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20 March 2014

Our Culture: Investing in Money

I believe there is such a thing as a perfect economy. This would be an economy running smoothly enough to be incapable of further growth, and not inclined to diminish.

A perfect economy implies that there be full market share of all businesses, especially banks. Banks are particularly important, because they fund new ideas (represented by entrepreneurs), and a full market share in this area implies no new ideas are currently available.

Full market share for businesses also means that business operations are sustainable. This means, among other things, that profits come from robust, sustainable growth. By robust, here, I mean that profits come from genuine market share, and not from, for instance, slashing costs and burning through third-world labor. Such cost-cutting techniques do not produce robust nor sustainable profits. Robust growth comes from opening new markets and increasing shares in old markets.

Now what I'm saying basically rests on what I consider to be a robust assumption: that it is possible to gain a maximum market share. I think not only that this is possible, but also that a lot of companies have already achieved this given today's economy.

Another implication has to do with the value of money. Money, itself being a commodity, also has a maximum share of market. It also must be managed in sustainable ways promoting robust growth. This sustainable growth responsibility lies with all of us, from ordinary consumers to Exxon-Mobil.But this is not to say that we need to be overly concerned with income inequality. Barking about income inequality is largely barking up the wrong tree, because the nature of new ideas is that they tend to concentrate wealth for their creators. However, if income inequality is produced by burning through labor resources by exploiting the poor, your wealth is not robust. I can handle inequality, provided the poor are not exploited. Inequality must be based on the production of new, valuable ideas.

Now all this is not to say that infinite growth is impossible, or that society must be stratified between rich and poor. On the contrary, infinite growth is definitely possible, but it must be robust, and rooted in such things as the continued evolution of the human mind and body, not in exciting, new opportunities, of which there are probably a finite number at any given moment. As for stratification, there will always be motion in markets, which implies liquidity in assets, including human ones. And anyway, I think we owe it to ourselves as human beings to offer the opportunity to all of us to live either simply or complexly, as we choose.

05 March 2014

The Value of Bitcoin

I've seen it said one or two places that the value of bitcoin is in its anonymity, or its lack of corruption due to the lack of centralized banking. I don't believe this to be the case. Dollar transactions can be anonymous, too, and gold has no central bank, but the value of bitcoin is different than the value of gold or dollars. I think the value of bitcoin has to do with the nature of the tangible thing which is coined.

Dollars are pieces of paper with art printed on it. The art is printed in such a way that it is difficult to forge. The value of the dollar is enforced by the United States government, and the open market. It can go up or down, depending on the quality of things bought with it. When a thing is put into circulation in the open market, the value of the dollar is affected by the amount people are willing to pay for the thing. If the thing contributes to the value of the economy, then the value of the dollar goes up.

The value of the dollar bill itself that you carry in your pocket depends on its availability for use in transactions. This depends on the armored vehicles, bank vaults, printing centers, and so forth which manage and create dollar bills. As a physical thing, it is very difficult to create and very difficult to transport when compared to bitcoins. Bitcoins are easy to create and to transport. But they are comparatively more difficult to transfer. It is more difficult to pull a bitcoin out of your wallet and hand it to someone else than it is to pull a dollar out of your pocket and hand it to someone else.

The overhead of transportation and creation of bitcoins is very low, while the overhead of transferrence is very high. This indicates a couple things for the value of bitcoins. For one, complex, long-distance infrastructure of transactions are easy to maintain, provided the "buy it now" attitude is not too highly stressed. I believe this means that bitcoins are good for small, independent businesses that deal primarily in quality of service and quality of product, while dollars are good for more simple, standardized businesses like franchises that deal in immediate products where the quality and service doesn't carry too high a premium. Dollars are good where things remain the same, as with MacDonalds. Bitcoins are good for where things are different, as with Main St. Pawn.

What is needed currently for the value of bitcoin to be optimized, I think, is a decentralized banking infrastructure. This banking infrastructure would provide backing for the businesses that choose to use the bitcoin, so that they are all benefitted by the growth of the bitcoin economy. What I'm talking about is a radically decentralized system of investment banking that anyone can use but that promotes wise investment. Something that connects investors in a way that does not require a "stock market" or any other kind of limiting institution which tries to rule out companies to invest in. This would have to simultaneously fulfill the needs of an investment community of small, diverse businesses, and also prevent "boom/bust" cycles in the bitcoin economy. If such a system were developed, bitcoin would be a great boon to the artisans and small business owners that make up the middle class.

23 February 2014

Clarification of Psychiatry: What It Is and What to Do About It

Psychiatry is the following two-fold act:

Part 1: Inventing discrimination.
Step 1: The psychiatrist picks out people he doesn't like based on their behaviors.
Step 2: Everything the psychiatrist doesn't like is labelled part of an illness.
Step 3: Every side-effect caused by the medications prescribed is labelled part of the illness.
Step 4: Pretend, with no evidence, that all things labelled part of the illness are a chronic, incurable, biological, genetic disease, and that the only treatment is medications which, in fact, cause all the behaviors described as part of the illness.

Part 2: Brainwashing.
Step 1: Isolate someone from their friends and family. Give them no contact to the outside world. Take away their posessions. Treat them as inferiors.
Step 2: Reprogram them to convince them all pleasure is bad and all pain is good.
Step 3: Hurt them over and over again.
Step 4: Release them into the world, finally, when they have given up on life.

It is my belief that all psychiatrists must be professionally disabled, and disallowed from doing their profession. There are a list of concrete rules, directed at psychiatrists, which would prevent them from doing their discriminatory and harmful jobs and which are based on pure common sense. Here are some:

  1. Everyone in a mental hospital must have the same rights as people in a physical hospital. E.g. cell phones, Bible study, hugging, computers, exchanging notes, publishing written material for distribution, etc. are to be allowed.
  2. You are not allowed to punish anyone for legal activities. You are only allowed to punish people through recourse to the law, for illegal activities.
  3. You are not allowed to claim something is "scientific" or "known" unless it has been shown to be experimentally valid through scientific experiments. Science is in the business of determining causation, not engaging in wild, baseless speculation. Consequently, none of the data in psychiatric journals as of this writing is to be drawn from, because they all postulate biological and genetic causation for behaviors when no causal link has been established.
  4. You are not allowed to prescribe medication chronically as the sole treatment for mental behaviors which probably have psychological causes. You are not allowed to cause brain damage just because you don't like someone's behavior.

If we as a society followed even just one of these rules, psychiatry would be completely defanged and psychiatrists wouldn't be able to find a job, because their profession would be rendered obsolete.

22 January 2014

Thoughts about Anonymous's Project V

This is a clarification of Anonymous's new project, "Project V." This came on the heels of their "Operation V," the goal of which was apparently to take over the United States government.

I've noticed, just looking around at society today, that there are thugs involved in my government and perhaps corporations and so forth, taking things over and not really doing positive actions or behaving in an awake manner. So I'm not at all surprised that there is a movement to try to take over the government, or to protest the government. I support a lot of what these people do.

The reason I support many of the people who fight government and corporations and so forth is because of the thuggishness I've seen. The thuggishness itself is the first part. The second part is the fact that thuggishness is not merely the natural, human sort — an understandable sort which you can expect to be some part of any society — but something which is slowly becoming law. We cannot have "thug law." Thug law, in this case, involves people in office, and running corporations, who don't care about listening to other people, especially the people they affect. Thug law involves things being created for their own purpose, to multiply like viruses, such as cash or even money, or such as government regulations, or psychiatric harm.

A commodity is produced in a factory not for its own sake, but in order to be sold to someone else. However, it seems an awful lot like many of the people running these corporations would be satisfied if the product is produced for its own sake. In other words, the attitude is that it's about the product itself, and promoting the product itself, rather than about listening to what the consumer wants.

This doesn't happen everywhere, but it does happen in the case of food, for instance. Food today is produced for the purpose of food being produced and sold, not for the purpose of feeding people. There is an important difference between the two, and we need to start rethinking the way we do things to promote feeding people instead of producing and selling food. Similarly, transportation seems to be about producing and selling gasoline, not about transporting people. Energy production seems to be about producing and selling raw materials, not making energy. Our corporations are sick.

Now that I've talked a bit about what I agree with about Anonymous, I'd like to share what I disagree with.

Consider the idea of a revolution. What is a revolution? The idea is that you're getting rid of a society, and replacing it with a new one. But if you examine it closely, the idea becomes less and less clear. What do you want to revolutionize? Just the executive government? We do that every eight or so years. What about the law? Are we trying to change the law? Well, perhaps we are, but we can change the law in a couple of ways: by changing the letter of the law, or changing how it's enforced. If we change the letter of the law, then we get into the problem of semantics, which means we may have changed nothing unless we change how it's enforced. If we change how it's enforced, though, we have a problem there, too. Who enforces? Who enforces law against the enforcers? In a sense, the people enforcing the law are embodiments of the law. But are we changing just the people themselves? How do we control against merely switching out one corrupt judge or peace officer for another? Either we have to use the law to control this, in which case we're going in circles again, or we have to change the underlying society which educates and produces the judges.

But how do we change society? Are we changing the actual minds of the people themselves? Are we giving them more education? Education of what? What do they already know? What don't they know? Is it really about what they think they know, or how they behave? How do we change the way people behave? And are we changing a group of people, or changing people one-on-one? And where do we stop? Should we just switch out everyone we don't like and throw the old people in jail? If so, what makes us any better than the oppressors? Or should we let everyone be as they are and work out their own problems? If it is this, how is our movement a revolution?

I don't think we need a revolution. I think we need loyal opposition parties, and we need perhaps a simplification of our culture. But you can't have a loyal opposition party and a revolution at the same time. And a simplification of something doesn't involve the introduction of new elements. That's what you do when you want to make things more complex. What we need is to go back to our roots, and instead of wildly thrashing about and making more new ideas and stuff, we need to be satisfied with a simple understanding of how things work. Instead of choosing more stuff, choose the right stuff. This sounds like an economic idea, but really it applies to government as well. We should be more conservative about how we run our government. We should be conservative about how we run our churches as well. The only thing we shouldn't be conservative about is helping other people. But remember: help doesn't come in the form of money. I am not a socialist. As soon as you start thinking that help comes in the form of money, you begin producing money for the sake of producing money, which is exactly the kind of problem which I see today that needs to change. We need to help people live. In every sector of our society. That's what we need to do. And a lot of what the resistance people in our society are doing is just that. But I don't think they see it that way, and they really should.