Saving Someone Doesn't Unkill Someone Else

Obvious fact of the day. Statistical aggregation clouds facts like that in the title of this post. Doing an act cannot undo another act because all acts have consequences and those consequences include the options available to oneself and to others for further action.

Say you break your mother's iPod. You buy a new one that is the same model and install exactly the same song library on it and leave it where your mother last saw the original. She then continues to make use of this new iPod oblivious to the change.

But you are not, as your bank account balance and memories will attest. All actions matter, even if those actions are words spoken and written down in the form of agreements between people. Honesty is a form of social capital, after all, and keeping to one's agreements while also respecting others will enhance one's status far more than wandering onto some absentee's land and cultivating a strip farm or a donkey sanctuary or a paintball course there.

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Iain McKay, Bryan Caplan & the Case of the "Anarchist" Anarchist

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Zeitardation

A Youtuber called axe863 made a video in which he used scientific, mathematical and statistical common-sense to deliver the KO that the Venus Project and Zeitgeist Movement so richly deserved. If his approach seems weird and unconventional it's because he's not attacking from a tradition neoclassical or Keynesian perspective. Axe863's poison is complexity economics, something a good deal more dangerous to ideas like TVP and TZM. [ 2 ] Now to a couple of comment threads from below the video that I thought could od with being replicated just in case they get deleted at source! ~~~ AstralLuminary 1 year ago Why can't we generalize the consumption patterns of middle-income people in the western world, set our constraints equal to the amount of localized resources, and the rate of resource recovery, derive a population growth model that would be sustainable to said consumption patterns, and derive the necessary quantifiable amount of work required to expen...

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