I saw an infuriating video of police arresting a nurse who refused to draw a patients blood at their request. Comments on Twitter included a lot of, “Why are police so nasty and brutish?”, and most responses were, “They need better training and to be nicer.” Nope.
Tag: change
Welfare States Encourage Bad Economic Thinking
In the absence of sound economic thinking, which explains why particular resources end up in the hands of particular members of extended social order, there appears a tendency to invent arbitrary pseudo-reasons as to why one’s position in this order is not as satisfactory as one would like it to be.
Why We Need Markets for Justice
Richard Ebeling once told me, “Government makes criminals of us all.” Government sets up society so that no person can live a life without using some sort of government service, paid for through coerced taxes. I later came to realize that government needs to make moral cowards of us all, in order to keep us dependent on it for the dispensation of justice.
The -Ism No One is Talking About.
Children are wild and free. This alone can be very triggering to some people, but they are and that is the truth of their biology. They are meant to move, explore, be rowdy, run around, test things, play, and be in connection with other people. And not just for a couple of hours blocked off every day, but all the time. They are meant to live it. The problem is not children, the problem is a society that makes no room for them to be who they are.
Paradigm Shift II
Can we bootstrap ourselves into another paradigm? It says here I don’t think so. With Rome, it took the Visigoths. With the British Empire, it took Mahatma Gandhi. With IBM, it took Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. With FDR, it took the grim reaper. With the camel’s back, it took a last straw.
“But There Are Limits!”
If you advocate free speech, free movement, freedom in exchange, and freedom to engage in any peaceful activity an individual desires, you will hear this objection.
Paradigm Shift
Tha USA has been in a paradigm since the Civil War, that of the military industrial complex. I don’t see how we make a paradigm shift away from that. We are too fat and happy with our comic book heroes, drugs legal and illegal, video games, reality television, cable news, and professional sports spectacles. What could make us change?
Words Poorly Used #102 — AI
Putin and Musk are holding forth on the future of AI. They, and most the rest of us, act like AI is a stage play that is evolving toward a tightly plotted ending. Observations: AI is in the Stone Age. We’ve been wrestling with the mouse for over 3 decades. That is glacial change.
Intrinsic Motivation vs. Extrinsic Motivation
Maybe this isn’t a problem for you. Maybe you are perfectly willing to reward your child for good behavior until they move out, but for the rest of us, we want our children to want to be kind, to want to share, to want to help out around the house, to want to learn.
Legislation Can’t Fix Imperfect Information
Perhaps someone discovers that she’s paid less for approximately the same job that another performs elsewhere, though both may have approximately the same skills, experience, and ambition. This doesn’t mean the employer had any malicious intent, rather that the employer and employee made a voluntary agreement based on their information and what the company could offer.