The traditional american school of thought on money is that
1) the optimal supply of money is externally determined by the needs of commerce for liquidity,
2) new money can be created to meet the needs of commerce through public loans secured by real property pledged as collateral without any fixed artificial limits on supply
3) money may be circulated with an expiration date to discourage long term hoarding,
4) general governments should retain the ability to suppress the private issuance of bank notes and regain public control of the circulating medium of exchange in order to emit unsecured notes to pay for defensive war expenditures in the event that it cannot obtain loans from private banks and it is existentially necessary to do so
So some of the ideals espoused by blockchain activists may clash a bit with that.
I've never heard of 3, I love the idea, but it's literally the first time I've heard of it. Are there any sources that that is indeed a common opinion?
In order for money to be both real and useful it should be secured by unencumbered interest in durable real property.
The simplest way to circulate commercial paper for daily transactions is the Benjamin Franklin paper money system which involves appointing public loan officers throughout a nation to issue equity loans to anyone in possession of unencumbered interest in durable real property which they are willing to pledge as collateral which the public can auction in the event of non-payment.
This way money is placed in circulation so that the interest paid for the first use of legal tender is publicly collected and immediately spent back into the economy and so that the total quantity of money expands dynamically in proportion to the aggregate quantity of physical durable capital.
Competing theories say that the main value of monetary tokens comes from the government's monopoly on violence. What I mean is that governments ask taxes to be paid in tokens that they issue (pounds, dollars etc) and they threaten you with jail / physical violence if you don't pay. Governments then issue these tokens and pay people in order to employ them. Under this model, money is devoid from the value of the asset backing it (in the case of fiat money, no such asset actually exists).
Because allowing new public legal tender to be created on security of fictitious capital such as speculative land values and deposits of credit created by other banks is accounting fraud, transfers wealth from the poor to the rich, creates speculative bubbles in financial asset markets, promotes disinvestment in the real economy, decreases demand for labor, inflates the price of land relative to wages for unsupervised labor, and worsens inequality.
The only reason inflated valuations based on speculative hype, i.e. your 'fictitious capital', are able to redistribute wealth from the productive economy to rent-seeking interests is that parties taking irresponsible risks are bailed out by government programs that socialize losses. These programs are sold to the public as making the market safer for consumers:
Which is rational. The annual product of lunar soil is zero. Extending the margin of production to the moon will lower wages and increase poverty. The only way to get the general public behind the idea of settling other planets is through remote terraforming. If there were robots, domes, mirrors, and synthetic organisms put there first to provide free soil, air, and water to settlers, then the annual product of lunar soil be above zero, and off-planet workers could actually receive wages.
The value of having massive amounts of aluminum made from the lunar crust and sun power can be quite above zero.
Same with water mined from some lunar craters.
With more technology advancement, the oxygen trapped in oxides of lunar soil could also be extracted and put into useful orbits away from Earth surface, hopefully cheaper than brought from Earth.
Well, maybe also some dome-grown fruit and vegetables, but not very soon.
There's not much reason to settle the moon and mars prior to the remote establishment of an independent food supply. Aggressive remote terraforming through domes, mirrors, foreign microorganisms, explosives, and robots should come first. Establishing automated synthetic systems on these rocks to mimic what nature provides for free on Earth is the hard problem to be solving. Without such systems already place, wages will be extremely low and no one will want to live there.
It may be easier to undertake a massive industrial operation on an unfamiliar celestial body when there is a human around to oversee things first-hand and troubleshoot issues when (not if) they arise.
First Lunar habitats are going to be mostly underground anyway, and nuclear-powered. Not much is needed to terraform.
I'm constantly "impressed" (not in a good way) at how good some people are at saying completely unfounded statements as fact. There is literally no reason to believe either premise of most bases being underground, nor is there to believe nuclear power will be the dominant power source. We have a hard time getting RTGs inside steel boxes capable of surviving disasters into orbit.
You don't need the reactor working, or assembled, on the way to the destination. Consider a pebble-bed design.
Digging underground is a reasonable way to get a massive layer of radiation protection without carrying it with you. This is important when you are just starting a long-term habitat. Later designs can of course be different.
1) The issue isn't limited to the existence of the reactor. It is linked to the public perception of anything nuclear being launched into the air. A commercial/proven pebble-bed reactor doesn't even exist yet, and last I heard they only started the first design in 2018.
Digging underground is reasonable if your only requirement is "block radiation". Its less reasonable when requirements also include 'get the digging machines into space', 'have it survive landing', and 'learn all the new fun techniques required to dig into lunar regolith in a low g environment with never before tested or used techniques and equipment'
There are already big suitable underground spaces in the form of lunar lava tubes. Those should help massively with bootstrapping of any undrground lunar colony.
Viability due to public opinion is a reason. I think that NASA has been successful enough in popularizing the ideals of not interfering with the potential biospheres (or lacks of biosphere) of other planets, 'Planetary Protection', that any plan for 'aggressive remote terraforming' would be met with public outcry, for the sake of preserving areological history.
"the ideals of not interfering with the potential biospheres (or lacks of biosphere) of other planets"
I think their ideal is to protect planets from interfering with their ecosystems unintentionally. Microbial contamination, for example. Especially Mars, since we don't know what kind of life, if any, existed or currently exists there. Also some of Saturn's and maybe Jupiter's moons. But I think if there were ever a strategic reason and viable option to terraform one of those bodies, which I think is pretty unlikely anyway, NASA would probably consider it. But by that time, I think it's extremely likely that NASA and the USA probably wouldn't exist as we know it anyway.
NASA states that the first goal of Planetary Protection is to "Carefully control forward contamination of other worlds by terrestrial organisms and organic materials carried by spacecraft in order to guarantee the integrity of the search and study of extraterrestrial life, if it exists." [0]
It does seem that unintentional interference is the main concern, but intentional interference almost certainly won't be considered on the relevant timescale, which is now until the first Mars landing, since aggressive terraforming was posed as an alternative to unsustainable Martian colonies.
A population decline is certainly not necessary to continue growing GDP/capita. What kind of neo-Malthusian nonsense is that? The economy is operating nowhere near peak performance... at least 1/3 of GDP is lost annually due to private capture of economic rent.
If the desire is to make online content more readable, it might be worth starting with the assumption that all content downloaded from the network will be read on a black-and-white ereader device with no persistent internet connection.
This assumption might require substantially reworking the hyperlink model of the internet, so that external references to content delivered by third-parties is sharply distinguished from internal references to other pages within the same work.
Your idea of hypermedia with an offline browsing assumption is very good! Imagine an "offline archive" format that contains a document D + a pre-downloaded copy of all referred documents R1, R2, ..., Rn, along with necessary assets to render R1,R2..Rn in some useful manner (e.g. save html + main-narrative images from each page Ri, but skip everything else).
This "offline archive format" has numerous benefits:
(A) Cognitive benefits of a limited/standard UI for information (e.g. "read on a black-and-white ereader device"),
(B) Accessibility: standardizing on text would make life easier for people using screen readers,
(C) Performance (since accessing everything on localhost),
(D) async access (reaching the "edge" of the subgraph of the internet you have pre-downloaded on your localnet could be recorded and queued up for async retrieval by "opportunistic means", e.g., next time you connect to free wifi somewhere you retrieve the content and resolve those queued "HTTP promises",
(E) cognitive benefits of staying on task when doing research (read the actual paper you wanted to read, instead of getting lost reading the references, and the references's references).
I'm not sure what "standard" for offline media (A) would should target... Do we allow video or not? On the one hand video has great usefulness as communication medium on the other it's very passive medium, often associated with entertainment rather than information. Hard choice if you ask me.
I'm sure such "pre-fetched HTTP" exists already of some sort, no? Or is it just not that useful if you only have "one hop" in the graph? How hard would it be to crawl/scrape 2 hops? 3 hops? I think we could have pretty good offline internet experience with a few hops. For me personally, I think async interactions with the internet limited to 3 hops would improve my focus—I'm thinking of hckrnews crawled + 3 hops of web content linked, a clone of any github repo encountered (if <10MB), and maybe doi links resolved to actual paper from sci-hub. Having access to this would be 80%+ of the daily "internet value" delivered for me, and more importantly allow me to cutoff from the useless information like news and youtube entertainment.
I'm carving out a subsection for this, as the concept appears to contain a number of the elements (though not all of them) mentioned above. See Wikpedia's 9P (protocol) entry for more:
In particular, 9P supports Plan 9 applications through file servers:
acme: a text editor/development environment
rio: the Plan 9 windowing system
plumber: interprocess communication
ftpfs: an FTP client which presents the files and directories on a remote FTP server in the local namespace
wikifs: a wiki editing tool which presents a remote wiki as files in the local namespace
webfs: a file server that retrieves data from URLs and presents the contents and details of responses as files in the local namespace
The U.S. lost Vietnam because rural farmers thought U.S. troops were working for land lords. Land lords would take control of rural areas and start charging farmers rent after it was cleared of Viet Cong. There is a similar problem in Afghanistan: the Afghan government raises most of its revenues from sales and excise taxes, and doesn't tax land owners on property privately seized from rural residents. Since it doesn't tax land and has not centrally issued titles to rural residents, it doesn't have good records on land ownership and can't prevent private land seizures effectively.
These are not inevitable problems. Our politicians just don't understand the difference between land and capital and have undermined U.S. efforts to promote land reform in Asia after it worked so well in Japan.
Interestingly, before it went downhill, US advisors told the S. Viet gov that the one thing they had to do to stave off revolution was land redistribution, in the least in the Mekong Delta, (I believe land redistribution was done to some extent in SK), but the S Vietnamese refused, and so the NVA had an “in”.
Sounds like one of those scenarios where the side we picked to support was itself corrupt, so the general population saw no good reason to support our side over the opposing side.
Yes, but it’s not so much the side we “picked” but the team that was given to us. Just as the Soviets often times had no choice but to work with truly bad people.
Hard to say, but given the realpolitik of the time, there doesn’t seem to have been much choice. The world was hostage to an indeological foe which took no prisoners and was looking to aggressively take over control of the world. That was their stated objective.
That’s mostly surface talk. They invaded fewer countries than the US has, sticking mostly to supporting rebellion.
The US and Europe squashed home grown communism mostly through things like social security, unemployment insurance, and a helping of good old propaganda. Yet, we where suckered into fighting ideology on foreign soil with military force.
I don’t think it was obvious at the time, but going forward we need to learn from these mistakes.
Korean War can be viewed North Korea as a separate country attacking South Korea, or a civil war. But, Vietnam war (including invasion of Cambodia) and a host of South American wars where much more clearly started as civil wars with Forein support not really invasions.
PS: Afghanistan is something of a wash with the US also invading the country.
The ownership of land by value is more unequally distributed than the ownership of capital. Capital depreciates and needs to be regularly replaced each generation. The wealthy have never needed robots to live a life of plenty; they can extract as much labor power as they need through rent.
The "rich will just live on their land without workers" seems like a hypothetical scenario, but it actually happened a few times during the colonization of the Western United States and Australia (post-Native American/Australian genocide). Marx has an interesting note on this in chapter 33 of volume I of Capital:
> It is the great merit of E. G. Wakefield to have discovered, not anything new about the Colonies, but to have discovered in the Colonies the truth as to the conditions of capitalist production in the mother-country… First of all, Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative - the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 3,000 persons of the working class, men, women, and children. Once arrived at his destination, "Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river." (E. G. Wakefield. "England And America," vol.ii, p. 33)
In the United States, the slave labor system kept the workers from subjecting their masters to this "violation" of property rights. There are many historical records of European colonists running away from indentured labor to join Native Americans (the reverse does not seem to have ever happened).
The wealthy need poor laborers a lot more than vice-versa. What is really happening with automation is that it is being used to build militarized police states around the world that keep the poor from squatting the land held by the rich, to force the poor to work for the benefit of the rich (for example, someone is going to have to keep working on oil extraction for a long time to come, even if all the farming will be done by robotic tractors). A police state forcing people into wage slavery is the necessary precondition for the "rich live in automated luxury" scenario to occur.
Compact urban settlement is a direct market substitute for the hydrocarbons which would otherwise be required to transport goods and people across longer distances.
The most important thing we can do to transition off of oil and fossil fuels is to maximize the intensity at which we utilize renewable resources which directly substitute for them.
We maximize the intensity at which urban land is utilized by phasing in a 100-1200% national or global land value tax over the next century on the appraised market price which all land is expected to sell for if cleared of improvements.
We can also promote the development of a national, inter-state, zero-emission, passenger & freight rapid-transit market several times faster than automobile highways by allowing private rail and hyper-loop operators to deduct qualified ticket sales from their land value tax liabilities.
I think you're more likely to promote a shift en masse to EV manufacturing before you're able to institute a global land value tax (Tesla is building >200k EVs/year, other manufacturers are following suit, a million EVs are sold every 6 months [1]), with the added benefit that all of that EV manufacturing is going to stoke demand for more battery manufacturing capacity we'll need for utility scale energy storage. We don't stop building solar PV, wind, battery, and EV manufacturing capacity until CO2 emissions are halted (remember, we need to account for current energy usage, the transition of mobility to electricity, electrical growth and the amount of energy we're going to need to sequester existing atmospheric carbon back into the ground).
Urbanizing is a noble goal, but not realistic in the decades timeframe the necessary solutions demand. Build more solar [2], wind [3], energy storage, and electric transportation now, rebuild cities over time. Everything I mention above can be scaled in a massively parallel fashion.
The biggest current roadblock to urbanization is the insanely high cost of living in cities, and your solution to this is to add an up-to-1200% land value tax?
This would be a really quick way to force working class people to live even further away from the city than they already are.
Why we subsidize low density suburbs is beyond me.
We need to stop pretending roads are free and trains/trams are subsidized. Government plays an essential role in transportation. People should pay for the roads they drive, income adjusted. That's healthier capitalism, because the prices are clear and better mobility = better markets.
The shift of the state and local tax burden off of real estate held by wealthy savers and on to sales and purchases of household expenditures, the shift of the federal tax burden off of property income (most 'capital' gains are land value gains) and on to payroll earned by younger workers.
All of these changes to the tax code have increased the rent which wealthy property owners can extract from younger workers without having to work themselves, at the cost of increasing the tax burden on younger working families, so that they cannot afford to have as many children as early in life.
1) the optimal supply of money is externally determined by the needs of commerce for liquidity,
2) new money can be created to meet the needs of commerce through public loans secured by real property pledged as collateral without any fixed artificial limits on supply
3) money may be circulated with an expiration date to discourage long term hoarding,
4) general governments should retain the ability to suppress the private issuance of bank notes and regain public control of the circulating medium of exchange in order to emit unsecured notes to pay for defensive war expenditures in the event that it cannot obtain loans from private banks and it is existentially necessary to do so
So some of the ideals espoused by blockchain activists may clash a bit with that.