Diverse libertarianism

actually Diversity Libertarianism https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/more-antifragile-diversity-libertarianism

libertarians want to be free from the state, what about religion, corporate oppression, monopolies etc.

Thiel comes out as somebody who just does not want to pay taxes, but “Freedom and (small “d”) democracy are, in conditions of rampant inequality, a cruel sham as Bakunin understood.” this is James C. Scott

Scott again “Nor do I believe that the state is the only institution that endangers freedom. To assert so would be to ignore a long and deep history of pre-state slavery, property in women, warfare, and bondage. It is one thing to disagree utterly with Hobbes about the nature of society before the existence of the state (nasty, brutish, and short) and another to believe that “the state of nature” was an unbroken landscape of communal property, cooperation, and peace.”

this is Tyler Cowen on how there is no stable “libertqrian equilibrium” when a virus kills score of fellow citizens andntherefore is better have an efficient state at the onset of an epidemy that spares everybody much suffering “Given the way government and public choice work, anything that kills over half a million Americans is going to be a big deal for policy, whether we like it or not (Don should be the first to recognize that government will restrict your liberties for far less than 500k deaths!). You want the best feasible version of a response, as there isn’t really a stable libertarian response pattern out there. Trying partial but non-sustainable libertarian approaches will in the end get you more and more statism as the virus keeps on defeating you, deaths rise, and calls for ever-greater state action increase. A lot of what libertarians don’t like about lockdowns in part stems from the “do nothing” response of the first two months of notice that we Americans had when Covid first appeared in China.” from here https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/04/from-the-comments-34.html

Tyler coined the term “State Capacity Libertarianism” by the way

So we are at 2 diverse types of libertarianism here, and I have also quoed an anarchist

GS and SF

that would be General Semantics and Science Fiction

I started from here by chance https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qc7P2NwfxQMC3hdgm/rationalism-before-the-sequences

“SF author Greg Bear probably closed the book on attempts to define science fiction as a genre in 1994 when he said “the branch of fantastic literature which affirms the rational knowability of the universe””

and follows some stories on GS and SF

General Semantics, a rationalist society https://www.generalsemantics.org/

“THE GENERAL SEMANTICS AND SCIENCE FICTION
OF ROBERT HEINLEIN AND A . E . VAN VOGT*” http://www.generalsemantics.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/articles/gsb/gsb41-drake.pdf

“Students’ critiques of General Semantics seems to constantly include the
following : (1) It’s nice but people can’t or don’t live that way : and, (2) How can
General Semantics be used in the ‘real’ world outside of the classroom? ”

building worlds, I guess, I should read on, Heinlein and van Vogt both attended GS groups

GENERAL SEMANTICS AS SOURCE MATERIAL IN THE WORKS OF ROBERT A. HEINLEIN https://www.jstor.org/stable/42579098?seq=1

economics

AOC, Smith and the Invisible Hand

AOC says she likes Adam Smith and discussion ensues https://mobile.twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1376263604584976388

Is Adam Smith the capitalist forefather that unveiled to us the Invisible Hand, she decides who stays low or climb high (said with the voice of those green critters in You Story

Bad news, Adam Smith only used the I.H. expression 3 times in his books, two of them he used it to make fun of old things, the 3rd stuck but we are not sure that was not sardonic either

So let us forget the interpretations that piled up over the centuries, let us go and read him like Chomsky did https://mobile.twitter.com/paleofuture/status/1376378264575299591

You got to read the classics especially when the times are achanging

economics finance startup

Startups stock options homoploutia

Questo è un link che ti aiuta a decidere quante stock options dare alle persone che lavorano nella tua startup.

https://www.indexventures.com/optionplan/#pre_funding_valuation=7000000&initial_amount_raised=500000&expected_funding_rounds_pre_exit=seed-only&employee_country=italy&option_allocation_level=1&technical_dna=5&mode=seed

se sei dall’altra parte, quella di ricevere un’offerta da una startup, a questo link puoi trovare dei riferimenti su quanto farti pagare quante opzioni chiedere a seconda dello stage della startup

nei tempi che viviamo non c’è più la netta differenza tra lavoro e capitale, tra lavoratore e imprenditore nell accesso a redditi da capitale, il modo migliore per affrontare la vita è quella di lavorare per avere delle quote di azioni del posto in cui lavori

Questo fenomeno di crescente sovrapposizione tra il ruolo di lavoratore e capitale, si definisce homoploutia. il termine è stato coniato dall’economista Branco milanovich ed è giusto conoscere il fenomeno per capire come funziona la distribuzione del reddito la disuguaglianza nel mondo attuale.

https://mobile.twitter.com/BrankoMilan/status/1339956804604874752

Questo è uno dei motivi per cui mi fa piacere lavorare con te al progetto di imparare a conoscere i mercati finanziari e gli investimenti

internet

access to cyberspace

internet barons getting rich via internet platform of billions of users somehow do not trust the internet as it is and enjoy themselves with fancy projects of ariborne points of access which can do without relying on Telcos, without their digging trenches and building aerials.

Facebook built drones offering connectivity, cancelled in 2018, google blimps just cancelled

Was it for some cyberpunkish attempt to free their platforms from regulated telcom space? Make they cyberspace untouchable?

In the end the only one who could really do that is Musk with his constellation of satellites. Satellites are more intangible to government that either drones or blimps in the airspace

economics technology

Progressivism

Progressiv-ism, -ism like in Illumin-ism which followed the dark ages, Progressivism comes after the Great Depression. The Great depression is the title of the book written by the economist Tyler Cowen. Tyler and the tech entrepenuer Patrick Collison, founder of Stripe, have started the filed of “Progressive Studies”. They did so when they wrote the piece “we need a new science of progress” https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/ and now there is a page where you can check a lot of contributions to it https://patrickcollison.com/progress

Oh, in there, Zuck interviews Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison. Zuckerberg looking at things, interviewing things https://about.fb.com/news/2019/11/a-conversation-with-mark-zuckerberg-patrick-collison-and-tyler-cowen/

politics science sciencefiction

Future “legibility”

Charlie Stross, SF writer, on reality stickness and ability to forecast into the future:

“You don’t need a science fiction writer to tell you this stuff: 90% of the world of tomorrow plus ten years is obvious to anyone with a weekly subscription to New Scientist and more imagination than a doorknob.

What’s less obvious is the 10% of the future that isn’t here yet. Of that 10%, you used to be able to guess most of it — 9% of the total — by reading technology road maps in specialist industry publications. We know what airliners Boeing and Airbus are starting development work on, we can plot the long-term price curve for photovoltaic panels, read the road maps Intel and ARM provide for hardware vendors, and so on. (..)

(..) However, this stuff ignores what Donald Rumsfeld named “the unknown unknowns”. About 1% of the world of ten years hence always seems to have sprung fully-formed from the who-ordered-THAT dimension: we always get landed with stuff nobody foresaw or could possibly have anticipated, unless they were spectacularly lucky guessers or had access to amazing hallucinogens. And this 1% fraction of unknown unknowns regularly derails near-future predictions.”

from this speech on, of all things, AI https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/12/artificial-intelligence-threat.html

Legibility is a “seeing like a state” term, James Scott terminology but it sticks lately. Scott Alexander on the experts, journalism and legibility. In different terms, like Nate Silver put it, the surpirsing gap between what you read in the news about Covid and what you could gather yourself from preprints and experts’ twitter threads

The point of Scott is that experts in public position and journalists with duty to report to the public have to strip down what the want to communicate in order to make it “legible” to the wide audience, so information and even message geto lost in mainstreammedia https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/journalism-and-legible-expertise

this is not what I wanted to write, I got carried away by the legibility concept which is probably misappropriated and used outside its intended reach. Anyway I wanted to say really, reality ius mostly sticky and the part that sticks from a decade to the next moves in ways you can guess with a proper knowledge strategy. )0% stays the same, )% changes in this way, 1% can’t be easily guessed and that probably chages the meaning of all the rest

energy environment

Net Zero EU

2 reports:

EU Commission https://ec.europa.eu/clima/sites/default/files/docs/pages/com_2018_733_analysis_in_support_en_0.pdf

and McKinsey https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Business%20Functions/Sustainability/Our%20Insights/How%20the%20European%20Union%20could%20achieve%20net%20zero%20emissions%20at%20net%20zero%20cost/Net-zero-Europe-vF.pdf?shouldIndex=false

and Adam Tooze on Social Europe https://www.socialeurope.eu/europes-decarbonisation-challenge-wir-schaffen-das

from Tooze:

between now and 2050, almost half the necessary investment will not meet standard investment criteria

need to mobilise €4.9 trillion in subsidies over 30 years. That is the amount of profit taxpayers would need to offer investors to get them interested in the energy transition—€365 for every man, woman and child in the EU27, every year for 30 years.

Total GDP of the EU27 in 2019 was shy of €14 trillion. Overall investment runs to about 22 per cent of GDP. McKinsey suggests that, to achieve net zero by 2050, the EU needs to invest every year about 5.8 per cent of GDP in the energy transition

a carbon price of €100 per ton 80 per cent of the necessary investment could be justified on commercial grounds.

EU’s regular budget is capped at 1 per cent of GDP

NextGenerationEU programme is a step in the right direction, but the €32 billion per annum it allocates to climate spending over the next seven years is far too small

Both modelling exercises predict that a carbon-neutral economy by 2050 will offer more jobs than the fossil-fuel-addicted status quo

Europe’s neighbours in north Africa are obvious clean-energy partners.

As McKinsey remarks en passant, reaching net-zero may require 18 million workers to be reskilled by 2050 but this is small beer by comparison with the 100 million it expects to need retraining already by 2030, on account of what it euphemistically refers to as ‘automation’.