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Pfhorrest

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They're already paying the inflated price. The inflated price is the current market price. But that money they pay now goes to someone else. If that s...
December 03, 2020 at 07:18
So either the workers sell the product at the inflated price to other workers and keep the profit for themselves, and all the other workers do the sam...
December 03, 2020 at 06:34
:up:
December 03, 2020 at 06:07
The people who do the work produce it, just as they do now; they just get to keep all of what they produce, instead of some parasites siphoning it off...
December 03, 2020 at 06:05
Only because money is concentrated in so few hands (those of the banks) to begin with. If the capital of the world was spread around more or less even...
December 03, 2020 at 05:19
Yes, and it's your answers in admiration of them that make me anticipate your opinions on the institutes of capitalism:
December 02, 2020 at 05:55
Your general stance of seeming to think that the super-rich got there by meritocratic means would suggest a likelihood that you don’t believe that the...
December 02, 2020 at 04:30
I didn’t assume that just because of that question, but because of the impression I get from your other posts in this thread.
December 02, 2020 at 02:03
For simplicity, just picture money as energy. Stuff only happens when energy flows from concentrated areas out to less concentrated areas. That increa...
December 01, 2020 at 23:53
A free market is one in which all trades are uncoerced. I consider certain kinds of contract, including those of rent and interest, to be coercive bec...
December 01, 2020 at 23:36
In my view introverts are the emotionally balanced people: those who neither need constant emotional support from others nor need others to vent their...
December 01, 2020 at 20:55
In an ideal world, no, but you’re missing the point: I’m against “government regulation” that you’re probably in favor of, government action that bene...
December 01, 2020 at 20:16
December 01, 2020 at 10:19
On Hempel's dilemma: there's really more of a trilemma there, which illustrates why one fork of the supposed dilemma is clearly superior, even though ...
December 01, 2020 at 07:52
Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Econophysics And especially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoeconomics Also, from a future thread of mine: ...
December 01, 2020 at 06:12
I'm using investing as the clearest example, but generalizing the principle to risk in general. Someone with enough money can afford to invest in a bu...
December 01, 2020 at 05:34
I have become more comfortable with risk as I’ve built up a safety net and can afford to lose a bit before I start winning. (And I am looking for a ne...
December 01, 2020 at 03:43
It’s just a way of speaking in terms of statistics, exactly like distribution of ability. A uniform distribution means the quantity in question is equ...
December 01, 2020 at 02:42
I can’t think of any real-world examples of biological organisms doing that. That was just a hypothetical on my part. Glad to see you responding to fe...
December 01, 2020 at 01:37
If we had equal distribution of opportunity, we would expect a normal distribution of outcome, to match the normal distribution of abilities. But in t...
December 01, 2020 at 01:35
(to the tune of “We’re Number One!”) We’re not the worst! We’re not the worst! We’re not the worst!
December 01, 2020 at 00:17
Causal closure isn’t so much a hypothesis as it is a definition: anything that has a physical effect is considered a physical thing. Since dark matter...
November 30, 2020 at 21:46
You can have a change in entropy without a change in PE, but you can’t have a change in PE without a change in entropy. Or more to the point here, if ...
November 30, 2020 at 21:14
Your counterexample is including the inside of the volume and its surrounding environment as the system under consideration. In that case, energy rema...
November 30, 2020 at 01:38
I agree completely. :up:
November 30, 2020 at 01:00
A hot volume of gas does actually weigh more than a cold one per E=mc^2. Mass is not just in elementary particles but in the interactions between them...
November 29, 2020 at 21:00
I agree that there is a question that is a personal emotional one, but it’s separate from the moral question; yet the possible answers to it follow th...
November 29, 2020 at 16:42
Okay good, so we agree on that front. Having a store of potential energy is the same thing as there being an energy gradient to exploit. For example i...
November 29, 2020 at 08:12
Are you differentiating “animate vs inanimate” from “living vs nonliving”? I took them to be synonyms for our purposes, in which case a definition of ...
November 29, 2020 at 06:10
Using what units? If you plot distance in lightyears and time in years, position over time at the speed of light draws a 45 degree slope. If you plot ...
November 29, 2020 at 00:16
Something like this is, I think, the main error underlying pretty much all philosophical error: that the only alternatives are either abject nihilism ...
November 28, 2020 at 22:33
Okay, that makes more sense of the von Neumann quote which otherwise didn’t seem connected to what you were saying, which I thought was about reproduc...
November 28, 2020 at 01:56
Thanks so much! Should have guessed you would be the one to ask about this.
November 28, 2020 at 01:09
It sure sounds like one, but I'm not sure if I'm remembering it accurately, or if there's anymore specific source than just "Zen Buddhists".
November 27, 2020 at 22:50
I thought that crystals were excluded from my definition because a crystal is not in itself a machine. Crystals are lower-entropy than other arrangeme...
November 27, 2020 at 22:25
My own definition of life is very similar to yours, so I think you're on the right track at least. My definition hinges on the physics concept of a "m...
November 27, 2020 at 20:35
There’s an old adage that a philosophy professor related to me once (if anyone knows the source of this please let me know it). It went something like...
November 27, 2020 at 09:22
So your argument is that panprotopsychism should not count as a kind of kind of panpsychism because panprotopsychism is actually a plausible view but ...
November 27, 2020 at 06:56
I meant the pattern recognition thing this time too. By "directly" I mean that music is composed of patterns that are not the naturally-occurring patt...
November 27, 2020 at 06:41
Adults are selfish too. And if anything I was happier being alone as a child than I have been as an adult. I could entertain myself for untold ages as...
November 27, 2020 at 00:28
Now that I have a moment to elaborate further: I see the primary axis as from abstract language to practical trades, and philosophy bridges those two ...
November 27, 2020 at 00:09
https://geekofalltrades.org/codex/images/fields.png
November 26, 2020 at 23:12
I think my theory can and does explain how music can invoke such strong emotional states, since it's directly pushing emotional buttons normally trigg...
November 26, 2020 at 22:14
I agree and didn't mean anything contrary to that. Rather, that moral principles (including those regarding freedom) apply to commerce as much as they...
November 26, 2020 at 09:38
The adult mindset is basically the child's mindset plus many years of scars and trauma. I was fortunate enough to be spared from a lot of that scarrin...
November 26, 2020 at 07:43
I see it rather as framing the foundations of commerce in social terms. Such that if you are doing nothing, you are doing nothing wrong, which is as i...
November 25, 2020 at 21:30
It is not just freedom-to that matters but freedom-from. This is the difference between liberty rights and claim rights: the former is having to oblig...
November 25, 2020 at 18:28
:up: Since you liked that short quip so much, I thought you might enjoy some more fleshed out versions too: ---- When it comes to tackling questions a...
November 25, 2020 at 06:44
It’s absolutely like that. We don’t need to appeal to God to compare our experiences and come to an unbiased consensus on what is real, nor do we need...
November 24, 2020 at 06:00
...which is only an argument at all if you think induction works already, which is why that makes the argument circular. I think a pragmatic argument ...
November 24, 2020 at 04:50