Amazon is crowded with Star-Wars related RC flying toys right now, from a Millennium Falcon quad-copter to a really cool X-Wing RC airplane (with ducted fans, so it's safer then normal RC planes with props).
All these toys should be registered as drones under the new rules. It's total nonsense.
They used to. Then they nationalized the oil business. Then they discovered that maintaining oil fields is a complex business requiring highly skilled workers, all of which had been foreign contractors. Then they discovered the various oil companies whose oil fields they seized were, for some reason, not interested in training or contracting that work. Oil production isn't going so well these days, and prices have fallen far.
Norway has a great model for sharing the proceeds of natural resource exports with the people (including the workers on those oil fields!), one that damn well should have been tried in Iraq. Venezuela did not follow that model.
"Investment" means, to most people, ownership of an asset that generates income (or more generally, "earnings"), or, more directly, ownership of the means of production. Has nothing to do with the money going "into" what you own. I do see that commonly misused by idiots who say things like "I'm investing in my new luxury car".
Actually I'm confident that most people, e.g. the super rich, understand my point of view:)
And how rich has your superior understanding of investing made you so far? With your low UID, you've been around long enough to at least become a millionaire, right? Anyone with a professional income and an understanding of investing can do that in 15-20 years - you don't have to be "super rich" to join the "owner class".
And when you tax energy companies? Raw material companies? Transportation companies? Builders? Consumer products are just one industry out of many. And you realize that consumption-based taxes are regressive, right?
I understand your plan: "tax everyone but me! yay! it's free!". But in addition to your plan being evil, it's also wrong.
The biggest fallacy is that people investing at a stock exchange in fact really believe they are investing anything into that particular company
They are exchanging ownership of the company. Ownership that was created when the company went public to expand its capital for growth. Ownership of the means of production is the important thing, and you're insisting on an odd definition if you don't call that "investing".
I think you'll find most shares are owned by people who understand this.
Capital gains are taxed at a low rate because the owning class
Blame the Man!
Short-term capital gains are taxed at the same rate as income. If you make a lot of money, they're taxed at a higher rate than income.
Laong term capital gains pay a lower rate, partly because they're not inflation adjusted (that more than anything needs to be fixed), and partly because we want some incentive to invest long-term, as daytraders are a nuisance.
If you want rules like one-topic-per-bill, or line item veto, then it has to be a Constitutional Amendment. And not enough states, much less Congressmen, are willing to lose that much power.
The line-item veto gives an insane amount of power to the president's party. Think about how it can be gamed. Imagine this had gone a better way, and CISA was tacked on, then the GOP (this is imaginary) had further amended it to make CISA less crazy and that bill passed. Obama could then line-item veto the specific fixes to CISA leaving the original as the bill, because of the way bills evolve as a series of amendments amending amendments.
One topic per bill is what we need especially for budget bills. Budget bills should contain only budget items!
You know, that could actually work. I wouldn't call it "current technology", since it's not something we've actually built, but it's a very low-tech idea.
You and ESR, go settle this in a cage match. I claim the popcorn vending rights!
Whoever wins, it's not like the government could seize all the guns if it wanted to - gun owners outnumber the US army something like 50-to-1. Some of us learned in school what happened when the governor of Massachusetts send in troops to confiscate a hoard of guns from some militia crazies - it did not end well for the government.
You know what happens when a mass shooting is stopped by a "good guy with a gun"? It's not a mass shooting! It's just one guy using a firearm in self defense to stop another guy with a gun. That's hardly newsworthy, unless there's something colorful about the incident (like may favorite: a Houston Justice of the Peace who shot a mugger on the stars of the courthouse - OK, not a mass shooting stopped, but still humorous). Sometimes, there's not even a shooting if the confrontation happens before the would-be shooter starts waving his gun around.
It's no coincidence that the vast majority of mass shootings happen in gun-free zones! (One exception was a political shooting with lots of casualties, not the usual mass shooting, and I think there's only one other exception in the past 50 years).
u seem to be one of the younger crowd who doesn't even understand why you should store your mail locally instead of counting on somebody else to keep it backed up (the "cloud").
I'm certainly not one of the younger crowd. I love web mail - hassle free, can read my mail from anywhere. I wouldn't care much if it was all lost suddenly. Anything important I back up to an actual file, but that's like 0.01% of mail - no reason to care about the rest.
You have no reasonable expectation of privacy while robbing a store. The danger with this list/sharing is that it could be abused, and restricting it to people actually convicted would be wise IMO. OTOH if your face is on tape pointing a gun at a cashier, there's no part of that you should expect to end well.
If you're driving the speed limit, stay the fuck out of the left lane. It's not a complicated concept. If you need to drive slowly in order to drive safely, by all means do so, but that doesn't give you the right to become an obstacle to navigation. "In the flow of traffic" is always the safest speed, assuming your reactions and willingness to focus are up to it.
Hitler would condemn capitalism as a Jewish conspiracy, not just Marxism. The stated ideals of the Nazi party were to combine socialism with nationalist (i.e., pro-war) ferver.
The Nazis instituted a "full-employment" program, and drastically reduced unemployment, made May Day a national holiday to celebrate labor, stressed that Germany should honor all it's workers and break down traditional class barriers.
State economic control increased, and free markets dwindled. Corporate income tax was over 100% in some cases. Nazi economics were explicitly pro private property, in contrast to Marxism, but the state would take control of industries that it particularly wanted to control. Actual propaganda: "I can love Germany and hate capitalism".
So anti-capitalist, pro private property for the little things, state control of the important things. Very pro-worker and nati-traditional-classes. How is this not modern Socialism? Modern Socialism isn't very Marxism either, right?
The evil of the Nazis, other than the persecution of Jews, wasn't front-and-center on display until 1938. There's a lot that may be obvious in hindsight, given where it all went, but plenty of people on the left were praising Hitler's economic policies through 1937 or so.
Fascism implies the protection of corporate power, even the merger of corporate power and the state
That's a modern definition contrived to help explain away the fact that Hitler came to power as a Socialist.
But even if we accept it at face value: both Communism and Fascism are the merger of corporate power and government. The only difference is the job titles of the guys who run both the government and the economy: whether they have government or private job titles (or, as in China today, half one, half the other).
An empire has an emperor. Communism has no government.
The Empire had a dictator. Communist USSR had a dictator. Communist China had a dictator. Communist Cuba had a dictator. Was there ever a Communist country that didn't have a dictator?
You want to hire someone to fix your space station? Though luck, everyone remotely competent is dead.
Nah, the population of the Empire was vast compared to the Death Star, and further the Empire was racist and (at least on screen) only employed humans on their flagship.
What we have to technology to do now is deliver a 1-ton payload safely to Mars surface and a 4-ton payload to orbit on the same rocket, for a mission cost of $2.5 billion.
We do not currently have to technology to make millions of these.
We do not currently have the technology to make thousands of these within the limits of our economy.
If you meant to say "it wouldn't require some new and uncertain scientific breakthrough", which is different from technology, then maybe. But really, I doubt it: "scale" is technology, and we've never done anything space-related at that scale. Plus "elevated expenses" understates it a bit, as it would take several thousand years for the US to build millions of these rockets even if that's all we did beyond subsistence.
I've been the victim of that level of violence several times (hopefully not because I was being a dick). No one was ever held legally accountable. Unless you have the name of your assailant, so that there's no work for the police to do, it seems they won't bother. It really pisses me off.
There is no "in addition to hate speech", those three terms define 'hate speech'.
Maybe it loses something in translation? Per Webster
Sedition : the crime of saying, writing, or doing something that encourages people to disobey their government
We have a long tradition of this in the US, and the occasional shameful period of outlawing it anyway.
Some "other people" have a little higher level of protection, e.g. ethnic or religious groups are extra protected, again: why you can not cope with that is beyond me.
Because of a popular and well-know act of sedition: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." It's rather fundamental over here.
"When the limits of free speech are trespassed, when it is about criminal expressions, sedition, incitement to carry out criminal offences that threaten people, such content has to be deleted from the net," Maas said. "And we agree that as a rule this should be possible within 24 hours."
These are 3 separate categories banned: * criminal expressions * sedition * incitement
So, my point was in addition to "hate speech" this also bans sedition, which is speech advocating overthrow of the government.
This shit always happens with speech-banning laws. They always creep in scope until they include criticizing the rulers.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazon is crowded with Star-Wars related RC flying toys right now, from a Millennium Falcon quad-copter to a really cool X-Wing RC airplane (with ducted fans, so it's safer then normal RC planes with props).
All these toys should be registered as drones under the new rules. It's total nonsense.
Does Venezuela have oil?
They used to. Then they nationalized the oil business. Then they discovered that maintaining oil fields is a complex business requiring highly skilled workers, all of which had been foreign contractors. Then they discovered the various oil companies whose oil fields they seized were, for some reason, not interested in training or contracting that work. Oil production isn't going so well these days, and prices have fallen far.
Norway has a great model for sharing the proceeds of natural resource exports with the people (including the workers on those oil fields!), one that damn well should have been tried in Iraq. Venezuela did not follow that model.
Every system will favor the powerful. That's life. That's no excuse per se for not succeeding yourself, and joining the owning class.
"Investment" means, to most people, ownership of an asset that generates income (or more generally, "earnings"), or, more directly, ownership of the means of production. Has nothing to do with the money going "into" what you own. I do see that commonly misused by idiots who say things like "I'm investing in my new luxury car".
Actually I'm confident that most people, e.g. the super rich, understand my point of view :)
And how rich has your superior understanding of investing made you so far? With your low UID, you've been around long enough to at least become a millionaire, right? Anyone with a professional income and an understanding of investing can do that in 15-20 years - you don't have to be "super rich" to join the "owner class".
And when you tax energy companies? Raw material companies? Transportation companies? Builders? Consumer products are just one industry out of many. And you realize that consumption-based taxes are regressive, right?
I understand your plan: "tax everyone but me! yay! it's free!". But in addition to your plan being evil, it's also wrong.
The biggest fallacy is that people investing at a stock exchange in fact really believe they are investing anything into that particular company
They are exchanging ownership of the company. Ownership that was created when the company went public to expand its capital for growth. Ownership of the means of production is the important thing, and you're insisting on an odd definition if you don't call that "investing".
I think you'll find most shares are owned by people who understand this.
Capital gains are taxed at a low rate because the owning class
Blame the Man!
Short-term capital gains are taxed at the same rate as income. If you make a lot of money, they're taxed at a higher rate than income.
Laong term capital gains pay a lower rate, partly because they're not inflation adjusted (that more than anything needs to be fixed), and partly because we want some incentive to invest long-term, as daytraders are a nuisance.
If you want rules like one-topic-per-bill, or line item veto, then it has to be a Constitutional Amendment. And not enough states, much less Congressmen, are willing to lose that much power.
The line-item veto gives an insane amount of power to the president's party. Think about how it can be gamed. Imagine this had gone a better way, and CISA was tacked on, then the GOP (this is imaginary) had further amended it to make CISA less crazy and that bill passed. Obama could then line-item veto the specific fixes to CISA leaving the original as the bill, because of the way bills evolve as a series of amendments amending amendments.
One topic per bill is what we need especially for budget bills. Budget bills should contain only budget items!
You know, that could actually work. I wouldn't call it "current technology", since it's not something we've actually built, but it's a very low-tech idea.
You and ESR, go settle this in a cage match. I claim the popcorn vending rights!
Whoever wins, it's not like the government could seize all the guns if it wanted to - gun owners outnumber the US army something like 50-to-1. Some of us learned in school what happened when the governor of Massachusetts send in troops to confiscate a hoard of guns from some militia crazies - it did not end well for the government.
People are mostly shot by others in their social circles: people who they know, or people at the same bars or clubs.
You know what happens when a mass shooting is stopped by a "good guy with a gun"? It's not a mass shooting! It's just one guy using a firearm in self defense to stop another guy with a gun. That's hardly newsworthy, unless there's something colorful about the incident (like may favorite: a Houston Justice of the Peace who shot a mugger on the stars of the courthouse - OK, not a mass shooting stopped, but still humorous). Sometimes, there's not even a shooting if the confrontation happens before the would-be shooter starts waving his gun around.
It's no coincidence that the vast majority of mass shootings happen in gun-free zones! (One exception was a political shooting with lots of casualties, not the usual mass shooting, and I think there's only one other exception in the past 50 years).
I hate this about Google. It merges my phone's contacts with my email contacts. These are different lists of people!
u seem to be one of the younger crowd who doesn't even understand why you should store your mail locally instead of counting on somebody else to keep it backed up (the "cloud").
I'm certainly not one of the younger crowd. I love web mail - hassle free, can read my mail from anywhere. I wouldn't care much if it was all lost suddenly. Anything important I back up to an actual file, but that's like 0.01% of mail - no reason to care about the rest.
You have no reasonable expectation of privacy while robbing a store. The danger with this list/sharing is that it could be abused, and restricting it to people actually convicted would be wise IMO. OTOH if your face is on tape pointing a gun at a cashier, there's no part of that you should expect to end well.
If you're driving the speed limit, stay the fuck out of the left lane. It's not a complicated concept. If you need to drive slowly in order to drive safely, by all means do so, but that doesn't give you the right to become an obstacle to navigation. "In the flow of traffic" is always the safest speed, assuming your reactions and willingness to focus are up to it.
Hitler would condemn capitalism as a Jewish conspiracy, not just Marxism. The stated ideals of the Nazi party were to combine socialism with nationalist (i.e., pro-war) ferver.
The Nazis instituted a "full-employment" program, and drastically reduced unemployment, made May Day a national holiday to celebrate labor, stressed that Germany should honor all it's workers and break down traditional class barriers.
State economic control increased, and free markets dwindled. Corporate income tax was over 100% in some cases. Nazi economics were explicitly pro private property, in contrast to Marxism, but the state would take control of industries that it particularly wanted to control. Actual propaganda: "I can love Germany and hate capitalism".
So anti-capitalist, pro private property for the little things, state control of the important things. Very pro-worker and nati-traditional-classes. How is this not modern Socialism? Modern Socialism isn't very Marxism either, right?
The evil of the Nazis, other than the persecution of Jews, wasn't front-and-center on display until 1938. There's a lot that may be obvious in hindsight, given where it all went, but plenty of people on the left were praising Hitler's economic policies through 1937 or so.
There's never really been a Communist country. The USSR, for example, was officially "State Capitalist".
And who are all these guys living in Scotland? Not one of them is a True Scotsman!
Fascism implies the protection of corporate power, even the merger of corporate power and the state
That's a modern definition contrived to help explain away the fact that Hitler came to power as a Socialist.
But even if we accept it at face value: both Communism and Fascism are the merger of corporate power and government. The only difference is the job titles of the guys who run both the government and the economy: whether they have government or private job titles (or, as in China today, half one, half the other).
An empire has an emperor. Communism has no government.
The Empire had a dictator. Communist USSR had a dictator. Communist China had a dictator. Communist Cuba had a dictator. Was there ever a Communist country that didn't have a dictator?
You want to hire someone to fix your space station? Though luck, everyone remotely competent is dead.
Nah, the population of the Empire was vast compared to the Death Star, and further the Empire was racist and (at least on screen) only employed humans on their flagship.
What we have to technology to do now is deliver a 1-ton payload safely to Mars surface and a 4-ton payload to orbit on the same rocket, for a mission cost of $2.5 billion.
We do not currently have to technology to make millions of these.
We do not currently have the technology to make thousands of these within the limits of our economy.
If you meant to say "it wouldn't require some new and uncertain scientific breakthrough", which is different from technology, then maybe. But really, I doubt it: "scale" is technology, and we've never done anything space-related at that scale. Plus "elevated expenses" understates it a bit, as it would take several thousand years for the US to build millions of these rockets even if that's all we did beyond subsistence.
I've been the victim of that level of violence several times (hopefully not because I was being a dick). No one was ever held legally accountable. Unless you have the name of your assailant, so that there's no work for the police to do, it seems they won't bother. It really pisses me off.
There is no "in addition to hate speech", those three terms define 'hate speech'.
Maybe it loses something in translation? Per Webster
Sedition : the crime of saying, writing, or doing something that encourages people to disobey their government
We have a long tradition of this in the US, and the occasional shameful period of outlawing it anyway.
Some "other people" have a little higher level of protection, e.g. ethnic or religious groups are extra protected, again: why you can not cope with that is beyond me.
Because of a popular and well-know act of sedition: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ..." It's rather fundamental over here.
Per TFA:
"When the limits of free speech are trespassed, when it is about criminal expressions, sedition, incitement to carry out criminal offences that threaten people, such content has to be deleted from the net," Maas said. "And we agree that as a rule this should be possible within 24 hours."
These are 3 separate categories banned:
* criminal expressions
* sedition
* incitement
So, my point was in addition to "hate speech" this also bans sedition, which is speech advocating overthrow of the government.
This shit always happens with speech-banning laws. They always creep in scope until they include criticizing the rulers.
"Sedition" has always meant "criticizing those in power". It's right there that the point is to abuse this to outlaw such speech.