cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
1yr ago
The size of the Supreme Court shall be permanently fixed at 9 members. All Presidents are guaranteed one appointment per term. If there is no vacancy during the term, then the President may vacate any single judge to create a vacancy at the conclusion of the Presidential term. If there is more than one vacancy, the President may appoint additional interim justices who will automatically be vacated at the start of the next Presidential term. [EDIT] The Senate may veto permanent appointments by a two-thirds majority. Interim appointments may not be vetoed.
Interesting, would probably heavily moderate the supreme court members (to avoid being the one that gets yeeted next term).
The House of Representatives shall be expanded to 1,000 members, with additional districts being added proportionally. The House of Representatives must conduct its business in a way that allows members to participate without being present in the chamber. Members shall be required to maintain residency in their district, spending no less then 50% of the calendar days per year there.
This feels like the direction of the legislature for the past century. More "democratic", but less practical. I'm still a little annoyed at the amendment that changed how senate seats are selected. It basically stripped the state governments of their representation in the federal government.
Birthright citizenship shall be granted only to children where at least one biological parent is a citizen or resident having legally remained in the country continuously for a period of at least 3 years. Children may have no greater than two biological parents.
I'm generally more of an open borders advocate, because I think people should be allowed to work and live wherever. And citizens should be allowed to hire and rent to whoever. The birthright citizenship has always felt like a frustrating sticking point. I'd be in favor of this.
The non-state district of Washington, D.C. shall be formally dissolved and the land de-annexed to the original states from which it was obtained. Congress may designate property within the current district to remain federal enclaves immune to state jurisdiction.
I live in Northern Virginia, please let Maryland have all of DC.
cjet79
1yr ago
Low price products aren't a problem if they stay that way. They are a problem if the company raises the price once they've driven competitors out of market and relies on entry costs to keep others from entering the market again. The company can also use lowering the price as a threat: if anyone tried to enter the market they'll lower the price and make them go broke.
If you precommit to doing something that harms both you and your target, you may get your target to act as you wish and not have to follow through on your precommitment very often.
This is like playing a game of chicken. And the strategy of a pre-commit is great against a singular opponent. But below production cost pricing is like driving on the wrong side of the road. Yes people will swerve to avoid hitting you, doesn't mean everyone will see you or swerve fast enough. And now you've just dumbly pre-committed yourself to crashing against someone that doesn't see you there. Meanwhile the more aware competitors will wait for your crash to come in.
There are just so many ways "predatory pricing" can go wrong and blow up in the face of the company doing it. History is littered with companies that took market advice from socialists and wound up in the dustbin. Its a very risky strategy with a high cost and a potentially low payoff.
As long as it's a valid threat, they don't have to do it very often and many companies will refuse to enter the market because of the threat without costing the big company anything.
In actual markets this is the mechanism that matters, but it matters more in reverse. You'll have something like two companies producing paper products. They can easily retool to start producing the other type of paper product, but they don't because the other company is already selling that paper product cheaply. If one company ever jacks up its price, its easy for the second company to switch into the market and start selling at a profit.
Basically entry into a market is sometimes cheap and easy for certain companies.
I could go through things like this all day. It seems pointless. For predatory pricing to work it requires a perfect set of market conditions to exist. And those conditions might not even exist for very long. As soon as the conditions stop existing you might be fucked if you went the predatory pricing strategy. The proof is that it just doesn't happen very often. Companies certainly get prosecuted for it, but many of those are political witch hunts.
They can lower their prices but to an amount that's still greater than the cost of production. Then it isn't predatory pricing.
Except that is basically exactly what Standard Oil did and what WalMart does and they are the two go to examples of "predatory pricing".
cjet79
1yr ago
Its tough to prove to the current expectations of the law. It wasn't always tough to "prove".
There are some examples of it blowing up in a company's face. Almost no examples of it ever working.
cjet79
1yr ago
Predatory pricing is BS. Almost any company can be "guilty" of it. The courts have over time had to reign in the excesses in enforcement. But the original applications of those laws were comically and transparently political. As I sort of asked of Jiro: consider what kind of price change disproves predatory pricing. The answer is 'nothing' as far as I can tell.
Economists have a saying "dont reason from a price change". It naively applies to just understanding how supply and demand have changed. But it can also be some sage wisdom about not rushing to judge the activities of some company.
cjet79
1yr ago
You keep seeing low price products as some kind of problem. They aren't. They are an opportunity to for individuals and others to profit off of that company's mistake.
I brought up playstations elsewhere. Sony was competing with Microsoft in the game console market. The Playstation ended up being sold way below production costs. It gave Sony some advantage in the market share in that market, and there were knock on benefits for them having more consoles out there so they were sorta willing to eat the loss.
But microsoft is in the computing industry in general. Sony ended up taking way more of a loss because the playstation could be converted into a computing platform, and it was way underpriced relative to its capabilities. Server farms started hilariously looking like rows and rows of popped open playstations sitting on racks.
You ask how I'm going to profit of some item being undersold. The answer is that it probably depends on the item. For some things this is simple. The penny costs more than a penny worth of metal to make. If it wasn't illegal people would probably be melting down pennies (they might be doing it anyways).
For some assembled items the answer is "break it down and reuse the most expensive parts".
For some items it might be "find new uses for it now that it is much cheaper". This happens in food markets commonly where you popularize new recipes to take advantage of cheap foods. McDonalds supposedly does this with the McRib, waiting until pork prices are low to sell it.
It is dangerous to be a company selling their product below production costs. Because people might start finding a way to exploit those resources. It doesn't have to be a competitor. If you are a competitor you have an extra incentive to help people find those ways to exploit the competitor's resources. There is obviously no evidence of it, but someone smart at microsoft could have easily figured out "Hey the playstation is selling computation for way under production costs, we know this because we know exactly how much computation costs. How about we go spread that news around in a bunch of trade magazines, or ask some newspapers to run stories about how people are using playstations for cheap server farms."
There is also often this built in assumption among anti-market perspectives that the competitor trying to enter the market will always have to be some poor wily entrepreneur. This is often not the case. Its usually massive corporations expanding into another area. The Sony/Microsoft with Playstation/Xbox is a good example. WalMart's main competitor is Amazon. Apple competes heavily with Google/android in the smartphone market. Pepsi vs Coke. Etc etc.
Answer me this: what should a large company with an advantage in slightly cheaper production do? Because to me it seems like anti-market people will be unhappy no matter what. If they leave the price the same, then they get called greedy for not lowering their prices when they can afford to and charging way more than the product cost to make. If they do lower their prices they get accused of predatory pricing. If they ironically raise their prices, then they go out of business, and are replaced by smarter people that have to pick between one of the other two options (or if they successfully raise their prices, then people accuse them of successfully executing the predatory pricing strategy).
Ultimately the correct answer seems to be "invest in politicians so you don't get fucked over in Washington by one of your competitors sending a which hunt after you". Which is why I have a problem with centralized regulatory bureaucracy.
cjet79
1yr ago
You misunderstood, I'm saying retail already does the thing where they buy someone else's product and resell it. The comment I responded to said that was illegal, which must be news to most Amazon sellers.
Also I mentioned elsewhere if you don't ha e the capital you just have to make the market is aware that the good is being undersold. The more undersold it it the better an investment it is to get it now. The less undersold it is, the less you are being pushed out as competition.
Turns out the optimal amount of underselling is at production cost which to me just sounds indistinguishable from competition. So we have people complaining that market competition doesn't work, and they point to market competition as their example.
cjet79
1yr ago
Yup people have done that. One of the main findings is that existing competition doesn't actually matter very much. It's potential competition and goods substitution that matter a lot.
Imagine someone buys up all the old fashioned wood pencil producers. They then jack up the price. Suddenly no one is buying the pencils. They switched to pens and mechanical pencils.
Many people confuse a product for the market. The product was pencils, the market was "writing implements". Also there is often an option to just not have the thing at all.
The only way people actually corner markets these days (the last half century) without IP is by going after specific metals/elements, which rarely has impacts on end consumers, but definitely screws over certain producers.
cjet79
1yr ago
I don't understand why. Uber is a great recent example of that. Their shareholders basically funded them selling below market price for a while. And then Lyft comes along and it turns out people that are price sensitive really don't have that much "brand loyalty". The shareholders bought a whole bunch of cheap rides, not a monopoly.
cjet79
1yr ago
There has been a century and a half long propaganda campaign against market regulation. Your using some of the ideas they came up with a century ago that have long since been neutered and debunked.
The pricing stuff is extra silly because you can talk yourself into thinking there is a monopoly or collusion based on any price change. Price goes down, ah it's the beginning stage of predatory pricing. Price goes up, ah it's the end stage of predatory pricing. Price stays the same ah they must be colluding because they don't have to change their prices.
It's the perfect example of reasoning backwards from a conclusion.
Intellectual property is generally only possible through centralized regulatory regimes. Prior to global trade markets it was more about trade secrets and being first to market was the main benefit of innovation. I am much more sympathetic to the argument that IP is one of the good use cases of centralized bureaucracy. But it's ridiculous to blame the results of abuse of centralized bureaucracy on markets.
Walmarts are still cheap. They are still convenient. They do face competition with online ordering.
"Walmart complaints" often say so much about the priorities of someone complaining. Wal Mart is mostly fine and doesn't do anything wrong. Most economists, even left leaning ones are on board with that. They do have a PR problem in politics though. And it's great to appeal to voters when complaining about Walmart.
However, you either ignored the rest of my list or didn't read it. Third bullet points was "local regulation". If a city or locality wants to ban Walmart that seems fine to me. I'll try to avoid living there, or fight the ordinance if it comes up locally. You have not provided any mechanism by which a centralized bureaucracy could even fix this supposed "problem", in fact they often do the opposite! A centralized bureaucracy is more likely to tell all localities "no if Walmart follows these specific rules then you have to allow them in".
If Walmart is your biggest complaint you should be agreeing with me, not getting hung up on an ideological fight.
cjet79
1yr ago
It's called retail usually. And who is making it illegal? A centralized bureaucracy probably. Which is the thing I'm arguing against in the first place. It's a little awkward when the thing that is supposed to be stopping the problem is actually just preventing it from being fixed in the first place.
cjet79
1yr ago
You only have to do some of the buying. You can also just make the market aware of the discrepancy. It won't always drive them out of business, but it is a costly mistake on their part. Happened with one of the versions of PlayStations where they accidentally made it the cheapest computing platform in an effort to stay price competitive with Xbox.
cjet79
1yr ago
The same thing that happens with most market inefficiencies, they will get plugged by entrepreneurs trying to make money, or the inefficiencies are too small and no one will bother.
Company collusions were often regularly attempted and failed prior to when they were made illegal. It's a prisoners dilemma where new prisoners can show up and defect.
There is a fun way to deal with producers that sell beneath their own production costs: buy all of their products, put them out of business, and then resell the products you bought for profit.
The only sustainable way to "undersell" is to actually just make the products at lower cost. At which point it's just inefficient producers being sour grapes because they are losing.
Why do the suppliers want to limit their customer base just to help out another company? In that case compete with the suppliers, since they are strangely operating like charities rather than businesses.
cjet79
1yr ago
outer layer of quartz?
I'm sure the experts at Pharaoh Building Services LLC will have some good recommendations for long term preservation.
cjet79
1yr ago
Haha, this gives me an idea for a foundation whose sole objective is to keep enlarging a pyramid, layer by layer, in perpetuity, with the only tricky part being managing the endowment so that it doesn't deplete too fast and allows continued investment in more pyramid-building supplies.
This has been one of the more fun thoughts I've had lately. In another thread we are discussing the costs and feasibility of it.
I think it just irks me that the end result is that the assets in question always end up captured by ideologues (usually left-leaning) when they could just be distributed out to some class of beneficiaries directly or throw into the market at semi-random so no one cause or entity receives all the benefit. So the wealth isn't burned but also isn't available to be captured and 'squandered' by activists or layabouts.
There does seem to be some natural competition between the layabouts and the activists. Many of the orgs I know that have become generic left wing mouth pieces, also tend to just burn through cash on useless employees. Its a bit like cancer. A tumor has to have some inter-cell cooperation to grow large, but its also not cooperating with the host body by being a cancer/tumor in the first place.
It might be a difference in our perspective. I don't really think of wealth as being "burned" if there are actual people spending and enjoying it. War, natural disasters, certain kinds of government Hoop Jumping, etc are the things that burn wealth to me. And having most of the organization's endowment sitting in the stock market also seems like a form of redistribution to everyone.
cjet79
1yr ago
Growing $1b into $4b over 30 years only requires about a 5% annualized return rate. The S&P 500 has had about a 10% return rate over the last three decades. Assuming you can keep your Die Like A Pharaoh Foundation for a half century that should be enough time to complete the construction.
Its also possible to get lots of savings in here. With the amount of concrete to be bought, you should be making your own concrete, not buying from someone else. Find a location where both the raw inputs and the labor costs are cheap.
More Billionaire should definitely be building great pyramids.
cjet79
1yr ago
A good point to bring up to MadMonzer. I'm sometimes happy to make the extreme version of arguments and not quibble over the details.
cjet79
1yr ago
I've come to the conclusion that it is impossible, and that is probably ok if its impossible. Because if it is possible then that means society could eventually end up being run from the grave.
If these billionaires want a legacy that will outlive them, then they should emulate the Pharaohs and just build giant monuments. Bonus points for monuments like Pyramids which are difficult and annoying to remove.
I think a billionaire could probably afford to build a great pyramid of Giza equivalent in America.
Simple missions are also probably more resistant to change. Its harder to subvert "I want a pyramid 500 feet tall made out of concrete" than it is to subvert "I want to promote [vague term], [vague term 2], and [vague term 3]".
cjet79
1yr ago
If I ever get rich or famous I'm going to include something in my will about not naming things after me. After half a century I'm sure that thing will not reflect any of my values. Happens in the think tank world all the time. Conservative/libertarian think tanks get infiltrated by leftists and become skin suits worn by people that the founder would have hated. In the Koch network some places don't even have the patience and decency to wait until both Koch brothers are dead.
cjet79
1yr ago
very few people want to live in a world where those things are not regulated at all.
Do you mean "not regulated at all" or "not regulated by a federal bureaucracy"? If you mean the first, then yes I think no one really wants to live in that world, but also that is not what is at stake in this SCOTUS decision. The latter statement is what is at stake, and I think many people would want to live in that world if they could actually experience it. I wrote this comment in last week's thread. There are serious and fundamental problems with centralized bureaucracy. The kind of problems that constitutional amendments don't fix.
There are three serious alternative to centralized regulation by a bureaucracy:
- Market regulation. If there is a functioning and competitive market its not clear to me that anything really needs to be done to protect people involved in the market. Companies will have to compete with each other on every margin, including quality, price, and reputation. They will police each other on these things. This will cover nearly all of the minor stuff.
- Court and legal regulation. If there is a functioning common law court system then many of the serious fuckups can also be addressed. Deaths, serious property rights violations, and uses/threats of violence could all be addressed. This will cover nearly all of the major stuff.
- Localized government regulation. This will suffer from many of the same problems as a large centralized bureaucracy that regulates things. But it at least has a pressure valve. If the local regulations become too onerous and annoying, people can leave that jurisdiction.
cjet79
1yr ago
Is there a reason to care about these conferences? I think every time I've seen a list of the books that won awards I'd never read a single one, and never had any interest in reading them from the descriptions. That isn't a criticism of the conference, I have very weird and esoteric reading preferences so its not a surprise when my preferences aren't mirrored by these conventions.
Let them have their weird little conference where they pretend to be super progressive, and then also hold the conference in a country with active censorship.
With many other culture war issues I get why there is a fight. The universities should not just be surrendered. The institutions should not just be surrendered. The competitions and sports that are location based should not just be surrendered. The licensers and certifiers should not be surrendered. This though? I don't know why you'd want to save it or fight for it. Just let them go off the deep end.
cjet79
1yr ago
The low level cogs in the machine are mostly blameless. The high level parts of bureaucracies know exactly what they are doing.
Bureaucracies with enforcement powers of any kind are generally going to be worse and more politicized. IRS, ATF, FCC, etc are bad. NASA, BEA, etc are not bad.
Politics is at a level in the US where parties feel it is dumb to just leave weapons lying on the table unused.
cjet79
1yr ago
The main criticism that most judges are ignoring, and most commenters seems to ignore is that the bureaucracy as a whole is not public service oriented. Those are organizations are subject to incentives, they are run by regular people, and if there is congressional oversight that oversight is concerned with winning elections, not writing good legislation.
Its conflict theory vs mistake theory writ large. The libertarian story is that conflict theory explains most of the bureaucracy. But every issue that winds up in front of a court seems to be resolved on mistake theory grounds.
"Ah well, the bureaucracy filled with people that hate you didn't mean to ruin your livelihood and humiliate you, it just accidentally happened over a series of years as congress didn't provide enough oversight into the day to day rules of the organization. And they may have gotten a little too overzealous about applying certain rules."
Its politics all the way through. And I think whatever protections we expect for people to not be fucked over by their political opponents are the same type of protections people should have from bureaucratic over-reach. If that means gutting the bureaucracy then that is a win. No amount of complaining bureaucracies can't effectively legislate is ever going to move me, because I don't fundamentally trust bureaucracies in the first place.
cjet79
1yr ago
You dismiss the libertarian approach a little too quickly I think. The modern bureaucracy is still in need of some degree of justification. There are three major problems with bureaucracy:
- Political infections. One of the things bureaucracies are used to do is to reward a politicians' constituents by punishing their competitors. There was a good study of anti trust activities taken on by an anti-trust bureaucracy. 98% of the cases followed this pattern.
- Principal agent problems. Private markets often pay better. They get the more competent people, and the few competent people that go into government have a retirement plan of big payouts in the private sector. How do you tell your regulators to carry out some aggressive anti-industry stance when most of those regulators are counting on a job at those companies in a decade? Answer: you don't, at "best" you will just aggressively regulate all newcomers out of the market (which incumbent companies love).
- Beating market / court regulation. In the free market and in common law court systems there are already existing forms of regulations and limitations. Many pollution situations are covered by property rights violations. Many cases of bad products are covered by fraud in the court system. Shoddy products that don't do much harm are just handled by the market itself.
You make me a liar, fine, I'll go through the circumstances. These are some of the things that make predatory pricing possible:
The factors that make predatory pricing possible are almost all contradictory. For it to be possible also makes it unlikely.
This conversation has gone down too many sublevels, and I feel that I have said all that needs to be said on the topic. I'm done with it. I'll read any response you have on this topic but I won't be responding anymore.
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