Robin Israel

master watchmaker @self-employed @omega, very into craft, science, technology, love sports, nature and freedom.

[Ian Quigley @allmeasures]

I'm on a mission to make this plot as publicly recognizable as the one with the holes in the WW2 airplane

[Robin Israel @RobinIsrael10]

@joejoematic @GamHolaBim @yann63992 @sparbuchfeinde Der Satz "Rente hängt nicht von der Demographie ab" hat mir eine gute Idee gebracht: Wieso geht nicht einfach die ganze Gesellschaft morgen in Rente. Spielt ja sowieso keine Rolle, das Verhältnis zwischen Arbeitern und Rentnern.

[Dieter @PatriotDieter76]

Abschaffung vom Ehegatten Splitting: Ich finde die Begründung so toll: Damit Frauen nicht in der Teilzeit verharren, erhöht man krass die Steuer, damit Frauen in Vollzeit arbeiten müssen um das gleiche Geld zu haben wie vorher.

[Robin Israel @RobinIsrael10]

@D4RW1NEXE @signulll "Handwerk hat goldenen Boden"

[Robin Israel @RobinIsrael10]

@anon_opin Brain horse power counts in this matter... Some people need years to learn a second language, others can get fluent in 9 months or less.

[Robin Israel @RobinIsrael10]

@ki_agent In welchem Buch wird das Thematisiert?

[Robin Israel @RobinIsrael10]

@MAllenBidwell @BrianRoemmele In stone you don't use a drill, you use a lathe and as turning tool you use shattered diamond, glued on the tip of a brass holder.
Early watchmakers lathes were hand driven, this method was used since 1704 long before the invention of electricity.

[Robin Israel @RobinIsrael10]

@BrianRoemmele Grok is wrong.
Ruby bearings in watches were invented 1704.
About 1930, industrial production was common.
And I'm talking about Ruby, which has a hardness of 9 on the Mohs scale.
In 1970 it was indeed routine and you can find these Ruby bearings with 0,12 holes in any, wristwatch

[Robin Israel @RobinIsrael10]

@MissionUniX @BrianRoemmele No, they could do it with cactus thorns, grinding dust in oil and use a technique like fire drilling. This would take 1-3 days per hole I think, but it's 100% possible.

[Robin Israel @RobinIsrael10]

@allgarbled Some human traits are there for a reason. These reasons weigh much more than any moral idea of how you should be.
How you really need to be to survive under harsh conditions is encoded in your genes, and feeling superior is surely one of these traits.

[Robin Israel @RobinIsrael10]

@cremieuxrecueil Taxes are never intrinsically good.
It all comes down to what you want to maximize. Economic growth? Birth rates? Government size?

[Robin Israel @RobinIsrael10]

@mattvanswol Easy: Any craft that requires skill and or creativity.
Watchmaking, Goldsmith, ..

[Robin Israel @RobinIsrael10]

@BerlinReporter Hundert Prozent Zustimmung! Ich habe auch schon jede Menge Zeit verbrannt ohne den geringsten Mehrwert.

[Max @minordissent]

nothing in social science is axiomatic. MV = PY is a theory. However i would argue that it explains and resolve huge amounts of confusion in economics.

and yes money printing generally means prices go up. but its not that simple.

The variables are not completely independent. By printing money you can give it to people and those people have an incentivize to spend it (partly because it will become worth less over time but that’s a whole nother can of worms) which increases V (economic activity) which increases P (prices) but also Y (economic output) because more people with more money spending it increases demand which increases the incentivize to increase supply which drives building of new stuff.

This is exactly how the fed works and why it expands the money supply when there is an economic downturn and then contracts it when there is an economic boom.

The problem is that this creates a vicious cycle where printing money spurs growth but not necessarily productive growth because people are spending it because their dollars will be worth less in the future rather than because that thing itself is really worth it to them.

Furthermore, this creates a parasitic effect which saps purchasing power from the people who touch the new dollars last (because by then the new higher prices will have settled into the economy) and gives its to the people who got them first (because they could spend them before all the prices went up). This is known as the cantillon effect and is a huge component of our worsening income inequality.

furthermore, the fact that everyone knows the fed will just print money to bail the economy out when they take too much risk or invest in stupid things, it causes the system to go way out on the risk curve and spend artificially. This leads to a cycle where the money supply is never fully contracted by the time the last “hit” wears off, leading to a slow increase in the money supply over time.

The fed, and most economists, argues that without inflation you would see slow economic growth because people would hoard dollars instead of spending, expecting the purchasing power of their dollars to appreciate. However Austrian economists argue that people will still spend they will just spend more intelligently thus leading to more sustainable growth.

To the fed’s credit, if all your competitors are juicing and you aren’t, you are gonna lose. Furthermore, people are irrational and prone to hype cycles. If the fed did not control the money supply, we could see run away bubbles or run away depressions, due to the reflexivity of economies (bullishness begets bullishness, bearishness begets bearishness).

At the end of the day, the fed is stuck between a rock and a hard place and the only viable solution is to print baby print.

Thus, really your only option as an individual to not have all your wealth inflated away is to own as many durable scarce assets as you can which will appreciate (or ideally outpace) the price increases.

[Robin Israel @RobinIsrael10]

@CankayKoryak Is it so hard to understand that there's a healthy amount of empathy and there can be too little and also too much?
Societies with too little empathy won't prosper. Societies with too much empathy will die out, because they will be invaded and captured by very bad people.

[Robin Israel @RobinIsrael10]

@CankayKoryak There's a big difference between the concept of suicidal empathy and empathy.

[Robin Israel @RobinIsrael10]

@robinhanson It's not all of us, it's part of the western culture. Neither Africa nor Muslims have this problem.

[Robin Israel @RobinIsrael10]

@sparbuchfeinde Wenn das in größerem Stil so weitergeht, sind massive Schulden die einzige kurzfristige Lösung. Es könnte spannend werden, ich sehe nicht, wie unter diesen Voraussetzungen der Euro und die EU stabil bleiben könnten. Steht ein Systemwechsel bevor?

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

I think a lot of people are very confused about the whole discussion about platforming, censorship etc.

I believe it is your right to eat anything you want. Even things that are terrible for you, like dog shit.

I also believe that it is your right to tell other people that you enjoy eating dog shit.

I also believe it is your right to have people on your show who believe eating dog shit is good for you. Even if you don't challenge them at all, while challenging anyone who comes on your show to say dog shit eating might be bad for you.

I also believe it is my right to say that what you are doing is wrong, bad and harmful. It is my right to point out that you are clearly partisan on the dog-shit-eating issue and in the wrong direction. It is also my right to say that in promoting terrible ideas you are being irresponsible. It is also my right to not want to associate with you and to think that other right-thinking people shouldn't either.

This simple distinction appears to be beyond a lot of people. Just because you hold or promote terrible ideas doesn't mean you should be censored or prevented from speaking. But I think it is essential that you are challenged very robustly on those ideas.

The Right has been so (rightly) focussed on defending free speech that many people now routinely (and in some cases deliberately) confuse criticism for censorship.

Any movement has to engage in a battle of ideas to work out which ideas it wants to adopt and which it doesn't want to include. Saying "this idea should not be acceptable in our movement" is not censorship, it's hygiene.

Charlie Kirk understood this very well. It's amazing how so many people who call themselves his friends do not.