'Anonymous' Stratfor Hack Reportedly Start Of Weeklong Assault

[polaris93]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/25/anonymous-stratfor-hack-hackers-hacking_n_1169268.html

Hackers on Sunday claimed to have stolen a raft of e-mails and credit card data from U.S.-based security think tank Stratfor,

Comments

[galadrion]

If everyone had the same amount of money, money would lose its value, and we'd have to use something else to get goods and services transferred from seller to buyer.

Not really, because while money is a facilitator of value exchange, it isn't (and cannot be) the sole repository of value. As the Coase Theorem (which won the 1991 Nobel Prize in Economics) states, if there's nothing to stop people from trading then people will continue trading until they've exhausted all possible gains from trade.

Allow me to phrase it this way: assuming that hypothetically, everyone in the world has, by fiat, an equal share in all the money in the world. Everyone in the world has approximately $5,000 US. (Very approximately. No one is exactly sure how much money there really is in the world. As it turns out, without very strict definitions, and a great deal of verbal weaseling, no one can know.) So, because everyone has the same amount of money, do they stop wanting other things?Quick and simple answer from any basic, honest entry-level economics

[polaris93]

Yep. Mainly I was presenting the idea that a human or any other economy is a system in which energy (services) and matter (goods) are transferred from entities to entities (a living creature or creatures of some kind, or a non-living object or process, such as a river, a lake, a stone, etc.). Those are real transfers of real things between real entities, and they can only occur if there's a steep enough gradient between the organisms/entities (including, e.g., hives, nests, colonies, packs, bands, corporations, etc.). The gradients are established because of desire by an entity or set of entities to gain goods and/or services from another entity, whether or not the other entity is alive or not, willing or not.

What is always present is the will of the first entity to gain something the second entity has or is; it must be alive, and must desire what the second entity possesses/is. Take away that will and desire and the gradient that is necessary to an economic transaction disappears. As you point out, incentives power the system

[galadrion]

And the way you do that is to even out the economic highs and lows of the system -- make everyone start from the same position, none having any more or less than anyone else.

Fortunately, this aim has never been achieved and probably cannot be achieved by any human-derived agency. It is - theoretically - possible for all people to be allocated the same physical resources (if you're willing to grant a totalitarian authority sufficient remit), but people themselves are not equal: the utility each will be able to extract from his or her own resources will be different. (No two people have identical capabilities; for an instructive parable, see Harrison Bergeron.) As a result, no possible human agency will be able to eliminate trade and the benefits thereof without completely eliminating humanity - and from the outcome of recent current events, such a human agency can apparently look forward to being eliminated by the oppressed: see Qaddafi, Hussein, and others. (I doubt Obama will suffer the same fate, but then, he didn't take the dance

[polaris93]

I agree with you. Here, I was exploring something that I suddenly realized was fascinating: the basic likeness of an economy to an ideal gas, electricity, or crowd behavior. Along with astronomy, my first love as a kid was mathematics, which is the language of the physical sciences. So I got very excited about this, and wrote about it. But the conclusion, that Socialism is a civilization-wrecker, not only is not fun, it's also confirmed by what we've seen happen in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. And not just when it comes to money and what it can buy. There are other things than money that people value -- a man or woman's children are worth any amount of money to them, which is why it's hard to keep them from giving in to kidnapper's demands and giving them the money they demand within minutes of the demand being made. Both China and Russia have lost a great deal of their cultural strength, thanks to Socialism. China has money and economic strength now (some), but culturally and socially she is shot