Bjorn Pagen - Descendens

Globalization vs. The Pirate State

Caribbean pirates made money by being a parasite, a negative externality, an external risk for shipping and merchant sailors. They made their living through stealing from a highly profitable industry (in this case, shipping). We don't see many pirates anymore, because nature innovated centralized nation-states with far greater military capabilities.

God and Philosophy

Would you cross the bridge of an architect that believes 2+2=5? Believing in a god is the cardinal epistemological sin of any philosophaster. They fuck up the most fundamental question: why should we take them seriously?

Guys Literally Only Want One Thing And It's Fucking Disgusting

Yet, for some reason, most guys' measures of success don't mention sex at all. There are men who rent two-story penthouses in southern Brazil with harems of live-in 9's and 10's, rotating between dozens of women for on-demand sex. That's the dream, for any man on earth, and there's some

Nature's Market

People can all be looked at as black-box units with objectives, needs, and wants: incentives. People fulfill their incentives through their own work, or through arbitrage with other people. Nature, the largest free market, facilitates trading of these incentives between people. Nature, like all other markets, seeks to maximize its

The Texan Command Economy

Say your town had a bread shortage: should the price of bread be raised 300 times to help conserve it? A big snowstorm hit Texas. State regulators responded by pegging the price of electricity at $9/kWh, 300 times spot price. On the surface, this doesn't seem a terrible idea.