Money, as unit of taxation, compels action. Pay for liberty: if you fail to pay taxes, your liberties will be restricted.
Money has limited value if its pursuit is perceived to require a greater loss of liberty than risking the penalties for tax evasion.
How do we repay the debt of knowledge, and in what currency?
If America is racing to the bottom, are the presently most successful also the most self destructive?
How do you act–how do you do–when anything you express might be deployed to subvert the aims you intended to forward?
Can the believability of a statement be couched in terms of how much the world would have to (have) change(d) to make it true?
For instance: I've eaten 10.25 pounds of sardines over the course my life. The back of this envelope suggests that statement may be true. It’s believable.
Strange, as there is almost surely no way for anyone to confirm its truth; at best we have guesswork, envelope backs. Usually we treat such cases with distributions and confidence, the stuff of (subjectivist) probability. Yet what observation could be made now to adjust belief in a past fact that presumably leaves no trace on the present and future other than memory?
It’s not hard to imagine a person keeping track of such a figure, however. The world would have to have been changed in a seemingly negligible way for the truth of this statement to be known now not as an interval with confidence but as an actualized fact.
Herein lies a cognitive error: as technology advances, and more changes become “seemingly negligible,” more statements become believable. Among those undoubtedly number false statements.
If I had a nickel for every time someone said “If I had a nickel for…”, I’d be rich like a banker.
If one complains about A and trouble results, A is not the cause.
But if A causes trouble and one complains about it, A is still the cause of trouble.
I just want to see this work.
These structures were commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito in the 1960s and 70s to commemorate sites where WWII battles took place (like Tjentište, Kozara and Kadinjača), or where concentration camps stood (like Jasenovac and Niš). They were designed by different sculptors (Dušan Džamonja, Vojin Bakić, Miodrag Živković, Jordan and Iskra Grabul, to name a few) and architects (Bogdan Bogdanović, Gradimir Medaković…), conveying powerful visual impact to show the confidence and strength of the Socialist Republic. In the 1980s, these monuments attracted millions of visitors per year, especially young pioneers for their “patriotic education.” After the Republic dissolved in early 1990s, they were completely abandoned, and their symbolic meanings were forever lost.
If capitalism is the theory that the worst people, acting from their worst motives, will somehow produce the most good; and if scarcity is what we are experiencing when making a living requires expression of our gifts; then doesn’t this theory suppose that a perpetual feeling of scarcity is a good, unless you’re bad?
