A skyrmion is a type of topological soliton—a stable, localized configuration of a field—found in certain magnetic materials. It is characterized by a nontrivial topology and can be thought of as a swirling configuration of spins, which are the magnetic moments of atoms. The concept of skyrmions originates from theoretical physics and was first proposed by British physicist Tony Skyrme in the 1960s, primarily in the context of particle physics.

Can be approximated with a diaphragm.

First let's discuss the argument against abortion. Most people would save the life of an infant over that of an animal, even if the animal is more intelligent. The only unbiased reason to do this is that given nutrients, the baby will develop into a more intelligent lifeform in the future. Thus wanting to save a "clump of cells" isn't as irrational as it may seem.

But our hypothetical above assumes that both the baby and the animal want to live. By not killing themselves, all conscious creatures have implicitly expressed their desire to continue living, and most people agree that that is to be respected, at least for humans. Which is why killing a person painlessly while they're unconscious is still considered wrong. But this desire does not apply to fetuses before the third trimester, which have never been conscious. This is the moral argument for abortion. There is also the obvious utilitarian argument for it.

The current system is dominated by government action, so fixing problems often requires even more government action. This does not say anything as to the feasibility of a fully libertarian system. Private entities take time to develop and immediately dismantling entire government institutions may not be the best move, hence why companies benefitting from government aid and intellectual property also need antitrust legislation, and why suddenly cutting subsidies/welfare can hurt a lot of people.

This is really a question of how much of the rights of a human do we give animals? Giving them no rights doesn't make sense from an ethical perspective as they have sentience and the capacity to feel pain. And yet we don't grant them the right not to be confined or killed, not just because it would make meat-eating humans unhappy, but also because rights are a human concept, and animals in nature are so horribly brutal that it seems incongruous to try and make humans not confine or kill them.

Human desires are limitless. We can never have too much of something, so people would move into the remaining jobs and produce more of that. Workers would be paid less, but due to automation, everything would also be cheaper. This would work until the very last jobs are replaced. In a utopia where there is no need for labor, art, or science anymore, a market economy is no longer needed, but I doubt that day will come anytime soon.

A customer that can afford it may willingly overpay for a product due to brand affinity/prestige. Even otherwise, there are 8 billion people on the planet. Getting $10 profit from 100 million people means a billion dollars in profit. None of the 100 million people need to have been poor or exploited; small profits per person can result in a billionaire simply due to the large human population. This is not to say that all current billionaires obtained all their wealth through such innocent means – many have used violence or state assistance – just that it is possible.

That would be confinement. You can't just build a wall around someone and say, "Hey, I haven't harmed you or your property." You are still violating their property rights, more specifically, their right to access property.

By the Kickstarter model – if a high enough number of people agree to pay your desired price, you take all their money and give them all the product. Otherwise no one's money is taken and the product is never released. This latter condition is needed so people don't just wait for cheaper copycats.

The latter situation isn't a novel scenario, the company miscalculated the demand, spent resources developing a failed product, and will have to eat the losses, something that will always hapoen.

Defamation is not fraud because no one has a legal agreement with the public by default to provide true facts only. If defamation was legal, there would be so many false accusations and fake evidence of the same, that most people would actually learn to think critically and not believe something until it has truly been verified. If a majority of people gain this skill, their critical thinking would be the predominant opinion, and anybody blindly believing things would have to be willfully blind.

Libertarianism simply refers to the notion of a minimal state. However, the term, especially in the US, generally refers to right-libertarianism, which also advocates for strong private property rights and a free market, and is also the meaning with which this FAQ uses it.

An important concept to libertarians is the non-agression principle (NAP), which forbids the non-consensual breach of contract (i.e., fraud), or of property (which includes the body). Aggression is, however, permitted to the extent necessary to defend against the above.

Right-libertarianism has several variants based on how minimal the state is:

This FAQ aims to defend a minarchist model. All uses of 'libertarian(ism)' henceforth will refer to the same.

A government not supported by the majority cannot sustain itself without tyranny. They will eventually get rid of the current government and laws, even amend the constitution, if needed, to get their way. Thus it is impossible to maintain libertarianism by restricting voters or their power.

To achieve a libertarian country, either the majority of people in an existing country must be convinced of its merits, or libertarians must come together to form a new nation. And if the majority is libertarian, they will vote as such, maintaining the minarchy.

It is important to note that nowhere is discrimination against every category prohibited. Nearly all businesses would turn down certain types of customers. Only discrimination against certain protected characteristics, usually (but not always) immutable ones, irrelevant to the business, is prohibited.

In a democracy, the passing of a law prohibiting discrimination against a certain group requires the majority to be against said discrimination. This means that this group won't be discriminated against by most people anyway. Those that do will suffer losses from missed customers. People strongly opposed to the discrimination may even counter-discriminate, boycotting those that do.

In such a situation, it doesn't seem all that necessary to legally prohibit discrimination, especially to libertarians, who believe that no one can be forced to serve another for whatever reason, even "social justice".

Everything we do is an investment, with the potential for profit and the risk of loss. The same applies to education. You invest money from loans or personal funds to undergo training. You take on the risk of flunking or the skill you learnt lessening in demand. The true value of any investment is the value people give to in a free market. There is no reason to forcibly transfer money via taxation and give extra favors to one type of investment, subsidising it by taxing (artificially and additionally disadvantaging) others.

Yes, every four or five years, a single government is elected that does every single one of the thousands of government functions. Voters don't perform a careful analysis of how efficiently these thousands of fuctions were performed compared to the previous ruling party. Since these governments also have the power to make various laws with sweeping societal effects, here's what actually happens:

Thus the incentive for the branch performing each function to do so efficiently is extremely small. A highly specialized and efficient agent is hindered by having to join, obey, and share in the outcomes of, this inefficient behemoth. In a libertarian system, the sole function and power of the government would be the enforcement of the NAP. This is best done at the local level. Any subjective laws passed will be based on local opinion, eg., laws protecting those incapable of consenting (children, the mentally disabled, etc.), laws against endangering others' safety, etc. The best performing government in each region can be elected, as opposed to the best one averaged across all regions. This is why libertarians want powers transferred from the federal to the local government.

When a company begins selling a product, the price starts off higher to recoup the cost of development, advertising, equipment, land, etc. Some costs don't increase proportionately to the number of units sold, so the cost of making each unit goes down as more are made. Thus a new company entering the market will have to charge higher prices. Does this mean that the existing companies will be able to get away with charging high prices forever because the barrier to entry is even higher?

Let's say that a company needs to charge a total of $100M more than their final prices to recoup initial costs. But by using investor funds to pay said costs, the new company can collect this $100M over, say 10 or more years, instead of 2 or 5, making the additional cost of each unit from the final price very small. Thus they can beat the overcharging company. Big investors are surprisingly ready buy billions worth of stock of companies that have been losing billions every year, if they believe it's a necessary sacrifice that will more than make up for it in the future.

In a free market, the one who provides a good/service for the lowest price gets nearly all the customers. The one offering the highest for the same job gets nearly all the employees. No one wants to let another do this and dominate the industry, so they all compete against each other for customers and employees. Employees can also form unions to demand payment almost equal to the value they bring.

That the person you're about to attack may have a gun on them will deter the majority of attackers. If nobody had guns, only melee weapons, it would be easy for a group to attack someone, say with baseball bats, etc., suffer little to no injury themselves, and get away. If everyone has a gun, you can ambush someone on the street, but will likely get killed by bystander. If you target someone in a location where they see/hear you coming, like their home or workplace, the attackers will suffer more harm than the "victim". This is more effective deterrent and solution to attacks than the police, who can almost always arrive only after the crime is over.

In countries with gun rights, like the US, the chance of someone not involved in crime being killed in a shooting is very low, and the number of victims in suicidal mass shootings can be minimized if even more bystanders have guns. It is unfortunate that it is impossible to quantify the number of attacks/muggings that never happened because the possibility of people being armed stopped them. This number is almost certainly huge.

Moreover, one otherwise cannot guarantee that the government will never ever turn tyrannical. An armed populace almost certainly can.

This is an unsolvable problem because there's no way to extract large amounts of value from a person without cruelty, and even with cruelty, there's a limit to how much you can extract.

Banning data/information and its use, literal 0s and 1s, is not just a violation of the free market, but of liberty itself. It is nothing short of tyranny. Keep in mind that by the law of supply and demand, data once created has no monetary value, since it can be duplicated infinitely. Any such value is thus something artificially maintained by the state using force to restrict its duplication. It lets companies charge whatever price they want for data and products built using said data, without competition for decades, which is terrible.

The justification given for such an infringement upon our freedoms is that it promotes creativity and innovation. We will discuss how in today's world, the idea that art and science would be significantly hindered without IP protections is untrue. The aforementioned monopoly caused by IP is a much worse effect than any benefits it may possibly have.