dsheets

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This time displacement of value service is exactly why the industry is financialized. Of course, the financialization creates a huge moral hazard and introduces middlemen that take more than they supply in many cases but the near universal demand for wealth preservation for old age is one of the few truly noble pursuits of finance. Now if only pension systems didn’t treat their beneficiaries as contemptible idiots who cannot be allowed to manage their own finances, the rampant corruption might stop.

I agree with you. The island simplification came later. If the economy is broken, gold is not a good investment. This doesn’t change the fact that it is also non-extractive of future labor, though, which was the purpose of the thought experiment.

The problem with productive assets or non-inert commodities in this thought experiment is that they are much more dynamic — inert commodity prices are much easier to reason about.

You are fundamentally correct about capital accumulation, though. If you want future value, you should accumulate something (dynamic or static) that is valuable in the future — extracting rents or expropriating labor via force in the future are not pro-social behaviors.

It depends on how the problem is defined.

Do private pensions solve the “I hope I have money in old-age” problem better in a fundamental way? No.

Do they solve the “I want to pay more now to have more later” problem better? Probably in most systems.

Do they solve the “what is the fair value of grandpa’s pension this month” problem? Definitely yes.

If you want guarantees, the state can pull tricks to make you believe that the world is static… for a while. Eventually, reality will force the state to price pensions in line with demographics or suffer increasingly severe budget crises.

In the past, your children were your pension. This is a private system. When responsibility for old-age is distributed without accounting for monetary or demographic contribution, politicians can promise the moon. Stop eating the young.

Yes, a nonzero quantity of labor is necessary to avoid a pathological economy? This is not debated.

The question is how the future value is priced. The original assertion was that future value must come from labor and there is no difference between direct redistribution and private transactions (of which only rent extraction was given as an example). My counter is that there are alternatives that are neither taxation nor rent-seeking. In particular, the holding of assets to be later sold is a store of value that notably does not depend on future labor any more than any functioning economy depends on labor as an input.

We have pretty robust systems for deciding what (most) things are worth via supply and demand. Claiming that future value must be extracted from future labor is just false — a system with some backpressure on the payouts to retirees is much more sustainable than one without backpressure. In your simplified thought experiment, you must agree that there is no dependence on future labor as none exists! The pension is also not effective, of course, but that is to be expected — essentially no pension is effective when stranded on a desert island.

(To be clear, I don’t advocate storing gold by birth year as a practical way to run a pension scheme.)

You have demonstrated only that the thought experiment is dependent on the future market for a commodity and not on some future labor being exploited. Value in the future is dependent on demand and not on extraction from labor.

Yes, it could be! Life is risky. Nothing is guaranteed. I’d rather have the market set the rate of redistribution than have it done by fiat in a completely unsustainable way.

In your simplification, you have removed everything that isn’t labor (i.e. demand for commodities) as well as labor. It is unsurprising that working to bury gold is a bad investment in this scenario. Instead, you should have invested in a farm and some robots. Sorry, there’s no free lunch if you can’t steal it from younger generations.

Edit: you’ve revised history and now added a bit about “similar arguments” and inflation. The answer is simple: yes, you might get back less real value than you put in. Yes, there might be inflation. This is fine and normal and would be preferable to the present system and is not dependent on future labor in the same way as direct redistribution. There are no guarantees. ‘Enforcing’ guarantees is a recipe for disaster as we are now seeing unfold.

If you redefine everything as deriving value from labor and labor alone, OK. Government intervention is not a given, is not universal, and its impact on labor isn’t unique.

There are other investment vehicles besides equity and other ways to take value from past into future that are neither garnishing the wages of children and grandchildren (most current state systems) nor investing in artificially inflated markets.

Just as a thought experiment, consider if all state pension contributions were just used to immediately purchase gold on the open market that was then put into a vault labelled with the year of birth of the contributor. Please explain how this (obviously naive) strategy is dependent on future labor. As far as I can tell, this system would be completely market-based and future labor would likely benefit as their “gold” might be cheaper as there would be less demographic demand.

Why must the money come from future labor? Money can be saved and invested. Let them eat their capital and not their young.

2년 전discuss

I use it with WireGuard.

2년 전discuss

I contributed improved ipset support to this project. As far as I know, it’s one of the few off-the-shelf DNS servers that can insert result records into Linux ipsets to enable domain-based firewall policy. I run it on OpenWRT and use the ipset support to open the default drop firewall from my “smart” projector on my IoT subnet to NetFlix and YouTube. It sets the ipset entry expiry to the DNS TTL. Now, the only way for the machine to connect to the internet is to resolve a whitelisted domain and it can only access while the record is fresh. I haven’t encountered any issues so far. I take it that some Chinese users use this same functionality to selectively VPN domains to evade GFW.

2년 전discuss

We agree. You don’t want universal computation in your configuration. Your “gas” approach is the right one and very weak computationally. I further posit that you don’t even want to offer gas fuelled TC and everyone would be happy with a provably total primitive recursive language fuelled by gas. Why? Accidents happen. I’d rather have my configuration tool tell me statically that some construct isn’t provably terminating than wait to find out later when someone imports my config snippet library and uses it in an unexpected way.

2년 전discuss

The article did not advocate for a TC config language. I think Ruud would probably have been happy with a total primitive recursive language.

2년 전discuss

Spam. Please flag and remove.

3년 전discuss

Classical logic embeds in intuitionistic logic by Gödel–Gentzen see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-negation_translation

3년 전discuss

I recommend creating a pyclass over a struct that stores the converted data. Instantiate it once and then repeatedly call a function on it in a pymethods impl with the parameters that differ.

dsheets · HackerTrans