HiYaBarbie

I've debated lots and lots of other psychopaths, going through variations of those bullshit distractions, so I'll just not bother now.

How does it matter?

> One thousand times NO. The rule of law applies to all equally.

This is just your cognitive dissonance talking.

You can say "NO" a million times, but Bradley Manning was just imprisoned without trial (and tortured for months.. years?), even though Habeas Corpus was supposed to apply.

> The president murders their spouse, expect them to be charged.

Why would you expect that? If the president murders his spouse, he's probably reasonably sure he'll get away with it. Otherwise he probably wouldn't.

> By definition the rule of law applies to all.

That's what we're trained to believe.. so many TV shows and movies show police officers risking their lives in fighting crime and courts being fair and just and all, but have you ever dealt with the court system? Did you get justice?

You've probably heard of "plea-bargaining", right? http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/12556-overwhelming-use-of...

People are blackmailed into accepting a punishment for something they haven't done, to avoid the potential life-ruining punishment for whatever outrageous bullshit they're charged with (that they haven't done either).

And you insist that everything is fine?

Maybe this will clarify things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNIgztvyU2U

Look, the NSA as an organization, as a whole, is blatantly violating the Constitution, which is supposedly the most sacrosanct law of the nation.

The fact that they don't care about what laws say doesn't get any clearer than that.

The fact that no one from NSA has gone to jail for the NSA violating the Constitution shows.. well, pretty much that the government doesn't bother punishing itself for violating its own laws.

To be fair, that would be kind of silly, after all.

You're right to point out that the NSA doesn't give a fuck about the law, but..

> the rule of law is the point, it is a necessary condition for a civilized society and MOST ESPECIALLY the government needs to be bound by it

You seem to be overlooking the fact that the organization that makes the laws is, by definition, above them. The government is not bound by its own laws any more than a King or Emperor by his, back in the day.

The reason why you see crimes go unpunished is that people with political power and/or connections are effectively above the law.

> they are probably allowed, under the same charter that allows CIA to conduct HUMINT missions, to attack Italian security companies

They are definitely not allowed, under the Constitution, to monitor everyone, but they do it anyway. You know this too.

So why do you discuss legislation as if it mattered to the NSA, when their actions show it clearly doesn't?

Payment fees are high and plentiful because banks are a state-maintained cartel everywhere.

For example, it's outrageous that they charge us something like $30 - $60 for a wire transfer, but that's what happens when they can charge just about whatever the fuck they want, because there is no competition!

Yeah, that was seriously weird. No one needs an emoticon to tell himself his own mood.

It could be useful for surveillance purposes though..

Alright. Well, we're talking about something that might be theoretically possible, but is impossible in practice. I don't think it matters.

Wow, that's just absurd.

> That fallacy is called ipse dixit, roughly translated as I say so, therefore it is.

That's not what happened though. I pointed out that bureaucrats aren't prudent when spending other people's money, and that's self-evidently true.

For example, you know would not be prudent with other people's money either, or with $1000 you found on the street.

> And that's the fallacy of the excluded middle. Just because (some) bureaucrats aren't particularly prudent when using our money, it doesn't follow that (as you alleged before) the free market is always better.

I was hinting at the fact that since everyone uses someone else's money less prudently than his own, using someone else's money results in 'waste' compared to using one's own, and therefore, all public spending results in 'waste'.

So it's clear that the free market actually is 'always better' in that sense. It's better in all other senses too.

For example, you'd be hard pressed to argue that a state-maintained monopoly or cartel is better for us than no such thing.

> I actually happen to think the opposite of the two assertions that you claim constitute my premise.

Quote the two assertions I claimed constitute your premise.

So how does the 'optimization' work? :)

I have no clue about physics, so I'm just curious.

The question is actually based on the false premise that value can be objectively measured/quantified.

In fact, value is purely subjective. In other words, the value of 'Wikipedia consumption' is only what each individual places on it.

For example, someone may find Wikipedia valuable in pursuing his quest for greater knowledge, whereas someone else is completely uninterested in 'consuming' it (and doesn't see Wikipedia as valuable).

In a nutshell, the value of X is its subjectively perceived utility as a means towards an end.

See http://mises.org for more.

Perhaps more clearly, GDP doesn't distinguish between productive and unproductive activity.

The government could pay people to dig ditches and fill them back in, and that would contribute to the GDP even though it was a complete waste of effort and a net negative considering the opportunity costs.

> if you're willing to spend enough energy, you can optimize the state an arbitrarily large system as you please

Define "optimize" and "system"?

> Thats exactly analogous - both oversized parking lot and burning down forests for few years worth of farming are profitable, yet highly undesirable.

I specifically talked about an oversized parking lot getting reduced due to it not being a good investment, so no, not exactly analogous.

The point is that the allocation of anything that's privately owned and used in/for some sort of production will get adjusted as necessary, purely out of its owner's self-interest.

But for starters, burning down a forest would not be a productive endeavour, and as such, not in its owner's interest. Already we can see you're not quite clear on what the problem is.

On the other hand, cutting down a forest to make room for a farm might well be a good idea, but probably not for only "a few years worth of farming".

Why would someone operate a farm for only a few years when it could produce him wealth indefinitely? Again, it's not clear what problem you're seeing here.

> everything is spaced out by parking lots, so more and more people are using cars in turn needing more parking lots

Here you're assuming that people will buy more cars if there's more parking space. I can't see how that would be the case.

If people notice that there are more bicycle parking spaces, will they buy more bicycles? If someone brings you an extra coat hanger, will that make you buy a new coat?

I don't see the connection. Can you point out a real problem related to any of this?

> hardly desirable outcome for a city, which would be better served by good public transport

Now you're talking about something that's not determined by market forces, but by government. Public transport is irrelevant to the earlier discussion. If bad decisions are made in that sphere, blame it on the government.

> A simple metastable suboptimal state example is extreme income inequality - it took years to get out of another metastable state - more sensible income distribution

"Metastable" sounds like a term some academic self-proclaimed philosopher might use. That means it's probably nonsense (or pointless).

> Now, it would take a lot of effort/change/work/whatever to switch the states.

I'm not sure what sort of effort you're imagining, but all it would take is for governments to not dictate what currency we're allowed to use.

> I'm always a bit weary, when people rely on physics or rigid math to derive economic conclusions.

You'll be delighted by Austrian Economics then: http://mises.org

They start from some axioms on how humans actually behave, and build everything on top of that.

For whatever it's worth, he was clearly not posting substantively. Perhaps a reminder would be in order?

If you take the idea of "getting rid of randomness" to its logical conclusion, it boils down to making the world deterministic.

Does it make sense to pursue impossible goals? If not, does it make sense to philosophize about pursuing impossible goals?

Oh come on. We all know politicians break their promises and lie all the damn time.

We all know there's massive surveillance everywhere, very much against the citizens' wishes.

We all know politicians don't give a shit about us, as evidenced by their actions.

If you want to claim otherwise, you're either being dishonest or just delusional.

In every single election throughout the past decades, there have been some people working hard to enact a change for the better.

How's that working out so far? Will it be different next time? Vote the bums out.. so that other bums will take their place?

Voting is fundamentally pointless because: you dropping a piece of paper into a box does not magically constrain what the politician you voted for can do in office.

It's just a piece of paper. It has no magical powers.

In other words, politicians are free to do whatever the fuck they want, and strangely enough, they pretty much always break their promises and make things worse for us.

So no, voting really doesn't matter. Elections are a distraction meant to make us believe that we have a say in how we're governed (through magic paper!), and "governance" itself boils down to coercion.

There's a tiny elite passing laws that we must obey. Any law is just a command to behave in a certain way and we get punished for disobeying them, regardless of whether the laws make sense, or correspond to morals, or even benefit us in any way.

> I may be able to guess that no, you don't do any of the harder stuff, either

In fact, I'm doing the harder stuff right now. Encouraging independent thinking and trying to get people to wake up, and enduring the resulting cognitive-dissonance-induced hostility.

Dude, seriously. By that logic, it's unethical for you to buy anything, because something bad could have happened to someone along the production chain.

That's a completely nonsensical view to take, because you just can't know what happened and why, and none of it happened due to your actions.

We're not morally responsible for things that happen without any input from our personal choices and actions.

It's not "an ideology", by the way. It's simple truth, and I pointed to one element of why it's obvious:

>> bureaucrats just aren't particularly prudent when they are using our money

> Another view is that the so-called free market is very focused on the short term, which isn't conducive to providing public goods

I can't decipher what potential problem you're pointing to. Apparently even "knowledge" is a "public good".

But whatever your complaint there is, it's based on the flawed premise that there is some One True Way <X> should be, and that central planning intervention is necessary to make it so.

> If mass deforestation was so bad, no one would do it! /s Or production/mining with extreme environmental havoc

How is that analogous to what I said?

What is that "METASTABLE" nonsense? :P

What's the connection between this:

> A hard core libertarian might argue that all those property owners should have the right to build parking lots if they want to, and it’s nobody else’s business.

.. And this:

> In my opinion though, a city where blanketing downtown in parking lots is the rational behavior has a pathologically broken city planning / tax system.

You might also want to consider whether a property owner would "blanket downtown in parking lots", if there were no reason to believe that would be a good investment.

If someone makes a bad investment, that's his problem.

If there are way too many parking spots operated by a private enterprise, some of them will be removed to make way for more productive uses of the land.

Cute, but where would you draw the line?

"You see, the government owns your car too, because you're driving on roads built by the government"

"Oh but you see, clearly, based on the government deciding under what conditions you're allowed to leave the country, the government owns your body too, and is therefore within its rights to torture and kill you on a whim."

Do you really see no problem at all with the idea that governments own everything and are just graciously "renting" things to us?

Do you sincerely see nothing as your own legitimate property? When you buy a new phone, is that actually the government's property instead of yours?

All of which could be much more efficiently provided by private enterprises competing in a free market.

Strangely enough, bureaucrats just aren't particularly prudent when they are using our money.

> America/Europe doesn't have to help Africa now just like they didn't have to hurt Africa for centuries before.

You don't see the fallacy in yours?

I have never "hurt Africa", nor have I ever "made a mess" there, so I have no reparations to make.

Please don't tell me I'm complicit in hurting Africa because of some piece of paper I may have dropped into a voting box.

First, I don't vote because it's pointless, and second, I'm not even from the US (or any other Imperial country).

Perhaps the safety-related government agencies aren't really doing their purported job?

> No, they're given a hard time because they ignore regulation like driver background checks or insurance or calibrated tamper proof meters.

"Ignoring regulations" in this context basically boils down to "competing with taxi cartels". That's obviously upsetting to the cartels, and unhappy noises are made about background checks and meters, as if those potential problems could only be solved with a cartel.

We both know that Uber & Lyft drivers give better service overall than taxi drivers overall. That's because Uber and Lyft are not part of a cartel, and have to therefore please their customers lest they lose them.