While I’d say altruism is not a virtue the way it is defined in our culture, I will say that who we are is about 50% nature and 50% nurture, and inside we are very different beings for one reason or other. A born sociopath is only human the same as you in visible form, the being is nothing like you. A person who was badly abused and tattoos his face and perpetuates abuse on those around him is completely different from you both. A monk in a monestsry and an Instagram influencer are completely different beings inside, besides some basic neurology that makes them both human. If you could see the being inside every human they’d look as different as Pokémon. That’s my philosophical insight.

I’m with you on most of that. But I think the problem is more fundamental: the money devalues at a rate of 2-5% a year.

Think about it. Why wouldn’t the wealthy just hoard money? Because you can’t just hoard money. It devalues. You have to monetize other assets. So they buy real estate, with money they made from you when prices go up but your wages haven’t gone up yet. They benefit from the cantillion effect and in the process siphon wealth from the bottom. and as they accumulate non-money assets, that effect compounds because the prices go up some more. The wealth gap, all of this, it stems directly from our inflationary monetary system. Their trick is that they get to fuck with the money.

I don’t just want to learn what the article says, I want to learn what people think. That’s why I’m using a network designed for discussion and not just, say, an RSS feed.

Well that doesn’t add up. Hoarding wealth would imply saving dollars in the bank. But that doesn’t actually store the wealth, they’d have to buy things that don’t devalue, or in other words, invest. Investing is paying people to do things that will be profitable to you, or in other words, use it. Obviously thats not what’s going on, or you wouldn’t have an unusually high a concentration of wealth. There’s got to be more to the story than this.

What’s the non simple answer?

God damn I’m just trying to learn dude. Do you come here for discussion or just to be an asshole?

How’d they do it?

Does it mean black against black?

I drop usernames without a second thought if it suits me. I use different ones I think up on the fly most of the time. The only one that matters to me is one attached to my development activities in the FOSS community, and I might share opinions using it but primarily I use it to engage in discussion related to development so that people who know me in those circles know who they’re talking to.

So the government takes your money and squanders it and doesn’t help the people it took your money to help and you don’t blame them?

This is all a game of incentive. “Unable to manage things well” and “profitable to not prioritize running things well” are the same thing. Governments benefit from things sucking because then they can ask you for more money to fix them.

What?

Because, and we try to tell y’all this often but you don’t listen, anything managed by government gets managed badly.

How so?

But most of the people they’re going against are Nigerians, and they’re black south Africans. Xenophobic? Sure. Racist???

Removed by mod

Absolutely not.

He was a very high profile criminal.

Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is way better and super underrated.

Burn After Reading.

Yeah I understand that, but I don’t think it’s a good rule even generally speaking. It doesn’t actually prevent abuse, all it does is disempower people from being autonomous via social stigmatization as a mechanism rather than penalty of law.

Personally, I think the number is arbitrary and there are 20 year olds incapable of making responsible decisions, and 15 year olds that are. But that’s the world we live in, it’s a compromise we make with our community to prevent abuse of little kids, and a way to set expectations of people, “by this age you need to be capable of looking out for yourself or you’re going to have a hard time”. I’m OK with this particular compromise, arbitrary though it may be. I don’t know that there is a smarter alternative, and half your age plus seven is most definitely further from the goal than a set age when someone is expected to be able to navigate the world on their own. In older times (and in some less developed cultures even today), people were expected to be capable at puberty, in others it was when their fathers said they could, and we don’t do that anymore because those systems almost always lead to fathers selling their children. So I’m happy with the current rule.