Laws need to be absolute to be realized as unfair.
Saving Wesley is just the same as when some rich or powerful guy's child is caught in some offense and doesn't have to serve what some guy of the street would have had to serve.
If no senator or congressman ever experiences the law as unjust, they will not be willing to change it, because they don't see what is wrong with it if they are exempted from it - of course, this doesn't directly apply to that TNG episode as Picard didn't make the law, but still it doesn't mean that laws shouldn't be absolute.
The moral one should take home instead is that laws, while absolute, need to be proportional: murder is worse than accidentially stepping into the flowers or infringing on copyright, thus murder should carry a heavier penalty than the others.
Provided, of course, one buys into the idea of punishment instead of prevention: If one wanted the crime not to take in the first place, you cannot be fixated on revenge, which only causes a cycle of fear and violence, but instead on understanding the causes to uproot them. For the US, for instance, this would be repealing all copyright law except for expressly commercial infringement of significant size and instead introducing social security so that starving artists don't starve.
From this it also follows, by the way, that one shouldn't use the death penalty - except maybe for government officials - as a punishment, as it only continues the cycle of violence.
What you want to say is that you endorse zero tolerance policies. That's something different than understanding it - because you don't understand it, for if you did you'd know why they're bad. It's pretty much the same as with e.g. DRM: There are some people copying "IP", so we get a "zero tolerance policy" by getting it all DRM'd - with the result that it is easier to abuse than to use correctly: you can download cracked versions via P2P, but can't get the legally purchased version to play on your systems. All zero tolerance policies err on the side of making as much errors as possible, letting those through who should be stopped and stopping those who should be let through.
When you say "especially in the US where we all think we are owed something" what you mean is that you want others to stop asking for what they need so you can get what you lust for. At least is that the attitude I see in USians: crying for less social security because you don't want anyone have the right to live unless they took it from others (in form of money) - not seeing that if you are upper middle class or less, you're making yourself vulnerable to the random tides of life, without anyone to help you should you need it, because you demanded that nobody should be helped, because you wanted to keep "your" money.
Re:Geeks do- everyone else doesn't.
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 1
They don't need to crack it themselves. When they realize that they cannot play DRM'd content, they'll run to their computer-savy friend and ask him why it doesn't work. He will set up some file-sharing application for them, which they will then use do download cracked media from those guys who crack it (which always exist).
Thus, they don't even need to circumvent DRM anymore, because they can get it DRM free. But then they don't need to buy it anymore: By using DRM, the industry deprieves itself of potential sales and then cries about pirates and how they need to remove rights from consumers (and artists!) and give them to them.
Re:Geeks do- everyone else doesn't.
on
The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 1
Actually, it only keeps the "moderately lazy but potentially dishonest people honest", because the honest people whould have stayed so in the first place.
Also, DRM is pretty much a surefire way to make honest people dishonest, because if you can't play it legally, you've got to get an illegal copy.
Thus, DRM serves only the purpose of forcing honest people into illegality, so the industry can point and scream that there are so many pirates that we need more laws.
Darwin does not say that the average intelligence is the optimum, but that the IQ group which produces most becomes the average simply because it outbreeds both the more and less intelligent.
Indeed, with time, the average IQ goes up (prompting the test makers to renormalize it at 100 for the average); this is widely considered to happen because people more intelligent than the average breeding more than people less intelligent than the average, causing the average to rise.
(well,... with a quirk, so that they can never win against my side)
Why that? I'd think that'd just make them more angry ("American imperialists, making even their games so that they always win."). Shouldn't you rather make it so that they can never lose, so they find something they consider an efficient tactic - which horribly fails when tried in reality?
You may have voted for them, but it's not you who is paying them. Voting Demoblican or Repucrat is throwing your vote away. Vote for a third party instead.
Of course it's satire, some of these are hillarious...
What has the former first lady and senator of New York to do with that? If you didn't mean to use Hillary Clinton as an adjective, maybe you should try writing it with one less l.
Also, the US isn't that stupid (at least it was until the current administration); it knew that it was better to dominate a country economically than militarily. Less backlash that way.
Fixed what? Did I overlook something, or do you have a problem with addressing the US properly as the US instead as the whole of America? The Canadians neither claimed that the Canadians forced them, nor did they claim the Mexicans, Cubans, Brasilians,... did.
Yeah, 'cause I totally overlooked that and wasn't sarcastic in the least.
It's just that the GGGGP (correct number of G's?) didn't care to cite any examples when putting the words "Gore" and "scandal" produced several anti-Gore hate sites already on the first result page.
I can't hold a whole theatre in my hand, so I represented it by pebbles, and I guess I can hold enough pebbles in my hand for a handful being all the theatres in Montreal. The important point is that they're a finite number, not how many exactly. If that behaviour were to spread, you'd be out of theatres someday, it's that simple.
My point is, you can't just say "oh, it's just that one, that doesn't matter". Otherwise, others might think it prudent to follow - if the government manages to get everybody strip searched at the airport, don't you think that the entertainment industry has the will and, by virtue of their monopoly on their "content", the means to force the theatres to do the same?
It may not be x-ray machines yet, but it's just a question of time until the cameras are built so that they can't be detected easily (camera in the lenses, anyone?), requiring more sophisticated means of detection.
Also, news, per definition, are about the unusual.
There are far more theatres where these sorts of privacy invasions are not occurring than those where they actually are.
Of course you can try and take your money elsewhere - now. But in time, every theatre will be invading your privacy due to pressure from the entertainment industry. Not paying them money is just going to encourage them. After all, it can't possibly be that they have less customers because they're invading their privacy, but it has to be those pirates.
And that isn't even considering that you only have a selection of a handful theatres in a reasonable driving distance. Once you visited the last theatre, it just becomes like an election: you can chose one who invades your privacy or one who invades your privacy, no other options available.
What people seem to be unable to learn is that you need to stand up when the inconvenience begins, not when it is all-encompassing. If you fight back early, you can stop it. If you keep running from it, it will get you someday.
Exactly. They should stand up for themselves instead of claiming the USians forced them to do it. After all, the US is all nice, never ever invading a country not doing its bidding.
Well, as the GP doesn't seem to enumerate the scandals, let me:
He was involved in the scandal of being accused of having claimed to have invented the internet - which no self-respecting Republican would ever do.
He was involved in the scandal of being associated with a president who had a blow job - which is something no Republican would ever do.
He was involved in the scandal of talking of the scam that is global warming, which does take so little courage due to being a majority position that 90% of the USians don't believe in it, just to spite those arrogant scientists - which is something no Republican would ever do.
He was involved in the scandal of being consistently hypocritical by e.g. flying with a private jet to his talks about protecting the environment, and doesn't ever stand up to his ethical faults - which is something no Republican would ever do.
He was involved in the scandal of making phone calls from his official residence - which is something no Republican would ever do.
He was involved in the scandal of taking drugs - which is something no Republican would ever do.
Come on, if the son of a friend of the cousin of your spouses' uncle claims to have heard that someone saw that a guy which looked like you once walked down a street which once another guy walked down who once visited Afghanistan where he met someone whose brother was the in-law of some official working for a Taliban who allowed Bin Laden to hide there - that's evidence as hard as it gets, especially if he gets paid for delivering a terrorist to the government: if that isn't an incentive to tell the truth, nothing is.
You can't hope for anything better - except maybe phone records showing that, if we ignore daylight savings time and swap those two numbers around, replace the first number by a 1 and add a six-digit number to it, you called a number of a store which is next door to a hotel in which the room whose number is the sum of the digits of the first two digits of your birth year times 911 is the very room in which the criminal incriminated by aforementioned evidence was resisting arrest by accidentially shooting himself.
Of course we wouldn't want them to have to pay for it. After all, this is the battle cry of capitalism: "Privatize the profits! Communalize the costs!"
The Null Hypothesis is "the person is a terrorist" (because people are presumed guilty until proven innocent instead of innocent until proven guilty). By throwing any bottle away, you will always make an error of the first kind (false positive), because you automatically accept the Null Hypothesis: you accuse everyone to be a terrorist (because if they believed that you aren't a terrorist, why take away your water?). On the other hand, you will always make an error of the second kind (false negative), because you fail to apprehend the terrorist.
Therefore, if you throw any bottle away, you do away with innocent until proven guilty but instead just say that everyone is a terrorist, but don't apprehend them because there's not enough place in Guantanamo bay: Actions are chosen so the most harm possible is caused by deciding to make any error possible. Not only don't they reach their declared aim of reducing terrorism, they also actively harm the people (need some liquid medicine, like insulin? Too bad, into the trash it goes).
It indeed is ridiculous that they claim "whatever we do is wrong" because they believe that that "not always making the right decision" is the same as "always not making the right decision", taking this as justification to maximize one error while - in the best case - not reducing the other error which they claimed as the reason for needing to maximize the other.
Creating a feeling of safety in exchange for actual security really scares me. No terrorist has the ability to inconvenience me as much as government can: There are only two things which are inevitable, which are death and taxes, and I'm not so sure about death.
He differentiated between private property and property of the means of production, like slashdot differentiates between physical property and intellectual property, so it's not a self contradiction - though it might contradict reality and definitely contradicts social delusion of property.
Regarding your questions: those and many more are answered differently by different proponents of socialism, so I will only address your third point: "Why do you think that a bunch of greedy assholes voting themselves more stuff is better than the greedy assholes having to do something useful to get more stuff?".
Firstly, the fundamental idea of democracy is that consensus of the many is better than the consensus of the few: Of course, due to the stupidity of the people (as ensured by the education system which was designed to keep people uneducated and docile), this is, as Churchill said, the worst form of government - apart from any other. Because if only one person decides what is best, he will give himself anything and the others only that much that they can survive to serve him, but not fight him. But if many decide, then the end result is more likely to be fair to everyone.
Indeed, that - and not "taking the factory" - is what socialism is all about: the equality of the people. Just because one was born rich or became rich by treating others as subhuman beings doesn't mean he's superior to anyone else.
Also, while I personally don't condone taking the factory away, there are many cases where the corporation just fires everyone and closes the factory, razing it to the ground, out of some short-sighted profit considerations or, most often, just to spite customer, worker or government. In those cases, why can't we just say that, if the corporation doesn't want the factory anymore, they should just fuck off and let the workers do their thing?
Secondly, you are so hateful against the worker, calling them "greedy assholes", demanding them to "do something useful" instead of "voting themselves more stuff", that you completely neglect that it is the worker who makes the stuff in the first place and the capitalist is the one who votes that everything should be given to him - with him being the only one having a vote. Really, that question is a great argument for socialism and against capitalism.
To make this last claim more clear, consider the following:
Capitalism, also known as really existing socialism as practiced in the Soviet Union, can be summed up as "do what you can. If you control the means of production, you get more money than you can ever use. If you are worker, you will starve.". Thus, it absolutely doesn't matter how hard you work, you're only going to get money if you are in a position to decide who gets how much money - in which case you will give most to yourself, making you "more equal" than everyone else, because you "deserve" it because you are "more equal" - a circular reasoning like "god exists because the bible says that he exists and the bible is right because god exists and wrote it", hallmark of any ideology.
Socialism can be summed as "do what you can. You get what you deserve by your actions: if you do much, you get much. If you do little, you get little.". Especially being some fat capitalist just milking the factory instead of being productive is not wanted, which is why the capitalists, having control of the media and education system, don't want you to like socialism. The central claim is that every human is equal, so you have to be given the same chances: this means being aware that if you are born rich you have better chances than one born poor, and socialism aims to correct this. Hoever, the central object of socialism still is work: considering how more and more tasks get automated, neither capitalism nor socialism will survive this century, because there simply will be no work anymore, condemning everyone to starving to death who cannot make up some unnecessary work.
Why? The bank charged him the difference afterwards, so it was his. So why should he go to prison for that? And I'm not even advocating to take advantage of the corporation's bad luck (while corporations actively put people into "bad luck" and take advantage of it). I just don't think it makes any sense to send people to jail for whatever they do, even if no harm is done, because the bank corrected his account to correctly reflect the amount actually withdrawn.
I'm going a step further: Living in continental Europe, I don't even want to travel to any country which isn't a member of the Schengen Agreement. I've got a right to travel whereever I want. If one doesn't admit that, but rather wants me to get a visa and prove that I'm no terrorist (proving a negative is somewhat difficult, anyway) etc., I don't want to visit. For if you can't even enter and leave freely, you ain't got that much freedom inside, either, as was impressively demonstrated by the iron curtain during the cold war.
And really, who has more to lose? Me? Definitely not. Guantanamo, indeed, is nothing anyone would regret not having visited (though, unfortunately, the CIA can pick you up whereever you are in the world; but you needn't make it easy for them). The US, however, completely relies on foreign work: Latin Americans do do the physical work not already outsourced to China, because the USians don't want to pay USians to do it; Chinese and Europeans to do the intellectual work USians can't do because their education system is the crappiest in the world.
Funny. Over here in Germany, we're destroying a well-working, socialized system of higher education which brought to us the engineers known as the best ones in the world, replacing it with that capitalist system because "the US has it".
It's especially sad if you consider that USian research is only done by researchers from Europe and Asia working in USian universities, because the US education system is among the crappiest in the world.
This argument "everyone else does it" just doesn't hold water. Not only doesn't it consider what is right but only what is common. It also is called upon selectively to justify one's actions, but never when it contradicts them.
Or can you point me to the system of socialized health care and social security in the US equivalent to the European ones? Of course you can't, because that's "evil communism".
You need to realize that sometimes, the market works, and sometimes it doesn't. And the cases where it absolutely doesn't work are health care, due to inelastic demand, and education.
A free market is like free software: it's only free if it stays free. But if you forego regulation good for the society as a whole but instead impose regulation profiting the corporations.
For the corporations only want to reap the profits, they don't want to pay for it: they want the tax payer to subsidize everything, so they just can pocket the profits while the expenses are carried by the tax payer.
Case in point being education: While true education would be to teach people to think, education in capitalistic (or "communistic", for that matter - see my sig) societies only serves to control people: The corporations don't want to expend money to train their workers (and most certainly don't want them to question their practices). Instead, they want the education system do that.
Thus, instead of learning computers, you learn Microsoft applications. And always there is the cry about how far removed education is from practical applications.
Because what this claims is that there is no gold which glitters, which is obviously false.
What it wants to say (and how the proverb is given in any other language) is that "Not all that is gold does glitter", i.e. that there are things which glitter but are mistaken to be gold (fools gold, i.e. pyrite, for example).
And this is not, as I am often accused of, a "misunderstanding of the English language" on my part, but yet another case of incorrectly usage of a word causing the English language to become less expressive, leading to the very stupidity lamented in rants about the English language:
What you can't express is very difficult to understand. In this case, you cannot express the difference between "none is" and "some are, but not all", thus reinforcing the delusion of a black and white world where either all are or none is.
Also, your attribution to Tolkien is only half correct: While he used it, he didn't come up with it. Indeed, it is a proverb known in many languages and, as noted above, put correctly in most of them - except English, where you manage to always fuck up negation.
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Laws need to be absolute to be realized as unfair.
Saving Wesley is just the same as when some rich or powerful guy's child is caught in some offense and doesn't have to serve what some guy of the street would have had to serve.
If no senator or congressman ever experiences the law as unjust, they will not be willing to change it, because they don't see what is wrong with it if they are exempted from it - of course, this doesn't directly apply to that TNG episode as Picard didn't make the law, but still it doesn't mean that laws shouldn't be absolute.
The moral one should take home instead is that laws, while absolute, need to be proportional: murder is worse than accidentially stepping into the flowers or infringing on copyright, thus murder should carry a heavier penalty than the others.
Provided, of course, one buys into the idea of punishment instead of prevention: If one wanted the crime not to take in the first place, you cannot be fixated on revenge, which only causes a cycle of fear and violence, but instead on understanding the causes to uproot them. For the US, for instance, this would be repealing all copyright law except for expressly commercial infringement of significant size and instead introducing social security so that starving artists don't starve.
From this it also follows, by the way, that one shouldn't use the death penalty - except maybe for government officials - as a punishment, as it only continues the cycle of violence.
What you want to say is that you endorse zero tolerance policies. That's something different than understanding it - because you don't understand it, for if you did you'd know why they're bad. It's pretty much the same as with e.g. DRM: There are some people copying "IP", so we get a "zero tolerance policy" by getting it all DRM'd - with the result that it is easier to abuse than to use correctly: you can download cracked versions via P2P, but can't get the legally purchased version to play on your systems. All zero tolerance policies err on the side of making as much errors as possible, letting those through who should be stopped and stopping those who should be let through.
When you say "especially in the US where we all think we are owed something" what you mean is that you want others to stop asking for what they need so you can get what you lust for. At least is that the attitude I see in USians: crying for less social security because you don't want anyone have the right to live unless they took it from others (in form of money) - not seeing that if you are upper middle class or less, you're making yourself vulnerable to the random tides of life, without anyone to help you should you need it, because you demanded that nobody should be helped, because you wanted to keep "your" money.
They don't need to crack it themselves. When they realize that they cannot play DRM'd content, they'll run to their computer-savy friend and ask him why it doesn't work. He will set up some file-sharing application for them, which they will then use do download cracked media from those guys who crack it (which always exist).
Thus, they don't even need to circumvent DRM anymore, because they can get it DRM free. But then they don't need to buy it anymore: By using DRM, the industry deprieves itself of potential sales and then cries about pirates and how they need to remove rights from consumers (and artists!) and give them to them.
Actually, it only keeps the "moderately lazy but potentially dishonest people honest", because the honest people whould have stayed so in the first place.
Also, DRM is pretty much a surefire way to make honest people dishonest, because if you can't play it legally, you've got to get an illegal copy.
Thus, DRM serves only the purpose of forcing honest people into illegality, so the industry can point and scream that there are so many pirates that we need more laws.
Darwin does not say that the average intelligence is the optimum, but that the IQ group which produces most becomes the average simply because it outbreeds both the more and less intelligent.
Indeed, with time, the average IQ goes up (prompting the test makers to renormalize it at 100 for the average); this is widely considered to happen because people more intelligent than the average breeding more than people less intelligent than the average, causing the average to rise.
Why that? I'd think that'd just make them more angry ("American imperialists, making even their games so that they always win."). Shouldn't you rather make it so that they can never lose, so they find something they consider an efficient tactic - which horribly fails when tried in reality?
Wouldn't that be more like taking hundreds of cabs and consolidating them down to 40 buses?
You may have voted for them, but it's not you who is paying them. Voting Demoblican or Repucrat is throwing your vote away. Vote for a third party instead.
What has the former first lady and senator of New York to do with that? If you didn't mean to use Hillary Clinton as an adjective, maybe you should try writing it with one less l.
Well, I'm no Canadian, so tough luck with that.
Also, the US isn't that stupid (at least it was until the current administration); it knew that it was better to dominate a country economically than militarily. Less backlash that way.
Fixed what? Did I overlook something, or do you have a problem with addressing the US properly as the US instead as the whole of America? The Canadians neither claimed that the Canadians forced them, nor did they claim the Mexicans, Cubans, Brasilians, ... did.
Yeah, 'cause I totally overlooked that and wasn't sarcastic in the least.
It's just that the GGGGP (correct number of G's?) didn't care to cite any examples when putting the words "Gore" and "scandal" produced several anti-Gore hate sites already on the first result page.
I can't hold a whole theatre in my hand, so I represented it by pebbles, and I guess I can hold enough pebbles in my hand for a handful being all the theatres in Montreal. The important point is that they're a finite number, not how many exactly. If that behaviour were to spread, you'd be out of theatres someday, it's that simple.
My point is, you can't just say "oh, it's just that one, that doesn't matter". Otherwise, others might think it prudent to follow - if the government manages to get everybody strip searched at the airport, don't you think that the entertainment industry has the will and, by virtue of their monopoly on their "content", the means to force the theatres to do the same?
It may not be x-ray machines yet, but it's just a question of time until the cameras are built so that they can't be detected easily (camera in the lenses, anyone?), requiring more sophisticated means of detection.
Also, news, per definition, are about the unusual.
Of course you can try and take your money elsewhere - now. But in time, every theatre will be invading your privacy due to pressure from the entertainment industry. Not paying them money is just going to encourage them. After all, it can't possibly be that they have less customers because they're invading their privacy, but it has to be those pirates.
And that isn't even considering that you only have a selection of a handful theatres in a reasonable driving distance. Once you visited the last theatre, it just becomes like an election: you can chose one who invades your privacy or one who invades your privacy, no other options available.
What people seem to be unable to learn is that you need to stand up when the inconvenience begins, not when it is all-encompassing. If you fight back early, you can stop it. If you keep running from it, it will get you someday.
Exactly. They should stand up for themselves instead of claiming the USians forced them to do it. After all, the US is all nice, never ever invading a country not doing its bidding.
And I just got started. Do you want more?
Come on, if the son of a friend of the cousin of your spouses' uncle claims to have heard that someone saw that a guy which looked like you once walked down a street which once another guy walked down who once visited Afghanistan where he met someone whose brother was the in-law of some official working for a Taliban who allowed Bin Laden to hide there - that's evidence as hard as it gets, especially if he gets paid for delivering a terrorist to the government: if that isn't an incentive to tell the truth, nothing is.
You can't hope for anything better - except maybe phone records showing that, if we ignore daylight savings time and swap those two numbers around, replace the first number by a 1 and add a six-digit number to it, you called a number of a store which is next door to a hotel in which the room whose number is the sum of the digits of the first two digits of your birth year times 911 is the very room in which the criminal incriminated by aforementioned evidence was resisting arrest by accidentially shooting himself.
Of course we wouldn't want them to have to pay for it. After all, this is the battle cry of capitalism: "Privatize the profits! Communalize the costs!"
The Null Hypothesis is "the person is a terrorist" (because people are presumed guilty until proven innocent instead of innocent until proven guilty). By throwing any bottle away, you will always make an error of the first kind (false positive), because you automatically accept the Null Hypothesis: you accuse everyone to be a terrorist (because if they believed that you aren't a terrorist, why take away your water?). On the other hand, you will always make an error of the second kind (false negative), because you fail to apprehend the terrorist.
Therefore, if you throw any bottle away, you do away with innocent until proven guilty but instead just say that everyone is a terrorist, but don't apprehend them because there's not enough place in Guantanamo bay: Actions are chosen so the most harm possible is caused by deciding to make any error possible. Not only don't they reach their declared aim of reducing terrorism, they also actively harm the people (need some liquid medicine, like insulin? Too bad, into the trash it goes).
It indeed is ridiculous that they claim "whatever we do is wrong" because they believe that that "not always making the right decision" is the same as "always not making the right decision", taking this as justification to maximize one error while - in the best case - not reducing the other error which they claimed as the reason for needing to maximize the other.
Creating a feeling of safety in exchange for actual security really scares me. No terrorist has the ability to inconvenience me as much as government can: There are only two things which are inevitable, which are death and taxes, and I'm not so sure about death.
Regarding your questions: those and many more are answered differently by different proponents of socialism, so I will only address your third point: "Why do you think that a bunch of greedy assholes voting themselves more stuff is better than the greedy assholes having to do something useful to get more stuff?".
Firstly, the fundamental idea of democracy is that consensus of the many is better than the consensus of the few: Of course, due to the stupidity of the people (as ensured by the education system which was designed to keep people uneducated and docile), this is, as Churchill said, the worst form of government - apart from any other. Because if only one person decides what is best, he will give himself anything and the others only that much that they can survive to serve him, but not fight him. But if many decide, then the end result is more likely to be fair to everyone.
Indeed, that - and not "taking the factory" - is what socialism is all about: the equality of the people. Just because one was born rich or became rich by treating others as subhuman beings doesn't mean he's superior to anyone else.
Also, while I personally don't condone taking the factory away, there are many cases where the corporation just fires everyone and closes the factory, razing it to the ground, out of some short-sighted profit considerations or, most often, just to spite customer, worker or government. In those cases, why can't we just say that, if the corporation doesn't want the factory anymore, they should just fuck off and let the workers do their thing?
Secondly, you are so hateful against the worker, calling them "greedy assholes", demanding them to "do something useful" instead of "voting themselves more stuff", that you completely neglect that it is the worker who makes the stuff in the first place and the capitalist is the one who votes that everything should be given to him - with him being the only one having a vote. Really, that question is a great argument for socialism and against capitalism.
To make this last claim more clear, consider the following:
Socialism can be summed as "do what you can. You get what you deserve by your actions: if you do much, you get much. If you do little, you get little.". Especially being some fat capitalist just milking the factory instead of being productive is not wanted, which is why the capitalists, having control of the media and education system, don't want you to like socialism. The central claim is that every human is equal, so you have to be given the same chances: this means being aware that if you are born rich you have better chances than one born poor, and socialism aims to correct this. Hoever, the central object of socialism still is work: considering how more and more tasks get automated, neither capitalism nor socialism will survive this century, because there simply will be no work anymore, condemning everyone to starving to death who cannot make up some unnecessary work.
Why? The bank charged him the difference afterwards, so it was his. So why should he go to prison for that? And I'm not even advocating to take advantage of the corporation's bad luck (while corporations actively put people into "bad luck" and take advantage of it). I just don't think it makes any sense to send people to jail for whatever they do, even if no harm is done, because the bank corrected his account to correctly reflect the amount actually withdrawn.
No. It rewards those who can lie (aka "market") best. I really somehow doubt that lying could be considered "good behaviour".
I'm going a step further: Living in continental Europe, I don't even want to travel to any country which isn't a member of the Schengen Agreement. I've got a right to travel whereever I want. If one doesn't admit that, but rather wants me to get a visa and prove that I'm no terrorist (proving a negative is somewhat difficult, anyway) etc., I don't want to visit. For if you can't even enter and leave freely, you ain't got that much freedom inside, either, as was impressively demonstrated by the iron curtain during the cold war.
And really, who has more to lose? Me? Definitely not. Guantanamo, indeed, is nothing anyone would regret not having visited (though, unfortunately, the CIA can pick you up whereever you are in the world; but you needn't make it easy for them). The US, however, completely relies on foreign work: Latin Americans do do the physical work not already outsourced to China, because the USians don't want to pay USians to do it; Chinese and Europeans to do the intellectual work USians can't do because their education system is the crappiest in the world.
Funny. Over here in Germany, we're destroying a well-working, socialized system of higher education which brought to us the engineers known as the best ones in the world, replacing it with that capitalist system because "the US has it".
It's especially sad if you consider that USian research is only done by researchers from Europe and Asia working in USian universities, because the US education system is among the crappiest in the world.
This argument "everyone else does it" just doesn't hold water. Not only doesn't it consider what is right but only what is common. It also is called upon selectively to justify one's actions, but never when it contradicts them.
Or can you point me to the system of socialized health care and social security in the US equivalent to the European ones? Of course you can't, because that's "evil communism".
You need to realize that sometimes, the market works, and sometimes it doesn't. And the cases where it absolutely doesn't work are health care, due to inelastic demand, and education.
A free market is like free software: it's only free if it stays free. But if you forego regulation good for the society as a whole but instead impose regulation profiting the corporations.
For the corporations only want to reap the profits, they don't want to pay for it: they want the tax payer to subsidize everything, so they just can pocket the profits while the expenses are carried by the tax payer.
Case in point being education: While true education would be to teach people to think, education in capitalistic (or "communistic", for that matter - see my sig) societies only serves to control people: The corporations don't want to expend money to train their workers (and most certainly don't want them to question their practices). Instead, they want the education system do that.
Thus, instead of learning computers, you learn Microsoft applications. And always there is the cry about how far removed education is from practical applications.
is painful, please change it.
Because what this claims is that there is no gold which glitters, which is obviously false.
What it wants to say (and how the proverb is given in any other language) is that "Not all that is gold does glitter", i.e. that there are things which glitter but are mistaken to be gold (fools gold, i.e. pyrite, for example).
And this is not, as I am often accused of, a "misunderstanding of the English language" on my part, but yet another case of incorrectly usage of a word causing the English language to become less expressive, leading to the very stupidity lamented in rants about the English language:
What you can't express is very difficult to understand. In this case, you cannot express the difference between "none is" and "some are, but not all", thus reinforcing the delusion of a black and white world where either all are or none is.
Also, your attribution to Tolkien is only half correct: While he used it, he didn't come up with it. Indeed, it is a proverb known in many languages and, as noted above, put correctly in most of them - except English, where you manage to always fuck up negation.
Some links:
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/notall.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_that_is_Gold_Doe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothes