THE VIRTUE OF JURIES.
Judges may not be very bright. And the law may be impossibly complex. But jurors are still moral animals. And if you can construct a moral narrative. They will buy it.
Adams was right.
Get a jury. Ask them to do the right thing. They will more often than not, oblige you.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 06:16:00 UTC
http://www.brinsonfoundation.org/whoweare/founder_statement.shtmlGARY BRINSON: LIBERTARIAN. WEALTH MAGNET.
Gary has been, through proxy, an investor in one of my companies. A smart man from seattle who we all admire. If you read this biography, or read his book, you’ll love him too.
BUT VIRTUE DOESN’T ROLL DOWNHILL
Unfortunately, the fellow that works for him, and is on our board, is a dishonest lying thief who has systematically stolen from our shareholders. It is a blatant constructed effort to create conditions whereby any profits are directed not to shareholders equally, but to him alone.
And I think, now that we have some clear evidence, it’s about time I did something about it. I couldn’t do it while CEO. But I can do it now.
But I think Brinson beat me to it. From what I’ve just learned, he’s been released from his position.
That’s good. Now all I have to do is prevent him from ever getting another one.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 06:14:00 UTC
“DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST TOTALITARIAN JUSTIFICATIONIST WANTED”
Well. That’s the proper translation of an ad I just recieved in my inbox. They’re seeking “German Political Theorists”.
Sigh.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 05:40:00 UTC
PFS Friends That Didn’t Make It This Year:
Hoppe succeeded. We have become a family. And your PFS family misses you. So please try to save up a bit and come next year. OK?
You know who you are. 😉
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 05:37:00 UTC
I met an orthodox priest (Decon?) a few months ago, walking down the street. Elderly. One cataract covered eye. Perfect english. And he had that magic that wise old priests used to have when they were our educated class.
I wish the church had allowed marriage, and adopted to modernity by teaching all european history as moral lessons. But they took poverty as an intrinsic good, rather than as a necessary means of ensuring individual commitment to society which was during most of its history, poor.
We left our church sure. But our church abandoned us in favor of developing nations.
Now we have Academia, Totalitarian Humanism, Marxism. And the church is no longer our institutional opposition to the state. We no longer have an independent moral institutional framework to separate us from the judicial and military institutions.
We destroyed that balance of power. Then the Feminists allied with the marxists and destroyed the family.
Sad.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 04:24:00 UTC
Westerners are crazy. Russians and Ukrainians are wonderful people – both east and west. Trust will develop more slowly. Commerce will spread slowly. But they will get it. If they didn’t use Cyrillic they’d be indistinguishable from the rest of us. But that they are distinguishable probably helps them resist us.
Their the only sane Christians left. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 04:19:00 UTC
Is it just me, or did Microsoft taint the Metro style UI so badly that it’s dead?
I realize that flatness is fashionable (as resolution increases it’s only natural). But the metro UI, at least to me, reads as synonym for failure.
I’m overly sensitive to this stuff. So maybe it’s just me.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 04:04:00 UTC
THE 150 YEAR BATTLE
Hmmm…
We won the battle over capitalism – property rights.
We’re in the middle of winning the battle over economics – a) the necessity of preserving the quality of the information system, b) the limit of credit and interest, and c) the restoration of the contract between the generations.
We are very close to overturning a century of progressive anti-reason and anti-science.
We have at least undermined the fantasy of universal democracy as a ‘good’.
But we are just beginning to work on institutions and norms. And, of all of these. That will be the most difficult I think. I do not know if we can put destruction of the family by the feminists back in the bottle.
(Which as a nerd, is what makes it an interesting problem. 🙂 )
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 03:44:00 UTC
HUMAN BEHAVIOR QUESTION: LOTTOCRATIC BUSINESS PROCESSES?
If you have worked with me before, you know that I have a sort of personal commitment to eliminating overhead bureaucracy and empowering the people who actually do the work. I’ve found that it’s better to distribute management functions to a large number of people, each of whom does just a little bit of it.
The side effects are fascinating. First, you educate a lot of people about how to run a business. If you rotate these duties you basically train most of your staff in how to operate the boring but necessary parts. Second, it makes it impossible for people to use their management duties to obscure information. Third, it prevents stagnation and encourages innovation. People want to eliminate these little process functions rather than expand them. So they tend to invent ways of making them go away.
TIME CARDS AND EXPENSES AS LOTTOCRACY
I have been toying with the idea of lottocratically assigning timesheet approvals around a services company. That is, anyone with one year of experience or more gets X randomly assigned timesheets and expense reports to review and approve. Most of what is accomplished by approvals is error checking. If accounting, upon entering and posting, approves it too, your score goes up, and if they reject it your score goes down.
Now you might think this is crazy. But I’m pretty sure, that if I made it an option. Most people in any company would want to do it. Particularly the less experienced people. And the senior people would avoid it at all costs.
People would want to do it because it increases Sovereignty. They are more in control, and participating more in their environment. And from my perspective, an informed and participatory employee is happier one, who brags about his or her job to others. Which helps recruiting. And customers ‘SENSE’ it. And that ‘sense’ sells.
I’M WONDERING WHAT YOU THINK?
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-07 01:19:00 UTC
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/opinion/sunday/dogs-are-people-too.html?pagewanted=allGREAT ARTICLE: DOGS SHARE OUR EMOTIONS
Which is pretty obvious really. They’re more like us than most primates.
Now, the author makes the assertion that personhood, and rights are properties of sentience. And I am not sure that I agree with that. Rights are a property of cooperation, not emotional or intellectual presence.
We show compassion to other creatures. We show compassion to children. But we do not give children ‘rights’. They can’t make use of them. Nor can they understand them. Likewise, any human that would demonstrate a lack of compassion to a child, a dog, or a goat for that matter, is a threat to the rest of us either materially or normatively. Our ‘do not unto others’, rule (the silver rule) cannot be broken with any sentient creature, because it cannot be a choice. This is a normative, moral, requirement. Not a legal one. So it is not that animals have rights. It is that humans have duties of care. We regulate humans, because we can. And we punish humans because we can.
We cannot go around throwing the term ‘right’ around as comfortably as liberals tend to. A right is a contractual property of voluntary exchange. An obligation is a property of a contract of voluntary exchange. A duty is an obligation that is part of the human contract for acceptance into any society. It is a tax. A fee. An insurance policy. Your personal commitment that you are safe to have and hold for the rest of us, and capable of having ‘rights’ by voluntary exchange.
If you cannot hold your duties of care, then you are a threat not only to children and animals, but to the rest of us as well.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-06 16:17:00 UTC