rkbabang

It can certainly be played that way, but not if you want to actually ever feel sustainably happy and satisfied and fulfilled, IMO. Wait, I don't get to kill random strangers on the street and jump on their corpses for fun? What kind of game this is? ::) ......... IMO the post makes some good points, but the metaphor used in it is crappy. Single player game does not mean "it's not competitive". Single player game does not mean that you are content. Lots of single player games are competitive and do not result in happy life. Also the image of "single-player game" conjures is that nothing matters but you. Maybe the author has not played many single player games, but yeah there's tons of "get millions in gold, get the castle, get the princess, get the superhuman abilities, get the McMansions" in single player games. Which is not what the author writes about in the article and definitely not what Liberty (and others) preach in terms of family, etc. Edit: Ah, DooDilligence just posted an exact link that "single player game" metaphor conjures in my mind: http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-mental-tricks-getting-over-yourself/ . Solipsism. That's what single player game is. And that's not what author wants to say. ::) Be happy. That is what a single player game can be, but not what it has to be. You are playing a single player game, but you choose how you play. Anything you do for others, in the end, you do because it makes you happy to do so (or at least happier than whatever the alternatives are). Your game starts when you are born and ends when you die, it is single player and takes place entirely inside your head. That doesn't mean you have to be a jerk. If being nice to others makes you happy then you can choose to build your character accordingly.

Happy Bitcoin Pizza Day. That is pretty depressing. I was following bitcoin since it was far less than $1. I remember the excitement on the discussion boards when it achieved "dollar parity". The only way to aquire it was either through mining (which I never looked very closely into) or MtGox which was difficult to setup an account, they only took wire transfers or something, so I too never bought any. I watched it soar to over $1K and then back down. I finally started acquiring some at around $200-$300 per bitcoin. I also choose not to participate in the ETH ICO and didn't start acquiring it until it was between $4-$8. Oh well, such is life. At least I didn't acquire 10K bitcoins (~$22M today) and trade them for a pizza.

BH and I was going to say Blackberry, but it appears to have just gone way up in the past few months.

"One button push will produce all of the current output of 150 million Americans". And an AI will make the decision to push the button and a robot will push it.

Crime just doesn't pay... enough. 8) Even if they somehow get ahold of their $50k they caused an enormous amount of damage for very little reward. It's like a mugger who kills someone for $5 in their wallet. Luckily a 22 year old who still lives with his parents accidentally stopped the attack. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-22-year-old-stopped-global-cyberattack-ransomware-registering-domain-2017-5

There are Bitcoin mixers which can anonymize your Bitcoin, but you could be correct. I am not concerned about the short term price though. If it falls by half or more it won't be the first time nor the last. I plan to hold for a decade or more.

I was just listening to the latest Thaddeus Russell "Unregistered" podcast episode 5 an interview with Daniele Bolelli and there was a good discussion that was relevant to this topic starting at time 59:00 until almost the end. http://www.thaddeusrussell.com/podcast/2017/5/9/episode-5-daniele-bolelli I highly recommend this podcast, some great interviews so far. Also, Thaddeus Russell's book "A Renegade History of The United States" is phenomenal. I can't recommend it enough. It is the history of the US from the point of view of black slaves, prostitutes, various waves of immigrants, drug dealers, gangsters, criminals, etc... Very different from the normal history books which focus on the history of the wealthy and political classes.

+1. I don't think it is necessarily politics per se that is the problem, it is when people get rude and mean. It should be possible to discuss any topic civilly. What distinguishes politics is that it tends to bring out emotional responses, but that doesn't mean that a bunch of intelligent adults can't keep their emotions in check to have a reasonable discussion. I don't blame Sanjeev for locking many of the topics he has locked. The board is working fairly well IMHO. Things can be discussed with minimal to no moderation, but Sanjeev steps in and locks topics only when people start getting out of hand. I'd vote for no changes, except maybe people could make a conscious effort to be more civil when they post. Re-read what you write before hitting post and make sure there are no ad hominem attacks and that you are focusing completely on ideas rather than attacking the other members personally.

I would drop: 1) MSFT 2) FB 3) GOOGL 4) AMZN 5) AAPL I pretty much already live without much MSFT, I have a rarely used windows machine in my office at work, but I use Linux most of the time. And I have a rarely used windows machine powered off in my basement at home, but I use my iMac most of the time. My son uses his Xbox, but I never do. I have no use for this company or its products. I go on FB daily, but I could give it up easier than the bottom 3. As for GOOGL I don't think it would negatively effect my life very much to start using Duck Duck Go for searching the internet. I could switch back from chrome to firefox. I already don't use Android. The only thing I'd miss is YouTube. I do a lot of shopping on AMZN and could you really live if you couldn't access any site hosted on AWS? I'd miss Netflix for sure. My iPhone and my iMac are my primary computing and communicating devices. I would not want to switch to using only windows/linux/android. Of these stocks the only ones I own are AAPL (since 2013) and AMZN (since late 2016). I'd like to own FB and GOOGL at the right price. I have no interest in MSFT.

+1 again SD. I think frontiers are an important part of what humanity requires for progress. Humans don't progress well in large settled groups. People get too comfortable and don't like change and worry too much about safety. Then a small subset of people take advantage of those wants/needs and seek power with promises of fulfilling them. That is when things get bogged down with rules/regulation/taxes/enforcement. Problems are created (real or imagined) solutions are proposed which create more rules and more problems and so on. This is why I am rooting for Musk's Mars plans as well as Patri Friedman's Seasteading ideas. The land mass of the planet is getting smaller (both figuratively and literally) and humanity desperately needs new frontiers.

The human condition. Almost all humans look at themselves in the mirror each morning and think "I look good" yet that's not what everyone else thinks.. this is culture agnostic I think that is more of a male condition than a human condition :) So when I look in the mirror and think I look like hell, I wonder what everyone else is thinking? :0

If you use Fidelity you can create email alerts for stocks you add to your watchlists. I was done with Yahoo when they removed their portfolio transactions feature. Stupid moves by a stupid company with stupid management.

Everyone would listen to me, because I'd put that I have earned 300% per year for 50 years! But seriously I think there would be a lot of performance inflation if this were required.

I'd agree it isn't a complete throw-away. It is a net negative, just not anywhere near -20%. Just like when the mafia keeps drugs and petty crime off the streets, that makes up for some portion of the wealth that business owners are extorted, but it is still a net negative to some extent.

Yes, it created wealth *at the top end* but it also meant a big chunk of the population were disincentivised and unproductive. If it was such a good system for creating wealth, there's a decent chance the south would have been wealthy enough to beat the north. In fact, the north's economy dramatically outperformed the south's and was a major factor in winning the war. Similarly if slavery was an effective economic system great wealth would have been created in feudal Europe; in fact, wealth creation exploded as we moved away from the feudal system. Slavery is a great system for moving wealth from the poor to the rich; it is not a great system for creating wealth, not compared to free trade. Ha! Fair. Although everything is relative: what I meant was that America didn't start with a feudal system and have to waste centuries persuading the lords to give up their serfs. The south had an aristocratic class who was land-rich, but it had little industrial capacity compared to the north. Had the civil war not happened and the south was allowed to leave, the mechanization of farming would have devastated the southern economy and done away with slavery anyway. The southern US is still poorer than the northeast and west coast to this day and the difference would have been even more pronounced had they stayed separate.

I don't know about "won" wars, but the US didn't have cities and infrastructure bombed to the ground in those wars as other countries did. The US came out with its industrial capacity largely unscathed. Most of the rest of the industrialized world had to rebuild, but the US didn't. That is quite a head start into the last half of the 20th century.

That would be my recommendation. I don't know why people feel compelled to discuss politics here - this is and investment board. Granted, politics and investment mix to some extend, but much less than generally presumed. Even Munger said, that politics don't matter much for BRK's business, I don't know why it should matter for us here. That is a little naive I think, I'm not feeling comfortable calling Munger naive, but I stand by that. He should be grateful that he lives and does business in a place where politics doesn't matter much, rather than some other parts of the world that could be mentioned. The problem is that even if you choose not to care about politics, politics can change things which can effect your business.

This is quite good, I think, rkbabang. It makes me wonder about how to achieve this efficiently in a world with Putin. Like, tiny groups can't efficiently do defence, or highway systems, or big buildings, or law systems, or healthcare. But is there some easy way to take a bunch of tiny groups and make agreements between them to deal with these bigger issues, and then agreements between these bigger groups to deal with even bigger issues etc.? I think defense can be done quite effectively without super centralization. Invert the question. How would one go about occupying a land mass the size of the US filled with hundreds of thousands of "states" no bigger than towns or cities and in many cases just voluntary contracts without states at all. All with no centralized authority to surrender to you. With no systems already in place to police or to collect taxes on a large scale. No weapons laws so you have no idea to what extent these people are armed. I suppose you could nuke a few cities and demand the rest of the continent surrender to you, but I think most of the world would have a problem with you if you did that. It's a logistical nightmare, its messy, and therefore safe.

I don't see it as individualism vs collectivism at all. I have no problem with either or a mix of the two. A family is usually a collective, and I don't think it would work well any other way. I also don't see why collectivism couldn't work well in larger groups as well. I see it as aggressive force vs volunterism. I have no problem with a commune type setup if everyone involved agrees to all of the terms and can opt out at any time. It is the "you were born here so you are a member of this group whether you like it or not, now hand over 28% of your income" that I disagree with. I never chose to join this group and have no easy way of opting out. I am a member of a homeowners association, but I choose to be a member and signed the contract, and it doesn't bind my kids to anything for life. I would have no right to bind my children to a contract for which they never, as adults, agreed to. If you want to setup a commune collectivist type society with a group of people, I'm all for that. People did just that in the 60s. I'm not against trying any type of rules as long as they are voluntarily agreed to by all consenting adults involved with the option for getting out without needing to leave the continent or travel to Mars.

I'm not sure if it is even comparable like this. If there is a huge advancement in social media, Facebook can simply change their core code to put that feature into it. Other smaller social networks did stuff like videos, live streaming, stories, etc first and Facebook adopted the ones that worked well. Facebook at launch was a wall that people can write on. Now it is very different. The crypto-currencies are very limited in their ability to change like that. What if someone figures out something better than Bitcoin's block chain? It's almost certain to happen over time. When someone invents a vastly superior crypto-currency, is everybody going to stick with the old one? Over time sure something better might be found. Thus far it took all of human civilization to come up with a solution for the Byzantine generals problems allowing for the trust-less transactions enabled in Bitcoin. Yes, but once a solution to a problem is found using new technology (remember in the grand scheme of things the internet and even computers themselves are new technologies) is the first solution likely to be the best solution? It took all of human civilization to get off the ground, but the Wright brothers original aircraft has been improved upon a bit over the years. But that is just playing devil's advocate a little, because we don't really know. To answer tng's question, cryptocurrencies can be changed in how they work. ETH has forked a number of times to change things and add features, there is a huge debate going on now in the Bitcoin community over forking the blockchain to change some things. It isn't easy to do. Building consensus is never easy to do, and it probably shouldn't be easy to do, but it can be done. If something was invented that didn't evolve a blockchain at all, could bitcoin and others evolve to support that? I don't know, probably not, but I don't think that is likely. I think blockchains in one form or another are going to be the fundamental building blocks for many useful technologies in the coming decades. Blockchain technology in 2017 is like the internet in 1985, most people have no idea it even exists, and even those who are excited about it have no idea what exactly it will look like in a few decades. And maybe the killer app (such as the WWW was for the internet) hasn't even been invented or thought of yet. I think it is possible that revolutionising money is just the beginning of what the blockchain will do. Back in 1985 the internet was supposed to revolutionise mail delivery and personal communication, I don't think many people thought it would change the entire global retail industry or the entire entertainment industry in their lifetimes.

I like that, the messier the safer and better. This is correct and why decentralized power structures are better than centralized ones. Ideally as much power and control should be pushed from nation states down to regions (states in the US) then down to cities then down to neighborhoods/large buildings and in a perfect world down to individuals/families. The reason I'd like as much power as possible to reside at the neighborhood/building level is that these power structures are usually voluntary and private (i.e. condo associations or homeowners associations) rather than compulsory and enforced violently. Also at each level you go down it increases competition as it is easier to move to new buildings or neighborhoods then it is to change cities and much easier to move to new cities than nation states. Variation and selection = evolution. The only way societies/cultures can evolve quickly (non-violently) is through decentralized power structures. The US has been heading in the mostly the wrong direction since June 21, 1788, but it started out so decentralized it had a long way to deteriorate before it turned into what it is now.

Also the argument: "Most people are not going to like it when you say x" says nothing about the validity of x. Is it possible for a small number of people to be correct and the vast majority to be wrong? I would say it is. I guess you could say that I don't think much of efficient market of ideas theory.

I think there is, but then again I've been accused of being an optimist so take this with that in mind. The path is through increased wealth. It is simply easier to help others when you are wealthy and have a lot of free time on your hands. People struggling 24/7 simply to survive and feed their families don't put a lot of effort into which charities they will support this year and where they will volunteer their time. The more people who are freed from subsistence level poverty the more people will help each other. And the more wealth which exists in the world in total the better off humanity will be on average. "Wealth inequality" doesn't concern me in the least as long as people are moving out of extreme poverty in large numbers. Thankfully the numbers of are all moving in the correct direction and have been since at least the beginning of the industrial revolution. It is tempting to force people to do what you think they should do, but I think that always comes with unintended consequences which makes the cure worse than the disease in the long run. Yes some people will hoard lots of wealth, never give anything to charity or help anyone, then pass 100% onto their children who will then squander it. But in the grand scheme of things taxes decreases total wealth in society, so fixing that problem with a few bad apples has a negative net effect on the world as a whole. Most people are good. Again the optimist in me coming out, but if that is true things will take care of themselves as we become more wealthy as a species. If most people aren't good, however, then we are doomed. And having powerful governments won't save us from that doom, rather they will be the cause of it (governments consisting of people as they do). IMHO. In a world of nukes and biological weapons and the coming AI revolution, the only ethical framework which will enable the survival of humanity is the non-aggression principle. You can't initiate force. <--- period. No exceptions. This needs to be applied both to individual people and groups of people (regardless of how large). Initiation of force simply can't be tolerated for any reason in a world where these things exist. Once you start drawing lines elsewhere (well this group of people can initiate that amount of force for these reasons. (i.e. The IRS can tax you because: democracy, or the US government can bomb whoever it likes because: its interests... And terrorism...And democracy.) those lines will be continually moved. If humanity does not adopt this code en masse then conflicts will continue to be started and escalated, over resources and such, and eventually someone will use those weapons.

To further diversify, Tezos looks interesting. I am thinking about participating in the ICO at the end of this month. If you participate in the first 2 days you get 6000 TEZ per Bitcoin which decreases down to 5000 TEZ/BTC over the 10 day offering. It is an open-ended ICO, so the resultant market cap will depend on how many participate, they are hoping to raise $20M. I would be using my current bitcoin holdings to further diversify my cryptocurrency basket, not new money. Some info: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/tezos-receives-investment-smart-contact-system-polychain-capitals-digital-currency-fund/ Tezos, the generic self amending crypto-ledger Tezos.com

Because to a non-libertarian, anything they consider good is a right and must be mandated by force if necessary and anything they consider bad is pure evil and must be outlawed by force if necessary. There is no grey area between must-do and must-not-do. "I'd likely do it, but I wouldn't force someone else to." is an incomprehensible position.