The words are easy: freedom is the first priority. The founding principles of our nation, including the divisive ones, were well argued in the Federalist Papers, but the philosophy is mostly Locke's ("life, liberty, and property" became "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" when we told George to fuck off, but given it was a tax protest, we really meant "property"). Certainly Hobbes' notion, that we should blindly accept government power because anarchy is worse, is firmly rejected.
When you start talking about how the people will serve the government, instead of vice versa, you're not talking about freedom. When you start talking about how it's OK for the people to be afraid of the government because of X, rather the it's OK for the government to fear the people, you're not talking about freedom. When you start talking about "the collective good", you're not talking about freedom.
There are many worthy goals for a government, but freedom is the first priority, simple as that.
'Right to keep what you earned'--more accurately translated as 'right to live in a society I don't want to pay for'.
There are certainly anarchists who call themselves libertarians. Fuck those guys. Rational libertarians don't object to the state providing infrastructure, policing, and contract/fraud enforcement. That's about 10% of the budget, however, so if you think that's what arguments about government spending are about, you're just wrong.
Maybe you're saying something than I think you're saying, but according to the site you cited, revenue per GDP is presently around 35%
That stat is fed+state+local. I was talking only fed - I could have been more clear. People rarely discuss their bright ideas for state-level taxation. If you look at federal revenue as a % of GDP throughout the past century or so (before then income taxes were negligible), we've never moved far from 19%, though wildly different taxation schemes. People change their behavior in response to taxation changes and the net result isn't much different. Federal revenue has taken a serious dip over the past 8 years or so, however, with very little changes to tax plan, because of the lack of stability you get when you focus on the top income tiers.
far more prosperous eras of American history.
It's easy to convince yourself otherwise, but this is a terrific, wonderful time if you compare what your money can buy in absolute terms. People lose track of that because what they really want is to do better than their neighbors, but this is an age of wonders, and cheap wonders at that.
That's better than a median-income Californian buying a median-priced home in California, so I guess that entire (most populous in the country) state is fucked.
I agree completely: the entire state is fucked. Have you seen their pension debt? The counties with >100% of revenue needed to meet pensions (not much better at the state level). Escapeing CA was the best move I ever made.
Also, the national debt is only about one year of mean income per citizen, so if we were to tax all citizens (why are there so few taxpayers compared to citizens anyway?) -
Good luck taxing 4-year-olds, the homeless, those primarily living on government checks, etc. We tax the employed, and the wealthy.
Charge every citizen 2% of their income
That will about cover the interest on the debt (long term average, interest is very cheap now of course). And it misses two key points: we currently tax plenty to pay off the debt, but we spend more. Further, no tax plan has ever sustained more than 20% of GDP as revenue (which would be fine if we had any spending discipline). Also, the more you tax the highest incomes, the more revenue will dip in recessions
While the motivation for this change is a bunch of SJW nonsense, to be sure, the result is hard to argue with. She was a heroic figure at a time when America needed heroes. (Plus, we're replacing a Democrat with a Republican, so there's that.)
It is huge, ghastly and has relatively large ground clearance. Those are pretty much the criteria for an SUV and it meets those just fine. I don't see the problem.
"It is huge, ghastly and has relatively large ground clearance" is the description of a crossover, not an SUV (or, at least, that is not sufficient for SUV). Crossovers are all hideous-looking beasts, the mutant offspring of a light passenger van (SUV) and a station wagon.
Plenty of people who make $60,000 a year are able to handle a $200,000 mortgage, for example--so why shouldn't a country be able to handle a debt commensurate with its income?
Because your analogy isn't numerically accurate. Proportional to $60,000 income, the federal debt would be $348,000. That's the sort of ratio that led to the 2008 collapse.
Thus, we can never default on the debt because we can print more money.
"We all had plenty of money, but there was nothing our money could buy"
ut in the late 2000s and early 2010s we effectively printed trillions of dollars with our quantitative-easing program
Nope, we didn't add anything to the money supply, because bank reserves on deposit with Fed increased at roughly the same rate that QE printed money for the government to spend. The other shoe still hasn't dropped for QE. This was an innovative idea by the Fed (really clever IMO) and we can't guess how it will play out when next we see a strong economy.
Shareholders provide investment funds but do not manage the company or get to make decisions about it; if the management doesn't approve the sale it's not likely to be doable, and doesn't matter if the CXo has 1/5 or 1/10 the shares.
The common stock has the vote - that's pretty fundamental (there are some odd cases where there are multiple runs of common stock and only one has the vote, but that's rare outside pre-IPO private stock).
Common stockholders choose the board. The Board chooses those who will manage the company. I've worked at 3 companies where the board fired the CEO while I was there - in one case because activist investors had enough votes to oust the board, and thus to force their hand.
If Ford made a large enough offer (and there wasn't a poison pill hidden in the corporate details, but that's rare these days), they could certainly acquire Tesla. However, Tesla's market cap is 2/3s of Ford's (an insane valuation given current Tesla sales), so it's all hypothetical and unlikely.
Today's young are already crippled by more debt than they can ever pay off in their life times
The US national debt is over $160,000 per taxpayer. Great gift to our kids to go with their college loans. Unfunded liabilities are over $850,000 per taxpayer, so just over a million total. I'm sure today's youth will get right on paying that while I'm in retirement. (And yet, suggest on/. that maybe we could spend a bit less and someone will reply asking "why don't you move to Somalia", as if the extremes were our only choices.)
Another fun stat: the total value of all assets in America is slightly less than the total of various government debts and unfunded liabilities. This will inevitably end in "but though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy," which is actually good news for those under crippling personal debt, as enough inflation fixes that problem.
Affecting other is also fundamental to freedom, as everything we do affects others, and some negatively. Tolerating minimal harm from others is the nature of freedom.
You can argue about costs and where to set the bar for that harm, but freedom is quite valuable.
consumption of sugar is fine but as a society we've gone WAY beyond what is demonstrably healthy. So over consumption of sugary drinks is a public health crisis because it is a significant factor in obesity, diabetes and other conditions common in the population.
The tyrant can always find a reason.
The right to self-destructive behavior is fundamental to freedom.
They've only done 2 albums in the past 10 years (though, to my surprise, those albums peaked at 2 and 3 on the US charts). They were most in the popular consciousnesses in the 1980s, but overall they've released 20 studio albums across the past 48 years.
Other companies have made the severance package dependent on helping with the transition. They probably only need a few key people to break ranks and it all falls apart.
It's easy to measure whether an employee "transfers knowledge". It's very hard to measure whether they do it well. In every large system I've worked on, many inportant details about interacting with the system are "tribal knowledge", not written down, and not occurring very frequently, but hugely expensive for the first guy who figured it out. Simply not passing that along seems the minimum resistance to provide here, even if the labor action fails.
There's the stuff you document formally, that describes some ideal vision of the system, and that's certainly "knowledge transfer", then there's the sneaky details about how the system really works, the misleading error messages, the simple tricks that mysteriously work to fix complex issues and so on. I believe I'd run out of time before explaining those particular details.... and it all falls apart.
Somewhere around Rush's 30th anniversary, their manager was trying to convince them to play Rio. They waffled, saying "we only have English albums, and we haven't done any new albums in a while - do you think people would really come"? Well, when it finally happened they sold out for 3 performances. 125,000 people all told came to hear them play.
When American "classic rock" channels do audience surveys/contests to pick the best rock groups of all time, the #1 choice usually goes to Rush, except in the South, where #1 is always Lynyrd Skynyrd, followed by Rush.
The R40 tour (40th anniversary) was also a big tour.
If your age corresponds with your UID you're forgiven for not knowing those lyrics by heart already, but, yes, most people (especially most geeks) do know who Rush is.
My uncle has a country place that no one knows about He says it used to be a farm before the Motor Law And on Sundays, I elude the eyes, hop the turbine freight Too far outside the wire, where my white-haired uncle waits
Jump to the ground as the turbo slows to cross the borderline Then run like the wind as excitement shivers up and down my spine But down in his barn, my uncle preserved for me an old machine For fifty odd years, to keep it as new has been his dearest dream
I strip away the old debris that hides a shining car A brilliant red Barchetta from a better vanished time Ooh, fired up the willing engine, responding with a roar Tires spitting gravel, I commit my weekly crime
Wind in my hair Shifting and drifting Mechanical music Adrenaline surge
Well-weathered leather, hot metal and oil The scented country air Sunlight on chrome, the blur of the landscape Every nerve aware
Suddenly ahead of me across the mountainside A gleaming alloy air car shoots towards me, two lanes wide I spin around with shrieking tires to run the deadly race It goes screaming through the valley as another joins the chase
Drive like the wind, straining the limits of machine and man Laughing out loud with fear and hope, I've got a desperate plan At the one lane bridge, I leave the giants stranded at the riverside Race back to the farm to dream with my uncle at the fireside
I don't care whether the ultra-rich become richer - there's not a fixed amount of wealth, and their success costs me nothing. I care very much about the concentration of power, and wish no more of it to go the the most powerful group in the US. I can, and mostly have, opt-out from using Google. I'm stuck with the federal government, which is so powerful already it's hard to say we're not a totalitarian state (we certainly have the panopticon surveillance, without needing your neighbor to rat you out).
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The words are easy: freedom is the first priority. The founding principles of our nation, including the divisive ones, were well argued in the Federalist Papers, but the philosophy is mostly Locke's ("life, liberty, and property" became "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" when we told George to fuck off, but given it was a tax protest, we really meant "property"). Certainly Hobbes' notion, that we should blindly accept government power because anarchy is worse, is firmly rejected.
When you start talking about how the people will serve the government, instead of vice versa, you're not talking about freedom. When you start talking about how it's OK for the people to be afraid of the government because of X, rather the it's OK for the government to fear the people, you're not talking about freedom. When you start talking about "the collective good", you're not talking about freedom.
There are many worthy goals for a government, but freedom is the first priority, simple as that.
'Right to keep what you earned'--more accurately translated as 'right to live in a society I don't want to pay for'.
There are certainly anarchists who call themselves libertarians. Fuck those guys. Rational libertarians don't object to the state providing infrastructure, policing, and contract/fraud enforcement. That's about 10% of the budget, however, so if you think that's what arguments about government spending are about, you're just wrong.
so in US political lingo, what do you call European socialism that wants both freedom and progressive ideas?
A contradiction in terms? A self-contradictory ideal? Looks good on paper?
Before you say you can't have both
Too late.
keep in mind that the European idea of freedom is somewhat different to the US one.
Progressivism is big on re-defining words and insisting that means they win the argument.
Did you know it's possible to reply to a post without intent to contradict it? It's true! One weird trick to understanding the internet.
We don't have a (classic) liberal political party right now. It's the core problem in US politics IMO.
Maybe you're saying something than I think you're saying, but according to the site you cited, revenue per GDP is presently around 35%
That stat is fed+state+local. I was talking only fed - I could have been more clear. People rarely discuss their bright ideas for state-level taxation. If you look at federal revenue as a % of GDP throughout the past century or so (before then income taxes were negligible), we've never moved far from 19%, though wildly different taxation schemes. People change their behavior in response to taxation changes and the net result isn't much different. Federal revenue has taken a serious dip over the past 8 years or so, however, with very little changes to tax plan, because of the lack of stability you get when you focus on the top income tiers.
far more prosperous eras of American history.
It's easy to convince yourself otherwise, but this is a terrific, wonderful time if you compare what your money can buy in absolute terms. People lose track of that because what they really want is to do better than their neighbors, but this is an age of wonders, and cheap wonders at that.
That's better than a median-income Californian buying a median-priced home in California, so I guess that entire (most populous in the country) state is fucked.
I agree completely: the entire state is fucked. Have you seen their pension debt? The counties with >100% of revenue needed to meet pensions (not much better at the state level). Escapeing CA was the best move I ever made.
Also, the national debt is only about one year of mean income per citizen, so if we were to tax all citizens (why are there so few taxpayers compared to citizens anyway?) -
Good luck taxing 4-year-olds, the homeless, those primarily living on government checks, etc. We tax the employed, and the wealthy.
Charge every citizen 2% of their income
That will about cover the interest on the debt (long term average, interest is very cheap now of course). And it misses two key points: we currently tax plenty to pay off the debt, but we spend more. Further, no tax plan has ever sustained more than 20% of GDP as revenue (which would be fine if we had any spending discipline). Also, the more you tax the highest incomes, the more revenue will dip in recessions
"SUV" is entirely a marketing term. They are van-bodied light trucks with passenger seating.
Democrats like to tell themselves that, to be sure, but progressives are not liberals.
Political correctness lives on.
While the motivation for this change is a bunch of SJW nonsense, to be sure, the result is hard to argue with. She was a heroic figure at a time when America needed heroes. (Plus, we're replacing a Democrat with a Republican, so there's that.)
It is huge, ghastly and has relatively large ground clearance. Those are pretty much the criteria for an SUV and it meets those just fine. I don't see the problem.
"It is huge, ghastly and has relatively large ground clearance" is the description of a crossover, not an SUV (or, at least, that is not sufficient for SUV). Crossovers are all hideous-looking beasts, the mutant offspring of a light passenger van (SUV) and a station wagon.
Plenty of people who make $60,000 a year are able to handle a $200,000 mortgage, for example--so why shouldn't a country be able to handle a debt commensurate with its income?
Because your analogy isn't numerically accurate. Proportional to $60,000 income, the federal debt would be $348,000. That's the sort of ratio that led to the 2008 collapse.
Thus, we can never default on the debt because we can print more money.
"We all had plenty of money, but there was nothing our money could buy"
ut in the late 2000s and early 2010s we effectively printed trillions of dollars with our quantitative-easing program
Nope, we didn't add anything to the money supply, because bank reserves on deposit with Fed increased at roughly the same rate that QE printed money for the government to spend. The other shoe still hasn't dropped for QE. This was an innovative idea by the Fed (really clever IMO) and we can't guess how it will play out when next we see a strong economy.
Shareholders provide investment funds but do not manage the company or get to make decisions about it; if the management doesn't approve the sale it's not likely to be doable, and doesn't matter if the CXo has 1/5 or 1/10 the shares.
The common stock has the vote - that's pretty fundamental (there are some odd cases where there are multiple runs of common stock and only one has the vote, but that's rare outside pre-IPO private stock).
Common stockholders choose the board. The Board chooses those who will manage the company. I've worked at 3 companies where the board fired the CEO while I was there - in one case because activist investors had enough votes to oust the board, and thus to force their hand.
If Ford made a large enough offer (and there wasn't a poison pill hidden in the corporate details, but that's rare these days), they could certainly acquire Tesla. However, Tesla's market cap is 2/3s of Ford's (an insane valuation given current Tesla sales), so it's all hypothetical and unlikely.
Today's young are already crippled by more debt than they can ever pay off in their life times
The US national debt is over $160,000 per taxpayer. Great gift to our kids to go with their college loans. Unfunded liabilities are over $850,000 per taxpayer, so just over a million total. I'm sure today's youth will get right on paying that while I'm in retirement. (And yet, suggest on /. that maybe we could spend a bit less and someone will reply asking "why don't you move to Somalia", as if the extremes were our only choices.)
Another fun stat: the total value of all assets in America is slightly less than the total of various government debts and unfunded liabilities. This will inevitably end in "but though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy," which is actually good news for those under crippling personal debt, as enough inflation fixes that problem.
Affecting other is also fundamental to freedom, as everything we do affects others, and some negatively. Tolerating minimal harm from others is the nature of freedom.
You can argue about costs and where to set the bar for that harm, but freedom is quite valuable.
consumption of sugar is fine but as a society we've gone WAY beyond what is demonstrably healthy. So over consumption of sugary drinks is a public health crisis because it is a significant factor in obesity, diabetes and other conditions common in the population.
The tyrant can always find a reason.
The right to self-destructive behavior is fundamental to freedom.
Most people won't bother to get the content by illegal means - they'll just watch something else from Netflix.
What that software called again, the one that lets you click on a title in the Netflix web UI and immediately torrent it so it starts playing?
George Ar! Ar! Martin is probably making bank off this.
He might be, if he still wrote books!
Oh, I agree that we've become a totalitarian state, I'm just saying it's a bad thing.
No one in Holland enjoys driving? I find that hard to believe. And no, electric cars are not the same.
Almost any totalitarian extreme can be justified with that reasoning. "Not taking chances" should be the reason to investigate, not the reason to act.
They've only done 2 albums in the past 10 years (though, to my surprise, those albums peaked at 2 and 3 on the US charts). They were most in the popular consciousnesses in the 1980s, but overall they've released 20 studio albums across the past 48 years.
Other companies have made the severance package dependent on helping with the transition. They probably only need a few key people to break ranks and it all falls apart.
It's easy to measure whether an employee "transfers knowledge". It's very hard to measure whether they do it well. In every large system I've worked on, many inportant details about interacting with the system are "tribal knowledge", not written down, and not occurring very frequently, but hugely expensive for the first guy who figured it out. Simply not passing that along seems the minimum resistance to provide here, even if the labor action fails.
There's the stuff you document formally, that describes some ideal vision of the system, and that's certainly "knowledge transfer", then there's the sneaky details about how the system really works, the misleading error messages, the simple tricks that mysteriously work to fix complex issues and so on. I believe I'd run out of time before explaining those particular details. ... and it all falls apart.
Somewhere around Rush's 30th anniversary, their manager was trying to convince them to play Rio. They waffled, saying "we only have English albums, and we haven't done any new albums in a while - do you think people would really come"? Well, when it finally happened they sold out for 3 performances. 125,000 people all told came to hear them play.
When American "classic rock" channels do audience surveys/contests to pick the best rock groups of all time, the #1 choice usually goes to Rush, except in the South, where #1 is always Lynyrd Skynyrd, followed by Rush.
The R40 tour (40th anniversary) was also a big tour.
If your age corresponds with your UID you're forgiven for not knowing those lyrics by heart already, but, yes, most people (especially most geeks) do know who Rush is.
Something like this, I expect.
My uncle has a country place that no one knows about
He says it used to be a farm before the Motor Law
And on Sundays, I elude the eyes, hop the turbine freight
Too far outside the wire, where my white-haired uncle waits
Jump to the ground as the turbo slows to cross the borderline
Then run like the wind as excitement shivers up and down my spine
But down in his barn, my uncle preserved for me an old machine
For fifty odd years, to keep it as new has been his dearest dream
I strip away the old debris that hides a shining car
A brilliant red Barchetta from a better vanished time
Ooh, fired up the willing engine, responding with a roar
Tires spitting gravel, I commit my weekly crime
Wind in my hair
Shifting and drifting
Mechanical music
Adrenaline surge
Well-weathered leather, hot metal and oil
The scented country air
Sunlight on chrome, the blur of the landscape
Every nerve aware
Suddenly ahead of me across the mountainside
A gleaming alloy air car shoots towards me, two lanes wide
I spin around with shrieking tires to run the deadly race
It goes screaming through the valley as another joins the chase
Drive like the wind, straining the limits of machine and man
Laughing out loud with fear and hope, I've got a desperate plan
At the one lane bridge, I leave the giants stranded at the riverside
Race back to the farm to dream with my uncle at the fireside
Written by Peart, of course.
I don't care whether the ultra-rich become richer - there's not a fixed amount of wealth, and their success costs me nothing. I care very much about the concentration of power, and wish no more of it to go the the most powerful group in the US. I can, and mostly have, opt-out from using Google. I'm stuck with the federal government, which is so powerful already it's hard to say we're not a totalitarian state (we certainly have the panopticon surveillance, without needing your neighbor to rat you out).