It's not just the conditions, it's how many people there are who can do the job (i.e. you forgot the supply part of supply and demand). Lots of people can pick strawberrys [sic], or flip burgers.
Feh. People should provide their own safety net (my parents did, and they were in no way rich). Anyone who thinks the government will provide for them in their old age now is a fool; the entitlement Ponzi scheme is about to collapse under the weight of the baby boomers. Few of the things you listed are proper functions of government, anyway...and that the Internet was invented by people working in a government agency is a historical accident, not the triumph of statism that some trumpet it as.
Earth to AC: robbery does other people harm. Working hard and making more money doesn't do them harm, unless you use deceit (e.g. the Windows FUD message when it found itself running atop DR-DOS) or do people harm (e.g. robbery again) to do it. Seems like an obvious difference to me.
If you tax something, you discourage it--so what will a "progressive" taxation scheme discourage? Working. (Too bad MS has so corrupted the I-word, or I'd use it here, too.)
Eh? That wasn't an argument; it was a statement of fact, trivially confirmable. Had I tried to make an inference from that, then I'd be making an argument (as per John Cleese in the "Argument Clinic sketch").
Libertarians aren't selfish--they just think that a group of thieves aren't made moral by being a majority.
You, on the other hand, seem to very generous with other people's stuff, unless you're preparing to sell all your extra stuff to help feed starving people around the world. Compared to them, you're a rich greedhead (heck, I bet you have more than one pair of shoes and change of clothing, and you are eating something other than vat-grown algae--horribly inefficient and wasteful), so you don't deserve to keep what you earn.
LaRouche, of the crackpot conspiracy of Aristotelian philosophers and claim that the Queen of England is a pusher, claimed to be a Democrat, if I remember rightly...so it's not clear what self-applied labels mean, if anything.
I can say that "eliminate the separation of church and state" doesn't coincide with what I've heard and read of the libertarian position--indeed, one of the major flash points of that matter, public schools, would be made irrelevant if the government got out of the education business (where it has no right to be, anyway).
Anyone caring to see the actual libertarian platform should head for the Libertarian Party web site.
Eh? Have you seen the Green Party platform? If Nader agrees with it, he's perfectly happy with "gigantism" in the market...with the government being the giant. The Green Party's platform is one of the more frightening documents around.
If the government was really out to screw you, you'd be dead.
No, I'd be what I am now, namely a drone having a major portion of my income seized by the government so government officials can stay in power by trading the money so seized for votes.
Let's see...the government will cheerfully deprive you of your right to use your land as you see fit if it considers it (under a broad and bogus definition) a "wetland", or the habitat of an endangered "species" (which may be an obscure variety of a very common species). The government will, at the drop of a rumor, break into your house or seize your property in the name of the War on Drugs. The government is still trying to push through laws to make your bank start profiling your transactions and report anything "unusual" to the government, which will take it as possibly meaning your a drug dealer trying to launder money. The government will also take as evidence of your guilt paying for something expensive in cash.
I'm sorry, but we're headed for a police state; I don't trust the government at all.
I think you may underestimate kids. I recall a friend who taught housewives to use OS-9/6809 Level Two (a rather Unix-like OS) on Tandy Color Computers, and who said they caught on with minimal difficulty. This was back when a large contingent of the CoCo crowd was making the same noises about how hard OS-9 was to learn (compared to BASIC) that are now being made about Unix, and RAINBOW (the big CoCo magazine) would regularly run introductory OS-9 articles and advertisements that made much of that supposed difficulty.
If I remember rightly, the P4 systems Intel was demoing had fan/heatsink combos that weighed one pound, and the chip had four holes so that the heatsink/fan could be bolted directly to the motherboard.
If I remember rightly, Microsoft came down on some charitable organization that was donating computer hardware to churches, libraries, and non-profit organizations, under the presumption that they had to be pirating Windows.
I would think that would make for good publicity for people to assist them by making a point of wiping whatever MS software was on the machines and installing Linux or BSD along with Open Source apps before they go out to the churches, libraries, etc.
Well, yes, but...one of the things that is wrong with a flat rate system is that it encourages abuse. A metered system would have stopped spam right away, by making it cost something proportional to the amount sent.
Actually, kanji are about as far from phonetic as one can get--so I'm not sure why you call Japanese "phonetic." To be sure, kana are phonetic, save for the way the "wa" particle is written with the "ha" kana and the "e" particle is written with the "he" kana, and the Hepburn Romanization is phonetic. (I hope the Japanese have given up on kunrei-shiki, though; any system in which "Fujitsu" is spelled "Huzitu" has no chance at all. OK, pinyin is as weird and it seems to be accepted, but it had a totalitarian state pushing it. Yeah, anything that maps one-to-one between sound and spelling is "phonetic," but there's a lot to be said for not being gratuitously misleading.)
In any case, the "n" is a syllable unto itself, as you'd see were "kuroshin" written out in kana instead of romaji, so it's "ku-ro-shi-n." (Apologies to everyone else for the pedantry; I'd like to think that I'd stopped the gratuitous displays, but "more learned than thou" types set me off.)
To answer your question, grade schools here mostly suck, because the government has an effective near monopoly on them. I'm doing my best to support people trying to fix that.
That's called Grosch's Law, after Herb Grosch, IBM and then ex-IBM gadfly from the big iron era. He gave three different statements of it, in descending order of rigor...for some reason I only remember the third, namely "No matter how fast the hardware gets, the software boys will [urinate] it away."
When someone called you on your desire to ban expression you don't like from the net, you had to drop back from "hate speech" to the usual trump card of kiddie pr0n. (BTW, are you from Canada? I recall that they've decided that people don't have the right to what they call "hate speech.") There's a big difference between child pornography, which necessarily injures someone who can't give informed consent, and the examples you started out with.
The majority can be utterly wrong (was the public right back when slavery was legal?), and a reasonable government will be designed to prevent the "tyranny of the majority."
...about other people's keyboards is this: after seeing random people leave the rest room without washing their hands, I can't help but wonder what the E. coli content of keyboards is. Yecch.
Hello...we're talking about a woman who puts the styrofoam coffee cup between her legs and then takes off the lid to add cream and sugar, and then is surprised that she manages to mash the cup and drench her legs with hot coffee? Were it me, I think I'd be too embarrassed by my own stupidity to ask for money.
Libertarian though I am, I have to disagree with this analysis. Even if any individual user only uses a few applications, which few applications those are will differ from user to user--I have no use for an accounting package or an astrology program, but Madame Sylvia, the "psychic" down the street, probably does. Thus to cover the user population still requires the availability of a larger set of applications than the authors seem to imply.
Then, too, those applications that are crucial may be impossible for a competitor to provide, due to proprietary file formats and protocols. (Ask any OS/2 user...) So overall, I have to disagree with them.
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It's not just the conditions, it's how many people there are who can do the job (i.e. you forgot the supply part of supply and demand). Lots of people can pick strawberrys [sic], or flip burgers.
Feh. People should provide their own safety net (my parents did, and they were in no way rich). Anyone who thinks the government will provide for them in their old age now is a fool; the entitlement Ponzi scheme is about to collapse under the weight of the baby boomers. Few of the things you listed are proper functions of government, anyway...and that the Internet was invented by people working in a government agency is a historical accident, not the triumph of statism that some trumpet it as.
If you tax something, you discourage it--so what will a "progressive" taxation scheme discourage? Working. (Too bad MS has so corrupted the I-word, or I'd use it here, too.)
Sure you didn't mean TECO instead of Emacs?
Eh? That wasn't an argument; it was a statement of fact, trivially confirmable. Had I tried to make an inference from that, then I'd be making an argument (as per John Cleese in the "Argument Clinic sketch").
You, on the other hand, seem to very generous with other people's stuff, unless you're preparing to sell all your extra stuff to help feed starving people around the world. Compared to them, you're a rich greedhead (heck, I bet you have more than one pair of shoes and change of clothing, and you are eating something other than vat-grown algae--horribly inefficient and wasteful), so you don't deserve to keep what you earn.
I can say that "eliminate the separation of church and state" doesn't coincide with what I've heard and read of the libertarian position--indeed, one of the major flash points of that matter, public schools, would be made irrelevant if the government got out of the education business (where it has no right to be, anyway). Anyone caring to see the actual libertarian platform should head for the Libertarian Party web site.
Eh? Have you seen the Green Party platform? If Nader agrees with it, he's perfectly happy with "gigantism" in the market...with the government being the giant. The Green Party's platform is one of the more frightening documents around.
Hey, it's like they said on the page...you don't have to use a new cumbersome language (i.e. you can stick with an old cumbersome language instead).
While we're at it, let's drop the word "utopia," which was made up by another sci-fi writer (of sorts). :-)
Indeed. If anyone has made a science, or perhaps an art, of character assassination, it would be the Clinton administration.
No, I'd be what I am now, namely a drone having a major portion of my income seized by the government so government officials can stay in power by trading the money so seized for votes.
I'm sorry, but we're headed for a police state; I don't trust the government at all.
I think you may underestimate kids. I recall a friend who taught housewives to use OS-9/6809 Level Two (a rather Unix-like OS) on Tandy Color Computers, and who said they caught on with minimal difficulty. This was back when a large contingent of the CoCo crowd was making the same noises about how hard OS-9 was to learn (compared to BASIC) that are now being made about Unix, and RAINBOW (the big CoCo magazine) would regularly run introductory OS-9 articles and advertisements that made much of that supposed difficulty.
If I remember rightly, the P4 systems Intel was demoing had fan/heatsink combos that weighed one pound, and the chip had four holes so that the heatsink/fan could be bolted directly to the motherboard.
I would think that would make for good publicity for people to assist them by making a point of wiping whatever MS software was on the machines and installing Linux or BSD along with Open Source apps before they go out to the churches, libraries, etc.
Well, yes, but...one of the things that is wrong with a flat rate system is that it encourages abuse. A metered system would have stopped spam right away, by making it cost something proportional to the amount sent.
In any case, the "n" is a syllable unto itself, as you'd see were "kuroshin" written out in kana instead of romaji, so it's "ku-ro-shi-n." (Apologies to everyone else for the pedantry; I'd like to think that I'd stopped the gratuitous displays, but "more learned than thou" types set me off.)
To answer your question, grade schools here mostly suck, because the government has an effective near monopoly on them. I'm doing my best to support people trying to fix that.
That's called Grosch's Law, after Herb Grosch, IBM and then ex-IBM gadfly from the big iron era. He gave three different statements of it, in descending order of rigor...for some reason I only remember the third, namely "No matter how fast the hardware gets, the software boys will [urinate] it away."
Seriously, everything can be misused--and I don't want a totally safe society.
The majority can be utterly wrong (was the public right back when slavery was legal?), and a reasonable government will be designed to prevent the "tyranny of the majority."
...about other people's keyboards is this: after seeing random people leave the rest room without washing their hands, I can't help but wonder what the E. coli content of keyboards is. Yecch.
So, the solution to the theft problem is to make sure that everybody gets robbed, eh?
Hello...we're talking about a woman who puts the styrofoam coffee cup between her legs and then takes off the lid to add cream and sugar, and then is surprised that she manages to mash the cup and drench her legs with hot coffee? Were it me, I think I'd be too embarrassed by my own stupidity to ask for money.
Then, too, those applications that are crucial may be impossible for a competitor to provide, due to proprietary file formats and protocols. (Ask any OS/2 user...) So overall, I have to disagree with them.