in retrospect and perspective

7th of September, 1940 – on this month, it is 75 years since London (and other major United Kingdom cities) started bearing the brunt of the of the Nazi-German ‘Blitz’, a series of massive bombings of industrial facilities, but more known for its purposeful targeting of the civilian populace, aimed at demoralizing the population up to the expected invastion (operation Zeelöwe / Sea Lion) of the island.

While the loss of life was great, with well over 44,000 lives perished, the devastation of the cities was likewise massive. The effect of the Blitz however was the opposite of the intended demoralisation; it galvanised the popular spirit of the war effort under Winston Chuchill’s resistance of the Nazi war machine, which eventually was smashed and the totalitarian system and ideology behind it, utterly crushed.

However the British were not the only ones to suffer the terror of war atrocities – as the tides of war turned, the Allies were increasingly raiding the Nazi production capacity, and one centre of such was Hamburg. The city was air-raided over the span of a week in late July 1943, with terrible conseqences – over 42,000 dead due to firestorms due to incendiary bombs igniting the dry lands, resulting in the formation of a enormous firey vortex that did not only torch the housing like a blast furnace, but claimed lives by the absolute horror of its victims being sucked into the vortex due to the underpressure created by the superheated air rising rapidly into the skies.

Likewise, the raid of Dresden in Feburary 1945 – 70 years ago – was an example of wartime terror, claiming up to 25,000 lives.

In the Sino-Pacific theatre, there was the Rape of Nanking / Nanjing which claimed at he very least 40,000 lives and untold human suffering due to unrestrained rape of it inhabitants at the hands of the Japanese. Conversely, the American firebombing of Tokyo, considered the most destructive conventional air raid in history with at least 88,000 dead and over a million left homeless, the raids on Japan culminating in the Nukes over Nagasaki and Hiroshima with its over 100,000 dead, are likewise examples of the enormuous bloodshed and destruction inherent to war. (Additionally, compare these casualty counts to the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, military and civilian, in the embittered and supremely intense fighting on Iwo Jima and Okinawa).

In war, there will be variations of the brutality on the different sides, but there are no single party that are exempt from perpetrating atrocities.

Link

http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/

An informative indicator of the environmental burden your personal resource use.

Disable cookies, fx. with Privacy Badger to be able to retake it to play around with what weights in the most.

The Pastor that went rogue

We don’t see this often.

After Year Of Atheism, Former Pastor: ‘I Don’t Think God Exists’

‘At the start of 2014, former Seventh-Day Adventist pastor Ryan Bell made an unusual New Year’s resolution: to live for one year without God — this reflecting his own loss of faith. He kept a blog documenting his journey and had a documentary crew following him.

After a year, Bell tells NPR’s Arun Rath, “I’ve looked at the majority of the arguments that I’ve been able to find for the existence of God, and on the question of God’s existence or not, I have to say I don’t find there to be a convincing case, in my view.

This is a remarkable thing – primarily that a human can change a, I would think, deeply held belief, as religion is in its formal and more explicit forms is most often something that is indoctrinated into children by their parents or pushed onto a person by his social circle which makes it awkward to be the lone nail standing out, which induces people to conform (ie. school clique social influence), but moreso that he went full public with it. My hat is certainly off to him.

One of his biggest lessons from the year is “that people very much value certainty and knowing and are uncomfortable saying that they don’t know.” Now he thinks certainty is a bit overrated.

Which is exactly the message that Nicholas Nassim Tabel brought to us  in his ‘Black Swan’ – people are SO afraid to say ‘I don’t know” (and to a lesser degree “I’m not certain”)… because it, in our times, implies ignorance, and in a world where people want certainty, both for the peace of mind in a chaotic, incompassionate world, as well as not wanting to be the nail standing out.

Ryan Bell is that lone nail sticking out – and, in my opinion, for the better.

http://www.npr.org/2014/12/27/373298310/after-year-of-atheism-former-pastor-i-dont-think-god-exists

Another misconception of market prices

From Cafe Hayek I read (and comment on here since the site does not allow such there):

The two shillings of a poor man are just as good as the two shillings of a rich one; and, if we interfere to prevent the commodity from rising out of the reach of the poorest ten, whoever they may be, we must toss up, draw lots, raffle, or fight, to determine who are to be excluded. (Malthus)

Market prices are not arbitrary.  Prices are determined by the forces that economists comprehend with the theory of supply and demand.  An attempt by government to change a price or wage from what that price or wage would be without government price controls at best masks the true price or wage – in the way that dressing up a woman to look like a man at best changes the woman’s outward appearance without altering her chromosomes.  (Many proponents of minimum wages and other price controls – those proponents who deny that such price controls generate negative effects – are victims of the primitive superstition that the superficial appearance of something is the essence of that something.) (Cafe Hayek)

First. Malthus is talking about that the purchasing power at the present moment, next touching upon rationing in the case of a price ceiling put on a good. Initially it is true in that is the purchasing power of two whomever the party that holds those two shillings, though the equal value of these ends there: For the poor man, there are immediate needs to be met – acommodation, food, clothing. This means that for a person with meagre or no savings, the money is his hand is likely to be gone very soon. On the other hand, the rich man (what that word means precisely I won’t go into here, lets just go with ‘loaded’) has his needs well covered, and the money is his hand does not immediately need to cover life necessities, which means they are likely to go into investments, yielding stock dividends, sales profits and other capital income. In short, the money for the poor man will be consumed away rapidly while that of the rich man will accumulate and likely result in linear or even power-law returns (for the while there are no precipituous market crashes).

So no, the two shillings are not the same for two different men (or, I’m afraid to say… men of different classes).

Second. Dan Bordeaux (the owner of blog CF) says that market prices are not arbitrary. That much is true. How goes on to say that prices are formed by laws og price and demand, which is likewise true, but treading into fuzzy terrain, since the immediate snapshot of the D-S curve is that of a continuum (sounds so ice, that word), or you can visualize it as a stretched box whith two lines dancing about within it.

And on the border, and outside that box are conditions and forcings (swiped i from climate science 🙂 upon it that are not known to the experts studying the economic observables inside the box, or the forcings are not well percieved or improperly understood by them.

As for the true price – what is true in the economic sense? The equilibrium price in a world where government influence completely wiped away? So, in the present moment or an arbitrary time in the future How about a government-less world where a monopolist/cartel has attained enough market power to be price makers instead of both sides of the D-S world being price takers (the idealized free market)?

(There is of course the case where government has too much influence on price and where it itself, if not actively becoming a supplier of a certain good, ie. direct market participation, becomes an external price maker. It is this state of affairs that the Austrians object to, and often they are right, but that’s me digressing)

As some of you may know, the Austrians do no take into consideration the economic singularity of natural resources: That they are exhaustible and that those who sit upon them are price makers, ie. have an inordinate market power – or one ultimate so, as shows in the notion of hydraulic despotism.

So that is the free market. To even out these inordinate amounts of market power is not just preventing government from overreaching, or prevent excess capital accumulation amongst the superrich, but it is indeed to prevent the ‘free market’ from turning the world and its population into a free-for-all for the diminishing resources, in which an increasing population (again very Malthusian) will fight harder and more frenetically for lesser and lesser scraps thrown in a calculated manner from the hands of those at the top of the pile.

The freed market will be ones where these (destructive) imbalances are more or less evened out.

Whereas the free market is essentially devoid af an activist government (or any at all), and the population reduced to mere economically-acting (ala Rand’s “Galt’s Gulch”) entities, the freed market needs some degree of intereference from government, and activism and collective action of its citicens. (While it is unpalatable for me to say so, the interference on government level does most likely not be limited to evening out the common resources.)

In closing, Dan makes the same mistake that Thomas Schelling commented on in 1978*, which is that an equilibrium isn’t particularly attractive, which is to say that just because there is an equilibrium achieve for a given good, does not necessarily mean that it is exactly godd, purposeful or satisfying, ie. that it serves a specific purpose (well) for either exchanges in that particlular good, or in the economic environs  surrounding, and perhaps dependent on that.

As for mistaking an apparence for the essence, I’d say Don has fallen into that trap, as well. The free market is that – on the surface.

*Micromotives and Macrobehavior, page 26, Norton Edition.

CC news #1

Twenty-two world-leading marine scientists have collaborated in the synthesis report in a special section of Science journal. They say the oceans are at parlous [sic] risk from the combination of threats related to CO2. They believe politicians trying to solve climate change have paid far too little attention to the impacts of climate change on the oceans.

It is clear, they say, that CO2 from burning fossil fuels is changing the chemistry of the seas faster than at any time since a cataclysmic natural event known as the Great Dying 250 million years ago.

They warn that the ocean has absorbed nearly 30% of the carbon dioxide we have produced since 1750 and, as CO2 is a mildly acidic gas, it is making seawater more acidic. It has also buffered climate change by absorbing over 90% of the additional heat created by industrial society since 1970. The extra heat makes it harder for the ocean to hold oxygen. (This is where the ‘missing heat’ that CC skeptics constantly complain about has gone – there was never a warming hiatus – there just weren’t looking, if looking at all.)

…They warn that the carbon we emit today may change the earth system irreversibly for many generations to come.

It is a certainty, not a possibility.

The marine food source (and sustainability in itself) is being shredded, and with it the the societies and communities that depend on it on this globe.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33369024

 

 

#geek #oldfag #nostalgia

It would seem that on ~this daydate, 25 years ago, I got my first computer, a Commodore Amiga 500. Commodore croaked in ’94, but the Amiga lives on in a quiet alley of the computechnical world… of significantly more gravitas, the works of visuals, music, sheer creative madness and achievement of all these people brought into the world… and its manifold derivatives that made it onto other platforms and modes of human impression and expression… will live forever. Or at least – for a very long time.