Slashdot Mirror

Even his supporters would have balked at footing the bill themselves.

And yet this exists. Though I would be extremely skeptical of any of that money going towards the wall. But maybe all the publicity that it has received will make it difficult for the organizer to renege on that.

No, it's her desire to see him not get a key campaign promise through

Okay. I can see why Nancy Pelosi would want to deny him that; you have to expect the opposition to oppose. My question is: Why did Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell want to prevent him from getting that key campaign promise through? This "blame the Democrats" mantra rings pretty hollow given that the Republican congress refused for two years to give Trump his wall.

The answer, of course, is that Trump's campaign promise was dumb, a waste of money. He knew that at the time he was encouraging people to chant "Build the wall!", which is why he kept having to claim that he'd find some way to make Mexico pay for it. Even his supporters would have balked at footing the bill themselves. His other option was to offer to pay for it himself, but he certainly didn't want to risk having to follow through on that promise. Especially since he might have to admit that he doesn't have that kind of money.

Basically no one other than Trump really wants to pay for a wall. I'm not sure even Trump wants it as much as he wants to keep Mueller off the front page. The shutdown is doing that. And the court battles that will arise from his emergency declaration and attempt to divert FEMA funding will do a fair job of it as well, for a while. I wonder what crisis he'll create next?

The fact is that if Trump wanted $10B to bomb a randomly named country

Yep, I'm sure you're right. That's the next crisis. And I suspect you're also right that the Dems will fall in line, given an even semi-coherent justification. Any guess as to what country it will be? Back into Syria, claiming that the withdrawal was just a ruse, to cover for his plans to jump in with both feet? I don't think so, because Russia wants Syria, and Trump does what Putin wants. Big expansion in Iraq/Afghanistan? Dunno. It would have to be something that doesn't step on the toes of his autocratic buddies in China, Russia and Turkey. Bomb Palestine? Turning the shacks of poverty-stricken and basically unarmed people into rubble would be beyond the pale for most, but Trump is capable of it, and sufficiently insensitive to public reactions to do it. Netanyahu would love it. Still, probably not Palestine. I don't see any good candidates, frankly, but I'm sure one of his remaining aides can find one.

As an aside, I'd love to see the House pass a government funding bill with $5.7B earmarked for a wall... but only as matching funding, to be disbursed as a dollar-for-dollar match for funds contributed voluntarily by Mexico, or by Trump voters (since there's no way to check who someone voted for, it's fine to accept contributions from any American -- they've got $20M so far). Yes, it would be pure legislative snark. And funny as hell. And probably beneath the dignity of the House of Representatives (as low as that bar is). So probably not, more's the pity.

I'm reporting on the gofundme, "We The People Will Fund The Wall":
--
The gofundme crowdsourcing page is at 14 million dollars at this writing (12/21/2018 @ 11:24 PM CST), contributed by 227,989 people over 5 days.

Doing a linear extrapolation, it will take 357 days to reach the goal of 1 billion dollars, and 16.4 million people
.
That's fuzzy math because the sample size is very small. So far, the average donation is $61.40.
Gofundme gets 2.9% of the total funds raised plus 30 cents per donation.
That's $29,000,000 plus (assuming 16.4 million donations) $4,920,000 for a total of $33,920,000.
--
12-29-2018, 11:04 AM

Goal $1,000,000,000
Current Donations $18,060,906
Current People 297,520
Current Days 12
People/Day 24,793
Donations/Day $1,505,076
Days Til Goal 664
People Til Goal 197,677,791
--
Today, 12-31-2018, 9:34 PM

Goal $1,000,000,000
Current Donations 18,495,710
Current People 305,416
Current Days 14
People/Day 21,815
Donations/Day $1,321,122
Days Til Goal 757
People Til Goal 231,179,230

Average donation has moved to $60.50.

So, good luck with that shit.

Here you go. Nobodies stopping you from paying for it.

Leftists have been propagandized to think that they can force businesses to pay workers more than they are worth to the business. Elementary logic ought to tell you that that is impossible. But, of course, elementary logic is what leftists lack (not to mention a lack of morality, decency, and compassion).

Speaking of lacking competence in remedial logic, what workers are paid has little to nothing to do with how much they are worth to the business, and its stupid to claim otherwise when the company is taking 80% or more of their output. Companies pay their workers as little as possible, unless those workers are in a strong negotiating position (powerful union, pro athletes, extremely limited labor pool like heart transplant surgeons, etc).

I know having your wingnut merit badge means shaving 50 points off your IQ, so I'll speak slowly and use small words for an example. A friend of mine used to work for a company that would wire new office buildings for telephones. Company would charge $110 per hour for the wiring, which....I'll give you a second to think about this....means by definition my friend was worth that much per hour for the contractor. He got $18.

So you're saying that a high minimum wage is a rational choice because Trump might support a tax on Amazon?

The point was simple enough to understand the first time. Do you really like paying more in taxes so more-money-than-God corporations can enjoy even more profits? Let me guess....you're one of the people who gave to the gofundme for Kyle Jenner because you "don't want to live in a world where Kylie Jenner doesn't have a billion dollars". And when you watched that old South Park episode on copyright infringement, you actually teared up when Lars Ulrich had to wait a few months to get his gold-plated shark pool for his mansion, and when Britney Spears had settle for a Gulfstream III, instead of a Gulfstream IV.

I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheel...

Sorry Dave, I can't do that.

I'm now convinced that you are not arguing with me, you are arguing with some construct of your imagination. I already agreed with you that the right of self defense does not mean people can murder without punishment. I'm trying to make it clear to you that gun control in the USA has gone one step too far with these recent blocking of sharing 3D printer files. That's not 2nd Amendment territory any more, this is infringement on the 1st Amendment.

Here's another thing, I'd like to see where you get this idea of an overwhelming dislike of the NRA. I saw a recent fundraiser for a march against the NRA. Go have a look on how much money they raised for the protest.
https://www.gofundme.com/natio...

A whole $70 on a national fundraiser. The NRA likely makes more money on a single order of overpriced t-shirts and "tactical" pants on their website.

I don't care what you say, the National Rifle Association is not the bad guy here. Perhaps you could start understanding this by reading some of the things that the NRA has written. This might be a good place to start:
https://www.nraila.org/article...

Many anti-gun politicians and members of the media have wrongly claimed that 3-D printing technology will allow for the production and widespread proliferation of undetectable plastic firearms. Regardless of what a person may be able to publish on the Internet, undetectable plastic guns have been illegal for 30 years. Federal law passed in 1988, crafted with the NRAâ(TM)s support, makes it unlawful to manufacture, import, sell, ship, deliver, possess, transfer, or receive an undetectable firearm.

The NRA supports laws barring people from producing undetectable firearms. It's already illegal to make an undetectable firearm. It's illegal for felons, drug dealers, illegal aliens, and others law breakers like them, to possess any firearm. It's illegal to murder people. It's illegal to threaten people with a firearm. It's illegal to carry a firearm into a school. I don't know what you want because it seems that what so many claim we need in laws restricting gun ownership and use already exists. What I don't want to see is a law barring the posting of drawings on the internet, that's simply a step too far.

Maryland spent $65 million on electronic voting machines in 2002, and replaced them for the 2016 election with $28 million of optical scanning machines. Ballots, oddly enough, cost millions of dollars each election (the ballots end up costing you more than the machines). Maryland estimated reprinting Baltimore County primary election ballots (1/6 of Maryland population) at $3 million when there was an error; that means Maryland spends $30 million in 12 years on machines and over $400 million on paper ballots.

I'm working on starting my own elections consulting company, building EVMs and using a strong elections integrity model. A prototype EVM would cost $150; I expect them to cost $120 in mass production, and a braille interface would cost $1,000. That's $2 million of EVMs (10 year lifetime) and another $2 million of braille interfaces with one per polling place.

I don't intend to get into the business of selling EVMs or software; I want support from gifts (donations, but it's a private B-corp), private services (notably Internet voting for parliamentary groups), and public elections consulting (carrying the marginal costs of the business). That means I can keep slim margins on the EVMs.

As for paper ballots? Pointless. Your EVMs need to be verifiably-untampered--every last one of them--at open. You have to demonstrate a verifiably-untampered wipe and install on the EVM at poll open, and demonstrate a verifiably-untampered vote count (or something that can prove a given ballot set is identical to the one collected) at close. That gives you perfect election integrity.

If your machines are tampered, you lose that integrity--paper ballots or not. If you let the ballots go out of sight before getting counts, you lose that integrity--which means all recounts are suspect of tampering. We accept these risks for a subset of ballots (mail-in ballots) because the alternative is disenfranchisement; we do not have to accept it for on-site polling, and we can even get perfect election integrity at a mobile polling center (a van with EVMs inside).

If you're that hard-up for paper ballots, we can encode the ballot data into large QR codes and display them one page at a time on a large screen before copying them from the EVM (yes, you have to carry the votes from the EVM to the Internet-connected machine that sends them to the Board of Elections--you don't plug EVMs into networks and you don't put wireless radios in them). Take photographs. You all have cameras in your phones. Cryptographic signatures built right into the output will prevent tampering, and we spend another $0.6 million on big LCD TVs instead of $500 million on paper ballots.

Paper ballots are useless security theater; that doesn't mean I can't implement requirements. Doesn't mean I won't get creative with ways to save half a billion in taxpayer money, either.

It's Peter Gutmann's principles of best practices: nobody knows wtf they're talking about, but somebody says it's best practice. Paper ballots are considered secure for reasons.

People think silly things, like that the voter keeping his own paper ballot somehow makes the system auditable, or that paper ballots recounted days or weeks later can't be tampered.

We can get stronger guarantees of integrity out of EVMs than paper, if somebody actually works out an election security model as a starting point. Actually implementing it all costs money.

First, I want to improve our elections integrity. I'm trying to raise funds for that. Internet voting is a different concern and not a short-term target; I intend to design an Internet voting system for government elections specifically to market it to independent parliamentary groups, as I don't want to design a system without considering the needs of a sovereign electorate.

People are up in arms about the Electoral College and will eventually want to replace it with something. Could you imagine if the Constitution specified a plurality popular vote? The outcomes would be horrible. The election would be easily manipulated by clone candidates and momentary media propaganda campaigns, first selecting a candidate in a primary and then exciting the voting base for that candidate's party and leaning the swing voters in that direction. A tiny oligarchy could carefully select the President every term--the will of the elite.

Well we'll put a stop that bullshit right now.

Too many candidates. Voter fatigue. Need primaries. Okay, you get a proportional primary: each party nominates two via single transferable vote, so the party's current lean picks candidate #1 and the remaining sentiment picks candidate #2. STV essentially buys candidates with votes: if a candidate barely wins the first seat, the voters who helped elect that candidate lose their votes in trade for that candidate; if the candidate wins by a landslide, those voters lose part of their vote and keep the rest (hey if twice as many people voted for someone as were necessary to elect them, why should any of those people not be allowed to allocate the other half of their vote to some other candidate?).

Now you have a span of ideals. The extreme, the moderate. You give that to the American people and use a Smith-efficient method like Tideman's Alternative Smith (which resists both tactical nomination and strategic voting). You get a consensus candidate: someone mutually agreeable to the majority gets elected, instead of whomever gets to tip the vote a bit in their direction.

Let's illustrate.

Imagine if 53% of the country voted Trump and 47% voted Bernie in a General Presidential election by popular plurality vote. Obviously, Trump wins.

Now imagine if the choices were Bernie, Hillary, Rubio, Trump.

Some of those Trump voters are Republicans, but not so extreme. Ten percent of them vote Rubio-Trump.

Some of these voters are independent swing voters. Five percent vote Rubio-Trump, ten percent vote Rubio-Hillary, ten percent vote Hillary-Rubio.

The same goes for Bernie voters, some of whom vote Hillary-Bernie and some who were not-Trump voters who go Hillary-Rubio.

You're down to around 20% of people voting Trump first, with many voting Rubio-Trump, Trump-Rubio, or Hillary-Rubio. Many vote Hillary-Bernie, and some stay Bernie-Hillary.

Guess what? You might get Hillary Clinton.

You know what else might happen? You might get a Conservative swing this election, with 25% of voters voting Rubio over Trump, and 20% voting Trump over Rubio. It's not as farfetched as you'd think: Trump got 45% of the Republican primary votes; Cruz got 25%; Rubio and Kaisch got 25% together. We're assuming Rubio got the nomination and is effectively a Kaisch clone.

We're also assuming swing-vote independents didn't vote in the Republican primaries--because they can't.

That means Rubio has the Democrat-leaning independents (Hillary-Rubio), the Republican-leaning independents (Rubio-Hillary), the moderate Republicans (Rubio-Trump), and the never-Trump Republicans (Rubio-Hillary).

So Trump is beaten by Rubio and Hillary. Trump beats Bernie. Hillary beats Bernie, so Bernie is out. Rubio beats Hillary. Rubio thus beats Hillary, Trump, and Bernie, and is the Condorcet winner.

First, I want to improve our elections integrity. I'm trying to raise funds for that. Internet voting is a different concern and not a short-term target; I intend to design an Internet voting system for government elections specifically to market it to independent parliamentary groups, as I don't want to design a system without considering the needs of a sovereign electorate.

People are up in arms about the Electoral College and will eventually want to replace it with something. Could you imagine if the Constitution specified a plurality popular vote? The outcomes would be horrible. The election would be easily manipulated by clone candidates and momentary media propaganda campaigns, first selecting a candidate in a primary and then exciting the voting base for that candidate's party and leaning the swing voters in that direction. A tiny oligarchy could carefully select the President every term--the will of the elite.

Well we'll put a stop that bullshit right now.

Too many candidates. Voter fatigue. Need primaries. Okay, you get a proportional primary: each party nominates two via single transferable vote, so the party's current lean picks candidate #1 and the remaining sentiment picks candidate #2. STV essentially buys candidates with votes: if a candidate barely wins the first seat, the voters who helped elect that candidate lose their votes in trade for that candidate; if the candidate wins by a landslide, those voters lose part of their vote and keep the rest (hey if twice as many people voted for someone as were necessary to elect them, why should any of those people not be allowed to allocate the other half of their vote to some other candidate?).

Now you have a span of ideals. The extreme, the moderate. You give that to the American people and use a Smith-efficient method like Tideman's Alternative Smith (which resists both tactical nomination and strategic voting). You get a consensus candidate: someone mutually agreeable to the majority gets elected, instead of whomever gets to tip the vote a bit in their direction.

Let's illustrate.

Imagine if 53% of the country voted Trump and 47% voted Bernie in a General Presidential election by popular plurality vote. Obviously, Trump wins.

Now imagine if the choices were Bernie, Hillary, Rubio, Trump.

Some of those Trump voters are Republicans, but not so extreme. Ten percent of them vote Rubio-Trump.

Some of these voters are independent swing voters. Five percent vote Rubio-Trump, ten percent vote Rubio-Hillary, ten percent vote Hillary-Rubio.

The same goes for Bernie voters, some of whom vote Hillary-Bernie and some who were not-Trump voters who go Hillary-Rubio.

You're down to around 20% of people voting Trump first, with many voting Rubio-Trump, Trump-Rubio, or Hillary-Rubio. Many vote Hillary-Bernie, and some stay Bernie-Hillary.

Guess what? You might get Hillary Clinton.

You know what else might happen? You might get a Conservative swing this election, with 25% of voters voting Rubio over Trump, and 20% voting Trump over Rubio. It's not as farfetched as you'd think: Trump got 45% of the Republican primary votes; Cruz got 25%; Rubio and Kaisch got 25% together. We're assuming Rubio got the nomination and is effectively a Kaisch clone.

We're also assuming swing-vote independents didn't vote in the Republican primaries--because they can't.

That means Rubio has the Democrat-leaning independents (Hillary-Rubio), the Republican-leaning independents (Rubio-Hillary), the moderate Republicans (Rubio-Trump), and the never-Trump Republicans (Rubio-Hillary).

So Trump is beaten by Rubio and Hillary. Trump beats Bernie. Hillary beats Bernie, so Bernie is out. Rubio beats Hillary. Rubio thus beats Hillary, Trump, and Bernie, and is the Condorcet winner.

Stop feeding the consumerist maw that is devouring you.

You all should be donating your money to making a nobody a billionaire.

A GoFundMe has been set up to pay for the legal defense, and a expert lawyer has been retained.

Please consider donating. The kid isn't without fault, but he's being railroaded by the local government.

https://www.gofundme.com/ns-te...

A GoFundMe has been set up to pay for the legal defense, and an expert lawyer has been retained.

Please consider donating. The kid isn't without fault, but he's being railroaded by the local government.

https://www.gofundme.com/ns-te...

Incorrect. The more thoughtfully crafted bombs he sent all specifically targeted the homes of sociopolitically prominent people of color, and the rest that came later were of much lesser construction. I call diversion.

Moreover, the attitudes of the misogynistic and racist church and community is well known to us in Austin.

Now whatever you decide, please consider doing something for this kid who watched her father die right in front of her. https://www.gofundme.com/tx-bo...

We need to buy a Senator.

like this? https://www.gofundme.com/ask-f...

The sort of friend who begs for money on the internet when his car breaks down.

I don't know about BLM, but nation of islam certainly has and does. Antifa does as well, and yet:

https://www.gofundme.com/Antif...

No, nor Antifa. You can roll up at a free speech rally attended by liberals, libertarians, constitutionalists and conservatives to, as she said, "bash the fash" (her words). You can turn up at this rally where it was made clear that white nationalists were not welcome and be pictured holding glass bottles like the ones Antifa were throwing at centrists. You can be pictured being punched in the face for your troubles, after deliberately turning up to cause violence and then attempt to play victim. None of this is a problem to gofundme - just waiting for ISIS to set up a page.

Democracy at work app - my ass!

I'm going to do a marathon on Twitch when I have leave from work but until then please look here and help if you want to

Sorry if this is considered spam but I would hate myself if I didn't

The vendor continues to insert their own ads and has been withholding the advertising revenue from us. How is this not outright theft?

Because they are half-owners of the site (Barbara Mikkelson sold her share) and in the middle of a lawsuit.

The gofundme is here, for what it's worth, with more information: https://www.gofundme.com/saves...

I assume that the mentality of the person who did the study was to compare it to conventional non-profits and the way they do fundraising. This is an important distinction because, under that model, there's a certain filtering process. If you've ever looked at a grant application, you'll see that the very nature of any of them tends to point out to you that there needs to be a valid reason for your request for funding. GoFundMe has no such filter, and as a result you get people like these three assholes or this snowflake. And those two are just what I came across by searching "Nintendo" on their site and seeing what came up in the first full set of results.

And then there's the other thing that the filtering process does...which is help reduce the level of scamming. GoFundMe also lacks any means to do this; you see a picture and a nice bit of text but there is absolutely nothing done to validate that either are true. As a result, scams are rampant, to such a degree that there's a whole site dedicated to uncovering the scams.

So, in short...I don't think there's anything wrong with the majority of GoFundMe campaigns failing to reach their goals. Most of them are just fucking ridiculous. And yes, I'm quite sure that some valid campaigns don't get funded as well...but 1, I would put some of the blame on the lack of any vetting process around the campaigns, and 2, that happens in the world of legitimate fundraising too. Posting a picture and type a few paragraphs describing your plight does not automatically guarantee you money...whether you are deserving or not...and that's just how life goes.

I assume that the mentality of the person who did the study was to compare it to conventional non-profits and the way they do fundraising. This is an important distinction because, under that model, there's a certain filtering process. If you've ever looked at a grant application, you'll see that the very nature of any of them tends to point out to you that there needs to be a valid reason for your request for funding. GoFundMe has no such filter, and as a result you get people like these three assholes or this snowflake. And those two are just what I came across by searching "Nintendo" on their site and seeing what came up in the first full set of results.

And then there's the other thing that the filtering process does...which is help reduce the level of scamming. GoFundMe also lacks any means to do this; you see a picture and a nice bit of text but there is absolutely nothing done to validate that either are true. As a result, scams are rampant, to such a degree that there's a whole site dedicated to uncovering the scams.

So, in short...I don't think there's anything wrong with the majority of GoFundMe campaigns failing to reach their goals. Most of them are just fucking ridiculous. And yes, I'm quite sure that some valid campaigns don't get funded as well...but 1, I would put some of the blame on the lack of any vetting process around the campaigns, and 2, that happens in the world of legitimate fundraising too. Posting a picture and type a few paragraphs describing your plight does not automatically guarantee you money...whether you are deserving or not...and that's just how life goes.

How do you get $120mn in funding for that?

Before the dot com bust, you needed a napkin and a pen to get funded.

Should all poor simply start a startup for some stupid app or other, by preference one that already exists?

https://www.gofundme.com/

(I am the OP)
TLDR: lost my job for writing this article
you can donate here: https://www.gofundme.com/lost-...

While I list my title online as the CTO of DuroSoft Technologies, I am a part-time graduate student, and the vast majority of my income comes from a contracting position I (until just now) held at a popular SaaS company. I am not going to leak the name of this company, and I would politely ask people who reply to this thread not to speculate about about which company this might be, or otherwise go on a witch-hunt at this time.

Effective immediately, I have been terminated from my contracting position at X explicitly because of the views I express in this article, and the article's subsequent popularity on HN, Reddit, Slashdot, Hacker Noon, Medium, and other sites. Earlier today the article was posted and discussed in my employer's private engineering Slack room. A highly positive discussion ensued in which a number of our senior developers identified some key points and takeaways we could use to improve our effectiveness as a team. The CTO intervened and put an end to the discussion with little explanation, even though it had been a very constructive conversation with zero negativity. Despite this, I was floored by the words of praise and encouragement I received privately from other developers, and fully expected my article to become the topic of our upcoming team-wide engineering lunch. Several hours later I was called into my supervisor's office and it was made clear that "your medium article goes against some of the core engineering values of our organization", and that my decision to publish this article was the deciding factor behind his decision to terminate my position. Within 5 minutes, I was kicked out of GitHub and slack, and escorted out of the office of a company where I had worked for the last three years.

I am scrambling right now to figure out what my options are, my main concern being that I am already in debt, supporting my fiance, etc., and need to get my financials figured out ASAP. I just sent out about 20 applications to various senior software engineer jobs, but I likely will go negative well before any of them gets back to me. If you would like to support me while I figure out my options, and potentially help me fight for my right to intellectual freedom online, please consider visiting the gofundme link at the top of this comment.

GoFundMe.com charges a 5% fee on contributions.

No, that is a different one. Compare:

https://www.gofundme.com/buycongressdata aspires to raise $500M
vs
https://www.gofundme.com/searchinternethistory aspires to raise $10k

One of these is more realistic than the other...

No, that is a different one. Compare:

https://www.gofundme.com/buycongressdata aspires to raise $500M
vs
https://www.gofundme.com/searchinternethistory aspires to raise $10k

One of these is more realistic than the other...

Please also see https://www.gofundme.com/buyco...

Here's the scam.., err, activist's gofundme page https://www.gofundme.com/searchinternethistory.

I don't have all the answers to a lot of questions right now. But I'm working with people who are assisting me in developing a fully fledged plan. I do hope that if you are skeptical, you'll stay with me and watch.

This will be a roaring success, I just know it.

If we want to have that kind of space program again

This begs the question, does not it?

Do we want that kind of space program again? Landing on the Moon, though awesome in itself, cured no ills... If you want to fund such a thing, there is a site for it.

But don't you dare to confiscate my money to do it...

The moon matrix media has of course been running the opposite narrative. Trumpers framing BLM in a robbery that turned out to be an attempt at insurance fraud. Some Trumper was arrested for voting twice somewhere.

An African-American church was burned down and people are raising money to repair it.

I got a 403 on that link, but at any rate, that's fantastic. Some asshole bombs a GOP office, people raise money to repair it. Some dickless shit burns down a church, people raise money to repair it.

HuffPo linked me to a GoFundMe page to donate for repairs.

Here's holding out hope for those better angels of our nature whether we get the giant douche or the shit sandwich.

Try this gofundme link

I heard that several of the campaigns had to be taken down/changed or whatever to satisfy the gofundme people.

Building a telescope for Galileo is cheap. It can be self funded.

Funny, it was your own example — now you are walking it back?

NOBODY is building a rocket ship to Mars with their own money. Boeing, SpaceX/Elon's entire space program is funded by government buying rides on his rockets.

That government is one of the customers — even a major one — does not contradict the fact, that these are private companies invested in (and even sponsored by) private interests. Voluntarily. Earlier, USPS may have been a big customer of the airlines, but Wright brothers still funded their research privately.

Hey I don't want to pay for imprisoning someone who stole from you.

Punishing criminals — to deter future crimes — is one of the few legitimate roles of the government. The legitimacy-criteria is very simple: if, without doing this, the society/country ceases to exist, it is Ok to force tax-payers to pay it.

Crime-fighting qualifies. Military does too (though, I'm ready to admit, not to the extent the US currently spends on it). But "fundamental research" does not. Feeding the homeless — neither. And so on.

A scientist with an awesome — but expensive — idea can start a funding campaign to convince others to give him money. He does not get to compel us — such compelling is both corruption-prone and, as TFA underlines, still unsatisfactory.

You aren't compelled to pay. [...] Most of our fundamental science has come from government funding.

That self-contradictory and thus automatically wrong. Government has no money of "its own" — it all comes from taxes, which are collected at gun-point. The gun-point is rarely explicit — until the armed deputies come in to evict you from the IRS-confiscated home — but it is always there implicitly.

you can leave the social contract

Not until I've paid my taxes...

But, now that you've admitted it being acceptable for you to force others to pay for the things you want, I'm done with this argument. Thanks for playing.

Please mod this up and get the word out about the link to donate to Hero David Levin's Legal Defense. The gofundme site goes into more detail about everything he did to try and inform people before he went public and made the video.

And they want money to test their hypothesis, https://www.gofundme.com/wow-experiment

This kid started giving speeches and organizing rallies at 6. He's the creation of an adult. It took a while to figure out who, because they changed his name from Roske-Martinez to something Aztec. His mother is executive director of Earth Guardians and her name is Tamara Roske. If you Google her, you can see she's the activist behind all of this. Oh, and she wants you to pay for his high technology. Maybe they should get him some more vegetable scraps for his compost pile instead.

Hate to be a dick, but you DID charge admission using another company's IP. I won't say you "deserve all you get," but you had to know that a huge party would have attracted attention. It's not "maximalists" and "gangs" and "fighting the good fight," they're a company protecting their IP. End of story. Good luck to you, honestly, but next time check out the rules and regulations first.

Lawl.

/. left the broken scribd link In from firehose for some reason.
Pokemon is owned by Nintendo which explains a lot.
The guy has setup a go fund me page to try to pay off Nin- I mean Pokemon. The comments so far aren't very nice;

Here's one for example:
"David Rustles 2 hours ago Not only were you illegally hosting an event, but you were charging for tickets and serving alcohol. TPC is completely in the right and you deserve everything that happened."

And here's a link to the gofundme in question https://www.gofundme.com/ng5f2...

Should be interesting to see where this goes.

Here's a great way to help a small non-profit, all-volunteer, no-kill cat shelter. Due to redevelopment (malls closing down) they have lost their home twice in the past year and are currently working on moving to a new location: www.gofundme.com/PurrfectPets

Besides, helping them can only result in more funny cat videos on the internet. The internet could use more funny cat videos.

(Disclaimer: I volunteer at that shelter, scooping cat poop and making sure they have clean rooms and fresh water & food, and have also been helping get the new facility ready.)

They have a gofundme to help cover their legal fees.

Fuck gofundme, and the horse they rode in on.

They have a gofundme to help cover their legal fees.

Someone should send them a birthday cake.

The baker refused to bake it because of some religious believe about GNU, and is now retired thanks to 842,592 on gofundme. Suckahs!

Quantum Energy Generator. Now that's the stuff.

I skipped around the video and the best part is at 9:20:
"When I stand in that lab, I can feel the magical presence of the QEG."

I hope that they are using the money to go beat everyone who donates to it with a stick.

You may pay me to find the open source project that you are looking for. I will invoice you for your books and donate the proceeds to http://www.gofundme.com/help-sherry That should clear up the accounting. Thank you.

If you want to donate some money to help this courageous man with his (what will be considerable) medical expenses, here is the link.