So what is the steelman case for Nick Bostrom? Every time he comes to my attention - for existential risk, for superintelligence, for the simulation hypothesis, for uncompromising objectivity - he is being either mediocre or stupid, however counterintuitive or repugnant that may seem to him. Is this just selection bias on the people I pay attention to? Am I the victim of a world-wide conspiracy to suppress the genius of Nick Bostrom? When I look at a summary of his work, he doesn't seem to have done much else except "anthropic reasoning". Is that really really really good, or what?
If you read contemporary accounts of the banking crisis of the 1930s and FDR's bank holiday, one sees a lot of apocalyptic visions. In fact, what happened is that people wrote IOUs or ordinary checks and, somehow or another, commerce carried on. It's like the 1907 crisis where everyone in my part of the world was using Lauridsen dollars, effectively IOUs. Perhaps Biden should direct the treasury to print an IOU monetary series of bills and use it for the payment of all government debts during the shutdown. The 14th amendment guarantees that those IOUs would have to be accepted as payment, and there is nothing in the whole debt ceiling charade that expressly forbids this. It's not as elegant as the platinum coin, but it would provide a useful and constitutional workaround.
Nothing guarantees that an IOU has to be accepted as payment, not even the legal tender attribute. If you look at the actual law, all "legal tender" means is that a tender will (more or less) discharge an antecedent debt unless the parties have previously agreed otherwise. Before the Depression, wholesale transactions frequently had a "gold clause," which either rejected any tender other than gold, or insisted that the appropriate tender would be gold's worth in dollars, rather than a fixed sum. They were quite enforceable, and have become enforceable again since 1977.
"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."
I might add that the Federal Reserve does nothing to keep Washington honest. In fact, they are working lock and step, probably because the global economy is dependent on the solvency of the US Dollar. Maybe it’s time to consolidate the balance sheet of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. As the definitions of debt, credit, and obligations are updated, the public and Congress needs a new education on central banking, money supply, and how the global economic order actually works. Then they can see how debts, deficits, and inflation work together and how one can mitigate the other. As Cheney said, “Deficits don’t matter.”
So what is the steelman case for Nick Bostrom? Every time he comes to my attention - for existential risk, for superintelligence, for the simulation hypothesis, for uncompromising objectivity - he is being either mediocre or stupid, however counterintuitive or repugnant that may seem to him. Is this just selection bias on the people I pay attention to? Am I the victim of a world-wide conspiracy to suppress the genius of Nick Bostrom? When I look at a summary of his work, he doesn't seem to have done much else except "anthropic reasoning". Is that really really really good, or what?
If you read contemporary accounts of the banking crisis of the 1930s and FDR's bank holiday, one sees a lot of apocalyptic visions. In fact, what happened is that people wrote IOUs or ordinary checks and, somehow or another, commerce carried on. It's like the 1907 crisis where everyone in my part of the world was using Lauridsen dollars, effectively IOUs. Perhaps Biden should direct the treasury to print an IOU monetary series of bills and use it for the payment of all government debts during the shutdown. The 14th amendment guarantees that those IOUs would have to be accepted as payment, and there is nothing in the whole debt ceiling charade that expressly forbids this. It's not as elegant as the platinum coin, but it would provide a useful and constitutional workaround.
Nothing guarantees that an IOU has to be accepted as payment, not even the legal tender attribute. If you look at the actual law, all "legal tender" means is that a tender will (more or less) discharge an antecedent debt unless the parties have previously agreed otherwise. Before the Depression, wholesale transactions frequently had a "gold clause," which either rejected any tender other than gold, or insisted that the appropriate tender would be gold's worth in dollars, rather than a fixed sum. They were quite enforceable, and have become enforceable again since 1977.
From the 14th amendment:
"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."
I might add that the Federal Reserve does nothing to keep Washington honest. In fact, they are working lock and step, probably because the global economy is dependent on the solvency of the US Dollar. Maybe it’s time to consolidate the balance sheet of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. As the definitions of debt, credit, and obligations are updated, the public and Congress needs a new education on central banking, money supply, and how the global economic order actually works. Then they can see how debts, deficits, and inflation work together and how one can mitigate the other. As Cheney said, “Deficits don’t matter.”