Most people aren’t looking for the best way to get from A to B, or even from A to discovering what B might be for them. Most people are looking to be given queues on what other people will think is normal. Seeking normal is a mind killer
Tag: money
Jamie Dimon is Right to Fear Cryptocurrency
When JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a “fraud,” what ensued looked a lot like a “poop and scoop” con: The practice of driving down a thing’s price by saying bad things about it, then buying up a bunch of it before the price bounces back.
My Brief Guide to Getting Started with Bitcoin
I’ve gotten a fair number of questions from friends and strangers like you about how to explore, understand, and use bitcoin properly. Rather than send you the same email and retread old ground, I’ve decided to make my recommendations available publicly here. I hope this helps you in your search!
Stop Lying about Laws Applying
I engaged in an instructive Facebook conversation recently. I approached it Socratically at first, but ended it with some food for thought (pun intended). Here it is in full, edited for presentation. The topic is the applicability of government laws as it concerns the food vendor that was robbed by campus police recently.
Words Poorly Used #103 — Charity
It is frustrating trying to assist charities. Like all organizations, they have pockets of management dysfunction, pockets of people problems. This is also the reason why big government bureaucracies have so many fail points, many egregious fail points.
Incentives, not Motives or Training
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.
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.
When Does Tradition Become Tyranny?
Traditions emerge for a reason. Society is impossible without them. Traditions provide lenses, rules, norms, and expectations that help make sense of the world, harmonize competing aims and interests, provide stability, and enable long-term planning. But tradition can be tyrannical. Traditions can oppress, restrict, stagnate, and destroy individuals and society. So where’s the line? When does tradition become tyranny?
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.
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.