72 Message 72: From extropians-request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Mon Aug 9 11:51:23 1993 Return-Path: Received: from usc.edu by chaph.usc.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1+ucs-3.0) id AA21511; Mon, 9 Aug 93 11:51:21 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: from panix.com by usc.edu (4.1/SMI-3.0DEV3-USC+3.1) id AA10110; Mon, 9 Aug 93 11:51:01 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: by panix.com id AA25283 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for more@usc.edu); Mon, 9 Aug 1993 14:42:41 -0400 Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1993 14:42:41 -0400 Message-Id: <199308091842.AA25283@panix.com> To: Exi@panix.com From: Exi@panix.com Subject: Extropians Digest X-Extropian-Date: August 9, 373 P.N.O. [18:42:22 UTC] Reply-To: extropians@gnu.ai.mit.edu Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Status: RO Extropians Digest Mon, 9 Aug 93 Volume 93 : Issue 220 Today's Topics: [2 msgs] ::help [1 msgs] Disagreement about Natural Law [1 msgs] ECOMAD: Gaia Liberation F [1 msgs] For My ExtroPositivist Critics [1 msgs] HUMOR: "Torching the Forests" LIVE on ABC! (was Re: ECOMAD) [1 msgs] INVEST: Transaction costs [4 msgs] INVEST:extropians, cypherpunks and congresscritters [1 msgs] Metaphors, memes (was Intelligence == wisdom == enlightenment?)[1 msgs] NETCOM (was Re: Extropians in Washington and Boston...) [1 msgs] PHIL: Divine right of kings vs. natural rights? [1 msgs] Threshold for digital cash [1 msgs] What's Perry's Notion of Natural Law? [1 msgs] good predictors [1 msgs] good predictors [1 msgs] physics: potential energy; extension [1 msgs] unnatural law [1 msgs] Administrivia: No admin msg. Approximate Size: 52740 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 9 Aug 93 10:28:47 -0400 From: merritt@macro.bu.edu (Sean Merritt) Subject: Metaphors, memes (was Intelligence == wisdom == enlightenment?) "In our age...Men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and to try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering." T.S. Eliot, from On_Poetry_and_Poets I'm sorry if it's been posted in this thread previously. It seems that it wouldn't hurt to examine it again if it were... -sjm ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Sean J. Merritt | Dept of Physics Boston University| "You leave me dry." merritt@macro.bu.edu | P.J. Harvey ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 09 Aug 1993 10:25:52 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: INVEST:extropians, cypherpunks and congresscritters Peter Baumbach says: > What do you think? > > If you are going to be around in 100, 200, 500, 1000 ,... years, then what > do you invest in? Pretty much the same things you invest in if you are only planning to be around for another fifty years. > If you can get a 10% return on your money now, what kind of return > could you expect if you were investing 100 Billion dollars? I bet > you couldn't do as well. If I had 100 Billion in CASH to invest today, I think I could do pretty well with it -- there are several projects I can think of that I could do if I had resources like that which would produce spectacular returns. On the other hand, it is obvious that you can't invest 100 Billion straight in normal markets -- you move the market too much in so doing. > If you could, then $1 invested now would be worth $100 Billion after > 266 years. That won't be worth as much then, but what if you > invested $1000 now? It would only take you 194 years to reach $100 > Billion then. In either case, the life span of an extropian is > important. As your investment grows, the return cannot possibly keep > pace. $1 or $1000 invested now will approach the same total as the > return rate decreases for larger investments. Why can't they keep pace? I see no reason they can't. Remember, the economy itself is growing -- and would be growing at quite a strong clip were it not for the government. Investments are not "bets". Your money actually provides the resources that drive the economy forward. With a lot of money, you can fund new ventures that will grow the economy and produce good returns. (By the way, my personal guess is that the government shaves at least 10% of the growth off the economy -- possibly far more. I think from what I've seen that economies should increase their growth rate post-industrialization, not decrease it, with time.) > In the short term(?), where do you invest if you think the > cypherpunks will have their way? What if there becomes wide spread > use of digital cash? Will the IRS fold? Will the U.S. fold? If any of these happen, you will have plenty of advance warning. > In the shorter term(?), where do you invest if you think the > interest on the U.S. debt will exceed the total income tax revenues? If you want to be insulated from hyperinflation, stick to things that would survive hyperinflation. (By the way, standard advice by swiss bankers is to keep 5%-10% of your assets in gold just in case. Thats a very conservative policy, but one can do worse.) In general, bonds do very badly in inflationary times, while the equities of some companies would do quite well. Certainly companies with good products but heavy debt might do well going into a hyperinflationary period. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 09 Aug 1993 10:38:51 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: Threshold for digital cash Nick Szabo says: > > What is the "fax effect" threshold for digital cash? > Hard to say, but given that digital and non-digital cash should be easily convertable, I'd say it isn't a problem. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1993 10:41:02 -0400 From: Duncan Frissell Subject: What`s Perry`s Notion of S.>Locke was replaced with Franz S.>Fanon, who owes a great intellectual debt to Locke - after a group of S.>students were led in protest by Jesse Jackson, chanting: "Hey! Hey! S.>Ho! Ho! Western Civ has got to go!"), but I don't know whether this S.>speaks ill of us or of Columbia. S.>Tim Starr - Renaissance Now! How to handle multiculturalism: "Karl Marx is a DWEM so as Marxists you are parroting the oppressive ideas of a DWEM." "Western Civilization didn't invent tyranny, slavery, racism, or the oppression of women. What it did do is eliminate those evils (to the extent they have been eliminated). The rest of the world should be damn grateful and if they're not we should return them to the ancient tyrannies from which we so recently rescued them. Would serve them right." "Since the West invented human rights and you reject the West you also have surrendered any claims to human rights. That being so, you don't have the right to complain about the curriculum. It will be set by the same methods the curriculims of ancient China or India by the Masters of this institution. It would be wrong to oppress you by giving you the rights of Westerners. BTW -- lose the clothes as well, all the women go home where you belong, stop sleeping around, and ask your parents to pick your spouses." Duncan Frissell Like all rulers, William Jefferson Blythe Clinton is a libertarian for himself. By the appropriate application of technology, we can force him, the Mrs., and all the other rulers to grant us the liberty that they arrogate to themselves. Write me to find out how. --- WinQwk 2.0b#0 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1993 10:41:02 -0400 From: Duncan Frissell Subject: ECOMAD: Gaia Liberation F S >Last year I was leafing through an Earth First! publication, and came S >across a piece bragging about how many EFers had sterilized themselves S >(it was quite substantial, perhaps even 50%) My wife had two toddlers and was pregnent in 1968 when ZPG was starting to become popular. She was verbally remonstrated for her pro natalism and used the obvious retort. "Oh, I agree, people of your sort should *definitely* not reproduce." S >This remains a powerful argument, we just need to keep bashing S >away at it. Ditto the "why don't you just commit suicide argument". S >It pisses them off every time, and distracts them from harm they S >might otherwise be causing, and best of all it's right on the mark, S >it points out their hypocrisy for all to see. Actually the more extreme groups are advocates of murder-suicide. We can point out that the best social outcome in muder-suicide cases can be achieved simply by *reversing* the order. Perhaps we can offer to help environmentalists save the planet by induging in a little defensive killing ourselves. S >Nick Szabo szabo@netcom.com Duncan Frissell ************************************************************************* ATMs, Contracting Out, Digital Switching, Downsizing, EDI, Fax, Fedex, Home Workers, Internet, Just In Time, Leasing, Quants, Securitization, Temps - Not as sexy as Tim May's signature line but just as important. --- WinQwk 2.0b#0 ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 09 Aug 1993 10:48:18 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: Disagreement about Natural Law starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu says: > In > fact, Perry's position on the nature of rights is most similar to a > combination of Hobbesian and Rousseaean ideas. Thats untrue -- they bear very little resemblance at all. Have *you* actually *read* "Leviathan" or "Emile"? > Since you indicated familiarity with Cicero, but not Aquinas, I take it, > then, that you haven't read any of the latter's works? I've read Aquinas too, Tim. I've also read Augustine, Moore, Mill, Sartre, Aristotle, Gibbon, and dozens and dozens of others. I really don't care to discuss this any further -- the topic is degenerating -- nay, has degenerated completely. Next we'll be comparing bibliography sizes. Mine likely is bigger than yours, but thats meaningless. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 09 Aug 1993 10:53:55 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: PHIL: Divine right of kings vs. natural rights? Arkuat says: > Thereafter, it was usually invoked when some king or another wanted to > assert control over the local church, again, more to put the Pope into a > position of weakness than the king in a position of strength. I think > Henry VIII may have brought it up in the course of creating the Church > of England. > > It didn't count for much more than that until a French historian and > political theorist named Bossuet made a big deal of it during the reign > of Louis XIV. Louis took the ball and ran with it, and so did his > successors right down to July 14, 1789. It was big with Henry VIII's successors until Cromwell, er, cut them off. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Aug 93 8:12:22 PDT From: thamilto@pcocd2.intel.com (Tony Hamilton - FES ERG~) Subject: good predictors > >the networks which Ender's brother and sister use to > >basically take control (under pseudonyms) are amazingly similar to what > >the internet is becoming. Also, I believe the their pen-pads, or whatever, > >are similar to products coming out these days. > > But _Ender's Game_ was written in the early 80's, by which time the > Internet was already in full swing, and the prediction of pen-driven laptop > computers (Alan Kay's Dynabook) was several years old. It wasn't the existence of these things those books predicted, but the application. The Internet, not 10 years older, is still a far cry from a network which everyone is linked to, a network where one can post and be heard by all. But it, or something else, will be some day. And again, I know pen-driven laptops weren're _predicted_, but their application effectively was. These books put it all together in a way which dispensed with the fantastical, and instead focused on the practical. I cannot be convinced that these events were so "obvious" to predict in the early 80's. We had barely any experience with PC's at all at the time, and networking was all but nonexistent in any significant way. To this day, most of the people I know don't truly believe everyone will all be networked in this manner any time soon, when it is very likely we all will be (in some countries, anyway) before the end of the decade. Tony Hamilton thamilto@pcocd2.intel.com HAM on HEx ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1993 16:25:39 +0100 (BST) From: D Crookes Subject: ::help ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 09 Aug 1993 11:25:36 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: good predictors Tony Hamilton - FES ERG~ says: > > > > I'm looking for writers who 1) Have/had a consistently good record of > > prediction or 2) made one, or perhaps a few, lucky hits. [...] > Their writings are well-known. Also, whoever wrote the Ender series. You > know, Ender's War, all that. Can't remember the name at the moment, but > in the first book of the series, which I think was Ender's War (or was > that the 2nd?), the networks which Ender's brother and sister use to > basically take control (under pseudonyms) are amazingly similar to what > the internet is becoming. You have it in reverse -- Orson Scott Card knows about BBS systems, Compuserver, the internet and the like and based parts of Ender's Game (not Ender's War) on them. He wasn't looking forward -- he was inspired to extend reality. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 09 Aug 1993 11:35:40 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: INVEST: Transaction costs Nick Szabo says: > Does Harry Browne give an accounting of the transaction costs > involved in his scheme? This kind of shuffling ("rebalancing") is > how stockbrokers make their living, by eating big holes in the > portfolios of individual investors (over the long run, and hidden > by the ups and downs of the securities themselves). With > portfolio sizes below the $10,000's, it is often not > possible to "rebalance" from 30% to 40% stocks, or back, without > trading odd lots. Not necessarily. You could stick to mutual funds. Fidelity even has mutual funds that basically just hold gold or other commodities for you. No-load mutual funds cost nothing to rebalance. In any case, if you have less than $10,000 in investments, you ought to be trying to get up into that range. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Sunday, 8 August 1993 18:26:23 PST8 From: "James A. Donald" Subject: For My ExtroPositivist Critics In <199308080512.AA07759@joes.GARAGE.COM>, arkuat@joes.garage.com (Arkuat) wrote: > *And* as long as the system that the axioms lead to does not obviously > diverge from what we observe in reality, there is no problem. Epistemological and metaphysical axioms do not make predictions about the non human physical world, but they do make predictions about our efforts to communicate, discover facts, and relate to each other. For example if nominalism was correct, then what the classical Greeks said would be largely meaningless to us, for example it is unlikely that they would use a word corresponding to "liberty" in a sense similar to that which we use. This prediction is obviously false. Liberty and similar concepts are plainly true universals, thus plainly universals exist. Thus all theories based on nominalism, for example Marxism and Utilitarianism, must be false, Marxism because of its nominalist definition of value, utilitarianism because of its nominalist definition of the good. Positivism unavoidably makes predictions about how scientists should act in order to be effective at discovering the truth. These predictions are flagrantly false, thus positivism fails by its own criteria. > I think that rationalistically derived systems of > epistemology and metaphysics (if they are to be useful at > all) end up saying things about physical reality and our > perception of it. The first four propositions of logical positivism are trivially true. The last four propositions of logical positivism are flagrantly false. (5) A proposition is literally meaningful only if it is either verifiable or tautologous. This proposition implies that it itself is meaningless, which is plainly false. (6) Since metaphysical statements are neither verifiable nor tautologous, they are literally meaningless. But metaphysical statements, or at least the ones that everyone is quarreling about, certainly can be verified or falsified, for example the values inferred from Marx's labor theory of value clearly differ from actual material values that people care about in practice, as the Marxist states dramatically demonstrated, thus value is not a social construct, capable of being arbitrarily defined. It is not pointless to inquire about metaphysical questions. Indeed we regularly fight and kill and die over them for excellent reasons. (7) Since ethical, aesthetical, and theological statements also fail to meet the same conditions, they too are cognitively meaningless--although they may possess "emotive" meaning. One can concoct an infinite number of different scientific theories that can explain away any given set of observations, and only a few theories that can explain them. The distinction between explaining facts away and explaining them is clearly aesthetic. (RM Persig, "Zen and the Art of motorcycle maintenance", 1974) For example scientists accepted general relativity primarily on aesthetic criteria, but very few knowledgeable people dispute its truth, and those few that do dispute it, dispute it primarily on aesthetic grounds. (And are rightly regarded as kooks.) (8) Since metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of religion, and aesthetics are all eliminated, the only tasks of philosophy are clarification and analysis. Thus, the propositions of philosophy are linguistic, not factual, and philosophy is a department of logic. In the hands of most philosophers, this conclusion (8) leads to nominalism, a plainly false theory. Although logical positivism does not necessarily lead to nominalism it leads to the conclusion that it is meaningless to claim that nominalism is false, a position that is plainly absurd, since nominalism has major practical consequences. --------------------------------------------------------------------- | We have the right to defend ourselves and our James A. Donald | property, because of the kind of animals that we | are. True law derives from this right, not from jamesdon@infoserv.com | the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 09 Aug 1993 11:52:39 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: physics: potential energy; extension D. Anton Sherwood says: > Tim says: > > Electrons do have weight, though, don't they? How can anything that has > > weight not have volume? > > I tried to make an analogy with collectivism, but couldn't make it work ;) Tim doesn't seem to understand a key point here: what something "is" often has no meaning -- but how it behaves has much meaning. Tell me, what "is" the price of IBM today? Well, my little screen in front of me says that the "price" is 43 and 3/4. Can I sell my shares of IBM at 43 and 3/4? No. I can only sell them at 43 1/2, which is the bid in the market. Could I sell 100,000 shares at that price? Probably not. The general semantics people have something when they note that abandoning the verb "to be" eliminates lots of problems. I can then note that the particle behaves as though it had no volume, that the last trade in shares of IBM was at 43 3/4, and I simply ignore meaningless questions like the one you pose below. > >> Children are taught to envision them as little red and green spheres, but > >> in reality we treat them as point-like singularities. > > I wasn't asking what we treat them as, I was asking what they are. > > We cannot know that. We can only know how they behave. To describe > that behavior briefly and intuitively, we make models. We perceive the world through our senses, and through devices that we use to convert things that we cannot directly sense into things that we can sense. All that we can say is that something appears to behave a certain way -- we cannot say what it "is" as we have no way to know what it "is". We do not walk around with Platonic Essence Detectors(TM) to tell us what things "are". I walk up to a building on 22nd street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan. I ask you "what is this building". You say "This is a church". In fact, the building merely *looks* like a church. It is typically *used* as a nightclub. What *is* it? The question is more or less meaningless. It was once used as a church. It might again be used as a church. Currently it is not used as a church. These are nice solid facts. The verb "to be" implies deceptive things. Now, its fine to say "this is an office building" provided you and I understand this is shorthand for "this is a structure currently used mostly for office work". However, if I start believing in the verb "to be" as if it had magical power, I might start asking "what *is* an electron?". I can't say. I can say that an electron does certain things to a Miliken oil drop experiment. I can say that electrons seem to have certain properties in electrical circuits. I can say that electrons appear to have certain statistical properties that are well-modeled by quantum mechanics in the sense that experiments produce results well correlated to the model. What *is* an electron? Who the hell can possibly know? I don't even know what the building at 22nd and 6th avenue in Manhattan is, and that thing appears to have well understood position and momentum, which an electron does not appear to have. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 09 Aug 1993 11:57:33 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: INVEST: Transaction costs Arkuat says: > "Odd lots" are not a problem with mutual funds. You > still take a hit on transactions costs for gold, but these come only > once a year and only after major price changes, and you're not selling > or buying your entire holding, but just a small part of it. You can hold no-load gold mutual funds -- there are people that sell them. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 09 Aug 1993 12:16:24 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: INVEST: Transaction costs Nick Szabo says: > (BTW gold + mutual funds is poorly diversified; in the Great > Depression, stocks and gold tanked at the same time, then adding insult > to injury gold was confiscated). Was it? I suspect that most people holding gold in, say, Switzerland, had no trouble with their gold being confiscated. I'm not saying that that sort of technique is available to > No, I'm talking about part-time amateurs picking stocks or commodities > themselves (including gold, not to mention bullion vs. coins), > against full-time pros with heavy hardware (most trading and > financial analysis is done by software these days -- financial > ratios, arbitrage spreads, and thousands of more subtle dependencies > calculated millions of times faster than any human can figure 'em > out). I work in the industry. I assure you of several things... 1) The only thing that might help you in terms of automation is access to a quote machine and news wire. 2) Yes, there are people that make money in automated arbitrage systems -- they make lots of money in them, in fact. They are not, however, the bulk of the activity that goes on. There is plenty of other stuff that requires only ordinary tools. 3) The boys on the equities floor emphatically do not have hundreds of things being plugged into models and displayed to them all day long. I know -- I work at a Lehman Brothers after all. People doing derivatives and fixed income work do have models running -- but they are usually not doing much very sophisticated. The sophisticated stuff is done by the statistical arbitrage people and the boys doing really complex stuff -- CMOs, multi-way swaps, strange convertable bonds, etc. And really, most people who understand what they are doing do just fine as "part-time amateurs" when it comes to picking stocks. Amateurs do lousy in the commodities business -- average time from opening an account to total blowout in the commodities business is a matter of months. However, thats because of the leverage in the commodities markets more than anything else. > In any case the knowledgeable market players take their cut, and the > typical small portfolio will be lucky to get that 2.5%/year. Even if you just bought a passive S&P 500 mutual fund, you would have done far far better than that. This is quite embarassing, Nick. > If the individual tries their own diversification scheme they will > get eaten alive by transaction costs and the superior knowledge of > pro market players. Bull. You can rebalance a diversified at NO COST AT WILL if you stick to no-load mutual funds. You *CAN* make good investments on your own in the stock markets, and you CAN beat the "professionals", especially when the companies involved are firms you are personally familiar with -- computer people investing in computer companies, for example. > If they don't diversify they of course stand a > good chance of getting wiped out. Point being, real life is not as > easy as in the books. Then how do you explain the number of folks on this very list who've done perfectly well in the markets? > Lots of folks here have been talking about "cypherpunks success > investments", investing in gold, etc. All involve guessing the > market, trying to play against the pros. In fact, that's very hard > to avoid -- even going for mutual funds vs. commodities vs. money > market is a subtle guessing game where folks like George Soros will > take their little cut. George Soros (or more to the point, his > staff of math whizzes, hackers, financial gurus, and billions of > MIPS of computers) George Soros has a fairly low tech operation. His most recent partner in crime, Sir James Goldsmith, has an even lower tech operation. You are talking about boys like D.E. Shaw, Susquehana, and the like. You've never heard of them, and thats because they aren't as huge as you think and aren't flamboyant. This is not to say that I would ever want to go up against George Soros. Thats merely to say, Nick, that you don't have a good idea of WHY he's successful -- and it isn't huge computer operations. The best speculative trader I've ever worked near was Paul Tudor Jones, who never touched machines in the time I watched him except for news wires and quote data. Worked a billion dollar portfolio with virtually no technology. Quite a guy. > knows much more than you do about how much money which central banks > are or are not printing, etc. So if you don't know the variables in the foreign exchange market, don't trade forex. (I wouldn't do it and I have access to lots of data -- speculative trading in commodities and the like is too dangerous for my tastes.) Perry ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1993 09:35:20 -0700 From: dkrieger@Synopsys.COM (Dave Krieger) Subject: NETCOM (was Re: Extropians in Washington and Boston...) At 3:43 AM 8/7/93 +0100, Arkuat wrote: > [Tim May raves about Netcom] I too am a very satisfied user of Netcom. Another great thing about Netcom (if you're a Mac user) is that it supports Eudora, a shareware e-mailer for the Mac that will log in, grab your mail, and log out, automatically, allowing you to examine your mail at leisure offline. Although Netcom does not charge for connect charges, some folks (like me) have only one phone line and don't like to tie it up for long periods while reading Mbytes of Extropian memage. dV/dt ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1993 10:34:43 -0700 From: dkrieger@Synopsys.COM (Dave Krieger) Subject: HUMOR: "Torching the Forests" LIVE on ABC! (was Re: ECOMAD) At 2:02 PM 8/8/93 -0700, Nick Szabo wrote: >* "Save biodiversity" will start to lose steam. With Jurassic Park, the >phrase "extinction is forever" has lost its power. They're moving away >from the halfway-rational "preservation of logically deep genetic >information" argument and to a more mystical notion of "ecological >information", which of course cannot be preserved accept by closing >down the plants and shutting off the forests to to humans. We'll >see less appeal to preservation and more direct appeals to mysticism >("ancient Indian hunting grounds"), recreation, etc. While driving to L.A. this weekend, I had a fantasy about making a television special in which exactly one acre of rainforest gets burned for the cameras. We are continually exposed to the statistic that "one acre of rainforest gets burned every second"... I'd like to see what that looks like, wouldn't you? I imagine we could even get the ecoids to put up the funds for this extravaganza (a la "The Silent Scream" for the anti-abortion movement), and make a fortune on the video market selling to pyromaniacs. :-) :-) :-) ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Aug 93 13:34:41 EDT From: pmetzger@lehman.com (Perry E. Metzger) Subject: unnatural law I accidently received James Donald's signature, e.g.: > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > | We have the right to defend ourselves and our >James A. Donald | property, because of the kind of animals that we > | are. True law derives from this right, not from >jamesdon@infoserv.com | the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. Now, I haven't actually read any of James Donald's articles on natural law, but if this exemplifies his attitude, i.e., that we have a "right" to certain kinds of laws, rather than those laws merely promoting what it is that we want, I stand by my statements in my earlier messages that "natural law" smacks of religion, not reason. Its fine to say that the libertarian constraints, i.e. the NCP, promote the goals that most of humanity shares. However to say that "true" law derives from "rights" is not a statement of fact -- it is a statement of faith. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 09 Aug 1993 13:57:04 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: INVEST: Transaction costs Nick Szabo says: > > Bid/ask spreads on gold > > coins *are* my transaction costs, > > I assume then you can tell us, what are the typical bid/ask spreads > on gold coins? I don't have the data handy, but the current market pricing (at least on a couple of the big ones, like Krugerands, Maple Leafs, etc) is available on the commodity price page of the Wall Street Journal. Myself, I've always thought of bullion as being more attractive to my tastes -- stuff stamped by Credit Suisse is more tasteful to me than stuff stamped by a government. Frankly, I own no gold at the moment -- I feel, perhaps foolishly, that I will see any monetary mischief going on in advance and have a chance to move my asset mix. Its likely risky. > How do they vary with market volume? Does market > volume or the bid/ask spread vary in any predictable way (eg > seasonally)? Which markets have the lowest and highest bid/ask > spreads for the individual investor? Well, the spreads on gold historically have been pretty small, as the market is very liquid and has usually been stable. It wouldn't suprise me to find that the spreads had opened up lately given the instability in the gold market of late. I suspect that you likely get bad deals if you are selling at the local "we buy gold" location and pretty good deals if you buy and sell at places like the MTB Banking Corporation. Gold is a commodity, of course, so shopping around will likely get you the best prices. However, as I've noted, you needn't hold gold directly at all -- you can buy it indirectly through funds. Perry ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 09 Aug 1993 14:21:15 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: What's Perry's Notion of Natural Law? starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu says: > I've been unable to find any source that supports Perry's view of > natural law, and I've rounded up all the usual suspects. For instance, > E.D. Hirschfeld, Jr.'s Dictionary of Cultural Literacy: What Every > American Needs to Know (Houghton Miffin, 1988) has the following entry > on natural law on page 99: > > "natural law The doctine that human affairs should be governed by ethical > principles that are part of the very nature of things and that can be > understood by reason." > > Funny, while it does imply that there is a naturalistic notion of right > and wrong, it doesn't specify whether these must be based upon a theistic > cosmology, I said nothing about theistic cosmologies. Its possible to be religious without involving a "god". In fact, I'd say that that quoted passage more or less says what I've said the natural law says: that there is an absolute right ans wrong, that it is part of the rules of the universe, etc. > So, what is Perry talking about when he complains that most natural > law adherents are theistic moral imperialists? Never once said "theistic". Merely religious. Nor did I say "moral imperialists". Perry ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1993 11:41:57 -0700 From: dkrieger@Synopsys.COM (Dave Krieger) Subject: physics: potential energy; extension At 7:05 PM 8/7/93 -0700, D. Anton Sherwood wrote: >Between two masses there is negative gravitational potential energy >(-Gmm/d). Energy is equivalent to mass, so this negative energy has >negative gravity. Where is it? That is, somewhere in the system there >should be a locus of (very weak!) repulsion; is it in the masses, in a >cloud between them, in their joint center of mass, or what? I have been excluding the natural law thread (where folks have been courteous enough to include "natural law" in their subject lines!), but I feel that this, at least, is a topic on which I can straighten folks out fairly easily. This is a rather clever paradox, Anton, but fundamentally it just comes down to the reification of a bookkeeping trick (or, more charitably, a mathematical abstraction). The "negative gravitational potential energy" represents the amount of energy you would need to _add_ to the system to make the two bodies gravitationally independent, which happens when the distance between the two bodies is infinite. If one of the bodies is a star and the other a spacecraft, imparting that much kinetic energy to the spacecraft would accelerate it to "escape velocity". This is the definition of escape velocity, V = SQRT(2E/M) when E is the kinetic energy; you get this by solving E = (MV^2)/2 for V. Both "gravitational potential energy" and "escape velocity" are mathematical abstractions... you can never move two objects infinitely far from each other. What the gravitational potential energy represents is the _absence_ of something... energy that would have to be _added_ to the system to break up the orbital relationship. It's useful to us because we can use it in real-world calculations... to get the delta-V between two orbits of the same spacecraft, we give each an "absolute" energy defined in terms of this unachievable extreme case, and subtract. The result is a useful real-world quantity, but the extreme case we chose was arbitrary. The arbitrary value chosen doesn't matter, because it cancels out in the subtraction. Gravitational potential energy is _not_ "anti-energy" in some Star Trek sense and it does _not_ represent some equivalent amount of "negative matter" floating around somewhere in the solar system. This is what I mean by reifying a mathematical abstraction. dV/dt ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V93 #220 ********************************* &