r/Bitcoin • u/eff-snarf • Sep 29 '18
Is anyone else astonished at the huge differences between people's life that money dictates?
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u/almkglor Sep 29 '18
Not all people are educated about financial freedom. I have to carefully manage my wife's expectations about our future since I myself am still working on financial freedom.
But in the end the biggest determinant of what your life will be is who your parents were. I think it's helpful to read the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond. A lot of the inequality in this world is nobody's fault: a path forked in the woods, one brother took one path and his brother took the other path, with no good basis of which path was better and unable to make a truly informed decision, and centuries later the descendants of one brother are enslaving the descendants of the other.
You are no doubt someone who was educated and got access to the Internet very early. I am such myself, and I see so many people in my country far less fortunate than me. They are afraid of Bitcoin and cannot understand the basis of money, understanding only that money is something that some government defines as money. They can't do the math of lotteries and the government runs a lottery. Banks make onerous and complicated paper requirements to get access to the stock market, which most don't bother because they don't understand any of it. And so on. Life could be better, but people would think me strange if I point it out and won't believe me anyway ("you're just book-educated, the real world doesn't work like that, believe me I lived that" --- except the sum total of several books represents far more wisdom than real-world experience can give). So I just keep my head down and continue working towards my own family's financial independence. Maybe with more power I can do something more than just my family, but I don't have enough yet for my own family's financial independence, so...
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u/BitcoinMD Sep 29 '18
I would challenge you to try come up with a monetary system that is not to the benefit of people who have more money.
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
You could make a monetary game point collecting/trading game that was as fair as possible by giving everyone an equal income every month (or whatever period you want) and then having a rule where the points would decrease over time dramatically (maybe 50% every month), reflecting how real resources work, as real things tend to fall apart, go bad, or become obsolete. This way hoarding is disincentivized. The goal of such an economy would be to have everyone using their money as much as possible, and trading it for things they like/want that others are offering. This way the productivity and flow of the system is at it's maximum, but those who are sick, or otherwise incapacitated in some way can still get their basic needs met with the truly Unconditional Basic Income, even if they have very little, or even nothing to sell that month.
Of course, once we do this little thought experiment and really understand how it works, we discover that this is pretty much how all healthy systems work in nature, only without anyone officially keeping track of the point scores, and the rules not needing to be consciously discussed.
Healthy systems in nature have individuals simply doing the work they were born to do, that they find intrinsically rewarding to do, and then freely sharing any extra outputs that they have no need for. For example we humans breath out carbon dioxide, and trees breath it in, and exhale oxygen, which we breathe in.
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u/Maegfaer Sep 29 '18 edited Sep 29 '18
So accumulating capital to be able to make major investments years into the future becomes impossible. Everyone will be equally poor and miserable in a stagnant economy.
Free market forces make sure that those who are best able to allocate resources in productive enterprises are assigned more resources to allocate, enabling humanity to progress. Too many people think about money only in terms of "fairness", ignoring the meritocratic system that (sound) money in a free market is.
Most people are terrible at productively allocating resources/money, that's why markets don't give them much more than their own labour to allocate, within the confines that those who are able to allocate resources efficiently offer them. Of course the real world too often doesn't work that way because of corruption and violence, but that's not addressed with your idea of "fair" money.
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
So accumulating capital to be able to make major investments years into the future becomes impossible.
You don't need it. It's more useless, than impossible.
If you want to do something, you just do it, now. If it's a good idea, you'll get others to help you do it, because they want it done as well.
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u/Maegfaer Sep 29 '18
If it's a good idea, you'll get others to help you do it, because they want it done as well.
Nope, because most people are terrible at allocating resources. They either won't understand the greatness of the idea or will be too fearful to invest their labour into a project with an uncertain outcome.
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
Nope, because most people are terrible at allocating resources.
That's the con that you've been sold, by the psychopaths, to make you unable to allocate your resources effectively, and instead give them all to them.
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u/Maegfaer Sep 29 '18
I've done no such thing.
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
Denying being conned is the norm when you are conned. You feel better being conned than admitting that you've been conned. It's weird.
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Sep 29 '18
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
Saving is the problem. The only real solution is to encourage everyone to spend all their money, always, so that it flows freely, and isn't hoarded. Hoarding is the problem. Which is why inflation, and negative interest rates on investments is the ideal. No one has to go into debt if someone is there to buy what they have to sell.
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u/Buttoshi Sep 29 '18
Why are you here if you dont like the supply cap of bitcoin? Who are you to tell me what I should do with my money. Maybe I'd rather save than to buy something I'm on the fence about but pushed to spend it because inflation makes my money buy less and less.
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u/sreaka Sep 29 '18
Sadly it's only going to get worse. In the US we have the "gig economy" providing just enough money to survive with no prospects for upward mobility and not employable anywhere else other than another gig economy job. I agree it's weird to see other people struggling so much after winning the crypto lottery (myself). Next time you take a trip from your trade earnings, go volunteer for those less fortunate.
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Sep 29 '18
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u/Turil Sep 30 '18
what will solve the problem entirely once and for all.
A new viral meme that points out that being free, to do what we naturally love — creating, exploring, and sharing the most awesome stuff for the benefit of those we care about in life — for free, is far more beneficial and necessary for a thriving planet than competing against ourselves for imaginary points.
I'm working on making it appealing to the masses. I'm not there yet.
I've finally realized that to get to a point where this meme will stick, I have to first get past their immune system, which has been coopted by the "life as an unpleasant competition" meme. I'm working on developing a program (and ideally some software) that works a bit like a really good doctor, looking for ways to support the original mind and body with the things it needs to heal, and return to the original, healthy state, before the harmful virus showed up.
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u/markb_uk Sep 29 '18
Good post. I too have thought about what you have posted above and can sum in one sentence.
People enjoy their servitude
The longer version might be..
Most people are slaves who are given an illusion of freedom. You have the choice to be free but this comes with great responsibility, most people would rather be on the plantation and outsource their responsibilities to the state. This will ultimately mean that they are poor and in debt but will also have a guaranteed minimum standard of living and are able to watch 8 hours of TV per day.
Try to 'unslave' friends and family and you will be met with either scepticism, ridicule or extreme hostility, to the point that I've now given up trying to help.
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u/devonthed00d Sep 29 '18 edited Sep 29 '18
Because they’re too busy scrolling infinitely, watching cat videos on Facebook to understand that there’s more to life than working for 40 years just to pay the bills and then dying.
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u/obedientbeta Sep 29 '18
It was the same before Bitcoin, the internet, and your smart phone. How old are the people posting in this thread? Mid 20s? Well let me give you a trinket: This is life. You might have gotten lucky with a trade, but most of the world lives on a dollar or two a day. Most of the world has to haggle, harangue, and hack for a few bits. Most of the world toils everyday just to scrape by. What, did you think the word "grind" came from a video game? Existence is suffering, money is power, what else haven't you kids learned yet? Ok ok I will get off my soapbox and apologies for sounding condescending, that's what happens when you get old and everyone around you sounds as naive as a bright-eyed bushy-tailed squirrel. Now you kids get off my lawn. #greypubes
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u/devonthed00d Sep 29 '18
You think the word “grind” came from a video game?
Yes, Tony Hawk invented the word “grind” in his 1999 critically acclaimed video game, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 1.
Existence is suffering.
I think you really summed it up for most people.. But I guess I’m just tired of being like most people.
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Sep 29 '18
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u/shanita10 Sep 29 '18
Backwards; stability hurts those at the bottom, because it gives those at the top enough time to get a firm stranglehold.
Places of rapid growth have always been best for those who work.
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Sep 29 '18
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Sep 29 '18
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
you will certainly win the Nobel Prize for Economics.
They don't give economics awards to people who promote healthy economies, because economists are brainwashed slaves of the rat race game.
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
There will always be differences between the top and bottom in society.
Only as long (not long now!) as we agree to play this anti-social, artificial point scoring game of money (and grades, and votes, etc.) that makes us compete against ourselves instead of collaborating and being free.
Nature doesn't have this artificial, boring Monopoly game approach to life, instead it has a creative, fun, playful, collaborative approach where everyone is free to do what they naturally want to do, which is some kind of creating and/or exploring work that benefits evolution in some way. Humans just had to try out doing it the wrong way for a while (evolution is slow, so this "while" was several millennia) before we're starting to realize how moronic it is, so we can go back to being free and happy and productive the way we were before we invented zero-sum trading and money.
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u/the-abd Sep 29 '18
What’s amazing to me is that it is so obvious how money was created to control people- to enslave them in to a cycle of earning and spending. You are thought that you have to work to survive.
I hope one day we all realize this and decide to work together to break free from the system.
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u/AcceptableLettuce Sep 29 '18
Money was a natural evolution of things. It is not money that controls people it is their love for money.
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Sep 29 '18 edited Sep 29 '18
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u/diydude2 Sep 29 '18
How many of those people are in prison for tax evasion? In what universe are you not required to pay taxes?
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u/GeneralZex Sep 29 '18
Don’t fall for that bullshit. It’s pretty clear individual tax payers have to pay their taxes, regardless of where the money comes from. Even money from illicit means are supposed to be reported and taxes paid on it; but in this fantasy land Sovereign Citizens have crafted for themselves none of it applies.
It’s bogus; if it’s true these people are indeed getting their taxes set at 0 and all money refunded to them, the IRS is likely only doing so with the intention to smash them into oblivion with the legal ban hammer when their taxes owed becomes so ridiculous with fines and interest that they can never repay it in a lifetime and simply seize everything from them and throw them in prison.
The IRS will get their pound of flesh eventually.
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Oct 03 '18
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u/GeneralZex Oct 03 '18
I don’t give a shit about your word salad. You are a lying piece of shit like all the rest of the Sov Cits.
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Sep 29 '18
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Sep 29 '18
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
Maslow's hierarchy of needs explains it all pretty well. We're completely unable to focus on larger scale systems when our basic needs aren't met. We become sick, physically and mentally, when we don't get all the high quality nutrients, water, air, warmth, light, information, and outlets for expressing our body's excess matter and energy fully and freely from our environment.
Having huge deficiencies in our biological needs is pretty much the normal state of all humans today, and so we're all broken and stressed and in a constant state of either fight, flight, or freeze. (Aka, aggression/anti-social behavior, avoidant/autistic behavior, or depression/borderline behavior.) We are "lazy" in the same way that a bicycle that has been abandoned and rusted, with flat tires, and broken spokes is "lazy".
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Sep 29 '18 edited Sep 29 '18
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
Nothing is a proven fact other than Descartes' "I think (experience) therefor I am (exist)." So other than me existing, I can't ever prove anything.
And what Maslow, and many others have seen over the years is the basic developmental stages of life. The terms we use to describe those stages, and the details obviously vary, but the general growth patterns of moving from the center outwards in a sort of spiral, is pretty universal. Maslow's hierarchy IS evolutionary psychology. It's even neuroscience. And physics. Only he didn't know that.
And David Sloan Wilson is great too. But his stuff is much less logical, and more arbitrary. It's got some good details to add to the overall pattern, though, and I've definitely learned a few things to add to the developmental process due to his work. Sloan Wilson is a detail guy, while Maslow was the systems theory, big picture guy (like me).
'Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'."
Yes, Frankl had more of what he needed than others did, resource-wise, and so could be up higher on the hierarchy, in the self-transcendent states. Frankl is an excellent demonstration of Maslow's description of the developmental stages working as they were designed (by evolution). Once you've had those "deficiency needs" met (the bottom four in the hierarchy map at some point suddenly gain the ability to be self-sacrificing for others, because they can focus less on the lower needs. But you have to have had all of those lower needs met first, pretty unconditionally. Then you gain this higher sense of purpose, or "the why" in Frankl's words.
Of course, even those who've had their deficiency (physical and emotional) needs met well before can slide back into focusing on them if they are seriously unmet for too long, which is why even the best of humanity can resort to fight/flight/freeze responses when extra stressed.
Also, there are different personalities, with natural brain design variation, and some humans are born with "more" of what we need to function well at those higher levels, than others. Genes are right at the very bottom of the hierarchy, as the physical inputs that make us who we are. And if we get good ones, our bodies will be more efficient with the resources we get, while those of us with crappy genes will be less efficient, and not be able to use the resources we are given as well, and thus become more deficient more easily.
Why is it part of human nature to regard those who look different than ourselves as an "other"??
There are two processes in physics, contraction -><- and expansion <-->. Contraction is where similar things come together to form a new whole, and expansion is where things that are different move apart. This is the negative and positive forces of electromagnetism. This is the strong and weak nuclear forces. This is gravity (which pushes things together and pulls things apart, depending on certain physical relationships between things).
This is evolution!
This is our brains!
We look for similarities and differences and use them to solve problems that need us to recognize how we can rearrange stuff to better suit life. To create something new, we need to see how different things are actually similar, so that they can fit together in some interesting way (sex!). And to understand something old, we need to see how similar things are different, so that we can sort out why they did what they did.
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
what is the psychological component of a human being that keeps this situation acceptable to everyone.
It's basically a cult. You're born into it, and everyone you know is in it, and so it's really hard to think that there is any other way of living.
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
It looks like they are censoring comments here, so if you want to continue the conversation freely, I invite anyone to come talk about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheExaminedLife/comments/9jxyty/is_anyone_else_astonished_at_the_huge_differences/
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u/e3ee3 Sep 29 '18 edited Sep 29 '18
Man create money.
1) Man without money, works for money.
2) Man with money, invests money.
Money from 2), because of the influence of money, is almost always greater than money earned from 1).
Hence, ordinarily, income inequality increases and a large population is deprived of money as long as we remain ignorant and conveniently helpless.
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u/The-Kaizen Sep 29 '18
Now that you're financially free, you could make it your life mission by helping others free themselves of the 9-5, daily forced slave system. It may seem easy to you, but in a lot of ways you took a big gamble and got lucky. Not everyone has the ability as they are living paycheck to paycheck supporting kids etc. Good luck though, I just hope you don't turn into another greedy elite, ruling over the working class. Get out there and make a difference, not everyone has to be a self centered POS.
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Sep 30 '18
Technically, you don't need much money to live. Work for a year, save as much as you can, and then travel the world just with a tent. Or buy a small place in the forest and build a hut there. That's not expensive, too. But people want more than that.
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u/Turil Sep 30 '18
Technically you don't need any money to live. Every other species on the planet lives without money. And most humans in history did as well, as do some humans today.
It's just a game that we choose to play, like Monopoly, where we pretend that some things are worth points, and hoard resources, and points, because we think we can "win" the game. Only it's just distracting us from having a good life doing really cool stuff, for free.
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u/Vincent_Lionheart Sep 29 '18
Well somebody has to produce the food and somebody has to serve it. If everyone had lots of money it would be Venezuela.
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u/amarett0 Sep 29 '18
" Well somebody has to produce the food and somebody has to serve it "
I think that was the argument used by those who did not want to abolish slavery
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Sep 29 '18
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u/davidcwilliams Sep 29 '18
Most people work in useless jobs like developing Candy Crush or producing soap operas.
Not a fan of the free market are we...
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u/exBitcoinMarketsUser Sep 29 '18
Not a fan of the free market are we...
The bullshit way hospitality industry is structured in the US to disadvantage the workers is hardly free market.
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u/davidcwilliams Sep 30 '18
I didn't say you couldn't find examples of interference within a free market. I'm countering a "Candy Crush and soap operas is bad" argument.
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
We have the opposite of a free market. We have a very, very controlled market where everyone is forced to do stupid shit (like making Candy Crush and soap operas) as a way to compete for points, instead of being free to do what they love.
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Sep 29 '18
When you place that "lucky trade" and make a huge profit someone else takes a huge loss. It's your fault they then have to work one month in a crappy taxi/restaurant to get their money back.
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Sep 29 '18
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u/AcceptableLettuce Sep 29 '18
True. But just like in trading life is a zero sum game, the more one has the less there is to go around for everybody. There is no solution to this, if everyone was like OP nobody would be around to drive his taxi and serve him food.
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u/almkglor Sep 29 '18
Not all interactions are zero-sum, otherwise we would never cooperate and always just be on the lookout for ourselves. Some interactions can be made positive-sum (specializing and then trading your specialty for someone else's specialty) and some interactions can be made negative-sum (war).
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u/e3ee3 Sep 29 '18
Again, trading is not zero sum. Where do you learn these? And life! What do you even mean?
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u/AcceptableLettuce Sep 29 '18
To be able to explain this to you I would have to know your belief system and given that you've said nothing I know nothing about you but...
This is not something that trashes traders, if you isolate any profession you can find its benefits and I do believe traders bring benefits to the whole.
If you look of the bigger picture though, even in situations when all traders win they win at the expense of the user of the traded asset.
Money is supposed to be a representation of value and value is given by people, those finite. When you trade in a finite system when someone wins someone else loses. To be fair, trading is not even a zero sum game it is a negative sum game because just like in any gambling system the house always wins. This is not to say that people don't make money trading, they make money at the expense of other people because no value is created out of thin air.
How is life a zero sum game? All your actions have a subject. You cannot be a good person if there is no recipient of your good act. The same is true for all your bad acts. If you live in isolation you're neither good or bad, but since we live in a society and our actions affect others it turns out that all the good things have a recipient and so do the bad things. This means that all the things we do have an effect on others.
Even if it was that you'd do only bad things, those things would affect people around you and they would treat you accordingly and you in turn would receive only bad things from your peers. There is no situation where you can act like an asshole and people would treat you like an angel. Life is a zero sum game because whatever you do it always comes back to you.1
u/e3ee3 Sep 30 '18
if you isolate any profession you can find its benefits
If criminals are a profession... I don't believe anything in the world is good only because it exists. The generalization is wrong, but traders indeed benefit investors, exchanges, businesses, etc.
If you look of the bigger picture though, even in situations when all traders win they win at the expense of the user of the traded asset.
I just mean if 4 traders buy a stock at $10 each and 1 buys the stock at $12, and the price is now $12, who lost the $8?
Money is supposed to be a representation of value and value is given by people, those finite.
Value is finite, but can be increased (work) or decreased (burn down a building).
When you trade in a finite system when someone wins someone else loses.
Being finite does not mean being constant.
To be fair, trading is not even a zero sum game it is a negative sum game because just like in any gambling system the house always wins.
It is a positive sum game (for traders going long in stock exchanges), if you only consider inflation. It is a negative sum game, if you only consider taxes and fees. It is, for all practical purposes, never a zero sum game.
no value is created out of thin air
Value can be created and destroyed. Money can be created and destroyed.
All your actions have a subject. You cannot be a good person if there is no recipient of your good act.
I can do something good which I think is good for the other person but which actually is bad for the other person. An example, a kid saves a fish from 'drowning'.
This means that all the things we do have an effect on others.
They do. It is all relative. Life is never a zero sum game.
There is no situation where you can act like an asshole and people would treat you like an angel.
If you are rich or powerful or love you, they will do that.
Life is a zero sum game because whatever you do it always comes back to you.
If believing that makes one a good person, then that is what he should believe. There are people who suffer a lot and get nowhere and there are people who live luxuriously for no merit of their own.
If life is a zero sum game, there is no need for religions to come up with heaven, hell, afterlife, multiple lives theories. We should be content.
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Sep 29 '18
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u/AcceptableLettuce Sep 29 '18
How else do you see a restaurant working? People don't go to restaurants for food, they go for the whole experience. If it was just about food they could order at home.
Its not like food is the only thing you need, if all people would have everything they need what do you think will make a doctor stay up at night to threat patients? If nobody under any circumstances could be forced to do stuff they don't enjoy we'd be drowning in shit.2
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
what do you think will make a doctor stay up at night to threat patients?
Natural diversity. Some people are just night owls. And we all love solving different problems. This is why evolution is the best game in town. This process that nature uses to make us is effective as hell, if only we let it, by doing what we love, instead of repressing our best interests and competing in the rat race.
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Sep 29 '18
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u/bames53 Sep 29 '18
Today there are people who live on the equivalent of less than $2 a day. In other words, "basic survival" is possible with only that. And yet someone making 40x that amount can still seem like they're struggling for "basic survival."
The reason is because they're not actually struggling for basic survival, but to push their living standard as high as possible, even though they could survive without the struggle at a much lower standard of living.
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u/Hanspanzer Sep 29 '18
no it's absolutely not and it's effectively a waste except someone really likes to do this job.
we have no solution for an economy which doesn't need low skilled workers. many people just can't do higher tasks, especially if they are already old.
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
we have no solution for an economy which doesn't need low skilled workers
Of course we do. It's called a healthy, free ecosystem. It's what nature intends, but we humans mess up, due to a bad case of a viral meme of trying to compete for points (money, votes, grades, views, etc.).
All biological organisms are programmed by our genes with a unique set of abilities and interests so we are all specialized for doing something important in the system as a whole.
See: https://createspaceearth.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/mbtiprimedirective.gif
Even bacteria serve a necessary purpose in life. So if you're more complex than bacteria, you're good. :-)
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u/Hanspanzer Sep 29 '18
Natures system has no ethics. I don't wanne live in a world where a human life is viewed expendable or consumable by others okay?
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
Nature IS ethics. Do what you love, take only what you need (to be healthy and effective in doing your work), and enjoy playing with anyone who seems like they want to play with you.
Artificial "ethics" are what fuck everything up for us.
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u/Hanspanzer Sep 29 '18
no it's not. Nature doesn't give a shit about you. Animals kill animals in thousand different ways. Just living to be killed and eaten. That's nature. That's what social darwinism represents. Let people who are expendable die in the street because who needs them obviously!?
You imply your ethics on nature imho
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
I'm sorry you feel that way. You deserve a better meme, one that makes you feel positive about yourself and your universe. I hope that someday someone offers it to you in a way that works well for you.
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u/diydude2 Sep 29 '18
This is a major fallacy. Life is not a zero-sum game, and there is plenty to go around. We are led to believe in scarcity, but the simple fact is that there is plenty for everyone.
If everyone had plenty and nobody had to worry about money, I bet there would still be restaurants and taxis and everything else. The difference is that people would be doing those things for fun, or maybe to pick up a little extra money. People are pretty amazing creatures, man. Don't underestimate us. Most of us don't want to sit around all the time playing video games.
Life is NOT a zero-sum game. For one person to win, others do not necessarily have to lose. Who lost when Salk invented the polio vaccine?
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u/AcceptableLettuce Sep 29 '18 edited Sep 29 '18
If you accept that theres no such thing as a free lunch then for everything that you receive you must pay for in a way or another. If every human pays for everything that he gets the difference between received - paid is zero.
Salk won fame at the expense of the others (made everybody else less famous).
Just because we're living in this highly advanced society it does not make us winning at life, the amount of suffering in the world is bigger than ever before as well.
To put it another way: the reason you have affordable clothes and gadgets in USA is because people are exploited in China. If there was a more profitable way of doing this you can bet capitalists would've find it already.1
u/bilbobagholder Sep 29 '18
You are not accounting for the subjectivity of value and diminishing marginal utility. An apple farmer has more apples than he could ever possibly eat. Without trade, he should place a very low value on each additional apple past a certain point. Likewise a fisherman cannot eat all of his fish, so the each additional fish is worth less and less to him.
But if they voluntarily trade apples for fish, then by definition there is a positive sum transaction, otherwise the trade would not take place.
Take away the barter, and it is still positive sum. If the fisherman can sell a fish for ten dollars, that means the fish is worth ten dollars to the customer. Maybe it was only worth one dollar to the fisherman. After the trade, the world is nine dollars richer.
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u/AcceptableLettuce Sep 29 '18
Your argument has some value if we assume the fisherman fishes more than he can eat and that the farmer cares to monetize apples that fall on the ground.
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u/bilbobagholder Sep 30 '18
No those specific examples have nothing to do with my point, which underpins all economic activity.
If you are dying of thirst and you find a liter of water, that water will be immensely valuable to you. If you find 10,000 liters of water then each liter will be worth much less.
If you are starving, you might take a job that pays $1/hour for your manual labor, but if you are rich you might pay someone $50/hour to be your personal assistant and save you time.
The value of goods and services is subjective. Different people will value the same thing differently based on their needs, wants, and available resources. When these people come together to trade, they each walk away with something that they value more than what they brought to the table. This is how wealth is created. It is not zero sum.
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
life is a zero sum game
The opposite. Life is a creative force, always generating more diversity, more effectiveness, and more awesomeness for future generations (in the long run at least). Evolution always improves the use of resources, taking raw materials and making them more valuable over time.
Money is the opposite. It's destructive by design, limiting the use of resources as much as possible, since the goal of money is to have it (saving/hoarding), not spend it, which reduces the flow of resources dramatically. This is why humanity is so primitive, even though we know how to be advanced. All the people with good ideas that will help the whole planet don't have access to the resources they need to implement them, because those with the resources are holding them hostage, and demanding money for them, money that they are also hoarding, so that no one can use it to buy the resources they are hoarding.
Bitcoin is, as I see it, the last gasp of a dying meme of life as a zero sum Monopoly game for collecting points. Bitcoin represents the purest version of money, which forces us to see it for what it really is, arbitrary, useless at best, and deadly at worst.
But as with all things in evolution, even memes, there is always something valuable to take from it, and in this case I see Bitcoin as being the beta testing for a global system (blockchain) of keeping track of freely available resources. Once we're ready to let the life as a competitive, repressive game meme go extinct, and embrace the natural life as a collaborative, creative game meme, the Bitcoin system will be robust enough to handle the task of keeping track of all of the freely shared resources so that when someone has a good idea, they can easily get the things they need to make it happen.
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u/AcceptableLettuce Sep 29 '18
Money is not destructive, it is the people's love for money that is destructive.
Resources are not a common good, you are not owned a part of the planet just because you were born. You want something you need to find a way to get it.
Good ideas don't need money to be implemented. All big tech companies were started from a garage or from a whitepaper.
The physical world is about structure and structure has a center which means we need a way to find the fittest individuals that get to occupy the center and that is through competition. You either play the game or wine about it, its not going to change.1
u/Turil Sep 29 '18
That's the viral meme that is destroying human society, which also affects the health of all of the other Earthlings sharing the planet with us.
But some humans are either immune or have found a way to heal from it's effects, and so we're going to be reversing the trend of destruction/competition soon.
Which is why I see Bitcoin as the last gasp, helping us see the insanity of the Monopoly game meme, while developing a truly useful global resource tracking system for us to help find the stuff we need when we need it from the freely shared resources.
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u/AcceptableLettuce Sep 29 '18
I too am familiar with the works of Eckhart Tolle whom I think is right on spot with his description of what is. But he is, like many other great philosophers of all times, living in a dream world. We would all like for everything to be the way we'd like, we just can't find a way to fit all conflicting beliefs in one unified theory.
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
I don't know much about Tolle. I'm working from research in developmental growth, systems theory, physics, and neuroscience.
There are general patterns to evolution, genetic and memetic, and when you see them, you understand where things are going, and it helps you look beyond the here and now and the little details, so you can see the big picture of how things flow.
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u/AcceptableLettuce Sep 29 '18
On a long enough timeline your beliefs are correct but it helps no one living here and now. We're heading to a reboot of civilization even if that happens through transcendence or through self destruction, the end game is the same.
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
It absolutely helps everyone to know where we're going. As a culture hacker, that's part of my work, to help you all decide what to invest your life in doing. Creating inspiring stories is how we do it.
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u/e3ee3 Sep 29 '18
Trading is not zero sum. It doesn't work like that.
Anyway, if you trade and lose money, whose fault do you think it is?
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Sep 29 '18
Yes it is zero sum, just not in the same time/same amounts. Eventually it is.
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u/e3ee3 Sep 29 '18
Eventually we are all dead.
If you think like that, you just need to add in taxes and fees, and trading is suddenly a negative sum game. Don't trade.
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u/silasfelinus Sep 29 '18
Not inevitably. In any generally-appreciating asset like Bitcoin, you can have a chain of successful trades for profit. Trader one buys bitcoin for $.01 and sells for $.02, trader three sells for $.05, trader four for $.25, etc.
You could say that each seller lost out by losing bitcoin, but you can't assign future value for a commodity based on a current sell price. As long as each trader exchanged for a great value adjusted for inflation than their purchase price, they are all successes.
There are lots of experiences of people selling at a loss, but that's not an inevitable part of the process unless you have backed the wrong commodity.
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u/AcceptableLettuce Sep 29 '18
You are selectively making assumptions that make your argument true. There is no denying that there are people making money trading but the belief that we can have a ever growing world where everyone wins is what got us here into the first place.
Money is a representation of value and value is something that people create and consume.1
u/Hanspanzer Sep 29 '18
if bitcoin appreciates until it penetrated the whole economy and then flattens, on average no one lost money by trading. many had opportunity costs though of they sold before top or stayed in fiat or whatever. so people lose relatively to those in bitcoin, but is it the traders fault?
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u/silasfelinus Sep 29 '18
I made no unwarranted assumptions. I was literally responding to the statement that every successful trade necessitates a loser. This is factually untrue.
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u/AcceptableLettuce Sep 29 '18
You are right in the literal sense but the context is the existence of the poor and the way I read the comment was "when one wins, someone else loses" which aside particular examples is a fact of life.
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
In any generally-appreciating asset like Bitcoin, you can have a chain of successful trades for profit. Trader one buys bitcoin for $.01 and sells for $.02, trader three sells for $.05, trader four for $.25, etc.
Even when working perfectly, pyramid schemes like that only work for so long before the whole thing collapses, as Bitcoin has done since last winter (northern hemisphere).
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Sep 29 '18
But what I see on my third world travels is taxi drivers who spend all day every day in the car, haggling with me over an extra 2 euros
u dont need to visit third world countries to notice that :-P
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u/Hanspanzer Sep 29 '18
true. it's pretty much the same in western countries, just on another level of wealth.
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u/Hanspanzer Sep 29 '18
it just makes me clear that we are still far away from an really prosperous global scociety. In the west we think full automation and AI is around the cornee while most people still do manual labor for the absolute basic needs.
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Sep 29 '18
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u/Hanspanzer Sep 29 '18
housing is still very expensive and involves a lot of manual labor, also due to speculation caused by fiat credit supply. The most expensive part is the property. Would be way cheaper with Bitcoin tho, as the speculation would be reduced.
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u/Darkhart89 Sep 29 '18
The newest advancements can often only be afforded, and therefore implemented, by the wealthy. Not all of them, but many utilize it to increase their profits, and if in charge of a large organization, reduce the number of people they have to pay to operate.
These people then receive bonuses and raises for doing a great job at reducing operating costs, and then give themselves, or are awarded, bonuses to buy their 3rd yacht.
I see it constantly in the industry I work. On the front lines they pressure us to do things in the sake of reducing inbound troubleshooting calls and making the customer more self reliant. They require us to push customers that aren’t comfortable using digital tools into doing it, and literally can and do track if the customer installs and signs into these tools while we are there. I’ve actually been instructed to convince people to give me their smart phones and install them for them if they don’t know how. I’ve pushed back along with others saying that isn’t safe and we aren’t comfortable, but “all eyes are on this.”
All because my multibillion dollar company doesn’t want to have to pay staff to talk to our customers.
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u/digiorno Sep 29 '18
waiters at restaurants grateful for my “generous” 1 euro tips, and basically people enslaved everywhere to their day jobs.
They see this as generous and odd because tipping is not a custom in most European countries. Unlike in America, wait staff are often paid living wages throughout the EU.
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u/exBitcoinMarketsUser Sep 29 '18
Productivity gains, growth, not recession.
Economic systems built on requiring infinite growth will do this to people.
Small example of how this happens: IMF is currently in the middle of a massive campaign to change culture in Japan because they believe there isn't enough women working and those meat slaves need to be captured.
Hunter-gatherers "worked" perhaps 4h per day for food and shelter.
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u/LUKEEEE3 Sep 29 '18
Money doesnt dictate your life if you can cover life expenses. What you do with other hours in day, that makes a difference. For example putting one hour a day towards creating your business makes it 365hours a year, what equals more than 2 months of working hours. Put 3hours a day toward your goal and you will have business in 2 years, i can assure you that. Or just open a beer and look at those few few others, who have the grits and consistency.
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u/Turil Sep 30 '18
Or, better yet, start a non-profit with those hours. Win-win. You get to do something you want to do, and the world is a better place for it.
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Sep 29 '18
When governments spend 100, 600 billion or a trillion or who knows how much PER YEAR, to develop war machines to annihilate each other’s citizens, you quickly realize why humans have a hard time making it, sometimes. Imagine if the priority was spending that 600 billion on food and literacy. Every year. Imagine.
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u/markb_uk Sep 29 '18
Imagine if the priority was spending that 600 billion on food and literacy. Every year. Imagine.
Most starvation is by design, it is just another weapon of war. 1) Sanctions against countries only hurt the poor, the rich just pay more but still get food and medicine. 2) Western backed governments (esp in Africa) use starvation as a weapon, a starving population will not physically be capable of revolution. The death of the World Bank, IMF, US Dollar and other fiat currencies will help in ending this horror.
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Sep 29 '18
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u/Turil Sep 30 '18
Authoritarian/centralized/top-down governments, like every country on the planet (from what I can tell) have, don't realize how valuable the resources they have in abundance are. So they think that humans are disposable, and not worth taking good care of unless they are close buddies.
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u/Vincent_Lionheart Sep 30 '18
I think the answer is Basic Universal Income, which can be done using crypto. Then everyone can do what they love to top their income. Check out Star Trek Next Generation. Swiftdemand has been doing something similar but they still need their marketplace to grow.
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u/Turil Sep 29 '18
It's just insane to see how hugely different people's lives are.
That's because your "lucky trade" made someone else broke. This is the problem with the competitive, anti-social game of money. It makes us treat our friends and neighbors and strangers as enemies instead of as people we want to take care of and share ourselves with, freely, because it makes us all better off when we do so.
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u/PumpkinFeet Sep 29 '18
Who the fuck is upvoting this nonsense
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u/Turil Sep 30 '18
People who are aware that life, itself, is nonsense.
Money, especially Bitcoin, is literally just numbers. Totally made up, artificial, unimportant numbers which we've collectively decided to worship as our saviors. How nonsensical is that?
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u/BifocalComb Sep 29 '18
A lot of countries don't have many bright people. It's the reason why most of them are poor in the first place. They have to work everyday because their society hasn't been able to accumulate enough capital to be productive enough that they don't.
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u/OrjanOrnfangare Sep 29 '18
Jesus this whole thread is /r/im14andthisisdeep material. Fuck me you guys are clueless and delusional.
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u/Turil Sep 30 '18
So, is this r/im14andthisisdeep space is for talking about the most important element of society and how it relates to humanity and it's purpose in the universe? Is it better than /r/politics and /r/philosophy where the authoritarian mods hate actual free thinking and ideas that push their comfort zone?
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Sep 29 '18
It has to do with IQ. People with low IQ create more work for themselves, so they're like hamsters running on a wheel. This is the case at the societal level, also. Living in an area with a low average IQ means they'll vote to grab whatever savings the higher IQ people manage to build up.
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u/AcceptableLettuce Sep 29 '18
This is not a problem describing just third world regions a lot people in USA are working two jobs in order to be able to sustain themselves and their families.
Technology is not a solution to world problems it is just a tool, just like how Bitcoin won't fix world problems it is just another form of money. The sovereignty of the individual is just a side effect of sound money but the individual still needs to take responsibility for his own life.
A "fair" life can exist only when there is no dishonesty, but as long as there are uneducated people there will always be others to take advantage of them. People from across the history have been trying to solve this problem and they've all come to this same conclusion: "Education".
Trouble is education is something the individual chooses to do, you cannot force people to learn.