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YAY The #Freemasons got back to me about my application and we will be begining the first steps soon with a discussion! excited!
@freemo If the application requires money, might i interest you in financing my twilight years as well?
@admitsWrongIfProven You only need to pay your local lodge if you want to be an active member, which is only once your accepted anyway.
@freemo Hmm, no end to senseless toil then. A lot of good it does, huh?
Sorry if i'm ranting, just so done with doing what will not help anyone to continue to habitate and eat. Could do without.
@freemo Got a brain teaser for you: if freemasons do well to address such, why is it not addressed yet?
@admitsWrongIfProven If everyone on my block is a good person, why isnt the world a good place?
Because being good and effective in your little world isnt enough since you are so small in a big wide world.
@freemo I see. Freemasons are small?
I do wish you find happiness, i just doubt you will find it this way.
Good luck :-)
@admitsWrongIfProven I wouldnt say small... but a small enough portion of the population they cant fix the whole world on their own.
@freemo Good luck in any case. Apply logical thinking and test anything thrown at you the same way you would if a rambling person on the street said it. And keep in mind the sunk cost fallacy.
@admitsWrongIfProven Yup, always think for yourself. That is usually my concern with these sorts of things, they may demand falling in line in a way I may not agree with.
@admitsWrongIfProven Also it isnt about finding "happiness"... The idea is to support eachother to be a better person and largely to spend timein the fraternity engaging in charitable work. In fact almost all of what they do outside the lodge is charity.
@freemo "charity" is a dangerous concept... the moment you achieve the wealth to do so, how many people did you need to step over to gain it?
There also seems to be a gross disconnect here i just cant see in line with reality... The vast majority of people who have moderate to high wealth (millionairs) most didnt step on anyone.. I mean they are good people about as often as the poor... but most of them got where they were by working hard and treating their colleagues, clients, and employees fairly (which is why they excelled, because they supported so many people they got the best out of them). Shitty people sometimes make it rich, but more often than not they dont.
@freemo It is common for rich people to rationalize what they do.
There is so much wealth to go around, so much chances to be realized as profit.
Not everyone can be wealthy. In the end, one winning (more than others) needs another to sacrifice.
So, we could all have enough, but if some have more, others have less.
No economic shenanigans can defeat the physics behind having stuff. Stuff might be in abundance, but if you take all, none is left.
So, no rich person personally made anyone poor. It's just a general shifting of rules, chances. Nobody is to blame, but results are there.
@admitsWrongIfProven yes rich people whoa re bad rationalize it all the time.. poor people who are bad also rationalize it... rich and poor have about the same perprotions of bad people who rationalize what they do.
> So, we could all have enough, but if some have more, others have less.
Also no, this is fundementally false and easily disproven... wealth isnt a fixed value you need to take from others to have more.
@freemo You cannot disprove physics. There are ten loafs of bread for five people. One takes all ten, the other four starve.
All economics arguments are invalid if that happens. And as long as food goes bad while people starve in roughly the same area, it does happen.
Your economic arguments come back into play if we have a less unfair power structure, but right now we do not.
@admitsWrongIfProven except there arent a fixed 10 loafs.. some guy might go out and harvest some seeds and make 100 loafs and come and now is loaf rich, all without taking any loafs from anyone.
@freemo That would be true if land was not owned :-)
Look at it from the result: we know starving people exist, way beyond the people that fast willingly.
So if the economic theory says that cannot happen, it must be wrong. Maybe only wrong due to circumstances beyond what is accounted for in the theory, but wrong none the less.
@admitsWrongIfProven the fact that land can be owned doesnt change the fact that i just demonstrated wealth (loafs) can be generated and isnt fixed... you just moved the goal post. Regardlesss to any otber objection you have i just showed how a oerson can become loaf rich without needing to take any loafs from the existing loafs being shared.
@freemo Ok, important distinction here: "can be", not "is". The products needed by people can be produced. That does not mean they are, it also does not mean they are available to everyone (affordably). After all, not everybody can just up and produce: one needs a place to do that and raw materials, which are not available to everyone just like that.
You yourself wondered:
> There also seems to be a gross disconnect here i just cant see in line with reality...
I think you fail to account for different starting positions in life. Even if someone modestly rich does not "step on anyone", that does not mean that everything is fine.
You once said you came from next to nothing and built everything up. Taking you at your word here, that is nice to accomplish. But it is not something that can reliably work for everyone. There is no reasonable safety net for those that fail, for those that just don't have a practical idea.
Which brings us back to the current status: people do starve, both here and in the US. Any talk about that it should work better is obviously not realistic - people don't starve for fun.
Maybe it would be time to reevaluate the core beliefs the economic arguments are based on? Somewhere in there, there must be something missing, and i would start with the assertions that people can do this or that. Can they really?
@admitsWrongIfProven you are all over the place man... one fact at a time... right now we are on the point that for one person to be wealthy (have a bunch of loafs) they dont need to take it from other peoples wealth (loafs), they can, and do, make more loafs without needing to take a loaf from anyone...
Once we establish and agree wealth is not a zero sum game and this is true we can go on to address other facts that may lead to unfairness ornpoverty... but one at a time or else you just muddy the water.
@freemo Ok, you are right, there are two things at play here:
The general economy, which can work better on counterintuitive principles. I do not doubt that part.
What i introduced additionally is the part where an economy, no matter how productive overall, is not useful to most people if distribution of its products is too uneven.
@admitsWrongIfProven Ok so do we agree atleast on the first point.. wealth isnt a pie, for someone to be rich they dont have to deprive other of their wealth, they can make their own?
@freemo Well it depends on who exactly.
Someone with no assets cannot do anything.
Assets can be abilities (is mentally stable enough and of able body regarding what a job needs) or money, land.
Obviously the latter (money/land) are way better, as you are way more flexible and do not expend your time, just something you have externally.
So, who do you mean? All are not equal!
@admitsWrongIfProven Who said anything about equality? We are talking about one specific thing, not if everyone can equally generate wealth, not if its fair, not anything but if wealth is a zero sum game.. once you agree to that we can move on to other aspects and get deeper into fairnes.
@freemo I agree that there exist people that can make their own, but not that they would not need anything. Assets are necessary, so they do not make "their own" out of nothing. They grow something from something, and what they use in the process is finite (at least for a snapshot in time).
@admitsWrongIfProven Again we arent addressing (yet) who can create wealth or if wealth can be generated fairly by everyone equally.. thats a fair tangent we can go on in a minute... But we agree on the fundemental original point, wealth is not fixed and one does not need to take it from others, it can be generated (even if generating it may mean converting and having some wealth to start).
@freemo Sure, if we hold that the basis for creating wealth takes resources which are finite, this can stand.
@admitsWrongIfProven resources are not necceseraly finite, some are, some arent. Corn is not finite, you can grow more or less and can replace lost corn.
Even resources that are finite often act as non-finite resources. Like gold, there is a fixed amount in the world but in practice we can always grow more.
Land, that is a good example of a fairly fixed resource. I mean sure you can always find new islands or even make them from sand. But this is rare and hard to do so it is fairly fixed.
But when we talk about wealth fixed or mostly-fixed resources is only a small portion of that. But when a resource is fixed I do agree it needs to be handled differently than resources that are more easily generated.
@freemo This, i have to protest:
There is a limit to how much wheat there can be. To be especially blunt, we could look at the total mass available to us, but there are many further limits (optimal agriculture could produce x amount of wheat).
Please remember we are not time travelers. Wheat is only useful to us if it exists now, not if it could be produced in the future.
I really wonder what you mean by "we can always grow more" in relation to gold. Have i been misinformed where gold comes from? Are you talking about waiting for supernovae to produce more heavy elements?
Take ability as a resource, even that is fixed (in a point in time). If you damaged your body (say, by overworking it, by not having health insurance and falling ill), you cannot go back. If you spent your childhood with people that did not teach you useful skills and ways of thinking, you cannot go back and correct that - in this moment in time, you only have what you have.
Sure, people can heal, people can learn new skills. But that is a possible future, not the status quo.
Saying these are infinite does not describe our world, it only says "we could do better", which i do not contest.
Yes if you take a snapshot of the world at any moment the wealth in that moment is obviously fixed... how can anything change if time is fixed? The point? I dont think that was ever in dispute.
> I really wonder what you mean by "we can always grow more" in relation to gold. Have i been misinformed where gold comes from? Are you talking about waiting for supernovae to produce more heavy elements?
The amount of gold we have in circulation is not fixed... there will always be more in the earth to mine. As technology improves our ability to detect it or reach it improves too. For all intents and purposes it isnt finite given how vast the earth is and how little of it we have tapped.
The bigger issue with mining isnt if its finite or not, it has to do with the cost in environmental damage it takes to mine it. But even that too can be improved with technology (and has been).
> Saying these are infinite does not describe our world, it only says "we could do better", which i do not contest.
I am not saying they are infinite. I am saying they are effectively not finite given the vastness of the untapped resources still available to us in most cases. In other words, for the moment they are not behaving as finite resources, and wont be for a long time, at least from an economic perspective.
@freemo I do not understand why you want to leave the time parameter completely open.
If we want to answer a question like "can a specific person do x (create value, create wealth, bake corn bread), then the corn grown in 100 years or the heating energy available with fusion reactors in 20 years (always 20 years away!) is irrelevant.
We have some resources right now, and it would be reasonable to include next years harvest in our plans. But an open time parameter?
Either we stay in a time frame we can reasonably work with (now, a year, maybe a decade), or i doubt the relevance for our reality.
So, today's harvest is fixed. Next years harvest could be improved by some degree, the one in a decade even more (if we optimize for it).
So today, the people that have access to the proper resources can create value and wealth. Those that do not cannot. For the future, we can change who has access, we can create some (limited) extra resources. Anything we can add has a limit, though. As you said, land has very strict limits, others are a bit more open.
Does that sound right to you?
> I do not understand why you want to leave the time parameter completely open.
Because thats the reality.. in the real world time moves forward. Therefore I insist we talk about things how they are, and not based on some model that doesnt reflect life.
> If we want to answer a question like “can a specific person do x (create value, create wealth, bake corn bread), then the corn grown in 100 years or the heating energy available with fusion reactors in 20 years (always 20 years away!) is irrelevant.
I havent objected to any claims of this nature... If you claim you want to do something that takes 20 years to accomplish I have not, and would not claim you could do it instantly...
> We have some resources right now, and it would be reasonable to include next years harvest in our plans. But an open time parameter?
Huh? at no point did I say all things must be assumed with infinite time into the future... you seem to be getting into irrelevant meta. Time is considered, and it must be considered in line with the reality of the scenario we discuss, which has been the case so far. If you feel I am representing a 20 year time period as an instantanious thing than be specific where I may have done this and we can discuss.
> So today, the people that have access to the proper resources can create value and wealth. Those that do not cannot. For the future, we can change who has access, we can create some (limited) extra resources. Anything we can add has a limit, though. As you said, land has very strict limits, others are a bit more open.
Yes some people with access to more reasources can generate more wealth, others with access to less resources cant generate as much. This has never been in dispute.
Nothing wrong with this, there is no ethical reason to think everyone needs to have the same resources and identical abilities to generate wealth. In fact quite the opposite, people who have invested more time into generating wealth in the past, and thus have more wealth(or their parents did this for them) should reap the benefits of them and their parents hard work by being able to generate more as time goes on. It seems your idea that everyone needs to have the same amount of resources or its unfair is the fundemental flaw in your reasoning.
@freemo Ok, so we agree on that the ability to do something is always limited by the resources available at the time in question.
We can look at arbitrarily long time periods, but they should always be chosen so they are relevant to the question we ask.
With a time frame chosen, the resources are more or less clear. Expand the time frame too far into the future, we will get some vagueness. But we can work with that, as we can at least take a guess.
I do not agree that there was no ethical reason to equalize access to resources, but if it is not fundamental to the reasoning you want to do here, we can ignore it.
Should it be relevant, i would point out that unequal access to any natural resources is a kind of "right of the strongest", just with money instead of brawn.
@freemo To invest time into making things better is a behavior we want, correct. Some can do that, others are kept from any meaningful contribution due to resource limitations.
What are you trying to get at?
@admitsWrongIfProven
> With a time frame chosen, the resources are more or less clear. Expand the time frame too far into the future, we will get some vagueness. But we can work with that, as we can at least take a guess.
Well no, the resources are only clear over very short time periods, or where the total supply has little relevance. Entier countries worth of wealth can be destroyed in a matter of months in some extreme cases.
> I do not agree that there was no ethical reason to equalize access to resources, but if it is not fundamental to the reasoning you want to do here, we can ignore it.
Since its not clear what you are disagreeing on I cant even state if its relevant here. The main premis we covered and agreed to: wealth is not a zero-sum game.
So the real question now is, what is it you are trying to assert, and is it even something we disagree on?
> Should it be relevant, i would point out that unequal access to any natural resources is a kind of “right of the strongest”, just with money instead of brawn.
Well no, because I (or my parents) had to earn and work for those resources. So its not a right to the strongest, its a right to reap the rewards of what you, or your ancestors, invest time into.
The fact that I can invest time into something and get a reward that makes my future easier is **exactly** the behavior we want in a society, because it encourages people to build for the future and invest that time rather than to just sit around and contribute the minimum.