A Tragedy

Once upon a time
On a network long ago
Academics and scholars,
Scientists and intellectuals
Discussed logic and theology
Pondered science and philosophy
With civility and decorum
And a semblance of respect for others.



Then the Great Unwashed Masses showed up and fucked everything up.


The End

Personality Types

Consider a continuum of personality:

A.  People that will "be good" regardless of laws
B.  People that will "be good" because it's the law
C.  People that will "be good" in fear of the law
D.  People that will "be good" because cost-benefit suggests they should
E.  People that will "be bad" because cost-benefit suggests they should
F.  People that will "be bad" because they don't fear the law
G.  People that will "be bad" because they oppose the law
H.  People that will "be bad" because they don't consider the law

Problems with the world:

• If Rule of Law is diminished, people from (C) and (D) will shift to (E) and (F)
• If laws are oppressive, irrational or misguided, people will shift from (B) to (G)
• If people are not taught from an early age to be (A) or (B), they will probably end up (H)

It's interesting to consider the causes that would put people in each category.  Yes, a lot of people end up in (H) because they Just Don't Think, but I'm sure there's a pretty wide distribution across all categories.

More importantly, laws are somewhat ineffective at changing behavior, and weak or selective enforcement makes it even worse.

Regulation

Regulation only works when it's more profitable to follow the regulations than to break them.

Over-regulation simply encourages regulations to be broken.

Is there something similar to a Laffer curve for Amount of Regulation vs. Compliance?

Under-regulation can be equally devastating, but where is the point of peak compliance with regulation?

Alternatively, how else can we encourage powerful and influential people to just stop being dicks?

Financial Hockey

If hockey was like modern finance:

• Teams would be able to borrow goals from future games
• Teams would be able to borrow goals from other teams
• Referees would have a stake in the outcome of the game

Just think, eventually you could end up with teams starting games with negative scores.  Teams would be borrowing against their expected future performance, when every member of the current team would be long retired.  There would be hordes of sports analysts trying to predict the future by trying to analyze statistics of a chaotic system (OK, that's a lot like now).

A Theory of Money

Money is just a method for redistributing labor and goods across space and time.

Borrowing is a method for moving labor and goods through time, but of course time travel costs money.

Since money is just a convenient fiction, we must realize something:  everything that has ever been created by people could have been created without money.  Money did not magically move actual labor from the future to the present or the past.  Everything that has ever been accomplished was done within the capabilities of the people alive at that very moment.  The only thing that ever mattered was the motivation/incentive.

That is interesting, because the banks and governments of the world have managed to generate obscene levels of debt, but debt is just a fiction too.  It may have been used as a good incentive to get things done at a particular time, but it didn't actually create labor, it only created incentive.


I wonder what we could accomplish if we were all sufficiently motivated without dragging a burden of debt along.

Prohibition

Ostensibly, the reason for prohibition is that using them will destroy the user's life.

This explains perfectly why the punishment for using them is to throw the user in prison and destroy their life.

Oh, wait, no it doesn't.

It's like capital punishment for attempted suicide.

Just had to get that off my chest.