Woods (This guy Rocks)

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Woods (This guy Rocks)

No, it is you who is wrong. There is no new life life or sentient being spontaneously created by a group of individuals interacting with each other. Assessment and action is still taken at the individual level.

I entirely agree that assessment and action contines to take place at the individual level. This is not an either-or. Higher order structures do not negate lower orders. There are also higher order structures. It's both.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Woods (This guy Rocks)

Keep the Financial Elite from robbing us blind by enforcing regulations to control the greedy bastards.

That's a false hope. Regulations are a necessary element of the solution, but in the current circumstances, regulations have been twisted into tools of oppression and corruption.

[LargoWinch]

Re: Woods (This guy Rocks)

No, it is you who is wrong. ...

Mashuri, I am sure you are not mean-spirited and I recognize that it is sometimes difficult to express oneself on the internets ;), but I suggest using terms like "I still disagree" instead of the above-quoted (see Medved posts in this very thread).

[raja]

Re: Woods (This guy Rocks)

Originally Posted by raja
Keep the Financial Elite from robbing us blind by enforcing regulations to control the greedy bastards.

ThePythonicCow
That's a false hope. Regulations are a necessary element of the solution, but in the current circumstances, regulations have been twisted into tools of oppression and corruption.

In that case, let's just cut off their heads :eek:

[Mashuri]

Re: Woods (This guy Rocks)

Mashuri, I am sure you are not mean-spirited and I recognize that it is sometimes difficult to express oneself on the internets ;), but I suggest using terms like "I still disagree" instead of the above-quoted (see Medved posts in this very thread).

I apologize if I hurt anyone's feelings.

[Mashuri]

Re: Woods (This guy Rocks)

I entirely agree that assessment and action contines to take place at the individual level. This is not an either-or. Higher order structures do not negate lower orders. There are also higher order structures. It's both.

Understand the lower order and the higher order will fall into place.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Woods (This guy Rocks)

Understand the lower order and the higher order will fall into place.

Whatever meaning you intended to convey with the phrase "fall into place" did not survive its journey across the Internet to my conscious.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Woods (This guy Rocks)

I am convinced that these are false or at least too simplistic dichotomies. But I lack the clarity and power at this point to guide the other gentle respondents on this thread to any better understanding.

The Zeitgeist Movie and associated Zeitgeist Movement provide another interesting critique on our current problems (as did Marx perhaps) though I don't know if it can guide us along a better path (nor could Marx.)

[Rajiv]

Re: Woods (This guy Rocks)

Also Martin Armstrong's latest - Martin Armstrong - Creating the Floating Exchange Rate System; the Fate of the Dollar 2010 and Beyond…

Another interesting paper and good lesson in history in which Martin clearly points out the shortcomings of a gold monetary system and describes the checks and balances created within a floating exchange rate system. He sees serious consequences for our currency and offers that the year 2015 would fit in his cycle analysis as a potential year that a transition to a new currency system might transpire – hmmm, that’s very interesting. He also provides market analysis for the world’s major currencies.

[Mashuri]

Re: Woods (This guy Rocks)

Whatever meaning you intended to convey with the phrase "fall into place" did not survive its journey across the Internet to my conscious.

Really... Ok, then

[Mashuri]

Re: Woods (This guy Rocks)

Also Martin Armstrong's latest - Martin Armstrong - Creating the Floating Exchange Rate System; the Fate of the Dollar 2010 and Beyond…

I love reading his stuff and he's totally right about our previous gold standard. So long as government is allowed a monopoly on currency, they will figure out a way to cheat everyone out of their wealth, gold standard or not.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Woods (This guy Rocks)

Originally Posted by ThePythonicCow

Whatever meaning you intended to convey with the phrase "fall into place" did not survive its journey across the Internet to my conscious.

Really... Ok, then

Ok - then could you elaborate? What did you mean by that phrase "fall into place?"

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Woods (This guy Rocks)

I love reading his stuff and he's totally right about our previous gold standard. So long as government is allowed a monopoly on currency, they will figure out a way to cheat everyone out of their wealth, gold standard or not.

Yes - his comments in this article on the gold standard are excellent.

[aaron]

Re: Woods (This guy Rocks)

In response to several excellent posts above ... I sense strong Libertarian politics and Austrian economics. When what I say disagrees with them, it seems perhaps that I am presumed to be advocating a strong central authority and neo-capitalist economics.

In other words, this is seen as a struggle between liberty and tyranny, between an honest gold standard and a centrally managed fiat currency. If what I say doesn't support liberty and gold, then it seems that I must be for tyranny and fiat currency crapola.

I am convinced that these are false or at least too simplistic dichotomies. But I lack the clarity and power at this point to guide the other gentle respondents on this thread to any better understanding. I am confident that I will be able to guide myself to a better understanding, as usual, but how and when that endeavor will play out can never be known to me ahead of time.

I could attempt to respond point by point, but given the fragility of my insight, it would quickly turn into a frustrating and futile debate, marked only the scoring of points for "one side" or "the other."

Instead I am spending these hours reading Survival+: Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation by Charles Hugh Smith. I am 15% of the way through at this moment, reading it on Amazon's free Kindle reader for PC's, running inside Wine on my Linux desktop. Good book so far.

My apologies for not giving the several excellent comments above the consideration they deserve.

Survival+ = Really good!

You can read the first 18 chapters at his web site oftwominds.com I just got the full book from Amazon. It is the best book that I have read so far on the subject.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Woods (This guy Rocks)

Understand the lower order and the higher order will fall into place.

Ah - to continue a train of thought dropped a half year ago, I take it you (Mashuri) meant roughly:

Understand the lower order and that will lead to understanding of the higher order.

No. I disagree.

The higher orders are commonly arranged by quite different principles, such that understanding lower orders provides little or no guidance into the higher orders, and for that matter, vice versa.

Consider this example from an area in which I have more experience:

• One can understand semiconductor device physics better than anyone else on this planet, and not understand the design principles of even a simple microprocessor such as the Motorola 6800, much less a present day Intel® Core™ 2 Duo.
• One can be a lead designer for that Intel CPU, and understand little about the architecture and design principles of a major operating system.
• One can be a principle design engineer on major operating systems for decades and have little more than a novice understanding of the software architecture of a major application such as Firefox (I might fit in this last category.)

The organization of society follows entirely different principles than the chemistry, biology, or psychology of individual humans. Society is certainly constrained by the capacities and limitations of the individuals within it, just as operating system cannot do that which the underlying CPU does not in any way support, and just as a physical CPU architecture cannot ignore the limitations of the physical devices it manages and uses. But society is not simply the sum of its parts.

The idea that we can understand macroeconomics by summing up microeconomics over all the participants is roughly like claiming that we can understand the properties of materials using just the properties of ideal gases. For another example, one cannot understand Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) just by understanding the inorganic properties of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur (CHONPS).