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Economics, Star Trek Style

Jean Luc Picard, spiritually drained from another battle won, still 3 minutes, 15 seconds of show time before the credits, and time for the denouement. The Captain of the Starship Enterprise arises from the seat of command, makes halting steps waving off the advance of Doctor Crusher always hoping help, chagrined by his refusal she turns away wringing her wrists. The door to his ready room opens, and he approaches the Replicator. “Earl Grey and a slab of Bolognium.” The Replicator dutifully responds, creating chains of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates which, when correctly proportioned with water and other inorganic chemicals bring the food we eat, to fruition. But there is a problem. The replicator cannot find Bolognium in its directory of foods, body parts, living things, anything. It shudders emitting clouds of acrid smoke and dies.

What happened? Why the Bolognium problem? Was there a Bolognium agenda of some sort? No. The answer is simple. Bolognium does not exist.

In fact, science fiction sprinkled as it is with Bolognium often appears more like fantasy than science. Some stories have none. The real hard Sci-Fi. The Martian. All real, available science. An exciting story nonetheless results and the audience is drawn in without a hint of boredom.

Some have a little. Ursula LeGuin created the Ansible, a device that allowed instant communication. With travel bound by Special Relativity[i], Kingdoms could handle multiple star governance quickly (as long as the governors stayed loyal.) This was one helping of Bolognium, OK. Her stories were still fantasies (or were they?) but, OK. Sci-Fi still borrowed the device and called it other things and justified it many ways including quantum entanglement. BTW, there is a proposal out for serious study to develop such a system. Maybe de-Bologniumizing instant distant communication.

Then come Star Trek, The Next Generation, and science gets shot to hell. Continue reading “Economics, Star Trek Style”

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An AnCom’s Mixmaster Brain

Here are the words of the Mixmaster mind of the everyday AnCom alone in his room, the everyday AnCom who gave up a good mind for me.

(Sung to the tune of, The Everyday Housewife by Glen Campbell)

I saw this on my Tumblr feed to which I repair every time we run shy of Ipecac. Worked like a charm this time. Next time I will just leave the Hemlock down.

leftist-daily-reminders

What’s the difference between classical liberalism, modern liberalism, and neo-liberalism? Continue reading “An AnCom’s Mixmaster Brain”

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The Apotheosis of Jane Roe and John Doe

Last year, I entered a drugstore in a nearby town, made my way to the pharmacy, and stood in the empty waiting line. An attendant called out, “Hi Mark; it will be a few minutes. I have a slight emergency.”
“No problem!”, I replied. “I’m used to waiting. I had to replace my lost driver’s license yesterday.”
“Hear that. Bet Pam found the license when she got home.”
Chagrined, I sheepishly was about to respond when I heard, in a slight, but audible, voice, “I was in line, sir!”
I could barely hear the exclamation. “Hello?” I said as my head swiveled swiftly. (Yes. It is damn difficult to say. It is also damn difficult to type!) “Where are you?” I implored.
“Back here.” The little echo returned.
“Where here? Can you step to a location where I can see you? That would be very helpful to me.” I was ready to buy a flare gun. Throw a gold carp. Anything to let her know where I was.
She moved away from the wall she was standing near and suddenly appeared, no longer hidden by the outstanding bend in the wall. Ten feet from that corner.
“Why are you back so far?” I was quite interested in this.
“Why, it’s just common courtesy.”
“I agree that it is quite nice, but there was no one in line! To whom was the courtesy being paid?
“Well, I couldn’t tell if anyone was there, so I thought I should stand back here just to be certain.” Her answer, well, that line was odd. I told here she could move to the front of the line, so she began to make her way there. Before she got to the corner, another older lady arrived at the front of the line.
Our Lady, lady one said, “I was here first!”
Of course, lady two, the elder, was rather brusque. “Who the hell are you kidding?” I sought to intervene. The situation was going downhill quickly. The prospect of blood frightened me, and I am not easily intimidated.
Lady two had already assumed a position of power, feng shui anyone, which sent lady one back to her corner saying, “OK. Take your front. I’ll take second.”
“Wait a minute!” I shouted. Lady two just waved her cane menacingly, while lady one stood akimbo looked my way indignantly. My way? All I could see were mental images of me in the local weekly advertisement pick-up being hauled off for inciting violence.
I went to lady one. “Sorry for all this.”
“You should be. People could have been hurt!”
“Yes, ma’am. How far back should I stand?”
“Fifteen feet would be fine.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
One hour later, I decided to leave, the line having grown. I was still at the rear and now out into the parking lot. Luckily, I was standing next to my car. Continue reading “The Apotheosis of Jane Roe and John Doe”

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#Musk, The Scent of Progress and The End of The Individual

 

I am waiting for Elon #Musk‘s new dark #Comedy.
Arsenic and #Neural #Lace. A Study in #VR #Autocracy.
Appearing in a brain stem near you.

— Mark E Deardorff (@medeardorff) February 20, 2017

DATELINE 1970: THE WORLD. COLOSSUS – THE FORBIN PROJECT

Large mainframe computers proliferated in the 1960’s. Industry after World War II put demands on computation that could no longer be handled entirely by rows human calculators with slide rules, adding machines, or Burroughs Comptometer.

The public-at-large knew little other than what the wagging televised tongues and wrinkled words on fading newsprint bespoke of the world less run by the electrochemistry of organic man and more by the artifice of minds leaving many of them behind to toil as their support and not, they believed, as equals.

Hollywood, just as much then as now, take an opportunity to exploit fear to turn a profit. Profiting itself is not the problem. The fact is that Hollywood was prescient. The science-fiction community was and always has been, for the most part, very farsighted.

There were the idealists like Wells who saw great things that man would evolve away from in The Shape of Things to Come (1933) or Clarke who, twenty years later, believed that interdiction was the only way. Aliens steal humanity’s children in Childhood’s End. Wells, no friend of liberty it should be noted, argued for the pacification of religion. Continue reading “#Musk, The Scent of Progress and The End of The Individual”

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The Confusion Between Government and Society

By Andrew Kern of the Principled Libertarian

Being a commonly misunderstood fellow, I am often wrongly accused of many things. The number of times I have been accused of wanting to get rid of roads is uncountable and the times I have been thought of as selfish or uncaring on account of my apprehension to support government welfare is likely nearly as many.

Many people will say things like, “We can do better as a society” – or – “We need to help those in need.” It is a considerable misconception to think I disagree with these statements.


Frédéric Bastiat summed it up well:

Frédéric Bastiat

“Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”

Society is a group of people who work together for the benefit of one another. Government is an organization that interferes in society. Continue reading “The Confusion Between Government and Society”

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Why I Don’t Vote

By Kevin LeCureux

Why don’t I vote? Because politics is, at its core, immoral solutions to problems which are exaggerated, non-existent, or caused by politics themselves.

I’m optimistic about the present and the future. I see that the world is richer, safer, more peaceful, and better educated than ever, and is getting better overall. Politicians feed on pessimism and fear – fear of foreigners, fear of other “classes”, and especially fear of freedom. They see the human world as a hostile place and getting worse every day. This is not limited to one group, nor is any group free from it.

What problems do I think are exaggerated or made up? Let’s take for example fear of foreigners, usually manifested as fear that jobs will be lost to cheap foreign labor or immigrants. Prophets of doom have been pushing this fallacy for decades, yet as globalization has spread, Americans’ material well-being has only gotten better. Where would the state of the electronics industry be if America had blocked imports from Japan and Taiwan. Today we don’t fear losing jobs to those places, because they are as rich as Americans. The same will happen for China, India, Vietnam, and other places where productivity and wages are currently low. This is one of the central theories of economics that has been proven over and over: trade, including trade in labor, is beneficial to both sides.

So the problem of foreigners reducing Americans’ job prospects is at best exaggerated and at worse completely fabricated. If that weren’t bad enough, politicians and their advisers want to implement immoral “solutions” to it. Yes, blocking people from entering the country is immoral. When a non-citizen comes to America, they don’t kick a family out of their house and take it over, and they don’t go to employers and demand jobs at gunpoint. Just like anyone already here, they must trade what they have – a willingness to work – for what they need. If a major city were to say, “People from the rural areas come here and work for lower wages and live in tiny apartments, and bring down our average income, therefore we are imposing quotas on how many people can immigrate from poor rural areas and will punish anyone who employs them or rents them an apartment”, everyone would be rightly horrified. Moving to a big city is a dream for many people, and even if they have to start out living in a studio apartment eating ramen every day, it is worth it for the opportunities it holds for the future. And cities are not made worse off by allowing people to move in – the large population is part of what makes a city what it is! Why should the case of a person from the countryside moving to the city be different from a person from a poor country moving to a rich one? Just because the latter is crossing a different kind of artificial boundary? To keep poor people from moving to rich countries where they are wanted as employees and as customers – as producers and consumers – is to condemn them to poverty for no other reason than being born in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is no different, morally, from Jim Crow, and I hope that my descendants look back on this period of anti-immigration sentiment with the disgust with which we consider state-sponsored racism.

That is just one example of many: fear of capital (such as robots) putting people out of jobs, fear of poorly educated people harming the morality of a nation, fear of wealthy people, fear of poor people, fear of drugs, fear of guns, fear of terrorists, fear of spies. To the extent that any of these fears are justifiable, there is no political action that will be both achievable and ethical.

That, in short, is why I don’t vote. I have no desire to put my name to anyone’s awful propositions. I don’t need to feel like I’ve played for the right team, or demonstrated my credibility to the right people, or shown my undying faith in democracy. Besides that, I don’t live in a swing district in a swing state nor do I vote for one of the major parties, so my vote has no effect. My life will be made richer by looking at pictures on Facebook for 30 minutes rather than spending that time voting.

One last soapbox speech: Politics is not the answer. Loving your neighbor – which in part means giving him or her the respect you want others to treat you with – is the key to a good society. Treat adults like adults, be generous and gracious, be slow to speak and slow to become angry, and you will do more good in a single day than a lifetime of casting ballots.

This post originally appeared at Preposterous Preponderance

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A New Study From Google’s DeepMind Shows What Happens When AI Gets Selfish

 Devin Klos From OUTERPLACES.COM

As our world becomes more and more reliant on artificial intelligence, a vital moral question crops up: if two or more AI systems end up being utilized together, will they choose to cooperate or conflict with one another? In much the same way that humans ultimately have to decide whether it’s better to work as a team or go it alone, the same holds true for AI. The key difference, of course, is that if the AI is left to its own devices, the choices it makes will be out of the control of humans to try and alter it, or to instill any form of empathy in the decision-making.

To understand this concept more fully, researchers at Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind published a study that explored whether they could predict how AIs would respond to various situations involving socially conscientious variables—essentially, they wanted to see if two different AIs would choose to compete or work together as a predictive test. The tests were partly based on the famous game theory scenario known as the prisoner’s dilemma and took the form of various games where cooperation and self-interest were pitted against each other.

The first game, called Gathering, has two AI’s compete by retrieving apples from a central location. The AI’s can choose to just gather the apples or can use a laser to tag the other AI, which temporarily removes them from the game, allowing the remaining AI to gather on its own.

The testers found that when there were plenty of apples, the two AIs tended to ignore each other and gather, but as the supply became scarce, the lasers started firing. This is probably to be expected, as the law of supply and demand seems to make most people compete more fiercely. Black Friday, anyone?

What was more interesting, though, was that when a slightly more computationally savvy AI program was introduced into the game, it seemed to just want to fire the laser at the other regardless of the number of apples. The testers theorize that the phenomenon might be because firing the laser took more skill and ability, which the more advanced AI simply might have found more challenging.

A second game, called Wolfpack, revolved around two AIs essentially trying to corner and hunt the third AI through a course with obstacles involved. What’s interesting is that points are given not just to the player that catches the prey, but to anyone that is also close by—so it could actually be helpful to work together.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/0kaIqz6AvwE

The testers did, in fact, find that in the second game the AIs worked together more often, but again, it could stem from the fact that cooperating and planning were actually the more challenging and computationally stimulating choice.

What the testers more or less concluded was that AIs respond to the context and rules of the situation and that determines whether they will act as individuals or work together for the betterment of the whole. Apparently, the key to keeping AIs from making cold, logical, and selfish choices is to always establish a context and set of rules that make the choice of working together both the most stimulating and most rewarding choice.

Perhaps someone should tell that to Sarah Conner.

Source: Science Via Markets

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My Facebook Friends

​By ANonyMom

Based on what friends have posted on Facebook, they all hate me. 

They just don’t know it. 

Did you know that Silence is Violence? Haha. Right. 

Most friends probably assume I am like minded to them, that I obviously support/detest the same things or else why would we even be friends?!
There is no point in me telling people how I feel, they’re not going to like it.

The truth is painful for these people and they will avoid it at all costs behind a wall of virtue signaling garbage shit into their echo chamber of emotionally charged irrational beliefs.

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Legalized Theft aka Civil Asset Forfeiture

By Captain A

If I told you the most effective robber of the American people was the US government would you believe it? Im not even talking about theft via taxes, but theft via civil asset forfeiture. Personally, I think the fact that civil asset forfeiture exists is a huge testament to the inefficiency of central planning. Why would state and local law enforcement need to participate in legalized theft when the government is supposedly capable of providing the people with a police department. Most individuals reading this have been asked “without taxes then who pays for police?”. To them I say clearly not the government, since departments are participating in civil asset forfeiture at record highs.  

It doesn’t take much effort on google to locate stories of abuse that have occurred under civil asset forfeiture laws.  A New Jersey man lost $22,000 when traveling through Tennessee on his way to purchase a car.  Police suspected the money to be drug money and simply took it.  Since the individual could not prove immediately that he had no criminal intent the police assumed him guilty.  Since when in America are we guilty until proven innocent?  In Oklahoma, there are fears concerning police using card magnet readers.  The argument being police can simply empty an individual’s bank account using the card readers.   The two most troubling things that exposed themselves upon reading the Oklahoma story are 1) at least 25 other states have these card readers, and 2) civil asset forfeiture has become so profitable that the business making the card readers will earn almost 8% of all money stolen via forfeiture.  Government has not only motivated law enforcement to participating in “legalized” theft, but now businesses are cashing in on the stolen goods.  

According to a report put together by the Institute of Justice, since the creation of the of the Department of Justice’s Assets Forfeiture Fund in 1984, there was an increase in forfeiture funds between 1986-2014 of 4,667%. Between 2001-2014 alone there was an increase of over 1,000% collecting just under $29 billion from the people. In 2014 the DOJ and Treasury Forfeiture Funds saw $4.5 billion in net assets. That is to say – after they paid back some of the people who they stole from, they retained $4.5 billion in 2014 alone. States and local departments aren’t actually required to report their forfeitures which makes studying their numbers more difficult, according to the report.   My main issue with civil forfeiture, aside from it being blatant theft, is that it actually gives departments incentive to participate in the theft. The amount of states that simply require only a “preponderance of evidence” is scary. No trial, no criminal conviction, just the subjective interest of the officer involved. If a police officer knows that a major portion of his department’s budget comes from civil asset forfeiture then it benefits him to participate, and in some cases his job may depend upon it. This doesn’t imply all police officers are bad. This implies that the federal government is hanging a fucking jelly donut in front of police departments, and it’s too good not to grab. It’s not surprising to me that civil asset forfeiture has exploded, especially if the department is self funding via civil asset forfeiture. Figuring out which departments self-fund via civil asset forfeiture would be interesting, but because departments aren’t necessarily required to report their numbers that study would be impossible.  

Even if the state doesn’t keep the funds seized under civil asset forfeiture, there is a policy called “equitable sharing” that allows any state participating to receive a portion of the funds stolen by the federal government. For example, Texas keeps 70% of the funds taken via civil asset forfeiture, and the remaining portion is sent to the federal government. This remaining portion is then redistributed amongst the states. And if you were wondering, only 8 states don’t keep the funds collected from civil asset forfeiture. Unfortunately, that is misleading because all of those states participate in “equitable sharing”, so they are still receiving stolen goods. $4.7 billion was paid out between 2000-2013 via the “equitable sharing” program.  
Theft is theft. Government “legalized” theft is still theft. There is no possible way I can support civil asset forfeiture. Especially when the government is simultaneously threatening me if I steal anything. Not only does the government steal from us via taxes, but they’ve managed to motivate law enforcement departments to steal from you as well. Cato institute did a poll and found 84% of Americans oppose civil asset forfeiture. My first thought when I saw that number was — fuck the 16% who think it is ok to steal from someone. Then I looked up the percentage of people employed by government which came to 18%, and the 16% made more sense. When your paycheck depends on government plunder then government plunder is okay!  If ever there was a great argument against government then it is found in civil asset forfeiture.  

Sources  – Institute of Justice report – “Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture” http://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/policing-for-profit-2nd-edition.pdf
Cato institute – https://www.cato.org/policing-in-america/chapter-4/civil-asset-forfeiture

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Understanding the Value of a Vote Makes You More Friendly

By Kevin LeCureux

What’s the value of a vote? In a presidential election, practically zero. Your vote has virtually no chance of impacting the outcome. That’s one reason I don’t feel bad about not voting.

The corollary to this fact is that since no one’s vote is likely to affect the outcome, there is no reason to be upset about anyone’s voting intentions. If your co-worker’s or relative’s vote for a candidate you dislike had virtually no impact on the election, then there’s no reason to feel resentful towards them because of how they vote.

If you really embrace this logic, then you ought to be more friendly and charitable towards people whose politics you dislike because their vote has no impact on you personally.

This post originally appeared at Preposterous Preponderance