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Nicky

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Everything posted by Nicky

  1. Like Leonard Peikoff once said: Sleep is good. He was very tired at the time.
  2. Most business models would work in an Capitalist economy (unclear whether you're aware that Objectivism stands for simple, achievable Capitalism, not any kind of Utopia) even better than they do in our current mixed economy. Elon Musk's ventures would not, they would have to be closed. So what exactly is he efficacious at, except for obtaining government backing through a combination of pushing nonsensical ideologies and hiring former government officials as negotiators?
  3. He sold Paypal, right? So he doesn't actually own a viable business, that wouldn't go bankrupt without government assistance?
  4. How does that make sense? The Americas were separated from the rest of the world 15,000 years ago. The people who lived there don't get a separate race, but Europeans do? Why? Do you know how much mingling there's been between Asia and Europe in the past 17,000 years? There are languages in Europe (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian) that arrived from Asia only 1,000 years ago. And, of course, countless large scale migrations before (Huns, Slavs, just to name some recent ones. The most ancient European ethnicity is the Basques, and not even they can be traced back to Europe for longer than 7,000 years. That's half the time we know for a fact pre Columbus Americans have had the place all to themselves.
  5. I wish I had the wherewithal to put myself through medical school and start making money off of the sick and dying. Unfortunately, I'm just a lowly software engineer. Btw., there was no reason for you to assume that I'm a doctor. You just did, without any anchor in reality to support that assumption. Which is what you're doing with the "medical industrial complex conspiracy", as well. This is a very dangerous pattern of thinking, and you should start paying attention to it. Between the production and consumption of food, there's a human being with free will. So no, producing unhealthy food doesn't cause cancer. Someone has to choose to binge on it...it's that choice that is causing diabetes and cancer. I don't think Warren Buffet, just because he happens to be rich, has a moral responsibility to treat humanity as his flock, and craft our diet for us. It's okay that he feeds people what they want to eat, not what he thinks we should eat. He's a business man, responding to demand, not Jesus.
  6. Look up death and still birth rates in populations that don't have access to a hospital, and then decide whether you're getting your money's worth from this service. The cost isn't for an hour of the one doctor's time, spent ticking off check-boxes on his sheet, or for the nurses changing the bed sheets. The cost is for the team of highly trained specialists the hospital has on standby, for the eventuality that something goes wrong: they can perform what 100 years ago would've been considered acts of God, to save your and your child's life.
  7. It seems insane. You're welcome to tie it to the real world in some way. But you haven't attempted doing that, as of yet...
  8. Nicky

    Sex and Trade

    Sex is a trade, but the price is steeper than a trip to the store. You're trading in virtues of the highest order, not in small favors. Your virtues make people love and desire you. If you don't have them, you will only be able to buy sex from people who lack them too.
  9. I'm not yet ready to post anything definitive on the diet front (I'm doing okay diet wise by eliminating sugar and limiting carbs, but still have a lot to learn and experience before I'm comfortable throwing advice around), but here's a video of my favorite farmer in the world, giving a short presentation on ideas I'm very comfortable promoting: He's talking really fast, and referencing things rather than explaining them...he's referencing 100+ hours worth of material in a 50 min. presentation. But, imo, he (and the people he's crediting, he certainly hasn't come up with all this on his own) are solving massive problems no one else is even so much as addressing...and they're doing so in a realistic way, while advocating getting rid of the government incentives that have caused a lot of those problems to begin with. If you watch other vids on his channel (it takes some patience, and headphones, because he's refusing to put any effort into audio quality, he just speaks into his iPhone whenever he feels like it, and then posts it on youtube), you will be able to pair a lot of concretes to the theory he presents in this talk.
  10. ...hired by the " Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex"? About the same level of insane.
  11. Well, if we're sharing what things "seem like" to us, to me that suggestion seems insane.
  12. Fair point. Here's an interesting thing though: my parents retired to the countryside and keep a few laying hens. In my experience, every time my mom "steals" the hen's egg (I'm assuming that's the word you would use, if you think the hen has rights), she just comes back the next day and lays another one. That's an odd attitude towards theft, from a supposedly rational creature, no? More importantly, does your argument above still apply, if the supposed "victim" is never going to deprive me of my means of survival, and will in fact keep me fed much more nutritious and healthy food than what any vegan I've ever come across eats?
  13. No it doesn't. US regulatory policies are a huge barrier of entry for Chinese products. China answers with regulations of their own (Elon Musk is complaining about swimming in lead shoes, as his companies receive massive benefits from environmental regulations, government subsidies, federal contracts, etc., etc.). The rational answer to the problem of competing regulations would be to reduce regulations, in exchange for China doing the same...which is something they'd be very much interested in. Problem is, that wouldn't address the trade deficit...because the trade deficit is a natural consequence of China moving from socialism towards capitalism. Of course a country that does that will increase its productivity faster than a country that doesn't change. And increased productivity clearly results in imbalanced trade. And that is not a bad thing for the US. The trade deficit is not a problem for productive Americans, it's only a problem for politicians who are staking their careers on promises of curving it. The only way it could possibly be curved is if China stops moving towards capitalism...so Trump's goal is directly opposed to the cause of freedom.
  14. Veganism: slow suicide for the sake of lower life forms. Though perhaps that doesn't apply for you...are trolls lower or higher life forms than a cow? Who here had troll bourguignonne before?
  15. Another Kremlin ordered hit on British soil: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2018/03/06/poisoned-ex-spy-likely-latest-victim-in-long-line-kremlin-ordered-hits.html
  16. Love how unimpressed Yaron Brook is about the whole thing.
  17. Other than the "shrewd" part, this is accurate. It wasn't shrewd, the existence of this electorate has been obvious for a while now...Republicans have been subtly flirting with them for years. One more thing to note, that will perhaps give this morality-neutral stance of yours some pause: your sentence also describes what Hitler did, with the same accuracy. Clearly not. If any of the other well funded Republicans were willing to stoop so low, Trump would've never won. And sure, it's not just about one man's decision. If it was, somebody would do it. It's about the entire Republican fund-raising system, which does not allow individual Republican politicians to act in such a despicable manner. If any mainstream Republican were to do that, the major Republican donors, who invest in politics mainly to further a set of principles, would intervene to end their careers. The reason why Trump was able to do this is because he's not part of that system. He funded his own primary, in defiance of everything that's decent about the conservative movement.
  18. Here's a video that sets out to prove that free will doesn't exist, and does an excellent job at proving the exact opposite. And yes, it's a video, and it's 25 minutes long. I apologize for that, I wouldn't normally post something like this on a message board. It's bad form, people don't come to a message board to watch videos, they come for written content. But this one's very, very good, both in terms of production value and content, and I don't have a written alternative for it. Plus, he talks fast enough that it's practically an audio book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0GN4urbA_c P.S. The guy's other videos, on nutrition and diets (he's a Keto diet guy, and an American who lives in Japan...so he moved from one of the least healthy developed countries in the world to the healthiest), and many other subjects, are just as good. Keto is somewhat similar to the Paleo diet, but less philosophizing and more actual science. I would love to make a thread on it, as well as on grass-fed and/or antibiotic/chemical pesticides/fertilizer free farming....if anyone's interested.
  19. Hillary Clinton isn't the subject of the thread. Furthermore, the truth value of the statement I quoted is not dependent on who made it. So you're very clearly committing the most famous logical fallacy of them all. So famous that it's not even worth switching to Latin to name it...or read the rest of your post. If you have valid arguments, next time start with those.
  20. Like what? As far as I can tell, every time there's a budget impasse between Congress and the White House, the positive economic measures are being pushed by Congressional Republicans. The White House is pushing funding for the wall, economic protectionism, and reductions in immigrant quotas (even outright abolition of some forms of legal immigration), and only agreeing to fiscally conservative measures if there is a 40-50 billion worth of spending in there that furthers Trump's nationalistic agenda. Same with the Obamacare replacement. As Conservatives were proposing a bill that would've made the US healthcare system considerably more free, Trump felt the need to engage in his usual populism and go around calling it "mean" and "lacking heart"...until he eventually killed the whole thing, and moved on to what he really cares about.
  21. The richest business leaders in America are more often than not to the left of mainstream Democratic politicians. Only thing they would be effective at is pushing socialism. I can't think of anything worse than a socialist (or a nationalist and a protectionist, in Trump's case) who's really good at running a large scale enterprise and negotiating deals...precisely because he's going to accomplish things that a career politician like Obama couldn't. The Clinton quote the "deplorables" meme originates from: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.” How you went from that to "return to former levels of self-reliance, self-esteem and independence achieved by being productive", I have no idea. Trump ran on nationalism and economic protectionism, not self sufficiency. And the reason why he won the nomination was because he was the only such candidate, among a dozen conservative and libertarian ones competing for the kind of electorate you're describing. There's nothing self-reliant about people who demand foreign workers be kept out so they can keep their artificially high paying union backed or minimum wage jobs. There's also nothing self-reliant about steel executives applauding the 25% tariff he just slapped on steel imports, reaping a huge windfall at the expense of every US company that buys steel or steel products, not to mention all the companies that are going to be hurt by the worldwide, coordinated retaliation sectors of the US economy are about to get hit with.
  22. Oh yeah, I heard of Stockton before. They made headlines as the largest US city to declare bankruptcy, a few years ago. You'd think that would be a good enough demonstration of the merits of the welfare state, and they would learn from it.
  23. Your confidence and bravado about purported abilities you clearly lack is astonishing. Last time I encountered this level of arrogance, a four year old kid was demanding that he be allowed to fly the plane we were on. Since I'm not getting anywhere by explaining why you're wrong, let's try pictures. From further on up the page, here's you quoting the post in question: Can you tell when I posted it now, or am I gonna end up having to start up Paint and draw an arrow?
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