Transactions on dark pools still settle — if you buy on a dark pool you still get the stock, if you sell you still give it up. The hallmark of a bucket shop is that your “position” is just a zero sum bet with the broker.
It's only an illegal bucket shop if you are betting against the house. Completely synthetic trading can (with a big asterisk, there are a lot of laws and regs here) be legal so long as the house is a neutral market maker where market participants bet against each other.
Isn't that like saying that all goods are overpriced? The argument posits a "true value" the stock "should" have, which is lower than its market value. Rather like medieval peasants arguing over the true price of bread.
"X is overpriced" means "the price at which I am indifferent between buying and selling X is lower than the current market price".
BTW all values are relative, so if something is overpriced than something else must be underpriced. Sometimes it's the currency that the prices are quoted in.
Your definition says X is overpriced /for me/. That's not what the linked argument claims--it says all stocks are always overpriced. The market price is the price at which the average? median? potential buyer is indifferent, so by your definition, it can't be the case that ANY stock is overpriced. The "proper" price is /defined as/ the market price. Which was my point as well.
The linked article is wrong. 99% of stocks, 99% of the time, are extremely cheap and easy to short for long periods of time. Meme stocks at the top of their run are impossible to short because you can't locate shares to borrow. So they have it exactly backwards when they say "shortselling is a very short-term fix that only takes care of the very worst and very obvious cases of over-pricing"
In general, "X has a lower intrinsic value than the market price" means "I have a valid argument for why my indifference price is lower than the market price, and not enough other people have updated on this yet"
I put this argument to Phil Getz above, and is relevant here.
Suppose I have a prediction market where I can only trade the Yes contract (there is no No contract enabled). Would you trust the probabilities of that market? That's how we trade shares.
Well this is only true if the only purpose of stock is to resell it at a higher value, which is the entire problem with the market.
Stock X is overpriced SHOULD mean, the nominal value of this stock is such that taxes and fees are greater than expected dividends + the value of input into the company that ownership gives me. Gotta move away from this stock as speculation paradigm and towards investing in a company, higher price for more productive, innovative companies. Hyperfinancialization is not your friend.
This seems to me to be the same argument medievals, Marxists, and their fellow-travellers make against markets: that the price of bread SHOULD be its use-value, and we gotta move away from this shifting-and-unreal concept of "market value". The stock market is a market; stocks thus have a market value, which is based mostly, but not entirely, on their use-value, which is how much money you get from them. (It's a market of bundles market values; those bundles of market values are themselves only use-values when considered from the point of view of the stock market.)
I am a strong believer that setting things up such that capital gains are taxed lower than dividends was distortionary and A Mistake, because it creates an incentive structure where growth is incentivised over building a business that's simply ... profitable. (I think we want both sorts of business and it would be nice if the incentive structures made them more equally attractive to own stock in)
Warren Buffett's public comments that since investing is his job morally his resulting gains should probably be taxed as income feels somewhat adjacent to my theory.
Note however that my first comment in this thread was basically me being overconfident about a finance thing so appropriate pinch of salt is indicated with to my 'strong believer' stance.
That sounds reasonable. But there's a stronger incentive for growth:
(A) Executive salary is (O(n) guess) proportional to something like the log of the size of the company.
(B) Executives who make a company grow are seen as great executives, and can move on to a higher-paying job at a bigger company. "I kept this company running" doesn't look good on an executive's resume. I realized this when I worked for a tech company whose founder just wanted to work on interesting projects. He didn't really want to grow the company past the point where everybody could be friends with everybody else. (They weren't, but that's another story.) But the CEO he hired was much more pro-growth, and I think didn't really understand how someone could not want to make a company bigger.
Yes and no both. The argument I make requires me to be able to tell people with a straight face "you are overpaying for this", which I cannot do for consumer goods whose use is its own reward.
I can do that for financial assets, as we're all playing there for money, not utility and so the argument holds. I can say that "Tesla is overpriced and will come down in 20 years", but I cannot say the same for bread.
A financial asset for which the overpricing argument doesn't hold are the contracts traded in a prediction market, as I can buy both Yes and No options there. Imagine though a market where we play as we do with stocks, you can only buy the Yes contract and we rely on selling it for price discovery. Would the probabilities that market would give us be fair?
I think the word "fair" takes you out of economics and into metaphysics. But I agree there is value in some contexts in saying "stocks are overpriced", as in saying "Gamestop is overpriced" to tell someone that that particular stock has a high price because a religious cult has decided to make it their social currency. But also, the Gamestop stock price is what it is literally, monetarily worth; and you can still make money (sometimes) by buying it.
TL,DR: Both definitions of "price" are useful in some contexts. We were both making the mistake of pretending that a word can have only one correct meaning (or, as people who make this mistake usually say, one "true" meaning).
Antistocks wouldn't work because of the counterparty risk. If you had to post collateral it would be the same thing as dividend-adjusted single stock futures.
Single stock futures were a thing for a while in the US until the OneChicago exchange went out of business. That was a more convenient way to go short when a company is hard to borrow. You can also do it with options by buying a put and selling a call at the same strike and same expiry, but you have to be careful about early exercise of American options. You'll likely get assigned early on your short call if it's ITM and the underlying is hard to borrow.
It would be pretty easy to implement single stock futures as a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, using an oracle for the underlying stock price, with some forced liquidation when the excess collateral gets too small. I don't know of a good implementation of that yet. Someone needs to do a really good job of it and make it a Schelling point for bringing a lot of liquidity together.
We built a derivatives market without liquidations on Ethereum (Arbitrum) but it uses an oracle and features compression of gains and losses (the compression is negligible for slow price changes and substantial for rapid price changes). The long and short positions are both ERC20s. In theory there are some pretty fancy AMMs you can build that'd make permissionless deployment of derivatives markets somewhat feasible, but time will tell if we see these markets.
It seems like antistocks could be a way for a large company with reliable cash flow to credibly commit to crush a fast growing upstart. EG Blockbuster announces "We believe that Netflix stock will be worthless in a few years. If you are thinking of buying Netflix stock, come pay us half the price instead, and we will commit to pay you, indefinitely, whatever dividends Netflix would have paid out." If an ordinary investor wanting to short Netflix made this announcement, they wouldn't find any partners because the risk of the shorter going bankrupt would be too large, but I could imagine a large company being taken seriously -- what's the risk that Blockbuster goes bankrupt?
Let's say there were a million shares of Netflix outstanding, trading at $100/share, and Blockbuster is offering synthetic shares to all comers at $50/share.
Now, Deep Pockets Hedge Funds decides to take a $150MM position in synthetic Netflix, buying 2MM shares. Next, DPHF offers Netflix $101MM on the condition they pay out a one-time $100/share special dividend, keeping the remaining $1MM as an inducement, if any is needed in addition to all the dividend money that will wind up in the pockets of Netflix insiders.
Blockbuster is now contractually obligated to pay DPHF $100/share in dividends, or a total of $300MM. Subtract out the $101MM payment to Netflix and the initial $150MM purchase price, and DPHF has made a near-immediate $49MM cash profit, and they still own 3MM synthetic Netflix shares.
Except that, you know, in the actual way described they imply potential unlimited loss for one party without a way to set a stop, much like a short, but you can at least stop a short.
Otherwise CFDs and soreadbets have all those properties, they aren't done on private companies because of data unreliability
Ask a non-Zen Buddhist. Western Buddhism, which is mostly Zen, mostly hides behind a chill semi-formalized agnosticism: "Yeah man, it's cool if you want to believe in reincarnation, but it's probably not real. Let's just have a good sit and call it a day, eh?"
As a non-Buddhist (with sincere apologies if this question is dumb, offensive, or both) is reincarnation considered a necessity at least to answer the question of "why not nuke the Earth or otherwise undertake to destroy all life and thereby efface all selves and all suffering, given that existence is suffering?"
If you think that one is subject to reincarnation until achieving enlightenment then I could see how destroying the Earth might seem like a hindrance to getting everyone to become enlightened, but if you just stop at "all existence is suffering" as the most basic precept without an attendant cosmology, it seems like that has some obvious apocalyptic corollaries once it becomes a practical possibility to literally destroy all life (or at minimum, all sentient life, unless we can figure out a way to cause the Earth to spiral into the Sun and finish the job).
To answer you directly, no, it's not considered a necessity at all.
One of Buddhism's fundamental teachings is that no one teaching is considered "infallible". In fact, this is just about the only teaching that nearly all Buddhists agree on, though I'm sure there's some intolerant jackass sect somewhere who'd like to have a word with me on that.
Also, you've got your priors wrong - we *don't* "just stop at 'all existence is suffering'". In fact, that statement isn't even what the faith says. The _actual_ Four Noble Truths are something like this:
1. All existence necessarily _involves_ suffering.
2. The root of suffering is desire [or "unfulfilled/unrequited desire"] (in its many forms).
3. Suffering can thus be ceased by relinquishing desire.
4. In order to achieve the cessation of suffering, we follow the Eightfold Noble Path (which basically outlines what passes for "Buddhist morality", but also isn't nearly the end of the story).
So yeah, enlightenment or the alleviation of suffering would never be achieved through destruction. It's actually kind of funny that that's the direction you go in, because you're thinking in terms of an *external* morality, while pretty much the entire Eightfold Noble Path is *inwardly focused*. A Buddhist's classic reaction to the idea of "fixing the world" would be "obviously, you would seek to fix yourself first, so that you may do the most good out in the world and not add to any suffering".
But don't feel embarrassed. Nihilism -- the question of "if suffering is inevitable, why bother stopping it?" -- is one of the big problems that Buddhism has been struggling with for the better part of 2,500 years. You're not the first to ask this question.
I'm also very interested in the question, but I don't see why you think the alleviation of suffering could never be achieved through destruction. The belief that following the 8-fold path /can/ relieve suffering doesn't imply that no other action can relieve suffering. Nothing you wrote seems as clear to me as the simple argument (1) existence is suffering, and this suffering outweighs any pleasure; existence is on net suffering (I don't think you can deny Buddhists believe this), (2) ending existence thus ends suffering, which would be good.
To convince me that Buddhists don't want to end all life, you'd need to present a counter-argument that is clearer than that 2-step argument. Clarity is the most-important thing in these ethical or almost-metaphysical arguments, because when they fail, they fail in making false assumptions about semantics or metaphysics, which can be extremely hard to detect. If you make an argument with 3 parts, it won't satisfy me, because 3 is more than 2, and the odds of making an error in each step are probably at least 50%.
The most charitable interpretation I can make of your answer is that Buddhists would probably agree that it would be good if somebody destroyed the Universe, but don't feel obligated to do it themselves. So I'm then relying on the nihilism of Buddhists to trust them not to try to kill everybody once they have the power to do so painlessly.
Dude, I have no idea where you're getting off with all that. I'm trying to be polite here, but you're being borderline accusatory, and your whole second paragraph is just an outlandish demand. Ironically, you didn't even obey your own rule, because your "argument" hides a middle step: You've assumed that it's even possible to end existence.
But to directly address you: Your mistake here is that you're extrapolating ONLY from the first noble truth. There are FOUR. They all go together. Buddhists don't believe in the one, they believe in all four. Without the other three, you're not indicting Buddhism/ists, you're indicting some imaginary strawman of them you've concocted in your head. I'm sure it would make for a great movie, but it's not real, and honest-but-civil discourse doesn't require me to indulge you your strawman just because you insist it exists. So just stop it. Either engage with what Buddhism actually believes, or leave us alone.
" the alleviation of suffering could never be achieved through destruction"
Well, if we destroy the earth by steering it into the sun, or blow up all of humanity with nuclear bombs, that still leaves us with the, ah, I know "souls" is the wrong term here but I can't think of the correct one.
The souls of all the dead humans who did not reach enlightenment in their lifetime and are now still in existence, still bound to the Wheel. What happens to them? If you've destroyed earth, they can't be reborn on earth. So either they have to be reborn on another world (if comparable intelligent alien life exists elsewhere) or they are stuck in limbo, as it were; unable to work off their karmic debt, unable to be reborn with another chance to reach enlightenment.
So you haven't solved the problem of suffering for all the dead, which still exists and needs to be addressed. You've prevented new life from coming in to existence, so no new suffering happens (we'll assume) but suffering is still ongoing with the unsaved (again, wrong term) dead.
Because in context of meditation, 'reincarnation' stands for a different sort of a phenomenon related to the concept of self.
Further, 'destroying all life' physically doesn't really end suffering as life will go on anyway, maybe from scratch, maybe somewhere else, same cycles. Compassion is one of the fundamental Buddhist values for multiple reasons and I don't see how it would accommodate either, it tends to be the empathetic kind that hopes others get what they hope for, not a 'greater good bulldozer' - see the concept of 'metta' for instance.
I'm not a Buddhist either, but I don't think nuking the earth would solve the problem. The atman (or whatever term you wish to use about cosmic eternal consciousness) caused other, dependent, consciousness to arise, and life arose out of matter. Destroying the matter of the earth won't prevent life from arising on some other world, and the same problems of attachment, desire, and suffering will recur there.
Possibly, via reincarnation, those still bound to the Wheel would then take birth in those worlds and have to work out their karma until enlightened. So why not cut out the middle-man and save the beings which are in existence here on earth while you have the opportunity to do so?
Thank you very much! Back in my much younger days, I thought that if I weren't Catholic, I'd like to be Tibetan Buddhist (mostly because there's a lot of rituals/practices that I can make parallels with Catholic rituals/practices) but that's just the usual shallow Western take 😁
I think this does answer the question, but presumably you see why this argument relies on some mix of cosmological belief in reincarnation or the nature of consciousness (viz., second paragraph and reference to the atman) and/or kind-of-empirically-testable-but-ultimately-based-on-supposition belief in sapient life existing or arising elsewhere (possible, certainly, but no direct evidence for it yet, and thus having at least elements of faith to it in the sense of staking a claim about the physical world without dispositive evidence of it.). This is what I was originally trying to get at with my question about whether reincarnation was actually a load-bearing member of Buddhist belief (despite formal agnosticism about it) as far as being required to answer the question of "why not nuke our way out of desire / attachment?"
The argument against saving the beings in existence here on earth as proposed is that
(1) empirically, most people have died unenlightened, and
(2) we keep making more people
resulting in that much more attachment, suffering, an desire--and, depending on whether consciousness / souls / whatever entity karma attaches are a stock or a flow (i.e., can new consciousness be introduced or is it pre-existing or eternal?), this is utilitarian-bad if new consciousness is capable of arising (if all consciousnesses are pre-existing, you probably do want to give people as many shots at enlightenment as possible, but this is, again, kind of a cosmological claim about consciousness and incarnation since it otherwise needs to account for why population numbers are mutable instead of fixed). Also, we don't have infinite time for everyone to reach enlightenment either in principle or practice (entropy, increased solar output rendering Earth incapable of supporting life, finite individual human lifespan if you don't commit to belief in reincarnation) so I don't think the sort of "Groundhog's Day" answer is sufficiently responsive (although I guess one could believe that at some future date everyone would become Buddhists and reach enlightenment as a matter of faith-analogous conviction). Of course, you could also try to solve this through just preventing births in other ways, mass sterilization, relying on the broadly negative correlation between wealth and fertility, or just otherwise trusting that humans will peter out on their own, but this seems like it risks being conceptually indistinguishable from nuking everyone (in the sense of brute-forcing your way out of existence being suffering by limiting existence) while subjecting everyone living or born between here and now to the putatively negative-sum same of existing and being subject to desire / attachment.
Per conservation of mass, none of that would reduce the amount of stuff that exists. Perhaps people would start reincarnating as self-aware clouds of ionized gas, a shift of context which risks enormous setbacks for research into practical asceticism.
I mean, reincarnation at all provides what I consider to be a strong reason *not* to destroy all sapient life due to the aforementioned setback risk. My point was that I nevertheless understand Buddhism to remain formally agnostic as to reincarnation (i.e., it generally isn't treated as a load-bearing member necessary to preclude the mass-murder option) and I was asking how Buddhism resolved the issue of allowing sapient life to continue existing despite apparently positing that existence was a form of suffering, *if* reincarnation were not, in fact, treated as a cosmological axiom.
(Side note: I'm not sure conservation of mass *per se* is relevant, both because one can obviously have mass that isn't self-aware, like, say, a brick, and also because monotonically increasing entropy seems like it's guaranteed to end all life over a long enough time horizon even if there is other life out there.)
Specifics of reincarnation aside, if any sort of malevolent illusions might be involved you'd need to deal with that first before formulating comprehensive mass-euthanasia plans. What if you miss some whole existential category, and accidentally make things so much worse for them that it ends up being a net increase in suffering?
But I presume that the 4 Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path are considered fairly 'infallible' at least in general terms?
So, if we take the first three NobleTruths, and their implied desire to 'cease' or diminish suffering, it is not clear that the 8fold path is the only or best way to accomplish these ends, I would be interested in hearing how it is demonstrated that the Path is the most effective way to cease or diminish suffering. The other posters point if I might try to restate it, seems to be that eliminating the sufferer is a bit of a shortcut. If it is possible to eliminate the sufferer, which unless we postulate some sort of 'immortal soul' then that elimination looks feasible, what confines the Buddhist to the Eightfold Path and prevents him from taking this shortcut?
This doesn't just apply to Buddhism but to Effective Altruism or any commoditization of suffering. Why not end life with a short plague and thereby end suffering?
I think the EA response would probably be that Buddhism is different[1] in positing existence as being worse than non-existence, whereas most secular utilitarians would say that while it can be, it generally isn't in expectation. Ending suffering is important, but "the only winning move is not to play" is a contingent rather than absolute truth depending on your payoff matrix.
[1] But not unique at least inasmuch as Christianity and (I presume) Islam also posit a heavenly afterlife superior to Earthly existence, making being alive arguably a state of forgoing gains.
I'm not a practicing Buddhist, but my understanding of reincarnation is that moment to moment continuity is an illusion, so someone dying and someone else being born isn't all that different from moment to moment experience. What is "passed on" is the karmic bundle you've created over the cycle of reincarnation.
Which (passing on the karmic burden) has always seemed to me (another non-Buddhist, so take it as you will) to be monumentally unjust. *I* did actions which incurred karmic "debt". Now *you* (some other existence) has to suffer (more) because of that. If moment-to-moment continuity is an illusion, then the me of now and the me of 10 seconds from now are different people and there's absolutely no just way for the me of now to burden the me of later. The only recourse is utter nihilism, saying that justice doesn't exist and all of this is inevitable, so why worry.
I hate to interject with my sect specific protestations but the whole of Christianity is based on the idea of a failure of the Tao to address the problem.
As St Paul has it, 'The Law is good and holy and just but I am carnal, sold under sin.' That is, 'my problems cannot be addressed by the Law/Tao/Golden Rule. But cannot be resolved without breaking the continuity of reality in the Incarnation of God, the interjection into Creation of an Exterior Saviour'
The specific claim of St Paul, picked up most clearly by teachers like Augustine or Luther is that the Law cannot be the solution precisely because it is part of the problem. Without this claim, in fact, Christianity does not differ materially from other world religions as younsay.
Re: Tao. Similar to Judisim, Buddhism AIUI has impersonal, yet perfectly fair(per Tao) Karma resulting in appropriate reincarnated destiny. Judaism has Natural Law enforced by an often angry, yet merciful Father God. Judgement upon death.
Both are legalistic and some interpretation/applications of Christianity are such. Here's the problem with legalism gone wrong:
"So many Christians exalt the demands and rigors of law because, in reality, law is less demanding than pure charity. The law, after all, has reasonable safe limits! One always knows what to expect, and one can always hope to evade, by careful planning, the more unpleasant demands!"
--Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters, 1961
Legalism, IMO, done as right as possible is intending to do your best motivated by both the practicality of the Golden Rule and perfectly fair performance evaluations.
The clear message and known existence of Christ is a refinement or advancement from legalism. From reading Eknath Easwaran recently I'd say [you won't agree, but hear me out] that the equivalent of 'faith in Christ' is and has been readily available in eastern religion and Judaism as well as amongst the 'savages.'
"20 For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."
That’s not exactly an accurate description of karma.
First of all, reincarnation is an optional belief, so it doesn’t fit into every interpretation of karma.
Broadly speaking, karma is thought of as “a result of the fact that suffering can breed more suffering”. When you murder someone, it makes you more likely to murder again. When you lie, it makes you more likely to lie again. It’s the weight of all your decisions and how that impacts your propensities to make certain future decisions.
"First of all, reincarnation is an optional belief, so it doesn’t fit into every interpretation of karma."
Agree - although I'm no expert; just a guy that reads. : )
Karma AIUI still functions the same way without reincarnation (e.g. Zen Buddhism). Karma is a feedback loop of one's behavior. Competency-based training, if you will. It is as you wrote, "the weight of all your decisions and how that impacts your propensities to make certain future decisions." *If we don't recognize this* then essentially we are locked into ways of thinking/acting and oblivious as to why.
The following from an author who is "trained in" but not a practitioner of Buddhism per Wikipedia.
"Karma is often wrongly confused with the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns, which themselves result in further accumulations of tendencies of a similar nature."
--Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are, 1994
"the whole of Christianity is based on the idea of a failure of the Tao to address the problem."
Well, C.S. Lewis gave it a go where he seems to see the Tao as Natural Law in his book, "The Abolition of Man". Of course, Natural Law is not sufficient on its own for salvation, but it is a foundation:
"The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar. ‘In ritual’, say the Analects, ‘it is harmony with Nature that is prized.’ The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being ‘true’.
This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao’. Some of the accounts of it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself — just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind. And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, a judgement: in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it."
"You must not hold a pistol to the head of the Tao. Nor must we postpone obedience to a precept until its credentials have been examined. Only those who are practising the Tao will understand it. It is the well-nurtured man, the cuor gentil, and he alone, who can recognize Reason when it comes. It is Paul, the Pharisee, the man ‘perfect as touching the Law’ who learns where and how that Law was deficient.
In order to avoid misunderstanding, I may add that though I myself am a Theist, and indeed a Christian, I am not here attempting any indirect argument for Theism. I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reason as having absolute validity: that any attempt, having become sceptical about these, to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly more ‘realistic’ basis, is doomed. Whether this position implies a supernatural origin for the Tao is a question I am not here concerned with."
"The following illustrations of the Natural Law are collected from such sources as come readily to the hand of one who is not a professional historian. The list makes no pretence of completeness. It will be noticed that writers such as Locke and Hooker, who wrote within the Christian tradition, are quoted side by side with the New Testament. This would, of course, be absurd if I were trying to collect independent testimonies to the Tao. But (1) I am not trying to prove its validity by the argument from common consent. Its validity cannot be deduced. For those who do not perceive its rationality, even universal consent could not prove it. (2) The idea of collecting independent testimonies presupposes that ‘civilizations’ have arisen in the world independently of one another; or even that humanity has had several independent emergences on this planet. The biology and anthropology involved in such an assumption are extremely doubtful. It is by no means certain that there has ever (in the sense required) been more than one civilization in all history. It is at least arguable that every civilization we find has been derived from another civilization and, in the last resort, from a single centre— ‘carried’ like an infectious disease or like the Apostolical succession."
Yes, like Lewis I take the Tao as a close analogue of the Divine Law. It is precisely the weakness of the Tao, which leads to the need for a Saviour. For the Law is most useful and life-giving to those who keep it, but has nothing but condemnation for those who break it, and has no ability to restore those who have fallen. It is quite simply a teacher made for better pupils than we are. And Lewis knows this well enough, although I can only point to Mere Christianity as somewhere he deals with this point off the top of my head.
Equating the Tao, Confucius' Analects, natural law, Christian divine law, and Plato's Forms, is trying too hard to pretend that all ethical religions or ethical codes are the same. Viewing them at that level of abstraction makes them useless for anything but generating trite banalities that sound wise, but give no guidance in problematic situations.
Christian divine law is handed down from God on the basis of "might makes right", and is thought of as something you must strive to obey. (Christians, feel free to argue that it is not in fact "might makes right", but I won't reply. I'm quite familiar with how divine law is actually spoken about in the Christian church. I think alternative formulations are distinctions without a difference.)
Natural law is the idea that morals can be rationally deduced. Whether natural law has any place in Christianity has been debated explicitly and at great length. Most Protestants don't talk about natural law; they only care what they think the Bible tells them to do.
Plato's Forms aren't even things you can obey or disobey; they're things you can see or fail to see, intermediaries between God and the material world.
Following the Tao is more like giving up striving. It doesn't result in justice; it is just the way of things, and fighting against it is foolish, not immoral. At least, that's my take on it.
Confucius' rules are based in pragmatics, tradition, valuing stability and disliking change, and a firm belief in a hierarchical, class-based society. They're not attempts at a logically rigorous systematic philosophy or theology.
"Most Protestants don't talk about natural law; they only care what they think the Bible tells them to do."
*shrugs* Yeah, well, Protestants 😁
I think the Protestant hang-up comes from the *huge* emphasis on the epistles of St. Paul and his teachings there (even more so than the Gospels themselves), and the Law Paul is speaking of is, of course, the Judaic Law, the Law Moses brought down from Mount Sinai, the Law he had been trained in as the favourite pupil of the Pharisees.
That is Divine Law. I don't think Paul refers much to Natural Law as an argument save when he, too, is making the same correspondences as Lewis is, when speaking in the Areopagus and indeed even quoting Classical - pagan - Greek poetry:
"22 So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24 The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. 26 And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, 27 that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, 28 for
“‘In him we live and move and have our being’;
as even some of your own poets have said,
“‘For we are indeed his offspring.’"
The argument from natural law is the beginning of discussion with those who are not ready at all to hear about divine law, or salvation, or even the existence of God. So you have to begin with "what are the foundational moral principles which the majority of humans, in the majority of places, over the majority of time, have agreed upon?" and work up from there. The cardinal virtues may be pagan, but they are still virtues:
Nonself is one of the core teachings across almost all denominations of Buddhism. There are esoteric debates about what it specifically means, and there's a radical Thai denomination that claims things like "Nirvana is the true self", but even those guys aren't disputing the basic teaching that the daily experience of self is an illusion -- they're just saying "sure, it's an illusion, but something else is the actual thing we mistake the illusion for".
Of course there's got to be SOME Buddhist out there who also endorses radically selfish ideologies like Objectivism, but my point was that the religion in general is diametrically opposed to radical selfishness. And not just in the sense that all religions hazily preach against selfishness, but that one of its fundamental teachings specifically says, "What's the point of selfishness, since there is no self?".
SA's not wrong that the liberative aspects of Buddhism would probably be the best way to appeal to Texans. But any non-insane-outlier Buddhist who tried to seriously proselytize Texans would balk at going around telling them, "Buddhism and Objectivism are like, the same thing, man!". That's a bridge too far even for the concept of "skillful means" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upaya).
1st para - yea. Many disagreements in the philosophical/religious realm can be resolved within the use of language(semantics)(1) or categorized as For Academic Use Only(meaning it's extraneous or not remotely necessary to practice a given belief). Take the long contentious debate in the US: evolution vs. creationism. God chose to evolve humans from a lower life form - almost certainly different from post-modern's science's various theories on evolution. The story of Adam and Eve is mostly metaphor. Done.
(1) less true across Western and Eastern culture. Pls see my other post, if interested.
2nd para - selfishness is impractical. Like W. Buffet approx. stated, Machiavelli inspired no following. Even Satanism is, as I understand it, partial or feigned selflessness.
"You should do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but if your courtesy is not returned, they should be treated with the wrath they deserve."
--Anton Szandor LaVey, The Satanic Bible
[btw, the basis of every popular revenge movie I've seen]
last para - I've heard it said the official religion of Texas is Christianity AND football. IMO, to get popular buy-in you'd have show Buddhist(Zen, probably) concepts compatible with existing beliefs - and don't be obvious where the concepts originated!
So, mindfulness, as performance enhancement on the field and, as it happens, in life.
I feel like all responses to this should just be bad business ideas.
-A service to make you seem more interesting at parties.
First package, a beautiful woman in a slim fitting dress walks up to you and throws a flute of champagne in your face. She says “that was for Monte Carlo!” Then a slap across the face, she cries, “and that was for breaking my heart.”
10% discount if you remember to shout “I would give anything to be different than I am if it meant I could be worthy of you!” as she runs from the party.
Second package, a scary thickly muscled Jiu Jitsu soldier guy pretends that when he sees you he becomes instantly terrified. He seems to want to go the other way but can’t. In a stage whisper he asks how you got away. He thought you died in Cairo. You tell him your actual name and say he’s made a mistake, he goes white as a sheet. Stuttering he says of course he must need glasses, no one could have lived through that and flees the party.
Good call. I need to put some newspaper clippings in there about the mysterious deaths of tyrants and a bunch of photoshopped pictures of historical events.
Hiring people to go to your party to make it a better party is definitely a thing, especially if you count people who are paid in things less fungible than money (free drinks, etc).
Idk how much of a thing it is to hire people to have specific individual interactions at the party, though
What about a guy who wanders around and pretends he was destitute and living on the street until you took him in and provided him with money and an education?
Those are excellent business ideas! The first is kinda real, see book: Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit by Ashley Mears You can read about it here: https://putanumonit.com/2022/12/13/why-are-women-hot/ /one comment gives a valuable update: P Mouse, December 13
Superstitious people are rarely superstitious in only one aspect of their lives, and not all of them shun technology. Why not cater to that?
Services include
- arranging your server rack according to Feng Shui principles
- reducing electric radiation by soldering crystals into your PC case
- thelemic manual hermeneutics
- pendulum diagnostics
- thoughts and prayers for your browser speed
- snake oil DDOS protection (might make the server a bit sticky)
- summoning updates via ritual
- malware exorcism
- numerological overclocking
- reformatting your drive while retain the homeopathic essence of your data: deleting everything but the parity bits, calculate parity bits over the rest, deleting everything but the parity bits ...
- replace components for more compatibility of their zodiac signs based on production and assembly dates
- horoscope and tarot readings for your network. Avoid porn on Tuesday, good upstream on Friday, disconnect your landline for two hours at night to please the Old Gods.
- Is your capslock key a pressure point? Stop shouting at strangers on the internet to prevent the flow of bad energies!
- chakra identification & aura reading for your build/console
- the four humors and their balance: stop upgrading your GPU when your bottleneck's the RAM.
This is slightly off topic but I used to work with a guy I called the son of the God of User Acceptance Testing. You could literally email him at any time with any problem to perform any kind of conditioning and he would respond with a solution in like three minutes.
Sign me up for "rituals for appeasement of the dread eldritch forces that mean Windows performs a two-hour update, shutting down my PC, right when I need to upload a vital file for work"!
"A service to make you seem more interesting at parties."
Following on from how "gay" seems not to be used anymore in the older sense of "happy", here is another linguistic change: "The Club of Queer Trades", a short story collection by G.K. Chesterton.
“God knows I don't,” said the warrior, with fervour.
“You are standing,” replied Northover, “in the office of the Adventure and Romance Agency, Limited.”
“And what's that?” blankly inquired Brown.
The man of business leaned over the back of the chair, and fixed his dark eyes on the other's face.
“Major,” said he, “did you ever, as you walked along the empty street upon some idle afternoon, feel the utter hunger for something to happen — something, in the splendid words of Walt Whitman: 'Something pernicious and dread; something far removed from a puny and pious life; something unproved; something in a trance; something loosed from its anchorage, and driving free.' Did you ever feel that?”
“Certainly not,” said the Major shortly.
“Then I must explain with more elaboration,” said Mr Northover, with a sigh. “The Adventure and Romance Agency has been started to meet a great modern desire. On every side, in conversation and in literature, we hear of the desire for a larger theatre of events for something to waylay us and lead us splendidly astray. Now the man who feels this desire for a varied life pays a yearly or a quarterly sum to the Adventure and Romance Agency; in return, the Adventure and Romance Agency undertakes to surround him with startling and weird events. As a man is leaving his front door, an excited sweep approaches him and assures him of a plot against his life; he gets into a cab, and is driven to an opium den; he receives a mysterious telegram or a dramatic visit, and is immediately in a vortex of incidents. A very picturesque and moving story is first written by one of the staff of distinguished novelists who are at present hard at work in the adjoining room.”
…“How on earth does the thing work?” asked Rupert Grant, with bright and fascinated eyes.
“We believe that we are doing a noble work,” said Northover warmly. “It has continually struck us that there is no element in modern life that is more lamentable than the fact that the modern man has to seek all artistic existence in a sedentary state. If he wishes to float into fairyland, he reads a book; if he wishes to dash into the thick of battle, he reads a book; if he wishes to soar into heaven, he reads a book; if he wishes to slide down the banisters, he reads a book. We give him these visions, but we give him exercise at the same time, the necessity of leaping from wall to wall, of fighting strange gentlemen, of running down long streets from pursuers — all healthy and pleasant exercises. We give him a glimpse of that great morning world of Robin Hood or the Knights Errant, when one great game was played under the splendid sky. We give him back his childhood, that godlike time when we can act stories, be our own heroes, and at the same instant dance and dream.”
…Major Brown received the explanation with complete simplicity and good humour.
“Of course; awfully dense, sir,” he said. “No doubt at all, the scheme excellent. But I don't think —” He paused a moment, and looked dreamily out of the window. “I don't think you will find me in it. Somehow, when one's seen — seen the thing itself, you know — blood and men screaming, one feels about having a little house and a little hobby; in the Bible, you know, 'There remaineth a rest'.”
I love this. Have not read Chesterton but he’s been on my list for a good long while.
One of my favorite memories is of being in a coffee shop and two kids trying to write an essay for school. They kept getting distracted by cell phones and other weird distractions on the computer there that had nothing to do with the story. They complained they didn’t “get” the story then started talking about hot girls they knew.
It eventually came out that the story was Harrison Bergeron.
I quietly refused to believe it wasn’t staged and tried to inconspicuously look for hidden cameras. I’d like to think it’s the kind of thing such an agency would do.
I was thinking the same thing, but was thinking about the "Organizer of Repartee" in the next story, "The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation." The organizer "hires himself out at dinner-parties to lead up to other people's repartees. According to a preconcerted scheme (which you may find on that piece of paper), he says the stupid things he has arranged for himself, and his client says the clever things arranged for him."
How much to bump up to have the guy saying stupid things be a total scoundrel and then you can take some decorative swords off a display over a fireplace, throw one to him and demand he defend himself, and then sword fight him out of the party?
When I heard of the movie, that was the first thing that came to mind. Had Chesterton no shame, back in 1905, stealing the plot of the 1997 movie by David Fincher? 😁
I don't know who the screen writers are or if they had ever heard of Chesterton's story (probably not). Though Fincher could throw in a fourth influence here:
"According to David Fincher, there were three primary influences on The Game. Michael Douglas' character was a "fashionable, good-looking Scrooge, lured into a Mission: Impossible situation with a steroid shot in the thigh from The Sting".
It really does seem that there are only the same basic plots in existence and the same stories are told over and over!
New company, to produce the “Blood Dumper” where you have a pouch installed in the femoral artery in your leg via surgical tubing with a valve you can easily open discreetly in your pocket to immediately and discretely cause the effects of massive blood loss.
Idk if this counts but I’m working on an internal composting startup. The beta is installed surgically, but ultimately you’ll be able to swallow it.
Even assuming no longevity revolution, the average person will spend 8000 hours of their life passing waste, which is 1. gross 2. bad hygiene 4. distracting and 5. a suboptimal use of their time. My product frees users to spend these hours as they see fit.
Theravada Buddhism is about self-liberation. In the Mahayana traditions, though, it's considered selfish to reach enlightenment before everyone else does.
(Disclaimer: this is based on a half-remembered college course.)
Buddhism is pretty fractured in its interpretations, but I'm almost certain this isn't universal to sects of Mahayana Buddhism. I don't think it's a majority take either.
The new translations since you went to college show that the wheel of the Dharma is fourfold and crushes smaller vehicles or sometimes jumps over them. The purpose of sticking around until everyone else is enlightened is so you can mog them while you wait.
The immortal cancer thing is a plot point in the Baru Cormorant fantasy series by Seth Dickinson. It's an interesting series, if not exactly my cup of tea.
It's also kind of like that black lady whose tumor cells were remarkably good for vaccine tests and her cell line has spread to labs all over the world decades after she died.
> “The moneychangers in the Temple were a housing problem!” objects the YIMBY. “If first-century Jerusalem had been vertically denser, there would have been room for banks in the commercial district. The only reason they had to invade the Temple grounds was because of artificial land scarcity.“
Believe it or not, I have heard nearly this exact sermon preached at an Eastern Orthodox Church. Not the bit about "room for banks in the commercial district," but the rest of it. The thrust of the argument was that the Sadducees, the Jewish faction that controlled the temple (and the rivals of the Pharisees, the other major Jewish sect, from whose tradition both Christianity and modern Judaism descend), interpreted the law in an incredibly strict way, particularly the bit about not travelling on the Sabbath. The upshot was that in order to live up to the strictures of the law to the Sadducee standard, you essentially had to be very rich, and you had to live close to the temple. This had a predictable effect on housing prices close to the temple.
Further, the bit about the money-changers had to do with the monopolization of a scarce non-produced asset, e.g. Hasmodean currency from before the Romans took over (you couldn't use pagan money with the Emperor's image in the temple, but you could exchange it for these ancient coins, at exchange rates the moneychangers set. And then give the ancient coins right back when you made your purchase). So in addition to an economic struggle over literal land, you also had one over a scarce non-produced monopolized asset (Hasmodean coins).
Just to chime in with the relevant Jewish law, the first point is correct, but houses built on the outskirts of the city would count as within the area of the city, so unless there is some other non-biblical requirement that the Sadducees imposed, there wasn't really an artificial scarcity - just the natural one of how far you can travel. The second point, though, is exactly right even according to the Pharisees - see the Mishna Shekalim, which explains the specifics of what can be given, and the requirement to use a moneychanger and pay a specific fee.
Thanks! So that would still imply Jerusalem real estate itself would fetch a premium, but not as concentrated right around the temple itself? I also might be misremembering the specific details of the sermon.
Yeah, I mean, there's nothing that's going to fix the fact that places close to the center are more valuable and expensive than those further away, especially before the existence of technology to build high-density housing! And we certainly see this same issue in modern Jewish communities, both in the US and abroad, where walking distance to the synagogue is a key requirement.
Would an eruv have an effect on this? Or is that just getting around a different complication, and observant Jews would still need to walk to the synagogue even inside an eruv?
> especially before the existence of technology to build high-density housing
Off-topic nitpicking, but this technology already existed at the time. Most lower-class citizens in Rome lived in low-rise apartment blocks called insulae which Wikipedia says "could be built up to nine storeys, before Augustus introduced a height limit of about 68 feet".
To go back to the earlier point, there were also Jewish law considerations that made some types of multi-story buildings a problem - specifically, the laws of ritual purity, so that the priests and those who were going to the temple, or eating sanctified foods, could not live in buildings in which ritual impurity was spread between separate areas, via the roof. (But the details of this are very, very complex.)
That sounds wrong: in general the criticism of the sadducees was that they weren't strict enough, in that they were willing to accommodate Roman demands as to Temple practice in order to maintain their own positions. They also tended to reject glosses on the Torah. I can believe that land prices near the Temple were inflated for a reason like that, but I think it would have been motivated by some other group.
As for the Temple tax, it was paid in Tyrian shekels. These continued to be minted, so they weren't a scarce resource, but the Romans allowed them to be minted on condition that they were only used for the purpose of paying the tax (since in general they mandated the use of Roman currency). Accordingly, you had to change your ordinary money for Temple money in order to pay the tax. Oddly the Tyrian shekel bore the image of Melqart, so the requirement doesn't seem to have been a rejection of pagan images per se. I think the issue is that Exodus specifies the tax as half a shekel "according to the shekel of the sanctuary", but there was no Roman coin matching this standard.
> As for the Temple tax, it was paid in Tyrian shekels.
This strikes me as very strange. If they're being minted for the sole purpose of being used at the Temple, why not mint them right there in Jerusalem, and why include a pagan image? It seems to me that an image of a pagan god would be even worse than an image of a mortal man.
I did a little searching and found <a href="https://www.begedivri.com/shekel/J-Tyrian.htm">a webpage explaining</a> that the problem was the purity of the silver used in the coin. Myself, I'd say that an image of Melqart is even worse than lower-purity silver, but apparently the rabbis at the time disagreed with me.
The Tyrian shekel, despite its name, was in fact minted in Jerusalem during Jesus' lifetime. Per the same link above, the mint in Tyre had closed in 19 BCE. My understanding is that Exodus 30:13-15 was read as requiring a precise amount of silver, neither more nor less.
On the opposite side of the coinage/moral axis, in Roman territories, it was illegal to use coins with the emperor's head on them in brothels. Special brothel coins were minted w/o the emperor's visage on them. My understanding is that they had an image of people fornicating stamped on them. Not sure if they had the same metallic composition or whether they were more like poker chips. If like poker chips, it raises questions in my mind about Gresham's Law as applied to naughty money droving out moral money.
Yes! Mary Beard mentioned them in one of her lectures on Youtube. I think they dug some up in a bordello in Pompeii. I thought it was interesting because it reminded me of the Chinese Emperor's name taboo.
It offends my sense of social justice that Scott is this funny in addition to being so smart. I'm really looking forward to gpt5 so I can tell myself he's having the humor parts written by ai.
Buying an anti-stock seems pretty similar to being short a call option: you take in a small premium in exchange for the obligation to buy a share at a specific time in the future
That's equivalent to writing a call option, right?
Antistocks seem different ... they are tied to things other than share price (dividends and possibly profits?). Much less likely to have a huge downside.
Yes, being short on a call option is the same as writing a call option. It would also be equivalent to buying a put option, which is possibly a better example since the bank / financial institution is long the underlying when writing the put.
You could structure the option to include payouts for dividends if you wanted (it's just contract!)
Hmm ... I don't believe buying a put option is equivalent to writing a call option. Buying a put costs cash, and has bounded downside (the cash you paid). Writing a call *gives you cash*, and has unbounded downside.
There are four distinct actions in put/call options: writing a call, buying a call, writing a put, and buying a put. All have different characteristics.
Yeah, this is different, because the option is going to be realised at some point, whereas the anti-stock never will be. Also, it doesn't seem to take into account share buybacks or new issuance, so the anti-stock won't track the stock price in the long run.
Ah yeah, realise I didn't read the description closely enough. You'd have to create this by being short and long each side of the dividend date. Great idea, can't wait until an IB gets into this
This was really good but I think repeats what I think of as a misconception about the effects of a land value tax:
"Land value tax could ensure that every parcel is put to its most productive use."
Compared with having no land value tax, I don't think a land value tax does anything to incentivise more productive use of land.
I have two arguments.
The first is that a land value tax is usually argued as being efficient because no one changes their behaviour due to the tax - land is in fixed supply and while there will be a price change of land, there is nothing anyone can do to avoid the tax. But if no one is changing their behaviour due to the tax, then they can't suddenly use it more productively. They will continue doing what they were always doing.
The second is that currently, if there is a better, significantly more productive use to which land could be put, the landowner is already incentivised to put it to that use - they are bearing a large opportunity cost by not doing that.
The real gain from a land value tax is the abolition of the tax that it replaces. If that's an income tax, then the efficiency gains are from the reduced deadweight loss from abolishing the income tax.
Not so. Under the current systems in place in most places in the US, landowners are taxed a smallish (10%ish) fraction of a combined assessment of "value of land and improvement" (property).
The first and obvious issue is that the improvement is included. Therefore further improvements are likely to increase the taxes. This is in fact what happens on the ground, in most localities when people's property taxes go up it is significantly-to-predominantly the improvement portion. This is easily solvable by shifting tax only to the land value.
The second more relevant issue is the small percentage of that tax.
Because only roughly 10% is taxed, that means that the owner gets to extract 90% of the land value as rent. While it is true that as the value of the land increases there will technically be an increase in the tax and therefore incentive, it is an order-of-magnitude smaller, and this is rarely (but occasionally) enough to justify the capital expenditure of an improvement, especially when it is likely that by waiting a little longer a different, even more valuable use may be determined and you wouldn't want to miss out on that by being locked in on a halfway completed improvement.
The LVT would absolutely change behavior around land - it would tend to make land on average less expensive, but ill-used land more expensive
It would make the upfront cost of land less expensive, but the purchaser would have to pay an equivalent (in NPV terms) sum in land taxes to the government, so all up it shouldn't make land less expensive I don't think.
It doesn't need to change the price, and you're basically right that it shouldn't - but it changes the incentives to improve or use the land differently, which is the point.
Given a fixed owner and a fixed land parcel, nobody will have an incentive to change their use of the land, because if there was a more productive use of the land, which that owner was equipped and willing to enact, that person then they would already be doing that.
However, those things need not be fixed. A LVT provides an disincentive towards holding land as an investment. Someone who just happens to have a whole bunch of land that is suddenly rising in value will, in the current system, be incentivized to hold onto it so they can sell it later. Maybe the most efficient use of the land in general would be a restaurant, but the current owner does not have the skills or inclination to be a restaurant owner and would fail if they tried to start their own restaurant, so the most efficient use for this particular owner is to hold it as an investment, or maybe lease it to a restaurant if they have the skills and inclination to be a landlord (maybe they don't). But with a LVT there is now a pressure to sell the land immediately, because rising values won't increase the sale price (which is approximately 0), and instead make their tax higher. You then have a different owner, who has better skills to enable more productive use of land.
No individuals' abilities or incentives with respect to the daily use land have changed as a result of the LVT, but incentives with respect to ownership have, and therefore individuals with more potential productive uses are more likely to become the owners and actually put it to that use.
Ok I think I have actually misunderstood what you guys are talking about when you talk about a LVT. I thought it was a fixed percentage (say 1%) of the land's value, paid annually. You guys are talking about a full blown georgist land tax that totally captures the value of rent. I agree with you that that would have quite different effects than I was originally thinking.
How is the value of the land going to go up? It is not being used for its best use and its possible value under another use might be a fairly hard to evaluate counterfactual.
It happens all the time, it's just supply and demand. Often someone starts building something nearby, and, then demand for nearby housing goes up, and then other businesses want to move in to serve or hire from those people, and all sorts of other stuff wants to move in, and then more people want to move in, and the place shifts on the rural -> city axis, which drives up land prices.
It's difficult to evaluate counterfactually, but not impossible, by comparing to prices on other nearby land plots. Especially if you allow people to bid on the land plot in question directly, then the market can answer for you.
"But if no one is changing their behaviour due to the tax"
I thought the argument was that taxing the value of unworked land does not make unworked land less *scarce.*
Typically, if you tax something you get less of it and that's distortionary. But since nobody produces unworked land (excepting edge cases like artificial islands and floating platforms) you'll still have the same amount of land as you would if there was no LTV.
Oh, I laughed so hard at translating 'Mahayana' as 'monster truck,' and had several more laugh out louds after that. "Live forever in the hearts of those you love." Thank you, Scott.
Back to Mahayana as monster truck: Would anyone like to try to come up with equivalent translations of 'Form is emptiness, emptiness is form'? I want to laugh some more.
Well, I tried to give it a shot, but I think the only place to go with it is the “conservatives already hate paying attention to diversity” joke that Scott already made. (According to sanskritdictionary.com, the word translated as “form” can mean color, shape, appearance, etc., and the word translated as “emptiness” could be “absence”, “want of”, or maybe “loneliness”; anyone else want to give it a try?)
It needs no alternative translation. Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. Therefore, it goes without saying, function is all. It's a reactionary stance to hippy dippy feng shui offices and ugly corporate style guides.
Played straight, it's already "vanity of vanities, all is vanity." But after a bit of effort with ChatGPT we were able to produce:
"I'm working on a new translation of the Pali Canon for conservative audiences. I translate 'rūpa' as 'structure,' and 'śūnyatā' as 'chaos.' You see, it's perfect! In Buddhism, 'form is emptiness, emptiness is form' is meant to be a negative statement, highlighting the idea that all things are transient and ultimately lacking in inherent existence. Conservatives can relate to this sentiment, as they often rail against the idea of big government and the structures and bureaucracies that it creates. By equating these Buddhist concepts with conservative values, the joke highlights the idea that conservatives recognize the emptiness and lack of meaning in the structures and systems that society creates. It's the perfect blend of Buddhism and conservative values!"
Wait, which part of that came from Chat? Also, I don't think "form is emptiness, emptiness is form" means all things are transient & sort of unreal, etc. I means something like "the labels you are attaching to everything you experience to give it meaning are nonsense -- but that very unlabelability of everything is the meaning it has -- here it all is, before you, unlabeled."
The wording of the whole quote is from ChatGPT, though it's incorporated stuff from the conversation we had of me trying to explain what the format is and what the joke is supposed to be about, and I still think it doesn't quite have it.
(Its first attempt before I did any further explaining was "A banana is a cell phone, a cell phone is a banana." Runner-ups were "Country is rock and roll, rock and roll is country" and "conservative values are liberal values, and vice versa".)
As for the meaning of the original, it may be that GPT isn't Buddhist enough yet to understand (and me I'm not Buddhist at all).
Having spent several cumulative party-hours explaining transmissible cancers to everyone involved, I am contractually obligated to point out that there are in fact _three_ mammals that have achieved immortality: one dog and _two_ tasmanian devils!
The linked paper, if you read it, discuss that question. Since these kinds of tumours are seen in almost no other species, it seems likely there is something that makes Tasmanian Devils particularly susceptible for it. In the paper they go through a couple of possible explanations, but there's no certain answer to the question. Devils do have low genetic diversity (thanks to hunting in the 19th Century), limited geographical spread and apparently spend a lot of time biting each other on the face, which all seem factors that help encourage the spread of the tumour. Its also weird that the two tumours only seem to have appeared in the last few decades, with no evidence of older tumours existing. So perhaps human changes to Tasmania have somehow made it more likely for the tumour to arise and spread.
Note that there are receptors on almost all your cells (called HLA or MHC1) that help your immune system distinguish self and nonself. (They also help to detect when your cells are infected by a virus or have mutated into cancer.) This is at least one reason why organ donations have to be matched, and why close relatives are usually better donors than strangers. It seems likely that the mechanisms that cause your immune system to attack the new kidney from a stranger they discover in your body one day are the ones that defend us from transmissible tumors.
I wonder if anyone has checked to see if organ transplants get rejected often in Tasmanian Devils.
As Alastair points out, there are specific features of Tasmanian Devils you can point to. However, I think the larger answer is "transmissible cancers are much more common than the few examples we currently have."
CTVT is sexually transmitted. As far as I know there is no reason to believe dogs are special outliers with respect to their sexual behavior or immunology. They don't, for instance, have spiked penises, which might be expected in analogy to the face-biting explanation for DFTD. But maybe they just had the luck of the draw.
Outside of mammals, there are now I think nine examples of Bivalve Transmissible Neoplasia, which affects clams + mussels. Some of those are circulating in species other than the species they originated in.
I bet there is an evolutionary tradeoff between transmissible cancers and some autoimmune diseases. And I wonder if the largish number of autoimmune diseases that appear to just happen instead of being triggered by an infection are an indication that we've been under selection to resist transmissible cancers.
I'd note that the dogs do share one trait mentioned with Devils: low genetic diversity due not to hunting but selective breeding bottlenecks. This diversity might have been extremely low in whatever historical host population supported CTVT's creation. (One experiment I've wondered if anyone's tried: can wolves or half-wolves get CTVT?)
Shouldn't cancer be studied from, "How did this (these) cell(s) overcome their Hayflick limit?" Which is our 'first line defense' against cancer. (In my world view)
Masterpiece. Sounded exactly like all those EA events I used to attend. Also, wasn't there an immortal woman who is still being used in labs (hela cells)?
After thinking a little more I think Antistocks as written might actually be legal? They're described as essentially annuities with payment amounts tied to dividends or corporate income (not the same thing) or rents. That's not quite the same as a conventional bucket shop where synthetic bets were made on asset prices.
Well I happen to like most people but I do have a “Cats don’t care if you are crazy” refrigerator magnet.
Antistocks sound like a great idea!
It's called a bucket shop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)
If this were an NYC house party, everyone would know that already :-p
Link didn't catch the last parenthesis FYI
So how does this differ from a dark pool?
Transactions on dark pools still settle — if you buy on a dark pool you still get the stock, if you sell you still give it up. The hallmark of a bucket shop is that your “position” is just a zero sum bet with the broker.
It's only an illegal bucket shop if you are betting against the house. Completely synthetic trading can (with a big asterisk, there are a lot of laws and regs here) be legal so long as the house is a neutral market maker where market participants bet against each other.
Not to the SEC
At least it stems from a crucial issue, that all stock is overvalued.
https://mendimeterastit.blogspot.com/2022/01/on-share-market-of-most-liquidity-and.html
Isn't that like saying that all goods are overpriced? The argument posits a "true value" the stock "should" have, which is lower than its market value. Rather like medieval peasants arguing over the true price of bread.
"X is overpriced" means "the price at which I am indifferent between buying and selling X is lower than the current market price".
BTW all values are relative, so if something is overpriced than something else must be underpriced. Sometimes it's the currency that the prices are quoted in.
Your definition says X is overpriced /for me/. That's not what the linked argument claims--it says all stocks are always overpriced. The market price is the price at which the average? median? potential buyer is indifferent, so by your definition, it can't be the case that ANY stock is overpriced. The "proper" price is /defined as/ the market price. Which was my point as well.
Sorry, I hadn't read through the link yet.
The linked article is wrong. 99% of stocks, 99% of the time, are extremely cheap and easy to short for long periods of time. Meme stocks at the top of their run are impossible to short because you can't locate shares to borrow. So they have it exactly backwards when they say "shortselling is a very short-term fix that only takes care of the very worst and very obvious cases of over-pricing"
In general, "X has a lower intrinsic value than the market price" means "I have a valid argument for why my indifference price is lower than the market price, and not enough other people have updated on this yet"
I put this argument to Phil Getz above, and is relevant here.
Suppose I have a prediction market where I can only trade the Yes contract (there is no No contract enabled). Would you trust the probabilities of that market? That's how we trade shares.
Well this is only true if the only purpose of stock is to resell it at a higher value, which is the entire problem with the market.
Stock X is overpriced SHOULD mean, the nominal value of this stock is such that taxes and fees are greater than expected dividends + the value of input into the company that ownership gives me. Gotta move away from this stock as speculation paradigm and towards investing in a company, higher price for more productive, innovative companies. Hyperfinancialization is not your friend.
This seems to me to be the same argument medievals, Marxists, and their fellow-travellers make against markets: that the price of bread SHOULD be its use-value, and we gotta move away from this shifting-and-unreal concept of "market value". The stock market is a market; stocks thus have a market value, which is based mostly, but not entirely, on their use-value, which is how much money you get from them. (It's a market of bundles market values; those bundles of market values are themselves only use-values when considered from the point of view of the stock market.)
I am a strong believer that setting things up such that capital gains are taxed lower than dividends was distortionary and A Mistake, because it creates an incentive structure where growth is incentivised over building a business that's simply ... profitable. (I think we want both sorts of business and it would be nice if the incentive structures made them more equally attractive to own stock in)
Warren Buffett's public comments that since investing is his job morally his resulting gains should probably be taxed as income feels somewhat adjacent to my theory.
Note however that my first comment in this thread was basically me being overconfident about a finance thing so appropriate pinch of salt is indicated with to my 'strong believer' stance.
That sounds reasonable. But there's a stronger incentive for growth:
(A) Executive salary is (O(n) guess) proportional to something like the log of the size of the company.
(B) Executives who make a company grow are seen as great executives, and can move on to a higher-paying job at a bigger company. "I kept this company running" doesn't look good on an executive's resume. I realized this when I worked for a tech company whose founder just wanted to work on interesting projects. He didn't really want to grow the company past the point where everybody could be friends with everybody else. (They weren't, but that's another story.) But the CEO he hired was much more pro-growth, and I think didn't really understand how someone could not want to make a company bigger.
Yes and no both. The argument I make requires me to be able to tell people with a straight face "you are overpaying for this", which I cannot do for consumer goods whose use is its own reward.
I can do that for financial assets, as we're all playing there for money, not utility and so the argument holds. I can say that "Tesla is overpriced and will come down in 20 years", but I cannot say the same for bread.
A financial asset for which the overpricing argument doesn't hold are the contracts traded in a prediction market, as I can buy both Yes and No options there. Imagine though a market where we play as we do with stocks, you can only buy the Yes contract and we rely on selling it for price discovery. Would the probabilities that market would give us be fair?
I think the word "fair" takes you out of economics and into metaphysics. But I agree there is value in some contexts in saying "stocks are overpriced", as in saying "Gamestop is overpriced" to tell someone that that particular stock has a high price because a religious cult has decided to make it their social currency. But also, the Gamestop stock price is what it is literally, monetarily worth; and you can still make money (sometimes) by buying it.
TL,DR: Both definitions of "price" are useful in some contexts. We were both making the mistake of pretending that a word can have only one correct meaning (or, as people who make this mistake usually say, one "true" meaning).
Antistocks wouldn't work because of the counterparty risk. If you had to post collateral it would be the same thing as dividend-adjusted single stock futures.
Single stock futures were a thing for a while in the US until the OneChicago exchange went out of business. That was a more convenient way to go short when a company is hard to borrow. You can also do it with options by buying a put and selling a call at the same strike and same expiry, but you have to be careful about early exercise of American options. You'll likely get assigned early on your short call if it's ITM and the underlying is hard to borrow.
It would be pretty easy to implement single stock futures as a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, using an oracle for the underlying stock price, with some forced liquidation when the excess collateral gets too small. I don't know of a good implementation of that yet. Someone needs to do a really good job of it and make it a Schelling point for bringing a lot of liquidity together.
We built a derivatives market without liquidations on Ethereum (Arbitrum) but it uses an oracle and features compression of gains and losses (the compression is negligible for slow price changes and substantial for rapid price changes). The long and short positions are both ERC20s. In theory there are some pretty fancy AMMs you can build that'd make permissionless deployment of derivatives markets somewhat feasible, but time will tell if we see these markets.
https://www.tracer.finance/radar/perpetual-pools-explained/
Don't Total Return Swaps do this as well?
retail can't trade those in the US
Seems pretty similar to the short end of a perpetual swap
Except that there is no tracking of the value of the underlying through periodical payments, its either exercised or it isn’t.
It seems like antistocks could be a way for a large company with reliable cash flow to credibly commit to crush a fast growing upstart. EG Blockbuster announces "We believe that Netflix stock will be worthless in a few years. If you are thinking of buying Netflix stock, come pay us half the price instead, and we will commit to pay you, indefinitely, whatever dividends Netflix would have paid out." If an ordinary investor wanting to short Netflix made this announcement, they wouldn't find any partners because the risk of the shorter going bankrupt would be too large, but I could imagine a large company being taken seriously -- what's the risk that Blockbuster goes bankrupt?
Let's say there were a million shares of Netflix outstanding, trading at $100/share, and Blockbuster is offering synthetic shares to all comers at $50/share.
Now, Deep Pockets Hedge Funds decides to take a $150MM position in synthetic Netflix, buying 2MM shares. Next, DPHF offers Netflix $101MM on the condition they pay out a one-time $100/share special dividend, keeping the remaining $1MM as an inducement, if any is needed in addition to all the dividend money that will wind up in the pockets of Netflix insiders.
Blockbuster is now contractually obligated to pay DPHF $100/share in dividends, or a total of $300MM. Subtract out the $101MM payment to Netflix and the initial $150MM purchase price, and DPHF has made a near-immediate $49MM cash profit, and they still own 3MM synthetic Netflix shares.
Except that, you know, in the actual way described they imply potential unlimited loss for one party without a way to set a stop, much like a short, but you can at least stop a short.
Otherwise CFDs and soreadbets have all those properties, they aren't done on private companies because of data unreliability
...so, all the financial instruments mentioned in here have to already exist in some form, right? :P
...like a financial version of Rule 34.
Exactly, probably true too.
Bucket shops! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)
Buddhism preaches nonself, yo.
So what is it that reincarnates?
Ask a non-Zen Buddhist. Western Buddhism, which is mostly Zen, mostly hides behind a chill semi-formalized agnosticism: "Yeah man, it's cool if you want to believe in reincarnation, but it's probably not real. Let's just have a good sit and call it a day, eh?"
As a non-Buddhist (with sincere apologies if this question is dumb, offensive, or both) is reincarnation considered a necessity at least to answer the question of "why not nuke the Earth or otherwise undertake to destroy all life and thereby efface all selves and all suffering, given that existence is suffering?"
If you think that one is subject to reincarnation until achieving enlightenment then I could see how destroying the Earth might seem like a hindrance to getting everyone to become enlightened, but if you just stop at "all existence is suffering" as the most basic precept without an attendant cosmology, it seems like that has some obvious apocalyptic corollaries once it becomes a practical possibility to literally destroy all life (or at minimum, all sentient life, unless we can figure out a way to cause the Earth to spiral into the Sun and finish the job).
Yeah, you gotta watch out for Buddhist physicists.
So, what is the physics equivalent of "gain-of-function research"?
I only know about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_vacuum_decay
To answer you directly, no, it's not considered a necessity at all.
One of Buddhism's fundamental teachings is that no one teaching is considered "infallible". In fact, this is just about the only teaching that nearly all Buddhists agree on, though I'm sure there's some intolerant jackass sect somewhere who'd like to have a word with me on that.
Also, you've got your priors wrong - we *don't* "just stop at 'all existence is suffering'". In fact, that statement isn't even what the faith says. The _actual_ Four Noble Truths are something like this:
1. All existence necessarily _involves_ suffering.
2. The root of suffering is desire [or "unfulfilled/unrequited desire"] (in its many forms).
3. Suffering can thus be ceased by relinquishing desire.
4. In order to achieve the cessation of suffering, we follow the Eightfold Noble Path (which basically outlines what passes for "Buddhist morality", but also isn't nearly the end of the story).
So yeah, enlightenment or the alleviation of suffering would never be achieved through destruction. It's actually kind of funny that that's the direction you go in, because you're thinking in terms of an *external* morality, while pretty much the entire Eightfold Noble Path is *inwardly focused*. A Buddhist's classic reaction to the idea of "fixing the world" would be "obviously, you would seek to fix yourself first, so that you may do the most good out in the world and not add to any suffering".
But don't feel embarrassed. Nihilism -- the question of "if suffering is inevitable, why bother stopping it?" -- is one of the big problems that Buddhism has been struggling with for the better part of 2,500 years. You're not the first to ask this question.
I'm also very interested in the question, but I don't see why you think the alleviation of suffering could never be achieved through destruction. The belief that following the 8-fold path /can/ relieve suffering doesn't imply that no other action can relieve suffering. Nothing you wrote seems as clear to me as the simple argument (1) existence is suffering, and this suffering outweighs any pleasure; existence is on net suffering (I don't think you can deny Buddhists believe this), (2) ending existence thus ends suffering, which would be good.
To convince me that Buddhists don't want to end all life, you'd need to present a counter-argument that is clearer than that 2-step argument. Clarity is the most-important thing in these ethical or almost-metaphysical arguments, because when they fail, they fail in making false assumptions about semantics or metaphysics, which can be extremely hard to detect. If you make an argument with 3 parts, it won't satisfy me, because 3 is more than 2, and the odds of making an error in each step are probably at least 50%.
The most charitable interpretation I can make of your answer is that Buddhists would probably agree that it would be good if somebody destroyed the Universe, but don't feel obligated to do it themselves. So I'm then relying on the nihilism of Buddhists to trust them not to try to kill everybody once they have the power to do so painlessly.
Dude, I have no idea where you're getting off with all that. I'm trying to be polite here, but you're being borderline accusatory, and your whole second paragraph is just an outlandish demand. Ironically, you didn't even obey your own rule, because your "argument" hides a middle step: You've assumed that it's even possible to end existence.
But to directly address you: Your mistake here is that you're extrapolating ONLY from the first noble truth. There are FOUR. They all go together. Buddhists don't believe in the one, they believe in all four. Without the other three, you're not indicting Buddhism/ists, you're indicting some imaginary strawman of them you've concocted in your head. I'm sure it would make for a great movie, but it's not real, and honest-but-civil discourse doesn't require me to indulge you your strawman just because you insist it exists. So just stop it. Either engage with what Buddhism actually believes, or leave us alone.
" the alleviation of suffering could never be achieved through destruction"
Well, if we destroy the earth by steering it into the sun, or blow up all of humanity with nuclear bombs, that still leaves us with the, ah, I know "souls" is the wrong term here but I can't think of the correct one.
The souls of all the dead humans who did not reach enlightenment in their lifetime and are now still in existence, still bound to the Wheel. What happens to them? If you've destroyed earth, they can't be reborn on earth. So either they have to be reborn on another world (if comparable intelligent alien life exists elsewhere) or they are stuck in limbo, as it were; unable to work off their karmic debt, unable to be reborn with another chance to reach enlightenment.
So you haven't solved the problem of suffering for all the dead, which still exists and needs to be addressed. You've prevented new life from coming in to existence, so no new suffering happens (we'll assume) but suffering is still ongoing with the unsaved (again, wrong term) dead.
Because in context of meditation, 'reincarnation' stands for a different sort of a phenomenon related to the concept of self.
Further, 'destroying all life' physically doesn't really end suffering as life will go on anyway, maybe from scratch, maybe somewhere else, same cycles. Compassion is one of the fundamental Buddhist values for multiple reasons and I don't see how it would accommodate either, it tends to be the empathetic kind that hopes others get what they hope for, not a 'greater good bulldozer' - see the concept of 'metta' for instance.
I'm not a Buddhist either, but I don't think nuking the earth would solve the problem. The atman (or whatever term you wish to use about cosmic eternal consciousness) caused other, dependent, consciousness to arise, and life arose out of matter. Destroying the matter of the earth won't prevent life from arising on some other world, and the same problems of attachment, desire, and suffering will recur there.
Possibly, via reincarnation, those still bound to the Wheel would then take birth in those worlds and have to work out their karma until enlightened. So why not cut out the middle-man and save the beings which are in existence here on earth while you have the opportunity to do so?
For a non-Buddhist, this is probably the most Buddhism-fluent take I’ve seen yet on this thread.
Thank you very much! Back in my much younger days, I thought that if I weren't Catholic, I'd like to be Tibetan Buddhist (mostly because there's a lot of rituals/practices that I can make parallels with Catholic rituals/practices) but that's just the usual shallow Western take 😁
I think this does answer the question, but presumably you see why this argument relies on some mix of cosmological belief in reincarnation or the nature of consciousness (viz., second paragraph and reference to the atman) and/or kind-of-empirically-testable-but-ultimately-based-on-supposition belief in sapient life existing or arising elsewhere (possible, certainly, but no direct evidence for it yet, and thus having at least elements of faith to it in the sense of staking a claim about the physical world without dispositive evidence of it.). This is what I was originally trying to get at with my question about whether reincarnation was actually a load-bearing member of Buddhist belief (despite formal agnosticism about it) as far as being required to answer the question of "why not nuke our way out of desire / attachment?"
The argument against saving the beings in existence here on earth as proposed is that
(1) empirically, most people have died unenlightened, and
(2) we keep making more people
resulting in that much more attachment, suffering, an desire--and, depending on whether consciousness / souls / whatever entity karma attaches are a stock or a flow (i.e., can new consciousness be introduced or is it pre-existing or eternal?), this is utilitarian-bad if new consciousness is capable of arising (if all consciousnesses are pre-existing, you probably do want to give people as many shots at enlightenment as possible, but this is, again, kind of a cosmological claim about consciousness and incarnation since it otherwise needs to account for why population numbers are mutable instead of fixed). Also, we don't have infinite time for everyone to reach enlightenment either in principle or practice (entropy, increased solar output rendering Earth incapable of supporting life, finite individual human lifespan if you don't commit to belief in reincarnation) so I don't think the sort of "Groundhog's Day" answer is sufficiently responsive (although I guess one could believe that at some future date everyone would become Buddhists and reach enlightenment as a matter of faith-analogous conviction). Of course, you could also try to solve this through just preventing births in other ways, mass sterilization, relying on the broadly negative correlation between wealth and fertility, or just otherwise trusting that humans will peter out on their own, but this seems like it risks being conceptually indistinguishable from nuking everyone (in the sense of brute-forcing your way out of existence being suffering by limiting existence) while subjecting everyone living or born between here and now to the putatively negative-sum same of existing and being subject to desire / attachment.
There is no alpha left in introducing destruction of life to religion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo
Per conservation of mass, none of that would reduce the amount of stuff that exists. Perhaps people would start reincarnating as self-aware clouds of ionized gas, a shift of context which risks enormous setbacks for research into practical asceticism.
I mean, reincarnation at all provides what I consider to be a strong reason *not* to destroy all sapient life due to the aforementioned setback risk. My point was that I nevertheless understand Buddhism to remain formally agnostic as to reincarnation (i.e., it generally isn't treated as a load-bearing member necessary to preclude the mass-murder option) and I was asking how Buddhism resolved the issue of allowing sapient life to continue existing despite apparently positing that existence was a form of suffering, *if* reincarnation were not, in fact, treated as a cosmological axiom.
(Side note: I'm not sure conservation of mass *per se* is relevant, both because one can obviously have mass that isn't self-aware, like, say, a brick, and also because monotonically increasing entropy seems like it's guaranteed to end all life over a long enough time horizon even if there is other life out there.)
Specifics of reincarnation aside, if any sort of malevolent illusions might be involved you'd need to deal with that first before formulating comprehensive mass-euthanasia plans. What if you miss some whole existential category, and accidentally make things so much worse for them that it ends up being a net increase in suffering?
But I presume that the 4 Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path are considered fairly 'infallible' at least in general terms?
So, if we take the first three NobleTruths, and their implied desire to 'cease' or diminish suffering, it is not clear that the 8fold path is the only or best way to accomplish these ends, I would be interested in hearing how it is demonstrated that the Path is the most effective way to cease or diminish suffering. The other posters point if I might try to restate it, seems to be that eliminating the sufferer is a bit of a shortcut. If it is possible to eliminate the sufferer, which unless we postulate some sort of 'immortal soul' then that elimination looks feasible, what confines the Buddhist to the Eightfold Path and prevents him from taking this shortcut?
This doesn't just apply to Buddhism but to Effective Altruism or any commoditization of suffering. Why not end life with a short plague and thereby end suffering?
I think the EA response would probably be that Buddhism is different[1] in positing existence as being worse than non-existence, whereas most secular utilitarians would say that while it can be, it generally isn't in expectation. Ending suffering is important, but "the only winning move is not to play" is a contingent rather than absolute truth depending on your payoff matrix.
[1] But not unique at least inasmuch as Christianity and (I presume) Islam also posit a heavenly afterlife superior to Earthly existence, making being alive arguably a state of forgoing gains.
misunderstanding
Someone else.
This is a decent koan, actually.
I'm not a practicing Buddhist, but my understanding of reincarnation is that moment to moment continuity is an illusion, so someone dying and someone else being born isn't all that different from moment to moment experience. What is "passed on" is the karmic bundle you've created over the cycle of reincarnation.
Which (passing on the karmic burden) has always seemed to me (another non-Buddhist, so take it as you will) to be monumentally unjust. *I* did actions which incurred karmic "debt". Now *you* (some other existence) has to suffer (more) because of that. If moment-to-moment continuity is an illusion, then the me of now and the me of 10 seconds from now are different people and there's absolutely no just way for the me of now to burden the me of later. The only recourse is utter nihilism, saying that justice doesn't exist and all of this is inevitable, so why worry.
where pain and pleasure are merely ornaments, yo.
Buddhism is hardly one unified thing. You can find it preaching just about anything, like most of the major world religions.
Partly agree on specifics, Strongly disagree on generalities.
Buddhism starts splintering on specifics like all ideologies/philosophies/religions.
The major religions and really all lasting ones are based on the Golden Rule which is abbreviated Natural Law/Tao.
"All of us are apprenticed to the same teacher that the religious institutions originally worked with: reality."
--Gary Snyder(The Practice of the Wild) via Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are, 1994
I hate to interject with my sect specific protestations but the whole of Christianity is based on the idea of a failure of the Tao to address the problem.
As St Paul has it, 'The Law is good and holy and just but I am carnal, sold under sin.' That is, 'my problems cannot be addressed by the Law/Tao/Golden Rule. But cannot be resolved without breaking the continuity of reality in the Incarnation of God, the interjection into Creation of an Exterior Saviour'
The specific claim of St Paul, picked up most clearly by teachers like Augustine or Luther is that the Law cannot be the solution precisely because it is part of the problem. Without this claim, in fact, Christianity does not differ materially from other world religions as younsay.
Jon, your post is welcome.
Re: Tao. Similar to Judisim, Buddhism AIUI has impersonal, yet perfectly fair(per Tao) Karma resulting in appropriate reincarnated destiny. Judaism has Natural Law enforced by an often angry, yet merciful Father God. Judgement upon death.
Both are legalistic and some interpretation/applications of Christianity are such. Here's the problem with legalism gone wrong:
"So many Christians exalt the demands and rigors of law because, in reality, law is less demanding than pure charity. The law, after all, has reasonable safe limits! One always knows what to expect, and one can always hope to evade, by careful planning, the more unpleasant demands!"
--Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters, 1961
Legalism, IMO, done as right as possible is intending to do your best motivated by both the practicality of the Golden Rule and perfectly fair performance evaluations.
The clear message and known existence of Christ is a refinement or advancement from legalism. From reading Eknath Easwaran recently I'd say [you won't agree, but hear me out] that the equivalent of 'faith in Christ' is and has been readily available in eastern religion and Judaism as well as amongst the 'savages.'
"20 For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."
--NIV, Romans 7
That’s not exactly an accurate description of karma.
First of all, reincarnation is an optional belief, so it doesn’t fit into every interpretation of karma.
Broadly speaking, karma is thought of as “a result of the fact that suffering can breed more suffering”. When you murder someone, it makes you more likely to murder again. When you lie, it makes you more likely to lie again. It’s the weight of all your decisions and how that impacts your propensities to make certain future decisions.
"First of all, reincarnation is an optional belief, so it doesn’t fit into every interpretation of karma."
Agree - although I'm no expert; just a guy that reads. : )
Karma AIUI still functions the same way without reincarnation (e.g. Zen Buddhism). Karma is a feedback loop of one's behavior. Competency-based training, if you will. It is as you wrote, "the weight of all your decisions and how that impacts your propensities to make certain future decisions." *If we don't recognize this* then essentially we are locked into ways of thinking/acting and oblivious as to why.
The following from an author who is "trained in" but not a practitioner of Buddhism per Wikipedia.
"Karma is often wrongly confused with the notion of a fixed destiny. It is more like an accumulation of tendencies that can lock us into particular behavior patterns, which themselves result in further accumulations of tendencies of a similar nature."
--Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are, 1994
"the whole of Christianity is based on the idea of a failure of the Tao to address the problem."
Well, C.S. Lewis gave it a go where he seems to see the Tao as Natural Law in his book, "The Abolition of Man". Of course, Natural Law is not sufficient on its own for salvation, but it is a foundation:
https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20150135/html.php#c4
"The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar. ‘In ritual’, say the Analects, ‘it is harmony with Nature that is prized.’ The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being ‘true’.
This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao’. Some of the accounts of it which I have quoted will seem, perhaps, to many of you merely quaint or even magical. But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself — just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind. And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason (when we feel liking for what ought to be approved) or out of harmony with reason (when we perceive that liking is due but cannot feel it). No emotion is, in itself, a judgement: in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it."
"You must not hold a pistol to the head of the Tao. Nor must we postpone obedience to a precept until its credentials have been examined. Only those who are practising the Tao will understand it. It is the well-nurtured man, the cuor gentil, and he alone, who can recognize Reason when it comes. It is Paul, the Pharisee, the man ‘perfect as touching the Law’ who learns where and how that Law was deficient.
In order to avoid misunderstanding, I may add that though I myself am a Theist, and indeed a Christian, I am not here attempting any indirect argument for Theism. I am simply arguing that if we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reason as having absolute validity: that any attempt, having become sceptical about these, to reintroduce value lower down on some supposedly more ‘realistic’ basis, is doomed. Whether this position implies a supernatural origin for the Tao is a question I am not here concerned with."
"The following illustrations of the Natural Law are collected from such sources as come readily to the hand of one who is not a professional historian. The list makes no pretence of completeness. It will be noticed that writers such as Locke and Hooker, who wrote within the Christian tradition, are quoted side by side with the New Testament. This would, of course, be absurd if I were trying to collect independent testimonies to the Tao. But (1) I am not trying to prove its validity by the argument from common consent. Its validity cannot be deduced. For those who do not perceive its rationality, even universal consent could not prove it. (2) The idea of collecting independent testimonies presupposes that ‘civilizations’ have arisen in the world independently of one another; or even that humanity has had several independent emergences on this planet. The biology and anthropology involved in such an assumption are extremely doubtful. It is by no means certain that there has ever (in the sense required) been more than one civilization in all history. It is at least arguable that every civilization we find has been derived from another civilization and, in the last resort, from a single centre— ‘carried’ like an infectious disease or like the Apostolical succession."
Yes, like Lewis I take the Tao as a close analogue of the Divine Law. It is precisely the weakness of the Tao, which leads to the need for a Saviour. For the Law is most useful and life-giving to those who keep it, but has nothing but condemnation for those who break it, and has no ability to restore those who have fallen. It is quite simply a teacher made for better pupils than we are. And Lewis knows this well enough, although I can only point to Mere Christianity as somewhere he deals with this point off the top of my head.
Equating the Tao, Confucius' Analects, natural law, Christian divine law, and Plato's Forms, is trying too hard to pretend that all ethical religions or ethical codes are the same. Viewing them at that level of abstraction makes them useless for anything but generating trite banalities that sound wise, but give no guidance in problematic situations.
Christian divine law is handed down from God on the basis of "might makes right", and is thought of as something you must strive to obey. (Christians, feel free to argue that it is not in fact "might makes right", but I won't reply. I'm quite familiar with how divine law is actually spoken about in the Christian church. I think alternative formulations are distinctions without a difference.)
Natural law is the idea that morals can be rationally deduced. Whether natural law has any place in Christianity has been debated explicitly and at great length. Most Protestants don't talk about natural law; they only care what they think the Bible tells them to do.
Plato's Forms aren't even things you can obey or disobey; they're things you can see or fail to see, intermediaries between God and the material world.
Following the Tao is more like giving up striving. It doesn't result in justice; it is just the way of things, and fighting against it is foolish, not immoral. At least, that's my take on it.
Confucius' rules are based in pragmatics, tradition, valuing stability and disliking change, and a firm belief in a hierarchical, class-based society. They're not attempts at a logically rigorous systematic philosophy or theology.
"Most Protestants don't talk about natural law; they only care what they think the Bible tells them to do."
*shrugs* Yeah, well, Protestants 😁
I think the Protestant hang-up comes from the *huge* emphasis on the epistles of St. Paul and his teachings there (even more so than the Gospels themselves), and the Law Paul is speaking of is, of course, the Judaic Law, the Law Moses brought down from Mount Sinai, the Law he had been trained in as the favourite pupil of the Pharisees.
That is Divine Law. I don't think Paul refers much to Natural Law as an argument save when he, too, is making the same correspondences as Lewis is, when speaking in the Areopagus and indeed even quoting Classical - pagan - Greek poetry:
"22 So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24 The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. 26 And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, 27 that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, 28 for
“‘In him we live and move and have our being’;
as even some of your own poets have said,
“‘For we are indeed his offspring.’"
The argument from natural law is the beginning of discussion with those who are not ready at all to hear about divine law, or salvation, or even the existence of God. So you have to begin with "what are the foundational moral principles which the majority of humans, in the majority of places, over the majority of time, have agreed upon?" and work up from there. The cardinal virtues may be pagan, but they are still virtues:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinal_virtues
Nonself is one of the core teachings across almost all denominations of Buddhism. There are esoteric debates about what it specifically means, and there's a radical Thai denomination that claims things like "Nirvana is the true self", but even those guys aren't disputing the basic teaching that the daily experience of self is an illusion -- they're just saying "sure, it's an illusion, but something else is the actual thing we mistake the illusion for".
Of course there's got to be SOME Buddhist out there who also endorses radically selfish ideologies like Objectivism, but my point was that the religion in general is diametrically opposed to radical selfishness. And not just in the sense that all religions hazily preach against selfishness, but that one of its fundamental teachings specifically says, "What's the point of selfishness, since there is no self?".
SA's not wrong that the liberative aspects of Buddhism would probably be the best way to appeal to Texans. But any non-insane-outlier Buddhist who tried to seriously proselytize Texans would balk at going around telling them, "Buddhism and Objectivism are like, the same thing, man!". That's a bridge too far even for the concept of "skillful means" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upaya).
1st para - yea. Many disagreements in the philosophical/religious realm can be resolved within the use of language(semantics)(1) or categorized as For Academic Use Only(meaning it's extraneous or not remotely necessary to practice a given belief). Take the long contentious debate in the US: evolution vs. creationism. God chose to evolve humans from a lower life form - almost certainly different from post-modern's science's various theories on evolution. The story of Adam and Eve is mostly metaphor. Done.
(1) less true across Western and Eastern culture. Pls see my other post, if interested.
2nd para - selfishness is impractical. Like W. Buffet approx. stated, Machiavelli inspired no following. Even Satanism is, as I understand it, partial or feigned selflessness.
"You should do unto others as you would have them do unto you, but if your courtesy is not returned, they should be treated with the wrath they deserve."
--Anton Szandor LaVey, The Satanic Bible
[btw, the basis of every popular revenge movie I've seen]
last para - I've heard it said the official religion of Texas is Christianity AND football. IMO, to get popular buy-in you'd have show Buddhist(Zen, probably) concepts compatible with existing beliefs - and don't be obvious where the concepts originated!
So, mindfulness, as performance enhancement on the field and, as it happens, in life.
I feel like all responses to this should just be bad business ideas.
-A service to make you seem more interesting at parties.
First package, a beautiful woman in a slim fitting dress walks up to you and throws a flute of champagne in your face. She says “that was for Monte Carlo!” Then a slap across the face, she cries, “and that was for breaking my heart.”
10% discount if you remember to shout “I would give anything to be different than I am if it meant I could be worthy of you!” as she runs from the party.
Second package, a scary thickly muscled Jiu Jitsu soldier guy pretends that when he sees you he becomes instantly terrified. He seems to want to go the other way but can’t. In a stage whisper he asks how you got away. He thought you died in Cairo. You tell him your actual name and say he’s made a mistake, he goes white as a sheet. Stuttering he says of course he must need glasses, no one could have lived through that and flees the party.
Those people except for funerals are supposedly a service that has been available for centuries.
I want to get a bunch of fake passports and foreign currencies just so my son can find them one day if anything ever happens to me.
Gotta have an old clipping from Soviet era Pravda with a photo of you being taken into custody too.
Good call. I need to put some newspaper clippings in there about the mysterious deaths of tyrants and a bunch of photoshopped pictures of historical events.
Thats good. I'm gonna photoshop myself into a picture with Stalin then when it's found and compared with the real one it'll look like I was erased
Lol!
Hiring people to go to your party to make it a better party is definitely a thing, especially if you count people who are paid in things less fungible than money (free drinks, etc).
Idk how much of a thing it is to hire people to have specific individual interactions at the party, though
It's called LARPing. Though you don't really hire them, they just pay less money to be at/in the party.
People pay to go to parties now?
What about a guy who wanders around and pretends he was destitute and living on the street until you took him in and provided him with money and an education?
Ah, the My Man Godfrey.
There's the professional beach bully from Futurama.
What about an anecdote salesman for people who had boring childhoods?
Those are excellent business ideas! The first is kinda real, see book: Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit by Ashley Mears You can read about it here: https://putanumonit.com/2022/12/13/why-are-women-hot/ /one comment gives a valuable update: P Mouse, December 13
I would prefer to pay for your package!
Been trying to sell this one for a while:
Holistic IT services
Superstitious people are rarely superstitious in only one aspect of their lives, and not all of them shun technology. Why not cater to that?
Services include
- arranging your server rack according to Feng Shui principles
- reducing electric radiation by soldering crystals into your PC case
- thelemic manual hermeneutics
- pendulum diagnostics
- thoughts and prayers for your browser speed
- snake oil DDOS protection (might make the server a bit sticky)
- summoning updates via ritual
- malware exorcism
- numerological overclocking
- reformatting your drive while retain the homeopathic essence of your data: deleting everything but the parity bits, calculate parity bits over the rest, deleting everything but the parity bits ...
- replace components for more compatibility of their zodiac signs based on production and assembly dates
- horoscope and tarot readings for your network. Avoid porn on Tuesday, good upstream on Friday, disconnect your landline for two hours at night to please the Old Gods.
- Is your capslock key a pressure point? Stop shouting at strangers on the internet to prevent the flow of bad energies!
- chakra identification & aura reading for your build/console
- the four humors and their balance: stop upgrading your GPU when your bottleneck's the RAM.
How much would it cost to throw a goat into a volcano to recover a burned out hard drive?
99% of programmers will go for it after a week chasing down an incomprehensible intermittent bug.
This is slightly off topic but I used to work with a guy I called the son of the God of User Acceptance Testing. You could literally email him at any time with any problem to perform any kind of conditioning and he would respond with a solution in like three minutes.
Sign me up for "rituals for appeasement of the dread eldritch forces that mean Windows performs a two-hour update, shutting down my PC, right when I need to upload a vital file for work"!
Sir, have you heard of audiophiles?
"A service to make you seem more interesting at parties."
Following on from how "gay" seems not to be used anymore in the older sense of "happy", here is another linguistic change: "The Club of Queer Trades", a short story collection by G.K. Chesterton.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1696/1696-h/1696-h.htm
From "The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown":
“Do you know where you are, Major?” he said.
“God knows I don't,” said the warrior, with fervour.
“You are standing,” replied Northover, “in the office of the Adventure and Romance Agency, Limited.”
“And what's that?” blankly inquired Brown.
The man of business leaned over the back of the chair, and fixed his dark eyes on the other's face.
“Major,” said he, “did you ever, as you walked along the empty street upon some idle afternoon, feel the utter hunger for something to happen — something, in the splendid words of Walt Whitman: 'Something pernicious and dread; something far removed from a puny and pious life; something unproved; something in a trance; something loosed from its anchorage, and driving free.' Did you ever feel that?”
“Certainly not,” said the Major shortly.
“Then I must explain with more elaboration,” said Mr Northover, with a sigh. “The Adventure and Romance Agency has been started to meet a great modern desire. On every side, in conversation and in literature, we hear of the desire for a larger theatre of events for something to waylay us and lead us splendidly astray. Now the man who feels this desire for a varied life pays a yearly or a quarterly sum to the Adventure and Romance Agency; in return, the Adventure and Romance Agency undertakes to surround him with startling and weird events. As a man is leaving his front door, an excited sweep approaches him and assures him of a plot against his life; he gets into a cab, and is driven to an opium den; he receives a mysterious telegram or a dramatic visit, and is immediately in a vortex of incidents. A very picturesque and moving story is first written by one of the staff of distinguished novelists who are at present hard at work in the adjoining room.”
…“How on earth does the thing work?” asked Rupert Grant, with bright and fascinated eyes.
“We believe that we are doing a noble work,” said Northover warmly. “It has continually struck us that there is no element in modern life that is more lamentable than the fact that the modern man has to seek all artistic existence in a sedentary state. If he wishes to float into fairyland, he reads a book; if he wishes to dash into the thick of battle, he reads a book; if he wishes to soar into heaven, he reads a book; if he wishes to slide down the banisters, he reads a book. We give him these visions, but we give him exercise at the same time, the necessity of leaping from wall to wall, of fighting strange gentlemen, of running down long streets from pursuers — all healthy and pleasant exercises. We give him a glimpse of that great morning world of Robin Hood or the Knights Errant, when one great game was played under the splendid sky. We give him back his childhood, that godlike time when we can act stories, be our own heroes, and at the same instant dance and dream.”
…Major Brown received the explanation with complete simplicity and good humour.
“Of course; awfully dense, sir,” he said. “No doubt at all, the scheme excellent. But I don't think —” He paused a moment, and looked dreamily out of the window. “I don't think you will find me in it. Somehow, when one's seen — seen the thing itself, you know — blood and men screaming, one feels about having a little house and a little hobby; in the Bible, you know, 'There remaineth a rest'.”
I love this. Have not read Chesterton but he’s been on my list for a good long while.
One of my favorite memories is of being in a coffee shop and two kids trying to write an essay for school. They kept getting distracted by cell phones and other weird distractions on the computer there that had nothing to do with the story. They complained they didn’t “get” the story then started talking about hot girls they knew.
It eventually came out that the story was Harrison Bergeron.
I quietly refused to believe it wasn’t staged and tried to inconspicuously look for hidden cameras. I’d like to think it’s the kind of thing such an agency would do.
I was thinking the same thing, but was thinking about the "Organizer of Repartee" in the next story, "The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation." The organizer "hires himself out at dinner-parties to lead up to other people's repartees. According to a preconcerted scheme (which you may find on that piece of paper), he says the stupid things he has arranged for himself, and his client says the clever things arranged for him."
How much to bump up to have the guy saying stupid things be a total scoundrel and then you can take some decorative swords off a display over a fireplace, throw one to him and demand he defend himself, and then sword fight him out of the party?
Clearly a merger between The Adventure and Romance Agency Limited and The Organiser of Repartee is needed to fill this gap in the market!
This is basically the plot of "The Game" (starring Michael Douglas).
When I heard of the movie, that was the first thing that came to mind. Had Chesterton no shame, back in 1905, stealing the plot of the 1997 movie by David Fincher? 😁
I don't know who the screen writers are or if they had ever heard of Chesterton's story (probably not). Though Fincher could throw in a fourth influence here:
"According to David Fincher, there were three primary influences on The Game. Michael Douglas' character was a "fashionable, good-looking Scrooge, lured into a Mission: Impossible situation with a steroid shot in the thigh from The Sting".
It really does seem that there are only the same basic plots in existence and the same stories are told over and over!
A fashionable Scrooge? Scrooge would never spend more money on clothes than he needs to!
Can actors actually "go white as a sheet" voluntarily?
New company, to produce the “Blood Dumper” where you have a pouch installed in the femoral artery in your leg via surgical tubing with a valve you can easily open discreetly in your pocket to immediately and discretely cause the effects of massive blood loss.
Idk if this counts but I’m working on an internal composting startup. The beta is installed surgically, but ultimately you’ll be able to swallow it.
Even assuming no longevity revolution, the average person will spend 8000 hours of their life passing waste, which is 1. gross 2. bad hygiene 4. distracting and 5. a suboptimal use of their time. My product frees users to spend these hours as they see fit.
We’re you inspired by Fart Proudly by Benjamin Franklin?
Theravada Buddhism is about self-liberation. In the Mahayana traditions, though, it's considered selfish to reach enlightenment before everyone else does.
(Disclaimer: this is based on a half-remembered college course.)
Buddhism is pretty fractured in its interpretations, but I'm almost certain this isn't universal to sects of Mahayana Buddhism. I don't think it's a majority take either.
I'm a follower of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Buddhism.
The cat is not dead, nor alive, nor simultaneously dead and alive, nor simultaneously not-dead and not-alive.
The new translations since you went to college show that the wheel of the Dharma is fourfold and crushes smaller vehicles or sometimes jumps over them. The purpose of sticking around until everyone else is enlightened is so you can mog them while you wait.
What does "mog" mean?
To embarrass someone by being starkly more masculine. It's a verb derived from.AMOG (alpha male of group).
The immortal cancer thing is a plot point in the Baru Cormorant fantasy series by Seth Dickinson. It's an interesting series, if not exactly my cup of tea.
Love that series, though first book is best. Really good writing.
Also makes reference to The Secret of Our Success culture stuff in third book, plus misc other rat-adjacent tropes.
It's also kind of like that black lady whose tumor cells were remarkably good for vaccine tests and her cell line has spread to labs all over the world decades after she died.
Henrietta Lacks.
Thanks.
Brilliant.
And canine transmissible venereal tumor is real.
Yeah, I think I heard it on Radio Lab.
I have learned, to my horror, that you're correct.
This struck too close to home... Up to and including the fact that my daughter's name is Astra 😂😂
> “The moneychangers in the Temple were a housing problem!” objects the YIMBY. “If first-century Jerusalem had been vertically denser, there would have been room for banks in the commercial district. The only reason they had to invade the Temple grounds was because of artificial land scarcity.“
Believe it or not, I have heard nearly this exact sermon preached at an Eastern Orthodox Church. Not the bit about "room for banks in the commercial district," but the rest of it. The thrust of the argument was that the Sadducees, the Jewish faction that controlled the temple (and the rivals of the Pharisees, the other major Jewish sect, from whose tradition both Christianity and modern Judaism descend), interpreted the law in an incredibly strict way, particularly the bit about not travelling on the Sabbath. The upshot was that in order to live up to the strictures of the law to the Sadducee standard, you essentially had to be very rich, and you had to live close to the temple. This had a predictable effect on housing prices close to the temple.
Further, the bit about the money-changers had to do with the monopolization of a scarce non-produced asset, e.g. Hasmodean currency from before the Romans took over (you couldn't use pagan money with the Emperor's image in the temple, but you could exchange it for these ancient coins, at exchange rates the moneychangers set. And then give the ancient coins right back when you made your purchase). So in addition to an economic struggle over literal land, you also had one over a scarce non-produced monopolized asset (Hasmodean coins).
Government regulations are what crucified Christ.
Just to chime in with the relevant Jewish law, the first point is correct, but houses built on the outskirts of the city would count as within the area of the city, so unless there is some other non-biblical requirement that the Sadducees imposed, there wasn't really an artificial scarcity - just the natural one of how far you can travel. The second point, though, is exactly right even according to the Pharisees - see the Mishna Shekalim, which explains the specifics of what can be given, and the requirement to use a moneychanger and pay a specific fee.
Thanks! So that would still imply Jerusalem real estate itself would fetch a premium, but not as concentrated right around the temple itself? I also might be misremembering the specific details of the sermon.
Yeah, I mean, there's nothing that's going to fix the fact that places close to the center are more valuable and expensive than those further away, especially before the existence of technology to build high-density housing! And we certainly see this same issue in modern Jewish communities, both in the US and abroad, where walking distance to the synagogue is a key requirement.
Would an eruv have an effect on this? Or is that just getting around a different complication, and observant Jews would still need to walk to the synagogue even inside an eruv?
They'd still need to walk, but the Eruv would let them carry things and push strollers, so it would help slightly.
> especially before the existence of technology to build high-density housing
Off-topic nitpicking, but this technology already existed at the time. Most lower-class citizens in Rome lived in low-rise apartment blocks called insulae which Wikipedia says "could be built up to nine storeys, before Augustus introduced a height limit of about 68 feet".
Wow! I had no idea that pre-modern structures could be built that high!
I mean, excepting those with huge arches and supports like the Colosseum, of course.
To go back to the earlier point, there were also Jewish law considerations that made some types of multi-story buildings a problem - specifically, the laws of ritual purity, so that the priests and those who were going to the temple, or eating sanctified foods, could not live in buildings in which ritual impurity was spread between separate areas, via the roof. (But the details of this are very, very complex.)
That sounds wrong: in general the criticism of the sadducees was that they weren't strict enough, in that they were willing to accommodate Roman demands as to Temple practice in order to maintain their own positions. They also tended to reject glosses on the Torah. I can believe that land prices near the Temple were inflated for a reason like that, but I think it would have been motivated by some other group.
As for the Temple tax, it was paid in Tyrian shekels. These continued to be minted, so they weren't a scarce resource, but the Romans allowed them to be minted on condition that they were only used for the purpose of paying the tax (since in general they mandated the use of Roman currency). Accordingly, you had to change your ordinary money for Temple money in order to pay the tax. Oddly the Tyrian shekel bore the image of Melqart, so the requirement doesn't seem to have been a rejection of pagan images per se. I think the issue is that Exodus specifies the tax as half a shekel "according to the shekel of the sanctuary", but there was no Roman coin matching this standard.
> As for the Temple tax, it was paid in Tyrian shekels.
This strikes me as very strange. If they're being minted for the sole purpose of being used at the Temple, why not mint them right there in Jerusalem, and why include a pagan image? It seems to me that an image of a pagan god would be even worse than an image of a mortal man.
I did a little searching and found <a href="https://www.begedivri.com/shekel/J-Tyrian.htm">a webpage explaining</a> that the problem was the purity of the silver used in the coin. Myself, I'd say that an image of Melqart is even worse than lower-purity silver, but apparently the rabbis at the time disagreed with me.
The Tyrian shekel, despite its name, was in fact minted in Jerusalem during Jesus' lifetime. Per the same link above, the mint in Tyre had closed in 19 BCE. My understanding is that Exodus 30:13-15 was read as requiring a precise amount of silver, neither more nor less.
On the opposite side of the coinage/moral axis, in Roman territories, it was illegal to use coins with the emperor's head on them in brothels. Special brothel coins were minted w/o the emperor's visage on them. My understanding is that they had an image of people fornicating stamped on them. Not sure if they had the same metallic composition or whether they were more like poker chips. If like poker chips, it raises questions in my mind about Gresham's Law as applied to naughty money droving out moral money.
Are you talking about these? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spintria
As I understand it, no one actually knows what these things were for.
Yes! Mary Beard mentioned them in one of her lectures on Youtube. I think they dug some up in a bordello in Pompeii. I thought it was interesting because it reminded me of the Chinese Emperor's name taboo.
I'd been very content in my decision to not move to California, but now I have intense FOMO.
I live in the bay area and I've never seen anything like this, but then again, I don't go to many parties.
It offends my sense of social justice that Scott is this funny in addition to being so smart. I'm really looking forward to gpt5 so I can tell myself he's having the humor parts written by ai.
Buying an anti-stock seems pretty similar to being short a call option: you take in a small premium in exchange for the obligation to buy a share at a specific time in the future
That's equivalent to writing a call option, right?
Antistocks seem different ... they are tied to things other than share price (dividends and possibly profits?). Much less likely to have a huge downside.
Yes, being short on a call option is the same as writing a call option. It would also be equivalent to buying a put option, which is possibly a better example since the bank / financial institution is long the underlying when writing the put.
You could structure the option to include payouts for dividends if you wanted (it's just contract!)
Hmm ... I don't believe buying a put option is equivalent to writing a call option. Buying a put costs cash, and has bounded downside (the cash you paid). Writing a call *gives you cash*, and has unbounded downside.
There are four distinct actions in put/call options: writing a call, buying a call, writing a put, and buying a put. All have different characteristics.
Yeah, this is different, because the option is going to be realised at some point, whereas the anti-stock never will be. Also, it doesn't seem to take into account share buybacks or new issuance, so the anti-stock won't track the stock price in the long run.
Ah yeah, realise I didn't read the description closely enough. You'd have to create this by being short and long each side of the dividend date. Great idea, can't wait until an IB gets into this
“What, please tell me, is the right branding for gaining immortality by becoming a sexually-transmitted cardiac tumor?”
This made me laugh out loud. Bravo.
"It's not a tomah!!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_FRWUPcR7Y
Loved it, thank you!
>”There are immortal species of mammal? I didn’t know that!”
>“Not species. Two individuals.
OK, but what about Henrietta Lacks?
New idea: make a cell line from the person, popularize it in biomedical research, and hope scientists keep using it for the next 1000 years.
That's what I thought about too. This way scientific research is tailored specifically to your cells!
Unfortunately, you'd first need to get cancer so your cell line wouldn't naturally die out!
Nope. You can immortalize normal cells that are taken from a person.
George Church already has the PGP1 iPSC line made from himself, which I sometimes use.
This was really good but I think repeats what I think of as a misconception about the effects of a land value tax:
"Land value tax could ensure that every parcel is put to its most productive use."
Compared with having no land value tax, I don't think a land value tax does anything to incentivise more productive use of land.
I have two arguments.
The first is that a land value tax is usually argued as being efficient because no one changes their behaviour due to the tax - land is in fixed supply and while there will be a price change of land, there is nothing anyone can do to avoid the tax. But if no one is changing their behaviour due to the tax, then they can't suddenly use it more productively. They will continue doing what they were always doing.
The second is that currently, if there is a better, significantly more productive use to which land could be put, the landowner is already incentivised to put it to that use - they are bearing a large opportunity cost by not doing that.
The real gain from a land value tax is the abolition of the tax that it replaces. If that's an income tax, then the efficiency gains are from the reduced deadweight loss from abolishing the income tax.
You know, there's a neat alternative financial system where transactions are highly resistant to being hijacked...
Not so. Under the current systems in place in most places in the US, landowners are taxed a smallish (10%ish) fraction of a combined assessment of "value of land and improvement" (property).
The first and obvious issue is that the improvement is included. Therefore further improvements are likely to increase the taxes. This is in fact what happens on the ground, in most localities when people's property taxes go up it is significantly-to-predominantly the improvement portion. This is easily solvable by shifting tax only to the land value.
The second more relevant issue is the small percentage of that tax.
Because only roughly 10% is taxed, that means that the owner gets to extract 90% of the land value as rent. While it is true that as the value of the land increases there will technically be an increase in the tax and therefore incentive, it is an order-of-magnitude smaller, and this is rarely (but occasionally) enough to justify the capital expenditure of an improvement, especially when it is likely that by waiting a little longer a different, even more valuable use may be determined and you wouldn't want to miss out on that by being locked in on a halfway completed improvement.
The LVT would absolutely change behavior around land - it would tend to make land on average less expensive, but ill-used land more expensive
It would make the upfront cost of land less expensive, but the purchaser would have to pay an equivalent (in NPV terms) sum in land taxes to the government, so all up it shouldn't make land less expensive I don't think.
It doesn't need to change the price, and you're basically right that it shouldn't - but it changes the incentives to improve or use the land differently, which is the point.
Given a fixed owner and a fixed land parcel, nobody will have an incentive to change their use of the land, because if there was a more productive use of the land, which that owner was equipped and willing to enact, that person then they would already be doing that.
However, those things need not be fixed. A LVT provides an disincentive towards holding land as an investment. Someone who just happens to have a whole bunch of land that is suddenly rising in value will, in the current system, be incentivized to hold onto it so they can sell it later. Maybe the most efficient use of the land in general would be a restaurant, but the current owner does not have the skills or inclination to be a restaurant owner and would fail if they tried to start their own restaurant, so the most efficient use for this particular owner is to hold it as an investment, or maybe lease it to a restaurant if they have the skills and inclination to be a landlord (maybe they don't). But with a LVT there is now a pressure to sell the land immediately, because rising values won't increase the sale price (which is approximately 0), and instead make their tax higher. You then have a different owner, who has better skills to enable more productive use of land.
No individuals' abilities or incentives with respect to the daily use land have changed as a result of the LVT, but incentives with respect to ownership have, and therefore individuals with more potential productive uses are more likely to become the owners and actually put it to that use.
Ok I think I have actually misunderstood what you guys are talking about when you talk about a LVT. I thought it was a fixed percentage (say 1%) of the land's value, paid annually. You guys are talking about a full blown georgist land tax that totally captures the value of rent. I agree with you that that would have quite different effects than I was originally thinking.
How is the value of the land going to go up? It is not being used for its best use and its possible value under another use might be a fairly hard to evaluate counterfactual.
It happens all the time, it's just supply and demand. Often someone starts building something nearby, and, then demand for nearby housing goes up, and then other businesses want to move in to serve or hire from those people, and all sorts of other stuff wants to move in, and then more people want to move in, and the place shifts on the rural -> city axis, which drives up land prices.
It's difficult to evaluate counterfactually, but not impossible, by comparing to prices on other nearby land plots. Especially if you allow people to bid on the land plot in question directly, then the market can answer for you.
Yeah that is how land values go up now.
But there are also transactions now to give you prices, but those transactions are often driven by improvements and zoning, not the land itself.
How much would the giant park next to my neighborhood be worth as a factory? Really who the fuck knows without a specific company interested.
And what about turning my neighborhood into a second park? Does that drive up other homes values even more, or defeat the purpose of either park?
With a Georgist LVT instead of the market figuring this out you have some underpaid civil servant.
"But if no one is changing their behaviour due to the tax"
I thought the argument was that taxing the value of unworked land does not make unworked land less *scarce.*
Typically, if you tax something you get less of it and that's distortionary. But since nobody produces unworked land (excepting edge cases like artificial islands and floating platforms) you'll still have the same amount of land as you would if there was no LTV.
The owner of land might still change.
Now I want the SHRIMP LOVE ME T shirt.
I stole it from https://ea-merch-store.sleekplan.app/feedback/61986 (proposed, not actually a product yet) - if they decide to make it a product you should be able to get it there soon.
Oh, I laughed so hard at translating 'Mahayana' as 'monster truck,' and had several more laugh out louds after that. "Live forever in the hearts of those you love." Thank you, Scott.
Back to Mahayana as monster truck: Would anyone like to try to come up with equivalent translations of 'Form is emptiness, emptiness is form'? I want to laugh some more.
Well, I tried to give it a shot, but I think the only place to go with it is the “conservatives already hate paying attention to diversity” joke that Scott already made. (According to sanskritdictionary.com, the word translated as “form” can mean color, shape, appearance, etc., and the word translated as “emptiness” could be “absence”, “want of”, or maybe “loneliness”; anyone else want to give it a try?)
Yeah, it's really hard. I thought of one that sort of works, but it's not funny or incisive:
"Trying to be stylish is just slutty, sluttyness is actually a good style." See, doesn't that suck?
(Obligatory contrast to "blows")
Appearance of absence is not absence of appearance. So you see, Buddhism actually argues for the existence of God...
It needs no alternative translation. Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form. Therefore, it goes without saying, function is all. It's a reactionary stance to hippy dippy feng shui offices and ugly corporate style guides.
Played straight, it's already "vanity of vanities, all is vanity." But after a bit of effort with ChatGPT we were able to produce:
"I'm working on a new translation of the Pali Canon for conservative audiences. I translate 'rūpa' as 'structure,' and 'śūnyatā' as 'chaos.' You see, it's perfect! In Buddhism, 'form is emptiness, emptiness is form' is meant to be a negative statement, highlighting the idea that all things are transient and ultimately lacking in inherent existence. Conservatives can relate to this sentiment, as they often rail against the idea of big government and the structures and bureaucracies that it creates. By equating these Buddhist concepts with conservative values, the joke highlights the idea that conservatives recognize the emptiness and lack of meaning in the structures and systems that society creates. It's the perfect blend of Buddhism and conservative values!"
Wait, which part of that came from Chat? Also, I don't think "form is emptiness, emptiness is form" means all things are transient & sort of unreal, etc. I means something like "the labels you are attaching to everything you experience to give it meaning are nonsense -- but that very unlabelability of everything is the meaning it has -- here it all is, before you, unlabeled."
The wording of the whole quote is from ChatGPT, though it's incorporated stuff from the conversation we had of me trying to explain what the format is and what the joke is supposed to be about, and I still think it doesn't quite have it.
(Its first attempt before I did any further explaining was "A banana is a cell phone, a cell phone is a banana." Runner-ups were "Country is rock and roll, rock and roll is country" and "conservative values are liberal values, and vice versa".)
As for the meaning of the original, it may be that GPT isn't Buddhist enough yet to understand (and me I'm not Buddhist at all).
Yeah, even though I proposed playing this game, I can’t think of a damn thing that’s amusing.
Quick, call Jordan Peterson!
'All the best stuff is outdoors?' I think that almost captures the spirit of the original post
Having spent several cumulative party-hours explaining transmissible cancers to everyone involved, I am contractually obligated to point out that there are in fact _three_ mammals that have achieved immortality: one dog and _two_ tasmanian devils!
There are two lineages of DFTD: DFT1, which arose from a female devil, and DFT2, which arose from a male devil. https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108(18)30117-X
(There are also all the immortalized cell lines we have in labs, but none of those would be viable in the wild afaik)
Why did it happen twice to Tasmanian Devils in particular? Is there something about them which makes them extra susceptible?
The linked paper, if you read it, discuss that question. Since these kinds of tumours are seen in almost no other species, it seems likely there is something that makes Tasmanian Devils particularly susceptible for it. In the paper they go through a couple of possible explanations, but there's no certain answer to the question. Devils do have low genetic diversity (thanks to hunting in the 19th Century), limited geographical spread and apparently spend a lot of time biting each other on the face, which all seem factors that help encourage the spread of the tumour. Its also weird that the two tumours only seem to have appeared in the last few decades, with no evidence of older tumours existing. So perhaps human changes to Tasmania have somehow made it more likely for the tumour to arise and spread.
Note that there are receptors on almost all your cells (called HLA or MHC1) that help your immune system distinguish self and nonself. (They also help to detect when your cells are infected by a virus or have mutated into cancer.) This is at least one reason why organ donations have to be matched, and why close relatives are usually better donors than strangers. It seems likely that the mechanisms that cause your immune system to attack the new kidney from a stranger they discover in your body one day are the ones that defend us from transmissible tumors.
I wonder if anyone has checked to see if organ transplants get rejected often in Tasmanian Devils.
As Alastair points out, there are specific features of Tasmanian Devils you can point to. However, I think the larger answer is "transmissible cancers are much more common than the few examples we currently have."
CTVT is sexually transmitted. As far as I know there is no reason to believe dogs are special outliers with respect to their sexual behavior or immunology. They don't, for instance, have spiked penises, which might be expected in analogy to the face-biting explanation for DFTD. But maybe they just had the luck of the draw.
Outside of mammals, there are now I think nine examples of Bivalve Transmissible Neoplasia, which affects clams + mussels. Some of those are circulating in species other than the species they originated in.
Life finds a way.
I bet there is an evolutionary tradeoff between transmissible cancers and some autoimmune diseases. And I wonder if the largish number of autoimmune diseases that appear to just happen instead of being triggered by an infection are an indication that we've been under selection to resist transmissible cancers.
I'd note that the dogs do share one trait mentioned with Devils: low genetic diversity due not to hunting but selective breeding bottlenecks. This diversity might have been extremely low in whatever historical host population supported CTVT's creation. (One experiment I've wondered if anyone's tried: can wolves or half-wolves get CTVT?)
I can tell that you're fun at bay area house parties
Cue Monty Python joke: "Really breaks the ice at nerd parties!"
Wow, just thankyou for the paper and discussion that followed. This seems like a good cancer to study. Are a lot of people working on it?
Shouldn't cancer be studied from, "How did this (these) cell(s) overcome their Hayflick limit?" Which is our 'first line defense' against cancer. (In my world view)
How about multiple Syrian hamsters? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagious_reticulum_cell_sarcoma
Thanks. So four so far...
Masterpiece. Sounded exactly like all those EA events I used to attend. Also, wasn't there an immortal woman who is still being used in labs (hela cells)?
Henrietta Lacks.
There are other cell lines that have been immortalized, I think HeLa cells are just the most famous.
This is amazing!
After thinking a little more I think Antistocks as written might actually be legal? They're described as essentially annuities with payment amounts tied to dividends or corporate income (not the same thing) or rents. That's not quite the same as a conventional bucket shop where synthetic bets were made on asset prices.
The SEC would still probably not be a fan
> I translate nirvana as ‘freedom’, maya as ‘fake news’, and Mahayana as ‘monster truck’. Gādhrakūta is ‘Mt. Eagle’.
OK, I want to read that. And I live in a red state. I think they are onto something here.