Really odd, most data centers have top notch fire suppression systems. They trigger before the fire starts, and can suppress fires without damaging anything else.
I know a guy whose entire job for several years was setting such fire suppression up for a major data center. Some of the stuff he showed me was out of this world.
I know a guy whose entire job for several years was setting such fire suppression up for a major data center. Some of the stuff he showed me was out of this world.
I know wikipedia is suspect these days, but this article matches with the story I was told by a lawyer:
https://wikiless.org/wiki/English_land_law?lang=en#History
"Feudalism meant that all land was held by the Monarch. Estates in land were granted to lords, who in turn parcelled out property to tenants. Tenants and lords had obligations of work, military service, and payment of taxation to those up the chain, and ultimately to the Crown. Most of the peasantry were bonded to their masters. Serfs, cottars or slaves, who may have composed as much as 88 per cent of the population in 1086,[4] were bound by law to work on the land. They could not leave without permission of their Lords. But also, even those who were classed as free men were factually limited in their freedom, by the limited chances to acquire property. "
Historically speaking, everything was the property of the king and simply granted for a limited time. It was a little after the dates above that the first property rights were established. Just the ability to own property was a big change, and later on the ability to have land solely pass to your heirs, rather than having your superiors be able to take it from you at any time.
"[...] the Statute of Westminster 1285 formalised the system of entail so that land would only pass to the heirs of a landlord. The Statute Quia Emptores Terrarum 1290 allowed alienation of land only by substitution of the title holder, halting creation of further sub-tenants."
Which quickened the process of the end of feudalism. The story is really interesting, and one I come back to often when talking about labor rights and the effects of certain ostensibly unrelated policies on the same.
https://wikiless.org/wiki/English_land_law?lang=en#History
"Feudalism meant that all land was held by the Monarch. Estates in land were granted to lords, who in turn parcelled out property to tenants. Tenants and lords had obligations of work, military service, and payment of taxation to those up the chain, and ultimately to the Crown. Most of the peasantry were bonded to their masters. Serfs, cottars or slaves, who may have composed as much as 88 per cent of the population in 1086,[4] were bound by law to work on the land. They could not leave without permission of their Lords. But also, even those who were classed as free men were factually limited in their freedom, by the limited chances to acquire property. "
Historically speaking, everything was the property of the king and simply granted for a limited time. It was a little after the dates above that the first property rights were established. Just the ability to own property was a big change, and later on the ability to have land solely pass to your heirs, rather than having your superiors be able to take it from you at any time.
"[...] the Statute of Westminster 1285 formalised the system of entail so that land would only pass to the heirs of a landlord. The Statute Quia Emptores Terrarum 1290 allowed alienation of land only by substitution of the title holder, halting creation of further sub-tenants."
Which quickened the process of the end of feudalism. The story is really interesting, and one I come back to often when talking about labor rights and the effects of certain ostensibly unrelated policies on the same.
The photo on the left is 20 years old, the photo on the right is 20 seconds old. Take another photo in 6 months and we'll see how it looks.
Based on the history of rights and common law, you're correct. The first human rights ever were property rights, and prior to that the kings owned everything and simply delegated out his various possessions to different people. Eventually, courts decided that there was such a thing as a right to property, and that you owned a control that property, and that you could pass down that property to your heirs. From there, common law courts ended up deriving civil rights from the property rights.
And that kind of swings back to my previous point, because good government would have fair and reasonable rules about property, and rules that basically apply to everyone the same. And we've seen that, that where is at one point for example only white men could own property, eventually that privilege was extended to people of color and eventually women and that is the way things should be (but don't say that on the fediverse LOL). When you have a certain set of rules that give specific protections or powers to only one group of people, often that is a bad law, and the extraordinary powers and protections granted to the banking industry are a good example. If a bank had to maintain its business model without all of these different protections, it would be no different than these Bitcoin exchanges. They would be constantly going out of business, and they did constantly go out of business, and that's why they got in bed with government.
If the government stepped in and canceled all debts tomorrow, it wouldn't be particularly equitable since there are some people who have massive debt and they would otherwise eventually go bankrupt for, but it wouldn't end capitalism. More likely it would hurt a bunch of people, make a lot of people much better off, and it would massively reduce the magnitude of things that got done.
A life without real debt isn't unprecedented. Under Christian ideology the commandment against usury was interpreted as a commandment against interest-bearing debts, and that commandment was carried forward to the Muslim theology and there are entire countries operating by Islam that don't have that kind of debt.
And that kind of swings back to my previous point, because good government would have fair and reasonable rules about property, and rules that basically apply to everyone the same. And we've seen that, that where is at one point for example only white men could own property, eventually that privilege was extended to people of color and eventually women and that is the way things should be (but don't say that on the fediverse LOL). When you have a certain set of rules that give specific protections or powers to only one group of people, often that is a bad law, and the extraordinary powers and protections granted to the banking industry are a good example. If a bank had to maintain its business model without all of these different protections, it would be no different than these Bitcoin exchanges. They would be constantly going out of business, and they did constantly go out of business, and that's why they got in bed with government.
If the government stepped in and canceled all debts tomorrow, it wouldn't be particularly equitable since there are some people who have massive debt and they would otherwise eventually go bankrupt for, but it wouldn't end capitalism. More likely it would hurt a bunch of people, make a lot of people much better off, and it would massively reduce the magnitude of things that got done.
A life without real debt isn't unprecedented. Under Christian ideology the commandment against usury was interpreted as a commandment against interest-bearing debts, and that commandment was carried forward to the Muslim theology and there are entire countries operating by Islam that don't have that kind of debt.
Except when they're not even that.
The refuge in audacity in the past 20 years has been crazy. It's bad when folks in power realize there's nothing you can do to stop them anyway.
The refuge in audacity in the past 20 years has been crazy. It's bad when folks in power realize there's nothing you can do to stop them anyway.
I was sitting thinking more about what you're saying, and I think you've missed a core piece here, and that's the power of the state and what that adds.
Capitalism is by definition private ownership and control of capital. Therefore, if something is too heavily controlled by the state it isn't capitalism anymore. I'd argue that something so heavily supported and controlled by the state as banking therefore isn't capitalism. It's more like fascism, especially when you start having NGOs getting their fingers into the process as well.
We have an example of something like the banking system done entirely in a private manner: Bitcoin exchanges and bitcoin loan companies. They generally don't have government regulation, and the don't have government support. If they use money they have while promising clients that they can always pull their money but go too far, then as I explained earlier they will go out of business. It's happening a lot right now, lots of companies going out of business because they fraudulently claimed to have bitcoin they didn't have, and they don't have the protection of the state to make their deceptive business model risk-free.
Capitalism is by definition private ownership and control of capital. Therefore, if something is too heavily controlled by the state it isn't capitalism anymore. I'd argue that something so heavily supported and controlled by the state as banking therefore isn't capitalism. It's more like fascism, especially when you start having NGOs getting their fingers into the process as well.
We have an example of something like the banking system done entirely in a private manner: Bitcoin exchanges and bitcoin loan companies. They generally don't have government regulation, and the don't have government support. If they use money they have while promising clients that they can always pull their money but go too far, then as I explained earlier they will go out of business. It's happening a lot right now, lots of companies going out of business because they fraudulently claimed to have bitcoin they didn't have, and they don't have the protection of the state to make their deceptive business model risk-free.
If you want to just change the goalposts by saying me telling my son to clean his room is government and therefore me telling him not to call his mom a bitch is a violation of government freedom of speech, then I guess so.
Unless me telling my son not to call his mom a bitch is capitalism?
Unless me telling my son not to call his mom a bitch is capitalism?
Yeah, empathy to the individual is the countermeasure to the greater good, the intersection of the two is important, and in my examples that empathy would see the unfair cost to an individual considered unacceptable.
The other thing that we have to be careful of is the intersection of what is true and what we would like to be true or what we would like to make true. It's another thing that both sides of the political spectrum each have issues with. In some ways you can end up with policies that are entirely too pragmatic and mercenary, and in other ways you can have policies that are so disconnected from reality that they can't work.
There are a lot of intersections we need to take into account in public policy and in our personal lives.
Policies that dramatically fall outside of intersections like these (for example by being too extreme in one direction or the other), or policies whose location along these intersections change as reality or our perception of reality changes tend to be polarizing politically because it causes otherwise reasonable people to seek a correction towards a natural point and the perception is that the way to get that correction is a hard course change for a bit, but you end up with polarization as a result.
The other thing that we have to be careful of is the intersection of what is true and what we would like to be true or what we would like to make true. It's another thing that both sides of the political spectrum each have issues with. In some ways you can end up with policies that are entirely too pragmatic and mercenary, and in other ways you can have policies that are so disconnected from reality that they can't work.
There are a lot of intersections we need to take into account in public policy and in our personal lives.
Policies that dramatically fall outside of intersections like these (for example by being too extreme in one direction or the other), or policies whose location along these intersections change as reality or our perception of reality changes tend to be polarizing politically because it causes otherwise reasonable people to seek a correction towards a natural point and the perception is that the way to get that correction is a hard course change for a bit, but you end up with polarization as a result.
The fact that there is good government and bad government doesn't mean one is government and one is not.
The fact that bad government is worse than no government is often true, though.
The US healthcare system is a prime example. There's as much public money there per capita as universal healthcare systems around the world, but the system is so badly run that it effectively doesn't exist, so people end up paying the state to provide the service, then they pay insurance companies to provide the service a second time.
The fact that bad government is worse than no government is often true, though.
The US healthcare system is a prime example. There's as much public money there per capita as universal healthcare systems around the world, but the system is so badly run that it effectively doesn't exist, so people end up paying the state to provide the service, then they pay insurance companies to provide the service a second time.
"The greater good" is a quick road to the worst atrocities ever committed by mankind, and that's not a partisan or tribal truth.
The reason is simple: in aiming at an aggregate, you ignore the individual.
Let's say you have a button, and if you press that button, ten deserving people (or one hundred people, or one thousands people, or ten thousand people, it doesn't matter) will immediately have a million dollars added to their bank accounts, and one random people will die.
If you care only about the greater good, then you'd press that button all day every day. After all, ten, one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand people will be made immeasurably better off, and at the low cost of only one person dying.
Alternatively, you could choose random criminals to kill and harvest their organs, and those organs could go to save perhaps 6-10 lives at the cost of just one life. The greater good is satisfied, but to the criminals who are selected it would certainly not feel so good.
The reason is simple: in aiming at an aggregate, you ignore the individual.
Let's say you have a button, and if you press that button, ten deserving people (or one hundred people, or one thousands people, or ten thousand people, it doesn't matter) will immediately have a million dollars added to their bank accounts, and one random people will die.
If you care only about the greater good, then you'd press that button all day every day. After all, ten, one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand people will be made immeasurably better off, and at the low cost of only one person dying.
Alternatively, you could choose random criminals to kill and harvest their organs, and those organs could go to save perhaps 6-10 lives at the cost of just one life. The greater good is satisfied, but to the criminals who are selected it would certainly not feel so good.
That goes to the root of what I'm saying, the government did create the system because some unbelievably rich people used some of their money to convince them to create the system.
Prior to the current system, fractional reserve banking still did exist but it was something that had a connection to physics, monetarily speaking. Investors would invest in a bank, the bank would technically loan out the money, and they would probably loan out more money than they had, but investing in a bank account was an investment. You had risk and you had return. There was a chance that too many people would try to pull their money out of the bank at once, and there just wouldn't be money there and the bank would run out of money and go out of business.
Even though arguably what they were actually doing should have been illegal anyway since they were showing two people the same dollar, at least there was a way that they could overdo it. Later, you basically ended up with this lender of last resort with the ability to print as much money as it was required to keep Banks from going under, and then various insurances that meant not only were they taking risks with depositors money, but those risks were fully insured and backed with the full faith and credit of the United States. Then the banks turn around and give the money they've made entirely due to the government in exchange for further favors. They don't even need to tax to get it, they just erode the buying power of everyone earning wages and let banks skim some off the top for the privilege.
Prior to the current system, fractional reserve banking still did exist but it was something that had a connection to physics, monetarily speaking. Investors would invest in a bank, the bank would technically loan out the money, and they would probably loan out more money than they had, but investing in a bank account was an investment. You had risk and you had return. There was a chance that too many people would try to pull their money out of the bank at once, and there just wouldn't be money there and the bank would run out of money and go out of business.
Even though arguably what they were actually doing should have been illegal anyway since they were showing two people the same dollar, at least there was a way that they could overdo it. Later, you basically ended up with this lender of last resort with the ability to print as much money as it was required to keep Banks from going under, and then various insurances that meant not only were they taking risks with depositors money, but those risks were fully insured and backed with the full faith and credit of the United States. Then the banks turn around and give the money they've made entirely due to the government in exchange for further favors. They don't even need to tax to get it, they just erode the buying power of everyone earning wages and let banks skim some off the top for the privilege.
The legal framework is actually completely out of whack. The money that you deposited in the bank has very little relation to the money that you put in there. Right now, reserve requirements are 0%. Meaning, if you put $1 in the bank, the bank is allowed to lend out Infinity dollars.
The only way that you can have a system where you can print Infinity dollars is that the government has created this system. Those are government dollars, and a massive subsidy for one industry that's allowed to do this even though you and I never could.
The only way that you can have a system where you can print Infinity dollars is that the government has created this system. Those are government dollars, and a massive subsidy for one industry that's allowed to do this even though you and I never could.
Can you create money out of thin air? I can't. I'd go to jail if I tried.
So who really created that money?
So who really created that money?
The US federal government has enough of a budget to buy the top 3 companies on earth straight-up.... Every single year. China can buy the top company. Germany, Japan, France, the UK, and Italy could buy about half of the top company. Besides buying things, these governments can also straight-up hand cash to companies for various reasons and using various methods. Besides spending money directly, they can exercise authority to help industries. Central banks for example are an explicit insurance policy for banks (along with all the other insurance policies like fdic). Internet companies get blanket immunity for things that any other company would be liable for, and they also got a largely government funded worldwide communications network that any other type of communications company would have to somehow create themselves. Then there's clever companies that ask for more rules, but rules they can follow to ensure nobody else can create a company that does what they do.
And then the companies hand the money received in one way or another back to the government as "lobbying" for further beneficial rules.
So yeah, we can focus on trying to do the right thing ourselves, but there's some structures you simply can't change so easily. If that's all it took, then the companies would have gone out of business years ago.
And then the companies hand the money received in one way or another back to the government as "lobbying" for further beneficial rules.
So yeah, we can focus on trying to do the right thing ourselves, but there's some structures you simply can't change so easily. If that's all it took, then the companies would have gone out of business years ago.
And the biggest wallet in the world is the state, and it'll happily pick winners anyway, regardless of what the rest of the market wants.
At that point, all that matters is sucking up to decision makers in government. Even the top companies in the world can't compete with that kind of buying power.
At that point, all that matters is sucking up to decision makers in government. Even the top companies in the world can't compete with that kind of buying power.