62 thoughts on “Weekend reflections”

  1. Ah, so you aren’t advocating actually burning people’s homes down (as happened for example at Weipa when Comalco wanted the locals out) just starving them out.

    So they can explore the exciting career opportunities in petrol-sniffing and homelessness offered by the typical town camp.

  2. Ernestine Says:

    Are you or are you not ‘Fred Taylor’?

    No, I am not in fact some guy who’s been dead for nearly a hundred years. Surprise surprise. That was a taunt. I don’t suppose your real name is Thorsten by any chance?

    I wasn’t really asking you for any empirical evidence anyway. I was rather pointing out the utter ridiculousness of your post #34. You start out at #26 dismissing an argument because of a dodgy assumption you thought it contained. But to try to prove the existence of the (imagined) original dodgy assumption, you had resort to even dodgier assumptions.

  3. SJ gave ‘Fred Taylor’ as his name in an earlier post this year. Now he says it was a taunt.

    I take his posts #32, #42, #43, and #52 to be taunts, too.

  4. Since there’s no substantive rebuttal of #43, I’ll take that as game, set and match.

  5. SJ, I see no need to to ‘rebut’ your silly statements in #43? You made them. You can refute them means of proof by contradiction. Have fun.

  6. Take out one “to’ in line one and insert ‘by’ between ‘them’ and ‘means’. Thank you

  7. Since there’s no still no substantive rebuttal of #43, i.e., a justification of why your assumptions about Paul’s statement explain anything about Paul’s statement, and you still appear to want to change the subject, you ain’t lookin’ too good here.

  8. “you ain’t lookin’ too good here.”

    As someone who respects both you and Ernestine I have to say that as a result of this whole exchange neither of you are lookin’ too good here.

  9. Thanks, Ian, for reminding me of the proverb that if one enters a discussion with an idiot one ends like looking one. I should have written to JQ after SJ’s post #32.

  10. Before this escalates any further, allow me to point out that:

    a) I’m just some anonymous dude on the internets. I have no reputation to protect, even though Ian says kind things about me.

    b) Ernestine, you aren’t anonymous, and should perhaps be more circumspect in what you say.

  11. I’m down with that, but I don’t understand why gold is the best alternative. The strongest argument for gold seems to be that it comes with a built in stabilizer: people mine more gold when the price is high and less when the price is low. That’s great, but if supply and demand are so cool why not let people go the whole hog and issue money based on whatever they like?

    Technically under a gold standard the price of gold doesn’t change but I agree that within the context of a gold standard gold can be used to form a self stabilising monetary system.

    I agree with the notion that free people should be free to choose what unit of account and medium of exchange they like in terms of their own contracts and affairs. Except for the problem of government. Assuming you have a government that legislates for taxes and which sets fines and which borrows money then that government also exercises a choice. The issue then becomes what is the best choice (for all concerned) for the government to make. As far as I am concerned everybody should be free to choose the unit of account and the medium of exchange that they prefer but the government should decide carefully and wisely and for the greater good. It is at this point that I personally think the government should look to use gold rather than diamonds.

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