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Comment Re: not original (Score 3, Insightful) 190

Price "gouging" is a good thing. It sends information signals to the market to divert goods to where they are needed. Hurricane approaching Florida? That load of plywood headed to Michigan should be diverted to boarding up windows in Dade County instead of to building a dog house in Lansing. But if the price of plywood is kept artificially low (only possible by the guns of government), there's no incentive to send the truck towards a hurricane, so the Michigan contract is fulfilled.
During Hurricane Sandy some friends and I looked at renting a truck and getting some generators from our local stores to NJ - about 300 miles. It would obviously have to be worth our effort but both we and the people without power who could not find generators would benefit. But then Chris Christie got on TV threatening anybody who would charge above big-box store non-emergency prices with National Guard action. "Screw that", we said, "they can sit in the dark and enjoy their fairness".
The important information theory piece to learn is that prices are the information signals that are sent through markets. The important economic piece to learn is that scarcity is real. The important political piece to learn is that politicians ignore both, to the detriment of their people but to their own personal gain.

Comment Re:Waste (Score 1) 170

From what I recall, notch splits the 2.5 billion with 2 other people and his share is about 70%. I can't find a citation right now (grr) but pretty sure I read it back in september.

I was also happy to hear that he shared 3 million dollars with the 25 mojang employees. It is nice when a business owner that sales the business shares something with the employees who made the business a success.

From what the articles have said, part of the reason he sold was he couldn't take the stress and fan anger directed at him (as the company figure head for things he didn't personally have a hand in) made him really unhappy.

Comment Re:Dementia will get'm long before 120 (Score 2) 441

Or many of the other old age related diseases of which there is no treatment. Wishful thinking.

He's 47. He's got more than two decades before those are likely to affect him. I'll bet that in 2034 we have effective treatments for most all of them, with genomic analysis and gene therapy being available at the shopping mall, next to the place that does nails. OK, probably not FDA-approved (possibly even banned in the US due to costs of welfare if people don't die off) but that's what medical tourism is for. You might need to fly to Theil's boat to get it.

Comment Re:Nothing can go Wrong Here (Score 2) 441

"no welfare, looser building codes, no minimum wage, and few restrictions on weapons"

How could this possibly go wrong?

It's just nonsense - to build on a sea platform would require tremendously strong buildings and no owner of such a platform would permit shacks to be built there as crumbling buildings would threaten the platform and its other occupants. The notable difference between a seastead and local building codes is that such agreements on a seastead would be entered into voluntarily, not by fiat backed by violence.

The people who would live and work there would need to be attracted to live on a sea platform, so low-paid workers and destitute beggars aren't even an issue. This isn't a model for society, it's more of a Galt's Gulch.

I still think it's silly to get all the anarchists on a platform that can be sunk by a torpedo (see the Free State Project for a more sensible option) but TFS is written as if by a seventh grader who's heard something about libertarians.

Comment Re:Stone Age diet ? he wants to live all 20 years? (Score 3, Insightful) 441

Read up on the anthropology, especially about the value of grandparents. Also be careful to avoid means as averages in such cases.

Hint: healthy humans don't undergo menarche until they're about twelve, and human children do not survive well if their parents die off before they're eight.

There's evidence that life expectancy went down with agriculture, though housing heralds an improvement for infant mortality so the means go up, though tempered by increased disease.

Comment Re:Precious Snowflake (Score 0) 323

A child without physical punishment learns early that all consequence is harmless. Risk becomes a non-existent factor in decision-making. The child becomes a self-entitled asshole or goes to an early grave.

Right, you know more about this than all the neuroscientists who have evidence that your claim is idiotic.

Lemme guess - your parents abused you and you feel a cultural need to love Mommy and Daddy, so you'll claim it was good for you to make the dissonance stop.

Comment Re:Precious Snowflake (Score 3, Insightful) 323

And thus the decline of western civilization...

If it's to fall, it'll be due to people who were raised on the idea that physical violence against innocents is a virtue and who thus support societal institutions that use it as their primary means of motivation against adult subjects, contrary to the human drives towards freedom and creativity.

Way to ascribe the cause to the cure.

Comment Re:LOL ... w00t? (Score 1) 292

Addendum: It turns out the author used the minus sign instead of the hyphen. That (a) looks wrong on the page, (b) breaks screen readers, (c) confuses readability scores and (d) makes this not news.

Ah. What's news then, is that Amazon can't deploy a simple perl script to fix common typography errors such as these. YouTube wants more content creators so it deploys helpers like 'auto-stabilize' and such. Amazon, in contrast, prefers to castigate its contributors for typography errors. Who benefits? Copyeditors.

Comment Re:How is this a crime (Score 1) 69

No, a chop chop receives the stolen cars (acting as an accomplice of the thief), disassembles them, and then sells the parts.

That part in parentheses is important: if the shop simply bought cars from whoever brought them in and then parted them out, that's a legitimate business.

Of course, cars are a little bit of a bad example because transferring ownership requires registering the title and whatnot. Let's talk about cellphones instead, since they don't: are those automated kiosks in the mall that let you trade in old cellphones illegal? After all, somebody could steal a cellphone and then turn it in at the kiosk. Does that make the kiosk owner a huge criminal?

Comment Re:In unrelated news: Average IQ up 5 points in US (Score 0) 275

When the police stop killing 7 year old black girls.
And when the police stop killing blacks at 2x the rate of whites.
And when police stop pulling over blacks at over 5x the rate they pull over whites
And when police stop pulling the white girls in mixed groups aside- calling their parents to come pick them up so there is no arrest warrant AND THEN telling the black girls in the group that "the trash goes in back"
And when judges and juries stop sentencing blacks to longer sentences than other groups for the same offenses...

Then the crap you are trying to sell will be valid.

Can blacks succeed in america? Yes.

Is it MUCH harder than it should be for them because of massive and systemic racism? Absolutely.

Whites do well given unequal schooling, unequal job opportunity, unequal law enforcement, a larger "old boy" network holding a disproportional portion of the plum positions and passing them down to their children, etc. etc.

The days of white privilege are still slowly ending and they will probably continue slowly end for at least another 40 years.

Comment Re:How is this a crime (Score 1, Insightful) 69

He was dealing with cash and bitcoin. Nothing else. So which one of those do you claim is illegal?

The person on the other side of the transaction might have been dealing with illegal goods, but that isn't and shouldn't be any of his business. Otherwise, you could make the exact same argument to persecute anyone who, for example, buys a car from somebody on Craigslist who then uses the cash to buy drugs.

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