MagsJ,
I’ve had sex exactly 15 times in my life. I’m 43.
Most 43 year olds have had sex 6000 times in their lives.
I always cared about truth more than sex.
My life is a testament to this. Even the sex I did have: I fucked up. This human species is not fit for sex! It’s a nice fantasy that they are; no bearing on truth whatsoever!
sounds an awful lot like progressive taxation
no?
suffering sucks but how many layers of comfort are we going to add to the existing comfort (in the 1st world at the cost of plenty of suffering in the 3rd world) before realize that the whole thing is artificial af and that what we are really doing is postponing the suffering so that we can have it all at once at some point in the future?
just let people die
people fucking die it’s natural
we do not need any more people eating and shitting on the planet and making 5 pounds of garbage per year for 100 years
and till the fuck out of the earth and then spray poison on it to produce enough corn to feed all of this goddamn people we allowed to live for 100 years by pumping them full of antibiotics and spraying them with alcohol
fucks sake
we don’t need any more busted systems to fix busted systems
we need less!!!
I do wonder what goes on in Silhouette’s mind/the mind of Silhouette… 
He talked of elegant systems, but his solutions are anything but… they are clumpy and clumsy, at best.
Fuck outta here!
Why’s man getting literal, as opposed to philosophical though?
Um… the Thread title says it all. 
Oh it is philosophical … and aside from the thread title, I’m responding to YOU!
If I knew at 16 years old what I know now, I’d never have had sex!
I took the hits for my sex (spiritual), I both cringe and chuckle at what you folks have to go through.
Like the John Lennon song, I was blessed (Cursed) with ‘instant karma’. I feel bad for all of you. Seriously. It upsets me to know your fates.
Tee hee hee 
There’s only one thing that sends someone to hell: contradiction.
MagsJ, I hope for your sake that you can currently admit that I understand existence better than you do.
As you being a moral nihilist (currently), I don’t hold out much hope.
Thank you for the guided tour.
As for long winded solutions, mine is as easy as this:
Was that over too fast? 
There’s minor but necessary details to work through, such as how far back in life ought each person’s/business’s rate of expenditure be considered valid for the above calculation? Perhaps just the past year to date ought to count (going by financial years is already pretty standard for businesses), in order to get a large enough sample size, yet to also take into account long term changes in rates of expenditure over a lifetime.
Also, how best might it be to apply the model to businesses? The intention is to optimally foster a Meritocratic outcome, which appeals to the Classical Liberal economic theory around “Perfect Competition” - we want the objectively best businesses to acquire the most credit “points”, but we also want to enable and reward as many start-ups as possible. To get this right will be another compromise that I’m still trying to work through. Any outside suggestions on these details are most welcome.
If there is to be any long-windedness to this solution, it will be in the persuasion of people to adopt it. Most of my original post was spent trying to translate my solution into appealing terms for very different mindsets, and laying out the two fundamental differences between my solution and the current situation: “a disconnect in the continuous flow of currency around the whole economy” and the addition of a measure to keep track of expenditure, indirectly rewarding altruism by rewarding self-interest. The math of exactly how it works is simple, and the practice of using it convert rates of expenditure into the prices you pay is even simpler.
Indeed it’s been studied how psychopathy is more common at the extremes of society. Perhaps you’ve come across the “Dark triad”, which links psychopahy with narcissism (and Machiavellianism) - and my solution takes perfect advantage of the narcissistic personality by converting the need to self-aggrandise into charity. The more they seek the former, the more they contribute to the latter, and they can act like the latter was what they sought all along as much as they like.
People standing up and saying “enough” happens all the time, everywhere, and it always has done. Still, the only laws that end up changing are the ones that benefit corporations. Events like Occupy Wall Street gain massive traction, yet they’re so easily forgotten and dismissed as quickly as they can be criticised for providing no clear alternative that can’t easily be written off as having been tried before without perceived success.
I’m providing a clear alternative that has no such precedent, which unites left with right, and solves all our economic problems.
Yes, it’s hard to make 10 million dollars a year, and yes, making that the “maximum wage” can allow you to be as capitalistic as you want… up until that point, after which it is overtly anti-capitalistic. So overall, conditional/limited capitalism perhaps - like all “Social Democrat” solutions are. Cooperatives (again, not your idea/definition) are another solution supported by some “Social Democrats” - basically all Western governments are Social Democrats to some degree. They want to keep their Capitalism, but to try and tame it - to give it a nice face, as Zizek would put it.
I suppose my solution could be said to fit this shoe in some ways too, except it is better described as transcending Social Democracy by virtue of a critical difference: that Capitalism is no longer being pitted against socialising controls, the two have been melded and incorporated within one another to work together.
This is the fun part - to work it all through, to try and rip it apart and destroy it, and also to rebuild it better than before. Whilst I’ve traced the fundamentals of this solution to some of my works from at least 5 years ago, it’s only very recently crystalised in my own mind after a few strenuous weeks wrestling with the most basic building blocks. As such, even I can’t claim expertise on the praxis of the whole thing - and since it is without precedent, I’d be a fool to think I could foresee all the consequences that would actually result from implementing my solution in reality. I can however claim expertise in folly, so let surgery commerce. I’ve already mentioned the odd prediction of how I see the mechanisms unfolding upon application to things like luxury items.
It seems like you more or less have the gist of it, maybe you can think of some interesting applications of my economic solution, perhaps predict outcomes, potential abuses and fixes. I expect all degrees of quality in the contributions of posters here, I’m sure I’ll have thought of much that is to be said already, but ultimately I just want some food for thought and hope the menu is able to offer me the odd tasty meal.
Folks, this thread isn’t about sex, sorry.
Less of that and more caring about the truth, if you please.
Yes, with the critical difference that now there’s incentive to genuinely want to pay more, with the happy consequence that tax is no longer necessary if you do.
Much better than simple progressive taxation, no?
Yes, suffering sucks just as much as it is necessary - I’ve taken great care to maintain inequality with my solution. Too much suffering is as bad as too little, which is why I draw upon the 80-20 rule to optimise the middle-ground.
I like your attitude towards comforts and nature, and I think you’ll agree that before we naturally die, we live too. Most of us in the first world with perhaps too much comfort, and most of us in the third world with certainly far too little. The whole point is that before we die, a win-win situation is possible to get people to both selfishly and altruistically want to address this imbalance, and optimise it.
One phenomenon that tends to be observed is that the best antidote to too many people eating and shitting on the planet is to make them richer. As a result of my solution, 91% of the world will be paying less than the average, completely funded by the remaining 9% competing with each other to pay off this deficit in accordance with the Pareto Principle.
How is that a busted system? I’ve tried to make my solution as “less” as possible - in terms of complications and any potential to go bust.
I expect all the emotional “aversion to change” that posters here can each possibly muster. What I’m waiting for the most, though, is any intellectual and rational dissection and fair/insightful consideration of what would actually happen if it was put in place. What would change and how, if anything at all? How would you break it? How would you fix it?
Silhouette,
I’ve been told that people care more about being heard than anything. I’m not an exception to this rule.
The co-op economy that I espouse is that when you make over 10 million a year, you pay all your employees until they all make 10 million a year.
Now, you have a huge 10 million a year family to do whatever you want, the key being here that it’s necessarily social instead of anti social.
Silhouette, We both have systems that work in theory, the problem is sociopaths. (Who want neither of our systems!) My system works better for sociopaths because it requires cooperation for larger projects.
well my criticism, though maybe not necessarily thoughtful as I am sure you’ve spent a lot more time on this than I have, is that it sounds a lot like what we already have, as i stated above
high-end manufactures making high-end products to sell to high-end consumers for a lot of money
mid-range manufactures making mid-range products… et cetera
throw some magical welfare dust on it to subsidize lower costs for the poor and give bragging rights to the ones doing the welfaring
did I get it completely wrong, or does this sound about right?
if you’re basing it off on the pareto distribution, then there will always be an extreme low end just as there is an extreme high end
and I’ll go on a limb here and say that the distribution of wealth right now falls into a pareto ratio, naturally
so… what is it solving?
i mean what great advantage is there to warrant the disruption of the current system?
do… do I get a 130ft boat, for cheap? some rich ass motha is going to fund it?
does everybody get a boat?
hahahahah
Oh I was responding to something ecmandu said… along the lines of creating ‘actual capitalism’, as he put it.
Actual capitalism is how it works when smaller business fail. But at a larger scale businesses cant be allowed to fail because they provide so many jobs. The government is then forced to artificially support (ignoring the principle of free market) big businesses to avoid mass unemployment and low tax revenues.
So the situation for at the last hundred years at least has been this vicious circle of nonsense… all because the working class cant take the government themselves… cant become the governing power… cant take control of the means of production.
Seriously though, imagine the unemployment problem that would result if a major automobile manufacturer went out of business, for example. The government cant risk letting that happen, so it takes the money made by the workers and gives it back to the business so they can continue exploiting the workers.
Its the dumbest shit I ever seen.
If it shuts someone up, shall I just agree to the above, and done?
Tee hee hee 
This idea is pretty good Silhouette. In fact it is quite robust.
It relates nicely to value ontology as well; a person is compelled to value outward in terms of his own wealth. The phenomenon of wealth, a systemic relation, is mitigated by the deeper phenomenon of value, of actual relation.
This would probably stabilize the social fabric.
I think this is worth developing.
What is especially worth while about this idea is that it creates a new dimension of merit/worth, which can be attained through the more superficial dimension of wealth - namely, social status based on actual merit.
I Have always found it unfair that people who pay enormous amounts of taxes don’t get any credit for what they pay for - it is a bit of a waste not to acknowledge these merits, as they are very real and such acknowledgement would, as you suggest, form an impetus for spending on the social cause.
If we can integrate the unorganized impulses to be charitable and valuable to the community in a mathematically calibrated social reward system, this would in fact produce an upward motion of cultural growth.
Yes, very good.
“Value” would acquire a dimension beyond both surplus and need, a dimension addressed only in terms of, well, actual value.
Alright MagsJ (and these comments are short Sil, and your thread is so good it’s not remotely a hijack… MagsJ and I have issues to resolve in brief posts)
MagsJ, every being in all existence is currently in hell. It’s not a matter of ‘if’, it’s a matter of ‘how bad’ and “what are you going to do about it.”?
Lack of contradiction protects. Preaching “zero sum consent violating realities don’t work” is the only memory you won’t have to regret … regretting everything else keeps you out of hell. Do I still contradict myself occasionally ? Hell yes I do!
Unlike a lot of posters here… I know for a fact that the spirit world exists. I’m fucking grand central station for the spirit world!
That’s why they donate to charities, it’s 100% tax deductible.
Makes you look charitable, but it’s actually just your taxes going elsewhere.
It’s all for show. The super rich don’t even have to pay any taxes (tax loopholes with lawyers only the super rich can afford)… some super rich people do pay taxes (for appearances) but it doesn’t matter Because of corporate welfare. Everyone else’s tax money is going into their pockets. They’re playing a zero risk game. These are not the brave and the brilliant… it’s a zero risk game. Anyone at my level of intelligence and even much lower can do this.
Silhouettes argument fails because sociopaths will never let it occur as a “gentlemen’s agreement”.
Laws need to be rewritten by the people, and I mean everyone but the ultra rich!
why don’t you make your own thread about your own plan, and stop trashing his?
You’re feeling protective of silhouette, I understand this.
Silhouette is a man who is more than capable of responding to criticism. I know this about silhouette.
If someone states something like we should all be Keysnians, and someone else states “there are other options. That’s not trolling, that’s standard debate.
Just because Silhouette and I both came to different solutions independently !!! Does not make either of our ideas garbage. I used to hate message boards where all they said was “cite”. Fucking hated those fucks! I’m sure silhouette does too. As if someone can’t possibly come up with their own idea.
So the question is, am I bullying silhouette?
I don’t think so.
No, you’re derailing a thread by going “mine is better”.
It’s not about you, stop acting like a fucking kid.
If you want to give criticism, give it.
No need to insert some other idea into a thread already devoted to the discussion of one, like an attention whore.
“Solution” to economics he says… LOL, when will you learn Sil? Ever?
Let me guess, your “solution” is to take my taxpayer money, and dole it out among the poor and whomever else YOU decide, with MY money?