The Bible states that hostile questioners tried to trap Jesus into taking an explicit and dangerous stand on whether Jews should or should not pay taxes to the Roman occupation. They anticipated that Jesus would oppose the tax, for Luke’s Gospels explains their purpose was “to hand him over to the power and authority of the governor.”[4] The governor was Pilate, and he was the man responsible for the collecting of Rome's taxes in Judea. At first the questioners flattered Jesus by praising his integrity, impartiality and devotion to truth. Then they asked him whether or not it is right for Jews to pay the taxes demanded by Caesar. In the gospel of Mark, the additional, truly provocative question is asked, "Should we pay or shouldn't we?" [5] Jesus first called them hypocrites, and then asked one of them to produce a Roman coin that would be suitable for paying Caesar’s tax. One of them showed him a Roman coin, and he asked them whose name and inscription were on it. They answered, “Caesar’s,” and he responded “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and give to God what is God’s.” His interrogators were flummoxed by this authoritative (though ambiguous) answer and left disappointed.
At his trial before Pontius Pilate, Jesus was accused of promoting resistance to Caesar's tax. [6]
Then the whole assembly rose and led him off to Pilate. And they began to accuse him, saying, “We have found this man subverting our nation. He opposes payment of taxes to Caesar and claims to be Christ/Messiah, a king.” (Luke 23:1-4)
so what you're saying is that you preferred when the church remained ignorant and refrained from scientific investigation? as though only people who you agree with should be allowed to investigate the world? as though you yourself haven't got bias that could lead you to ignore possible explanations for phenomena?
are you honestly opposed to the church spending money on science? at the very least there are utilitarian reasons for you to be in favor, notably the increase in the market size cheapening goods you may want in pursuit of your own research and the diversion of church money away from other activities you may find more objectionable.
personally i think that the more people there are doing scientific research the better, and the more backgrounds and perspectives available to evaluate data the better.
it makes me a sad panda when i optimize an algorithm, put it in VHDL, and the simulation of the VHDL runs comparably to the original ratlab. thankfully that doesn't happen that often.
that bio majors are just failed pre-med or chemistry majors.
and that they got there by smoking up too much. it's like they wake up from a 5 year bender (undergraduate) and realize they have to work or something (grad school). meanwhile the rest of us in technical majors had to work during our undergrad programs so we weren't surprised when there was more work in grad school./troll
i think the concerns people have about fiat currencies are fair though. As historical evidence of fiat currencies shows, they are an extremely bad store of value given that the interests of those whose fiat decides the value of the currency are at odds with those trying to use it as a store of value (their life's retirement savings). Our policy makers are concerned with feeding the congress' deficit spending and "creating jobs" by encouraging people to spend (and spend recklessly if at all possible) to add demand for goods and services that theoretically creates jobs. They neglect the pressure all this debt puts on the currency. They neglect the needs of retirees, frequently explicitly. And they neglect the stability of the economy, stability that only savings can provide. Shortly, those denigrating fiat currencies are acting in their own rational interest and in favor of a more stable economy.
as to the illegality of passing silver in trade, it also used to be illegal to own more than $100 in gold. As I'm sure you know, passing a law does not make the law constitutional or advisable, nor does it prevent that law from harming citizens' interests.
Moreover, I'm not sure how one could mistake coins with Ron Paul's image on them for any silver US currency minted in the last 75 years or so. The collectible silver dollars and uncirculated silver dollar bullion all bear an image of Liberty personified (a woman in flowing robes, etc.) As to the guy collecting too much seigniorage, yeah, but i don't hear too many people complaining about the $6.3 billion in seigniorage the government collected from state quarters alone last decade.
silver and gold are money because, writ large, society treats them as money, and particularly as a store of value. there is nothing mystical about them. however, one might argue that their industrial uses detract from their utility as currency. look at the design goals of bitcoin: an ideal currency would be hard to produce, durable, easy to verify, and not useful for other purposes. historically, gold and silver have been hard to produce, durable (they don't corrode nearly as easily as other metals people had access to for all those millennia [copper, bronze, iron, steel, zinc, nickel]), easy to verify (it is soft and gives when bitten unless alloyed excessively), and industrially useless (until recent times). In the interior of the US, native americans used seashells as currency. again, the seashells were hard to produce (had to collect and transport them to the interior), durable (relatively), easy to verify, and not useful for other purposes.
One could say similar things about aluminum, but we only recently (1800s) discovered how to refine it and it is extremely useful in industry and fairly common.
and moreover, gold and silver are less vulnerable to political dilution. nearly every other paper currency in the history of the world has fallen to political dilution. we can easily see that process at work in our own politics given how little either party cares to pay for its spending, even in times of plenty (early-mid 2000s). monetarization of government debt is also a tax, and a particularly regressive one, punishing those on low and fixed incomes like retirees living off of savings.
and regarding your scaremongering about the guy you're badgering being foolish to invest in gold, you may be correct now, but not at any time in the past 10 years. but who knows, gold could still go up. it all depends on how much QE (expansion of M1) is done and how the markets react to it.
no, you are cherry picking a short-lived anomaly (WWII). we are spending more over a decade with arbitrary end dates in the 1990s - 2000s than we did for an arbitrarily ended decade in the 1890s - 1900s. We get more services in the current era than in eras past.
also, GDP is a gameable number but it is what we have. it is gameable in that government spending is considered positive for GDP and in other ways. moreover, with monetization of debt, this is not a closed system over money, nor are its effects realized in a timely manner.
my concern is not exactly the stereotypical one you place in my mouth. i was making a point of fact. spending has increased. it is reasonable to argue that it has been worth it. it is foolish to argue that it hasn't occurred.
also, i am not in favor of merely cutting discretionary spending. i am also in favor of cutting military spending dramatically. and entitlement spending as necessary after the first two.
The actual reason Americans didn't backlash against these actions is that it is less painful to confront the idea that our "heroes" aren't all above board all the time. it would require action. it would require dissent against the government, something that our political culture does not reward. one has only to look at the outcome of the financial crisis to see that it pays to break the law and punishes to blow the whistle on illegal activity or on government complacency in the face of such law breaking.
i didn't think it was terribly controversial that the federal government had expanded quite dramatically as a percentage of GDP over the past 100 years.
the disturbing part was the doublespeak, cover-up, and "losing" of the footage after the fact when asked for it by AFP in its investigation of what happened to its reporters. bad things happen in war. there are also bad apples in any force. the controversy (which never materialized in the US despite its merits) centers upon the premise of going to war to "liberate" people (a process which necessitates the goodwill and cooperation of the occupied people) and then undermining that goodwill and cooperation by shielding US forces from accountability, a policy that has permeated our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Shortly, if we had admitted what had happened and retrained, reassigned, or prosecuted the individual military members acting outside their rules of engagement / international law then there would have been no controversy. (i would think the person cavalierly and unnecessarily driving over the bodies of those killed would be in the prosecuted category and those acting exhilarated would be in the retrain/reassign category.)
Instead, we got lies and cover-up. It took the release of that video to give the lie to the propaganda spin developed after the fact. (Which is why the mix in of the military spokesperson claiming that "extraordinary care" was taken to avoid civilian casualties and desecration of the dead and wounded was particularly effective in the collateral murder video: it juxtaposes the fact against the spin, inducing cognitive dissonance.)
The actual reason Americans didn't backlash against these actions is that it is less painful to confront the idea that our "heroes" aren't all above board all the time. it would require action. it would require dissent against the government, something that our political culture does not reward. one has only to look at the outcome of the financial crisis to see that it pays to break the law and punishes to blow the whistle on illegal activity or on government complacency in the face of such law breaking.
and sometimes it's marketing rubbish, useless for advancing scientific knowledge but great for making people with e.g. crappy focal length, low resolution webcams feel attached to science.
Some of us were concerned about warrantless domestic spying in the dim prehistory of time, by which i mean 2000-2008. You may have heard snippets here and there of the time when Democrats gave a damn about these issues. But like you, now that their guy is in power, they suddenly disappeared all at once on or about 20 January 2009. Kinda like most of the anti-war activists. The problem with people like you is that you help the powerful consolidate these encroachments as solidly under the bipartisan consensus and thus forever after uncontroversial, no matter how much damage they do to our society.
a guy i knew got a letter during the summer before his senior year (my freshman year) saying, "We are pleased to announce that there has been a decrease in the tuition increase for the '95-'96 academic year." His response was something to the effect of, "What? So you're screwing me less more?"
you presume interest on the part of the DoJ in prosecuting crimes and enforcing the laws uniformly. given that it was the DoJ who put both the chamber of commerce and bank of america in touch with the law firm at the center of this debacle i don't think they'll be terribly interested in justice in this case. because discovery might embarrass them and justice might inconvenience them.
Slashdot Mirror
"...and unto God the things that are God’s”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Render_unto_Caesar%E2%80%A6
by your logic Gandhi was not anti-authority. it's called non-violent protest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turning_the_other_cheek
so what you're saying is that you preferred when the church remained ignorant and refrained from scientific investigation? as though only people who you agree with should be allowed to investigate the world? as though you yourself haven't got bias that could lead you to ignore possible explanations for phenomena?
are you honestly opposed to the church spending money on science? at the very least there are utilitarian reasons for you to be in favor, notably the increase in the market size cheapening goods you may want in pursuit of your own research and the diversion of church money away from other activities you may find more objectionable.
personally i think that the more people there are doing scientific research the better, and the more backgrounds and perspectives available to evaluate data the better.
it makes me a sad panda when i optimize an algorithm, put it in VHDL, and the simulation of the VHDL runs comparably to the original ratlab. thankfully that doesn't happen that often.
that bio majors are just failed pre-med or chemistry majors.
and that they got there by smoking up too much. it's like they wake up from a 5 year bender (undergraduate) and realize they have to work or something (grad school). meanwhile the rest of us in technical majors had to work during our undergrad programs so we weren't surprised when there was more work in grad school. /troll
if you have henchmen you have to give them mooks to make them effective and increase your henchmen retention ratio. evil empires get expensive fast.
if he were going to gitmo it would probably have happened sometime in the last decade... this is old news. it's still cool, but it is old.
http://www.google.com/search?q=john+coster-mullen&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_samuels
http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/how-john-coster-mullen-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-reverse-engineer-the-bomb_b6222
http://docs.nrdc.org/nuclear/files/nuc_04110001a_024.pdf
i think the concerns people have about fiat currencies are fair though. As historical evidence of fiat currencies shows, they are an extremely bad store of value given that the interests of those whose fiat decides the value of the currency are at odds with those trying to use it as a store of value (their life's retirement savings). Our policy makers are concerned with feeding the congress' deficit spending and "creating jobs" by encouraging people to spend (and spend recklessly if at all possible) to add demand for goods and services that theoretically creates jobs. They neglect the pressure all this debt puts on the currency. They neglect the needs of retirees, frequently explicitly. And they neglect the stability of the economy, stability that only savings can provide. Shortly, those denigrating fiat currencies are acting in their own rational interest and in favor of a more stable economy.
as to the illegality of passing silver in trade, it also used to be illegal to own more than $100 in gold. As I'm sure you know, passing a law does not make the law constitutional or advisable, nor does it prevent that law from harming citizens' interests.
Moreover, I'm not sure how one could mistake coins with Ron Paul's image on them for any silver US currency minted in the last 75 years or so. The collectible silver dollars and uncirculated silver dollar bullion all bear an image of Liberty personified (a woman in flowing robes, etc.) As to the guy collecting too much seigniorage, yeah, but i don't hear too many people complaining about the $6.3 billion in seigniorage the government collected from state quarters alone last decade.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage
silver and gold are money because, writ large, society treats them as money, and particularly as a store of value. there is nothing mystical about them. however, one might argue that their industrial uses detract from their utility as currency. look at the design goals of bitcoin: an ideal currency would be hard to produce, durable, easy to verify, and not useful for other purposes. historically, gold and silver have been hard to produce, durable (they don't corrode nearly as easily as other metals people had access to for all those millennia [copper, bronze, iron, steel, zinc, nickel]), easy to verify (it is soft and gives when bitten unless alloyed excessively), and industrially useless (until recent times). In the interior of the US, native americans used seashells as currency. again, the seashells were hard to produce (had to collect and transport them to the interior), durable (relatively), easy to verify, and not useful for other purposes.
One could say similar things about aluminum, but we only recently (1800s) discovered how to refine it and it is extremely useful in industry and fairly common.
and moreover, gold and silver are less vulnerable to political dilution. nearly every other paper currency in the history of the world has fallen to political dilution. we can easily see that process at work in our own politics given how little either party cares to pay for its spending, even in times of plenty (early-mid 2000s). monetarization of government debt is also a tax, and a particularly regressive one, punishing those on low and fixed incomes like retirees living off of savings.
and regarding your scaremongering about the guy you're badgering being foolish to invest in gold, you may be correct now, but not at any time in the past 10 years. but who knows, gold could still go up. it all depends on how much QE (expansion of M1) is done and how the markets react to it.
http://www.kitco.com/charts/popup/au3650nyb.html
http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=INDEXDJX:DJI
set the google chart of the DJIA to 10 years. then ask yourself which you'd rather have invested in during the last decade.
i hear in the next privacy settings reset facebook will start publishing your current session cookie by default.
no, you are cherry picking a short-lived anomaly (WWII). we are spending more over a decade with arbitrary end dates in the 1990s - 2000s than we did for an arbitrarily ended decade in the 1890s - 1900s. We get more services in the current era than in eras past.
also, GDP is a gameable number but it is what we have. it is gameable in that government spending is considered positive for GDP and in other ways. moreover, with monetization of debt, this is not a closed system over money, nor are its effects realized in a timely manner.
my concern is not exactly the stereotypical one you place in my mouth. i was making a point of fact. spending has increased. it is reasonable to argue that it has been worth it. it is foolish to argue that it hasn't occurred.
also, i am not in favor of merely cutting discretionary spending. i am also in favor of cutting military spending dramatically. and entitlement spending as necessary after the first two.
The actual reason Americans didn't backlash against these actions is that it is less painful to confront the idea that our "heroes" aren't all above board all the time. it would require action. it would require dissent against the government, something that our political culture does not reward. one has only to look at the outcome of the financial crisis to see that it pays to break the law and punishes to blow the whistle on illegal activity or on government complacency in the face of such law breaking.
oops. should read, "...it is painful..."
i didn't think it was terribly controversial that the federal government had expanded quite dramatically as a percentage of GDP over the past 100 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Us_gov_spending_history_1902_2010.png
the disturbing part was the doublespeak, cover-up, and "losing" of the footage after the fact when asked for it by AFP in its investigation of what happened to its reporters. bad things happen in war. there are also bad apples in any force. the controversy (which never materialized in the US despite its merits) centers upon the premise of going to war to "liberate" people (a process which necessitates the goodwill and cooperation of the occupied people) and then undermining that goodwill and cooperation by shielding US forces from accountability, a policy that has permeated our actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Shortly, if we had admitted what had happened and retrained, reassigned, or prosecuted the individual military members acting outside their rules of engagement / international law then there would have been no controversy. (i would think the person cavalierly and unnecessarily driving over the bodies of those killed would be in the prosecuted category and those acting exhilarated would be in the retrain/reassign category.)
Instead, we got lies and cover-up. It took the release of that video to give the lie to the propaganda spin developed after the fact. (Which is why the mix in of the military spokesperson claiming that "extraordinary care" was taken to avoid civilian casualties and desecration of the dead and wounded was particularly effective in the collateral murder video: it juxtaposes the fact against the spin, inducing cognitive dissonance.)
The actual reason Americans didn't backlash against these actions is that it is less painful to confront the idea that our "heroes" aren't all above board all the time. it would require action. it would require dissent against the government, something that our political culture does not reward. one has only to look at the outcome of the financial crisis to see that it pays to break the law and punishes to blow the whistle on illegal activity or on government complacency in the face of such law breaking.
and sometimes it's marketing rubbish, useless for advancing scientific knowledge but great for making people with e.g. crappy focal length, low resolution webcams feel attached to science.
Maybe, but he's dead.
Karl Rove on the other hand, is still alive.
It's Obama wielding these powers these days. And he seems content to be just as bad if not worse than Bushco. Just ask EFF or the ACLU.
Some of us were concerned about warrantless domestic spying in the dim prehistory of time, by which i mean 2000-2008. You may have heard snippets here and there of the time when Democrats gave a damn about these issues. But like you, now that their guy is in power, they suddenly disappeared all at once on or about 20 January 2009. Kinda like most of the anti-war activists. The problem with people like you is that you help the powerful consolidate these encroachments as solidly under the bipartisan consensus and thus forever after uncontroversial, no matter how much damage they do to our society.
clearly it's 1.21 GW.
he'll still give you cement boots if you're not careful... :p
panda eats, shoulds, and leaves?
how much for just the planet?
a guy i knew got a letter during the summer before his senior year (my freshman year) saying, "We are pleased to announce that there has been a decrease in the tuition increase for the '95-'96 academic year." His response was something to the effect of, "What? So you're screwing me less more?"
i guess the operating theory is that coincidental identical independent works are a corner case?
sorry, mostly it was the drinking and hallucinations.
you presume interest on the part of the DoJ in prosecuting crimes and enforcing the laws uniformly. given that it was the DoJ who put both the chamber of commerce and bank of america in touch with the law firm at the center of this debacle i don't think they'll be terribly interested in justice in this case. because discovery might embarrass them and justice might inconvenience them.