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Comment Re:Can we ask Richard Dawkins instead? (Score 1) 182

It seems a very small leap to make when looking at something like a rock or a tree and saying "that thing sure doesn't seem conscious,"

I'm no anthropologist, but I have the impression that many cultures have attributed a measure of consciousness to things like rivers, forests, storm clouds, things that we would immediately dismiss as not being conscious. "You got sick because the spirit of that sacred grove didn't like the fact that you cut down a tree in it," that sort of thing.

I don't think that these things do have consciousness, but I do find it really interesting that so many humans have been so quick to attribute consciousness to them. Some form of animism seems to be the default human religion. We had to first pass through monotheism, and then we had to subtract the one remaining god, before we fully departed from animistic thinking.

Comment Re:strategic national bitcoin stockpile (Score 1) 234

Before World War One, the socialist movement was a mash-up of a bunch of disparate ideas, leading to such oddities as Helen Keller declaring her support for eugenics as a socialist, or the guy who first asked "What Would Jesus Do?" deciding that Jesus would've been a socialist.

After the war, the different strains of pre-war socialist thought broke into separate movements:

  • "Violently overthrow capitalism" socialism broke off into Bolshevism
  • "Human breeding program" socialism broke off into Nazism
  • "What Would Jesus Do?" socialism broke off into welfare state policies
  • "Workers unite" socialism broke off into trade unionism

Pre-WWI socialism was such a mess in part because a lot of it was generated into response to the messy, wide-ranging thought of Herbert Spencer. He wasn't a socialist himself, but his half-baked theorizing inspired more half-baked theorizing in response than perhaps any other person in history.

I learned most of this not from right-wingers, but from Reasoning Otherwise: Leftists and the People's Enlightenment in Canada, 1890-1920.

Comment Re:Well, some nukes are needed (Score 1) 209

What gave France the choice of nuclear in the 1970s was its African colonies, Niger in particular. They've diversified since then, mostly to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. I'm sure you can see the incoming problem: Russia continues to loom over the economies of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and recently became Niger's new best friend. Maybe Canada and Australia can make up the difference?

Of course there's also the problem that if everything in the world was switched to nuclear we'd run out of economical sources of ore in as few as 5 years.

Comment Re:...as far as we know. (Score 4, Informative) 75

I wouldn't say "no one":

The endosymbiotic theory for the origin of the nucleus started with Mereschkowsky [13]. He postulated that the nucleus evolved from a prokaryote (mycoplasma), which was engulfed by an amoeboid cell homologous to the eukaryotic cytosol (figure 1a; [15]).

The Mereschkowsky paper they reference is from 1905. In their further discussion of the idea, they reference a number of papers from the 1990s and 2000s, including Was the nucleus the first endosymbiont?, Selective forces for the origin of the eukaryotic nucleus, and A new fusion hypothesis for the origin of Eukarya: better than previous ones, but probably also wrong.

So it has been thought of many times, there just isn't strong enough evidence to convince everybody yet.

Comment Re:There has to be something better (Score 1) 66

The relevant "large scale" would be the largest sustainable scale, wouldn't it? If we calculate the peak power output of a hydrogen bomb to be a few yottawatts, that doesn't mean we've created a sustainable nuclear power output of a few yottawatts, does it? It means we've created an explosion that has used up all its fuel.

You make a fair point about the evidence for long-term egalitarianism. The best evidence we've got is that everywhere that Europeans explored they found a mix of societies ranging from slave-owning to radically egalitarian (what you're using the term "equity" for), so it seems reasonable to assume that the same sort of mix has generally always been present. That's why I said "some of them egalitarian", and not "all of them egalitarian", though you're correct to point out that the sort of "demand sharing" egalitarianism that I'm thinking of might be beside the point.

Although... that kind of demand-sharing radical egalitarianism does prevent the accumulation of capital, which leads to:

I think you might be confusing capitalism with free markets. Capitalism is about production decisions being made by those who have accumulated large amounts of financial or physical capital, hence its name. (And it's usually limited to non-government accumulation of capital, and it's usually applied to the deployment of capital specifically for profit-making.) I don't know of any serious scholar who would apply "capitalism" to barter systems. Even Fernand Braudel's excellent Civilization and Capitalism has been criticized by other scholars for placing the start of capitalism too far back into the medieval period, when many of the tools for deploying large amounts of non-government financial capital were being developed. (Although there are other scholars who have argued that its starting point should be pushed even further back into earlier Islamic or Persian civilizations. But nobody has said "let's find any old barter system and call it capitalism!")

As Braudel and others have pointed out, capitalism has often has had an uncomfortable oppositional relationship with free markets, since what's a quicker way to make a return on your capital investment than to use it to distort markets? That's why we need anti-monopoly and anti-collusion laws, and why they're so frequently undermined by capitalists. It's why elements of free markets like price transparency have been opposed by basically every capitalist you'll ever meet. (That's been the case at every company I've worked at, anyway - nothing is kept more confidential than the terms of large deals. This is a classic pro-capitalist, anti-free-market move, and it's one sign that we have more of a capitalist system than a free-market system.)

When you say "equal rights", do you mean equal rights to eat the same food as anybody else, or to live in the same house as anybody else, no matter how much money you have? Those are the kinds of equal rights that have been found in many (but not all, don't get me wrong!) societies. Or are you limiting equal rights to its capitalist sacredness-of-private-property definition?

(I won't get into the debate about whether barter systems as a permanent feature of an economic system have ever been anything more than a Just So story. But that's a thing, too.)

Comment Re:There has to be something better (Score 1) 66

Altruism isn't a sustainable model of resource allocation, capitalism is, in fact it is the only model that has been successful at scale over long periods of time.

What do you mean by "long periods of time"? Various models of resource allocation, some of them egalitarian, managed to sustain themselves for ~200,000 years before capitalism came along. Capitalism has been around for maybe a few hundred years (depending on how you define "capitalism"; if you're thinking of industrial capitalism in particular, even less time than that), and there are already serious questions about whether it can avoid exhausting the resources that made its growth possible. Will capitalism as it exists now really be able to survive for the next 200,000 years?

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