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Thursday, March 8, 2012
11:09PM
More questions, this time from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) dbsurfeit. If you want your own seven questions I am still gradually handing them out when inspiration strikes...
( Read more... )
So, for those playing along at home - what do you think I'm most picky about?
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Actually got to church this morning for once, to discover that they're running a new-years 'basics' series, which started with one of those 'historical proof that Jesus rose from the dead' sermons. If you haven't heard one, the first page of Google results for 'historical resurrection' provides plenty; I could go into it if anyone was interested, but I'm not a historian and I'm sure other people have put it a lot better than me.
I was thinking, on the way home, of reasons why people hear what seems superficially like very compelling historical evidence (on the level with or better than most historical 'facts' they would cheerfully accept) but quite reasonably go away not believing a word of it - mostly as an exercise in 'how can these kind of sermons be improved', but also as an interesting question of what actually motivates human beings and makes them believe one thing or another.
So, in no particular order, some reasons I came up with - and if you have any further information or are generally thinking 'but that's not why _I_ don't believe it', please comment and tell me where I am full of shit :).
Note that I don't believe most of these statements; I do believe in the physical Resurrection, but not really because of the 'historical evidence'. This is what I think other people are thinking - if I'm wrong, which I quite likely am, please tell me!
( 1) The supposedly compelling historical evidence isn't actually very compelling if you look at it closely. )( 2) I don't accept the 'historical' standard of evidence for things that I might actually have to care about if they were true. )( 3) I don't actually care whether Jesus was resurrected historically or not. Unexplained stuff happens all the time. It doesn't affect my life or mean the rest of Christianity is true. )( 4) I don't actually care if it is true - I live in my own truth / I would have to change too much / it's just not relevant to me. )( Conclusion / Coda: Why _do_ people believe what they believe, then? )
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Inspired by the latest #obscenitytrial craziness, here are some under-informed thoughts on the different trade-off positions you can consistantly take on personal liberty. I notice that they line up quite well with the major UK political parties (at least in principle; the practice is much murkier, of cousre), so it's possible my views have been shaped by the political landscape in which I find myself.
There's the 'state-socialist' approach, typified by Labour. The state promises to keep you safe and healthy, but dictates how you should live your life, for your own good. This keeps down the amount the state has to spend on keeping you safe and healthy, because you are mandated to undertake preventative measures and avoid risks. At its extreme, this approach involves state-mandated exercise routines and a complete ban on any sex without condoms outside a carefully monitored breeding program.
There's the 'libertarian' approach, typified by the Conservatives (economically, anyway - social conservatism holds them back in this regard) and the Liberal wing of the Liberal Democrats. The state doesn't necessarily promise to keep you safe and healthy, but in return it doesn't place any restrictions on your behaviour; you can have as much risky sex or extreme sports or couch potato behaviour as you like, but you are also at liberty to die of starvation or preventable diseases if you can't pay for the consequences.
Then there's the 'universal welfare' approach, typified by the Social wing of the Liberal Democrats and the Green party. The state promises to keep you safe and healthy, and keeps out of dictating the terms of your life as far as it possibly can. However, it does require that you hand over a large percentage of your productivity to pay for the continued safety and health of all those people undertaking risky behaviours, even if you are personally very responsible in your life choices. Obviously you can see how this can be very unfair in practice!
Personally I support the 'universal welfare' approach, but I can see why it would require extremely careful management and education to avoid it completely wiping out productivity (why should I work at anything when all my money / reward for the work is just going to go to people who didn't bother?).
Sunday, January 1, 2012
This is the bit where I shamelessly self-promote the fic I wrote for Yuletide this year, or something.
If you like The Culture (as in, the Iain M Banks novels) you might want to check out my actual assignment, Faster, which caused one commenter to accuse me of being Banks trolling Yuletide by writing a story for it!
The other two stories I wrote are:
Snow White and Red Riding Hood, attempting to win the Most Unoriginal Title Award with an urban retelling of Red Riding Hood mashed together with Snow White and Rose Red (a completely different tale to the standard Snow White!). It additionally showcases my completely ignorance of inner-city areas and may also contain henious failure at portraying a non-white character...
Dance Until Sunset is practically original fiction, as its 'fandom' is the song Suzanne by Leonard Cohen. Particularly observant types might noticed that I totally ripped off elements of a holiday I had in Paris once and grafted them onto the side of that interview with Suzanne that's floating around the interwebs.
I actually think all three are quite good, but I suspect if you read my writing you'll have gone to read them anyway and if you don't then I'm not going to convince you with decent advertising blurb ;).
but mostly it's two in the first morning of 2012, and everything has been moving too fast for me to catch my breath for the last three months, and I don't really know what to say
my life is pretty much perfect, on paper, and I quite liked the future, too
but there's still part of me that is convinced we'll all be living in mud huts by the end of the year, and if I am still alive it will only be on the sufferance of people who ought to know better...
I feel like I should be doing more, but I'm so tired of being the voice in the desert and I am acutely aware that I'm not particularly qualified for this shit and I'm not always right.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Here are some more underinformed thoughts :) Please tell me where I'm being wrong/stupid, previous corrections have been very useful to me in thinking about this stuff!
The purpose of an economy, as far as I can see, is to produce things that people want, without producing too many things people don't want.
There is also a second-order effect here - economies should also produce 'the ability to produce more things people want in the future' and avoid producing 'a reduction in the ability to produce more things people want in the future'.
(I am using a very wide definition of 'things people want' here. People want iphones, food, world peace, novelty, countryside, etc etc. People don't want zunes (or insert your favourite failed gadget here), hunger, suffering, ugly architecture, hopelessness, etc etc.)
We haven't found a better way of measuring 'want' except in money (i.e. we model 'how much people want stuff' as 'how much money people are willing to pay for stuff'). I haven't been able to come up with a better measure either!
The present economy, up until the current blip at least, seems to be pretty good at producing things people want - at least for people in this country / 'the Western world'.
It seems to be pretty awful at not producing things people don't want ('minimising negative externalities', I believe, if we want to get techincal) and is starting to show signs of failing at 'ensuring people have the ability to produce more things people want in the future'.
So far, governments have been able to shore up the edges of this (regulation on pollution etc tamping down the negative externalities, public service education and healthcare and infrastructure keeping the productivity rising), but this is also breaking down - partially because the 'produce stuff people want - manufacturing the 'want' too if necessary' part of the system has gone into hyperdrive and become bigger than any governmental co-ordination acna handle.
Some key problems seem to be:
1) Money concentrates and gets inherited; there's not a complete relationship between 'what is good' and 'what people will spend money on'. So far, not enough people can agree on a better way to measure 'what is good'. There are ways to make money a 'better' model (for certain people's definition of 'better') like redistributive taxation and basic income guarantees, but they start to pretty obviously become awkward patches on the system only undertaken at the sufferance of those who could get ahead by breaking the system - and when the way to get ahead is to break the system rather than work within it, the system traditionally doesn't do well (see: various attempted implementations of communism).
2) There might not actually be enough stuff to go round, especially with the damage we've been doing to future productive capacity by ignoring that part of the equation. This makes people even more reluctant to try new models than the general human reluctance to change things - it might turn out that a model that maximises e.g. human happiness does it by markedly reducing the happiness of the people who are currently sitting on the levers of power, and also all of the people they are directly related to / care about personally...
3) We've even been messing 'make stuff people want' up lately.
I blame this partially on 'manufacture the 'want' if necessary' - there has been a lot of advancement in the ability of people to make people want stuff that isn't actually 'good' in any objective sense (if there is even an objective sense for it to be good in! this stuff is tricky) and that means there's a lot of wasted potential that doesn't necessarily immediatley look like waste.
And the other major part is lack of transparancy - especially lack of transparancy of negative externalities. When people buy things, they are pointed very firmly at the good ('this iphone makes my life better and makes me feel like I am living in the future') and away from the bad ('this iphone is manufactured in terrible conditions and uses a lot of irreplacable resources that we aren't doing enough to find alternatives for - it contains a lot of Suffering and Making My Future Suck').
The negative externalities build up and build up until they start making it harder to produce 'good' stuff - stuff people want - and that's why we're suddenly noticing them now...
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Friday, November 4, 2011
The gold standard keeps being advocated to me by all corners of the internet. I still think it is useless for a modern economy, and this is why:
Money Supply needs to be controlled to determine the level of risk that should be taken in investments - too much money in the system and bad investments are constantly made (leading to wasted actual resources, like abandoned factories); too little money in the system and good investments are not made (leading to unemployment).
In a gold standard or other commodity standard, money supply is entirely linked to how much of that commodity people are producing and how much gets lost/destroyed/decayed/used up.
The gold standard relies on constant supplies of gold being found and dug up out of the ground.
This works very well when there is a small constant supply of new gold strikes and mining productivity improvements such that more gold constantly enters the market - you get a small but positive inflation value, which encourages people to invest but not too much and makes them happy that their numbers are going up and 'progress' is being made.
(Even when it's working fairly well, you still get occasional abberations like a Gold Rush, where the money supply goes too high as a big supply is found, but not too many of them to cope with and they tend to be local.)
It does not work at all well when the supply of the commodity / gold begins to run out, and suddenly vastly un-environmental behaviour like tearing up rainforests to mine the gold under them is heavily incentivised to keep the good times rolling...
And eventually even that doesn't work, and you are left with a deflationary currency, as gold supplies go out of the system (through being milled into tiny pieces and lost, or hidden by savers who know it will just grow and grow in value).
A deflationary currency means that it's always worth keeping hold of the money you have - so nobody invests in anything, nobody buys anything, and the economy grinds to a halt.
Edit: I got the last paragraph entirely wrong, sorry! I have now fixed it so it says what I meant, which is the exact opposite of what I said before!
Thursday, November 3, 2011
As with all of these posts I may well be very wrong about most of this stuff ;).
These, as far as I can tell, are the issues the Occupy movement (and its precursor the 15M / Indignados) is attempting to address - which most of the movement has conflated into one mega-issue for which 'the bankers' are to blame:
1) Broken / nonexistant regulatory systems have led to a lack of transparancy in the financial sector resulting in the ongoing bank crisis seeded by the 2008 crash. This is very important to campaign on especially in the US as it appears that currently nobody is doing anything effective to fix it, and it is a clear and present danger.
2) Rising inequality, caused (at least in part) by taxation cuts (taxes are definitely down since e.g. the 1950s) reducing redistribution, and hence the measures the government is taking to reduce spending rather than increase taxes to pay down the deficit.
This is exacerbated by 1) because 1) has resulted in / further empowered a highly mobile financial elite who can go and sit in tax havens or a more welcoming country if unilateral taxation increases make one country more expensive for them to be based in, taking the extensive tax revenues they were already paying with them. Also it has been highlighted by the crash caused by 1) as governments are no longer able to borrow their way out of their spending/taxation gaps as easily as they have been doing.
This is again worse in the US because they don't seem to believe in giving people second chances or feeding, housing and clothing the people at the bottom of the pile even in the patchy and inadequate fashion our government do - which means rising inequality that includes people going down as well as up hits more people harder.
Also in this category is rising awareness of global inequality (and probably rising actual global inequality too, but that's harder to prove / could be said to be a good thing if you assume some people will always have nothing / next to nothing as it just means that the world as a whole is improving!), with some advocating much more widespread redistribution. Which I think is an excellent idea (...just as soon as we solve the problem of selfish human nature...), but would probably suffer greatly from if it happened because I have _way_ too many toys, globally speaking.
3) Environmental degradation and exponential growth patterns becoming unsustainable, causing the end of the assumption of continual economic growth in real terms
It's not clear we can or should do anything about this until we've got 1) and a bit of 2) under control, and it's even less of 'my field' than speculative economics, but due to exponential growth curves it's creeping up on us pretty fast so it's not surprising that people who are generically concerned about The World Being Broken and the onrushing New Dark Ages are also pretty concerned about this.
The Inflation / Money Sink Thing:
Crash Course (http://www.chrismartenson.com/crashcourse) is very interesting, but seems to have a massive anti-inflation, pro-savings, pro-commodity-backed-money standard thing. (I thought economists worth their salt were meant to be laughing at the gold standard, not idolising it?)
Then there's a rather old text on Stamp Scrip http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~roehrigw/fisher/ which neatly demonstrates that a money sink is good to kick-start an economy.
Edit: This theory is now a bit out of date since ilanin poked a big hole in the side of my uncritical 'buying stuff / investment is always good, right?' axiom. The people-backed money one below is still mostly current to my thinking, apart from 'how to control inflation here', though.
My thoughts are:
* Money is primarily a medium of exchange. If you want a commodity-backed store of value then buy some assets - that way your risks due to the commodity properties are more transparent and you have to take on the burden of storage etc etc.
* As a medium of exchange, money is no use in the bank. Savings encourage people to work less. People working less is bad :) that's what kills most socialist systems, after all.
* If you're going to destroy the desirability of long-term saving you also have to guarantee at least one of a minimum standard of living or a constant supply of money to each person. Fortunately there are many systems that can do this in various ways; see below for one...
* Pensions / retirement are an interesting special case - you do want people to be able to save money to have whatever advanced standard of living their productivity has sustained throughout retirement as well (and let people save in order to compete for scarce end-of-life medical interventions, quite possibly - it's a great motivator). But there are ways to deal with this too. You can exempt money that's being locked away in saving accounts that only let you take money out at 70 or so or for direct life-saving medical expenditure from your money sink, for instance.
You also need a wealth tax for this whole thing to work, because otherwise the rich mostly ignore your monetary system and trade in commodities, which they have the wherewithal to do - which does erode the 'save in commodities' thing a bit, but hopefully not too much.
To go with this, I am very interested in the idea of 'people-backed money'.
Instead of controlling the money supply by buying government bonds / interests in insurance and pension schemes / interests in businesses, you control the money supply by giving every individual a certain sum of money every (week/month/year) directly into their account. You can vary the sum of money to control inflation - but you also control inflation by some kind of stamp scrip like method, basically an explicit tax on holding money, so that people are motivated to spend their money instead.
You might say 'everyone would fly to foreign exchange, which they could hold onto' - but you can tax that too, or you can say 'well, yes, some economies are going to be forex-standard whatever you do, it's not a bad idea for a developing economy, but someone has to be the root economy and they need something like gold-backed or debt-backed or people-backed money.'
You don't get the weird thing of debt-backed money where you can massively benefit financial institutions and corps by printing money especially for them, because the money you're printing has to be distributed across the whole population. You don't get the constant-growth-requiring interest treadmill of debt-backed money, because the only 'paying it back' that happens is the anti-inflationary taxation, not an obligation to keep paying it back with interest.
You probably still do fractional reserve banking and end up in the situation where you have more debt than money, but because the liquidity of the system is so insanely high the government can easily fix a round of defaults on debt which threaten to fuck the system up by injecting money which spreads evenly across the economy and bolsters the reserves of all the banks directly (as it goes into the accounts of people some of whom won't withdraw it right away).
I know that this is undoubtedly a stupid idea for many reasons because I haven't seen anyone who isn't crazy advocating anything even similar - so can people enlighten me? :)
Monday, October 31, 2011
I realise that most of the following is pretty far up the idealism curve / probably not actually relevant because nobody who matters is going to ask my opinion on it, but these are the things churning around in my head that I'm trying to research / figure out at the moment.
These are mostly notes to myself, but I would appreciate input on any of them too (especially if it is in the form of 'you should read X' rather than 'that is completely stupid why are you even thinking about it?').
Most important as it's actually a clear and present demand of many people:
* 'Ban Lobbying' potentially impacts a lot of 'good' charities / think-tanks / individuals who are dedicated to a cause. How do we distinguish between 'constituent who has a legitimate interest in an issue', 'genuine advice from experts' and 'paid-for lobbying'?
Things I want to prove / disprove in general, and ideally write a clear and simple explanation of, because I keep getting into arguments over them and am ill-informed:
* Returning to a gold standard / gold or some other solid actually useful commodity as a store of value - what terrible things does that do to the world economy?
* Debt-backed money - is it actually untenable or can appropriate regulations to avoid obfuscation of debt values save it? (If so, what are these?)
* Alternative bases for money - what are the characteristics of the 'forex standard'? what about People-Backed Money (somewhat similar to the Equal Money guys' idea, but with actual exchange rather than a system where prices can't be market-set because you don't actually receive anything - so why ask for money at all when you could earn more social capital by gifting it?) what money-sink tricks can you use to get around the 'inflation is bad, it steals my savings' bleating while still maintaining an incentive to keep the economy running rather than letting money stagnate?
* Why social capital / 'whuffie' only schemes are a Bad Plan (or are they?)
* What are the downsides of 'socialise basic needs, capitalism for luxuries'? How does that work in practice? What are the awkward edge effects which need to be controlled for? How do you do it without authoritarian measures / what level of authoritarian measures are acceptable?
* Is it possible to have a government without going down the icky routes of 'monopoly on force' or 'serious brainwashing program'?
* 'banking', up to and including credit default swaps and CDOs, is an inevitable evolution of the desire to trade - discuss
* What kind of things constitute 'artificial scarcity', and how can we remove these barriers to progress in the easiest fashion - or are they in fact doing a good thing even though they have undesirable side effects? (Related: how do we manage the transition between 'full employment everyone needs to do as much work as they can to produce mostly physical stuff' and 'technological unemployment, most people are out-competed by machines and need to find something else to do', especially the tricky middle stages where we still need some compulsory work?)
* Is it possible to have a government without going down the icky routes of 'monopoly on force' or 'serious brainwashing program'?
* What are the alternative modern government forms to 'representative democracy', how would you implement them and what are their pros and cons?
Saturday, October 29, 2011
I like the Occupy movement, and the 15M movement across Europe which pre-dated it. If you don't know what I'm talking about you can find some more information at http://takethesquare.net and the website of the London occupation http://occupylsx.org, or the global map at http://occupytogether.org - or the article that 'started' the Occupy movement in particular and underlies many of its principles and methods at http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/91/capitalism-crisis.html - which also explains what that big Capitalism Is Crisis banner you might have seen on the news is about and why it isn't just an 'anti-capitalist' statement. I have been spending quite a bit of my energy attempting to support it, although mostly by the virtue of Arguing With People On The Internet which I'm not sure is the most useful thing ever.
If any of you have any questions about it, or politics and economics in general, or how to get involved, I have been doing a lot of talking and thinking about this stuff lately and am very happy to provide information about or enter into debate about it :-).
I am, however, worried it may have a bad case of the That Stuff Is Easy syndrome, though. The only thing that the current movement as it stands is truly good for is spreading the word - waking people up - explaining how the current system is corrupt, how certain financial institutions are cheating, as well as the general issues of global inequality (which less people are likely to get behind, as solving that will reduce living standards for those like us who are on the top of the pile globally!).
The movement thinks it can develop alternatives - it can come up with solutions - and maybe it can, by getting people talking, by getting them together. But the alternatives will take time. There are simpler stop-gap solutions that can be put in place - more restrictions on the use of money in political campaigning, maybe even debt forgiveness / jubilee or some similar 'reset switch' on the world economy - but the massive changes to the world that many people are advocating can't be done well in one step in a handful of weeks or months.
It's all very well, very inspiring and comforting, to share our grand visions of the future and utopian ideals, to dream of what might come - but there are serious individual problems with the current order that a much broader swathe of people can get behind solving, and I fear that they will get lost in the very attractive noise about more radical alternatives which haven't had enough time to be developed or trialled and are likely to come to nothing - or worse than nothing - if forced or rushed.
I love the idea of universal rights to basic sustenance without forced labour, direct democracy, a world where nobody starves or freezes on the streets again, and I can see why people want to seize the opportunity of change given by this current crisis, but the more of that kind of thing we attempt to embrace the further off necessary change gets and the more people we alienate and the more likely it is that instead we get one of the nightmare scenarios instead - collapse to the level of small communities due to violent revolution, or a society which is worn out too much to care about the plight of all the people discarded at the bottom...
Sunday, October 23, 2011
I would say I had the best day ever, but my life has had a lot of excellent days - this one is certainly in the competition, though.
Did lots of stuff. Mostly admin / getting people communicating / making stuff get done / spreading information. It appears I am good at that stuff. People thanked me profusely, anyway.
Am now more comprehensively knackered than I remember being at any previous time.
I also feel obliged to report that, in an obscure technical sense, it was a bad plan.[1]
[1] I lost my hat. In all other respects it was an _excellent_ plan.
Monday, October 10, 2011
8:03PM
I kind of feel that I ought to do some kind of write up of Level 5 (http://lvl5.org/), which I was at last weekend.
My usual approach is proving quite difficult here, though; the context and setup are important as well as the in-character elements, and I'm struggling to find the right song or prompt for telling the story of the event.
( Crazy Artlarp inside! )
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Having just snapped out of 'depression' into 'do-all-the-things-I-must-be-involved-in-everything', again, I kind of wonder whether it would be worth seeking some kind of actual psychological assessment. I quite like 'do-all-the-things-I-must-be-involved-in-everything' but it does have a tendency to make me into a ginormous flake when I suddenly swap back into 'depression' and drop everything on the floor. Also, the depression stage isn't so great.
Friday, August 19, 2011
Saturday, July 16, 2011
I have recently written some bad Harry Potter fanfiction, which you can find at http://archiveofourown.org/works/222036 if you are so inclined. (I'm Kastaka on AO3 and have a range of other fanfiction of varying quality on there as well, mostly written for Yuletide.) It was for the ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif?v=92.1) pod_together challenge, so it also features some poor girl doing an excellent job of reading my horrible prose for your enjoyment.
I now have this urge to write more bad Harry Potter fanfiction, or possibly some bad fanfiction of some other variety (Dragonriders of Pern is my other main bad-fanfiction fandom).
For this purpose I am defining 'bad fanfiction' as 'fanfiction it basically takes me no effort whatsoever to write'.
My current ideas are along the lines of either unearthing one of my ancient previous excursions into Harry Potter fanfiction or nicking someone else's ideas and extending them:
There's the gloriously predictable 'what do the books look like from someone in House Slytherin' at http://pinkstuff.publication.org.uk/~chess/Writings/Fanfic/Kestra/
Or the timeline that starts from the couple of chilling little stories at http://www.fictionalley.org/authors/kastaka/ and I already wrote quite a lot of once (it involved Hermione/Snape, don't look at me like that, not like that, standard issue having-a-crush-on-a-teacher only thank you very much) but then lost all of)
Or playing with the premise of the http://www.blotts.org/alternity/ journal-RPG - not the journals bit, but the 'Harry Potter raised as Voldemort's son' bit. Except in my version he would not basically turn out to be a decent sort of guy anyway...
But as I'm not likely to actually get much of it done as actually I need to use any moments when I possess a brain to write Maelstrom stuff.
Anyway, if you have any opinions or you happen to have a burning desire for some kind of fanfic related to Harry Potter or Dragonriders of Pern (or some other thing that I know, although things which aren't these two are much less likely to be written, and things which aren't books / written text that I have copies of are vanishingly unlikely for me to write Bad Fanfiction about), please comment :).
Friday, July 15, 2011
2:12PM
I think these Johari Window things that have popped back up all over the place would be much more interesting if they let you choose an arbitary number of words.
All they do in their current form is irritate me immensely as they all end up with this enormous list in 'Blind Spot' which isn't necessarily actually a blind spot, it might just be that someone else chooses one of the other words in the very close together families of words (like 'caring', 'loving' and 'giving').
(I may be slightly more easily irrationally irritated at the moment as I have been getting about five hours sleep a night this week...)
Monday, July 4, 2011
9:39PM
If you desire to have any hopes you might have for the far future, the triumph of progress or generally for the innate goodness that will surely win out in the independent future of humankind shattered, I can recommend Against A Dark Background by Ian M Banks.
I reckon if you take that and add forgetful reincarnation (to deal with the 'what happens when you die again' problem), you get a pretty good approximation of Hell.
Melodrama factor may be increased by the way I spent all day interacting with people cheerfully in a sunny field dressed as a cowgirl and now my legs won't stop hurting.
And I have some kind of Important Client Meeting on Wednesday which I have been implored by several different people to Dress Smartly for, none of which could give me a concise summary of how I could construct Smartly out of my current wardrobe without dying of heat exhaustion in London.
But at least I have nice red shoes.
I am not sure whether to go and attempt to be pious now or just to bury myself in LOTRO and pretend that the world does not exist or at least that I have no hand in the fate of it.
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