I believe the argument goes like this: "fiat" depends on a declaration by a government that something has value. The way a government does that is by declaring something legal tender and accepting taxes denominated in that currency.
Contrast with a time when currency was pegged to a physical asset like gold and GBP so no depreciation in something like 300 years. Savings actually had meaning.
The government imposes a tax, the tax is due in the state's unit of account. The government can then spend its unit of account into circulation, and later accepts it back in payment of taxes.
> Contrast with a time when currency was pegged to a physical asset like gold
Even when a currency is constructed from a commodity, it is not the commidity that is the money. It is a commodity that bears the stamp of the sovereign.
> and GBP so no depreciation in something like 300 years. Savings actually had meaning.
When money was constructed from a commodity there was a terrible shortage of coin to support the economy and it was a horror show for almost everyone.
It's certainly possible to have price stability and full employment, but if you're going to choose, a bit of inflation is much, much better than deflation.
Human rights are intimately woven into International Law and state sovereignty. The work of the TWAIL scholars is relevant, especially as regards how human rights are deployed to undermine the sovereignty of the global south following the rapid “decolonisation” of the mid 20th century.
I’m afraid it’s almost impossible to divorce politics and human rights.
Politics are intertwined in every facet of the human experience, because they're effectively the net result of a social group
Some people however strive to "live above" politics, or to breathlessly demand things be "apolitical" based on their own biases. That bias in of itself being as "political" as anything else
First time I heard about TWAIL.
Ok, now human rights are controversial?
The one ideal, that whoever you are, wherever you are, you hold universal rights because you are a human.
This are Western ideas and are not true for the global south? This belief is weaponized?
I cannot believe this. Simply outrageous. I never understood the religious people before - to me this is a sacrilege.
Universal human rights are the hill I will literally die on.
human rights in spirit are not. but in practice (see the the argument below) they are used more as a rhetorical shield. they are toothless paper tigers, they are extremely easy to co-opt and corrupt the spirit. (eg. see how Putin loves harping on about self-determination of people in the annexed regions; how proudly democratic North Korea is.)
I hope my extreme summarization is not completely useless.
Second: the biggest straw man I have ever seen. Rage bait Philosophy.Just because human rights are violated does not mean, that they are useless or non existence.
It's a good word of caution specially the normalizing states of emergency and dehumanizing people.
Civil libertys and democracy are fragile achievements, that need to be protected by the citizens. Human rights are rights against an overbearing state.
All the examples given are valid points, that violate human rights. And for every issue there is a human right group, that fights against the violations.
I dont buy his conclusion about potential either... Another magical force.
Regarding organisations and corporations he should really read up on Luhmann.
So maybe I am a fanatic - none of his arguments strike true for me.
Yeah, I had the exact same sentiment. (As in "sure we don't live in a perfect world, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to set goals as a bare minimum baseline".)
Canada ratified it years ago (if we're not counting optional protocols), but according to https://indicators.ohchr.org/, the US hasn't. Do you have a source?
Politics follow ethics in democratic societies. However, our understanding of ethics is always developing. We now understand that homosexuality is ethical. We understand that transgenderism is ethical. There will be more things in the future where politics has to bow to our improved understanding of ethics. Ethics is always a foundation for democratic politics, because politics needs to govern how we as a society live together in peace.
Not sure about English law but in Roman law (and derived systems as in South Africa) the emphasis is on specific performance as a first resort — the court will seek to implement the intention of the parties embodied in the contract as far as possible.
This is actually American law, neither English nor Roman. While it is derived from English common law, it has an even stronger bias against specific performance (and in fact bright-line prohibits some which would be allowed in the earlier law from which it evolved, because of the Constitutional prohibition on involuntary servitude.)
That's good, assuming the cost of harm is a cost in utility and not in money, otherwise it starts having issues. Make sure you have a good utility function.
Collect all the things in a big folder. Try to make sure the PDF has a page title.
Mine the data with pdf2txt and other things. ;)
My archive includes lots of juicy nuggets of things I did 20 years ago, and again 10 years ago, and so on. Just mining the data before feeding it to the AI, I'm learning things about myself .. I've returned to some subjects through multiple different paths.
There's also a lot of interesting parallels between the different slashdot, kuro5hin, reddit, HN and lobste.rs epochs. I could probably add an extra training stage where, after analyzing the PDF archive, it also gets access to my still-extant social media accounts.
Frankly, I'm half tempted to just fire up a "RoboTaco 1000 AI" on this, point it at a blog interface, and see how many like-minded souls/AI I can suck into the vortex ..
Contrast with a time when currency was pegged to a physical asset like gold and GBP so no depreciation in something like 300 years. Savings actually had meaning.