756 karma · joined August 10, 2017
Disclaimer: I am by no means a bonafide cryptopunk. I have contributed very little code and other meaningful technical work to privacy tech projects.
And none of these tell us the population-wide effects of switching to mask-wearing, even for the limited scope that the people in occupations you mention wear masks, would be benign. For example, there is indication that emotional connections between doctors and patients are disrupted by masks:
As for batteries, you don't have to bet on battery advances, just the scaling up of manufacturing, which is already underway.
One can praise Tesla while still acknowledging that it should not be blinded trusted to always work in the public interest, and also while recognizing Tesla's contributions alone are not enough for human civilization to get to zero carbon.
Minimizing how significant Tesla's contribution has been relative to other carmakers', and in fact, the vast majority if not all other companies in general, is not an honest way of addressing these inadequancies and challenges you highlight, and suggests to me a motivation unrelated to environmentalism behind it.
So assuming that most of those two million sales weren't in lieue of the sale, or at least use, of gasoline powered cars, doesn't seem reasonable to me.
But let's be extremely conservative in our praise of Tesla, and say that the company took one million gasoline powered cars off the road and replaced them with electric cars. That is quite the accomplishment if you accept the premise that electric vehicles are better than gasoline-powered ones for reducing the impact on climate.
As for mistakes, the company can afford many small to intermediate missteps and still accomplish what I described, because the company's momentum is already pushing it to accomplish these achievements.
Musk has since long ago pursued a publically disclosed plan for Tesla, for the company to release progressively more affordable electric vehicles, so the current growth rate in number of vehicles sold could very well be sustained for years to come.
Beyond Tesla's own sales, its success has sparked massive investment by other carmakers to push their electric vehicle manufacturing timetables forward. There is no reasonable case to be made that Tesla has not had a massive impact on pushing the world to replace gasoline vehicles with electric ones. And most people consider that to be good for the environment, even if you now don't.
We have no idea the damage that constant mask-wearing could do. This would be a very dangerous experiment, that interferes with basic the human functionality that we are adapted to.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-child-lan...
Novel viruses are exceptionally dangerous, so the severity of COVID-19 infections is not an unusual situation. Influenza, when novel, caused the immensely deadly Spanish flu. We also know how viruses evolve, and how populations adapt to them, and based on that knowledge, we can safely assume that COVID-19 will not remain exceptionally dangerous once it becomes endemic.
Once again, you miss my point, that you yourself have subscribed to this line of argument, where you argue one must accept the greater application of a principle if they accept the lesser application, when you made your snide remark that the original commenter must also reject seatbelt laws. You're also completely ignoring my claim that I've repeatedly witnessed many other anti-libertarians doing the same in relation to COVID restrictions.
Anti-libertarianism is a cause, movement and ideology, and it enables any level of rights violation, subject to the conditions that society finds itself in, because as an ideology, it rationalizes away the principle that we do not have a right to violate human rights. Libertarianism is the absence of this ideology that attempts to rationalize undermining human rights, leaving only the principle that it is morally inexcusable to violate human rights.
Other ways to counter the threat posed by the North Korean state include aiding and encouraging South Korea and Japan in building up their armed forces, as a deterrent to any North Korean attack, and expanding deployments of missile defense systems while increasing funding for the development of more advanced missile defense systems.
Yet another approach could be to apply pressure on North Korea's allies, like Iran and China, to reduce military cooperation with the state, as long as it remains outside of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
https://risk.lexisnexis.com/insights-resources/research/2019...
The impact on the developing world is profound:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/money-reimagined-starve-ugly-...
I'm saying that censorship resistant finance reduces the impact of repressive laws around the world. It helps individuals circumvent laws like those instituted in places like Venezuela and China, that give the state enormous power over private citizens by controlling how they move money.
Stopping North Korea from using cryptocurrency would require very repressive laws to shut down entire global cryptocurrency networks, which in and of itself would make for a less free world because of the extremely heavy-handed enforcement actions that such a campaign would require. On top of this, the end result of such a campaign were it to succeed - of these censorship resistant networks not existing - would further undermine the goal of creating more free societies, for reasons mentioned above.
These are proven economic prescriptions that expedite the removal of costly encumberences to increasing the efficiency of the market and reducing rent extraction by the few.
>>investment will happen regardless. the money literally has nowhere else to go.
You don't seem to understand the point I'm making. Some percentage of income is invested. That represents investment inflow, that leads to capital formation. The percentage varies between countries and eras, based on factors like the average ROI rate, tax/regulatory stability, and security of property.
It stands to reason that more tax/regulatory stability would lead to a larger percentage of income being invested.
>>investors and politicians, on the other hand, like to say things like "investment will go away", but those are lies told to the susceptible to get pet policies enacted, not to reflect reality, better the economy, or improve the lives of ordinary citizens.
You're allowing conspiracy theories to overwhelm your thinking. Your certainty in bad faith motivating these arguments is causing you to not even comprehend the arguments before you reject them, as in the case of you not making the minimal effort to understand my point about a variable rate of investment that's dependent on multiple factors.
>>history books are literally chocked full of governments being overturned, and it's happened dozens of times in the past century.
There have been hundreds of states in existence at any one time for the last several millennia. Many instances of a type of event does not imply that this event is common. The fact is, relative to how many states exist, and how large of a time period most historical analyses cover, the number of successful revolutions by the lower classes is very few, and thus the event is rare in the context how likely it is that it will occur in any one country in a given era.
If sanctions cannot be effectively enforced without repressing decentralized platforms, then the US should look to other tools of statecraft to combat problematic states like North Korea.
The percentage of income invested fluctuates, based on factors that include security of property rights and expected return on investment.
Creating a reliable regulatory and tax regime would mean greater annual inflow of money into investments.
>>historically, disenfranchised masses revolt, violently.
All the better then to remove the obstacles to the enfranchisement of the masses, by offering compensation to the current beneficiaries of rent-extracting institutions in exchange for recruiting them in the drive to abolish these institutions.
Violent revolutions that overturn power structures are actually quite rare and far more common is persistence of structural forces of rent-extraction for decades or centuries, and thus the threat of revolution is not an effective motivator for those in power to relinquish their privileges. The pragmatic reality is that we are more likely to get to a more just and efficient economy without these structures if we reach a settlement that removes the opposition of these structures' beneficiaries from the drive to eliminate them.
>>bonus point: a more equitable distribution of wealth would lead to smarter investment overall and a more productive economy.
Another bonus of eliminating rent-seeking institutions is that it reduces wealth inequality. Compensation to expedite the removal of a structural force that contributes to wealth inequality would likely be a net-gain for equity in the distribution of wealth, because the former is a one-time action while the latter has a recurring impact.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-number-of-confirmed-...
During that period, Bitcoin was amassing real network effects, which persist to some degree to today.
Some cryptocurrencies are amassing network effects these days, and may one day reach a critical mass of adoption that leads to one or more becoming a permanent fixture of the global economy.
>>As a result of crypto being a failure in its original purpose of payments
As touched upon, Bitcoin was succeeding in its original purpose up until 2017. Its failure since then was due to what amounts to politics, not any inherent limits in the technology.
Other cryptocurrencies have more than picked up the mantle since then with the development of technologies like zk-Rollups, zero-knowledge mixers and algorithmic stablecoins, and with these advances, hold the potential to create the ultimate payment system: one that is permissionless all over the world, not subject to volatile prices and cash-like in its resistance to mass-surveillance.
>>It's not: it's the fault of gas making it impossibly expensive to use the most basic tool in execution, splitting your order into smaller trades and applying logic to when you choose to trade.
Yes that makes sense.
A mandate to have health insurance is orders of magnitude more impactful on the unwilling than a mandate to wear a seatbelt. But because of some commonality in the principle behind both mandates, you believe a person must accept the latter if they accept the former, to be morally consistent.
>>Hence back to the earlier point, people aren’t anti-libertarian but rather find much of what is espoused in the name of libertarianism is too absurd to take seriously.
What I encountered when denouncing mandates that turned unvaccinated people into second class citizens is people using our society's acceptance of sanitary permits for restaurants as justification for such mandates. It is a rejection, on principle, of the right to one's own person, property and liberty. For that reason, I conclude anti-libertarianism animates laws that violate the right to private property, bodily autonomy, and personal freedom, whether that be mandatory minimum restaurant safety standards, the Income Tax Act, vaccine mandates or lockdowns.
>>Seat belts and 3 months of Shanghai style quarantines are way different.
Of course they're way different. But the former opens the door to the latter, because there is no hard principle to prevent the latter when you accept the principle that justifies the former. That is how Canada ended up confining 150,000 elderly people in their room for over a year. There was no principled reason not to confine innocent people for the greater good, so once the cost-benefit analysis determined it was the correct policy, the restriction was imposed.
You only oppose "3 months of Shanghai style quarantines" because you view the restrictions as being disproportionate to the public benefit they produce. Not because you oppose restrictions limiting personal autonomy on principle.
That is not what happens to tax revenue. I recommend you look at a government budget, and see the source of much of the money spent.
>>If you tax employment directly, private firms offer fewer jobs because there would be insufficient money in circulation to employ everybody (wages are insufficient to purchase output due to the tax take). The public sector then hires those who can no longer get jobs in the private sector.
Private firms don't offer fewer jobs when you tax employment. They offer less for the jobs they offer when you tax employment.
Government can hire people because it can offer wages competitive with those provided by the private sector, and it can offer those wages because of the funds it acquires through taxation.
Governments have no need to tax employment to hire workers. This is trivially shown by jurisdictions with no taxes on employment and many government workers.
>>Government is largely service based rather than goods based. What it needs is people.
Abstractly, people need land, so government can trade access to land for services rendered for the public, i.e. for employment with the government.
For practical purposes, gold is not finite for the time being. We can keep mining it to expand supply for a long time to come.
Maybe for some elements, it would make sense to apply a usage tax to discourage under-utilization of the existing supply, but that day hasn't come for gold.
>>You need land first and it need to be one of a few special locations on earth where such mining is profitable.
There are many places where one can purchase mining rights, and profitably mine gold. It's just a matter of investing the resources to do it.
No, but we can have special provisions for public goods like parks. Outside of properties that generate these kinds of public goods, the revenue a property generates is generally a proxy for social good it does. For example, a condo building with 150 residential units and 10 commercial units on the ground floor will do more social good than a parking lot, and that is easily revealed by how much more revenue it generates.
That is not true. Greater incentives translates to more investment, and more investment is socially beneficial.
>>it's the same fallacious argument used to keep progressive taxes at bay (oh noes, the rich people will leave america for... ???).
There is nothing fallacious about this argument. Disincentives to investment lead to less investment. Less investment means less gains in productivity and wages, which also means less taxable income that can support the mandatorily funded safety net leftists support.
>>certainly it means more political opposition in the form of money, but not in votes, which is the more pertinent metric.
Historically, measures that threaten major special interests are difficult to pass due to the opposition they face. Ignoring that is putting ideology ahead of pragmatic results.
As for the moral argument, I find it hard to believe that individuals should know that the laws that society collectively agreed on and implemented, are unjust. To some extent we rely on society to inform us of right and wrong, and there is no clearer example of that expression than the laws and policies the government institutes through at the behest of elected representatives.
So I think the fault of unjust laws, where they exist, should fall on society as a whole, as opposed to those who as a matter of circumstance, just happened to make investments of time or money that depended on those laws.
Finally, not compensating landowners means far more political opposition to instituting such a tax, and therefore delays in doing so, and that in itself is costly. Consequently, insisting on landowners being punished for benefiting from the legal status of land ownership will be harmful to society. It would be a case of prioritizing vengeance over society's wellbeing.
>>Don’t wear seatbelts either huh?
The implication here is that someone who on principle, opposes mandated health care, may as well oppose seatbelt laws.
In fact I saw many proponents of mandates prohibiting private citizens from providing a wide range of services to unvaccinated people, cite society's acceptance of restaurant sanitary permits, to justify these mandates. So this belief - that there is no principled difference between any restriction on private interaction - appears to be widely held among anti-libertarians.
>>That is why there isn’t much anti-libertarian ideology
Anti-libertarian ideology is the belief that we as a society have a right to impose our will on peaceful people, and in doing so deny them the right to their person, property and liberty, for the greater good.
To give a mundane example, it means restaurants having to meet mandatory minimum health standards, even if there are patrons who are willing to dine at restaurants which don't meet those standards.
Once that principle is accepted, then anything can be accepted, even locking 150,000 elderly people in their room for over a year, for their own safety:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/long-term-care-covid-...
Or taxing people of 50 percent of their income.