Jill

Wow, I've been waiting for this one for a while now. Thanks! What a great start for a day. *goes watch*

I don't appreciate people making jokes and talking about me in the third person like they knew me from the high school playground. Also, knowing there are art patrons out there but not knowing where and how to find them is not very helpful.

Not if the people that need help have no value to trade.

Welcome. I'm curious about your art now.

You improved a lot, in both rendering and anatomy. I like the one with the couple dancing the best. It's certainly possible, concept artists have to do this and do it and fast. This is what I wanted as well. I find it excruciatingly hard and frustrating, though. All the repetitive exercises one needs to learn to get there, I really don't think I have the mind for it anymore.

I'm not as well studied in Objectivism and economy as others here, but this is the way I see it: Supermarkets don't just have value products. There's something profitable about selling luxury products. I assumed it would be the same with medicine? I don't know if I'm missing something, but I love the idea of value medicine in a free market. My guess is the poor (like me) could get very cheap treatment for their ailments the same they can get cheap food, which wouldn't be the very best or the ultimate discovery available, but would still have a decent standard of quality, enough to allow them to get by. And unlike national health services, there would be no waiting lists the same we have no queues to get food rations.

Ok. But an attitude such as yours made this person's life difficult to the point they decided to ask the government for help. Why do you think you have the right to decide this person's gender above her own individual judgement? There is a problem if anyone owning a sidewalk, be that a private individual protected by the government or the government itself, has the right to arbitrarily chose who steps on it. If a rule makes someone's life impossible and it's imposed by force, it makes no difference for this person if it's the government laying the law or a private individual supported by the government. Because such situations happened in the past, with disabled people for instance. It's very likely there might be no public places the transgendered person can go at all in her area and she might not be able to move somewhere else. In a culture, it often happens that everyone, or a sufficient majority of people, holds the same bad idea about something, or decides to ignore the same problems of people, and this makes the life of some individuals impossible. Culture takes time to shift, sometimes too much time for an individual to get to live life like they want.

I disagree that he should own sidewalks. If every restaurant owner defines gender by the presence or absence of a penis, which is very likely, transgendered people have a problem. They cannot go anywhere. How to solve this problem? And disabled people a wanted a solution to their problem, because they didn't want to be prisoners in their houses, they wanted to live their lives. Who helped?

I'm glad you don't own the sidewalks then. It's interesting to note that disabled people complain that before goverment intervention, no business aknowledged their needs. They would be trapped at home. This person is an individual who wants to live as the gender she identifies with without having anyone else forcing her to identify with the opposite. As society is now, there is an advantage for people to group themselves according to common interests in order to defend those interests together.

This is what I would say in response to the teapot person: "I know for certain you are making the teapot up, because if it cannot be seen it with current technology, you had no means to acknowledge its existence."

This game reminds me of Dagny. I wonder why.

I guess I want to know how to find such individuals nowadays.

Clive, you want a violent revolution, at the expense of many individual lives, to overthrow the government and end taxation, is that it?

How?

Should socialists and environmentalists kill you because they think your ideas make you a dangerous planet destroyer? "No," you might say, "because they are wrong. I know that for certain, so I can be the tyrant." How can an individual predict with infallible accuracy which ideas lead to evil before the consequences actually happen? Should such an individual get to be the tyrant? When John Galt was tortured to be a tyrant, did he give in?

Is it possible for artists to still get private patronage nowadays?

Fantastic! And with the beautiful covers as well.

It's out today. Link to document from this blog post. I read a summary of points made in the home education group I'm in and basically it states that parents have to register a child annually at school, accept regular home inspections and draft a yearly plan that needs to be approved by the authorities. If this goes ahead it's a huge violation of liberty and there will be no place left in Europe to home educate without state interference.

Thomas, aren't the skills that you can actually trade the ones that hold real value, though? Isn't what others value part of the reality you live in and doesn't an individual's identity depend on reality? Ifat, attempting to live of one's personal art is very hard, because thousands of people are offering their images for free nowadays. It's like trying to sell a web browser. The pleasure of visual art is in seeing it and few people have a desire to own an image as a physical object after they saw it. The most marketable jobs in art are the less personal, such as concept art for film and games, for instance.

In what is this different from being a Keating? This is what I was asking, thanks. So the skills come first?

You never feel joy when you get gifts?

I'm not talking about being valued as being liked, but as competence to produce something others would offer value (money) for. All your self-esteem would mean nothing in a desert island if you have no skills to survive.

I find it hard to study and to get knowledge consciously and intentionally into long term memory, but it's not like I cannot what I did last Summer and other day to day things. Any clue why is this happening?

But you don't value yourself in a vaccum. You're only something if you are something in a world.

Ultimately, if others don't value you, you are in trouble. If you have nothing to offer, you have nothing to trade. Self-esteem comes from knowing yourself competent to live, but that competence comes from feedback, from the result of creating value and attempting to trade it. Thoughts?