I'm not sure quite what they meant, but that doesn't sound quite right to me either.
If the currency is stagnant or close to stagnant, the incentive to invest is that you end up with more wealth overall.
I'm not sure it's possible for deflation to be both predictable and higher than the market rate of return, because people today would immediately speculate and bid up the price of the currency to reflect its future expected value.
Of course inflation is an added incentive to invest money, or at least to store your wealth in assets other than money.
investments in a Bitcoin world would just have to give much higher rates of return.. I don't see how it fundamentally can't work. Also people don't realize but mathematically if Bitcoin was the size of a fiat currency its volatility would be more like a fist currency.
I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. All I'm trying to say is that economists generally agree that a small amount of inflation (around 2%) is good because people will rather have their wealth in stocks/bonds/etc rather than the fiat currency itself. We want money to move around, rather than sit in someone's safe
>We want money to move around, rather than sit in someone's safe
It's just paper. What's wrong with it sitting in someone's safe? We certainly don't want actual productive capital assets to be idle, but dollar bills don't produce anything. If they're sitting in a safe, the value of the ones that aren't in the safe goes up slightly.
>It's probably because of the Age of Enlightenment in the west that did a thorough self evaluation over a few centuries.
I'm not sure what a "thorough self evaluation" would actually mean. I don't think that's even remotely feasible, given the immense scope of the subject matter. What has happened is that certain elements within western civilization have focused their efforts on criticizing western civilization, some in good faith and some not, and the rest of western civilization has allowed them to do so. That is the part that is rare, just like suicide, and for the same reason.
>You can obviously avoid marriage in the first place, in order to maximize services or avoid taxes.
No, you really can't. Do you seriously think the state is going to pay out more benefits to parents solely because they haven't signed a marriage certificate?
You _can_ absolutely qualify for more benefits if the other parent is unable or unwilling to contribute financially and the state is unable to coerce them to do so. But the state goes after the other parent first.
Part of the reason these programs are so harmful is that they provide incentives for the father to stay away from the children. Staying around to raise the children makes it a lot easier for the state to A) find him and B) make the case that he's the father or has taken on a fatherly role and is therefore responsible for paying for them.
Is this sarcasm, or are you suggesting that the same institution which set up these perverse rules has done such a great job that it should be given control over the funding of health care for 99% of the population?
> ...It's legal to think about murder as long as you don't behave that way.
Sort of. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1117 ("conspiracy to commit murder") only requires one person to take action and everyone in the group that did the thinking with them is guilty of a crime. This is in the US, but I would be quite surprised if various other countries did not have similar statutes.
More generally, there are all sorts of laws out there that effectively criminalize thoughtcrime rather than behavior. Of course behavior might be needed for anyone to _discover_ the thoughtcrime.
> Sort of. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1117 ("conspiracy to commit murder") only requires one person to take action and everyone in the group that did the thinking with them is guilty of a crime.
Wrong. It requires all the people to have taken action to communicate their intention to collaborate on the plan, and only one of them to have taken additional action toward acheiving it.
People don't think in groups; thoughts have to manifest as action for people to conspire.
> to communicate their intention to collaborate on the plan
What the law says is "conspire to violate".
If person X and person Y together work out a way for person Y to commit murder and then person Y commits murder, is person X considered as conspiring?
> People don't think in groups
Sure they do. It's called "conversation" or "correspondence". If we had telepathy, we could skip the transcoding to sound or text, but we don't yet, but fundamentally it's the same thing.
> Sure they do. It's called "conversation" or "correspondence"
Conversation is action, not thought.
> If we had telepathy
There's a couple different things (in fiction, naturally) that go by that name; the active analog to oral communication is also action, the sort of passive integration associated (not exclusively, just as an example) many hive-mind collective organisms in sci-fi is thought rather than action, but also not analogous to what goes on between humans.
I think the distinction here is a pretty dubious one. Consider, as a hypothetical, a situation in which one can actually tell "what someone else is thinking" based on a more advanced form of EEG. Would it still be "thought" as opposed to "conversation" if two people are doing it to each other simultaneously? Why is transcoding in terms of pixels on a monitor different from transcoding as sounds? Is the key difference for you whether the transcoding is active or passive on the part of the thinker of the thought?
Put another way, if we define "thought" as being limited to those things which have no perceptible effect on the world at all, then we run into the separate question about whether this "thought" thing exists in the first place.
FWIW, the lawyers in this thread tuned out at this point. Nothing is very simple in law, but the ambiguities of criminal conspiracy are reasonably distant from the situation you've described. Conspiracy requires communication in order to agree to commit a crime. Positing a kind of thought that communicates doesn't really muddy the waters much.
I don't think the philosophers engaged, either. Redefining thought to be imperceptible denies everything we actually do know about the biological process of thought, so it's not clear the discussion leads anywhere worth going.
I think what you're trying to ask is: Is being labeled gay grounds for imprisonment? Or does one have to be caught in the act of fornicating with a male to be imprisoned? I'm sure it depends on the jurisdiction, but many jurisdictions that have this kind of explicit law usually frowns upon homosexuality so much, that the mere accusation is enough to be damaging.
What I'm asking is more like, if the government microphone in your potted plant hears you coming out as gay to your friends, would that be grounds for criminal punishment?
Laws against inherent characteristics seem to me at least to be worse than laws which ban behavior. Conflating the two in order to make some particular law sound worse seems sort of dishonest to me.
Perhaps. But within the context of gay rights it is the government that behaved improperly. Society bundled behaviour and innate characteristics into a single thing. That was wrong, and it is important to highlight that.
Of course in a post homophobic world the distinction is rather irrelevant. It makes no difference to anyone if homosexuality is innate, or just a set of chosen behaviours. Why would it matter either way? But for a while it was necessary to remind people that you don't have any choice about being gay, or about having gay relationships. That claim was a response to homophobia, not something rooted in science of philosophy
There's still plenty of conservative people who believe the being gay is a personal choice, or perhaps something caused by your upbringing/environment, not something you're born with.
Of course, this has as much veracity as the idea that the Earth is flat or that the Sun and planets revolve around it, but there's a lot of people who believe it.
But the whole argument is ridiculous. Maybe there is a choice element to being gay. So what? That is a perfectly valid choice to make. But attacking someone for that is not valid, it is completely perverse.
It seems to me that the purpose of the "born with it" argument is to develop empathy among people who lack understanding. Because it helps explain why people act on their feelings, even if they are not a good idea. We can all relate to the power of lust, love etc. It is an important point to make. But that argument only has relevance to people who find it distasteful in the first place. The argument is a reaction to homophobia.
I agree that it's a valid choice to make, and people should have the freedom to make such choices if they want. However, you said before that "It makes no difference to anyone if homosexuality is innate, or just a set of chosen behaviours." and that's incorrect. It does make a difference, to some people. To those people, they'd oppose it if it were proven to simply be a choice, whereas they'd have more empathy if it were proven to be completely innate: it'd like being mad at a mentally-retarded person for doing something dumb, compared to being mad at or disappointed in a very intelligent person for making a very dumb decision. I'm not defending this mentality (because again, I have no problem with homosexuality and I think people should be free to have whatever physical relationships they want), but I'm explaining it.
Also, remember that a lot of people (particularly religious ones) want to regulate social behavior, even in the bedroom, because they believe this is important for society's survival and prosperity. So in their view, homosexuals should be oppressed (either strongly by the state, or more weakly by social pressure) for the good of society, and to keep their behavior from "spreading". There's not really a way to counter this mentality by people like us because their worldview is so entirely alien to us: we don't believe in divine retribution for "immoral" behavior (a la Sodom & Gomorrah) and they do, and nothing's going to shake their belief.
>There's not really a way to counter this mentality by people like us because their worldview is so entirely alien to us
As you hint at up above, there are non-religious people who believe regulating sexual behavior is important for society. Do you have a way to counter that idea when it's based on a secular worldview which is not so alien to yours?
Liberty versus authoritarianism? I acknowledge such people exist, but I don't pretend to know or understand their full argument of why it should be regulated. At least with the religious people, I can understand why, I just reject the silly premises (that God will smite us like in the story of Sodom). With atheists (presumably Stalinists?), I really don't get it. Besides, we've seen atheistic authoritarian societies before, and they were a complete disaster, not only economically but also as far as having a happy, functioning society. Hint: if you have to have a wall to keep people from running away from your society, and you shoot people who try to climb over the wall, then the fundamentals of your society are not worth preserving. Now it might be obvious that I'm following a fairly utilitarian philosophy here (happy = good), but if you're not religious and don't believe in utilitarianism, what exactly is the goal for your society? Generally, societies which do not value the happiness of their citizens are religious, because they claim that they need to "please God" or act in certain ways to have a better afterlife. Remove the afterlife and deity and what do you have left? Either wanting people to be happy (but still functional; not happy as in drugged-out all the time and unable to keep society functioning), or you're running the society on what makes one person happy and to hell with what everyone else wants, which is basically narcissism (which probably describes North Korea today).
>but I don't pretend to know or understand their full argument of why it should be regulated
One reason might be that they believe that having a culture which is hedonistic toward sex is harmful for society, and they believe that acceptance of homosexual behavior necessarily leads to having such a culture.
>presumably Stalinists?
That is definitely not a reasonable assumption to make.
>but if you're not religious and don't believe in utilitarianism, what exactly is the goal for your society?
It is perfectly possible to be utilitarian, non-religious, and opposed to the acceptance of homosexuality. All it takes is a belief that acceptance of homosexuality is on the whole and over time more harmful for people than intolerance of homosexuality.
Yes we've rehashed the difference between internal thinking and action. I don't think anyone believes that a government is directly oppressing internal monologue.
The original quote was "being gay is illegal in many places". By saying "being gay is illegal" it seems to imply a behavior though. Being a murderer, or being a pilot, or being a carnivore...
But, you're right. We can all agree that it's totally legal to be a murderer or thief as long as you don't behave that way.
>totally legal to be a murderer or thief as long as you don't behave that way.
You must know this doesn't make any sense. Murderer and thief are words that describe people who actually murder or steal, not people who just have a desire to murder or steal. Gay describes who you are attracted to.
>Well, the United States is a living example of a country that tried that, and um ... hasn't failed because of it.
When did the US A) allow unrestricted immigration of people of non-European origin, B) actually have significant numbers of immigrants of non-European origin, and C) not quickly move to restrict that immigration?
Unrestricted immigration of people of European origins is not the same thing as opening up the borders without restriction.
