Extropy

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    Matias Volco
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  1. Wow I cannot believe it (though I have no reason for it) and it makes me realise how lucky I am to have been born in time to exchange a few emails with him. His writings allowed me to make sense faster of Ayn Rad's philosophy and its application to the practical (real) reality of man. As far as I could tell he was kind enough to give some of his time to strangers in distress.
  2. Sounds kinda like Vanessa Mae. she was very popular when I was a teenager. I don't now what to think about these interpretations. I'm surely happy people are playing history's greatest composer in new instruments. In the case of Glenn Gould playing Bach in the piano (which did not exist in the time of Bach) resulted in a, if not greater, comparable work of art. the sheer technique that playing vivaldi on an electric guitar demands should raise the bar for other electric guitar music.
  3. Has anyone made the point yet that otrhomyxoviridae (like the flu) kill more than 1000% more people on any given year than filoviridae (like ebola). Perhaps it is airports in general that should be quarantined as well as their hotels and areas of tge city they serve. Or more conveniently "safe zones" could be the ones quarantined or prepared for isolation, something like idk a gulch.
  4. Naturally, notice how poorly maintained the pools are on that spiral-balcony condo with a view.
  5. So did you cross from your hotel or condo to the favela to buy low quality crack (unless it was actual crack cocaine! in that case please do correct me) or did you actually spend the night in the favela? I'm just curious as to how expensive runs protection in a favela in Sao Paulo.
  6. I understand these people have bought the land but not the water rights, making the growing of lemon orchards and housing people rather impossible. So it begins with fraud, a shame since they could have began as honest homesteaders. I know an Ayn Rand fan who is actually selling a plot of land next to his house in a safe and well connected location in a nice town in the southern pampas. That is more akin to a real gulch than this commercialised version.
  7. That's "cute" but unlike the drug cartels which only provide a minuscule amount of "pleasure" in exchange for a lot of blood and destroyed lives, the banking system has allowed for the growth and flourishing of human civilisation for the last 500 years... can you blame them for having a dark side? It's not even such a closed entry market as government, there are private currencies like the berkshires and (perhaps as there are theories about this) the bitcoin, as well as gold.
  8. By the way, the only other possibility to this private arrangement I can think of would be a U.N sanctioned Global Currency, which I don't think it would be any more conductive to the rise of private and unregulated currencies.
  9. I know what it refers to, I wonder why you compare such sophisticated arrangement with that of the opportunistic druglords more akin to the VOC or the British East India Company?
  10. Specifically in the City? The difference from a Favela or Villa (slum) would be that of etiquette that allows for an old lady to travel unmolested through that part of London (on in other times throughout the entire British Empire). Yes they have in common the fact that they are a cartel or private association of some sort (care to specify of which sort exactly?), but they allow for civilised behaviour in the streets - if that's the only difference.
  11. Pretty much like a sunset or sunrise which isn't night or day, but both, the black market within a mostly white market society offers the "best" (and worst) of both worlds. The best would be the lack of regulations and taxes. The worst would be the violence inflicted by both groups, the gangster and the police and prison system. This is a market for the opportunistic, it is not a "model". In absence of organized society and a formal market, the attractive aspects of the informal market disappear. In Latin America the drug-cartel controlled neighbourhoods are a far cry from a free market. Warlords.
  12. What other course of action could have been taken by people from the Old World (Europeans, Asians, Africans) once a discovery of a huge continent and the possibility to know the world they inhabit, had been made public? Very funny about Japan, and informative as I'm not familiar with the numbers of America's fleets, while I do know they keep the world not just Japan, going around.
  13. From a biological point of view she's not so wrong. But that's just you evading the question of what other possible course of action could have been taken.
  14. Maybe the ascent of Islam is an acceptable comparison, with their forced connection of the east west and south of the pangea, but technically no. We have one big landmass where most likely man comes from and where, most likely, most civilizations arose, and with many domestic animals. We have a second, smaller landmass, quiet isolated from the other landmass, where man arrived through a bottleneck and forgot about it, and where no more than three proper civilizations arose, and with few domestic animals. At several points in history they meet, until one day the people from the bigger landmass declare the "discovery" official and make it public. What could have happened so differently than what happened?
  15. It's really not. I'm only saying that Ayn Rand might have used the same arguments of civilization vs barbary (or lower degrees of civ). In the case of the people of a big landmass settling upon a smaller isolated landmass, or westward expansion, there really was not a choice (unless you suggest the Iberians and the Vatican had decided AND had the power to "quarantine" the New World perpetually). In the case of the State of Israel it was not inevitable. Zionism was only one of four popular ways for Jews to contemplate survival among Marxism, Orthodoxy, and Liberalism.