Does anyone here, by chance, have a discord invite to Owen Benjamin's discord?

I think others set it up for him, he puts a link in his youtube description

That worked, many thanks, his link in his description is invalid

Why do so many Americans think it's a good idea to give away California to Mexico? It's not, please don't do it. It's got 3 major ports on the pacific, and perhaps some of the best farming valleys, not to mention wine growing countries in the nation... It must be reclaimed.

Deus Vult with Avocados

Really? I haven't seen people repeating it like one.

Rather than even getting into the whole "apology" discussion, force anyone who thinks you own them one to explain exactly what you did wrong.

Then watch them stumble trying to explain why you should apologize.

The problem is that Starbucks has essentially been too permissive with this in the past. That news lady on MSNBC was right, it is normal for women in yoga pants to sit in starbucks all day, use the wifi, restroom, and couches, and never pay for a thing.

There are different standards, but it's not racism.

I agree that freedom of association is more important than anything. But unfortunately we have SCOTUS decisions and civil-rights-era legislation that convinces people that businesses cannot discriminate in any way.

In order to go the right direction on this, we kind of have to undo the notion that private businesses cannot discriminate.

I have the opposite experience, most of the asians I know are quite aware of how much better the U.S. is, despite it's glaring faults.

If you need some Yellow fever, I am communicable.

There was a post-doc in my lab in college who was a Chinese national. His english was horrendous, but you could have a conversation with him. He definitely thought the entire CCP was a disaster, and that the U.S. was far better.

The only reason outsourcing is profitable is because the U.S. does not defend its currency. If the U.S. had openly acknowledged that China and other countries were engaging in currency manipulation, and taken steps to combat it, most of the outsourcing of jobs would have never happened.

Now, there's a tradeoff there too, other countries would not have industrialized so fast, China would still be agrarian.

It's hard to say if it would have been better to play capitalism straight and defended a stable currency market than a manipulatable one.. but at this point I think it's clear that it's time for China to face the consequences of it's long-term economic warfare against the U.S.

Its simpler than you might think

Imagine you have a country that is really good at making Cars, they make and sell a lot of them to a second country. The second country can only grow food, and it's really easy to do it, so much so that there's far more excess food in the world than cars.

Now, in order for those two countries to trade fairly, they have to essentially only trade equal value (whatever everyone feels the fair price of each is) of each of their "stuff"

But in practice, this never happens, right? I mean, you can't have the U.S. saying, "No, we've imported enough German cars this year, we can't import any more or else you Germans will be giving us more value in cars than we gave you in food."

Because then you'd have shortages of imported goods, artificially made by laws.

So instead, national currencies are supposed to make up for this difference in value traded.

In some "ideal system" national currencies would always float relative to each other such that if we imported too many German cars one year, instead of simply stopping all imports of cars from Germany, the value of our currency would go down just a little bit when compared to Germany's currency. The imbalance in currency value ideally should reflect trade imbalances.

However... that doesn't happen either, and really can't as long as humans are in charge of currencies.

Because you'll always have some country where one person has total power, and he/she will want to take advantage by artificially manipulating their currency (by simply printing more) and in so doing control it's value such that you can make it cheaper to manufacture goods in your nation in some kind of "permanent" way.

This is essentially what China did, they pegged their currency against the dollar instead of letting it float, and they performed whatever currency purchases on the open markets as they needed to keep it there. They still do this to this day.

In this way, Chinese goods were always made cheaper than if they were manufactured in the U.S., they've done this for decades.

They're definitely not the only country doing this, which is why the U.S. has a problem, much like Starbucks. Japan (our friends) have been allowed to do this for a long time (not so much pegging their currency, but certainly manipulating it).

There's other things that complicate this, like military spending.

Actually earlier than that. Automobile manufacturing started to go to the Japanese in the 70s

Yeah. I can honestly say that I knew absolutely nothing about currencies until I first read the bitcoin whitepaper... and then I asked the question... "wtf is currency"... and I couldn't stop learning on that topic

It was a f-ing addiction... learning crypto is like picking up the best thriller novel you've ever read, you won't stop reading until you recognize crypto as a bigger human advance than the internet.

Understandable, but you have to consider the source of the valuation you're comparing them to.

If you're valuing crypto against fiat, the valuation is always going to be shoddy or manipulated.

And that's on top of speculation by people with throw-away money.

I don't think it's fair yet to compare crypto against goods, because there are no vendors who are directly valuing their goods in crypto, it's always Crypto->fiat->goods.

If/when forms of energy are valued in crypto, then the world will change.

It takes energy to make crypto, but no one is buying basic energy resources (oil/gas/nuclear/etc..) with crypto. No one sells oil for crypto.

Well, it has a conversion, but since the value of fiat relative to crypto can be changed irrespective of the valuation of fiat-to-goods, it's not a fair way to value crypto, imho.

My advice to people curious about cryptocurrencies would be to read, read read read... When you feel like you've read enough and you see future value in these distributed ledger networks known as blockchains, then find yourself cash you're willing to throw away, and find a price entry point. No one knows where these values are going to go, NO ONE. All predictions fail, no economists can predict these things. Think of it as throwing throw-away cash at an uncertain but potentially much more free future.

It's not separable though. You have to have a reward for the people doing the auditing.

Whatever blockchain network someone sets up, there must be a reward for the "miners" the people doing the auditing of the network, and that must be a token/currency.

Well, discord is p2p/torrent messaging is it not?

servers are not "servers" any more, they're distributed records, aren't they?

Service writer?

But anyone can start a server with a client command. This tells me that discord doesn't have centralized servers, that instead any peer invited to a "server" is merely another auditor on the network that maintains the chat record and distribution.

Ah, that makes more sense Edgar

The man in the picture is white, so it's racist.

Actually, there were a lot more bigots in the past, but there was also more unity around the idea of America.

People allowed bigots to be bigoted

There's also the problem of trying to interpret the intentions of people in the past. It's a problem of relating to a foreign ignorance. It's much the same problem teachers have and parents have in teaching kids. The human brain cannot easily pretend it doesn't know the things it knows.

Since we don't have the set of knowledge/experience of people who have come before us, understanding their intent for evil or good becomes harder and harder the further into the pat we go.

past*

That's precisely it. We don't have the isolated set of information that people in the past were dealing with.

We can't really understand the limitations of their thinking, not really.

Must ignore those who would ignore you. Anyone not willing to listen has nothing worthwhile to contribute to the conversation.

You haven't arrived until some communications major vying for promotion at some 3rd tier internet media company has written a hit piece on you.

It takes effort to actually understand Peterson, active listening

I think a lot of those "media types" are actually incapable of that.

You don' t think so?

Yes, but all the details are still there if you actively listen. If you listen carefully his word choices tell you most everything those philo'sophers he's basing it off of also said.

It's when he seems to go scattered in his thought train that you can pick up what he isn't saying.

he doesn't do that as much anymore

no, just actively listen, watch him fight for the right words and consider why he fought for those words.

This Munk debate on political correctness is a trashing of the left.

They've got two intellectuals up there, and they keep just falling back on "muh identity politics has been hurt in the past, trump is stupid."

Meanwhile, JBP and Fry keep just saying, "Political correctness is harming enlightenment values, removing them from society in favor of real harm to ordinary people for speech.".... they come back with more "Muh identity, Trump!"

Well, a black identity politics church preacher and a feminist.

To be fair, the entire debate panel is leftist, even Peterson.

Not a conservative among them, and this is "debate"

Holy cow every word out of this black mans mouth makes me hate him. His entire perspective is group-identity

"It's hard to be a self-deprecating englishman"... jesus...

Just fucking deal with the IDEAS for one second

Wow, Stephen Fry's closing was A+

I can't take preacher's like this seriously... we just had a black president. There are no institutional barriers for anyone anymore. If you're complaining about assholes who are racist... well too bad, we all have to deal with assholes.

And one more final smear on JBP by the lady on her closing statement... unbelievable.

I like to think of Fry as more comedian, tbh.

You're trying to say it's a bit unfair? I might agree.

But I doubt the bloggers would agree with us.

I think what that debate was was the tiny, whiny, identity-charged left throwing their best shot at two very reasonable leftists, and failing utterly.

No conservatives on stage means that was a left-on-left debate.

Well, he does practice traditional marriage... he must be a white supremacist.

I took a screenshot of what my android news "feed" was trying to tell me about JBP yesterday

This is literally, word-for-word, what was the title of the link on my android feed yesterday... "Jordan Peterson advocates for 'enforced monogamy', defends the existence of witches and dragons"

I am not making that up, I have the screenshot to prove it.

lol... someone in the comments section of that debate suggested that Dyson debate with Thomas Sowell... lol

Sowell probably couldn't handle the rhetoric speed. There's a reason men like Dyson speak like they do, because it's a machine gun that is being brought to a swordfight. Not every bullet hits, but if they can make you look more bloody than your well-sharpened foil point will make them look, they win.

Yeah, sad.

I've got a privilege bridge I can sell you.

That song was so laughably stupid. they compare a 40 year old male, who has been working on his career and bank account for 40 years, with an immigrant.... and somehow the man who's been working 40-60 hours a week for 20 years has "privilege" over someone who doesn't speak the language, and just arrived in a new culture... lol

ugh, I won't go there.

Sh0e and I do align philosophically on many things, but I get a very THOT-y vibe from her.

What was the shilling incident?

I guess I had unsubbed long before this.

I never knew any of this.

She should procreate with Skeptic

get rid of the baby-rabies.

Acceptable losses to keep the internet going.