Astrohacker's comments

Thanks. This looks right up my alley.

Thanks for the response. I believe many forms of AI will be huge industries (of course, they already are, but they will be bigger in the coming decades):

* consumer products

* AI as a service, like more advanced search engines

* AI for businesses, like data analysis

Of these, my favorite is AI as a service, because for a lot of reasons I believe that will be first kind of AI to be very disruptive (primarily, if you do it as a service you will have access to more computational power, and thus could do more sophisticated AI).

I am actually somewhat interested in finance, so a hedge fund would be great if it somehow involved AI. However, I believe that fractional reserve banking is fraudulent, so if the hedge fund is part of a bank, I would probably not be interested (and they probably wouldn't hire me, since I've written articles in public about this).

I live in the midwest now, but I'd be willing to live pretty much anywhere in the developed world.

Things have gotten better for most people because of moral advances and technological advances. But government has gotten worse and has slowed down progress.

You wouldn't replace it with anything. You'd need a cultural change where people recognized that stealing is always wrong, even if they call it taxes and declare it legal. Police and courts would be businesses like any other and not funded by force.

As for examples, America was founded in liberty. Unfortunately the nightmare scenario is playing out in real time as the US evolves from the tiny government of two centuries ago into the police state of tomorrow (today?). All libertarian societies I'm aware of eventually give way to the nightmare of the state. So, nope, I can't give you any examples of a libertarian society that lasted indefinitely. But brief liberty is better than none.

The only way I can see liberty playing out in a sustainable way is if the entire planet becomes libertarian so that there are no giant concentrations of force capable of taking it over and turning it back into a state. And I think this will eventually happen since it would continue the slow but steady moral advance of humanity.

Government isn't effective, democratic or otherwise. But I'm not a cynic. I have high hopes for humanity, long term. The sooner we get rid of the institutionalized use of force (government) the better.

Politicians created the problem by creating IP laws. If they "solve" it, they will undoubtedly just introduce some new problem.

Or maybe governments should just not take on ludicrous amounts of debt.

Agreed. Children and young animals play because they learn from it. This is why evolution has programmed them to enjoy it. Play=self-improvement.

The next big thing will start out looking like a toy = bitcoin

Funny. I just disabled my account this week and don't have plans to go back. Facebook never made much of an impact on my life and I've finally decided the loss of privacy is no longer worth staying on.

Edit: Now after having read the post I realize it is sarcastic. So maybe I'm not so different after all.

But inflating the money supply doesn't take away everyone's purchasing power. It redistributes it to the people who get the new money.

Krugman thinks deflation makes things worse. So if bitcoin ends up making things better, that proves Krugman wrong.

Krugman prefers the dollar, which has a supply that is constantly inflated by the central bank. But if the dollar is so good, why do people have to be forced to use it? (You have to pay your taxes in dollars, and you have to accept payments for debt in the form of dollars.) And how come bitcoin adoption has radically grown even though no one is forced to use it?

Public services would be provided by businesses like everything else. "Law and order" would be maintained primarily the way it is now, which is through social custom. But since there would still be aggressors, you would have to pay for private security. And you would probably want to carry a weapon with you.

All of these issues are discussed extensively in the libertarian literature. Murray Rothbard and Stefan Molyneux are good places to start.

> Immoral does not equal illegal.

I meant criminal as in immoral, not as in illegal. Obviously the government is going to declare its taxes legal.

> I'm not even going to get into the fact that it's not always wrong to force people to do things.

There are cases where it's OK to force people to do stuff, just like there are cases where it's OK to kill someone. But those cases are rare. Government employs force beyond those rare moral cases, and is therefore immoral.

Agreed. I find it disturbing that other commenters in this thread would evidently use this program if they had a chance.

I can sense the downvotes already... but let me explain why this program is terrible. If I charged everyone a tax, and threatened people with violence if they didn't pay up, then everyone would recognize it was wrong. When government does it, the brainwashed masses think it's a good thing. But it is bad when the government taxes people just like it would be bad if I taxed people. It doesn't matter what the government does with the money (which is mostly wasted, but that's beside the point). It is still wrong.

To rat someone out who opts not to pay for the protection racket that is taxes is to participate in the crime of stealing their wealth. That is why this program is terrible. It converts ordinary citizens into criminals.

Government has one tool that legitimate organizations don't have: force. Because it is wrong to force people to do stuff, government is immoral. Government is therefore a criminal organization, like a scaled up version of the mafia. If these ideas appeal to you, I recommend reading the works of Murray Rothbard, in particular "For a New Liberty", but his books on economics will also set you on the right path.

There are tons of free textbooks available. Google for physics or math textbooks. There are also tons of free lectures available on YouTube and Khan Academy.

There is an enormous amount of information about science readily accessible to anyone who wants to learn it. Perhaps many people just don't care about science. If that's true, forcing them to learn it probably isn't going to accomplish anything.

Not all uses of cryptography are for encrypting information sent over a channel. Consider bitcoin, which uses public/private keys and hashing functions to create a digital currency. No encryption is even involved.

YouTube is good, but it isn't really designed for education. How can you give out assignments with YouTube? What about paying teachers? A YouTube-for-education would be explicitly designed to bring people together for learning purposes. And money would probably need to be involved... people should be paid to teach. After watching some free samples, students would probably be willing to pay to watch videos from some teachers, or to have their work critiqued by those teachers.