What happened to the gold Spain got from the New World?

W.r.t. your imputed definition, there is a sense in which everything is irreplaceable, because the identity of two things that are otherwise entirely identical is never the same; that X is never this X.

But I was not making the claim that the value of something is its “ability be itself”. I was claiming that a thing x of kind A is more valuable as an A than a thing y of kind B as an A, where A is not B. This is trivially true.

Consider the utilitarian value of a pencil as an object for writing and consider a particle accelerator. It should be clear that the utility of a pencil as a writing instrument is greater than the utility of a particle accelerator as a writing instrument. The particle accelerator is more complex as a piece of technology, but so what? It has no value as an instrument for writing down your grocery list.

In any case, I was not proposing a comprehensive basis for a theory of value on this notion alone, so I’m not sure how you managed to selectively read that into my comment. It was only listed as one way in which one could say that a mechanical watch is more valuable than a Casio.

It's like finding New York policemen devouring dime novels around the Far West and believing themselves as lonely, macho gunslingers...

In the end the 70's cop movies aren't that different to a Western movie, but they still look a bit rusty compared to a Charles Bronson movie with slight detective skills where a bit of slow pace and thinkering it's needed and most of the old rural tropes wouldn't apply to a big city.

A similar thing would be comparing the Medieval Spain tactics against the medieval ones where guns are becoming to be the norm.

Cherrypicking a quote from Stalin who was using sarcastic humor at a banquet when the gold arrived also doesn't refute my point or answer my question.

1. National treasures (ex gold) were returned in '35 and '56.

2. Romania intervened against the Bolsheviks in Bessarabia.

#2 seems like FAFO to me.

Eight hundred years is time enough to perfect it.

> Early data from a sub-district pilot showed sharp reductions in extreme poverty and improved wellbeing with minimal inflation, showing direct cash is a scalable tool to accelerating the end of extreme poverty.

https://www.givedirectly.org/district-scale/

Perhaps things are different in Malawi?

I won’t claim to know what the appropriate response level should have been back then. But it is very clear that the whole affair has hurt and damaged people and society irreparably. The only winners are the wealthy who scooped up assets at never-before seen interest rates.

> The COVID restrictions needed to be less and end sooner

What would we have been optimizing for here? GDP? Deaths? ICU Capacity? Lifestyle? Or would we weight them? If so would we take 2nd and 3rd order effects into consideration?

> An example graph, when restrictions should have been on or off left as an exercise to the reader

I lived in a country/state that did this during the pandemic. It wasn't a case of restrictions on, restrictions off. It was more a dialing back or ramping up of restrictions. If you look at other countries that did this you will still find the wave pattern. If I had to guess that is related to immunity after exposure. What would change however is the height of the peaks. With it's political/media landscape I don't know if the approach you suggest could have been applied effectively in the USA. Ultimately what drives cases/deaths is human behavior and the virus itself. Those who thought covid was an issue were taking precautions regardless of the restrictions.

> The disease didn't go away, we just at one point decided we were done with restrictions even though conditions didn't change.

This is a gross simplification of the whole pandemic. If I was to narrativize it I would say that over time as exposure to the virus increased it became less deadly so the vast majority of the people who were already prone to dying via covid had done so already.

> The problem is it became a non-expert political issue where people who knew meme-facts based on their social bubble only really argued absolutist policies against stone wall opposition.

This is more a comment on the political/media landscape than the response to covid itself. People have to operate within the system. If they present any sort of nuanced idea then they are persecuted by roughly 50% of the population whose narrative it infringes upon.

> We needed people in a minmax mode arguing about specific levels of risk vs reward to set optimums, instead you had 0 risk folks screaming at 0 restriction folks screaming back with the middle entirely excluded. (We'll STILL get people on both sides responding here)

The WHO was very clear at the beginning of the pandemic about the risks of the virus. For wealthy countries whose hospitals were "lean and mean" a high number of cases would cause immense pressure on these hospitals resulting in otherwise avoidable deaths not just from covid but from other things that would result from a limited ICU capacity. By this I mean life saving operations getting cancelled because there was no capacity in the ICU. It's also worth mentioning the restrictions pared with the financial aid allowed people to stay at home and not engage in any risk taking activities.

To summarize I think it's easy to arm chair quarterback the response to the pandemic. It's like most of politics. We sit here watching what is effectively a shadow puppet show but are left clueless to what is really going on because if we did know we can't be trusted with the secrets, or wouldn't be able to understand the data, or would object to a course of action as an emotional response, even if what is presented is truthful and the most optimal solution to a problem. The "masks are ineffective" narrative at the beginning of the pandemic was a classic example of this.