We already have more than enough data about what happens in the absence of the FDA and its non-American equivalents. It's abundantly clear from pre-20th century history. The absence of government standards and inspection for food and beverages didn't give rise to competing private agencies safeguarding public health but with lower costs and more vigilance. It made fraud so easy and pervasive that some commodities were adulterated more often than not. Even when they weren't committing outright fraud, the absence of regulation made it regular practice for manufacturers to use compounds of arsenic, lead, and mercury as food colorants and additives. It wasn't that nobody knew eating lead was bad for you, or that nobody knew many commercial beverages and foods were tainted. The oldest reference to such problems I can quickly find on Google Books is from 1758, in Elements of the theory and practice of chymistry by Pierre Joseph Macquer and Andrew Reid:


In an environment with much less government control, the poor customer got the most poisonous wine. The poor customer also had the least leverage to demand pure food and drink, to contract private analytical services if he suspected the quality of a product, or to get restitution if a product was indeed unsafe.

This and other dangerous and/or fraudulent practices were not greatly curbed in Britain and the US until another ~150 years passed, when governments established and enforced standards for food and beverage purity, safety, and labeling.

Environmental factors do give rise to mental defects. It's not just lead poisoning, though that is one of the most obvious. It's also malnutrition, fetal drug/alcohol exposure, even chronic harassment or witnessing violence. You were the first one to bring up influence in the OP, when you said "what anyone else does has absolutely nothing to do with your behavior." This can be taken two ways: as an empirical statement about reality or as a normative statement of your moral attitudes. On the first count it is false. On the second count, just like any normative statement it cannot be proven or falsified, but I disagree vigorously. Many crimes and disasters have multiple causes. We localize responsibility on one or a handful of people for criminal justice purposes because it's impractical to do otherwise, but that isn't the end of the story.

I think that you're trying too hard to atomize responsibility. There can be more than one party responsible for a problem. If an arsonist sets fire to a night club whose fire doors were chained shut to discourage cover charge avoidance, there are several parties responsible for the ensuing deaths. Ordered by (my opinion) level of culpability: the arsonist, the club operator who disabled safety features, the local enforcement agency who failed to catch the safety violation, and the cheapskate patrons who used working fire doors to dodge payment.

If we wish to minimize bad behavior rather than simply condemn it after the fact, it takes collective action: agencies to fund epidemiological research and uncover significant but non-obvious links between environmental factors and health/behavior. An EPA and FDA to ensure that people aren't unwillingly breathing, eating, and drinking chronic poisons. Social services to ensure that children are being fed and not abused. If you think that equivalent services have been and will be provided in the absence of government action, I will happily discuss examples.

There is no more evidence for an independent "free will" above and beyond your flesh and blood nervous system than there is for the existence of fairies and unicorns. This does not mean that I think the concept of choice is irrelevant; even obviously deterministic systems like digital computers can be usefully described as making choices. So likewise can less-obviously-deterministic (though still made of and ruled by physical substance) human beings be said to choose. However, like any other organism, humans can be altered by forces not under their control.

One of the most obvious examples is the relationship between lead exposure and mental alteration. Exposure even to low lead levels in children correlates highly with reductions in IQ, short term memory, fine motor skills, and appropriate social interaction. It correlates with increased aggression and risk-taking. Children who are persistently exposed to lead are less able to do well in school, less able to compete in the job market once they grow up, and more likely to engage in crime and violence if they can't make it in normal society. Does this mean that we give a pass to carjackers if we find high lead levels in their bodies? No, but it does mean that trying to solve problems that need collective action by telling others "take personal responsibility" is an abdication of responsibility and a refusal to engage with reality.

Children aren't responsible for their own lead exposure. Even their parents generally aren't responsible. If you grow up in a middle class family America right now, you typically won't be exposed to much lead, due to no special action of your own or of your parents. If you grow up in low income family in America, you're more likely to be in old housing stock where exposure from lead paint dusts and chips is much more common, and to be located near an industrial facility like a smelter or battery recycling plant that emits airborne lead. If you were born in a Ghanaian or Chinese village where some residents make a living burning electronic trash to extract the metals, expect severe lead exposure along with mercury, cadmium, and a heady brew of carcinogenic combustion byproducts.

You don't even need exotic geography to be poisoned: just revisit the 19th century in the US or Great Britain. According to 1855 hearings before Parliament, adulteration of food, beverages, and medicines was endemic in Victorian Britain. For example, more than 85% of cayenne pepper examined on the market was diluted with various poisonous materials. The poisonous pigment red lead oxide was present in more than 45% of cayenne pepper, and in 30% of curry powders! Snuff was adulterated with lead oxide and lead chromate (two toxic metals for the price of one). Candy regularly contained arsenic, lead, and mercury compounds (and this was not even fraud -- there were no meddlesome laws against putting these colorful poisons in candy despite their known effects). In 1880 the Illinois Department of Agriculture published about similar problems on the other side of the Atlantic: poisonous compounds of lead, chromium, mercury, and arsenic in jellies, coffee, spices, lard, sausage, wine, cider, and tea. Turpentine in gin and sulfuric acid in beer. This in addition to dozens of less-dangerous corner cutting schemes such as dilution of butter with lard and coffee with burnt peas.

This is like a Catholic offering to debate the nature of the Holy Trinity while saying that the question of evidence for God's existence is "far beyond the scope of this discussion." Your faulty conclusions follow logically from your flawed premises. Well played, Thomas Aquinas.

I was responsible enough to be born in a stable middle-class American family that prepared me to be prosperous as an adult. People who chose to be born to abusive/crazy/stupid/addicted parents or in the Gaza Strip need to take responsibility for their terrible planning. They're probably the same simpletons who confuse threats of starvation or eviction with real coercion such as income taxes.

I think that Mexico could be embargoed/blockaded quite effectively and cheaply if it were a few oil platforms in the middle of international waters instead of a large nation sharing thousands of miles of border with the US. I am assuming that Seatopia is going to offer legalized/deregulated services not found elsewhere, since A) they have little else in terms of comparative advantage for the domestic economy and B) if other nations offered what Seatopia does, people would just go there instead of to a platform in the middle of international waters. If Seatopia dares to live the libertarian dream -- no legal restrictions on weapons, drugs, gambling, prostitution, or private banking, and zero tax rates for everybody -- that's plenty of incentive for the IRS, DEA, and DHS (and most other nations' tax systems, drug enforcement, and counter-terrorism agencies) to shut down Seatopia.

Suppose for a moment that you have a "starter" seastead, Seatopia, of several platforms and 2000 people that is independent from any existing government. How is Seatopia going to remain independent? You're not included in any existing intergovernmental agreements, treaties, or trade organizations. That means that any nation that doesn't like your experiment can impose punitive restrictions on trade with Seatopia at trivial cost to its domestic economy but very significant costs to Seatopia.

The Seasteading Institute offers this naïve explanation as to why it won't happen:


By the same logic, the United States does not and can not impose punitive restrictions on trade with Cuba or Iran. Theory says it doesn't happen because it would be economically undesirable. The theory needs some work.

From the interview in Details:


Only $1.25 million? It buys a few years of studies and modeling at best. Might as well believe that he's going to build a libertarian space elevator out of Legos.

WTF? Afghanistan isn't a supplier of legal poppy products for pharmaceuticals. The legal suppliers are India, Turkey, Spain, Australia, and France. The big pharmaceutical companies rely on patent protection to make money on medications. Once patent protection expires and generics enter the market, profit margins collapse and they have to find new drugs to patent. None of the natural or semi-synthetic  medicinal chemicals derived from poppies are under patent or were under patent when the Taliban consolidated control of Afghanistan.

You may have to take legal tender, but you can link the amount of tender to the exchange rate with gold. A gold clause still lets you do that and it's been perfectly legal to enforce since 1977. See 216 Jamica Ave. LLC v. S&R Playhouse Realty Co.. Gresham's Law makes sense but it also contradicts the idea that the market will always choose gold. You just named some important reasons that market participants will continue to contract in fixed quantities of fiat currencies instead of gold-linked quantities, such as convenience and retaining market share, even though it is legal to specify payments in terms of gold.

If market participants prefer gold, it's even more puzzling that gold doesn't dominate savings. Right now Apple is sitting on more than $75 billion in cash. Microsoft has more than $50 billion and Google more than $35 billion. They don't appear to be in a hurry to spend it. There are many large companies with multiple billions in cash on hand. Why not convert it to gold if gold is stable and fiat currencies are unpredictable? They don't need to worry about any market share loss or customer inconvenience from what they do with their savings.

I'm a scientist, or at least I was until I discovered that employment writing software offers steadier and better pay. I was first interested in Bitcoin as a field experiment in economics. Later I realized that with wide enough adoption it could be a truly disruptive technology, due to its international reach and lack of central control. The deflationary nature of Bitcoin has never been especially important or interesting to me, but it seems to have attracted people who make wild, unsubstantiated claims about deflation, the nature of money, precious metals, and related topics. My bullshit detector goes off when someone makes a claim contrary to empirical evidence, without empirical evidence, or of such a nature that it cannot be tested. Examples of popular bullshit in this vein include "vaccines cause autism," "a truly free market will care for the destitute better than government," and "God created the universe 6000 years ago but doctored the evidence to make it look older."

In the United States it has been legal since 1977 to write contracts specifying payment in gold and it has been legal to acquire and keep any quantity of gold in any form since 1974. These changes reversed the 1934 Roosevelt order that outlawed private gold hoarding and gold clauses in contracts. Yet gold is still only storing a small fraction of US savings and enters into only a tiny fraction of contracts involving payment. If the market always "decides" gold is great, why don't cell phone contracts, insurance policies, mortgages, employment agreements, car leases, etc. specify payment in gold? It's legal right now and has been for 30+ years.

I'm not interested in promoting mercury or selenium as the basis for currencies, only poking holes in the stories told about gold and silver. I do it in the same spirit as Richard Feynman: "The first principle [of science] is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool." If I'm fooling myself I hope that gold/silver promoters will rise to the challenge and provide empirical evidence for the great stability of their metals. If I'm seeing clearly and others are being fooled, I hope that I can convince others to at least approach economics and economic theories with the same scientific, empirical mindset that we'd apply to chemistry or physics.

The Whiskey and Gunpowder post you used to start this thread says Largely forgotten the silver version of the currency is keeping its value relative to things you buy. A gallon of gas is still less than $0.20. Twenty REAL cents. Not the forgeries that pass for money in the minds of the unwary. If you think that’s something, realize that a gallon of gas is just five or six cents in terms of the old dollar bills that were also gold certificates. (One pre-1934 dollar was good for 1/20 ounce of gold, or about 80 of today’s dollars.) That’s an even more impressive holding of value than the silver coins. That's a claim that is subject to empirical scrutiny. It is not a distortion to cross-correlate exchange rates of different commodities, precious metals, and currencies. It's a test of the hypothesis that silver and gold have characteristically high exchange rate stabilities that justify their use for savings and for backing currencies used in day to day transactions. If you have a better test, please explain it and your reasoning.



Coins could be and were debased, forged, and clipped. If the trader actually measured coin mass and density to check its composition and value, there is no reason he could not do the same with mercury. In any case, I have the (perhaps mistaken) impression that enthusiasm for a return to gold or silver standards does not literally imply that every transaction would involve the trading of metals in person. It simply means that the issuing agency of a currency would maintain a fixed metal:currency unit exchange rate, and would trade its currency (paper, coins, electronic records...) for the metal on demand. There's no reason that we would have to give up electronic bank transfers or lightweight paper bills for everyday use as long as users always have the option to exchange for metals.

By that same reasoning, it is strange that enthusiasm for silver does not extend to other materials whose availability is limited by geological facts. Why no bismuth, indium, or mercury standard cheerleaders? Silver is more abundant and currently mined at a higher rate than any of those elements. Geologically speaking none of them is any more likely to go inflationary than silver. I think there is a substantial amount of magical thinking that leads people to specifically value gold or silver, and advance justifications for those metals as currency standards after they've already made up their minds. If they were starting from their claimed justifications, and simply looking for durable, rare substances whose production is limited and cannot be rapidly increased, then I'd expect as many cries for the Selenium Standard as the Silver Standard.

I think you're asking the right questions. Gold and the dollar need to be compared to at least one additional commodity to triangulate stability, but ideally you should compare multiple commodities with substantial historical data. Similar to your suggestion, I might include cement, steel, copper, wool, maize, sulfuric acid, sodium hydroxide, and coal. This includes construction materials, industrial metals, plant and animal farm products, commodity chemicals, and energy. Everything in the collection has been produced and traded on a large scale for at least 100 years.

Once you have the basket of items to compare, you can see how different prices correlate over time. If gold is more stable than the dollar then you should see a stronger positive price correlation coefficient, with lower standard deviation, between gold and the members of the basket of commodities than between the dollar and the basket members. That is, if 1 gram of gold buys 150 kilograms of steel today, and 1 dollar buys 2 kilograms of steel today, the gold to steel ratio should deviate less over time (past and future) than the dollar to steel ratio, and the changes should be positively correlated: steel moves up when gold moves up, steel goes down when gold goes down, and by similar amounts. You can even perform the correlation exercise with pairs of mundane commodities: maybe it turns out that sulfuric acid tracks other commodity prices more closely than dollars or gold, and cautious savers should actually clamor for an acid-backed store of value.

Even without running the exercise over a full century of data -- which I don't have to hand, alas, else I would have -- I don't think gold is going to perform too spectacularly. The tremendous gold price volatility around 1980 was not, so far as I know, reflected nearly to the same degree in mundane commodities like coal and wool. It may well be that gold holds its value better over long periods if you smooth the time series, but people can't (directly) trade in smoothed time series: someone who decided to convert all their saved dollars (or steel, coal, wool...) to gold in July 1980 would have taken a heavy loss only a year later and would have needed to wait 10+ years to recover anything like their previous holdings, converting back from gold to useful commodities. The same specious arguments (scarcity, durability) sometimes advanced now to justify an irreversible value increase for gold were being touted just a few years ago about real estate. Value is always relative.

Let's get back to silver dimes and silver as a value store for a moment. Mercury is rarer in the Earth's crust than silver, it's been known since antiquity, it's shiny and dense, it can be neither created nor destroyed, and supplies and production rate from mining are limited. It even has more desirable properties for commerce: since it's a liquid at room temperature, it can be subdivided for any transaction as needed, down to the limits of the traders' scales. So why do the traditional coinage metals have their privileged position, if (as sometimes claimed) precious metals are "natural" monetary standards rather than reflections of human psychology and historical inertia? Despite all these wonderful attributes of mercury which should make it equally or more precious than silver, it currently trades at less than 5% of silver's price, and no nation has ever backed its paper notes with mercury.

What are you talking about? Who is the "they" that will kick you off Internet2? Have you even joined Internet2 in the first place? Internet2 is a specialized research network. Most people are never going to publish or read content over Internet2 in the first place.

Edit: I see this idea is popular among the Alex Jones lunatic crowd. Your other posts make a lot more sense in light of it.

This requires the explicit cooperation and opt-in of web site operators, since they control the DNS entries. Web site operators can tell if Google is doing anything other than technical optimization, just by comparing the version served from Google and the original. If Google starts altering or filtering visible content the operators can just switch the DNS entries back.

In the spirit of the original list:

• Lyndon LaRouche
  
• Time travel
  
• Unicorn disclosure

More seriously:

• Aquifer depletion and water shortages
• Increasing oil prices
• Decreasing renewable energy prices
• Automated warfare
• Climate change
• Additive manufacturing
• The end of Moore's Law and failure-to-materialize of the Technological Singularity*
• Global convergence of material standards of living

Far more speculative, but not impossible and certainly disruptive if they come to pass:

• Molecular manufacturing as in Drexler's Engines of Creation
• Increasing the overall human life span or just finding a way to keep people healthy and productive up until death
• Nuclear war, even a "little" one like between Pakistan and India

*This is more of a refutation of another popular megatrend idea than a trend in itself

The story I saw was that Aaron Swartz had to keep returning to the MIT campus to swap out external hard drives. I don't think it fit on a single hard drive. Based on my past use of JSTOR, I would say those millions of articles would take up a few terabytes of space at least. Maybe could be cut down to under a terabyte if you re-encoded them with JBIG2 compression and packed them inside a high-compression rar or 7z file, but it would still probably be one of the largest torrents ever if the whole collection was released in one torrent.

I think you can read any of them without reading the others, though they share some characters and an overarching story. The fourth will make more sense in light of the others. The Stone Canal and The Cassini Division are the best if you like dramatic hard SF, The Star Fraction and The Sky Road are probably still interesting if you are more interested in the political/social ideas.

I think everyone having nukes is more like all my neighbors having truck bombs parked in their driveways. Even if they're just for deterrence against other people who might use truck bombs, I'm screwed if one of them goes off for any reason. Guns don't really compare.

The series of novels I talked about is the Fall Revolution series. I think the story of nuclear deterrence for sale is in the first book, The Star Fraction, and again in the last, The Sky Road. The first two books tell a certain future history and the next two books tell what happened after, with very different outcomes, based on the people who run the nuclear deterrence program making different choices at a crucial point in history. The third book is the most exciting, about a future where a hard technological singularity took off and humans left behind in the solar system almost went extinct. The fourth, the alternative scenario, is almost boring, about a "soft" technological singularity (and the history that led up to it) that left Earth like a libertarian paradise, with only voluntary cooperatives and long lives of abundance for almost everyone.

It's true, civilization could be smashed even now by foolish use of nukes. It almost happened before in 1983 and in 1962. More groups with nukes means more opportunities for disaster, though since the Cold War no nation has stockpiled ridiculous thousands of weapons.

Please cite a credible source for your idea that "anyone who wants a nuke bad enough" can get a former-Soviet warhead. Your gut feeling isn't very convincing.

Sort-of-on-topic for the thread: Ken MacLeod wrote a series of SF novels in the 1990s about about competing anarcho-capitalist and anarcho-socialist human factions colonizing space after many nation-states collapsed. One of the story strands was about an ex-Soviet republic that retained its nuclear arsenal and sold outsourced nuclear deterrence on the open market to groups who wanted to live under a nuclear umbrella without building their own weapons.