Imagine the Russian commander’s surprise when he realized North Koreans don’t know anything about StarCraft!

Have they received their $600 million? With that money they could set up an endowment that could take care of their community forever. Then they wouldn’t be dependent on trying to squeeze blood out of a stone from a political process that’s rigged against them.

This, by the way, is why I’m skeptical of arguments for universal basic income. When your livelihood depends on a political process you are extremely vulnerable to having political opinion go against you and then you are in a world of hurt.

Watch the show (S4E02: “Family”). At what point do you see thousands of tourists walking around, eating grapes, sampling wine, running through the vineyard, playing frisbee? Right, you don’t see it at all because the place is closed.

Now look at a public beach in China and see what it’s like when a place is open to the public (and this one not even the whole world, just China):

They charge you money and can ban you from it at any time. Picard’s family estate is closed to the public. You can’t even go there.

No one can walk around on Picard’s family estate. They own it! It’s private property.

Two words: margin call. When you borrow against your stock you can be forced by the bank to sell shares to pay back your loans. If you’ve borrowed a ton of money against a large percentage of shares and the share price goes down a bit, a margin call forcing you to sell shares can send the stock crashing down.

This happened to Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (creator of the Keurig) founder Robert P Stiller and it cost him his job as chairman.

You’re thinking about it in terms of commerce. I’m talking about the luxury of a huge piece of beautiful land in the French countryside. Compare that to some basic apartment in San Francisco which probably looks like the crew quarters on the enterprise.

Yes, I’ve watched TNG, the entire series, many times. We’re not even close to that! We don’t have replicators, we don’t have starships to take us to new planets for unlimited land to settle.

By the way, have you ever thought about how the Picard family owns this huge wine estate in France? Not everyone in the Star Trek universe gets their own family wine estate, so Picard’s family is wealthy and privileged even in a society without money.

Government employees are going to take over the farms and grow all the food? That’s not a market economy.

Furthermore if all that stuff is free then why are people still working?

Who is going to do all the work to make all that stuff if it’s free?

There’s no amount of money everyone can make that’ll get us all to stop agonizing over bills. Sure, billionaires today generally don’t have that worry but that’s only because they’re richer than everyone else! If everyone was a billionaire then you’d be spending billions to pay your bills.

What would make everyone happy is to achieve post scarcity as a society. The problem with that is that we’d then simply grow in population until scarcity came back. We’re never going to have infinite resources so that will always be possible.

There’s plenty of research that shows people are happier when they earn more money than their coworkers. Absolute quality of life improvements don’t translate into happiness nearly as much as we’d hope.

What are basic resources though? All people ever want is more. More than they had yesterday. More than the guy next door. More than Timmy whose parents took him to Disneyland in 3rd grade.

And land value taxes work on both. I mean, unless he wants to live on that yacht and not own any mansions of course. But the land value tax is still going to get him (indirectly) when he pulls into the marina.

That’s a consequence of capital gains tax being structured the way it is.

I think one of our biggest issues as a society is the way we try to use tax to target specific people. It never works out! They just find ways around it.

We should be trying to set up a tax system that’s very simple, straightforward, and easy to enforce, such as land value taxes.

Right, but then a CEO like Jensen Huang already has a paycheque to cover that sort of thing.

The question is what is it really like to have your stock holdings go from $5 billion to $120 billion as a result of the company you run getting caught up in the AI hype bubble? Honestly I think not much. Just a number changing on the computer screen, like a new high score in an arcade game.

How much do I think it affects his daily life? Pretty much not at all. Yet if it went back down to $5 billion people would be screaming at the company and he might be fired. It’s very strange!

They can’t do anything with it, even if they wanted to. Trying to sell $120 billion worth of stock will cause the price to crash. Plus since he’s an officer of the company he has to go through a bunch of reporting requirements and basically announce the stock sale well in advance. Announcing that you’re going to sell $120 billion of the stock, without providing a strong reason, is just going to cause investors to believe you think the company is in trouble and drive the price down before your stock sale goes through.

That or the alien will simply scour all life from the planet and then strip mine it for resources. They don’t even have to be more intelligent than us. Suppose they were roughly equivalent to human intelligence but had an insect-like eusocial behaviour with a billion year old culture. They could be far more advanced than us simply due to the availability of time.

Thank you. I would even argue that Return of the Jedi wasn’t great either. I mean sure, it was beautiful and the Moon of Endor with its giant trees looked amazing, but the plot was mostly a rehash of the original (another Death Star? Really?) plus silly Ewok shenanigans that made the empire into a total joke.

Another thing to note is that the episiotomy itself is no longer a recommended procedure for routine births. The incision lengthens recovery time and brings complications of its own.