He did say something like this in his Stanford University commencement address but yes, this is the first time in reading this quote from him as well.

I wouldn’t say 56 is young but I do believe he made a very stupid decision. He basically dodged a bullet (with a rare pancreatic cancer diagnosis that was easily treatable with surgery) and then asked the gunmen to try again.

I’m guessing that Tolkien felt Bilbo had not been wearing the ring enough to be addicted to it to the point where he’d do that. He had the ring for a long time but wasn’t wearing it. That’s my understanding anyway.

Interesting. At the time I don’t remember them being described as microscopic. But it was many years ago.

Not bones but even better. Scientists found soft tissue from dinosaurs that was 75 million years old.

I see what you did there.

And here I was thinking it was an elaborate marketing ploy by the Frito Lay company. /s

The only side effect is that in the middle of the night they sleepwalk to the refrigerator and eat everything inside it.

I read somewhere that startups are more successful when the CEO is older and that the age that sees the most success is 60.

Principles only mean something if you stand by them when it’s inconvenient.

Yes we cooperate when that is more sensible than competing. I’m simply saying that describing life as being competitive doesn’t elevate the concept of competition.

> elevate competition to an extreme and once decently enjoyable (and beneficial) competitions become something else. ..

You keep suggesting I’m elevating competition simply by using it to describe one aspect of life. I’m not. I’m using it as a word because words are how we describe things.

If I describe the sky as being blue, I’m not elevating the word blue. I’m using it to describe the sky. That’s what words are for.

While competition is a basic component of life, cooperation is not a basic component of competition. Some forms of competition require cooperation and some do not.

When two hunters are competing for the same animal, they don’t have to cooperate for one of them to win. When two trees in a dense forest are both trying to reach the canopy to get more sunlight, they do not cooperate. If they are side by side and there’s only room at the top of the canopy for one, there will be a winner and a loser without cooperation playing a role.

It being a basic component of life doesn’t change a friendly game of checkers.

Absolutely agree. Either way we can’t know which outcome it will be. All we can do is the best we can and hope that’s enough.

I’m not so sure. It’s also part of the reason we have our modern society. I certainly would not want to go back to living as a hunter-gatherer.

That basic human greed is the result of being shaped by evolution to make sure we survive and reproduce.

In the US 50% of Americans work for small businesses. If you want to work for yourself and you’re willing to do whatever it takes, you can. It’s not easy. I have worked for myself 32 of the 38 years of my adult life. There were times when I was working 16 hour days for weeks at a time.

Having said that, we need to overturn Citizen’s United. Corporations are not people. They are not allowed to vote for example. Given that they can’t vote they shouldn’t be able to donate to political campaigns. They are part of the reason our politics in the US are so divisive.

The fundamental difference here is that we have a built-in survival instinct. So we are going to work to ensure that we best we can. Profit creates a buffer so that we aren’t constantly right at the very edge of survival. As long as there’s an economy, there’s going to be a profit motive. And there should be because profit drives people to create things they their people want.

I just don’t think we should be trying to tell people how to live. That’s never ended well. We can educate but we shouldn’t be mandating.

Circumstances and values change over time. I’m sure if we could leap ahead 500 years there would be things we’d recognize and things we wouldn’t. We would be comfortable with some of how society works and very uncomfortable with other parts.

Consider that 500 years ago there were very few professions. Most people were farmers. Today we have an countless things people do to earn a living. It would seem like magic to someone from 500 years ago. It will almost certainly be true in 500 years as well.

I know many are pessimistic about mankind’s future. I’m not. We will adapt and we will wait until a problem is pretty bad before we resolve it but we will resolve it. People are terrible at predicting just about anything long term. That doesn’t mean we don’t have to take climate change seriously for example. We do. But the people who thing we won’t survive to 2100 should study history better. We’ve survived ice ages, the black plague, pandemics (prior to vaccines), wars and more.

It won’t be easy but we will survive.

That’s not true. Ants wage war. Chimpanzees have been known to do so as well. Dolphins gang rape other dolphins.

But forgetting all that, all those species social groups compete with other social groups of their own species and other species for resources. No living thing is immune to competition.

Over time values will change (that is a virtual certainty) and hopefully for the better. But society needs to change. Our government must represent the interests of the people not the other way around.

Indeed. Every time I say anything pro-capitalism I get downvoted despite the fact that it’s the reason we are no longer hunter-gatherers.

Communism is the worst of both worlds because those in power become corrupt and optimize around themselves. At least with capitalism, everyone has a shot.

Which resources are not actually scarce but only appear to be? And how is the entire planet being fooled so easily?

> The basics of commerce is fair trade. You value A as “= 1” and I value B as “ =1” so we agree in our trade that A = B, boiling it down to a zero-sum game.

But it’s not zero sum. Each party trades to get the best deal they can. It’s impossible to determine equality when trading corn for a good axe. I might be a good hunter but terrible at making axes. We can’t be good at everything. This is where capitalism comes in. I decide to specialize in making axes or farming because by specializing, I can create something of value more efficiently than someone who doesn’t specialize. That extra efficiency is my profit.

We do sometimes have to cooperate rather than compete when the resources are such that we can’t monopolize them (clean air for example) or when the risk of competition is just too great for all involved.

Generally speaking however, competition produces the best result.

Correct. We both compete and cooperate. Generally speaking we cooperate with those whose goals are aligned with and support our own while competing with those whose goals work against our own.

This reads like so many academic papers do: as if they were written by people who have never actually experienced the thing about which they are claiming to be an expert.

Competition is a built-in feature of life. All forms of life compete for resources. Until mankind reaches the point where the desired resources are effectively unlimited, there will always be competition. Capitalism is simply the most basic economic form of that competition.

That we compete with each other for resources may sometimes feel incompatible with a stable society but clearly it’s not. Society in general is stable enough and when it’s not, it’s rarely due to the competition for resources. Instability is nearly always politically-driven by those seeking power or trying to hold on to it. Making society more stable require political reform.

Competition is a basic component of life. That’s not going to change for the foreseeable future.