nafregnum
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Posts posted by nafregnum
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It seems both sides are running low on ammo...
https://www.economist.com/china/2023/03/02/chinese-arms-could-revive-russias-failing-war
"For decades Russia pumped arms to China. On average it sent $2bn-worth every year between 2001 and 2010, with a bonanza $7bn deal in 2015. Now the tables have turned. Russia has lost over 9,400 pieces of equipment, including more than 1,500 tanks, during its botched invasion of Ukraine. It is desperately short of ammunition. America says it has intelligence suggesting that China is considering whether to supply Russia with weapons. That could change the course of the war. It would also trigger a deeper crisis in China’s relationship with America and Europe."
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Forgive me please, reasonable people of all political leanings. My intent in mentioning SNAP had nothing to do with starting quarrels. Without wishing to offend any of you, I think the intelligent statement SD made is good enough that I'd be super grateful to shift the focus to questions related to investing:
Q1. Is the impact really 2.5 billion per month or was my napkin math wrong? I found this FRED graph that makes it look like SNAP during COVID was giving out a lot more. The 2019 number was $54.7B and the 2021 number was $150.4B. We probably won't see the 2022 number until October (implied from the Updated field on the graph)
If the SNAP number for 2023 drops down around $60B/year then that'd be a $90B drop from 2021 levels, meaning possibly as much as $7.5B/month, though that seems hard to believe for some reason.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TRP6001A027NBEA
Q2. Will the disappearance of $2-7B/month of grocery money have a real effect in the US economy?
Will its effect extend to other industries or will grocery stores be the main losers? Are restaurants going to take a gut punch as millions of people tighten their belts and eat only at home?
https://www.ibisworld.com/industry-statistics/market-size/supermarkets-grocery-stores-united-states/
It appears the grocery industry has around $800B in revenue per year. Losing $25B to $75B in the 10 remaining months of 2023 compared to 2022 is a loss of around 3 to 9% of revenue. Will that have an disinflationary influence on food prices? I'm inclined to think so.
But it'll hurt grocery store profits, right? I went to check the price of Kroger puts, just out of curiosity. So here's the July expiration puts, to satisfy anyone else's curiosity since I just looked it up. They report Q4 on March 6, and I am guessing they'll talk about the end of the COVID SNAP benefits as they forecast leaner times ahead.
This graph from the ibisworld.com link seems to think 2023 will see 0.9% growth in the size of the grocery industry as a whole, but that bump in 2020, 2021 and 2022 looks to me like that was probably the COVID emergency allotments, and perhaps 2023 will see real declines in grocery spending.
Q3. The biggest question for me as an investor is whether all this is priced in already. I never really look at grocery store stocks, and I don't know how quick the market is at pricing in this kind of thing. Kroger has a P/E of 13 and a dividend yield of 2.3% so it doesn't seem expensive. Maybe there are some overpriced "darlings" of the grocery industry I don't know about that have further to fall because of the upcoming reductions in grocery spending.
The Rube Goldberg machine of macro economics is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but it's still fun to make _some_ guesses.
Q4. What other interesting side effects do you foresee?
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It looks like starting in March, lower income US consumers will have around $2.5B less per month to spend:
12% of the US population depends on SNAP (food buying assistance for low income households), and as of beginning of March, the COVID emergency allotment payments will end for the 35 states which were still paying them. Losses will vary across households but an average 3 person household will see a $197 decrease in SNAP assistance. By my napkin math, the total impact size seems like around $2.5B per month. Not sure how that compares to the size of all the layoffs in big tech, but it feels like it must be quite a lot more than those? Is it big enough to be a disinflationary factor? I wish I knew. Is that big enough that we might be able to detect an increase in crime rates?
For avoidance of doubt about my intent: I wholeheartedly support the SNAP program. I grew up just a poor boy from a poor family, and food stamps made it possible to eat and survive on what little income my mom could make. My heart goes out to all these people who will surely be feeling much more financial pain than I would over the loss of $200/month.
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While I was trying to find a quote, I ran across some good comments from Allan Mecham -- he says he just has a basket of favorite companies which he thinks are run well, and he ends up just trading in and out of those because he already understands them from reading their reports and watching them for multiple years -- just sits still and waits for one of them to hit a speed bump one quarter and buys if the market overreacts and offers a good price.
https://acquirersmultiple.com/2017/01/allan-mecham-look-for-cockroachlike-businesses/
It seems similar to the idea you're working on, but it might give a person a little more conviction to hold through any temporary pain.
Buying at max pessimism is the goal, but so hard in practice, because by definition it's not "maximum" until even you are feeling pessimistic too.
I could feel the pessimism hitting Target in 2016 or '17 when Amazon bought Whole Foods and TGT got whacked just because everyone thought Amazon was gonna kill all retail. It was a good entry point for a long-term holding, but might not have been the "best" business I could've bought at the same time.
The CNN site has a "Greed and Fear" index meter. I wish I had the same meter for each individual stock. Anybody know of a site that does that?
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8 hours ago, Gamecock-YT said:
Australia is in a similar boat. 23% of households will be getting mortgage rates resetting by roughly a 2% increase in Q2 and Q3. They're already have one of the highest household debt in the world.
As opposed to "What's the Fed gonna do next?", I think this kind of "macro" has to be at least as actionable as weather reports following the path of a hurricane. Sure, a hurricane can change direction and make landfall somewhere else, but that doesn't mean weather reports are useless noise.
So, as mortgage rates in Australia and Canada begin to climb, what will happen?
- Mortgages become more expensive. Real estate prices see downward pressure. Some areas suffer more than others, depending on demand as people move to where they can afford to live.
- If rents go higher, do people move further from big cities out into the suburbs?
- In general, people have less money to spend?
- Maybe foreclosures go up?
In the aggregate, what behaviors change when people are feeling the pinch?
- Less eating out at restaurants?
- Cut back on travel plans?
- Start shopping at DollarTree and Walmart type stores?
- More people do their own car maintenance?
Some of you could add some good insights to add to these bullet points based on your wide reading and long experience. I remember reading that Allan Mecham (who used to run a fund called Arlington Value) wrote that AutoZone would benefit during downturns because as people have less money to spend, those who know how will start doing their own oil changes. I always thought that was an interesting detail to notice, and I often find myself trying to think of new insight like that.
If a mortgage debt hurricane is threatening Vancouver and Australia, how would you prepare for the financial storm?
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On 2/8/2023 at 7:30 AM, StevieV said:
I should clarify - I'm not asking for myself. I'm just curious if there are career paths people have taken that they'd recommend. The most common refrain from people seems to be: "don't become a ________". I'd love to hear opposite examples.
You might like this -- the "least regretted" chart from this post:
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I thought this was an interesting neutral opinion and commentary, similar to a lot of what's been said here as well:
https://adventuresincapitalism.com/2023/02/01/i-just-dont-know/
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A little book report, for anybody who likes to geek out about contributions of neuroscience to the development of AI.
Author is Jeff Hawkins, one of the founders of Palm Computing. In 1986 he was very interested in studying neuroscience and AI for speech recognition, but back then his ambitions were way too big for the PhD board in the neuroscience department of [Cornell or Berkeley, I don't remember which, maybe both]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Hawkins
He tells a story of how he gave a presentation to Intel leadership that predicted everyone will one day be using handheld computers and getting a skeptical reception.
After Palm Computing, he founded a neuroscience lab called Numenta. One day, holding a coffee cup, he asked himself a few thought experiment type questions about what his fingers would expect if he adjusted his grip on the cup and what would be going on in his brain as he did so. He had a eureka moment about how it all fits together, and called it the Thousand Brains theory of intelligence. It has to do with "cortical columns" which are like small 1mm x 1mm squares of lasagna layers spread out all over the neocortex. One cortical column will be tied to a little patch of nerves in a fingertip, another tied to a small patch of input from the eye, etc. In each cortical column, the top layer is made of neurons that receive the direct sensory inputs and they fire almost nonstop with the "blooming buzzing confusion" of constant inputs from the outside world. Traveling down the lasagna layers in each column, the neurons are firing less and less often because each layer is "refining" its prediction about what inputs will come next from above based on which "reference frame" the brain has chosen as the best prediction for what the current context looks like. To borrow a metaphor he doesn't cite in the book, think of that poem about the bunch of blind men who encountered an elephant, except imagine that they each share what they feel with each other and then vote on what it is that they're all encountering. A voting process among the deeper layers of the cortical columns help us determine where we are at the present moment and activate a reference frame kind of like a learned map of the territory.
He has a pretty decent chapter which patiently explains why "uploading your brain to a computer" is a fun sci-fi concept but is pretty much problematic even if it one day became possible to do atom-by-atom scanning of a person's brain. One example: You would have phantom limb syndrome for every part of your body all at once unless you virtualized the entirety of your nervous system.
He explains how all the current work in AI hasn't delivered any actual "intelligence" yet, just machine learning. He believes we need to be using everything we're learning about our neocortex brain structures to make better advances toward a real kind of intelligence, perhaps by aiming to produce a machine as smart as a kindergartner at first. He explains how we have an "old brain" from the 100 million+ years of evolution when the name of the game was just staying alive and reproducing, and that we do not need or want to reproduce the old brain in machine intelligence, so the future intelligent machines wouldn't develop fear of dying when being turned off. He believes we humans with our old brains are much more likely to cause our own extinction than to create a Terminator type future (overpopulation, nuclear annihilation, making earth uninhabitable among the threats). Intelligent machines would be more capable than humans at establishing a hypothetical 2nd home for humans on Mars because they could deal with the radiation and lack of atmosphere while they do their jobs to build things or dig tunnels or whatever the job requires.
The book steers into some fun sci-fi musings in the last 3rd. One chapter near the end is titled "Estate Planning for Humanity" ... he suggests that in the billions of years of time in our universe, intelligence like ours may spring up from time to time and only last a brief moment before the candle flame goes out again. So as we look for signs of life out there, the odds may be against us that a similar kind of intelligent life would be "awake" at the same time as us, so he suggests we should develop some kind of long lasting beacon in our solar system which would be capable of signaling to distant observers that intelligent life was once here. Think: some kind of window blinds orbiting the sun which block/diminish its light in a regular intelligence-signal pattern -- something which could function for millions of years without maintenance. Fun sci-fi thoughts if nothing else.
If you've read it before, or do so in the future, I'd love to know what you found interesting!
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Thanks @LC, I ended up selling 9 of the 10, so I can still watch the one just for the fun of seeing what happens.
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Three months ago, I bought a few META calls ($200 strike June 2024 expiration) for around $6/share and they're quoted at $38/share today (up 120% just today)
I'm pretty inexperienced in how options behave, but from less fortunate experience I think I've learned that they swing big on surprises and then when the volatility calms down their value drops a LOT.
Here's how I think it works, is this more or less right?
Decision 1: Sell today and take the 500% gain, because the value of these options is bound to drop a lot in the coming weeks.
Decision 2: Hold on longer, hoping that the price goes above at least $238 before June 2024 in order to beat the current gain.
For some of you more experienced with options, is this a complete no-brainer?
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Hmm... Is there a chance that a lot of the tech whiz kids of today will contribute meaningfully to real value creation if there's a meaningful exodus from Cloud Fart Coin Land?
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@changegonnacome you absolutely slayed me with the reference to Fart Coins, thanks for a good laugh. I had to google to see if it was real, and started laughing even harder. Couldn't help but share it
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2 hours ago, CorpRaider said:
"Well, I guess I might as well buy some $DIS." - Eeyore
That's what I was pondering. I'm curious what the big disappointment was, but the last time I bought was at $93 and I don't mind adding under that level.
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10 minutes ago, rkbabang said:
Well said. People can be incredibly stupid on certain subjects and political and/or religious beliefs tend to amplify the stupidity to enormous levels.
+1 to these thoughts. I'm finishing a book called "The Delusions of Crowds", full of examples of financial and religious manias.
One of the superpowers of homo sapiens is our capacity to imitate. Some ancient hunter figures out how to make a better kayak or spear and the idea spreads through imitation. Narratives and beliefs spread in similar ways -- if your friend "knows" something and tells you about it, then you might now "know" it too. The Economist recently had an article about how a bunch of people have gullibly accepted the rumor that some public schools are now putting cardboard litter boxes into the bathrooms for the children who believe they are cats and dogs. It's like how parents began to believe that halloween candy needed to be X-rayed first to make sure no razor blades were hidden in the snickers bars. Fake news travels 7x faster across social media. Surprising and dramatic stories run on their own legs.
On a daily basis we are told that the planet is heating up and dying. That's a dramatic narrative if there ever was one, and tweaking and repeating this tale is a boon to news media which now has a perennial scare tale to tell, with the added benefit that they get to feel righteous for telling it and thus doing "their part" to fix the problem. Really they're just scaring masses of people into feeling horrible about that extra minute of hot shower or leaving the lights on or using straws. Religious narratives used to help humans to deal with the existential dread of looking forward and seeing the certainty of one's own death. Religious belief is waning across much of the world, leaving many people exposed to the terror of death, but now it's even worse than in centuries past because we are also invited to consider such thoughts as (1) the death of all humans, (2) ecological collapse, (3) the eventual death of the sun, (4) the heat death of the universe.
So... the world is ending on one hand, and I'm to blame because I take hot showers and have air conditioning and do 1,000 other earth destroying things each day. That's a stressful psychological state to maintain. Hating on fossil fuels provides a release valve for some of the psychological pressures, regardless of the obvious hypocrisy. In a lot of ways, fossil fuel companies are the scapegoat -- people are transferring their own "sins" onto the head of the scapegoat to ease their feelings of guilt. It's like they are the new tobacco companies.
The recent Rolling Stone article was a transparent example. Externalizing blame. Virtue signaling. Denial. No invitations to self examination, no calls for reducing consumption here in North America. No concept of the second level effects that would result from "punishing" big oil. Very little understanding or respect for economic principles or history. But it sure feels nice to be righteous and to know who is to blame! Burn the witch!
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One more, both of these videos were over on dataroma.com commentaries tab at this link ... https://www.dataroma.com/m/comm.php
So, housing is 40% of core inflation. There's a backward looking measurement of housing costs, and there's a forward looking measurement. The forward looking indicators are down, but the Fed uses the backward looking indicators which are 'still' up... If the FFR is a forward looking policy tool, Jeremy Siegel here says they ought to be using the more forward looking measurements when deciding on what to do next.
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David Katz (I don't know a lot about him) definitely believes we're near the bottom.
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I've had this vague sense of worry for a few years, and Kuppy wrote it here a lot better than I could've done (see below). It seems like The Fed needs to talk a big game, because they know that there's no way they could actually allow ALL of the US national debt to roll over to a much higher interest rate. Think of the old advice to "Talk softly and carry a big stick." The fact that JP is talking loudly & tough may be hiding the reality that they don't have a big stick. I seriously wonder: What can they do if the tough talk doesn't scare away the inflation?
https://adventuresincapitalism.com/2022/10/09/the-fed-is-fuct-part-4/
QuoteThe Fed is trapped in a box of their own creation. As a result, they may want to talk tough, but their ability to maneuver is severely restricted. The Fed claims that they’re targeting a terminal rate of 4.6% for Fed Funds, but if they did that for any period of time, they’d only succeed in blowing up the Treasury.
Our government has run obscene deficits over the past two decades. This was only made possible by the Fed suppressing interest rates. Despite a succession of Treasury Secretaries, the US debt was never termed out. The majority of the debt is actually quite short term. During 2021, the Federal government paid $392 billion in interest on $21.7 trillion of average debt outstanding—or an average interest rate of 1.8%.
Now imagine if Fed Funds actually got to the terminal rate and stayed there for any period of time. What would paying an average rate of 4.6% on year-end 2021 debt do to the interest expense? Well, it rises by $636 billion to $1.028 trillion or the more than the cost of our entire military spending of $801 billion in 2021. Ignoring the budget pressure, the interest cost would then be 4.5% of total GDP, up from 1.7% in 2021. That’s like tying a lead weight around the neck of our economy.
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2 minutes ago, james22 said:
Thanks.
One wonders if the interpretation was deliberate...
Yeah, I'll have to watch out for Michael Schellenberger articles in future and put on my skeptic hat when I do. Bordoff definitely isn't calling for nationalization, a fact which Schellenberger could easily have verified if he cared to ask around. That's just the wild west we get from substack journalists I guess.
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Jason Bordoff turns out to be someone I have listened to a number of times on the Columbia Energy Exchange podcast, as he's one of the hosts. He's definitely not in the same category as the guy who called for nationalizing US oil back in July.
The zerohedge.com article seems to be scaremongering because the title is "Top Dems Urge Biden to Nationalize Oil & Gas Industry" but Tom Nelson was already someone who dropped out of his senate race in July, 3 days after posting his op-ed in captimes.com, a Madison Wisconsin local newspaper. Not sure that qualifies Tom Nelson as a "Top Dem" ... and Jason Bordoff's talking points were anything but calls for nationalization. Tyler Durden and Michael Schellenberger are the authors of the unfounded claims and ought to be ashamed of themselves for writing click bait like that ; )
(you have to put an email in to get a free-to-read link, a form of paywall I didn't mind as much as some of the others out there)
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/energy/2022-06-07/markets-new-energy-order
Including last couple paragraphs:
QuoteAlso risky are aggressive government efforts to achieve energy security by disconnecting from the global energy economy. Some members of the U.S. Congress, noting that the United States now exports more energy than it imports, advocate curbing U.S. exports of oil and gas in order to meet American energy needs first. Such actions would likely backfire, undermining energy security as well as free trade. Diversifying supply by stimulating domestic production of key commodities can bring benefits, but so too does integration into a well-supplied and flexible energy market. Energy self-sufficiency may seem like a route to security, but it would be highly inefficient and impose unnecessary costs. It would also leave the United States without the necessary global energy linkages to meet demand in the event of a future crisis or dip in U.S. shale production.
Finally, governments must avoid inflaming domestic partisan divisions, which in the United States are already deep with regard to the question of the role of government. In the years to come, a growing number of legislative proposals aimed at boosting energy security, smoothing the transition to net-zero emissions, and coping with climate change promise more political flash points and partisan wrangling. American leaders must therefore make a concerted effort to build a bipartisan and broad-based coalition in support of these measures, one that includes everyone from environmentalists to the oil and gas industry. Another coalition of strange bedfellows existed two decades ago, before the shale boom, when the United States imported huge quantities of oil from sometimes unstable regions that posed a national security threat. A broad spectrum of interests, each motivated by different arguments, pulled together then to push the United States to consume less oil. Today, a similar coalition could be built around the need for an integrated strategy that ensures both climate security and energy security.
Europe has called the Russian war in Ukraine its 9/11. The terrorist attacks of that day brought about a new security order that dominated the international landscape for 20 years and is still a dominant feature of world affairs. One legacy of the Ukraine war will be a new energy order, originating in Europe but radiating to the farthest reaches of the global economy. It will be defined by the dual imperatives of energy security and climate action. Pursuing them at the same time, without allowing one to compromise the other, will require harnessing the power of markets. But it will also require a much more expansive role for government to leverage, shape, and steer those markets, correcting the failures thrown into sharp relief by today’s crisis. Without government intervention, tailored and restrained but nonetheless increased, the world will suffer a breakdown in energy security or the worst effects of climate change—or both.
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Well, the other guy Tom Nelson, was running for senate in Wisconsin but already bowed out, just 3 days after the July 22 date on his newspaper opinion piece calling for nationalization. Perhaps it's an idea so distasteful that this had something to do with it. The Dems want candidates who can win, and candidates who call for nationalizing oil might be seen as way way too politically risky. As it stands, the Economist is saying they think the Republican, Ron Johnson, will win in that race.
https://www.economist.com/interactive/us-midterms-2022/forecast/senate/wisconsin
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Here are the last few paragraphs from the piece Bordoff co-authored for The Economist. It seems reasonable that they suggest low interest loans or some other mechanism for government to encourage the building of new fossil fuel energy assets which may not reach ROI before they're decommissioned (like refineries, terminals) ...
QuoteSecond, we need to invest in enough hydrocarbon infrastructure to meet today’s energy needs, while minimising the extent to which such investments hinder a transition over the longer term. In Europe, for example, that will require investing in terminals and storage for liquefied natural gas and pipelines to import more sources of natural gas, as Germany recently announced it would do after abandoning the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project to import more Russian gas. The European Commission will struggle to achieve its goal of getting off Russian fossil fuels entirely before 2030 if it relies solely on existing infrastructure.
The problem is that in the best-case scenario, these investments in oil and gas will become obsolete before many investors can see a reasonable return on their investment. Today’s energy crisis thus throws into sharp relief the need to reconsider governments’ role in energy infrastructure and whether to designate certain projects specifically as “transition assets”. For those, governments might lower the cost of capital and long-term risk in exchange for agreements to wind the assets down sooner than companies typically would. Or it may require that such assets be built, at additional cost, to be “transition friendly”, such as equipped to eliminate methane leaks, ready to be retrofitted for carbon-capture technology, or built to accommodate other low-carbon fuels like hydrogen.
Third, in the messy process of transition to clean energy, we need more, not fewer, tools to mitigate inevitable energy-market volatility. To smooth the jagged path to net-zero carbon emissions, America, the EU and their allies should increase strategic stockpiles; avoid prematurely retiring existing energy assets, such as nuclear power plants; expand programmes to curb consumer usage in periods of peak energy demand; and develop more mechanisms to insulate consumers from periodic extreme energy prices shocks (such as triggers for subsidies to low-income consumers).
As households struggle to pay their energy bills, and Europe attempts to ensure it can keep the heat and lights on next winter if Russian gas flows are slashed, today’s energy crisis should be a wake-up call. We need to ensure adequate supplies of energy, including fossil fuels, to meet today’s needs while dramatically accelerating a transition to clean energy and building new policy tools to facilitate investments that achieve both goals.
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54 minutes ago, james22 said:
Top Dems Urge Biden To Nationalize Oil & Gas Industry
At a Houston conference last week, Jason Bordoff, Dean of Columbia University’s Climate School, called for the “nationalization” of oil and gas companies. “Government must take an active role in owning assets that will become stranded,” he said, “and plan to strand those assets.” By “strand” Bordoff meant “make financially worthless.”
Bordoff made the point at least twice during the confrerence. Bordoff’s call shocked many in the audience. “Jason is smart, well-informed, and well-connected to the Biden Administration,” said someone who was at the conference, “so these comments are scary.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/top-dems-urge-biden-nationalize-oil-gas-industry
This scared the pants off me, so I went to twitter to see if anyone else said/heard this. Bordoff offers clarification here, saying he's never called for nationalization of the companies. I'm off to read the Economist article he refers to ...
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On 10/12/2022 at 11:13 AM, CorpRaider said:
Slightly below the bargains seen at the peak in 1929. They didn't even have magic internet money ponzis back then. Hooray!
(Fun fact I learned yesterday)
Greed springs eternal! There was no crypto back then, but they did have the original Charles Ponzi.
"Under the heading of his company, Securities Exchange Company, he promised returns of 50% in 45 days or 100% in 90 days."
(Learned it from a great book called "One Summer" about all the amazing things that happened in the summer of 1927. Ponzi was mentioned, even though his scheme happened in 1919 and 1920. Bill Bryson is a fantastic author, for anyone who hasn't heard of him.)
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Everything in this space is up 30%+ today on news of a Federal pardon of all simple possession convictions.
Moral philosophy transplanted from Disney thread
in General Discussion
Posted
@stahleyp was having fun over in the Disney thread, about whether you need to have a god in order to have a grounds for moral certainty between what is right and what is wrong. I was having fun reading the back and forth the last few days, and hope I don't spoil that party by trying to start a different thread.
I think human rights only exist to the extent that we believe they do, much like the gods in the Discworld novels. Kind of like money: it is only valuable if we all mostly agree that it has value. If nobody believed in human rights, would a god step in and enforce human rights?
I'm not trying to disrespect whichever god(s) forum members believe in -- philosophically I tend to agree with William James about both gods and human rights when he said:
"If there be any life that it is really better that we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if believed in would help us to lead that life, then it would be really better for us to believe in that idea, unless, indeed, belief in it incidentally clashed with other greater vital beliefs."
I think most people today would not say slavery is okay, whether they believe in gods or not. Speaking of god and slavery:
I was under the impression that in the past, when almost everyone believed in a god, the situation was worse. Each group tended to believed that god approved of their slave holding practices. Unfortunately, very few of the gods of the past ever came out against slavery. Greeks, Romans, Christians, Muslims, Mongols, Vikings, and quite a few more societies had gods who were either approving or silent about slavery.
Human rights exist as a thing because humans got together and decided to say so, not because they exist as a fact of nature. If a god unequivocally said so, I'd like to see the chapter and verse. I'm not aware of any universal declaration of human rights that came down from the gods, unless we are allowed to claim that anything we like was inspired by our god. I googled "history of human rights" and found these few paragraphs:
http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/edumat/hreduseries/hereandnow/Part-1/short-history.htm
To bring ChatGPT into it:
Me: Please summarize the development of the idea of human rights.
ChatGPT: The idea of human rights has developed over time through various cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions. Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy established the idea that all individuals possess inherent worth and dignity. In the Abrahamic religions, individuals are created in the image of God, and therefore have inherent value and rights.
The Enlightenment era emphasized the importance of individual freedom, and philosophers such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that individuals have natural rights that must be protected by the state. The American and French Revolutions further emphasized the importance of individual rights and freedoms.
In the 20th century, the concept of human rights was enshrined in international law with the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations in 1948. This declaration recognized that all human beings are entitled to certain rights and freedoms, regardless of their race, religion, or other characteristics.
Since then, human rights have continued to be developed and expanded upon through international treaties and conventions, and through the work of human rights advocates and organizations. Today, the concept of human rights is a fundamental part of the global discourse on justice and equality.
... and on Christianity and slavery ...
Me: Please summarize the contribution of Christian religious thought to the practice of chattel slavery in the new world from 1493 until 1865
ChatGPT:
Christian religious thought played a complex and contradictory role in the practice of chattel slavery in the New World from 1493 until 1865. On one hand, many Christians opposed slavery and worked to abolish it, citing the belief in the inherent dignity and worth of all human beings. On the other hand, Christian religious thought was used to justify and reinforce the institution of slavery in various ways.
In the early years of European colonization, many Christian leaders believed that slavery could be justified as a means of converting non-Christian people to Christianity. However, as the institution of slavery became more entrenched and profitable, Christian justifications for it became increasingly strained. Some Christian leaders continued to defend slavery on biblical grounds, citing passages that appeared to support it, while others opposed it on moral and ethical grounds.
Despite the mixed opinions among Christian leaders, slavery became deeply intertwined with Christian religious practice in the New World. Many slave owners used Christianity to justify their ownership of human beings, while slaves themselves often used Christian beliefs and practices to resist their enslavement and assert their humanity.
Overall, while some Christians opposed slavery and worked to abolish it, Christian religious thought was also used to justify and reinforce the institution of chattel slavery in the New World, with lasting impacts on both the religious and social landscape of the Americas.
... one more ...
Me: Are there any religions which were always opposed to slavery?
ChatGPT:
There are several religions that have historically been opposed to slavery. Here are a few examples:
Jainism: Jainism is an ancient Indian religion that emphasizes non-violence and respect for all forms of life. The religion has always been opposed to slavery and other forms of exploitation.
Buddhism: Buddhism also originated in India and has always emphasized the importance of treating all beings with kindness and compassion. The Buddha himself spoke out against the practice of slavery.
Quakers: The Society of Friends, also known as Quakers, emerged in England in the 17th century and were among the first religious groups to formally oppose slavery. Quakers played an important role in the abolitionist movement in the United States and other parts of the world.
Baha'i Faith: The Baha'i Faith is a relatively modern religion that emerged in Iran in the 19th century. The religion emphasizes the unity of all humanity and the importance of treating all people with dignity and respect. Baha'is have always been opposed to slavery and other forms of oppression.
It's important to note that while these religions have been opposed to slavery, their followers have not always lived up to these ideals. Slavery and other forms of exploitation have persisted in many societies, even those where religions that oppose these practices have been present.