| Happy "e" Day! |
[Feb. 7th, 2010|12:11 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | communication, computers, e, e day, ee, energy, engineering, euler, math, people, pi, special days | ] |
Happy "e" Day! Equal to ~2.718281828 etc., hence 2/7, right? -- this base of the natural logarithms is fundamental to the theory of alternating current; it might stand for "Euler", who discovered its sinusoidal nature; 1+e^(i*pi)=0!
Take a moment at 18:28 or 6:28PM today to thank the electrical energy distribution system that gives us our first-world standard of living and which is based on this theory, which is also the basis for computer communications and modern electronic music players. |
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| "Mikey" Life Cereal ad |
[Feb. 2nd, 2010|07:39 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | ads, archetypes, atlas shrugged, ayn rand, business, infoworld, life cereal, literature, little mikey, tv, youtube | ] |
"Life Cereal with Mikey": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34wJt3pRY0w ( http://www.youtube.com/user/VintageTVCommercials )
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Mikey
This was a famous commercial that began in 1972 and ran for twelve years, according to Wikipedia (citing references).
I read an article, probably in Infoworld, that talked about a company wanting to evaluate a product, so they sent a very hard-headed guy, who they called "Mikey", since he hates everything, to go and evaluate it. And Mikey liked it!
This is an Ayn Randian archetype; think Midas Mulligan in "Atlas Shrugged". |
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| The discipline vs. the benefits of libertarianism |
[Jan. 11th, 2010|02:55 pm] |
When people are told they can't have their loot under libertarianism, they tend to become annoyed. This is probably due to focusing only on the discipline of libertarianism. Think about the benefits for a moment: no taxation, no draft, you decide what substances you want to put into your body and how many sex partners you're willing to have, etc., and abundance and prosperity in society (for each individual person). This is why it's called "Freedom". And all you have to do (as far as the law is concerned) is respect others' ICPR so that others will respect yours. Compare this with the discpline and outcome of tyranny (majority or plurality rule can be tyranny too: tyranny is government violation of ICPR): the discipline is that they can take whatever they want from you and kill you, and the benefits are poverty and suffering except for maybe a piece of redistributed loot when it gets around to you (when freedom could have provided much more, and things that the government can't redistribute when they don't exist because tyranny removed the rewards for people to invent them).
The benefit of libertarianism to a business owner would be, for one, not being shut out of an area of competition by arbitrary law. |
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| Individual Creators' Property Rights (ICPR) |
[Jan. 10th, 2010|05:41 pm] |
By individual creators' property rights I mean, reasonably interpreted, the right to self-ownership, the right to all forms of created (non-sentient) property such as intellectual property, money, belongings, land (derived from mixing one's labour with the land), the terms of contracts, derived from the right to contract, voluntarily-given property and an individual's record of his achievements.
CICPR: Consistent Individual Creators' Property Rights - the basic idea of libertarianism, or of capitalism. Spelling-out what is meant helps to prevent knee-jerk reactions. This is classical liberalism, or liberalism before it was hijacked by communism, and the small-c conservatism of the West after liberalism got hijacked and before conservatism itself got hijacked by social coercives. We keep having to create new names for this concept as the old ones keep getting hijacked. "Capitalism" also got hijacked by the corporate corrupitalists, who are in favour of more violation of others' CICPR in order to guarantee them a living; hence the knee-jerk reactions that occur when capitalism is mentioned. |
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| Libertarianism is consistent |
[Jan. 10th, 2010|02:26 pm] |
It's tough to have consistency if any laws authorize theft -- thieves themselves hate to be stolen from. Court battles ensue, and legislation becomes complex. All agreeing not to steal would be a consistent situation that would work. Laws could be few and simple, which would be consistent with freedom.
To restate: inconsistency arises from a legal system that authorizes violations of ICPR, and not from one that protects ICPR, because we know that people hate to have their ICPR violated -- this is something that we can tell everyone agrees on by trying it on them and guaging their outrage (or watching them suffer and die if too much is taken from them). There is an asymmetry there that doesn't come from abstract logic, but from the nature of reality in which people of any theoretical race attempt to improve themselves from a state of nature.
See http://capjltn.blogspot.com/2010/02/internet-will-make-icpr-more.html , of http://capjltn.blogspot.com/2010_02_06_archive.html for further development of this idea from the comments which follow below this local post. |
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