Gyroscopic Investing

dualstow wrote: It'll never happen in the States. I'm excited for Finland, though. Nice small country, and a good place to try it out.

moda0306 wrote: Why don't you think it would happen?  I'm not necessarily in disagreement, but I'm curious why some folks are so positive that model would be rejected by either citizens or agents of the state would reject a model like that.

TennPaGa wrote:

MWKXJ wrote:

moda0306 wrote: Most of the world's ~7 billion people live outside the West in nations that do not provide a citizens dividend.  Such people will happily relocate to countries which subsidize citizenship.
  ...
The alternative is to define peoples, demarcate borders, and return to nationalism ...to establish who is and is not a citizen, who is entitled to inherit a nation's bounty, and who is not and should be excluded.

+1

jafs wrote: That's moving the discussion from a citizen's dividend to immigration policies.

A country could decide to implement the first while maintaining strict immigration standards - Denmark is very good to citizens and it's very hard to immigrate there.

moda0306 wrote:

dualstow wrote: It'll never happen in the States. I'm excited for Finland, though. Nice small country, and a good place to try it out.

Why don't you think it would happen?

MWKXJ wrote: The two are intrinsically linked.  The meaning of citizenship is determined by immigration policy.  The term "citizen's dividend" implicitly calls for discussion of what a citizen is.

jafs wrote: Well, of course they're linked.

But, my point is/was that a citizen's dividend doesn't imply a loose immigration policy, and so if one is opposed to the latter, that's fine, but it's not the same thing as being opposed to the former.

One can support or oppose either of those or both of them.

jafs wrote: Well, of course they're linked.

But, my point is/was that a citizen's dividend doesn't imply a loose immigration policy, and so if one is opposed to the latter, that's fine, but it's not the same thing as being opposed to the former.

One can support or oppose either of those or both of them.

http://thefutureprimaeval.net/notes-on-boundaries/

If you introduce a chemical (eg penicillin) that attacks the ability of bacteria to form cell walls, they lose their cell walls. This kills the bacteria. Why?

Any productive entropy resistant dynamic has an internal economy of connected mechanisms that need to make certain assumptions. The assumptions are often of the form that things deliberately excluded will stay gone, and that things produced will stay available for your use. That is, that investments are protected from destruction by the outside environment. This is accomplished by setting up barriers that insulate some part of the world from leakage or interference.
[...]
If you dissolve the cell wall, the cell dies because it is no longer able to capture the gains of its own labor and profit from its own investments. Barriers and investment protection of some kind are necessary for life or any other form of productivity. Lack of barriers is death.

A nation-state or community is itself a living thing: investing in good people, getting rid of bad people, and organizing them into social structures. Barriers to entry, exit, and interference allow these investments to be made and guaranteed, which allows super-individual social structures like civilization to live. The first civilizations were farming communities that built walls and armies against raiders.

A proposal to dissolve all controls on entry and exit from communities and nations is similar to the proposal to dump Penicillin in a bacterial colony. Soup composed of homogenized life-bits is not alive, despite being constitutionally indistinguishable from life (for a while). Mind you in the case of civilizations, removing one set of walls does not kill it, because civilizations are quite robust, and will find other ways to discriminate, but it does make it harder to live. For example, if we require companies to hire representative samples of the population by race and gender, and they will do things like put all the people they would not have hired in one of the less critical departments, to keep the effect of segregation in the critical departments, but they still have to pay for it, and it is less stable.

Pointedstick wrote: On the importance of borders, something I read today seemed exceptionally relevant:

A nation-state or community is itself a living thing: investing in good people, getting rid of bad people, and organizing them into social structures.

lordmetroid wrote: In Europe you can't just move to a country, walk into the nearest welfare office and go "Je... Je, je je... *pointing to yourself* - MONEY!" You actually have to have an employment first to be eligable for moving as a personliving living in EU.

jafs wrote: Birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the Constitution, and so a Constitutional amendment would be needed if we want to stop that practice.

What we do about the many illegal residents we have now is hard to figure out completely - I'm not against the idea of deporting them in theory, but in practice that's hard and expensive to do.  Somebody who was here on a temporary visa, and didn't get their application processed before that expired is in a different category for me than somebody who came over illegally.  And, if there are children born here, we can't deport them.