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• Commented on The cult of justice
  Are you using justice in the sense of "the legal system" (as in "the legal system is a religious cult" would be equivalent to your phrasing of 1.)? Or in some other sense? If yes, wouldn't the legal system being...
• Commented on Context is everything
  There'd be a tendency to turn the mythology of the past golden age when men could fly and every baby born survived to adulthood and there were no lords into a lapsarian account of history -- or even religion. It...
• Commented on Context is everything
  A couple of thoughts on the Olduvai future. Progress is not doing more with more, it is doing more with the same (or the same with less). Working harder to achieve more makes sense when one is cold, hungry, in...
• Commented on Context is everything
  Excellent post, though I think the conclusion is better framed as it all being about us, rather than none of it being about us. From any kind of global perspective, you would be right – on the cosmic scale we...
• Commented on I had a blog entry for you, but it eated me
  Money: an accounting unit indicating the amount of inputs (effort, resources, tools, reputation, etc.) you have expended for the benefit of someone else with the expectation that a similar amount of inputs will at one point be expended by someone...
• Commented on How Do We Get There?
  We are not equal in character, intelligence, ambition, self-discipline, imagination and so on. From what I have seen, outside of the very edge cases, differences in human capabilities are fractional – one can be 10% smarter or more imaginative, but...
• Commented on How Do We Get There?
  A quick thought on "unlimited wants" and the way they relate to "post-scarcity". The way I see it, only those things are scarce that we are actually able to have. For instance, there is not much scarcity of flying cars...
• Commented on How Do We Get There?
  The key word was "can" instead of "has to". The best cooperation is one that is wanted by the cooperating parties, instead of having them be forced together. Indeed, in such 'forced' cooperations some of the parties tend to be...
• Commented on How Do We Get There?
  I really think the better lens of looking at post-scarcity is not one of consumption, but one of production. The evidence for any life is in the way it has altered the world through its duration – we are limited...
• Commented on World building 302: Psychology, beliefs, and other times
  When it comes to work, I very much agree with #29. Underemployment is only possible when the economy is structured in such a way that most people must work to meet the needs and interests of others, as opposed to...
• Commented on High Street Blues
  Everything will go to the Internet and self-service 'advanced' vending machines apart from the things that cannot – namely stores in which you do not 100% know what you want, and the very act of shopping is an experience....
• Commented on The coming retail apocalypse: some axioms
  Complexity discourages purchases, and greatly discourages purchases if a much simpler alternative is around. This is at the heart of Apple's retail and iTunes strategy for instance (though they are somewhat drifting away from it in iTunes now). It's at...
• Commented on Rudy #2. The Nu Yu Lifebox.
  Perhaps we can frame it this way. Intelligence = knowledge + personality, with personality being the (gradually evolving) patterns of preferences that determine, given our current state of mind and set of immediately external stimuli, the next 'step' in the...
• Commented on Why I don't use the iPad for serious writing
  "The iPad is primarily targeted as a media consumption device. ... But if iOS is going to reach its true potential as the next generation of general computing" I would not apply either categorisation to the iPad's primary purpose. Media...
• Commented on Mercury, Retrograde
  I don't think it's about monopoly. Most customer service experiences fall somewhere between frustrating and atrocious. The standout here is not Virgin but Apple, and in Apple's case I think it goes to something quite fundamental. In my opinion, pretty...
• Commented on Cynicism
  Surely theft is forcibly depriving someone of something they have worked for. For what I propose to qualify as theft, the children of the wealthy would have to have worked for their inheritance significantly more than the children of the...
• Commented on Cynicism
  The existing businesses and farms would not be destroyed, they would just be bought into by a new generation of people not necessarily related by blood. Whoever wants to keep it within the family can themselves buy the property using...
• Commented on Cynicism
  I am by no means advocating that everyone should immediately become an entrepreneur upon receipt of their asset grant – I was just trying to argue that a more decentralised wealth structure would promote small business rather than hindering it....
• Commented on Cynicism
  It is not arbitrary in the least – in fact quite the opposite. The bedrock of civilisational progress is leaving the world a little bit better than you found it (at least locally. If everyone, over the course of their...
• Commented on Cynicism
  Absolutely agree with you on the charity part. I would thus also argue that any socioeconomic structure in which arbitrary charity plays one of the most significant (by volume) and critical (by importance) functions of capital allocation is unethical and...
• Commented on Cynicism
  On the contrary, if it is a significant inheritance tax coupled with a significant asset grant (i.e. instead of a few people inheriting massively and most people inheriting little, we have everyone being granted, at age of majority, the same...
• Commented on Cynicism
  Why? Inheritance conflicts with both the economic principle that the most efficient way for an individual to acquire capital is through free-market based allocation, and with the ethical principle that we are all born equal and with equal opportunities....
• Commented on Cynicism
  Get rid of the transference of advantages via inheritance and start every single person out with the same, non-trivial amount of capital and (a) and (b) would generally be reinforcing one another, not conflicting....
• Commented on Evil social networks
  Free social networks are going to be this generation's QVC. We need an HBO instead!...
• Commented on Three wishes
  End to ageing (past maturity) and disease (or is this two wishes? – then forget the disease part). A good, powerful clean energy source. Technology to cross large distances quickly (think wormholes)....
• Commented on A cultural thought experiment
  This is why I mentioned the biggest problem is being squeezed from two ends. If something is pretty pointless but trivial to do, chances are it will be done. If something is difficult to do but is incredibly rewarding, it...
• Commented on A cultural thought experiment
  Space colonisation strikes me as being squeezed from two ends. From one side, it is very technologically difficult, biologically uncomfortable, and expensive to do. From the other side, it offers few tangible benefits aside from knowing that you've done (and...
• Commented on Gadget patrol: Bigger is better?
  To me, my iPhone is less a communication device (and even less a phone) and more a way of interacting with the informational 'layer' of the world around me. For this, one-handed operation and absolute pocketability (I always want to...