war and our world

I’ve today went to the Museo de la Nacion in Lima, Peru. (Have i forgotten telling you i’m in Peru? Well, i had the best reason ever!) Anyway, the visit is awesome, in my forthcoming post about how maths is silly there will be a photo of me there with a quipu. Lots of Precolombino things there, but what was completely breathtaking was the exhibit about Terrorism.

As it turns out, Terrorism in Peru is the word for civil war, or more precisely to a kind of civil war that developed here in the 80s and 90s. Two left-oriented groups, the Sendero Luminoso and the MRTA created a lot of unrest and violence. I do not know nearly enough about such events to comment about anything, but i have a few musings about violence, war, and our lives.

damn u Friedman

Most of the time you see someone complaining that the State is too big, it’s business people whining about taxes. They don’t care about autonomy or efficiency or freedom or the will of the people or legitimacy or fairness or anything else besides their account books.

economy not capitalism

They say (“They say a lot, don’t they?”) that Capitalism is inevitable, that it is everywhere and will not go away. They even say “human nature is capitalist”. What do you do when faced with such bullshit?

To spell it out: every society has an economy, yes, but that only means that for example they keep stocks of food or clothes and such. Even societies without money have economies.

Economy is just a way to study society.

Capitalism is a system of production, a whole different story. If you don’t see the difference you gotta study more — at least if you want to continue dumping that garbage about “how capitalism is evil” in innocent (mine) ears.

cheap meals

The difference between a $0.8 meal and a $15 meal is not that the latter is (say) 10 times as nutritive as the former. It probably is 2 times (at most) more varied than the former, containing a richer set of rare compounds like vitamins and other stuff, but the energy level is hardly any bigger. The real difference between those, and say between any of them and a $600 meal, is that the gal eating the most expensive would be 750 (600/0.8) times as likely to receive food if there were not enough food for everyone.