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Tyco

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Everything posted by Tyco

  1. I just can't believe how many people get caught up in the XBox Live 'achievement points' challenge (they give you otherwise meaningless points for doing otherwise meaningless things in your games) I've often wondered if that determination could be easily channelled towards something more productive
  2. Are you you referring to material not provided by the senses? ie. one's own ideas/thoughts
  3. yeah if God was remaining anonymous about these coincidences, then how does the pastor know about it??
  4. You should take minimum effective action necessary to restore your life/property to normal conditions and punish your enemy but no more than that. Of course it may be difficult to establish what exactly those actions/punishments might be, but fairness should be the guiding principle. The reason for the punishment is to let the criminal experience the negative consequences of his actions - ie. retribution - it is not enough simply to restore the victim's life to normal.
  5. In response to the OP: The point is that you cannot RATIONALLY refuse to recognize the rights of others, whilst claiming rights for yourself. If you were being objective you'd need to accept that the rights you have also apply to every other individual. What is irrational is not moral. So it's not really a case of losing your rights, it's more a case of trying to enact a contradiction.
  6. Hmm. I often forget to ask people how thing's are going for them, it's because usually I'm not interested. That's not to say I'm not interested in their company, just that it's not my idea of an interesting conversation. Conversely I don't volunteer information about my own life/troubles, although if they ask I usually feel the need to at least make the topic interesting, whereas maybe they were just asking as a 'token gesture.' Maybe they think I'm self-centred?
  7. I never quite bought Rand's claims about the influence of Aristotle on history. Not to say I dismissed them, but rather found them hard to believe and furthermore not worth the study required to prove. Which is to say the Objectivist ethics held true for me regardless. I have a question at this point: You have mentioned that you have hundreds of examples to back up your argument. Obviously such a list can be convincing without being exhaustive. You do not have unlimited time to plot a curve for everything. So my question is, what qualities should I look for in finding more cases? If I looked at the term of team managers in soccer leagues, for instance, would you expect me to find the same trend?
  8. I was telling a colleague about this at lunch today. The way I put it, I said the stability of any structure is more vulnerable as entropy increases. So it makes sense that in ever more complex systems (due to population increase for instance), even if those structures are institutions like monarchy, they will be less stable so in that case not last as long. Is that anything like what you're saying?
  9. I just want to clarify that with the Hari Seldon statement I wasn't trying to make light of Math Guy's tremendous efforts, I was just struck by the similarity of Asimov's unexplained psychohistory concept and this historical maximum entropy idea. Don't want to derail the discussion either, although it'd be interesting to know of Math Guy has read the Asimov books in question. Looking forward to today's updates!
  10. I'm just waiting for him to bring up Hari Seldon and psycho-history!
  11. I think your argument for 'character' addresses stealing specifically, and strongly, but my argument actually pertains to rights violations in general i didn't construct my argument to conclude "you will be arrested" or "you will be shunned by your fellow man" it concludes with 'you will be acting irrationally, thus contrary to your survival' i'm going by 'reason is your only absolute' and 'reason is your means of survival' and 'all evil stems from the refusal to think' if you take a prudent predator approach, you will be seeking to hold rights, whilst seeking to infringe the rights of others since the only rational grounds for rights is ranting everyone else the same rights, you will be suspending rationality thus, it is immoral - rationality is man's means of survival (qua man) it's not because there will be an effect on others (like you said, that's not guaranteed), or a response from others, it's primarily because you will be trying to hold a contradiction imagine you were one of those people like the protagonist of Memento who only has short term memory - the long term (internal) effect on character/integrity would be negated because you would have no knowledge of previous actions, but you could still act morally on a case-by-case basis by holding reason as your only absolute and recognizing that rights must not be violated (of course character, integrity, pride, productivity are all still good additional arguments for not stealing, i just don't think they are the primary motivation)
  12. thanks for making this post, it's very interesting, exciting even i only have a basic knowledge of the field of statistics, but i'll let you know what i think, for what it's worth the social entropy idea, and the resulting dynasty trend, they make sense to me if the complexity of the system increases, ie. if the number of actors increases, if the human population increases, then - the dominance of any particular people/dynasty/institution will be lessened through increased competition no? especially if the dominance arose through monopolization/hogging of resources which other people want
  13. " If they demand the violation of the rights of others, they negate and forfeit their own." - Rand, racism essay although, you could argue that here Rand was referring to a political entity (civil rights related campaigns) and not an individual but anyway, the way *I* see it, the argument flows like this man needs rights to survive qua man rights must be mutually respected amongst humans it is irrational to want to keep your own rights whilst violating another's therefore someone who steals is living irrationally so stealing is contrary to your survival (as a rational being, ie. 'qua man') maybe the forfeiting sentence isn't the best way to phrase it but essentially - rights require mutual respect amongst rights-holders, if we are operating rationally say on my way home i can take two equidistant routes, one which is an open road, or another which is a path through private property production of value is not an issue here the reason i should not take the second route is because i want to preserve my own property rights, not my own self-respect/esteem
  14. Too add to discussion: surveys show that various subtleties tend to affect the evaluation of someone's beauty for instance, facial symmetry now that is something totally independent from healthiness (p.s. i don't recommend looking up what all these subtleties are... you'll most likely just notice flaws in yourself you never noticed before!)
  15. as cited two posts above: "If he wants to maintain rationally his own self interest, and claim he has a case for his right to self interest, then he must concede that the ground on which he claims the right to self interest also applies to every other human being." - Rand
  16. These answers don't really convince me. It may be impossible to use theft as a long-term means of survival but who said that was the thief's objective? That claim is pertinent to why a country develops property rights through law in the first place, but not in this individual scenario. Like I said a few posts ago, the reason you shouldn't steal is because you'll be forfeiting your own rights, and you need rights, not dollars, to survive. I could, for instance, draw a steady salary from my job, which I use to buy all my food and other necessities and luxuries, and then on the way home each day I could pinch an apple from someone's garden. I don't even need to eat the apple, I could just throw it away for fun. This does not undermine the income that supports my life, it is merely isolated theft or vandalism. And it is still immoral, and serious - because in violating someone else's rights, I forfeit my own.
  17. this is very insightful, thanks for posting it i think a lot of people who play games have a mental conflict arising from the apparent mystery of why we play them
  18. Man needs rights to survive (qua man, ie. as an autonomous, rational individual, not a beast or a slave). When you violate another's rights, you forfeit your own rights. Therefore violating someone else's rights is the last thing you should do!
  19. found evidence of one interesting piece of legislation: "This ecological disaster (little or no rehabilitation has been done since mining started 80 years ago) has been conveniently hidden from the public eye because this section of coast is a restricted area. Access control to it is strictly enforced by law. In South Africa, the possession of rough diamonds is illegal and could cost you years of jail time." but not quite sure what to make of it
  20. the De Beers cartel continues to puzzle me does anyone have thoughts on these two points: - even if they owned and controlled the supply and retail of diamond jewels, they still don't have a monopoly because the actual market, jewels, is much bigger than just diamonds - there's no way you can consider De Beers a monopoly as every consumer has the opportunity to resell their diamonds (ie. it's not like oil which gets used up, or transport which is a service)
  21. I found this article http://thedailybell.com/575/Edward-Epstein...ond-Racket.html first part is an interview with the author of a diamond-trade exposé, who concludes that De Beers was not a monopoly but a cartel, and that advertising is the main reason for the continuing illusion of diamond value/scarcity the editor of the webpage, however, disagrees on this point and says De Beers WAS a monopoly if it could exert this monopoly-like power on the price of goods. he goes on to argue the cartel MUST have been backed by government actions, but only because that's what Austrian economics dictates. he offers no actual evidence, taking us back to square one...
  22. I read in a book by Rothbard that the DeBeers diamond monopoly and/or cartel which allegedly lasted 100 years was only possible because they were not operating in a free market. He stated that in South Africa ('in particular') diamond mines were owned by the government and leased to miners/producers. Even if you found a diamond mine on your property, it would swiftly be nationalized. De Beers, he said, were conveniently the only party the government would deal with. Now, that makes total sense, the problem is I cannot find any evidence that this nationalization claim is true. Anyone know?
  23. quite simply: Courts, military, and police are the only 3 services that require force.
  24. I find this quite distressing (the Hickman thing). Not so much that she found something to admire in a loathsome killer (I can understand how that might be interesting from an artistic perspective, or how in the 1920s details of news stories didn't travel so fast. Plus her later writings contradict those sentiments), but its the way Rand attacked the public that bugs me. Her criticisms of the 'fat, little' (little seems to be the no.1 Objectivist insult) jurors and the suggestion that the hostile Joe Public had probably done 'worse' seem utterly ridiculous. Maybe I'm being too harsh, I mean the main characters in her novels, due to their society, often lead spiritually tortured early lives where they don't know what to think of their fellow men, until they have their revelations. Maybe they were more autobiographical than I thought. Hmm. Unless there is a huge amount of misquoting going on.
  25. It seems to me that situation is analogous to Roark forfeiting his fee in order to correct the dissatisfying west wing of the Sanborn house.
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