jadedhacker

I want to see what some other commentators who are more knowledgeable about the field say. This is a pretty striking attack against a central theory in... Scientific American? Without citing a wealth of evidence with detailed citations? I find the logic of the argument appealing, finding no inborn bias towards gain nor loss outside of what could be derived by reason would be a very nice thing to say about the future of humanity.

I read D. Kahneman's book Thinking Fast and Slow a number of years back and it did present some pretty clear looking graphs demonstrating loss aversion of 2:1 iirc. I've since lost my copy due to a friend's "borrowing". ;) Certain other elements of his book have come into question, including priming. I'm eagerly waiting to see how the cookie crumbles here.

The positive way to think about this is that it appears humanity's moral universe is expanding. I could name a long list of things that we do all day that we are going to be judged extremely harshly for, but it would derail the conversation.

It justifies critical awareness such as is happening here.

Why do we bother celebrating any of them? Mortals are mortal, they deserve to be evaluated based on what they do. I'm not sure what purpose, other than propagandistic, is served by looking at them through rose tinted glasses.

In any case, it's not entirely clear that other than the (wonderful) Bill of Rights, the American Revolution was anything other than the elites over here wanting more control. 3/5 compromise, male property owning voters, indirect election of senators, it really sounds like the new aristocracy, with an Enlightenment tinged bent, was taking control. After all, the UK was being run mainly by Parliament, not by the King.

Only popular struggle has made the US more democratic, direct election of senators, freeing the slaves, universal suffrage, but we see even that is being rolled back in the modern era with voter suppression, dark money, and the dark legacy of US foreign policy.

Hahaha, the small town capitalists are fighting the international monopolists and the workers everywhere lose.

They still escaped it. Competition was the driving force for companies to become big and monopolistic. The "intended" effect of the market resulted in the opposite.

I'm not sure I believe that S&P 500 chart proves his point that we are living in historically similar times to the 1960s. S&P looks at the top of part of the distribution, not the whole distribution. If for some reason, there were more or fewer companies, it would mean something different. I will note that we did in fact break up Bell Telephone and standard oil. If we act quickly, maybe we'll never get to 1T.

Big companies get bigger because of market consolidation. Competition is a lie. News at 11.

Carbon taxes have to be astronomical to actually affect market behavior. Better to take direct control and titrate down carbon fuels while ramping other methods.

The market can't do it except by perhaps a happy accident, an accident that would be resisted by the established players. Look for the big oil companies to buy up green startups and kneecap them to keep the oil money flowing. Consumables are much more profitable than capital purchases like solar panels, ask the printer makers about their ink.

How are those choices different from money? The money version is only more liberating if you're rich. First-come-first-serve does suck for newcomers, but do they have a right to displace someone that has lived there forever on a whim? It's not obvious at all. It would make sense to attempt to build enough to keep people moving though.