Indeed - and still Clinton is considered a nice guy by a lot of other, non-US westerners. Strange huh?
Clearly this is proof of the Liberal Media being masterfully duped by the evil, conniving Clinton.;-)
But seriously, comparing dot-com bubble with current day housing issues... I do think it is comparing apples and oranges. While Bush certainly didn't create the housing problems, the policies espoused by his administration (as well as the lack of fiscal oversight) accelerates the wealth transfer and entices the lower middle class to do foolish things. Telling people to spend money is a bad thing. People should be investing money (this is of course a bit impossible, since if too few people spend money the current majority-consumer-oriented businesses would fail). A house is only an investment because people need places to live, and only as long as people can actually afford living there. If you need vast loans in order to be able to live somewhere, on the order of only being able to pay back the loans with the money you get from the price of the house going up, something is very, very screwed up.
Err... this sounds fine, in a Libertarian sort of way, but how would you recoup the cost associated with catching a life-threatening disease from someone who have so few assets that what you could recoup would not be sufficient to pay for the treatment (if there was one)?
Or do we stick all the after-some-treatment-but-not-enough (I assume that you don't have the right to refuse care just because the person receiving it would not have the funds for a complete cure, which could alleviate some of the disease-generation I suppose) disease-spreading poor people in a place where they won't be bothering us currently-healthy? Is this a "You must have at least this amount of money to be allowed outside of the sick people ghetto" type of future?
I, personally, would probably benefit from such a setup currently (being youngish, male and with a reasonably-paying job). I do know how small the step is between my current state and what would be required to wipe out my savings, just as I know what requirements there would be for getting insurance. "If you, THE INSURED, get a communicable disease, and does not prevent the disease from spreading by reasonable means - which, as pointed out by Jennings vs. McDonalds (fictional case) means that you stay in your own home, alone and with the windows closed - we, THE INSURER shall not be liable for any damages incurred by you to third parties."
This is not the kind of society I wish to live in. Weeding out undesirables semi-permanently by putting them in ghettos or isolation wards at the point of a gun for the profit and protection of others... no, thank you. I am willing to pay a tax to keep the amount of diseases down, so that I am healthier and that society does not need to confine ill people to a much greater extent. While it may benefit the people with good immune systems, it has too many secondary and tertiary effects ("John went to work with a cold... and he was found out because he sniffled. Now he's liable for damages to all the people he may have infected.") that I do not want to experience.
OK, end of ranting (mostly).
There are some points I'd like to criticize in your post. First of all, I would argue that the main reason that communicable diseases are only at 3% (using your numbers) of the common causes of death at the moment is because of the amount of disease-preventative care we have right now. I realize that this is purely speculatively, but with the current social dynamics, people would not spend money on preventative care in the near future, because they would believe that the lowest-cost insurance will cover them ("just like it said in the commercial"). We would thus see a spike, at least temporarily, in the amount of communicable diseases being, well, communicated.
Secondly, some people will not allow themselves to be isolated just because they can communicate diseases. Even people with incurable communicable diseases today whose actions show that they will not stop spreading them are not kept separated from the population. This is mainly a social issue, not an enforcement issue, and will take time to change.
Thirdly, what you seem to be implying is that enforcement will need to be done by society against those who spread communicable diseases. In that regard, you are adding another cost to society (and thus, to everyone's bill). Your solution may or may not decrease the overall cost, but this is an *added* expense.
Fourthly, the ideal free market and free society assume that information is perfect, complete and has zero acquisition-cost. This is one of the reasons that we do not have free markets nor free societies (in the ideal sense).
There is a *vast* difference between "not here, John, someone might be watching" and "In the Future, Skynet Sees You!"
That is to say, the argument that "someone could be looking at you, right now!" is equal to "somewhere, someone is recording what you are doing, all the time" is flawed.
Yes, privacy will change. If we do it like we've done all other things in the past, we will allow a small subset of society, mostly comprised by honest persons, access to the information, and only provide partial and grudging access in rare cases (lawyers requesting time slice information in order to prove infidelity etc). Some of those persons, however, will be dishonest and will use their access to further their own, personal ends - and will use it in trade for power, whether legislative, judicial or physical (military/police).
People will be told that the system works perfectly, that no one ever misuses it and that anyone that does is an exception to the above rule. Most people won't consider it worth their time and effort to correct, and will choose to spend their time doing other stuff than crusading against the problems of the system.
We will not get an all-powerful elite that will spy on all of us. We will not get public access to the accumulated raw data.
Some companies will get access (legally) to the data and may create neat things, such as a Google Street that gets updated Tuesdays, for instance. It will not cause the dystopian futures for 1984 - it may cause a lot of other bad things, but the appearance (and sometime reality) of fairness, justice and equality will be maintained. To the extent that it is useful.
You are assuming that the current population levels are sustainable - which they may or may not be.
Just because current levels of populations have been sustainable (as in world hunger is not increasing or whatever measure you may use) for a while does not mean they will continue being sustainable - and of course it could be that Terra will quite handily accommodate 58 billion people by the year 2132. I personally do not know which range future populations will end up in.
I just wanted to point out that you assumed that the current population levels were sustainable... and improve my post count.
True, but having a high approval rating is why so many patents get sent in.
If 99% of all patents got rejected, there would be less incentive to send them in.
Currently fee * chance of getting application through amount of cash expected from patent, even for bad patents. If the quality the application had to be higher in order to get a reasonable chance of achieving a patent, there would be fewer bad patent applications... which would reduce the revenue.
While your statement may be true in the short run, in the long run it would be counter to the goal of any bureaucracy. What is needed is a feedback mechanism where there are *some* sort of penalty for the patent office to allow a bad patent application to become a real patent.
Of course, "Teacher XYZ is a pedo" is only words, and never hurt anyone - ever, right?
Also, a lot of people would be hurt if someone they knew and liked (like, say, their children) told them to "fuck off and go die in a corner."
I applaud your rationalistic world-view - be advised that most of us live in another, less logical place. Our worlds do intersect from time to time, and we can reach out and touch others - for better or for worse.
So kindly shut up, sit down and die in a fire, pedo.;)
Unfortunately, when I did chemistry, reality looked like this:
1. If your results does not match the expected results, you were at fault. 2. If the teacher performed the experiment, and it didn't yield the expected result, that was an unfortunate series of events totally outside of the teachers control. And both the teacher and the book were right. 3. Getting uppity and having conclusions of your own? Low grade. 4. Turning in the expected conclusions with a fudged experiment log? Good grade. 5. Doing the experiment perfectly with substandard tools, and spending three times the time on the report than what time is allotted for it on the curriculum, you get a chance at a better grade than "good".
Indeed - our friends at Blackwater uses diplomacy and sweet reason to perform the services they are paid for.
Or perhaps, they don't. Corporations are allowed to use force - under government license. So even the central point of government - being the monopoly on force in a society - is now being eroded or privatized.
I'll phone up the secretary and ask her for the connection info so that I and my fellow investors at Venture Vultures, Inc can talk to her boss in private. Could she email the keys to us? Thanks.
Social hacking is far easier than beating mathematics with brute force.
Indeed, I shall immediately throw away my mushroom book and "learn in person" what toadstools are good to eat!
Books are repositories of data. Hopefully he can make the transformation of that data into actual knowledge - you are right in that he needs to do so by practising what the book is about - but to completely disregard books as a source of data and sometimes information? That is plain stupid.
There are a number of excellent survival guidebooks out there, go take a gander - and if you find particularly useful/useless books, please do reply back!
"Citizen sertsa, thank you for volunteering for our Cuban Defense Force.
Your anti-State propaganda has been noted, and you are now convicted of aiding and abetting terrorism, both abroad and internal.
Please report to the Department of Peace as soon as you are able - if you are unable to travel to a nearby office, never fear - we will soon dispatch transportation.
Yours, , Department of Peace."
Seriously... why are you helping the terrorists? (note: written sarcastically)
Indeed - and this is why privacy concerned citizens used primitive but effective data destruction measures a while later.
Seriously, though, there is a difference between taking a copy of an intentionally published work (just as quite a few Western nations do) and taking a copy of all the correspondence people have.
If you are a normal person in US - or in most Western countries, you will have received some form of public assistance within the last 5 years. Depending on the definition of public assistance, your suggestion would disenfranchise a vast majority of people.
I would rather propose the more radical alternative that if you have, within the last time period since the last election which you now wish to participate in, paid an equal amount or more taxes than you have received in public assistance (public schooling should count here too) you are eligible to vote.
No other considerations (age, religion, even nationality may be disregarded if we aim towards a more capitalist society). If you pay more taxes than what you receive as a ten year old (do note that public schooling should be counted here), you are by definition a productive member of society. I see no real reason why we should disenfranchise some voters because of their age (or rather, why the current arbitrary limit is there).
I don't see why receiving a school subsidy should not be considered public assistance.
As an aside, this will have a strange effect with regards to children that receive home / private schooling, but that is A-OK in my book. It is not like allowing "underage" voters will dramatically lower the quality of political discourse - in fact, I'd approve of pandering to a currently powerless minority in society in addition to pandering to their de facto owners.
Personally, with regards to your last question, I have refrained from seeking tax exemptions on activities where I could have gotten them - I think that fits the bill. Of course, most of my taxes these last years have been on the realized profit of my stocks during my university years, and thus the possible exemptions would have been quite small, but still.
The proposed system would most likely have disenfranchised me during my youth and university years - I do not know if that is a good or bad thing. I do hope you understand the effects of such a system, though, as it would be to my immediate benefit to deny future public education assistance to others in order to make my own education more valuable. Long-term, this would mean a lack of people with the necessary education and would cause lack of growth possibilities, but in the short term it would be good for my salary and job opportunities - many people seem only interested in the short term.
Full disclosure: Currently living in Sweden. This system would disenfranchise at least 20-30% of the population here, as a rough estimate (mostly children, the people out of work, the really poor and the elderly).
Just a minor thing on Starship Troopers: Not all the people who volunteered for public service ended up as soldiers - they simply ended up doing what their society thought it needed and they had the ability to do.
Heinlein actually wrote a bit about the "world" of Starship Troopers in Expanding Universe (in a retrospective on his literary career). At the time when the events in the book take place, quite a lot of people were needed as soldiers - but due to the way we people are wired (with tight-nit social groups as soldiers), soldiers were usually the last to stop serving in public and thus the last to actually get to vote. Yes, you didn't get the franchise until *after* you've stopped serving in that world.
I do agree that the premise is shaky - but the idea of not giving everyone franchise just because they were 18 years old and alive was one of the ideas Heinlein was toying with in that book. Of course, he argued that clearly the founders of US of A never intended everyone to get the franchise either - his criterion were simply a bit more merit-based.
In Expanding Universe he did mention that the idea of having stable people with a stake in maintaining a working society as a rather good idea, and goes on arguing for removing the franchise from men and giving it to women who have born children, as they have a personal reason for being interested in having a society that works... and makes a rather convincing argument of it.
I can heartily recommend Expanding Universe if you are interested in what Heinlein said he was thinking when writing. As with all things written down, of course, you must consider the source - but I got a lot of amusement out of his writings, and like his meritocratic views personally. The book "Requiem" is also a good read, if a trifle sad at times - but it did contain his speeches at a few scifi conventions which I hadn't read - highly interesting for a person not born until the last years of the Red Scare.
(Sorry for pushing Heinlein, but I really liked those books and they represent a very enlightening perspective on what Heinlein professed to believe.)
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed - and still Clinton is considered a nice guy by a lot of other, non-US westerners. Strange huh?
;-)
Clearly this is proof of the Liberal Media being masterfully duped by the evil, conniving Clinton.
But seriously, comparing dot-com bubble with current day housing issues... I do think it is comparing apples and oranges.
While Bush certainly didn't create the housing problems, the policies espoused by his administration (as well as the lack of fiscal oversight) accelerates the wealth transfer and entices the lower middle class to do foolish things.
Telling people to spend money is a bad thing. People should be investing money (this is of course a bit impossible, since if too few people spend money the current majority-consumer-oriented businesses would fail). A house is only an investment because people need places to live, and only as long as people can actually afford living there. If you need vast loans in order to be able to live somewhere, on the order of only being able to pay back the loans with the money you get from the price of the house going up, something is very, very screwed up.
Err... this sounds fine, in a Libertarian sort of way, but how would you recoup the cost associated with catching a life-threatening disease from someone who have so few assets that what you could recoup would not be sufficient to pay for the treatment (if there was one)?
Or do we stick all the after-some-treatment-but-not-enough (I assume that you don't have the right to refuse care just because the person receiving it would not have the funds for a complete cure, which could alleviate some of the disease-generation I suppose) disease-spreading poor people in a place where they won't be bothering us currently-healthy?
Is this a "You must have at least this amount of money to be allowed outside of the sick people ghetto" type of future?
I, personally, would probably benefit from such a setup currently (being youngish, male and with a reasonably-paying job). I do know how small the step is between my current state and what would be required to wipe out my savings, just as I know what requirements there would be for getting insurance. "If you, THE INSURED, get a communicable disease, and does not prevent the disease from spreading by reasonable means - which, as pointed out by Jennings vs. McDonalds (fictional case) means that you stay in your own home, alone and with the windows closed - we, THE INSURER shall not be liable for any damages incurred by you to third parties."
This is not the kind of society I wish to live in.
Weeding out undesirables semi-permanently by putting them in ghettos or isolation wards at the point of a gun for the profit and protection of others... no, thank you.
I am willing to pay a tax to keep the amount of diseases down, so that I am healthier and that society does not need to confine ill people to a much greater extent.
While it may benefit the people with good immune systems, it has too many secondary and tertiary effects ("John went to work with a cold... and he was found out because he sniffled. Now he's liable for damages to all the people he may have infected.") that I do not want to experience.
OK, end of ranting (mostly).
There are some points I'd like to criticize in your post. First of all, I would argue that the main reason that communicable diseases are only at 3% (using your numbers) of the common causes of death at the moment is because of the amount of disease-preventative care we have right now. I realize that this is purely speculatively, but with the current social dynamics, people would not spend money on preventative care in the near future, because they would believe that the lowest-cost insurance will cover them ("just like it said in the commercial").
We would thus see a spike, at least temporarily, in the amount of communicable diseases being, well, communicated.
Secondly, some people will not allow themselves to be isolated just because they can communicate diseases. Even people with incurable communicable diseases today whose actions show that they will not stop spreading them are not kept separated from the population. This is mainly a social issue, not an enforcement issue, and will take time to change.
Thirdly, what you seem to be implying is that enforcement will need to be done by society against those who spread communicable diseases. In that regard, you are adding another cost to society (and thus, to everyone's bill). Your solution may or may not decrease the overall cost, but this is an *added* expense.
Fourthly, the ideal free market and free society assume that information is perfect, complete and has zero acquisition-cost. This is one of the reasons that we do not have free markets nor free societies (in the ideal sense).
Indeed. Because kmph is not equal to kilo-metres per hour.
;)
Get thee hence, at least three feet away.
There is a *vast* difference between "not here, John, someone might be watching" and "In the Future, Skynet Sees You!"
That is to say, the argument that "someone could be looking at you, right now!" is equal to "somewhere, someone is recording what you are doing, all the time" is flawed.
Yes, privacy will change.
If we do it like we've done all other things in the past, we will allow a small subset of society, mostly comprised by honest persons, access to the information, and only provide partial and grudging access in rare cases (lawyers requesting time slice information in order to prove infidelity etc).
Some of those persons, however, will be dishonest and will use their access to further their own, personal ends - and will use it in trade for power, whether legislative, judicial or physical (military/police).
People will be told that the system works perfectly, that no one ever misuses it and that anyone that does is an exception to the above rule. Most people won't consider it worth their time and effort to correct, and will choose to spend their time doing other stuff than crusading against the problems of the system.
We will not get an all-powerful elite that will spy on all of us.
We will not get public access to the accumulated raw data.
Some companies will get access (legally) to the data and may create neat things, such as a Google Street that gets updated Tuesdays, for instance.
It will not cause the dystopian futures for 1984 - it may cause a lot of other bad things, but the appearance (and sometime reality) of fairness, justice and equality will be maintained. To the extent that it is useful.
Sorry for the rant.
You are assuming that the current population levels are sustainable - which they may or may not be.
Just because current levels of populations have been sustainable (as in world hunger is not increasing or whatever measure you may use) for a while does not mean they will continue being sustainable - and of course it could be that Terra will quite handily accommodate 58 billion people by the year 2132. I personally do not know which range future populations will end up in.
I just wanted to point out that you assumed that the current population levels were sustainable... and improve my post count.
True, but having a high approval rating is why so many patents get sent in.
If 99% of all patents got rejected, there would be less incentive to send them in.
Currently fee * chance of getting application through amount of cash expected from patent, even for bad patents.
If the quality the application had to be higher in order to get a reasonable chance of achieving a patent, there would be fewer bad patent applications... which would reduce the revenue.
While your statement may be true in the short run, in the long run it would be counter to the goal of any bureaucracy.
What is needed is a feedback mechanism where there are *some* sort of penalty for the patent office to allow a bad patent application to become a real patent.
Of course, "Teacher XYZ is a pedo" is only words, and never hurt anyone - ever, right?
;)
Also, a lot of people would be hurt if someone they knew and liked (like, say, their children) told them to "fuck off and go die in a corner."
I applaud your rationalistic world-view - be advised that most of us live in another, less logical place.
Our worlds do intersect from time to time, and we can reach out and touch others - for better or for worse.
So kindly shut up, sit down and die in a fire, pedo.
This is a laudable goal.
Unfortunately, when I did chemistry, reality looked like this:
1. If your results does not match the expected results, you were at fault.
2. If the teacher performed the experiment, and it didn't yield the expected result, that was an unfortunate series of events totally outside of the teachers control. And both the teacher and the book were right.
3. Getting uppity and having conclusions of your own? Low grade.
4. Turning in the expected conclusions with a fudged experiment log? Good grade.
5. Doing the experiment perfectly with substandard tools, and spending three times the time on the report than what time is allotted for it on the curriculum, you get a chance at a better grade than "good".
Indeed - our friends at Blackwater uses diplomacy and sweet reason to perform the services they are paid for.
Or perhaps, they don't. Corporations are allowed to use force - under government license. So even the central point of government - being the monopoly on force in a society - is now being eroded or privatized.
I'll phone up the secretary and ask her for the connection info so that I and my fellow investors at Venture Vultures, Inc can talk to her boss in private. Could she email the keys to us? Thanks.
Social hacking is far easier than beating mathematics with brute force.
Indeed, I shall immediately throw away my mushroom book and "learn in person" what toadstools are good to eat!
Books are repositories of data.
Hopefully he can make the transformation of that data into actual knowledge - you are right in that he needs to do so by practising what the book is about - but to completely disregard books as a source of data and sometimes information? That is plain stupid.
There are a number of excellent survival guidebooks out there, go take a gander - and if you find particularly useful/useless books, please do reply back!
"Citizen sertsa, thank you for volunteering for our Cuban Defense Force.
Your anti-State propaganda has been noted, and you are now convicted of aiding and abetting terrorism, both abroad and internal.
Please report to the Department of Peace as soon as you are able - if you are unable to travel to a nearby office, never fear - we will soon dispatch transportation.
Yours,
,
Department of Peace."
Seriously... why are you helping the terrorists? (note: written sarcastically)
Indeed - and this is why privacy concerned citizens used primitive but effective data destruction measures a while later.
Seriously, though, there is a difference between taking a copy of an intentionally published work (just as quite a few Western nations do) and taking a copy of all the correspondence people have.
If you are a normal person in US - or in most Western countries, you will have received some form of public assistance within the last 5 years. Depending on the definition of public assistance, your suggestion would disenfranchise a vast majority of people.
I would rather propose the more radical alternative that if you have, within the last time period since the last election which you now wish to participate in, paid an equal amount or more taxes than you have received in public assistance (public schooling should count here too) you are eligible to vote.
No other considerations (age, religion, even nationality may be disregarded if we aim towards a more capitalist society). If you pay more taxes than what you receive as a ten year old (do note that public schooling should be counted here), you are by definition a productive member of society. I see no real reason why we should disenfranchise some voters because of their age (or rather, why the current arbitrary limit is there).
I don't see why receiving a school subsidy should not be considered public assistance.
As an aside, this will have a strange effect with regards to children that receive home / private schooling, but that is A-OK in my book. It is not like allowing "underage" voters will dramatically lower the quality of political discourse - in fact, I'd approve of pandering to a currently powerless minority in society in addition to pandering to their de facto owners.
Personally, with regards to your last question, I have refrained from seeking tax exemptions on activities where I could have gotten them - I think that fits the bill. Of course, most of my taxes these last years have been on the realized profit of my stocks during my university years, and thus the possible exemptions would have been quite small, but still.
The proposed system would most likely have disenfranchised me during my youth and university years - I do not know if that is a good or bad thing.
I do hope you understand the effects of such a system, though, as it would be to my immediate benefit to deny future public education assistance to others in order to make my own education more valuable. Long-term, this would mean a lack of people with the necessary education and would cause lack of growth possibilities, but in the short term it would be good for my salary and job opportunities - many people seem only interested in the short term.
Full disclosure: Currently living in Sweden. This system would disenfranchise at least 20-30% of the population here, as a rough estimate (mostly children, the people out of work, the really poor and the elderly).
Just a minor thing on Starship Troopers:
Not all the people who volunteered for public service ended up as soldiers - they simply ended up doing what their society thought it needed and they had the ability to do.
Heinlein actually wrote a bit about the "world" of Starship Troopers in Expanding Universe (in a retrospective on his literary career).
At the time when the events in the book take place, quite a lot of people were needed as soldiers - but due to the way we people are wired (with tight-nit social groups as soldiers), soldiers were usually the last to stop serving in public and thus the last to actually get to vote.
Yes, you didn't get the franchise until *after* you've stopped serving in that world.
I do agree that the premise is shaky - but the idea of not giving everyone franchise just because they were 18 years old and alive was one of the ideas Heinlein was toying with in that book.
Of course, he argued that clearly the founders of US of A never intended everyone to get the franchise either - his criterion were simply a bit more merit-based.
In Expanding Universe he did mention that the idea of having stable people with a stake in maintaining a working society as a rather good idea, and goes on arguing for removing the franchise from men and giving it to women who have born children, as they have a personal reason for being interested in having a society that works... and makes a rather convincing argument of it.
I can heartily recommend Expanding Universe if you are interested in what Heinlein said he was thinking when writing.
As with all things written down, of course, you must consider the source - but I got a lot of amusement out of his writings, and like his meritocratic views personally.
The book "Requiem" is also a good read, if a trifle sad at times - but it did contain his speeches at a few scifi conventions which I hadn't read - highly interesting for a person not born until the last years of the Red Scare.
(Sorry for pushing Heinlein, but I really liked those books and they represent a very enlightening perspective on what Heinlein professed to believe.)
Dude, it's a car analogy on Slashdot - it *can't* make sense, that's against the rules. ;)