More Notes from Previous Club Meetings

[Quite a few of us jot down notes during meetings. Try to post them here is you get the chance, especially since most of us view different things as worthy and miss a lot.]

Note: These are mostly fragments because I just use my phone's notepad.

Sputnik was different, because you could walk out onto your lawn and say, "Fuck, the Russians are up there!"

Soviets and Americans stealing German intellectual property at end of WW2. V2 rocket engineers were divvied up between the two superpowers, and during the Korean War both sides had almost identical fighter planes.

Nazi rocket scientists in Alabama.

If you can steal intellectual property, you can leap a culture centuries forward.

Judeo-Christian Greeks vs. Confucians

Egypt is still pretty much Pharaonic. (Example of middle class which has not tried to gain political power)

Performance = Talent X Effort^2 X Directed Effort^3

Ignorance = Not knowing
Incompetence = Not knowing that you don't know

I am comfortable, and I fear success not failure (Tisdall's psychoanalysis of me)

Stock value = Profit X Social Construct

The difference between good people and bad people is that good people figure out how to solve their problems.

Whenever there is government which brings about an unequal distribution of power between groups and individuals within a state [definition of politics], special interest groups will always focus their energies on capturing its power. The greater the power of government, the more energy special interests will spend trying to capture it.

Don't worry about your car not meeting environmental standards. Because oil is fungible , any less gas your car uses will simply make it cheaper for everyone else by the law of supply/ demand. The truth is that all of the oil is going to be burned up.

Mitigation

The only monopolies ever to exist were biological: Chinese tea, Brazilian rubber, and Dutch nutmeg. They did not last for very long.

Rent Seeking

Happiness is mostly correlated to hope

Happiness is only seen in hindsight

You say that you want my money because you will use it to help them. I don't trust you're intent. I think you just want my money. If you needed it, why didn't you offer to shovel snow off my driveway?

Willingness to perform simple manual labor is a good indicator of need vs want

The greatest inequality brings the greatest growth. See: USA 1890, at paradigm.

Anything you are given that you have not earned corrupts you. But you cannot tax inheritance and trust society to solve the corruption.

The Wire (show)