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I believe the argument is just ”my job can be performed from home”. It’s not about entitlement, it is about making ones life easier without additional downside to your employer. You might disagree with the no downside part but that is orthogonal to the entitlement argument.

This was a very pleasant read. The part about crossing the chasm really resonated with me. It’s something you try once In a while and always you get pulled back to the side you started on.

This is just hateful. The same point could have been made without kicking someone who is down.

Some (myself included) reject the premise that the designer and benefactor of the agreement has the right to define the usage of ’thing’.

We are talking about intangibles here (often described by the politically and philosophically loaded term intellectual property) I find it unreasonable to treat them as private physical property. It restricts the true potential of the digital, i.e virtually zero distribution costs.

In my view, digital content resembles a ’commons’ in their use and cultural significance. I believe the interest of IP-holders should take a back seat to the far more important free flow of information.

”Intellectual property” has always been stolen and copied and I would argue that the world is better of that way. So much of our art and technology would not exist without these ”thefts”. Intellectual property is only property because a state uses its monopoly on violence to enforce someones monopoly on an idea/concept/information. It is not because of any divine right of an owner to restrict what others do with intangible objects of information.

Also, there is a spectrum. No one would think it just if the Fourier transform was subject to licensing.

This is not the forum for clever one liners in response to engaging and earnest responses. Please add to the discussion instead of devolving it.

I strongly disagree that QE policies and central banking are socialist. In fact, I would argue that QE, as it has been enacted since its inception after the collapse of Japan’s credit bubble, is closer to the opposite since it strengthens capital’s control over labour. The mechanisms of which are asset price inflation, financialization, austerity which reduces spending on public goods, poor wage growth, and so on. These are all examples of capital increasing its power while labour loses power. I agree the policy choice is terrible, but I don’t see how they can be construed as socialist.

Also, keep in mind that the theoreticial justifications for these policies do not originate in socialist/marxist economics. Nor are the technocrats that implement them motivated by socialist theory.

It seems the only connection that exist is that central banking is central (so is the military) and that marxist-leninist regimes make heavy use of centralism. Central banking predates all such regimes, by the way. But that seems like a superficial connection that does nothing to elucidate. I disagree heavily with QE but labeling it socialist does not help in understanding it so that I may effectively oppose it.

Are you suggesting we accept human misery and injustice as necessary evils? Or are you advocating for change as these problems are endemic to modern manufacturing?

Giving people more money (i.e tie wages to increase in productivity) is demand side economics.

Supply side economics is increasing the amount of available goods regardless of demand. The lagging wages are mitigated by credit, i.e. debt.

It is interesting that you think that Piketty, who has studied growth extensively, has not considered the positive sum aspects of the economy. If you read his books you will see him talk about it in excruciating detail.

It is an example of how to think outside the constraints of scarcity when dealing with immaterial ”property”.

But if you are looking for individual artists there’s Patreon.

I’m sure people can think of reasons why Patreon does not fulfill some criteria which to them is important for a healthy artistic community. After all, people are imaginative. What I’m encouraging you to do is to use that imagination to think of ways to embrace digital abundance, instead of trying to shoehorn the property rights that humans constructed to distribute physical goods onto something inherently non-physical.

If humanity can not handle the virtually infinite supply of digital goods without artificially enforcing scarcity, what does that say about us?

Good question. I think I can best answer this by example:

People get paid to develop Blender. Blender even has an in house film studio, with paid artists. The software and artwork is made available for free. No artificial scarcity is imposed. And no one is starving.

Trying to emulate the restrictions of the material realm is the wrong direction.

Lack of scarcity is the unique selling point of the digital. I think future generations will look back at the madness of manufacturing scarcity because society refused to adapt to abundance.

I don’t know what anecdote you are referring to, I did not mention one. I did not even make a statement of agreement or disagreement with the original comment. I just pointed out that I did not see a logical inconsistency.

As for your claim that higher class males avoid trades: yes of course. That is actually a great example of what I mean. People factor in social norms in their decision making, be it male or female.

I’m in agreement here.

I would argue that I’m neither infantilizing women nor blaming every outcome on society. I never mentioned a cabal of men. It seems you are reading in many themes that are not present in my comment.

I believe that norms shape behaviour, that is the extent of my claim.

I do not necessarily agree with the original post’s statement but this response seems confused to me.

Few female applicants to trade schools is consistent with the original statement. If it is societally unacceptable for a woman to be a plumber then I would expect women to act as any rational agent and factor this in when planning their future career.

I'm really curious how a managerial hierarchy of 40 works in practice. If a manager is responsible for a headcount of 2 then GE would have 2^40 = ~1 trillion employees. Since this is obviously not possible then what does the org chart of a firm with 40 levels of hierarchy look like.

Any system that wants to identify a pattern will have false positives and negatives.

In this case we can’t accurately identify cases where a user has legitimate cause for refund without false positives letting through a few abusive users.

The decision to be made is whether we skew the system to be in favor of the corporation or the consumer.

In this age where we no longer own the software we run I find it strange when people advocate for less protection of the digital goods they use.

I'm very curious about the ethics of early retirement. Forgone consumption seems like a reasonable justification. But surely there is a limit? If I retire by early and through compounding interest amass a fortune that would allow my children to retire before they even enter the work force, is that ethical?

Similar scenario: I take up arms to aid the king and in turn ensure stability and peace for society. The land I'm given as compensation allow my lineage to live as nobility for centuries. Is that ethical?

I'm making hyperboles not to discount your logic but to show an extreme and try to pinpoint where the limit is. For what its worth, I'm saving quite aggressively and live very modestly for the sole purpose of increasing my leisure, perhaps to retire early. So I am obviously not making this argument as a way to bash FIRE practitioners. I am genuinely curious about the ethical implications of compounding rewards for legitimate sacrifice. Of course someone who works hard in their youth without consuming should be able to retire earlier without guilt. Though I think Warren Buffett is on to something in his disdain for dynastic wealth.

Sorry, I misunderstood you.

Were you convinced with that defence? In any case, he must understand that his usage of the word is inflammatory and will be perceived as mainly racially contingent. As long as he is aware that people will assume racist intent when he uses the n word his claim is entirely invalidated.

I mean, if I called a disabled person retarded and claimed that I am simply referring to his declining state of acceleration I doubt anyone will let that pass. Two people are involved in an insult, the insulter and the insulted. The insulter can't define the meaning as if words exist in a vacuum. The insulted is free to take offence at perceived intent if this perception falls within the realm of reasonable possibility.

You mean that he asserted that his use of the n-word only had behavioural and socioeconomic implications and not racial?

He might honestly intend it that way but I feel like he is very misguided. He could use the n-word to target someone with a PhD and see if his assertion holds. Would the targeted person respond with confusion as he does not fit the bill? Or would he interpret the slur for what it is, a word most often used to denigrate someone for their skin tone.

I assume you are using this anecdote as a counterargument against my claim that redneck is more classist than racial. My response would be to point out that white people frequently call other white people rednecks. Surely it would be absurd to think that white people do this to disparage whiteness. There is, in my mind, a racial qualifier when using redneck but the racial qualifier is not the insult.

I subscribe to a descriptive rather then a prescriptive view of language. It is "reasonable" to use a term if the usage conforms to how the term is understood by the people using it.

In Sowell's case he uses the term to make a point. The white connotations of "redneck" is apparent as it conveys his thesis that blacks in America got their culture from rural whites.

My point is not that "redneck" is not a racial slur because it could hypothetically be used against non-whites. I guess it can but I have never heard it in practice, save for Sowell's rhetorical use. My point is rather that a white person can use it against another white person, in a derogatory manner, without invoking statements about racial inferiority. In the majority of cases that I've heard someone use the term "redneck" it is one white person insulting another white person's behaviour or background. Clearly this implies something like classism rather than racism.

Speaking of Thomas Sowell, I think he is mistaken regarding black culture. James B. Stewart has formulated a good critique of his stance, if you are interested.

Perhaps but lets remember why it is rightfully separated from other more controversial slurs. Call me a redneck and I would mostly be confused as I am not a 1. uneducated, 2. rural, 3. from the American south, 4. poor. It is an insult for sure, and is mostly (perhaps exclusively) directed towards white people. Though it has a lot of qualifiers that in my view make it more of a classist insult rather than a racial slur.

I'm not condoning its use, just pointing out why it is in an entirely different ball park than the N-word, which when used implies an inherent racial inferiority that is simply not present in the term redneck. In fact, the classist connotation of 'redneck' implies that there are different types of 'whites' that take into account their background and behavior. The n-word, or similar slurs, reduces a person to only their race. I mean, the word simply means black. Even if redneck as a term applied to me I'd rather be insulted over my socioeconomic status rather than some unavoidable defect inherent to my pigmentation.

I'm assuming you are being facetious in order to highlight an alleged absurdity of the suggestion. Though in reality the suggestion seems quite sensible to me.

Where I am, we've been under the effect of a pretty steep tax on plastic grocery bags that get noticeably passed along to the consumer. The result, from my personal experience, seems to have been a widespread adoption of tote bags. These last a very long time, 5+ years in my own experience. It has not resulted in a decrease in supermarket visits, to the best of my knowledge.

Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding your comment.

It erodes social cohesion. When I went to elementary school in Sweden I shared a classroom with both a child that came to our country has a refugee and another whose parent sat in parliament. Different social classes intermingled frequently. While there are clear class divisions in Sweden, the distances are not so great. There is a sense of security that comes with a more equal society that I think can't be replicated by any other means. I think that once you've lived in a fairly equal society, though Scandinavia does have its shortcomings, it is hard to excuse inequality.

How does Bezos harm you? I don't want to put the blame squarely on his shoulders but I would like to point out an apparent dynamic. When a class of people are decoupled from the issues the majority faces the outcome is resentment. Recordbreaking growth for billionaires while many are suffering their most trying year to date is creating tension.

There is definitely a narrative that can explain why Bezos fortune is rightfully his down to the last cent and why he is a net positive in this world. And it wouldn't necessarily be incorrect. However you can't avoid the fact that his wealth is manifasted as unaccountable power. A society plagued by unaccountable power, which is what I believe that inequality ultimately is, is not healthy.

To clarify the intent of my original content, I'm referring to wealth vs income with regards to the obscenely wealthy. As you've pointed out, risk is generally very low for billionaires. The ELOCs that they utilize for credit have very generous terms as the sheer amount of assets all but guarantee that the debt can be serviced.

What I'm trying to get at is that while the distinction of wealth and income is very palpable for wage earners such as myself, it is less so for billionaires. Throughout my life my wealth will consist mostly of my primary residence and retirement portfolio. I can't really use that for my day to day consumption. But if a billionaire can get an ELOC against a portion of their stock portfolio and use it to purchase yachts, cars and whatever tickles their fancy then their wealth enables behaviour that renders the lack of liquidity irrelevant.

Seems that the most common retort in this thread is to hammer down on the principle that unrealised gains should not be taxed.

This is directly addressed in the article. Unrealised gains can still work as collateral for loans. The spending habits appear as if your unrealised gains were bonafide income. At what point does the distinction between wealth and income become arbitrary?

There seems to be a large amount of "missing the point" in this thread. As a wage labourer my wealth growth is significantly hampered by taxation. For the small group of people with net worth tied up in financial assets, taxation doesn't slow their growth in any meaningful capacity. If we ignore any ideological predispositions and instead simply ask what limit this system is approaching I think the answer seems terrifying.

A common sentiment here is that inequality is not a problem in and of itself. "How does Bezos wealth possibly impact me?". Having seen the difference in equality in Scandinavia, USA, and South Africa I would beg to differ. Inequality eats at a society at all levels. The rich I met in America seemed less happy than the poor in Sweden. In South Africa even more so.

Yes of course, I'm still assuming USD denominated loans. However repayments may be done in BTC still, unless I'm misunderstanding what legal tender actually is. Even if I, as a creditor, convert my payments from BTC to USD as soon as I can there will be a volatility, right? I wouldn't dare to predict the impact scale but certainly enough to warrant consideration?

Yes, I'd assume that creditors preferring USD would convert but that seems like a non trivial overhead for many creditors. The time between receiving payment and actually converting BTC to USD will surely result in a non-negligible balance difference?

As someone who readily admits to not fully knowing what legal tender entails, I have a question for the optimists:

As I understand it, legal tender status forces creditors to accept bitcoin as debt repayment. Given the volatility of bitcoin, wouldn't this impact risk assessment of loans? Being obligated to accept a high volatility asset as a repayment sounds like a nightmare for creditors. Wouldn't interest rates rise in order to cover this added uncertainty?