There is also the PETAL stack: Phoenix, Elixir, Tailwind, Alpine, and Liveview. The ordering doesn't make sense, but it is a nice acronym. I haven't actually gotten around to developing with it, but I am excited to do so.
After being prepped for an understanding of the conflict of visions by Thomas Sowell, Booker T Washington's autobiography really brings it all home as to what could have been. The accomplishments, the respect, the fulfillment.
A close second is Shelby Steele's White Guilt, in particular, his description of the difference of his parents' civil rights attitude (change the laws, get along) compared to his own in his youth (burn it down) with his eventual understanding of where that came from and what the consequences were.
I haven't finished it yet, but I am currently working through Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America which has a very satisfying history so far of different ethnic groups in America.
I also have to say that most years, I have barely been able to read even a few books. But this year I got audible and have now listened to 35 books. Of course, I have a growing queue which now stands at 176 books.
It would be helpful to have other measures such as the median and the spread in scores. In particular, if the high end of the natural spread gets cut off, the average can be skewed as there is more room below 6 than above it in a 10 point scale. The median, quartiles, and standard deviation would help to alleviate those concerns. As a quick example, compare a spread of 2: 6,4,8 average 6 versus a spread of 6: 6,0,10 average 5.3ish where that 10 ought to be a 12 given some underlying real variability, but it gets cutoff by the upper limit of 10.
As for the claim of neatness, I can attest at having graded math for over 20 years that neatness of work is very impactful, particularly for partial credit. I have often caught myself just before giving different scores for essentially the same argument based on presentation. The variability in presentation can be immense, even at the post-college level. And the work often, though certainly not always, conforms to sex stereotypes.
This applies most to handwritten work, but even typed up work shows this variability in its organization and depth.
Look at where there were massive famines with people starving to death. Were those capitalist societies? How many people have starved to death in the semi-capitalist countries such as the US? How many starved to death in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea? When China pivoted to a kind of capitalism, did people start starving or did they start prospering? Allowing individuals to accumulate wealth by being of service is the key to general prosperity. This is the heart of capitalism.
The more a society is capitalist, the more wealth gets created and that wealth is spread out to all. The less a society embraces capitalism, the more desperate the poor become. Inequality does increase with capitalism which is a problem for stability, but the government exacerbates that issue by imposing laws that prevent competition and take from the poor to give to the rich. In a freer society than we have in the US, it would be harder for the rich to become super-rich. They have to keep being useful in such a society.
Begnal famine: Controlled by the British during WWII with rice imports blocked due to Japanese occupation of Burma, wartime inflationary policies, trade barriers imposed, food forcibly diverted to those important to the war effort, etc. These were not capitalist policies, but rather statist policies.
Ireland: Reading the description of Ireland, it sounded like aristocratic English landlords brutalizing tenants. I could not find a definitive claim about how the land was acquired, but it did not sound like capitalist acquirement of lands, but rather forceful appropriation. A significant factor was the inability of tenants to profit from improvements which could be taken away from them at anytime by the absentee landlords except in Ulster which then prospered more than the rest. It should be noted that the migration of the Irish to a much more capitalist society (US) is what helped minimize the deaths of the famines. This can certainly be a warning about potential dangers of massive land holdings and could arise from capitalist accumulation, but it is not clear that it actually was such a thing. Rather, it seems more akin to imperialist extraction.
Cuba: Not sure what you mean. Do you mean the various periods of famine under communist rule? Are you blaming the US statist policies of trade embargos? I found the following article to be a succinct and seemingly balanced history of Cuban farming in the past few decades: https://www.anywhere.com/cuba/travel-guide/agriculture Despite embargos, the US has supplied a lot of food to Cuba. Cuba got out of some of the worst famine by doing half measures towards privatized farming though they never let the markets really work as they should.
Dust bowl: I can't find any statistics about deaths. There was massive migration to more profitable areas which allowed these people to survive. It isn't pleasant, but it is better than starvation. This is how capitalism works when disaster strikes. It doesn't prevent the problems, but it does mitigate them by allowing people the agency to adjust their lives to maximize their chances for success. Is your blame on capitalism about the bad farming practices employed? I am not sure that any other governing ideology would have had different outcomes. But the farmers learned what needed to be done and have implemented it such that those conditions have not returned for almost a century. It should be noted that the 1930s time period coincided with strong federal government intervention in the economy as they implemented work restrictions, price controls, wage controls, and explicit governmental crop destruction policies. In fairness, they also implemented measures to deal with the underlying problems causing the Dust Bowl.
This seems like a horrible notion of how to run a human society and is shocking if that is a foundational observation leading to his anarchist outlook. In a capitalist society, someone who refuses to share also fails to thrive as much as they could (natural consequence), possibly falling into poverty. But there is no need to violently rip them apart. In a society in which all is given freely, the only alternative for lack of cooperation would seem to be active punishment, either violence or some kind of exiling.
Even if one is okay with punishing those who refuse to work for the good of all, when does it get invoked? Who decides? What if there is a mistake in that notion?
And this is in the context in which work is generally simple to observe and equate. In a modern society, work is very unequal. How do you figure out appropriate levels of working across nursing, serving coffee, working in a sewage treatment plant, mining, farming, teaching, walking dogs, long-distance hauling, programming, managing, etc. Who would make those decisions? Do you have agreed upon shifts? If someone shows up late or doesn't show up, is there some consequence meted out by someone?
In an economic system, one has the price system where all of that gets figured out. If you think you are underpaid in such a system, you can seek to get paid more by doing something else. If you think someone is overpaid, you can undercut their prices. If you don't show up for work, you don't get paid. This creates the changing conditions that lead to better allocation of resources, including labor. It is unclear how this could work in a society where everyone just works for the betterment of society and the fruits of all labor are distributed "equally" (things are not equal, so someone has to decide some kind of price-equivalent system for this, I presume)?
> Who would make those decisions?
Some anarchists have everyone vote on such matters. Some have a legal system that is elected.
> Do you have agreed upon shifts?
Yes. These are established by vote of the workers.
> If someone shows up late or doesn't show up, is there some consequence meted out by someone?
Yes.
Rather than using prices to set which work is desirable people vote on it. Some anarchist societies today distribute undesirable work across the entire community. Everyone takes one cleaning shift a week for example.
If you're curious, you should read The Dispossessed. I especially recommend that book because it does not paint a utopian picture of an anarchist society. And most anarchists will be honest that you will loose benefits moving from a capitalist-statist political economy to an anarchist one. The goal in moving to an anarchist society is not to create a society where individual access to material wealth is the same as in a capitalist society. The goal is to create a society in which the unstated forms of domination that exist in "free" societies today are weakend.
There's all sorts of interesting arguments about how various libertarian societies would enforce their non-aggression, property rights and contract law etc.
It's very lazy to claim that any society doesn't have this requirement.
Also, anarchism (or socialism) and markets are not necessarily mutually exclusive, there's many different types, though some of those may claim they are exclusive and only theirs is the true anarchism/socialism.
A book that made the idea of a lack of government believable and appealing to me is David Friedman's Machinery of Freedom. He presents a flushed out vision of a withered state and it is the anarcho-capitalist version of anarchy, the only version which I feel is realizable without force-based coercion.
The idea is to envision a society which is stable, but has no government and yet not perfect people. There can still be theft, violence, laziness, polarizing differences of opinion, etc. but the society thrives despite the absence of a government and nimbly handles these problems. He presents a vision of how it could work. It is not a prescription since it is impossible to prescribe an anarchic society as there is nothing to prescribe to. The criminal justice system becomes a bunch of competing rights organizations, similar to competing insurance companies. It allows for economic evolution of laws as everyone can choose what kind of system they want to be governed by and conflicts of competing legal systems get negotiated and arbitrated. One can choose not to be governed by any laws, but if that individual comes into conflict with others, then there is no one to defend them. They are not automatically cast out for not being part of anything.
Most other anarchic systems seem to assume unity of purpose, a good work ethic, a lack of criminality, and an inability to fundamentally dissent from what the larger group wants. They often get presented as more of a direct democratic government that everyone belongs to while Friedman's approach is literally a lack of any coercive government. There is no governing body that all must yield to, including the collective. The fundamental transactions between people are voluntary and coercion to produce societal needs is both unnecessary and rejected. I find it to be a believable society with the people we have.
The idea of an anarcho-capitalist society functioning peacefully is pure delusion and ignores basically everything from history and observations of reality. It most importantly ignores the concept of power. There would be no free exchange at all. It would be all coercion all the time, an actual hellworld.
I'd be curious to know how many speed up the videos versus cc it. I know I prefer most videos at faster speeds unless there is a lot of music in it. But cc'ing it with faster speeds is difficult.
As a side note, I think the Rings of Power would be way more enjoyable if I could just 2x it. Kind of hoping someone here will say "You can do that, just ..."
I think there will be a trend of content being made specifically with a faster playback speed in mind. I watch my 10 year old son who habitually watches videos at 2x and I can't believe that its not the same for many other kids.
Why would the wages need to increase? UBI is additive to wages. It is not like welfare where one loses the money when one starts working. For the welfare state, you absolutely have to raise the wages to be above whatever the government is giving to those without money. UBI is explicitly intended to do away with that problem. In other words, if someone is willing to work for 20k a year now and we roll out a UBI that gives everyone 12k a year, then the 20k job is still an attractive option and would net them 32k. Now, it may be the case that the wage goes down to 8k which effectively leads to a UBI subsidizing the employers. That would be unfortunate and is a risk, but it certainly does not lead to a disadvantage compared to other countries in terms of employers though it may lead to disadvantages for attracting high earners.
A UBI also opens up the possibility of removing the minimum wage which not only allows for more people to obtain jobs, but also raises the competitiveness with other countries, potentially (it depends on whether the minimum wage is actually effective in raising wages above the market rate).
Doing a grueling low wage job because you need those wages to survive makes sense. Doing low wage jobs for the extra cash is not, because it's not a lot of cash. Money, like everything, has a diminishing marginal value. The first bunch of money is keeping you alive. If the government provides you that first bunch, your employer is providing much less value to you. Everyone preaches about how UBI will allow people to start businesses and learn skills. Well yeah, but that means they're dropping out of the labor force because they don't need to do those jobs.
How do you incentivize people to work? Pay them more.
In other words: We have to keep the slaves in poor conditions or else they'll quit working. The only thing we are able to provide to make them work, is a threat of death if they don't. No carrots, only sticks.
If you're in a globalized economy that has scarcity, yes. That is the unfortunate truth of it. And you're mostly deluding yourself if you manage to outsource your need for slaves to other countries and think you've done anything particularly good. It's a prisoner's dilemma over and over.
You already figured out the problem. If you agree to work a job for 20k, why would you not agree to work a job for 12 plus 8k? Earnings are the same, except now every net tax payer pays a subsidy for employers to pay pityful wages.
If mass unemployment was a substantial problem, this may well be an acceptable tradeoff, but in the current economy it is not.
This is backwards and incorrect. If you make $1M per year working very hard and now get $999k for free, are you going to work very hard for the extra $1k? No, because the marginal value of the $1k is trivial, but the labor effort is the same.
If you get just enough to survive from the government, and employers try to reduce wages because you'll net out the same, you probably won't accept the job. It's not worth your time. Even as a dirt poor person, your time is valuable. An employer needs to pay you more so that it's worth your effort again. You have much higher freedom to shop around too.
If the government does not pay you enough to survive (non basic income), you're still in a precarious position, but you are still in a BETTER position than you were without the funds. This will RAISE wages, which will in turn RAISE prices, until the equilibrium is found where the UBI is distinctly not sufficient and you need to work to survive. You will still be poor. You will make more wages, but have about the same level of real wealth. You will be a bit safer due the guaranteed portion of income.
Until globalization kicks in and makes your specific local circumstances much worse.
The evolution of the system in Bohmian mechanics includes the motion of the particles which is a non-linear and highly non-trivial equation which allows for chaos to appear.
Classical mechanics emerges from the theory under suitable conditions. An outline of the reasoning can be found in https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0112005
There is a strong suspicion in the Bohmian community that the sensitivity to initial conditions in Bohmian mechanics is an important piece of the sociological explanation for the embrace of the collapse theory of QM a hundred years ago, long before a full appreciation of such sensitivity was widely appreciated in non-linear dynamic systems.
