But if he had a dead man’s switch, wouldn’t it have been easier and lower risk to use state resources to penetrate his network and disable it? It’s not like a dead man’s switch is insurmountable, and when you’re entertaining these ideas of people who have vast amounts of power, doesn’t the simplest solution still make the most sense? How does an institution with an infinite amount of power fear one man? That’s the lazy paradox I see here. The government is all-powerful but wants to let one guy with a bunch of dirt on people live, even though they have the power to do whatever they want? And they choose to fake his death instead of coercing a prosecutor to slap him with charges that don’t stick or manipulating the jury? There are just so many more plausible ways that this plays out instead of faking his death.
As I said above, I think there are legitimate reasons to suspect foul play in his death. But a conspiracy involving the prison, the coroner and EMTs, the DA, whoever transported him, and whoever else you’d need to carry it out just gets so fantastical so fast. I’m not saying I believe the official story here, but people don’t consider the social implications of some of these conspiracies.
It’s like the people who think the moon landing was fake. Thousands of engineers, scientists, builders, etc. worked to get us to the moon. Anyone can read the source code from the mission today. Even with all of those people and resources poured into that project, nobody blew the whistle or leaked the press, how? That would’ve been one of the biggest political scandals in history if Kennedy/LBJ/Nixon got caught dumping tons of money into running fake NASA missions.
> It’s like the people who think the moon landing was fake
No. No it really isn't. Faking the moon landing would obviously take absurd amounts of effort. And honestly, the narrative on it is fucked anyways. These conspiracy theorists are really just smelling the stink from the overly confident "of course we did" narrative, which should instead be a "holy shit, the odds were against us and we probably shouldn't have made it."
In terms of faking a death, (I DONT BELIEVE THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED) all he'd really need is:
1. pay/threat the guards
2. turn off cameras
3. get a good enough replacement body
4. pay off any of the people who were doing autopsies or getting a really close interaction
5. photoshop
I don't think this is the most plausible answer, but fuck if I'm going to act like I know it didn't happen.
I may be way of my field here, but my understanding is that the whole point of the Austrian school is that human behavior is (purposeful, but) unpredictable.
This is a testable claim, and you can bother to observe, experiment and test this claim. Austrians should accept they are wrong if you can empirically prove that humans behavior is predictable.
But if this claim is correct, there's no reason for you to do empirical economic observations to prove or disprove economic laws. Any empirical conclusion will have no predictive power as a law, only as a trend.
Not only that, but any logical consequence of human behavior being purposeful and unpredictable is as correct as the original claim.
The thing that really doesn't seem to work in the Austrian model is the whole "hard money" superstition... the idea that money should be an immutable store of value. I really think it is a superstition of sorts, since I don't think the rationale or the underlying model work in the real world.
Not only does this seem to fall down in a variety of ways in practice, but I have philosophical issues with it. The value in the economy is in capital, goods, and services. Money has no value. You can't eat it, drink it, live in it, or use it for anything. It's a medium of value exchange, not a value of its own.
In fact one of the desirable characteristics of money is that it's useless for other purposes, otherwise those other purposes compete with its money use case. Cryptocurrency does check that box, but so far all popular cryptocurrencies are built on hard money assumptions. It would be theoretically possible to build a cryptocurrency that wasn't, but there are issues like how to make the inflation targeting algorithm not be trivially game-able by 'whales.' (Real world whales do in fact try to game central banks, so this is not fiction... of course central banks are AI-complete so they have a better chance of resisting this.)
Most of the affinity for Austrianism is really rooted in a dislike for central banking and the assumed authoritarianism that goes with it, but I am not convinced that these issues are intrinsically inseparable. I don't see why libertarianism necessitates Austrian hard money finance or why hard money prohibits totalitarianism in any way. Since totalitarians have guns they can easily just confiscate and monopolize any hard currency. Cryptocurrency is no different, since rubber hose cryptography is highly effective.
What Austrians fail to grasp is that human behavior is quite predictable at the population level, or for large groups in general. This is the entire basis of game theory, marketing, sociology, etc. Unsurprisingly, Austrians refuse to acknowledge that economics is subject to science and do not recognize entire fields such as statistics.
It's true that the actions of single individuals cannot be fully predicted, but that's not necessary. Any level of insight is enough to form the basis of a scientific theory. In other words, mainstream economists do not claim that they can perfectly model human behavior, but they do (rightly) claim that they can make educated guesses which are correct more often than not.
You can predict trends, not laws, using large groups observation. Austrians would not deny that. Trends are not a useful tool for economic policy, are only good tools for entrepreneurship.
Some do. Some mean buying something like GLD. That leaves you the risk of the exchange going out of business, though. So some prefer to actually take physical possession of the gold. That leaves you vulnerable to being robbed, though. So some prefer to have it stored in somebody else's vault. That leaves you vulnerable to the vault company going out of business, though.
There is no perfect answer. Different people worry about different secondary risks, and do different things in response.
If you buy physical gold, how does one go about converting that back into liquid cash without getting fleeced? Where do you sell it? I don't get the impression that pawn shops or jewelers pay fair amounts... what am I missing?
Its a hedge against SHTF scenario - full out crisis.
IF we look at history and dozens of cases of runaway inflation or currency crises (germany, argentina, russia default, venezuela etc) where currencies devalued fast in a short period of time - having physical gold (even 5-10% of the total portfolio) would have alleviated the pain.
people lost life savings... and will lose again, as history often rhymes again and again.
In an ancap utopia you mean? Point is that if you control the courts and police then whatever you do can be declared legal. And you can make money not necessarily lose money buying a controlling stake in all the courts and even renting them AirBNB style to your rich buddies. There are no other institutions left, that have any teeth, you bought all the major ones. If they come after you, your police will just rebuff them.
The point is people band together to create larger and more powerful organizations. But it still doesn’t solve all instances just pushes the corruption to a higher level.
>... or make more regulations, fewer people will sell drugs - at a higher price.
Which just doesnt happen in countries with stricter regulated medical markets. Quite the opposite, it happens in the US, thats what this article is about. Its a nice theory but not something that can be observed in reality.
>It only seems uncalled for if you don't believe price gouging on critical drugs to point of financial ruin and death is utterly evil.
It's naive and simplistic to actually believe that the price-gouging isn't far more nuanced than "evil" people sitting in a board room discussing how to screw over poor diabetics. But whatever works for you, I guess.
The system is broken, but at some point, people are sitting in a room deciding exactly that:
"Yes, some people will go bankrupt and some have actually died, but we need to strike while the iron is hot! After all, it's not our fault they can't get health care and we owe it to our shareholders to maximize profits"
It's naive and simplistic to actually believe that evil isn't far more nuanced than people sitting in a board room discussing how to screw over poor diabetics.
Utter nonsense. That kind of deregulation fixes everything always assumes a perfect market with perfect information, ie consumers who can actually judge the quality of the product their receiving. Drugs most definitely do not fit into this category, how do I tell if the drug I'm taking is actually working? Would I feel worse or be getting sicker faster if I weren't taking Pepsi Insulin (tm) or is it just a placebo and I'm just going through the disease normally (or tricking my self into feeling better because I'm taking something). Ok, this drug does make me feel better but it turns out it makes mutant babies if I happen to get pregnant while taking it (see Thalidomide or the warnings on basically any acne medication).
I make "no perfect market" or "perfect information" assumption.
I am pretty confident that people will take stupid risks, as I am confident that people who want to be safe - buying from reputable sources - will be able to.
How do people without a scientific background and without the access to clinical testing data (since we're deregulating here companies won't even have to do them before going to market legally) have a hope of evaluating what new drugs are safe and which companies are reliable?
If you want an example of how an unregulated medicine market works, check out the American medical "supplement" market. Plenty of producers, dubious and often purposely wrong claims, often don't even contain the compound as advertised, and still hilariously expensive.
If unregulation begets competition and that begets lower prices, why do these turmeric supplements cost $30[0] while you can go to the spice aisle and get 10x as much for $5?
It would be hard to notice if it were adulterated with something else with long term harmful effects though. Say something that increases the potency or allows the effect to last longer (so I'm not strawmanning a The Jungle style willfully negligent corp) but is ultimately harmful over long term or combination with other medicines?
Yes, this type of libertarian thinking presumes good information. Medicine and chemical production rarely have good information. It is too expensive. So the people as a collective must investigate these costs. This is why the government regulation exists. Even then it took a long time to fight against the greed of the tobacco companies as they fight tooth and nail to continue poisoning the populace and keep people ignorant about it.
Have to chime in here, since I once studied the history of anarchism as a social/economic/political movement.
Anarchism was overwhelmingly a socialist movement, contemporary with Marxism and communism. Many anarchists debated the ideal forms of socialism vigorously at congresses held by groups like the First International. Historically, Marxism and communism won the most mindshare, with rare exceptions like the Spanish Civil War.
Leading 19th c. anarchist thinkers, like Bakunin and Kropotkin, would have laughed you out of the room if you had claimed anarchism was in any way not a leftist movement.
This conception is from a much later argument of economist Murray Rothbard from the mid-20th c., and owes more to the Austrian school of economics then any strain of anarchist thinking. Rothbard drew upon some individualist anarchist writers, but tossed out all the economic parts he disagreed with, and called it anarcho-capitalism. Claiming anarcho-capitalism as a form of anarchism reveals a complete misreading of, or disdain for, the overwhelming majority of anarchist thought.
Now for an interesting follow-up: the term "libertarian" underwent the same change in America, but even more thoroughly, to the point that only historians recall its leftist origins. (Outside America, "libertarian" is more synonymous with anarchism.)
To quote Rothbard above: "One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, 'our side,' had captured a crucial word from the enemy... 'Libertarians'... had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over..."
That's not what anarcho-capitalists mean when they use the word "anarchism", though. They are explicitly claiming a relationship to 19th c. socialist anarchism, not that "linguistic analysis means this word used elsewhere should also apply to our unrelated ideas".
It's impossible to mention anarcho-capitalism in a non-ancap forum without more traditional anarchists coming in and screaming into the wind that anarcho-capitalism isn't real anarchism. In the end, the normies don't know enough about the debate to have an opinion, or care, or even realize it exists, and the ancaps don't care what the socialist anarchists think on the matter.
The whole debate feels like a fruitless exercise to reclaim territory that is long lost.
I think they propose voluntarily subscribed-to private cops/legal jurisdictions with either voluntarily subscribed-to arbitration contracts for inter-jurisdictional conflicts or insurance payouts for when some one who subscribes to no jurisdiction (or one with no arbitration agreement with yours) stabs/robs/whatevers you.
Basically as it is now but instead of the law and tax being collected based on location, you get to freely choose what law(s)-enforcement you want to be under.
>you get to freely choose what law(s)-enforcement you want to be under
Until someone under a different LE company accuses of a crime. Then you'll be subject to their process (unless, of course, your LE company has more guns).
Well the hardcore version is that the different LE company can't subject you to their process unless you consent and if you didn't the restitution for whatever crime they say you committed would be paid for by their own insurance company.
why would you ever agree then? Well maybe because they have an agreement with your LE company and you'd find yourself dropped as a client if you didn't or you both use the same insurance company and they'd jack up your rates if you didn't. More extremely you might be fired and become unhireable as a liability and unless you already have sufficient arable land to subsistence farm you will die of starvation or be shot for trespassing (initiating force) on the sidewalk that you can no longer pay for the use of.
Don't take this as me thinking it is at all a workable scheme also I'm definitely not AnCap and I don't hang out in their circles so this kinda just the low-nuance version that I've picked up via osmosis.
It's a lot of mental gymnastics that serve as a "reductio ad absurdam" argument, proving that the fundamental organizing axiom of human societies is still "might makes right" rather than "right is derived from mutually-agreed-upon moral principles".
The last arguments of kings are still guns.
The end state of all theoretical non-aggressive libertarian societies is that they are conquered through force by some form of cartel. In my opinion, seasteading, which is predicated on mutual non-aggression for prosperity, is strictly inferior to hiring a bunch of ex-CIA and ex-GRU contractors to destabilize and take over a pre-existing dictatorial country, and then rewrite its laws from scratch. The moral high ground loses to boots on the ground, every time.
If you can't or won't preemptively attack and annex another country's territory, you're better off trying to colonize space, where nation-states can't reach you as easily, or start by building the nuclear warheads, and then build the floating cities. The veneer of civilization is thin, and one gun is no longer sufficient for one man to defend his castle.
I wonder at what age one would voluntarily to subscribe to these contracts (at birth?), and who would observe, notarize and attest to the subscription and track compliance with all the permutations of its finalized terms?
Obligatory Blockchain woo preemption:
"The agent's model of what you are interested in would always be a cartoon, and in return you will see a cartoon version of the world through the agents eyes" - Jaron Lanier
I remember a libertarian telling me once that they believed it was unethical to start a war in order to free slaves, because violence is only ok in self defence and the slaves could rise up on their own.
That's not in line with the NAP. Slaves are by definition the subjects of aggression since they have been stripped of their natural self-ownership right. So it is definitely not unethical to help them.
To my mind, "not in line with" implies that it'd motivate violation of the principle. It seems like it's rather a stricter (... which doesn't necessarily mean better or worse) standard than the NAP (or at least the most common interpretations of it).
Is it a fundamental or emergent property of the universe?
What is the smallest/biggest structure possible for a consciousness to happen? (we should be able to tell what is conscious and what is not)
Can/do laws of physics account for it? (consciousness is not a necessary thing in physics, we are all p-zombies for physics laws, but for some reason it is able to affect the causal chain, as we are talking about it)
This alone tells me that "consciousness" is an ill-defined term.
> Can/do laws of physics account for it?
Either you define the word in such a way that they can, or the discussion becomes meaningless.
I think fundamental point often missed when discussing this topic (and similar philosophical issues) is that a thing can be either measurable in principle (even if not with our current understanding or technology), or it doesn't exist and there's no meaning in asking about it. I arrive at this statement through following chain of reasoning: there is no sense talking about things that do not impact observable reality in any way, since the world will be identical with and without them (and thus there's no way to assert those things exist, as opposed to e.g. an infinite family of similar-but-not-quite-the-same things). And if a thing does impact observable reality, then - in principle - we should be able to observe its impact, and that opens it up for measurement and understanding, and thus puts it squarely in the domain of physics.
So for the term "consciousness" to be meaningful, it must be defined in a way that it makes a physical difference in the world. Some bit in a brain must go to 0 if you have a consciousness, whereas it must go to 1 if you are a p-zombie. If there's no possible way to - even in principle - differentiate between a conscious mind and a p-zombie, it implies that both terms are nonsense (and also useless).
INB4 uncertainty principle - it doesn't mean there are things that can't be measured hidden behind some "quantum veil"; it means that this is where our usual conceptual models (like position and momentum being separate qualities) break down and no longer correspond well to reality.
Fundamental or emergent? What does that even mean?
Like nearly everything else in reality, you’d expect consciousness to be continuous, not integral. We know there are diminished states of consciousness by experience and observation. As such there wouldn’t be any lower limit on size of conscious objects, just smaller and smaller degrees of consciousness.
Yes, the laws of physics of course account for it. Everything that exists arises from physics.
No, I mean the laws that would still be making planets orbit the sun even if none of us were here to experience it, and indeed which had been doing for billions of years before we were here.
And with how unusual the whole 'suicide' was, accepting the official story at face value is arguably lazier than suspecting it.