3/ Debt is a weird thing. The fact that most of us are in debt for most of our lives is a weird thing. It's written from a left wing perspective, but I strongly recommend the book Debt: The First Five Thousand Years, by David Graeber.
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4/ Folks got all upset at Moldbug's statements about slavery, because they map them to "but slavery is good tho", when his point was much more nuanced: there are ALWAYS power relations, and these are mediated / documented / justified in different ways.
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5/ In explicit slave states, we have slaves and owners. In totalitarian socialist states, we have "citizens" and party members. In market states, we have debtors and investors.
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6/ It is always better to be powerful than to be powerless. It's worth talking about mobility between classes (because systems with more mobility are probably better than systems with less). Can a Chinese nobody become a party member? Can an antebellum slave buy his freedom?
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7/ Does a system reward good behavior? Is it fair? (Are any of them? (Is there any better alternative?)) But once we acknowledge the similarities between power hierarchies in different systems, ... well, now we're haggling.
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8/ Progs who talk about wage slavery aren't entirely right...but they're not entirely wrong either. But it's not wages that create the slavery - it's the fact that the universe is entropic, and we have to pay for our food and housing.
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9/ "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."
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10/ One weird thing is that to maximize your expected income you should NOT be an entrepreneur / indie author / startup founder / whatever. I ran my own firm for 14 years and made crap. That's common. I took compensation in autonomy / freedom, not dollars.
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11/ In a sense, freedom is conserved. You can either get freedom via earning cash, which gives you one kind of freedom (from debt / from the need to work more), or via off beat choices (which gives you freedom from bosses and cube farms). I'm not sure that either is better.
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that's a true form of freedom! my (!@#-ing ) farmhand had that freedom - made $12/hr, but woke up every day with absolute freedom, never committed to showing up at an office
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