Jeremiah

The Best way to Measure!

People defending 28%+ APR on credit cards are essentially arguing that banks have a right to exploit desperate people. A 10% interest rate cap is common sense. If a borrower is truly too risky for 10%, banks shouldn’t be aggressively pushing high-limit lines of credit on them in the first place.

Bir baba, kızına Zenon paradoksunu anlatmak ve parmaklarının neden hiçbir zaman gerçekten birbirine değmediğini göstermek için bir uygulama geliştirdi.

The Democrats impeached President Trump a second time and actually had a trial in the Senate when he was a private citizen.  Therefore, I propose the impeachment of every past president who is still alive for military operations in which they never received a declaration of war -- impeach them all and try them all -- as this is the new standard.  The same for every past, living SecDef and SecState.

Breaking: Charlie Kirk murder trial is put on the calendar for June 21, 2028.

I’ve dedicated my entire politically aware life for 40+ years to promote Liberty, US Constitutional Liberty, Conservative, Capitalist and Christianity so that this guy can call me a commie or “trotskyits” Because he believes (idiotically) that’s what I am (even though I’ve fought socialism, communism and Islamist supremacy for decades) and that it’s what “neocon” means - which it isn’t. I’m sure more anonymous trolls will take the opportunity to make veiled threats or call me a “traitor” for pointing out how stupid and useless their shifting definitions are.

Capitalism is perhaps the most misunderstood economic system in history, largely because it is routinely blamed for the consequences of violating its own principles. Capitalism means private property, individual rights, voluntary trade, and a government limited to protecting those rights. It is a system in which individuals are free to produce, compete, trade, and prosper without requiring political permission or favoritism. Cronyism, by contrast, means government granting economic privileges through subsidies, bailouts, tariffs, regulations designed to protect favored businesses, and other forms of political favoritism. Socialism, communism, fascism, theocracy, absolute monarchy, feudalism, mercantilism, corporatism, and cronyism differ in their doctrines, methods, and objectives. Yet all have permitted political authority or privileged groups to override individual economic freedom. The fundamental distinction is between voluntary exchange and political coercion. Under capitalism, economic success depends on creating value that others voluntarily choose to purchase. Under cronyism, political influence can substitute for earning that success through trade. This brings us to the mixed economy, where elements of capitalism coexist with government intervention, redistribution, regulation, and political favoritism. When intervention produces unintended consequences, critics routinely attribute those failures to capitalism simply because they occurred in an economy containing private businesses and markets. That is a fundamental error of causation. The existence of private businesses does not make every government policy capitalist. Nor does the existence of wealthy businessmen make political favoritism a product of free markets. A businessman who earns a fortune through voluntary trade and one who obtains privileges through political coercion are operating on fundamentally different principles. Pure laissez-faire capitalism has never been fully implemented. Yet to the extent economic freedom has existed, it has demonstrated its extraordinary capacity to create wealth, increase productivity, encourage innovation, and raise living standards. And here lies the great irony. The remaining economic freedom continues to generate much of the wealth that makes government intervention and redistribution possible, while helping cushion society against their destructive consequences. Critics then demand further intervention to remedy problems caused or aggravated by previous interventions, perpetuating a cycle in which political power expands while capitalism receives the blame. Before blaming capitalism for any economic problem, establish whether that problem arose from voluntary exchange or the coercive exercise of political power. You cannot reasonably condemn a system for the consequences of violating its principles while ignoring the benefits produced when those principles are respected.

Guys who are really successful at engineering or science tend to have slightly crackpot theories about history, anthropology, and social dynamics. Why? It's not because they are stupid. Anything but. They are consistently the smartest dudes in most rooms. But they tend to assume that stuff that doesn't require math must be easy, so they often don't really think things all the way through. They just have an idea, it sounds good, it explains all the facts that they are thinking about right now, so out the mouth it comes. They don't really treat that idea like they would a turbine blade that has to be tested to see if it can withstand serious rotational load. If states of a civilization were like life cycles, they would have a characteristic time frames. We can characterize a human as a toddler or as elderly, not only because they have characteristic behaviors and abilities, but because they happen at a characteristic time. Humans are toddlers at 1-2ish. Humans are elderly after about 70. Civilizations, while they do generally decay and collapse, don't do so on any particular timeframe. Some last a thousand years, some last two generations. No, the only thing this has in common with aging is *eventual decline*. So why do societies decline? It's not because they become tired and develop joint pain and inflammation. It's not because their cells can only undergo mitosis a certain number of times before building up DNA replication errors. It's because they have strategies for doing the things societies need to do, and these either fail to adapt to changing conditions, or some social change sabotages them. The reason eventual decline is, or at least appears, inevitable, is that anything which can happen eventually will happen, and sabotaging yourself, as a civilization, is extremely easy to do. If people never got old or sick, they would still die eventually from accidents or homicide. And that's how societies die, too. Why this is important is that you never have to accept the end as inevitable. Unlike old age, which we yet lack the technology to defeat, fuckups are at least theoretically avoidable, even if we, personally, might not actually end up being able to stem the tide of stupid. You have to fight.