Posts by BenWilson
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Sacha,
Says more about who defines history.
People who have the time, education, and inclination to write it. It should be everyone. Throughout history, including now, it hasn't been.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to andin,
Really? I would question your interpretation of history
Well I did mean "for most of history". Recently, in the developed world, a lot more people have enjoyed levels of wealth and comfort that have given them time to work on things of their choosing. That's one of the best things about modern times.
And I was careful not to say "all goods". Naturally that is not the case, most people who have lived have spent their lives making goods of one kind or another. I said only "high level goods", and I'd define that rather circularly as the kind of good that emerges only for cultures that have sufficient spare time in the hands of enough people. People who are required to hunt or farm all day simply have a far smaller amount of time to dedicate to, say, writing a novel, or painting a masterpiece. They are also far less likely to spend the time getting educated, or to have the money for it.
I'm not trying to glorify the wealthy and say that poor people are crap. Just trying to suggest that a world in which poverty disappeared entirely, and people enjoyed a tremendous amount of spare time compared to what has been available in the past, would not be a world in which people stopped doing anything useful automatically. I was heading off at the pass the argument that poverty is necessary to drive any usefulness out of people.
It would be probably much harder to find people to do unpleasant work. For such work as still required people to do it, I don't have a clear idea what the best method is. Either it should be very well remunerated as an incentive, or allotted fairly by some compulsion. I'd rather the former. It's one of the worst things about capitalism that this is not how things are - that the worst kinds of work are often paid the worst too, they fall on the most desperate and powerless. I think that would change if poverty disappeared.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Islander,
The idle rich *may* employ or commission the intelligent creators but very bloody few of ’em actually CREATE-
Fair enough, but they made the creation possible in those cases. The "idleness' needed to make the works was supplied by the patronage.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Angus Robertson,
That said (just between ourselves) I’m pretty sure even those idiots can’t be trusted to go for it long term, because their growth is jobless.
I don’t think it will go on either. My point above is to show the madness of it, that there isn’t some natural minimum interest rate, after which it is impossible for lending to be profitable, and thus it will just stop by itself. The only really natural end point to lending is when the lenders own everything, after which it hardly matters to them if they make a profit or not. But I doubt that it could get to that because social collapse would happen sooner.
I don’t know about the jobless side of it, though. The future vision of endless growth with steadily reducing employment is not only not inconceivable, it’s not even necessarily bad. It would only be bad if unemployment meant no access to the goods of society. If everyone became unemployed, but remained rich, and growth continued steadily, we’re actually talking about utopia. It’s not even that hard to imagine, in an age of automation.
Unfortunately both mainstream left and right economics have no place for increasing unemployment. In that they resemble each other more than they realize. They obsess about keeping everyone employed, even though there is a steadily declining need for people to actually be employed. There simply isn’t any plan for the reality of where industry and automation are inevitably taking us, other than to find more and faster avenues for growth to soak up the need for full employment.
It’s insane, seen from the outside. There are also a number of ways in which it could easily be fixed. Decoupling access to the goods of society from the work that people do is a start – for the rich this is already a reality anyway, so it’s not like there isn’t a model of such a society to look at. People would probably still work, they’d just work on the things they want to work on, as rich people do. Since the idle rich are where the lion’s share of the most important ideas, art, science and other high level goods have come from historically, it’s not like this would be a terrible thing.
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Hard News: Media3: We have much to discuss, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Seriously, what the hell does that mean?
Yes, it's a crap standard. I suspect it comes down to whether they think people will wank off over it. But the pleasure release from watching extreme graphic violence is somehow less disturbing? I don't get it.
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Hard News: Media3: We have much to discuss, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Possessing copies within New Zealand might still be, so they’d have to try to get around that somehow…
Does having it on MySky count as possessing a copy?
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to "chris",
Not to overcomplicate, but the thing about swimming is you don’t see too many women emerging from the waves having been impregnated by the ocean.
You also don't really hear of many people dying from sex. I think death is a far more serious consequence than impregnation (which is preventable and reversible), and our approach to improving child safety around such a deadly thing is not to ban them from it. Quite the opposite, we acknowledge that the very best time to learn to swim is when you're young, and no one ever learned it from a book.
In a society where the average age of child bearing is somewhere around 30 years of age, I’d argue that 16 year olds are still children albeit with a modicum of responsibility.
I would argue that our society has created a perverse outcome in this regard. I don't blame this entirely on the age of legal sex, but I don't think that the age of legal sex should be fixed around a perverse social outcome.
We have historically done this kind of thing quite a lot - making a rule to enforce something that is actually a "natural" state of affairs, and then justified the rule that way. It's faulty reasoning that creates bad outcomes most times it is done. Just because it has been historically natural for men to dominate society doesn't mean that we actually needed a rule to make it so. If it were natural, no rule would be needed, and the presence of the rule makes it impossible to judge the true naturalness of it.
Just because most pair bonding for the species is between opposite sexes doesn't mean that we needed rules about that. It's taken this country until this year to figure that one out.
My main reason for thinking that legal ages for sex still make some sense and are practical is around the danger of predation. Because it is not a supervised group activity, but a private business, the idea of allowing people to experiment in a controlled way is problematic. Possibly in a communal society it might work better, if sex were not something hidden away, where people can get away with things they shouldn't do, so long as the other party doesn't know or is too powerless to stop it. That doesn't describe our society, though, so we have to take a lot of care. Basically, we're not socially ready for a lower sex age.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Angus Robertson,
When the Western world ceases its current policy of very low interest rates we will have to do the same only more so, because we are smaller and a much riskier investment.
The reasons I gave why it's difficult in NZ are only more so in the "Western" economy. Until tools are implemented so that debt deleveraging can happen without catastrophic consequences, I expect we will continue to explore the infinity of interest rates between what we have now, and zero. Half the rates, double what people can borrow. Half them again, double borrowing again. You can keep halving a number without it ever reaching zero. Of course "half" is a gross exponential value, it's more like reduce by 1%, get 1% growth. Repeat ad infinitum.
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Speaker: Generation Zero: Let's Grow Up, in reply to Russell Brown,
There's no way on earth interest rates will triple. I'm surprised, in fact, that the Government and Reserve Bank are even talking about raising them at all, since doing so puts an instant handbrake on the economy. Less borrowed money circulating, and a higher dollar making exporters less competitive. It is only possible if they are able to create some kind of counter stimulus to stack against the depressive effect raising interest rates would have. They could, for instance, print money and distribute it directly, which would mean they could stop the dollar going sky high, and keep money circulating. But this has been ruled out so many times that it would take political amnesia to do it. The finance sector would not allow it, nor would the 1%, since it would erode the value of capital, and reduce reliance on debt.
The thing about low interest rates is that they're something the economy gets addicted to. It's often not appreciated that as a rate gets closer and closer to zero, the amount borrowable tends towards infinity. Smaller and smaller movements magnifying into large and larger effects. You can put interest rates up or down a basis point when the rate is 10% without affecting anything much. But when the rate is one percent, then one basis point is a ten percent change in the cost of servicing debt. Anyone maxed out is well over the line immediately. People struggling to pay their mortgage will be in default.
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Hard News: Media3: We have much to discuss, in reply to Emma Hart,
What would protect any production of R+J that went further down the Zeffirelli line would be the view that it was primarily artistic rather than pornographic
Yes, presumably underage sex can be depicted, just as sexual violence can be, so long as the presentation is in a way that is not designed to tittivate. I can't imagine Platoon being banned on account of the scene where soldiers rape an underage girl (she appears to be around 10) whilst sacking the village. The point of the scene was to be extremely unsympathetic to the rapists, to depict the soldiers as barbaric to the point of evil. It's not tittivating, even though it's very clear what's happening.
If Spartacus started showing underage sex, though, I expect they would not get away with it. Sexual violence is constantly depicted, gratuitously, though. It's pretty near the line already.
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