Agreed, I think. But the fraction (of total available supply) that others have decreases.

100% of available money can only buy 100% of available goods (because 110% of goods does not exist). Money supply, however, can easily be increased by 10%, especially in small towns or markets.

A specific sum of money is a potential claim on a percentage of available goods or resources.

If my sum increases, your percentage decreases. This would not hold if money supply was fixed.

_________________
Johan

It raises a few questions about decision space and free will.

If I can afford to buy all the dairy farms in a county and build luxury houses instead, we have the following consequences:

- milk price increases
- house prices shift
- various prices shift as demographic changes
- decision space of original inhabitants vastly different

Don't argue whether this is a realistic scenario - argue about the ethics of doing it.

_________________
Johan

Free will means you have the ability to make bad choices as well as good. This is a feedback system and if you are going down the wrong road the LCS will give you nudges. If you continue upon a path of increasing entropy then sooner or later you will die, do a life review, and come back to try again.

It is pointless to get lost in what if scenarios. Do the best you can and know that most other consciousnesses are doing the same.

:)
I won't argue at all.
Part of the reason is that my glass is half full ;)
Another part is that discussing this scenario would still be a lot about choices for everyone involved and not at all about taking away free will.

Cheers!

Johan,

entropy reduction and growth of QoC cannot be measured or evaluated with a help of PMR logic or intellect. Learning to live gracefully with uncertainty and doing your best during this life all what you have. Playing if/or/may be game doesn't do any good, and does not deliver any useful answer, but more confusion, beliefs and attachments. All of us have so many of them already, and to get more of them just to make this life less enjoyable and reduce existing awareness.

Lena

_________________
'Real knowledge is to know the extent of ones ignorance.' Confucius.

Ok, it's a stupid scenario, but the general case is this; if I have more money I will be less price-sensitive, and that will affect the decision space of people who are more price-sensitive.

It will not force anyone to commit to a decision (overruling their free will) but their options will change.

"Optimizing free will" is a strange sentence. Every action we take in this world changes the decision space of someone else.

_________________
Johan

Johan,

The concept of optimizing free will is not intended as the basis of an economic theory. It is intended as a matter of how you interact with others, specifically face to face, but also otherwise. You thus do not either manipulate nor force others to do your will. You thus realize that you cannot have everything just as you want it but must allow for the free will/desires of others as well. You should not say to someone being mistreated, 'too bad, you should look out for yourself', but if you realize that they cannot look out for and protect their self for some reason, it is not inappropriate to protect someone else. Even if you only call the police emergency line. You should realize that the world does not revolve around you and your desires nor anyone else as an individual or as a group.

Ted

But then why did you say this? "the free will of the 99% should not be violated by the 1% in quite so blatant a manner based upon the $ of the 1%"



Low entropy is about interacting with people, but not necessarily face to face. You said that the richest 1% of people are violating the 99%. I bet most of the top 1% barely ever have any face to face interaction with the other 99%, so it isn't a requirement. You can effect someone greatly by purposely not trying to help them. If someone is consciously willing to spend $500,000 on a home, they are purposely not spending any of that money to help those in need. That's why I said it is a slippery slope.


Well you don't have to answer my questions. There are other people in the forum who reply to me so if you are busy or you don't want to reply me, I understand. I would not consider it high entropy behavior if you don't want to reply, so don't feel obligated. I am gradually reading/listening to more of Tom's material.

a perspective from someone who has tutored economics 101

this discussion is fundamental, as it informs a great deal of one's interaction with this PMR and ethics

1) everything you see, feel, experience, consume on the planet, that is not raw nature, is there as a result of an individual forming the intent to produce it. Think about that. Individuals combine energy and imagination, and tools, to make and distribute stuff. Nothing exists above raw nature that an individual did not decide to produce.

2) there are two systems in an economy, the real sector, and the financial sector. Money is an artificial representation that mirrors the real sector. It is flexible and the level is determined by the intent of the Federal Reserve system, the leadership of which is appointed by Obama, to operate on an arms length basis to minimize political interference, and in order to keep the relative rate of change of the value of money, relative to goods, stable (low inflation). At the individual level, money represents the gap between production and consumption.

3) You have money when you produce something, and rather than consume it, you receive a promise to obtain stuff when you want to consume stuff, and that promise of future consumption is money. When you hold money, someone else took the actual stuff and consumed it as final consumption, or used it to build a tool or machine, which is capital. Your credit card debt is possible because someone else postponed consumption. Your car loan or mortgage, or apartment building, exists because someone decided to postpone consumption. Someone decided to design and build an apartment building for people to live in, rather than spend their money on fast cars and chasing skirts. (or at least for part of their day)

4) Economics is not a zero sum game where our consumption steals from others. An economy is a living organism, and at its core are individual humans forming intent, based on incentives. A few people incorporate the higher ruleset as part of their incentive matrix. Most focus on the self interest of their household, as most of us are not yet perfect and ready to be the monk with a cup begging on the side of a Thai alleyway. (though perhaps even this is not a TOEist ideal)

5) Giving stuff to others, or feeling guilt about not doing so, is part of the learning process, but with effectiveness we learn that that is rarely what people need, and a lack of stuff is not the actual limiting factor in Africa. When one delves into third world development on a serious basis, it turns out that the limiting factors are more along the lines of things that undermine incentives and the lack of mature political institutions and justice, rule of law. The legal inability for peasants to own their own land is likely the greatest cause of starvation on the planet.

6) When one wakes up to the reality that it is ethical to work hard and own and consume the fruits of our own labour, and that what the poor require is a fair shake, access to education and employment and global markets, and that the destitute who cannot help themselves require reliable social services and indeed a cheque, and that the real demanders on your intent are much more close at hand (look to your right and left under your own roof), this is very liberating...the shedding of socialistic malaise.

Indeed there are issues that need to be managed...where market failures emerge and political institutions need tweeking

- the influence of corporate and union money in politics
- pollution and unsustainability of some industrial practices, subject to real science rather than luddite hysteria
- reform the unnecessary disincentives to working and job creation in order to eliminate unemployment (though, anyone is free to create their own job if not for limited imagination and inhibition)

Apart from extreme models such as Mother Teresa and the monks of southeast asia, Ralph Nader is an interesting datapoint of an apparently selfless man, gifted, educated and energetic, living in relative poverty and working for the benefit of mankind. It is possible that he is of such low entropy, that this is where his "cheese is" (Who moved my cheese), and that he is merely selfish, in the bigger picture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader


There is a growing field of 20 something internet millionaires/billionaires on the west coast who live like students. I think some care needs to be taken to entrain to our feedback, rather than the values of someone else, rather than pretending we are something we are not...so it becomes this process of testing lifestyles and tasting the pudding - detecting our internal tracktor beam and following it.

_________________
Does this PMR make my butt look big?

I think you need to explain this more Randy - you give all the low entropy attributes to Ralph Nader and then ask if he is selfish??? He is all about "other" and almost none about "self." How is that selfish???

Most of this, if not all, of the internet millionaires/billionaires that live like students virtually are students. They are all young, many unmarried, and I would venture to guess none have children yet. Life changes all that. Warren Buffet is one of the few that had children and still lived very modestly. But he is one of the 1% trying to change the tax laws.

The moment you think that jobs are a hard thing to come by and you have to work for somebody else . Your freewill to choose what is best for you and the evolution of that business is constrained to what the owners want. So my point is if you do not want to be told what to do when you want to do something else, might i suggest going in business for yourself. That really opens your decision space to choose things that are more in line with you at the being level. I know big business is taking over america, but if memory serves america was built by small businesses. What happened was they did not evolve, do to the big businesses crushing them out. Their is still ways to compete with the big boys and succeed, one is personal service with a sincere caring attitude, people seem to get that at a being level. Maybe this is the way we can use our freewill to start tilting the odds back in favor of the minority. Less rule by the 1% and more freedom for the growing 99% to be less constrained, more empowered and less controlled. Just a thought, while i have been thinking about how to go in business for myself once again. Sabby

Love, in the greater reality, is "not stupid"

as we are more the sheet than the bump on the sheet, other oriented behavior is Selfish, in the bigger picture

Patting ourselves on the back and getting an ego trip from being more loving is a small picture way of looking at it.

small picture selfishness is not selfish at all, it is "stupid", entropic, does not scratch the itch

part of the take away from the above is that like the 99%, the 1% as well exist within an array from low entropy to high entropy, and the data suggest that much of what changes in the political economy is due to the energy of awake 1%rs such as Warren and Belinda.

so, the war is not between the 1% and 99%, it is rather between two kingdoms, and each kingdom has an array of 1% and 99% participants, and awake 1%rs are an important part of the mix, possibly the most important part.

that being said, the 1/99% thing is a clever and possibly effective tactic to define Romney to the confused, though there is growing concern that the class warfare this is stimulating could have longer damaging impacts...and there is growing list of Democrats who are refusing to attend the convention because of this anti-rich anti capitalistic strategy.

_________________
Does this PMR make my butt look big?

Think we might be packing some belief-system preconceptions in there...?

JUST wondering....~

Montana

While wanting to lower your entropy and working on it during experience packages is in one's self interest, where is the proof that Ralph Nader is patting himself on the back or getting an ego boost? His behavior has always been very humble. Do you think he is not being sincere? Almost NONE of the legislation he has gotten passed has benefited him personally.

If you get to the point that you don't see it as self interest and only see it from the perspective of working toward lowering the entropy of the LCS, then you probably aren't incarnating into a VR anymore.

I read the article in the Huffington Post about 3 West Virginia Democrats who are not going to the Democratic convention but none mentioned that it was because of the 1-99% debate.

While the 1% is also working on their entropy, the disparity in income makes their political power to help elect candidates that will be sympathetic to their causes makes the fight very uneven. See the donor list from Romney's recent "thank you" get together.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/us/po ... wanted=all

sure, the point was to hold up Nader as a case study regarding political activism, and suggest that this is possibly as close as you are going to get to that aspect being optimized.

self reliant, energetic, engaged in the democratic process, self supporting, optimistic, humility in demeanour and lifestyle. I put Nader up as a better more TOEian model for leftists than occupy-style activism in a democracy.

but further than this, I am leaning into the broader question which is that other-centeredness is not sacrifice, it is optimization of your FWAUian experience....a greater incorporation of the higher ruleset, for your personal benefit.

I doubt that Nader would think of his life as sacrifice, but likely thinks of it as fun. My comment regarding pride of sacrifice was pointing at ourselves and spiritual people generally.

Where this is science and not belief, is trying to be more other centred and seeing how it feels, see if it scratches the itch.

People like to talk about politics, because it is at a safe distance and little risk to ego, and always places the blame on other. A great deal of talk, and very little action. I doubt any of the occupy talkers here have actually been to an occupy event, which would actually be instructive.

The danger zone for ego is within the walls of the home and over the fence with your neighbour.

_________________
Does this PMR make my butt look big?