033803throwaway
033803throwaway on Hacker News
There is nothing wrong with investing in a productive enterprise and expecting to share in the profits of that enterprise.
If a man is starving (or, worse, has convinced himself he needs a new iThing when he does not) and you loan him money you are either violating charity or enabling debt-peonage, respectively.
This is setting aside the exponential nature of compound interest, which is why debt-based economies always go bust, and focusing on the individual morality of the transaction.
What they need is money, not loans, and, in particular, not loans against consumption rather than production, which is what broadly available credit inevitably devolves into. (Look at college loans, which started off ostensibly as an investment in productive assets and has devolved into financing four years of heavily curated consumption followed by crushing student debt.)
Even loans against production are dangerous and eventually lead to debt peonage and wealth concentration, as we have seen time and time again, from roman times onward.
The problem is usury, and there is a long, historical argument about it that is completely ignored in the west. This is because history is written by the victors, and the usurers won. We are all usurers (or aspiring usurers) now.
Sometimes I can't help but feel that we deserve what's coming.
I don't care much which OS I have to run, they are all the same now. I just want a smart phone that fits in a single hand.
I tried the palm and it is a bit too small, and the battery life was insanely bad.
It's one of the most pressing issues in sociology and is rarely discussed at all, and typically discussed dishonestly when it is.
We are one stock market pull back away from catastrophe even for wealthy boomers.
Interesting times.
Orthodoxy (1908) by G.K. Chesterton
The Brothers Karamazov (1880) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
And congratulations.
But you are not a useless worm and this is not a piece of dust.
Our culture tells us the opposite. But our culture is insane and wants you to be an isolated, rootless, consumer wage slave.
If the electoral college is abolished, it could actually end up getting another few republicans elected, since it would incentivize republican turnout in solidly democratic states like California.
Which is why I view the situation as hopeless, but not serious.
We pay for a single payer system, we just don't get it.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
nihil sub sole novum
It becomes very difficult to understand what happened during the 50s and 60s, the more you look into it.
Family formation without debt slavery doesn't have the same appeal to our media class, but it's far more important in the long run.
There is a reason the church was so hard on usury. I hope it rediscovers the issue: it is the most pressing social justice issue of our time, cutting across all non-elite identity classes.
This can be used to trigger a full browser refresh when the application topology had changed dramatically.