Albion_Tourgee

Thanks for responding! That's a good example of legal theft. It illustrates what I'm thinking about, as it's a case where someone takes something that doesn't or shouldn't belong to them, but it's legal. I can think of a variety of other types of legal theft.

Historically, the most egegious form of legal theft seems to me to have been slavery, not illegal but nevertheless a very egregious form of theft. Or, a more modern example, all those student loans handed out by substandard colleges promising economic benefits that didn't exist. (Not that every student loan was theft, but lots were.) Yet many of these did not meet the legal standard for theft by deception. Or, even a benign form of theft, when a book is pirated and it leads to higher sales and more profits for the publisher and author. (Ask Paulo Coehlo about that! -- I mentioned it in another comment here.)

Anyway, I definitely agree with you, Asset Forfeiture is legal theft, and actually, theft by legal authorities. Pretty outrageous. So thanks again for your response and for your interesting and fun work and AMA!

Do you have a workable definition of theft that doesn't rely on it being unlawful? I've been trying to think about the economic role of theft, but most everything I read about the economics of theft only deals with illegal theft, as if it isn't theft if it's not illegal. I think that's obviously not true, but I'm not having much luck finding anything helpful about legal theft, much less, anything that provides much insight into its economic role. Any thoughts or directions you can point me?

Am I understanding that you're saying, during the pandemic, a COVID-19 infection is the most common cause for anosmia. I know several people who has anosmia before COVID-19 even emerged (from flu or allergies), and several who've had anosmia during the pandemic, but did not have COVID-19 when tested.

Do you mean, there are studies that show, the majority of people with anosmia and cough or fever during the pandemic have COVID-19, or that COVID-19 is the most common single cause of these symptoms during the pandemic?

And related, if someone has anosmia without cough or fever, is this a common symptom of COVID-19 infection?

As we're looking into space time not space, doesn't this mean we can only look at a very narrow slice of history? For example, if a system is say 200 light years distant it would only be recognizable if an alien civilization had evolved to approximately our stage of technology 200 years ago, after several billion years of evolution. Are you assuming we could recgnize signals from a civilization even 200 years less technologically advanced? Or say 500 years more advanced? How do you deal with these probabilities that a distant alien civilization is at a very different point in it's development and therefore undetectable?