what is the proper limit to wealth?

People in our society give too much value to property, to having stuff. We have and long for too many things that tie us to debt, and work, and compromises with others. While in work, in a certain sense, we don't 'own our bodies' and must sometimes do things we don't agree or like which decreases your liberty. Seneca, in his second letter to Lucilius, said: "Do you ask what is the proper limit to wealth? It is, first, to have what is necessary, and, second, to have what is enough." We just bloat what we mean by necessary, and consider a wise position to assume that it's never enough.

ICAR

Não falha. Quando pergunto aos meus  alunos (os que se consideram religiosos) se se vêem primeiro como  cristãos ou católicos, a resposta é sempre a mesma: católicos. O que não  surpreende se pensarmos no que diz Antero na sua célebre conferência Causas da Decadência dos Povos Peninsulares: "O cristianismo é sobretudo um sentimento. O catolicismo é sobretudo uma instituição".  Ora, se pensarmos no modo como os nossos jovens vivem  institucionalizados desde que nascem, a creche, o J.I., a escola, o ATL,  a catequese, as actividades desportivas, os campos de férias, o Inglês,  a música, as explicações, os escuteiros, parece-me haver razão  suficiente para o facto de sentirem mais o peso de uma instituição do  que o de uma verdadeira religião. Tal como com o ISLA, o ISPA ou IST, o I  de igreja poderia ser de Instituto, passando assim a chamar-me  Instituto Católico Apostólico Romano. Fica naturalmente de fora o  pertinentíssimo O que bem poderia acrescentar-se no final para sugerir  como, ao contrário das verdadeiramente cristãs, falta às asas católicas  robustez para levarem as almas até ao Reino do Céus. -- José Ricardo Costa ref

All revolutions were illegal

Constitutions can’t create or destroy natural rights like self-determination. They exist only to protect such rights. Denying such right by constitutional or non-constitutional means ferments a tyranny. [...] It’s nice if constitutions make reasonable provision for secession votes but it’s not required. The natural right of self determination exists regardless of what constitutions say. -- Tyler Cowen

a sort of moral precept

I do have a sort of moral precept that I’ll stand behind, which is that you should not unilaterally reduce another person’s choices. -- Marcus J. Ranum

Answering the Fermi Paradox

Our civilization is making Earth a space-ship, by destroying ecological services and then trying to replace them with new industries and technologies. I cannot think of a more impactful stupid behavior.

Local

Some philosophies are like local shops for local people.

The food of reason

In order to reason, arguments are not enough. Without evidence, reasoning is like a blind person trying to walk straight in a desert.

Exposure

Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- HL Menken

Fail-safe

The rule that human beings seem to follow is to engage the brain only when all else fails - and usually not even then. -- David Hull

Cost-effective

Mutually costly-signaled reality is reality we can rely on. -- Sister Y ‏@TheViewFromHell

Truth

It is hard for a falsehood to be consistent. As time goes by, more inconsistencies accrue. The matter is worse if lies interact with each other. Sooner or later something must give. If that didn't happen, truth wouldn't be important.

Expectations

Ethics is a symptom of the economic progress that came from the extraction of cheap energy. This progress, and the wealth it provided, allowed society to accept the costs of harm reduction and the social securities that we are used today. Perhaps there's some inertia about the current mores that will resist some change, but the tap of cheap energy is closing. Don't expect much about the ones with power.

Tricks

The trick is to fix the problem you have, rather than the problem you want. -- Bram Cohen

Eating the World is not Enough

People assume that capitalism is a system defined by markets and trade. But these pre-existed capitalism by thousands of years. What distinguishes capitalism is that it is organized around perpetual expansion and accumulation, which is euphemistically referred to as "growth". This requires:

• enclosure to generate proletarianization
• artificial scarcity to generate competitive productivity
• an extractive relationship with nature and labour to enable surplus accumulation
• "frontiers" where nature and labour can be cheapened and costs externalized

Such a system is incompatible with ecology, and  incompatible with any vision for a world that's free of poverty, exploitation and structural inequality.  We need to have an open conversation about whether such a system is actually worth clinging to in the 21st century. -- Jason Hickel

Free-will as a necessity II

Holding people responsible is not a fact-finding process, its a normative process. -- Peter McKnight

what you are told

Morality is doing what is right, regardless of what you are told. Religion is doing what you are told, regardless of what is right. -- Anon.

Free-will as a necessity

Behavior is always going to be more important to the law than neuroscience. -- Peter McKnight

Scaling

Market exchange is a pathetically inadequate substitute for love, but it scales better. -- S. T. Rev

Stubborness

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. -- John Adams

what you do, not what you say

The purpose of the system is what it does.  After all, there is no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do. -- Anthony Stafford Beer

X

The Buddha rejected all questions of the type ‘Does X exist?’ He rephrased it: ‘Can we experience X?' -- What the Buddha Thought, Richard Gombrich 2009

Redistribution

The tax debate is 99% about distribution, 1% about growth. Don’t let economists fool you with their models that they don’t even pretend capture real phenomena. When they say lower corporate taxes increase growth they are modelling a world without assets where all profits are devoted to new investments in capital equipment. [...] Redistribution of global wealth is clearly the most obvious policy for a utilitarian. -- Cameron K. Murray

Replacing three horsemen

There are exactly four ways of limiting the numbers of the human population: War, famine, plague, and birth control. As long as birth control is discouraged, we are left with some combination of the other three. -- Charles St. Pierre

Incentives

I am usually pro private business except when it does not work. An important category are treatment, prevention, and elimination of negatives: Private prison industry does not work. Private law enforcement does not work. Private military industry does not work. Private drug research does not work. If you want to eliminate or prevent something, then do not privatize it. Private business wants to grow. Missions to shrink or end something must be publicly controlled. If we insist on privatization, then the financial incentives must be aligned with the desired results. For example, only give private drug companies the money that would be otherwise lost to the disease via whatever arrangements - probably some insurance scheme or similar - and make them lose money immediately when the disease appears again. -- Sakari Maaranen

Science

In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, as far as possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience. -- Niels Bohr

Transcendence

Transcendence, mother had said, is another word for escape. But escape to where? This life is all we have. To desire escape from life is to desire death. -- Karl Schroeder

Chesterton's Fence

If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. -- Aldo Leopold

Normal(s)

one of the signs of an abusive relationship is the creeping normalization of the abnormal: that one takes the most disturbing or painful circumstances as a meter stick for everyday life, and assumes that what one is experiencing is in fact the way everyone else lives, and not an aberration -- Charles Stross

as dumb as a mushroom

Think, for a moment, about lignin itself.

It's this complex structural biopolymer made by trees. It's what makes trees woody. And it's totally, transcendently worthless to everything else on earth. There's a tremendous amount of stored energy there -- this being why wood burns -- and nothing can get at it. Millennium after millennium, the accumulation of woody debris starves the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and poisons all of the earth's fresh water. Insofar as anything living has the capacity to suffer, everything is.

Eventually, bracket fungus figures out a way to break down lignin. In a matter of a few hundred thousand years, the quantity of atmospheric carbon dioxide triples, and the amount of atmospheric oxygen plummets. The giant insects that dominate the Earth begin to die. Temperatures rise. The oceans acidify. Almost everything dies. [Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction, 65.5 My ago]

Go back further, and disruptive species become increasingly catastrophic. For instance, when cyanobacteria discovered photosynthesis and produced oxygen as a byproduct, nothing respirated. These huge mats of bacteria were producing a waste product more toxic than chlorine gas. And it destroyed almost all life on earth, down to the microbiome, not that there was anything other than a microbiome. The ground corroded, crumbled, washed into the sea. [Great Oxygenation Event, 2.5Gy ago]

And then life, by chance, stumbled on a way to use this horrifyingly toxic gas to ride a more efficient biochemical gradient. And that's all there is to it.

In expending all of the Earth's stored carbon, we're acting just like bracket fungus, or cyanobacteria, or the first cycads. We've found a clever chemical trick and are riding the entropic gradient as long as we can, because, at worst, it temporarily relieves suffering, and at best, it gives us more degrees of freedom to someday not act just like bracket fungus.

This is a low bar -- to not be literally as dumb as a mushroom. But the biological incentives of disruptive species, us included, make environmental catastrophe difficult to avert. The dimensions in which disruptive biology is unsustainable will eventually place a burden on biodiversity system-wide. -- Andreas Schou

Profiteers must Profit II

The human ability to disconnect from and deny geopolitical reality lies at the heart of the “green” net-zero project.  Most obviously, those who claim victories along the road to the Nirvana of net-zero must maintain blindness to the way in which the UK economy is integrated into a global industrial civilisation.  As a result, such measures as closing British coal mines and coal-fired power stations can be translated into lower national carbon emissions figures, even though all that is achieved is the outsourcing of UK emissions to other, less developed states elsewhere on the planet.  Aiding this sleight of hand is the international convention that we do not include emissions from shipping in anyone’s national data, giving the appearance that there is no difference between goods moved tens of miles by truck or train, and goods transported by ship from the other side of the Earth. -- Tim Watkins ref