Curt Doolittle

Source: Facebook

  • CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS : I love how men and women are portrayed in the media here

    CULTURAL OBSERVATIONS :

    I love how men and women are portrayed in the media here versus in the states. Men are, frankly manly, mature, and women are elegant and beautiful, and the sexuality is not crass like hollywood videos, but beautiful.

    We celebrate the hedonism of peasantry as a vehicle for marketing with baser instincts. They celebrate their aspirations.

    It makes me realize how ‘cheap’ americanism is. Another packaged good for the proles.

    Aristocracy died with the first world war. It just took this long for the proles to tear down the castles and use the stones to build their hovels.

    Just like it always has been.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-31 07:02:00 UTC

  • HAPPINESS, INCOME, AND TAXES Daniel Kahneman states that above $60k, happiness d

    HAPPINESS, INCOME, AND TAXES

    Daniel Kahneman states that above $60k, happiness does not increase with wealth. And that pretty much reflects the other observations that almost all spending above about 70K is signaling. That’s it. Bigger more expensive homes, bigger more expensive cars, personal rather than state investments, and access to more cushy work environments.

    Now, unlike foolish equalitarians, I understand that signaling is terribly necessary, because without it, we can’t really function. After all, wealth and signals are a test, and it turns out that given how hard they are to obtain, they’re a pretty good test.

    Recent analysis says that not 47%, but 70% Pay Zero Net Taxes. Once it s 80%, then the Pareto principle will be again proved as well. The economy will consist almost entirely of abstract property that is held by the 20% who know how to use it, and the 80% will provide little other than consumption, and status to the upper 20%. Who will then use the artifice of state the capture and protect their positions – like always.

    I don’t like this kind of world. 🙁 But that’s just how it is. I am not sure I understand a world without families, where the vast majority of the population is manorialized into white collar serf labor managed through laws, credit and taxes at threat of deprivation of consumption. I mean, how is that any better than agrarian serfdom other than we have fuller bellies and lonelier lives? Does that mean that serfdom is our necessary and desired state? What happens when all simple desires are easily sated?

    I think that such a society cannot compete with a paternalistic society, and strong families, whether they be absolute nuclear families or traditional. Families create calculability and aggregates destroy it. Just like prices. Without families we cannot calculate anything because no category exists in common other than the individual, and the individual is a meaningless category.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-31 06:54:00 UTC

  • ON LOVE 1) Familial Love: (Kin Selection) – commonality of interest, necessary f

    ON LOVE

    1) Familial Love: (Kin Selection) – commonality of interest, necessary for the propagation of genes.

    2) Friendship Love: Someone else whose concern with our priorities, interests and states is as great as ours, and with whom we can discuss them with confidence in the pursuit of our exclusive unfettered interests. Friendship love does not commonly extend to sacrifice of wealth or life.

    3) Christian Love: The extension of friendship love in all conversations with all others in the society, at all times. (Despite the name, this is the result of outbreeding and the absolute nuclear family, not christianity. Albeit christianity does advocate a similar position, in practice people in Catholic countries limit this behavior to family boundaries.)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-31 06:43:00 UTC

  • THREE POINTS PROVE A LINE – IN PHILOSOPHY TOO In propertarian methodology I have

    THREE POINTS PROVE A LINE – IN PHILOSOPHY TOO

    In propertarian methodology I have explicitly argued in favor of an expanded version of the golden mean: that is that definitions of states or objects or properties are not testable unless they are described in the context of a spectrum (or axis), either end of which the concept fails to meet the criteria of the axis.

    This habit, like equilibrial thinking, is not terribly natural. Humans tend to gravitate to the simplest mode of comparison: ideal types, just as they tend to gravitate to finite states instead of equilibrial thinking.

    So, whenever I define something I try to construct the axis.

    In the propertarian method, what little I’ve written about it, in the few examples, I suggest the simple method of collecting as many related terms as possible, and arranging them into axis by playing what thing is like the other and not games so to speak.

    This allows us to construct the equivalent of supply demand curves for human concepts and behaviors.

    I find that most philosophical error comes from either:

    (a) failure to state human concepts as human actions (as if they are geometric, or platonic, rather than praxeological).

    or

    (b) definitions (like ‘knowledge’) that are specious by construction, because they describe a fixed state rather than a spectrum.

    or

    (c) Failure to account for equilibrial processes

    or

    (d) Failure to account for opportunity costs.

    This (geometrization) is a curable habit in human cognition, by training us to be less solipsistic and increasingly sympathetic and then autistic in our understanding of the world.

    Now, this might be a little deep for the mind to grasp, but the reason we make these mistakes can be accounted for by a particular spectrum as well:

    The Increasing Abstraction Of Point Of View:

    1) Self (solipsism) – Awareness

    2) Other (the insight of introspection) – Comparison

    3) Categories (the insight of numbers) – Numbers

    3) Relationship (the insight of geometry) – Measurement

    4) Independence from the self (the insight of calculus) – Motion

    5) Equilibria (the insight of economics and physics) – Systems

    6) Opportunity (differences in multiple ‘worlds’) – Possibilities

    Each of these increasingly complex ideas places a higher burden on us by requiring that we make comparisons against less perceptible and intuitive objects of consideration.

    A loose spectrum is more precise than the most precise definition, whose spectrum must be assumed.

    This is the value of the “golden mean” in virtue, but it is a generic test of any concept: if you don’t state the properties of the spectrum, you must assume them.

    In most of western philosophy, like all philosophy, despite being rational, the assumptions are unstated. The virtues are stated but without axis. The logics are stated but without axis.

    But one needs axis. We are terrible at conceiving more than one flight of an arrow. But We are terrible at it. But no question of consequence consists of a single arc.

    And no definition consists of a single state.

    Because no such arcs or states are sufficiently testable, and therefore are loaded with metaphysical assumptions.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-31 06:42:00 UTC

  • 1) WARRIOR – VIOLENCE – ORDER (soldier, sportsman, duty) 2) CRAFTSMAN – EXCHANGE

    1) WARRIOR – VIOLENCE – ORDER

    (soldier, sportsman, duty)

    2) CRAFTSMAN – EXCHANGE – WEALTH

    (merchant, scientist, engineer, professional, wealth)

    3) PHILOSOPHER – ARGUMENT – WISDOM

    (priest, advisor, mentor, teacher, judge, wisdom)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-31 04:49:00 UTC

  • IS IT DONE WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND IT OR EXECUTE IT? (self ridicule) My long time bu

    IS IT DONE WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND IT OR EXECUTE IT?

    (self ridicule)

    My long time business partner, Jim teased me for most of our twenty years together, that I separated problem solving from work. “You think something is easy once you understand how to solve it. But the work still has to be done.”

    I would agree. Always. Because my job in our business relationships, across multiple companies, was to figure stuff out: solving the problem, solving it early, and organizing execution. After that it’s just making license plates. And that wasn’t my job. I don’t make license plates. I hire people to make license plates.

    But he is right. work is still hard, and you still learn, and details affect the outcome.

    Writing is hard work.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-31 03:54:00 UTC

  • BITCOIN THREAD ON TYLER COWEN”S SITE I disagree with his premise. First, because

    http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/12/how-and-why-bitcoin-will-plummet-in-price.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+marginalrevolution%2Ffeed+%28Marginal+Revolution%29INTERESTING BITCOIN THREAD ON TYLER COWEN”S SITE

    I disagree with his premise. First, because the price of cryptocurrency is neutral. It’s just a means of financing it. In the long run it’s neutral. It might be a bad investment in the long term but I kind of doubt in the medium term that it’s other than pretty fair.

    Not sure why, but economists are almost worse than technologists at understanding BTC. Or its value. That’s because, as I’ve been saying, it isn’t money, it’s a money substitute like token money sold under a stock sheme.

    All stocks like this run up, peak and then decline. But the point is, the money is made by then, and teh product is commoditized. And assuming there isn’t any interference from the state, it should work as other stocks do. (big assumption I know.)

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-30 20:06:00 UTC

  • ON GLADWELL’S SATIRE When we agree to enter into discourse, debate, even polemic

    ON GLADWELL’S SATIRE

    When we agree to enter into discourse, debate, even polemic, we grant each other the right of free speech, in pursuit of the truth, for shared benefit.

    Otherwise, if we do not agree to the pursuit of truth, there is no reason to lay down our weapons: we simply substitute the honesty of violence for the deception of words.

    Satire and ridicule are forms of deception. They are theft. A crime. A moral crime. And the majority of us sense it is a moral crime, even when we disagree with it. You cannot get around this logic.

    Satire and Ridicule, unless they are, like the greek drama, directed at ourselves, rather than others, are a violation of the contract for cooperation.

    So one can state how and why we use satire. But one cannot legitimize it. It’s not possible.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-30 19:48:00 UTC

  • If a man must pay for a child at great personal cost to himself, and a woman and

    If a man must pay for a child at great personal cost to himself, and a woman and the child have a right to the standard of living prior to divorce, and he cannot export this expense to the state, then why does a woman have the right to export the cost of her single motherhood to the state?

    A man cannot chose whether or not he is to father a child. Women are no longer economic victims, but have both saturated their distribution in the economy, and forced men out of the economy such that more women are both voters and workers than are men. So we cannot say that women are disadvantaged. Just the opposite. It is true that men dominate the upper margins, but men dominate nowhere else in society.

    This is an inequality of justice. A double standard. Given the dissolution of the family, and our emphasis on individualism, it is only jus that men export their children’s cost to the state just as women export their children’s cost to the state. No?

    I don’t really see any moral case for child or spousal support. There isnt any evidence that it’s necessary. It is disproportionally more punitive to men, who have shorter working careers, and endure disproportionate economic risk.

    I mean, if we have universal socialized health coverage, why not universal socialized child coverage. Why not a minimum guaranteed income?

    In that world, men can contribute to a household or not, but they carry their productivity with them. So any woman whose nest he shares, gains from his productivity, but loses at his departure. His income is a luxury. A perk. A benefit, not a necessity.

    The point of my argument is that property rights in a world where the individual, not the family, is the rule, and where all costs are highly socialized, will be one in which it will be increasingly difficult for us to treat evolutionary norms and morals dependent upon previous economic political and social means of production and reproduction, as criteria for predicting human behavior.

    I wouldn’t mind a world where women could not become vampires on males, and where all rights were in fact, equal.

    I also realize that this is the only way to restore male-female relations. But I suspect it is too late. And that the more likely development will be a caste system like we see in the northeast, with white/jewish/asian elites and mixed and brown everyone else – with token representatives of those groups permitted into the upper castes as a means of preserving the illusion of meritocracy.

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-30 15:13:00 UTC

  • ARE WEALTH

    http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/redistribute-wealth-no-redistribute.htmlSIGNALS ARE WEALTH

    Source date (UTC): 2013-12-30 14:34:00 UTC