Felix

I'm the only person in Germany I know who knows who Ayn Rand is. I'm glad this forum exists.

Khaight said he has started reading the book in another thread, so I contacted him via PM. He gave me permission to post his answer here:

Very good!

Then I'd second that.

You get a free copy? How?

Being a big fan of Viable Values, I am thrilled that Smith has finally followed up with a treatment of Normative Ethics. I would like to know if anyone of you has read it, yet, and if so, what you think of it. If it is even remotely as good as Viable Values, she's found a new buyer even though the book is quite expensive at $80.

Quite okay, but to me she tends to looks suffering. But maybe you know a movie where she doesn't.

What happens if the debt can't be fully paid?

All I have is my "Enjoy Capitalism" mug. But I like it and it makes some of my friends who come over shake their heads. So it's fine This is just pro-capitalism, though. I have nothing, however, that would really qualify me as an Objectivist.

Wouldn't this mean that you can expand demand via expanding credit?

I can't resist the logic of this. But you forget a fundamental problem here. If there is no government (anarchy), you will have fights in the streets, robberies, etc. In the end you'll have the rule of the gun. You also have the rule of the gun to a degree if you have a government, that is correct, but at least this way it's at least partially under control. Without government you'd have warlords fighting with each other and organized crime taking over. It's sad but true. The idea of everything working out smoothly just seems naive to me. It sounds nice and it follows from the absolute of banning the initiation of force. But just because you ban it in your head doesn't mean that others do so, too. A short look at history shows how eager humans are to use the sword where the pen fails.

Image Streaming aims at improving your awareness of what's going on in your brain subconciously. This will increase creativity and thereby also intelligence/intellectual ability in general. You'd still have to learn what to do with it, though. That is: logical reasoning. Image Streaming only builds one of the legs your intellectual capacity is standing on, so to speak. It provides you with raw material. You still need logic to integrate your new findings. Here's Win Wenger's homepage. I would also recommend "The Einstein Factor", Wenger's book.

Personally I would say that the concept is invalid because it says there is no free will, which would be self-contradictory since concept formation depends on free will. But you'd better wait for what David Odden (or others) has (/have) to say about this. I'm not an expert on concept formation.

Cool! But why is the thing vegetarian?

Maybe I can help you here. What these psychologic theories do is to challenge free will. They say that people do things out of unconcious urges, deep childhood dramas and that all these things are unconcious and -and this is the part where Objectivists would disagree -beyond your control. According to them "your unconcious" is in the driver's seat, not you. It controls your motivations, your thoughts etc. Objectivists reject that as it would collide with the idea of free will. Is that what you mean?

CF, I don't understand the logic of that post. This means that there is "production" of goods that nobody wants. (i.e. excessive output) Just redefining production so that it means profitable production (creation of value) won't help here. Here you contradict yourself in saying that people do want the products even though you accepted right before that it could be that they don't. Not all creation is profitable. You said that yourself. And why don't unprofitable goods enter the economy? It's the only way to cut your losses. Here you redefine output so that it means profitable output. Again: it's only a redefinition of terms. This doesn't follow from the above. It just means that it is possible to do a lot of work and then have nobody who wants the end result at a price above your costs. Something that happens everyday. According to your new definitions, which make everything profitable , well, by definition, this of course couldn't happen. But it does. There are books that can't be sold profitably (even though they are made) and most movies end up with a loss and it's only the bestsellers and blockbusters in between that make the respective companies profitable in the end. You can't just redefine the core terms in the middle of the argument to prove an invalid point.

I've read about GoDaddy. Are they any good?

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you just like everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. e.e.cummings

I had the same idea. Unfortunately I read that the sort of feeding to get these foie gras is also forbidden in Germany (and Austria). But thanks to the internet, I can buy that stuff online. Strangely enough they allow that. For a carnivore on principle like me, this message is very bad news.

Since I'm from Germany, I guess I can help here. "Glaube" can mean belief or faith. There are some other words, but they have a different meaning. "Gl

Hi there! Which political forum was it?

If they loan it out, they don't spend it (pay it all out). You don't seem to get the difference. If you loan it out, you demand more back later, thereby worsening the problem and putting it off into the future. That's what the entire debt-pile-up-idea is all about. Maybe this quick and dirty example helps: Imagine if you had only one lender and one borrower. You have the lender give a $100 loan to the borrower. He demands $105 back in one year. For the borrower to pay back the money to the lender, the lender would have to either spend $5 to the borrower (That's what you're saying) or the lender lends the $5 to the borrower, which is nothing but compound interest by postponing the payment. The interest payment due grows exponentially at 5% per year. If the money was just paid out, the debt could be actually paid. I don't see why the bank would pay out its entire profit of $5 (in this example). Its business is lending money. Why would the bank spend its entire profit on "increased productivity" if they then only had the very same amount of money to loan? This makes no sense to me.

Why? They increase their business simply by lending out their profits again. It's not that they produce anything and need new machines for higher productivity or lots of more people to do the work. Your point is that they spend it all and that's something that I strongly doubt.

That's right. Paid back debt only reenters the market as new debt. Maybe that's a better way to put it. Hm. This is not very probable. It may occur in some cases. But for this to work in general it would require that the bank pays out its entire interest as dividend and that before it receives it itself. This doesn't happen.

Actually this image streaming is supposed to raise actual intelligence. A raised IQ is just a nice side-effect.