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In light of all this I'd like to remind all of you to donate money to the Democratic party so hopefully we can unseat this clown. I donated 225 dollars this week

I'm not entirely convinced the Democrats want to unseat him.

I'm just a thing that the universe is doing, and after "I" die, the universe will do something else, somewhere else, and whatever that is will feel like it, too, is "I".

I like that-- individuals are like a mask that "god" tries on for a little while


Alan Watts has a relevant section in The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are: http://www.michaelppowers.com/path/taboo.html

I credit Watts with two important things: describing things in a way that makes "materialism" seem way less sterile and dead, and having a pretty cool accent.

I'm just curious about what, if anything, you people think about life after death. Is it possible? Probable? What would the experience be like? I have some ideas, but they're vague and not very well thought out, maybe I'll try to organize them later.

I see three possibilities:

1.  You sort of just sit there watching but unable to do anything when people do awful or stupid shit.  I imagine Harry Truman's ghost, for example, is shitting on the oval office desk and trying to get Trump to notice.  That's like hell, only worse.

2.  You go to either heaven or hell, but in either case you are more or less fuel or spare parts for the endless tug of war between the two.  Your actions in life just determine which tractor you become fuel for.

3.  You wake up in your console and debate whether or not you have time for another round of Humans.

I like #3 except I'd hope there's something besides Humans in that arcade.

I don't believe in an afterlife


after you die, maybe something is left over -- but if so, is it you?

I think about how major life events change people. I know somebody that was in a train wreck and it gave her travel anxiety for years. I'm sure part of that stress never went away. If you were to experience something as traumatic as death, and something still existed afterwards, how different would it be from the self that's walking around today?

I think that after you die, people that had real contact with you can potentially carry on a piece of you inside themselves--and so parts of you can continue to act on the world after you've passed. Maybe you could call that a 'soul'; some lasting presence on the world.

But in the end, I'm pretty materialist about death.

I don't think anything of "me" is left over after death. There's no reason to think that happens except magical or wishful thinking. I'm more in line with traditional Buddhist ideas about reincarnation - that is, what I think of as "me" is just a collection of habits and memories and there's no continuity of that beyond the Big Dirt Nap. But what I really am isn't any of that anyway, I'm just a thing that the universe is doing, and after "I" die, the universe will do something else, somewhere else, and whatever that is will feel like it, too, is "I".

I'm just curious about what, if anything, you people think about life after death. Is it possible? Probable? What would the experience be like? I have some ideas, but they're vague and not very well thought out, maybe I'll try to organize them later.

That's the guy who played Moses, right?

Of course you know this means the acquittal is now a sure thing in fact, and not just in expectation. Romney wouldn't be casting this vote otherwise.

I think he might.  Just the things he has done has made him a mortal enemy of Donald Trump and his base.

Besides, we already knew the acquittal was a sure thing.  We always knew that.

In related news, Collins has returned to lap dog mode and will be voting to acquit, while Doug Jones of all people will be voting to convict.

Susan Collins is like a splinter that keeps getting wedged farther and farther underneath every one of my fingernails simultaneously.

Of course you know this means the acquittal is now a sure thing in fact, and not just in expectation. Romney wouldn't be casting this vote otherwise.

Dumb question, but what does money mean when it's not moving?  The point of money is to induce people to do things and/or give you some of their stuff.  If it's not being actively used, what effect does it have?  It doesn't seem the same as piling up food while the neighbors starve, since if money leaves circulation, the money that's left in the system just becomes worth more.

If you're just stockpiling it, isn't that morally neutral?  I mean, aside from the possible deflation caused by reducing the money supply.

(I expect my viewpoint is unrealistically simplistic, I'd just like to know why.)

I think of money as a sort of distilled potential. It represents everything it could be used to buy, so as long as it isn't actually used to buy anything, it can drive a lot of economic activity whose goal is to capture it in a transaction. Beyond that, having it concentrated in as few hands as possible allows for greater risks in that activity because you can put more time and effort into creating something I'll buy for $100 than you would into something else that 100 people will buy for $1.

Of course, that assumes that I do, eventually, spend that $100 on something. And that's a fine assumption as long as my money isn't tied up in some Rube Goldberg style contraption of speculation and financial instruments, which is just meta-betting on some eventual outcome that investment bankers confound and delay for as long as they can.

So it's the nature of currency to be a repository of economic possibility, but unless it's actually trans-substantiated into economic reality at some point, its only real purpose is counterbalancing risk. Apple can fuck up a whole new line of iThings if it wants to, because it has the cash to cover its bases. So the riskier (in terms of speculative demand or the time involved in bringing something to that market) your business model is, the more cash reserves you should have.

And that's all well and good. I mean, I don't have a moral objection to anything there. The problem is when cash just sits around doing nothing (except maybe growing through investment) just because some asshole wants to make sure he's the only one in his ZIP code with a private yacht and a personal helicopter. And that's what it comes down to - not just greed for an obscene standard of living, but malignant greed that wants to make sure nobody else has what you have. For that reason, I think it's immoral to hoard cash that could be doing a lot of good without jeopardizing your own lifestyle, just because you value the gap between you and everyone else.

The only thing I don't really understand is why those sumps are "immutable".

Because a corporation is a self-tuning instrument that by definition maximizes profits.  Any corporation with different operating parameters fails.

Sure. We can't change the nature of corporations. But why not change the nature of bank accounts from "a big hole where money goes to die" to "a pipeline from the top back down to where it's useful"?

Capitalism is only 150 years old.  There hasn't yet been time for the average Joe to see the built in failure mode, mostly because the people who doom the system (billionaires, by today's standards) have been remarkable effective in making sure the vast majority of people don't get it.

Liquidity sumps are an immutable part of capitalism.  As you say, money arrives at these sumps and stops moving (ie, Apple).

So Jeff Bezos wins, and all the wannabe tycoons lose, but still screech out their support for mathematically-guaranteed failure.

The only thing I don't really understand is why those sumps are "immutable". Mechanically, anyway, there should be no problem in just draining these currency caches and redistributing that money to consumers where it can be reused. Nothing about having billions of stagnant dollars in a bank account is necessary for Apple to keep doing its business, right?

Of course, if we did eliminate those sumps, we'd just run into the hard limits on resources and technology and the whole thing falls apart anyway, assuming there's no natural mechanism that prevents it.

I believe the system is collapsing because everyone has realized how preposterous it is to bother trying to govern at all. We are ready for utopia, as can be seen from the high level of every individual consciousness in the deep south.

The "Supply-side" of the economic equation isn't really the supplier of anything. They provide a service - namely, the magical transformation of consumers' economic potential (as expressed in currency) into tangible commodities (or services, or experiences, or whatever). It's like collapsing a wave function. A dollar might be anything at all, but nobody knows what exactly until they walk out of the store or click Submit Payment. Sellers are betting on the probability that dollars will transform into their products, and doing what they can to push that probability around.

But the "Demand-side" isn't limited to wanting things, either. They, too, provide the valuable service of exporting economic potential. That potential is what the supply side wants out of the transaction. So there's demand on both sides, and supply on both sides.

Most of the unsusatainability arises because sellers don't want to be buyers. When a company like Apple makes ten billion dollars from selling phones, that money is recycled as little as possible - especially when it comes to any sort of recycling that might move that economic potential back to buyers. That's because at some level, restoring the potential to buyers would seem to eliminate the necessity of the seller in the first place except as the service provider they are -- the buyers would end up with both the phones they wanted and the potential to do it again.

So rather than a cycle of collapsing economic wave functions (I'm calling dollars that from now on, you can't stop me) where the potential to buy things remains exactly where it must be for the system to continue -- with buyers -- we have an artificial restraint on that potential. Buyers end up with a poverty of riches (cell phones, cell phones everywhere, but not a drop to drink), and sellers end up with a bunch of buyers who can't buy anything because they've been sapped of all their potential.

I would posit that this kind of unsustainability will disrupt the system before hard limits on resources and the technology to process them will.

because i have nothing to lose, i clicked the thing.

it's harmless. seems to actually be some kind of puzzle. i'm not actually going to put any effort or time into figuring it out, because i'm lazy, but it isn't nefarious. it doesn't even use javascript. it's just presented in a way that looks tech-spooky, which happens to be an aesthetic i like.

I went into the wrong line of work, really.

The title of the Appendix is literally "the right to be wrong".