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Worldview and the Role of Government, among other things


Lordship
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We had an interesting debate and general discussion in the OWLs channel a couple of days ago on all sorts of political topics ranging from healthcare to taxes etc. I'm not sure if there's been a proper thread to discuss the differing philosophical viewpoints on these contested topics so figured I'd go ahead and make one. Political philosophy has become one of my chief interests as of late and there are many among this community that I hold in high esteem; should be fun to engage in the sharing of ideas with you guys :D

To start it off, my basic worldview is that individuals - when left to their own devices - will tend to make better decisions for themselves and those around them in order to improve their lives and ultimately live as virtuous as possible. To that end, I believe the role of government should be limited to meeting the basic needs required of its office; to ensure the freedoms, safety, and liberties of its citizens. Any legislation outside of that principle is, I believe, unnecessary. Fiscally, taxes should be either flat or low, spending should be kept to a level sufficient to fulfill the basic role of government (police, military, etc). Socially, quite libertarian. I believe the government has no business in determining who can marry who, whether or not people should be allowed to consume certain drugs (unless they pose a credible threat to the rest of society) and certainly don't believe in judging people by the color of their skin or what minority they belong to, but rather by their character and ideals.

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10 minutes ago, Lordship said:

We had an interesting debate and general discussion in the OWLs channel a couple of days ago on all sorts of political topics ranging from healthcare to taxes etc. I'm not sure if there's been a proper thread to discuss the differing philosophical viewpoints on these contested topics so figured I'd go ahead and make one. Political philosophy has become one of my chief interests as of late and there are many among this community that I hold in high esteem; should be fun to engage in the sharing of ideas with you guys :D

To start it off, my basic worldview is that individuals - when left to their own devices - will tend to make better decisions for themselves and those around them in order to improve their lives and ultimately live as virtuous as possible. To that end, I believe the role of government should be limited to meeting the basic needs required of its office; to ensure the freedoms, safety, and liberties of its citizens. Any legislation outside of that principle is, I believe, unnecessary. Fiscally, taxes should be either flat or low, spending should be kept to a level sufficient to fulfill the basic role of government (police, military, etc). Socially, quite libertarian. I believe the government has no business in determining who can marry who, whether or not people should be allowed to consume certain drugs (unless they pose a credible threat to the rest of society) and certainly don't believe in judging people by the color of their skin or what minority they belong to, but rather by their character and ideals.

Here's the thing: I also believe that individuals - when left to their own devices - will (barring basic human stupidity and socio-psychological habits) make the best financial decisions for themselves. However, I don't believe that makes them "virtuous." Quite the contrary. I believe if individuals are given the chance to push fellow man onto the train track for money, there's going to be a lot of dead people on train tracks. You just need to look around you. If it wasn't for government regulations, Deutsche Bank would own your house, you would be slaving your paychecks to a payday loan company called "Kwick Kash" that charges 300% interest, at least 2 of our family members would have died in car crashes (presumably taking the fast way out the front windshield) while driving to the hospital for lung cancer treatment, nobody would have car insurance to clean up after the mess, and some old white !@#$ who got a shit ton of money from his daddy would all somehow profit from your misery. 

Libertarianism will always be looked down upon in the US, simply because it is too closely related to anarchism. I believe Gary Johnson only got like 2% of the vote in 2016, and he had to shift a lot away from the hardliner libertarian philosophy. We tried it in the Gilded Age, and we tried it again in the Roaring 20's. The post-Keynesian economy simply can't handle unfettered capitalism without blowing itself up. Hell, many economists argue that Keynes is the only reason why capitalism still exists. David Hume may say that pursuing your own self-interests is beneficial to the rest of society, but he was writing in a pre-industrial age where nobody had anything. Ayn Rand's ideas sound pretty consistent, but putting unadulterated libertarianism into practice is as unrealistic as PnW is to the real world. Libertarianism would ultimately result in a feudal society powered by advertisements and poor healthcare. 

 

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It's a useful mental exercise. Through the years, many thinkers have been fascinated by it. But I don't enjoy playing. It was a game that was born during a brutal age when life counted for little. Everyone believed that some people were worth more than others. Kings. Pawns. I don't think that anyone is worth more than anyone else. Chess is just a game. Real people are not pieces. You can't assign more value to some of them and not others. Not to me. Not to anyone. People are not a thing that you can sacrifice. The lesson is, if anyone who looks on to the world as if it was a game of chess, deserves to lose.

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6 minutes ago, Caecus said:

Here's the thing: I also believe that individuals - when left to their own devices - will (barring basic human stupidity and socio-psychological habits) make the best financial decisions for themselves. However, I don't believe that makes them "virtuous." Quite the contrary. I believe if individuals are given the chance to push fellow man onto the train track for money, there's going to be a lot of dead people on train tracks. You just need to look around you. If it wasn't for government regulations, Deutsche Bank would own your house, you would be slaving your paychecks to a payday loan company called "Kwick Kash" that charges 300% interest, at least 2 of our family members would have died in car crashes (presumably taking the fast way out the front windshield) while driving to the hospital for lung cancer treatment, nobody would have car insurance to clean up after the mess, and some old white !@#$ who got a shit ton of money from his daddy would all somehow profit from your misery. 

Libertarianism will always be looked down upon in the US, simply because it is too closely related to anarchism. I believe Gary Johnson only got like 2% of the vote in 2016, and he had to shift a lot away from the hardliner libertarian philosophy. We tried it in the Gilded Age, and we tried it again in the Roaring 20's. The post-Keynesian economy simply can't handle unfettered capitalism without blowing itself up. Hell, many economists argue that Keynes is the only reason why capitalism still exists. David Hume may say that pursuing your own self-interests is beneficial to the rest of society, but he was writing in a pre-industrial age where nobody had anything. Ayn Rand's ideas sound pretty consistent, but putting unadulterated libertarianism into practice is as unrealistic as PnW is to the real world. Libertarianism would ultimately result in a feudal society powered by advertisements and poor healthcare. 

 

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However, I don't believe that makes them "virtuous" // Well what makes a person virtuous is quite debatable and I don't think it's just about improving one's economic situation as you mentioned above. When it comes to virtue I typically have a conservative interpretation of Aristotle's ethics (the idea of not having too much of one but rather constantly finding the balance in between and that being where the virtue lies) as well as stoic virtue primarily from the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius and ironically the Roman slave Epictetus. 

^bit of a tangent on virtue there but it's quite interesting. 

As for complete libertarianism which is what you outlined above, that's the complete extreme. Though I do disagree with this premise: "Libertarianism would ultimately result in a feudal society powered by advertisements and poor healthcare." specifically when discussing the American economy. Ultimately libertarianism ends at the base role of government, not a complete total lack of government. The idea is that you and I can do and believe what we want so long as it's constitutionally legal and we don't have to care about each other's beliefs or activities. That government has no business in marriage, or church, or drugs, or any of the other things it likes to stretch its hands and touch because it simply doesn't fit into its role.

"and some old white !@#$ who got a shit ton of money from his daddy would all somehow profit from your misery" -- well no, I disagree with the premise here as well because the only reason people are rich and continue to build wealth is through providing goods and services that make everyone's lives better. The fact of the matter is that we are living far better now than the people who lived 100 years ago because of the advancements in technology and industry and innovation which are considerably harder to create via government oversight and regulation.

If it wasn't for government regulations, Deutsche Bank would own your house, you would be slaving your paychecks to a payday loan company called "Kwick Kash" that charges 300% interest, at least 2 of our family members would have died in car crashes (presumably taking the fast way out the front windshield) while driving to the hospital for lung cancer treatment, nobody would have car insurance to clean up after the mess, and some old white !@#$ who got a shit ton of money from his daddy would all somehow profit from your misery. // Well, there obviously needs to be some regulation, just not to the extent that it stifles business and encourages companies to offshore their profits rather than invest it into the American economy. You shouldn't be taxing small companies an individual income which big companies don't pay, etc.

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To start it off, my basic worldview is that individuals - when left to their own devices - will tend to make better decisions for themselves and those around them in order to improve their lives and ultimately live as virtuous as possible. To that end, I believe the role of government should be limited to meeting the basic needs required of its office; to ensure the freedoms, safety, and liberties of its citizens. Any legislation outside of that principle is, I believe, unnecessary.

I agree with pretty much all of this, except that I believe the state should be abolished completely.

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Fiscally, taxes should be either flat or low, spending should be kept to a level sufficient to fulfill the basic role of government (police, military, etc).

This, I disagree with. If there is no state, there should be no taxes. If there is a state, people should be taxed according to their income and the revenue from these taxes should be spent on providing and improving services like healthcare, education and so on, for the general population, with as few costs as possible to all citizens.

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Socially, quite libertarian. I believe the government has no business in determining who can marry who, whether or not people should be allowed to consume certain drugs (unless they pose a credible threat to the rest of society) and certainly don't believe in judging people by the color of their skin or what minority they belong to, but rather by their character and ideals.

This is all good too.

The term virtuous is hollow and meaningless. It's just an expression of "people should behave this way because that's what I like and not like this because I don't like that". It's entirely subjective and means little to nothing. There's no practical usefulness in judging the behavior of others, their lives are theirs to live as they wish. Whether or not you consider them to be virtuous is irrelevant and changes nothing.

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"Libertarianism would ultimately result in a feudal society powered by advertisements and poor healthcare".

I disagree with this premise as well, as long as you abolish capitalism. Libertarianism in a capitalist economy and the so called "free market" (which is dominated by those who have the most money and isn't actually free at all), would be devastating to millions of people, who would end up being trivialized in the face of corporate pursuit of profits. Unfettered capitalism is an incredibly terrible idea, beyond terrible. Catastrophic.

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well no, I disagree with the premise here as well because the only reason people are rich and continue to build wealth is through providing goods and services that make everyone's lives better. The fact of the matter is that we are living far better now than the people who lived 100 years ago because of the advancements in technology and industry and innovation which are considerably harder to create via government oversight and regulation.

This is patently false. The only reason people are rich and continue to be are by making everyone's lives better? No. First of all, look up wage slavery. Second, what about people like arms dealers? They make some very large profits from selling arms and vehicles. Do they make everyone's lives better? Or just some people? There are few corporations that are unwilling to trample anyone in their path in order to gain the profits they seek. The logical thing for any profit seeking cooperation (which is, you know, most of them), would be to provide the poorest (and thus cheapest for themselves) quality services possible or acceptable, while charging as much as possible for said services. You could try to argue that there are some benevolent corporations, but the problem for those corporations is that there will always be non-benevolent corporations willing to do the sketchy things that the companies that try to be benevolent are unwilling to do, which results in the benevolent companies losing money in favor of those who are not benevolent. Since the de-regulation of the financial industry in the United States in the 80s, private enterprise in the US has been more or less permitted to ignore what economists call externalities in favor of seeking profits, which means that they ignore the negative consequences of their quest for profits. If they are well-managed, they will calculate and take into account the risks posed to themselves and their profit, but they don't take into account what is called systemic risk. An obvious example of this is the 2008 financial crisis, where privately owned banks ignored the systemic risks of their activities, causing a nearly global financial meltdown, which obviously hurts a lot of people. Private enterprise absolutely needs to be regulated in order to prevent these things from happening.

Nor is it at all true that technological, industrial and innovational advancements are more difficult to accomplish for the government or under government regulation. A great many major inventions that we use today have been either developed by governments or on a basis of support/funding from governments. Take the internet, for example:

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" The history of the Internet begins with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s. Initial concepts of wide area networking originated in several computer science laboratories in the United States, United Kingdom, and France.[1] The US Department of Defense awarded contracts as early as the 1960s, including for the development of the ARPANET project, directed by Robert Taylor and managed by Lawrence Roberts. The first message was sent over the ARPANET in 1969 from computer science Professor Leonard Kleinrock's laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the second network node at Stanford Research Institute (SRI)."

The internet was developed by people working for the DoD, and thus the government. Not private enterprise. In fact, private enterprise is often poorly suited to provide the kind of long term stable investments technological and industrial advancements need because of their dependence on a volatile market. Here's an article that illustrates what I'm talking about:

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Bill Gates won't save us

Silicon Valley prides itself on solving problems. Whether it’s colonizing Mars or finding a parking spot in San Francisco, the tech industry promises to tackle humanity’s greatest challenges. Yet on the most urgent challenge of all — how to stop climate change before it renders large portions of the planet uninhabitable — it has made vanishingly little progress.

It’s not for lack of trying. Eager to take advantage of what venture capitalist John Doerr called “the biggest economic opportunity of the twenty-first century,” from 2006 to 2011 investors poured a staggering $25 billion into companies that vowed to radically reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. It seemed like a perfect fit: Silicon Valley could fulfill its vision of itself as an instrument of human salvation by literally saving the world, while collecting the vast profits that would presumably flow from spearheading a global energy transformation.

The result was a disaster. By 2011, VCs had lost more than half of the money they had invested over the previous five years. Nearly all of Silicon Valley’s clean energy startups had gone bust or were about to. With the exception of a few high-profile outliers like Tesla, Silicon Valley fled the sector and “cleantech became a dirty word,” according to TechCrunch. The aversion has persisted ever since, although in December 2016, Bill Gates announced a new billion-dollar fund called Breakthrough Energy Ventures that aims to rekindle VC enthusiasm for clean energy.

But Breakthrough Energy Ventures is likely to suffer the same fate as its predecessors, for the simple reason that venture capital is a terrible model for funding innovation. If the goal is major advances in how we generate, store, and distribute clean energy, as well as how we remove massive quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere — all of which are critical for keeping global warming under the 2°C limit widely seen by scientists as catastrophic — then venture capital is the worst possible way to get there.

Venture capital is designed to demand large returns in the short term. This makes VC firms unlikely to support the sort of research that produces technological breakthroughs, which requires generous financing over long periods of time. Science operates on a different timetable than capitalism.

Most VC funds are structured as ten-year partnerships. This usually means they’re looking for startups headed for an “exit” — an IPO or an acquisition by a bigger company — within three to five years. Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures is organized as a twenty-year fund, in the hopes of giving founders a bit more breathing room. But this still sets an unforgiving pace for startups to achieve exponential growth. Because most startups will fail, VCs must select companies they believe can scale fast enough to pay off ten to a hundred times their investment. One or two superstars will make up for the many duds, enabling the fund to provide a competitive return.

VC firms are impatient and greedy because the market demands it. It doesn’t matter what’s in your heart: even philanthropically inclined investors like Gates must function under these constraints. VCs simply can’t afford high-risk, capital-intensive projects that don’t offer the possibility of a quick and sizable payout. As a result, they’re good at bankrolling the next Tinder or Snapchat, but bad at financing the more ambitious technologies needed to purge the carbon from our energy and our air.

So if venture capital isn’t capable of funding the innovation we need, what is? The same entity that has funded every major innovation since World War II: the state. It is an article of faith in Silicon Valley, and in corporate America more generally, that the private sector is entrepreneurial and risk loving while the public sector is stagnant and risk averse. The truth is nearly the exact opposite.

In one field after another, publicly funded research has supplied the private sector with its most pioneering and profitable inventions. That’s because the public sector can afford to be everything the private sector can’t: patient, generous, and insulated from the iron discipline of the market. This is most powerfully true in the case of the industry that most loudly proclaims its entrepreneurialism — Silicon Valley. The computer, the Internet, the smartphone — these are just a few of the technologies that wouldn’t exist without piles of public money. The state bears the risk of radical innovation so that companies and their investors can reap the rewards.

When it comes to clean energy, other countries understand this dynamic far better than the United States. In fact, as the economist Mariana Mazzucato has observed, one of the reasons that the US has lagged behind other countries in renewables is its “heavy reliance on venture capital to ‘nudge’ the development of green technologies.” China, by contrast, has opted for a strong “push” from the state. In 2015, China installed one wind turbine and one soccer field’s worth of solar panels every hour. Its lavish public funding of solar panel manufacturers has helped produce a 80 percent drop in world prices, driving down the cost of renewable energy everywhere. And larger investments are on the horizon: earlier this year, China’s National Energy Administration announced that the government planned to invest more than $360 billion in renewables through 2020.

China may be especially aggressive, but it’s not alone in its reliance on public institutions. Around the world, the state is leading the charge on clean energy. The single biggest actor in the “climate finance” landscape is state investment banks, which invested $131 billion in renewables in 2014 — compared with $46 billion from commercial banks, and a measly $1.7 billion from venture capital and private equity.

Public institutions aren’t just funding research into new technologies — they’re also funding decarbonization using existing technologies. This is a critical point too often obscured by Bill Gates and other clean energy capitalists: we already have the technology to transition to a zero-carbon energy system. We even have a detailed road map for what the transition would look like, thanks to Stanford scientist Mark Z. Jacobson and his colleagues, who have plotted out how to convert all fifty states to 100 percent clean energy by 2050.

Of course, innovation can help ease and accelerate this process — it can also find ways to scrub centuries of carbon emissions from our atmosphere. In fact, without major technological advances, we are unlikely to keep warming within the 2°C limit. But we’ll never generate those advances if we surrender society’s most important investment decisions to billionaires like Gates.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/bill-gates-wont-save-us

Honestly, you shouldn't trust governments to always do what is best for you and you shouldn't trust private enterprise to do the same either. There's no reason to believe one is more trustworthy than the other. It's naive to believe that private enterprise, who are competitors on a global market, are unwilling to do things that aren't good for most people in order to maintain their profits. Like I said, I'm not saying you should trust governments all the time, rather that you should apply the same healthy skepticism of government to private enterprise as well.

Edited by Big Brother

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2 hours ago, Lordship said:

As for complete libertarianism which is what you outlined above, that's the complete extreme. Though I do disagree with this premise: "Libertarianism would ultimately result in a feudal society powered by advertisements and poor healthcare." specifically when discussing the American economy. Ultimately libertarianism ends at the base role of government, not a complete total lack of government. The idea is that you and I can do and believe what we want so long as it's constitutionally legal and we don't have to care about each other's beliefs or activities. That government has no business in marriage, or church, or drugs, or any of the other things it likes to stretch its hands and touch because it simply doesn't fit into its role.

"and some old white !@#$ who got a shit ton of money from his daddy would all somehow profit from your misery" -- well no, I disagree with the premise here as well because the only reason people are rich and continue to build wealth is through providing goods and services that make everyone's lives better. The fact of the matter is that we are living far better now than the people who lived 100 years ago because of the advancements in technology and industry and innovation which are considerably harder to create via government oversight and regulation.

If it wasn't for government regulations, Deutsche Bank would own your house, you would be slaving your paychecks to a payday loan company called "Kwick Kash" that charges 300% interest, at least 2 of our family members would have died in car crashes (presumably taking the fast way out the front windshield) while driving to the hospital for lung cancer treatment, nobody would have car insurance to clean up after the mess, and some old white !@#$ who got a shit ton of money from his daddy would all somehow profit from your misery. // Well, there obviously needs to be some regulation, just not to the extent that it stifles business and encourages companies to offshore their profits rather than invest it into the American economy. You shouldn't be taxing small companies an individual income which big companies don't pay, etc.

Well, yes, generally speaking, libertarianism is on that end of the extreme. I think anyone who has a sense of politics would want to carefully define where government can or cannot intervene in. That being said, an unregulated economy would increase the wealth gap. As of 2010, the top 20% control 82% of the country's total wealth. The bottom 40% don't even show up on the map. Without things like the estate tax or government regulation of predatory industries (payday loans come to mind), there is eventually going to be a 1% class inheriting their wealth and owning the houses/cars/education/paychecks of the rest of the 99%. Besides the fact that this is against American values of being born equal, it's bad for the economy and kills innovation. 

How do rich people get rich? Unless you are a football coach, nobody gets millions of dollars a year. Even corporate CEOs base annual income is around $1 million. So how do the mega-rich get billions? Real estate. Buy properties, lease them to 99% schmucks, and suck their money out of their pockets. Donald Trump is a billionaire, not because he was a CEO somewhere, but because he bought property and rented it out to people for passive income. How did he get that much property to lease out in order to become a billionaire? Inheritance from his daddy. Fact of the matter is, rich people stay rich by controlling and owning the livelihoods of others, not necessarily through innovation. Rich people spend money to get more rich. It's the engineers/workers/scientists/service members that rent out homes and apartments owned by the top 1% that create new technologies, or build the buildings they live in. Elon Musk may have a firm grasp on the engineering and technological aspects of his company, but most would agree he is unique among CEOs, and it's not like he actually designed the batteries and builds them himself. 

 

The point I'm trying to make, is that the government's role in the lives of citizenry is not that clear cut and dry. The complexity of the economy (especially as we enter into the late stages of an information economy) demands government involvement, not necessarily just for the physical protection of its citizenry, but to ensure that a landed estate (the embodiment of everything wrong with the Old World) doesn't develop. It's rather ironic that the US - born from the concept that all men are created equal - has one of the largest wealth gaps, on par with China. 

It's a useful mental exercise. Through the years, many thinkers have been fascinated by it. But I don't enjoy playing. It was a game that was born during a brutal age when life counted for little. Everyone believed that some people were worth more than others. Kings. Pawns. I don't think that anyone is worth more than anyone else. Chess is just a game. Real people are not pieces. You can't assign more value to some of them and not others. Not to me. Not to anyone. People are not a thing that you can sacrifice. The lesson is, if anyone who looks on to the world as if it was a game of chess, deserves to lose.

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I believe the role of the state should primarily be two fold: protecting consumers from predatory and/or dishonest business practices, and protecting citizens from external and internal threats. 

The state, personified, is a stumbling, bumbling buffoon with the strength of a deity. Looking back at the horrors of the 20th century, which were primarily committed by strong, iron fisted governments, keeping as much power away from the buffoon is necessary to secure both life and liberty. 

However, through those horrors, we have also seen how a delicate balancing act can keep the buffoon both satisfied, and strong. Free markets and democracy won the century as much as blood and steel have. 

Both the despot and the president are humans. Humans are imperfect, as we know, and are likely to become evil if given a lot of power. Keeping the buffoon weakened is best for us, the citizens. However, the buffoon needs some strength to fend off citizens who would wish to abuse their fellows. Without oversight, businesses are likely to cut corners to save some cash. There's not much I could do to stop the local sewage plant from spewing sewage all over my lawn if I don't have the buffoon behind me who says that's a no-no. 

tl:dr, the ticker should be right before allowing McDonalds to have a private McArmy, but well before the state has the right to nationalize or destroy the golden arches based on "muh ideals". 

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It's.... complicated. On their own, I'd say that individuals will likely do what they can to make their lives and those of their immediate family better, or at least what they consider to be better. However, I don't think that you can depend on people to care about the impact have on others outside a fairly small community, which is dependent on cultural and societal pressures along with personality, ideology, and economic status. The government is there in order to protect the people it represents and the rights and laws guaranteed and implemented by the government. The government is also there as a way to guard against the people who will enact decisions that better themselves at an unacceptable cost to the people and the community around them, to act as a higher arbiter in order to resolve disputes between the people of its nation, and also to help direct efforts to better the nation and its people. It's fiscal and social policy should reflect those things, though it can change according to the situation.

 

Hope this sorta rambly thing is similar to what you're asking for Lordship.

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