skilesare

Karma: 136

skilesare 19 Aug 2015 18:53 UTC
1 point
on: Open thread, Aug. 10 - Aug. 16, 2015
Does anyone here have kids in school and if so how did you go about picking their school? Where is the best place to get a scientifically based ‘rational’ education.

I’m in Houston and the public schools are a non-starter. We could move to a better area with better schools but my mortgage would increase 4x. Instead we send our kids to private school and most in the area are Christian schools. In a recent visit with my schools principal we were told in glowing terms about how all their activities this year would be tied back to Egypt and the stories of Egypt in the old testament. I thought to my self that I didn’t even think that Moses was a real person so this is going to get very interesting.

I wish they’d spend half as much time on studying science and psychological concepts that they do studying the bible...but what are you going to do?

Any ideas?

I should add that I did graduate from this same school although I did not go through grades 1-9 there...only high school, and that education was really top notch...but still an hour a day of bible class.

skilesare 26 May 2015 15:19 UTC
0 points
in reply to: MaximumLiberty’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
Sorry for the delayed reply.

This system significantly reduces risk. It is one of its biggest benefits. Have you tried doing an NPV calculation with 0 risk?

Risk is reduced by folding the blockchain over delinquent entities so that you still procure some future benefit from investors/customers.

I agree though, the benefits must out weigh the negatives...and I think they do. The hard part is convincing businesses that they have more to gain by using the system...or rather that they will be out competed if they don’t use the system.

skilesare 22 Apr 2015 16:29 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Slider’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
Ahh...I see...The ‘stock’ that consumers get in hypercapitalism isn’t a stock of ownership or voting stock. It is a kind of non-voting prefered stock. Really it is more like an airline mile. It doesn’t affect what dividends are paid or the cap table.

skilesare 22 Apr 2015 2:29 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Letharis’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
..and I’m all for profit. I think it is a great thing....I just also think there is an advantage to it being a time bound great thing. You made a profit! Awesome! Good for you! Now use it for the greater good or give it back(slowly...but still...)

skilesare 22 Apr 2015 2:26 UTC
3 points
in reply to: SilentCal’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
I love your counter-parable. It does an awesome job of showing what massively complicated thing we are discussing. Land, money, consumables, exponentionables(your seeds), all have very different characteristics and drivers. Interest, investment, production, savings all are slightly different ways of talking about some of the same concepts.

I’m trying to get to the bottom of this statement and am having some issues:

The role of money is to make such long chains implicit; a positive real interest rate reflects that such chains are possible for most goods, and any exceptions will increase in price faster than interest accumulates.

Could you unpack it some more?

You can correct me where I’m wrong, but I think what you are getting at is that the current abstraction of money and the idea of interest paid for borrowing it is optimal enough to reward the people that put up the cash for the value that it creates? And if a good isn’t one of those exponential type things, the price just keeps going up faster than the interest rate because of its implicit limitedness?

Do you think RC would be more willing to make the more productive choice if he could benefit from all of the upside that lending the seeds produces or only the amount that is agreed upon? I think what I’m trying to get at with hypercapitalism is that we want RC to seek out the best use today instead of the best use tomorrow because if he waits until tomorrow all the work that could have happened to day can never be redone.

skilesare 22 Apr 2015 2:11 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism

You point out yourself that money is (in this context) is just a measure, an medium of exchange. It is NOT the same thing as the underlying value. Now, to “get more” I would want to get more value and you’re promising me just more money. The point is that an economy produces some amount of value and that’s all you have to redistribute. You can make money spin faster, but that will not increase the value produced—all you’ll do is increase inflation.

Do you think that the current economy is ginning at an optimal output? How much slack would you guess there is? How much GDP is currently left ‘on the shelf’? Maybe you think we are very close to optimal. If that is the case then I’m tilting at windmills. If it is suboptimal, the the next questions is ‘why?’ Is it a lack of tech. A lack of resources? A lack of time? I’m not sure but I think it is very sub optimal.

If increasing the flow of money would not bridge the missing value, what would? I think that a lot of actors in our economy get stuck ‘waiting for the check’ to get started on production, finish production,procure the capital necessary to build, etc.

Is there some data/study you can point to that says that faster velocity doesn’t increase production? Maybe I should run the model with mv > 1 transaction a month and see what happens.

Essentially, if I buy a loaf of bread from a baker and the baker knows he’ll have to pay me “dividends” in the future, the baker will raise the price of bread to compensate for these future dividends. Your hopes remind me of “free energy” mechanisms in physics—if only we could set up sufficiently clever loops we can get more energy that we put in! Um...

The difference is that there isn’t a law of conservation of value. We regularly see massive exponential movements in the ability of human beings to produce amazing things. Would you argue that we should go back to barter because money is just a clever way of abstracting away coincidence of wants? Energy is physics. Money is an artificial construct.

Also don’t ignore the fact that a consumer may be willing to pay the increased price charged because the consumer will be getting that value back in the future. I understand that this may seem like a clever loop, except that people die. So the loop breaks down and you have to have a system for legacy. The system has a consequence of corporate death as well so you don’t end up with supercorps sucking in all the economic decay. Legacy and transition are in the details of the book, but basically, this isn’t a system that jives with immortality...it is a system to get us there.

My current understanding of your idea is that you basically want a tax on wealth (or, specifically, on money wealth) with a very complicated scheme to distribute its proceeds directly to the population bypassing the government. Is that a reasonable approach?

It isn’t really much more complicated than the fractional reserve system we have now. I have no delusions about the ease of bootstrapping such a system, but it really can be a fairly straight forward and simple system.

I would also like to point out that I think your fears of wealth accumulation are overblown. Look at empirical data. Is there, in reality, old old money dominating everything? Does the Medici family rule Europe? What happened to the Vanderbilts? The oldest rich family I can recall offhand is the Rothschilds and while they are not poor by any means, how do they do compared to Gates or Brin or Musk?

I think the empirical data is there for the r > g problem(http://www.amazon.com/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty/dp/067443000X/r). I think most of use here probably fall on the side that assumes technology will keep g > r, but with no promises, I think doing something is better than nothing.

What about the traditionally most valuable kind of capital—land, also known as real estate? What about technology? or non-agricultural commodities like oil, coal, copper, etc?

Certainly somethings have more or less carrying costs. The closer you get to stable elements, the more you can decrease these (Gold, Silver). Carbon is an element but tends to be a slippery beast that takes all kind of crazy forms that break down or change in some way. Land does have a carrying cost of some form of maintenance and most has an artificial carrying cost in the form of property taxes. Gesell had some pretty crazy ideas about land that I don’t exactly buy into. I don’t have many super strong ideas about it because I think(hope) we are going to be moving past the point where land is that big of a deal for most of us.

The current inflation is controlled to best of central banks’ abilities. You are not controlling it any better, you’re just setting a floor as to how low can it go.

Actually the theory is that we can hold inflation at 0 by printing decaying dollars when we need them and decaying them faster when there is too much. Tech is always going to bring about some deflation, but the general goal is for there always to be enough money to buy all the things that are being produced.

I’ll take the standard capitalist approach—if the robot down the block can sell me the same shirt cheaper, I’ll buy it from the robot. If it can’t, I’ll buy it from the Vietnamese. I am not willing to pay extra for feel-good fluff.

I’m a humanist...I guess you are not...agree to disagree? We can’t do that on a rationality discussion board can we? If you aren’t willing to pay for the feel good fluff, do you at least want it to happen? By what means if so. If not, are you cool with the status quo going forward as long as prices always get smaller?

skilesare 22 Apr 2015 1:29 UTC
5 points
in reply to: SilentCal’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
Here is a video where I present a more ‘real world’ scenario. And I mean real world in the loosest sense. In it there are 3 actors that all have their role to play and the fallout is interesting.

https://vimeo.com/user17783424/review/115279592/1bb88f885d

Ultimately It would be cool to build a super detailed economic mode. I also think it would be cool to hook it up to something like World of Warcraft.

I do need to do a better job of ‘thinking evil’ because we all know there will be people that try to break the system and use its weakness for gain. The retiring farmer issue is a real problem and I’ve tried to balance it with a loyalty that mirrors what we see in our human life cycles. It is rarely optimal for the 55 year old man to stay with the wife of his youth once she hits menopause and he is still fertile, but we see it all the time...and there is usually something awesome and beautiful about it. Someone who grew up drinking Coke II will stick with it when Coke III comes along because....well nostalgia, loyalty, familiarity. At least that is the theory to be tested.

skilesare 22 Apr 2015 1:17 UTC
5 points
in reply to: CellBioGuy’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
Increase the decay rate and people move money faster and more cash comes out of the economy which keeps deflation from happening.

Things are ok if the economy recovers. In the event of a near extinction event we’ll have bigger problems.

skilesare 22 Apr 2015 1:15 UTC
9 points
in reply to: SilentCal’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
This is a great comment and I’ve been thinking about it for most of the day. Just wanted to let you know I’m thinking on it and will respond in a bit.

skilesare 21 Apr 2015 17:27 UTC
5 points
in reply to: SilentCal’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
Can you explain more? Currently I don’t care where an apple came from as long as two apples are the same to my perception. If I have a known reason why apple A is made in a more responsible way than apple B, I have no real incentive other than guilt to guy A over B. Under hypercapitalism you would favor A. Now B could lower their price...is that your concern?

I’m not sure where the assumption that rent rates are static comes from. Economic rent just is. It can vary all over the place. if someone comes up with a magic brain cancer pill that can only be used once, the rent extracted for that pill will likely be massive. In a perfect market for table salt, rents are going to be very very small.

As far as the model goes....I don’t really have a model of actual capital and commodity products. That should probably be in the next model and it should probably include some form of competition simulation.

I’m skeptical that consumers buying based on future value is desirable, and this model doesn’t address that.

Your correct...I make an assumption that if you had the chance to buy a gallon of milk and get nothing in the future vs buy a gallon of milk and get some of your money back in the future that you will almost always choose the second. A lot of people invest in Index funds even though they don’t know what is actually happening inside them. I think some people will pay more attention than others, but on net, more attention will be paid and that is the goal.

skilesare 21 Apr 2015 17:17 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Slider’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
Thanks for the feedback. I’m not quite sure I understand your concerns. Are you concerned that people will offer different levels of stock to different people? That is not exactly how I imagined things working. $1 spent = 1 unit of stock(point/air line mile/smoods/call them what you will it is a unit of account).

In general I think we should be more forward looking. I don’t see much of a negative in causing people to consider the future implication of their actions. We are limiting anyone’s freedom. You can still buy from the less attractive vendor if you want.

skilesare 21 Apr 2015 14:35 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Slider’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
You are on to something here and I think you are tracking pretty well with what I’m putting forward. There is a tension between ‘do I keep spending money with grocery store A that I have a long history with and get significant dividends from’ or ‘do I go with the new upstart where my money is getting in earlier in the game and who probably has more long term potential’.

Hypercapitalism put forward the idea of limited corporate lifespans where the law of diminishing returns eventually catches up with the growth potential of an existing corporation. I’ve run these models too but don’t have them out in public yet.

The theory is that this increases the turnover of corporations and allows for more ‘fresh starts’. In a sense it is like natural selection for ideas and commerce, but hopefully we do a better job of transferring knowledge from one generation to the next than nature did for billions of years.

Bubbles are an interesting thing to think about. They mostly happen because of the complexity that arises in the market. When the housing bubble burst, it was such a big deal because the people that had made the profits on the way up had taken the money and run. There wasn’t a systematic way to smooth the risk. We have the computing power to day to track all of that so that when a bubble happens we can smooth risk and fallout and ask, ‘Ok, now what did we learn.’

Think about the late ’90s tech bubble. How much did we learn? A ton! Billion dollar companies are ridding the wave that started back then. But what about the people that were hurt in the process of generating the wave? Today it is tough luck. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

skilesare 21 Apr 2015 13:24 UTC
5 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
I am not tied to the name. The public facing name I’ve proposed for this kind of money is ‘Art’, but I’m hoping to engage some actual PR and Marketing people to help come up with some thing better.

I love it. Can I steal it? :)

It is still a little obtuse for the man on the street, so I’m looking for even better ways to make it understandable.

skilesare 21 Apr 2015 13:20 UTC
0 points
in reply to: g_pepper’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
Thanks for the feed back! I’m glad to be having real conversations about this stuff instead of just letting it rattle around in my head.

A converse argument is, if whatever project you are considering is not economically viable if capital costs ~ 8-12%/year, maybe it was not really such a great idea.

Let’s look at the data. TTP(Time to profitability)

Tesla − 10 years FedEx − 4 years Amazon − 9 years Turner Broadcasting − 11 years ESPN − 5 years (http://www.inc.com/drew-hendricks/5-successful-companies-that-didn-8217-t-make-a-dollar-for-5-years.html)

This is another example where we ignore time. Of course we want our companies to make money. And we want people working on their best ideas. But how many other billion dollar companies failed because their owner flew to vegas to bet the last $5k on blackjack and lost? The market will eventually settle things out even over time. If no one buys what your are selling, your creditors will eventually catch on. But what if the trade off is over 3 years you learn enough to turn a profit or, if you fail, your creditors get to fold your entity and profit from all the places you spent their money?

This could be a serious problem if we are depleting massive amounts of non-replenishable resources, but in endeavors where the resources are renewable, your only limited resource is time.

You either believe we are in an upward trajectory or a downward one. The data suggests upwards and I’d suggest it is more important to learn as much as possible as fast as possible than to make sure that creditors make money at only 1 degree of separation.

Well, yes and no. My understanding of capital is that it is just wealth used to generate more wealth. For example, if I am a plumber by trade and I need a backhoe to repair a sewer line, the backhoe is capital that I need to complete my project and create wealth. If I don’t own a backhoe, I’ll probably opt to rent one, and this would arguably be preferable to owning one as it is not every day that I need to dig up a sewer line. Obviously, if someone owns a backhoe, they will expect payment (rent) in exchange for my using the backhoe. By the same token, if I am a real estate developer and I need $100M to develop a project, I would expect to have to pay interest (rent) to use that money. I don’t see the difference between paying to use someone else’s backhoe and paying to use someone else’s money. In both cases, I am paying for capital that I need to complete my project, and I don’t really see a problem with that arrangement.

Take a second read of Gessell’s parable and try to put aside the availability bias that we all currently pay interest.

Why is it obvious that someone would demand payment for use of a backhoe? If the backhoe is in use to you and returning cash to you then of course you would not take it out of service to rent to someone else unless they offered a premium. But if it is sitting idle in a work yard rusting, all you want back when you loan it out it your resource in the same condition you lent it in. This may have the cost of maintenance, oil, grease, etc. In a perfect market this is all you would be able to get for your backhoe and you’d be glad to get it. The potential for a backhoe is how many ditches it can dig, not how much money it can make for other people digging ditches. If you charge someone two ditches for them to dig one ditch, that is ‘economic rent’ that we seem to have some differences on. Of course it is profit for the renter, but we still only have one ditch.

The use of money only demands interest because it doesn’t have a carrying cost. The banker doesn’t need to part with it because $1 dollar will still be $1 tomorrow. If $1 were worth $0.80 tomorrow, some banker somewhere would be more than happy to give it to you today in exchange for you repaying $1 tomorrow. He might even be willing to give you $1.10 that he has no use for today in exchange for $1 tomorrow.

I don’t know so much if there is a ‘problem’ with the arrangement we have now(look how far it has brought us), but I also don’t think it is ‘the best’ way.

From a practical standpoint there is no shortage of money in the world, availability of capital is not a binding constraint.

If money is so available, maybe the issue is that people don’t know how to ask for the money because they didn’t have the money to pay for the education where they teach you how to ask. :)

skilesare 21 Apr 2015 4:27 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism

If she were rewarded for buying from someone who’d get better tomorrow, she will also get punished for buying from someone who’d get worse. In other words, you are asking the buyer to assume some risk associated with the future prospects of the seller. I don’t see why this is a good thing, given that the ability of the buyers to influence these prospects is very limited.

Some risk, yes. But in the models I’ve run, the risk is fairly small and is mitigated by the fact that shitty wine maker spends some of your cash with awesome barrel maker and awesome seed provider. The recursiveness of the system time shifts out some of your risk.

If shitty wine maker goes out of business, because we have a public ledger we can ‘fold the blockchain’ and connect where the money went to where the money came from and fill in a void that, in the current economy, causes all kinds of volatility.

As a buyer I don’t want to have a little bit of risky investment forced into every purchase I make.

I think you do, you just don’t know it yet :) Your choice would be between more than what you get now or way more than you get now. If I told you that your risk was between getting back 3% or 300% of what you spent over the next 50 years, even in the worst case you’ve gained 3%. You could of course choose to keep using your old money.

Err.. would you mind unrolling this reasoning? This sounds to me like a claim that if the lottery revenues are increasing you stand a better chance of getting a winning ticket.

If you buy a lottery ticket that is good for all future drawings, and they double the number of drawings, you do have a better chance of winning. Your economic potential isn’t a lottery ticket that expires. If people have more to gain by holding their cash than spending/investing it, the chance that they will invest/spend with you goes down. If they there is a cost for holding cash they will seek ways to at least break even. Maybe you break even today, but with your experience, you turn a profit tomorrow.

What’s “non-artificial capital”? Money itself is “artificial” to start with, the current fiat currencies for certain.

A bulldozer is natural capital(non-artificial). A tree is natural. You are natural. A computer is natural. All those things are subject to entropy and have a natural carrying cost. Items whose value derive from law, psychology, math, or ideas are artificial. Money is artificial, but if you don’t make the map the territory something is going to go wonky and you’re going to have a ‘correction’.

“Cash” is, generally speaking, some store-of-value with the following characteristics: constant nominal value, bearer form, fully liquid.

And I’d contend that the store of value part is convenient, but ultimately misguided. It was a shortcut we needed to use to get from horse drawn carriages to databases. But we don’t need to completely preserve the ‘store of value’ anymore. We can let it decay just like the world around it.

You can think of inflation as “entropy” for cash.

Yes, but I’ll contend that controlled inflation(demurrage) is better than the random inflation we deal with now.

Not in your sense, I don’t. I think a $1 t-shirt from a sweatshop in Vietnam is good value, for example.

As good a value as a $1 shirt made by a robot down the block? No fossil fuels burned in shipping, no slave labor. Surely there are better and worse ways of doing things.

Why? In the locally standard expectations a UFAI will have zero interest in human economics and the particulars of their arrangement. All it wants is atoms and energy.

I don’t contend it will solve the problem, just that it might buy us some time if it can get some decent utility out of humans providing the atoms and energy while it ramps up to do it itself. Maybe it is just second. It is just a theory.

Would an intelligence not subject to the availability bias ever choose to not use a form of exchange where it benefited from all uses of the exchanged material in the future vs. exchanging resources for only the perceived present value? I think it is a question worth asking.

skilesare 21 Apr 2015 3:49 UTC
6 points
in reply to: g_pepper’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism

Question to skilesare: what is the hypercapitalist take on rising interest rates? My impression is that hypercapitalism encourages negative interest rates. Am I understanding that correctly? Or, is hypercapitalism a reaction to negative interest rates?

I think rising interest rates should be a natural phenomenon arising for money getting more expensive. I also think that there are not many good reasons for money to get expensive. Money is a tool and a score keeper. It isn’t anything real. There should always be enough money in circulation to buy all the things that can be produced. If you’ve ever felt that you didn’t make something because money was too expensive then...money was too damn expensive.

This is an issue in an agrarian economy where most of your gdp is made up of actual limited resources. As we move toward automation, maker bots, massive computing power, etc the amount of our economy that is made up of people paying for the production of ‘limited only by means and imagination’ products and services will only increase.

Interest(and note that interest is not the same thing as return on investment) should be zero or negative until every person on this planet is making a heart wrenching decision on the order magnitude of spending their time curing cancer or solving world hunger.

To make money this available you have to have a means of destroying it when you approach these situations to control inflation. That is where the decay factor comes in. You can print it when you need it and burn it when the world gets stumped for progress.

Negative interest rates that we see today are a reality to deal with. Hypercapitalism manages this by flipping bankers to a form of vc where they make their profits off of the long term success of the people they lend money too instead of the interest charged. I think this is a better way.

skilesare 21 Apr 2015 3:27 UTC
6 points
in reply to: g_pepper’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
The map is not the territory. Money that doesn’t decay isn’t representing something real. And when this happens someone ends up holding the bag.

Positive interest is beneficial to bankers.

Give this parable a read: http://www.altruists.org/f245

skilesare 21 Apr 2015 3:23 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
I’m new here, tell me more about this thread?

skilesare 21 Apr 2015 3:22 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
Potential absurdity bias maybe? Tim Cook has a ton of apple stock and I don’t see many kidnaping attempts. Someone tried to blackmail David Letterman a few years ago and that guy is in jail. This is certainly in the realm of possibility, by I think highly unlikely. Now if you want to talk about your deadbeat brother in law hitting you up for a loan....again...maybe that is an issue worth addressing, but I bet your 3000 sq ft house says more about that than your blockchain activity.

You certainly wouldn’t want to try this without some significant rule of law.

...and besides, I do think privacy is important and you have to have a mechanism for it. Hypercapitalism has a mechanism.

skilesare 21 Apr 2015 3:10 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Publishing my initial model for hypercapitalism
Yes, exactly. Most economic theory assumes ‘in the moment’ and a bit of God like reach. In the real world we have to deal with time and space.

For most of us working stiffs, when we go to the store to buy milk we are charged an large amount of economic rent to buy it cold, in a container, near our home. Despite the fact that you really need to drive an hour or more to find a cow. Given infinite time and teleportation, we’d hit the farm and get it for much, much less. You only have to look to digital assets to see how this plays out. This isn’t a bad thing. We want the farmer, the pasteurizer, the delivery man and the grocery store to stay in business, but we also want them to do it better, faster, cheaper next time. General market dynamics cause this to happen a rate. I want it to happen at a faster rate.