The whole purpose of an economy is to satisfy the material needs of the people. In theory, at least. In practice, businesses spend a major amount of their time and energy trying to create new needs. So consumers work a lot to earn a lot to buy a lot, stuff they don't really need. And then they die. It's all a tremendous waste. If consumerism was somehow taken away, many people would actually perceive their lives as void, and that is scary.
Every first time smoker will tell you that smoking tastes awful. Nicotine doesn't even produce a high worth speaking of. Still many people smoke. The only explanation I have is that smoking is presented to be "cool" by the advertising industry, at least cool enough to try it often enough to become addicted.
Advertising amplifies several undesirable aspects of human nature, such as greed, envy and discontent. It is also morally reprehensible since it uses tried and proven propaganda techniques such as omissions, half-truths and suggestive associations, but rarely hard verifiable facts.
Moreover, advertising is a very conservative, slowing factor in
today's society: If you want to sell a product, you will have to
allude to values, feelings, ideas and images which are well-known and
well-liked by the majority, thereby reinforcing them. New values have
an extremely hard time to enter the mainstream in this climate.
Example: No one would try to sell a car with a picture of a fat woman,
since, at this point, only a minority of men prefer these
women. Therefore, you see young and slim women everywhere and the
beauty ideal can hardly ever change, if at all.
In Germany, advertising by lawyers and doctors is not allowed. It works perfectly well; nobody seems to have trouble finding a lawyer or a doctor.
It is a myth that advertising provides us with free TV, radio, and web
sites. The advertising budgets of major corporations are enormous, and
everyone who wants to compete with them has to spend at least as much.
These costs are of course handed down to us, the consumers. Not only do they
suck out our brains and steal our time, they also make us pay for it.
It thus makes economical sense to avoid products which are heavily
advertised. Buying such a product means financing things you don't
want: radio ads, TV commercials, web banners, junk mail and
billboards.
Advertising is offensive in at least two ways. It is philosophically offensive, because its stated objective is to widen the gap between perception and reality. Every serious thinking and perceiving being however tries everything to reduce that very gap. It is also personally offensive. Take your average car commercial: a happy family, driving through some unpolluted landscape without any traffic congestion, everybody is happy, nice music in the background, and the text "Exercise your liberty. Drive Ford" or some such nonsensical bullshit. This ad is very open and tells me directly: "You are stupid. If you buy a car, you don't care about its price, features, mileage, accident statistics etc.; you will buy it simply because we played some nice music while we showed it to you. In addition, you are way too stupid to see through our little tricks, even though you have probably analyzed many ads like these in fifth grade. Wow, you are so fucking dumb. Now go ahead and buy the Ford."
Many broadcasters and magazine publishers today are in the business of selling attentive audiences to advertisers. This affects the media content dramatically: advertisers like to pay for consumers who are in a positive, optimistic, buying mood. Critical thinking, depressing thoughts, deep story lines: no.
Advertising is an unstable, exploding system: the more advertising there is, the more it is ignored and the more of it is needed in order to get the message across. There is no end. All paid for by the consumers.
My main argument, however, is the following: We use up an unbelievable amount of resources (thereby ruining the environment) without elevating our level of happiness significantly. I blame the advertising industry for that. The one message contained in each and every commercial is:
A ban on advertising could be enforced very easily, if one would allow businesses to sue competitors over infractions. The "crime" of advertising cannot be hidden very effectively... Businesses would still be allowed to publish the specifications of their products and services in widely available listings, similar to the yellow pages.
If you feel like me, please support the following organizations:
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Laws against soft drugs are not justified since these drugs are no more dangerous than the legal ones. In fact, nicotine is much more addictive than marijuana, and alcohol is much more toxic. It is true that marijuana smoke is slightly more carcinogenic than tobacco smoke, but the average consumption per user is much lower and marijuana can be ingested and is then completely harmless. For references concerning health effects of marijuana consult the document "Marijuana Myths". For recipes check out the Cannabis usage page.
The argument that marijuana be an entry drug to harder substances is void: Every junkie will tell you that she started out very early with nicotine and alcohol, not with marijuana. The only danger with marijuana is that it is usually bought from a dealer who also sells hard drugs, which makes the transition easy. That is however not a problem of marijuana itself but one of its illegal status.
The demonization of a relatively harmless substance has the effect that people don't believe any drug information anymore. "Maybe it's all a hoax and heroine isn't that bad after all?"
Specially trained doctors should be allowed to prescribe hard drugs to persons who are demonstrably addicted to them and who would then have to consume them in the doctor's presence. This would have the following consequences:
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People who go into medical research because they want to do some good for mankind are lying to themselves, and deep down, they must know it. Five minutes of clear thought would reveal that they could save many more lives outside of the medical industry. These are unpleasant thoughts however, because intelligent people almost always prefer well-defined, "hard" problems ("How does HIV infect T-helper cells?", "Is there a violence-gene?") to the more important "soft" problems ("How to make sure that people in Ghana have access to and use condoms?", "Why are there children whose only successful role models are criminals?"). "Soft" problems are of course much harder than "hard" ones, and that's why people shy away from them.
It is only possible to justify the current practices of using the results of medical research by taking the morally indefensible position that first world lives are worth more than third world lives.
An immediate, sensible demand is that poor countries be allowed to manufacture patented drugs royalty free for domestic use. Drug companies wouldn't loose any money since nobody in these countries is able to pay regular prices anyway.
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The current laws have the sole effect of providing profits for organized crime and stigmatizing the working men and women and their customers. The often very bad working conditions of prostitutes are a consequence of non-existent labor laws and missing collective bargaining rights combined with the impossibility to get help from the police if abused or cheated on. The pimping laws have the effect that every man who lives with a prostitute has to fear overzealous prosecutors.
The effects on public health of legalization accompanied by regular, mandatory and free health checkups (as in Germany or Nevada) for all prostitutes are also quite clear. For instance, the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases among Nevada brothel prostitutes is lower than in the general population. [Note however that the situation of prostitutes in Nevada is rather exploitative; an insider report appeared recently on the web.]
In a world where more and more work is being done by machines, computers and robots, both supply and demand of personal services such as prostitution are bound to increase.
Prostitutes perform an important service in society and should be treated accordingly. There is nothing morally wrong with prostitution: society already allows and encourages the buying and selling of food, shelter, compassionate conversations, and medical services. Buying and selling of sexual services is no different. Providing pleasure to another human being is not immoral.
People who believe that something as valuable and central to human life as sex should always be given away for free out of love forget one thing: food is in fact much more valuable and central to our lives than sex.
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It is a misnomer, because there is no such thing as "recycling". It is all downcycling. If you start with a piece of paper, you "recycle" it, you'll end up with paper of lower quality. You "recycle" again, you'll have still lower quality. And after that, you can't "recycle" any more at all. It's the same with all other materials. Furthermore, this downcycling process eats up tremendous amounts of energy.
Downcycling is not only an insufficient means of preserving resources, but given the way it is advertised, it is detrimental in allowing people to have a good conscience when they put their newspaper in the recycling bin instead of throwing it away. In truth, they should still have a bad conscience. Consumption is the problem and it has to be attacked. We have to learn to live with less stuff. Downcycling is no solution, it only puts sand in our eyes. The major message should be "Use less stuff" and not "Always put your stuff in the downcycling bin".
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I still can't believe that during the Somalia adventure, no one really asked why these people had nothing to eat but all carried snipers. Who bought those, who provided the money, who sold them, who produced them, and who profited?
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Since it is almost a general rule that better paid jobs are also more pleasant, (only exception I can think of: prostitution, see above) and since government dictated salaries don't work, the logical conclusion is to have a much more progressive income tax system.
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There is no question that these projects will become more and more successful: eventually, most people will be dispensible and their work won't be needed anymore. At that point, socialism will have become inevitable: the means of production need to be owned by the whole of society, or else how are the dispensible people going to eat and how are the products going to be distributed?
The logical endpoint of capitalism would be a number of multi-national corporations which own everything, can produce anything and don't need any workers. In such a society, people wouldn't be able to buy things, nor would they be able to make money.
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Taxes are used in every society for two reasons: financing of common tasks such as infrastructure, education, juridical system, administration, defense and social services on the one hand, and behavior modification (cigarette taxes, booze taxes, fuel taxes) on the other. It is important to separate the two.
The money from the behavior modification taxes should never be used to finance common tasks, because otherwise the state gets into a conflict: on the one hand they want to eliminate the offensive behavior, but on the other hand they want to maximize the tax inflow. Both goals will suffer. Therefore, money from behavior modification taxes should always be reserved for projects that serve the same purpose as the tax, e.g. anti-smoking campaigns in the case of cigarette taxes and improvements of public transport in the case of fuel taxes.
The taxes that are intended to finance common tasks shouldn't be "punitive" at all; a behavior that is desirable from the perspective of the common good should not be taxed. Obviously, this cannot be achieved completely, but I believe we could do a much better job than we do now. Currently, we mainly tax salaries of employees and profits of businesses. It's not a good idea to discourage people from working and making money however.
Here's my proposal: we remove all income taxes and instead increase the gift and inheritance taxes to 100% each. While you live, you are perfectly free to make as much money as you can and enjoy it fully; if you're dead, the wealth you produced will be used for the common good. This way, you can't complain that someone took something away from you, since dead people don't complain (and don't have property rights). There's another positive effect of this scheme: the children of rich people will have less of an advantage in life than they have now; fewer people will be able to live off their inheritance and more will have to actually work for their living. The playing field will be a little more level.
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The penal code should be a thin booklet written in simple language that could be taught in school. It should come with an explanatory manual that gives good reasons for all laws. Why exactly is incest illegal? I want to know.
Lawmakers should be forced to come up with a defendable reason for every criminal law they enact. Isn't that the least thing to ask for?
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This article was clearly a consequence of horrible experiences in Nazi Germany, when many Jews couldn't get out simply because no one was willing to let them in.
The perverse provision adopted now, which let the German authorities immediately send back any refugee entering Germany from a "safe" country (all countries surrounding Germany have been declared "safe", of course), would have as consequence, if adopted by every nation, that only the immediate neighbors of crises would let refugees in. This is unjust for two reasons: firstly, those countries are typically extremely poor while Germany is extremely rich, and secondly, they are certainly no more responsible for the crisis at hand than other countries are, so they should not have to bear all the burden.
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The fact that death rows are closely guarded in order to prevent suicides shows clearly that vengeance combined with sadism, and not protecting society, is the underlying motive of capital punishment. Not only do we want her dead, but we want to enjoy ourselves in the process, and want time and place of the show specified. However, once we have decided to act like barbarians and let all our darkest instincts surface, why not go all the way? Why stop at psychological torture? Why grant them a nice painless death by lethal injection? I propose that, in order to fully accommodate our desire for revenge and to place the highest possible value on innocent life, murderers should be dragged naked through the streets and then slowly tortured to death for everyone to see.
Some argue that killing a killer is cheaper than housing her for the rest of her life. This may or may not be true, and it is irrelevant: the very discussion shows that society has already acquired the mindset of a killer, namely to think that it can be worthwhile to kill a human being out of financial reasons. That is precisely what murderers do, and we have no moral right to punish them if we consider doing the same.
On the side: the US has signed an international treaty (the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) which explicitly bans, among other things, the imposition of the death penalty for crimes committed by minors. They still sentence them to death and execute them, of course, claiming that this be the democratically expressed will of the American people. Mentally retarded people are also routinely executed, which annually gets the US into the Amnesty International report about nations violating human rights. Please don't puke over your keyboard.
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These laws are just about the worst that could happen to the US. Most criminals are active when young and settle down later. With this law, they will settle down in prison, for some thirty years on average. Prisons will turn into nursing homes, thereby wasting tremendous amounts of money, money which is desperately needed for work on the socio-economic root causes of crime in America.
Not to mention the obscenity of putting a sixteen-year-old three-times burglar away for life without parole. This clearly violates the US constitution which prohibits excessive punishment as well as the UN universal declaration of human rights.
"Campaign Finance Reform" is a very popular goal, but it is unclear how to structure it, since the Supreme Court ruled that any cap on campaign spending would be an impermissible restriction of free speech.
Here is my proposal: any candidate for a public office is given a choice: they can either accept public funds but then cannot use any other money, or they can forfeit all public funds and are then allowed to spend as much as they want. In the second case, they have to file precise statements about the dollar amount spent on their campaign. All competitors in the election will then receive that exact same sum from the government. That way, rich or well connected candidates don't have any advantage any more; choosing the second option is not in their best interest.
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There's now a unique window of opportunity where Esperanto could be adopted as official language of Europe, and maybe eventually of the world. It is a designed language with numerous advantages over existing languages: simple and logical grammar, simple and logical pronounciation rules, vocabulary derived from several european languages, helpful user communities all around the world. It is ideal as a second language for everybody. Right now, English is the de-facto second language for everybody, but English is hampered by a ridiculous non-correlation between pronounciation and spelling. It misses the whole point of a letter-based script: by looking at a word, one should be able to pronounce it; by hearing a word, one should be able to spell it. English also has too many words; for almost every concept, there are two words, one with germanic root and one with latin root.
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Simply removing all tariffs does not necessarily yield efficient production: it rewards nations that impose few social and environmental costs on businesses, which has nothing to do with efficiency as defined above. A downward spiral towards lower and lower social and environmental standards is clearly undesirable for everyone but the capitalist.
A system of international tariffs which rewards efficiency and does not punish high social and environmental standards is needed. It could be installed by bilateral or multilateral contracts. The key is that a nation is only allowed to levy a tariff against another country's good if the industry in the producing country has a lesser burden of social and environmental costs than the importing country; in this case, only the difference in those costs between the two nations may be levied as a tariff.
Tariffs are never negative, which implies that an industry from a (rich) country with higher "burdens" has a slight disadvantage compared to the native industry when it tries to export into a poorer country. In this way, the internal markets of poorer countries are somewhat protected against industries from richer countries which have access to technology not available locally.
The question remains whether salaries should be treated as "social burdens" in the this scheme. They should: lower salaries do not mean higher efficiency in the above sense and are therefore not desirable.
All comparisons of the various "burdens" should be carried out taking into account the purchasing power of the respective currencies. The daily currency exchange rate is too arbitrary and does not convey the relevant information for our purposes. When using this scheme, it would be best to levy the tariffs in the producing country's currency so that the tariffs would not have to be adjusted whenever the conversion rate changes.
Some international arbitrating agency would be needed to resolve disputes arising from this scheme of tariffs. Once some countries create this agency and sign according tariff agreements, there is a clear incentive for other countries to join: they would then be able to improve their social and environmental standards without jeopardizing their position on the world market.
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As a first tiny step towards labor market efficiency, it should be possible for two persons from different countries to exchange their nationalities. In the spirit of capitalism, this exchange could be linked to a payment from one party to the other. Everybody wins.
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In every war, deserters are the most moral actors: they follow the more basic and important ethical rule of never killing other human beings and refuse to follow the more artificial rule of always obeying orders.
The UN should actively encourage desertion in every war; deserters should get a UN medal of honor and some money and a passport so that they can resettle elsewhere.
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Such an institution, elected by the one-person-one-vote rule and provided with the monopoly on legal military force, is the only hope for a peaceful community of nations. If you hit me, I won't hit you back but will turn to the police and the courts instead. We need to achieve this level of civility in the international arena too.
A world government could also mediate between the rich and poor countries of the world. Obviously, the poor countries would have the majority in this government, and that is just, because there are more of them. This is how democracy works.
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The fact that a full-time worker in a poor country can barely feed his family while one in the first world who puts in the same amount of effort lives in incredible luxury would not be considered unjust by conservative economists. They would look at the situation locally, asking questions like "Is the poor worker forced to work at that factory?" or "Does the poor worker get the agreed-upon salary?" or "Has the rich worker gotten his advantage by cheating?" and so on, and if they can't find any wrong actions, they will be satisfied and won't detect any injustice. Leftists however see a structural injustice in this situation. The problem with this injustice is that no one in particular can be held responsible, since no single action can be blamed. Moreover, in many situations, the only way to remedy unjust situations is to take unjust actions. Conservatives take the easy way out of this dilemma by altogether refusing to acknowledge that a situation in itself can be unjust.
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The reason most people marry today is not financial but emotional: one tries to bind a loved one as tightly as possible. The whole concept of modern marriage is designed to make separation difficult, embarrassing and expensive. Divorce is synonymous with failure. Many people are invited to the wedding ceremony in order to create psychological pressure: "Before so many friends and family, you promised to stay with me -- and now?" In addition, divorce is costly and complicated. The underlying assumption however, that making a breakup difficult will increase the likelihood of a long and stable relationship, is clearly wrong. If the relationship doesn't work out, then it will break, sooner or later. If you're married, it will be later. And more painful. But it will happen.
In fact, personally I find a relationship much more exciting and also more romantic if it can do without any outside pressure whatsoever. Both partners should be completely free to leave every day. They stay together simply because they prefer the presence of the other over absence. And this has to be won every day anew, over and over again. It's great if it works, and if it has worked for a while and doesn't anymore, then it is no catastrophe.
To say it with Oscar Wilde: "Bigamy is having one spouse too many -- monogamy is the same."
For these reasons, I have a problem with gays who fight for the right to marry their partners. The goal should not be to get even more people into government-approved relationships, but to do away with these approvals altogether. Gays should exploit their peculiar situation and mock the institution much more than they do now. I propose that a group of gay men pair off with a group of lesbians and then stage a huge mass wedding party, complete with official marriage licenses and all, simply to make fun of the whole thing and to collect the tax breaks. Or will the government only issue its license if you promise to have sex regularly? How often? What position? Will Ronald Reagan be stripped of his marriage license? Questions everywhere.
I recognize however that everyone living in a rich country has an obvious moral duty to marry someone from a poor country to circumvent immigration laws and provide the unjustly disadvantaged with an opportunity to improve their lives and financially support their families.
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It could and should be called arrogant to believe that one's own genetic material is so perfect that it absolutely positively has to be transported into the next generation.
Do prospective parents never fear that one morning they'll wake up and realize that they do not particularly like their child? Or that their child wakes up and realizes that it does not particularly like them? You can't divorce your children. Some shared genes and a vast power difference does not always a good basis for love make.
Planned Parenthood offers cheap vasectomies.
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Such a simulation would be started at the big bang and would then proceed with accelerated time. If the equations are correct and the simulation is good, life will appear eventually, inside the computer's memory. A tremendously exciting experiment, and more and more scientists will want to repeat it to check out their own pet theories. Eventually, universe simulations will become cheap enough to put them on every pupil's desk, for educational purposes.
Of course, you already see where I'm going here. It is pretty likely that we ourselves, right now, are sitting inside just such a simulation on some school kid's desk. The remaining problem is how to contact the kid who created our universe. Let's just hope that he didn't smoke anything.
Appendix: Let's quickly estimate the probability that we are sitting inside such a simulated universe. In the worst case, a simulating computer takes up about as much matter and energy as the simulated universe contains. In that case, the approximate number of civilizations in all the simulated universes is of about the same order of magnitude as the number of civilizations in the real universe (since scientists will not stop before they have a simulation running which is big enough to generate at least one civilization, even if that means zoning off ever larger unused portions of the real universe for their huge computers), and the likelihood that we ourselves are simulated is about fifty-fifty. If it turns out to be possible to simulate a universe with significantly less matter and energy than the simulated universe contains, the likelihood becomes much bigger. All this assumes that the simulated universes look very much like the real universe, but this need not be the case. After all, once everything there is to know about our universe is known, "creative cosmology" will be one of the few remaining sciences.
Simulating universes creates a host of interesting ethical questions. Clearly, once there's life in your simulation, you are not allowed anymore to switch it permanently off. However, temporary interruptions are fine: the inhabitants of the simulated universe wouldn't even notice. What if you see that beings in your simulated universe suffer needlessly? Are you allowed or even required to intervene? God might have asked Himself this question from time to time.
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Infinite space with infinitely many stars. Wow. Consider the consequences: the probability that a given star has a planet that can support life is presumably pretty low, but if you have infinitely many stars, you also have infinitely many stars with life-sustaining planets. The probability that a given planet looks like the earth is admittedly extremely low, but if you have infinitely many planets, you will have infinitely many planets that look like the earth. The probability that on such an earth-like planet somebody hacks together a cheesy web site with weird opinions on it is certainly very very very low, but if you have infinitely many such earth-like planets...
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Here's my personal HTML style guide:
ALT=" description in the "<img>" tag.
<title> for
your documents. The
title will be returned by search engines and will show up in
people's hotlists.
My WWW Reader's guide:
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The vast majority of knowledge and literature is stored in our [university] libraries and won't be digitized for quite some time to come, if ever. We need to teach people how to "surf a library", because surfing the internet is trivial in comparison.
Freshmen here at UCSB get a non-mandatory 1-hour library tour; the internet seminars are about 7 hours and extend over several weeks. The priorities are wrong. It should be working knowledge for every student
Why not have a "Library Hunt" just like the "Internet Hunt"? The person who gets the answers first wins a cookie or something.
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In addition, user support for free software is generally much more snappy than that of commercial programs. Newsgroups, FAQs, WWW homepages, and even personal email to the author are available on a regular basis. Usually bugs will be fixed instantly. If not, the end user can try to fix them themselves, because they always get the complete source code for the programs. Having the sources liberates the user from being dependent on the program author.
You don't read much about these achievements in the media. I suspect it's because there's no advertising money to be expected from free software, so why praise them? (One more argument against the financing of journals by advertising here...) We should write more letters to the editors of computer magazines asking why they refuse to include free software in their reviews.
The successes of the free software movement suggest that one basic assumption of capitalism, namely that quality can only be created if a profit motive is involved, is wrong -- they forgot about enthusiastic volunteers creating a culture where one's worth derives from what one gives and not from what one owns. The neo-liberals love to repeat their lies: "You always get what you pay for" or "There's no free lunch", never supporting them with any evidence. High quality free software proves them wrong. GNU hackers of the world, unite!
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Try to leave as small a footprint as possible: don't buy stuff, save your money, don't procreate, retire early, sit still, think. Thank you.
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That is primitive. A monitor should act exactly like a window, and this is possible: every pixel on the screen should not simply be a light bulb that shines light in all directions, but instead should be replaced by a whole sheaf of individually addressable thin light beams which point in different directions. These beams probably would have to be implemented as low power lasers to prevent diffraction effects. A picture is then given by specifying a light color and intensity for every addressable beam of every pixel sheaf. Hopefully, the eye is easily fooled and not too many beams per sheaf are needed.
With a screen like that, the viewer will get a full three dimensional impression (without any special glasses), will be able to move the head slightly to get a better view of some details, and will be able to focus on everything they choose. Just like looking through a window.
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In order to encode messages in the telephone ringing, you start again with a (rejected) collect call, and then you call the other party's number and let it ring a certain number of times, according to the message you want to transmit. The other party knows that they shouldn't pick up the phone immediately after a collect call but should count the rings instead. Again, a catalog of messages has to be established in advance.
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Our noses and ears are just as primitive as snail's eyes. It's all but impossible to make out the precise location and shape of the emitting object. What we need are portable odor lenses and sound lenses.
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I argue that the Turing Test is not very useful in practice, does not properly capture "thinking capability", and Artificial Intelligence researchers should not strive to build a computer that can pass it. This is due to the following three objections:
The above objections against the Turing Test are readily answered by the Boldt Test:
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Please note that some of what you'll read there might not make much sense any more since I keep changing this document, but not the comments :-) Other stuff there does not make much sense for other reasons.
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