Seems like your judging everything not by any consistent ideology but only by whether it hurt or helps people you like or hate - which is my definition of "evil".
The rich is a minority group - it's just one you're clearly comfortable with hurting. The arguments you give are the same arguments that have been used against other minority groups in the past, groups you wouldn't be comfortable targeting. For the same process, you like it when it hurts the rich but hate it if it hurts the Jews? I'm assuming so (though the average American Jewish income is >$100K, but less than the average Hindu income, so I'm not sure you're being consistent even there).
You're really trusting the government not to be corrupt when you give it a power that you would be upset if it used on group A, because you want it used on group B. History suggests this is an unwise approach.
Sure, but you cannot fix the "government corruption" problem by "giving the government more control". That should be as obvious as any other tautology, but people seem to have a hard time seeing that.
I have a real problem with that definition of "Fascism", though, because it would mean that Nazi Germany wasn't a fascist state, and so doesn't fit with common usage - instead, it's a blatant and obvious attempt to Godwin any sensible discussion of economic politics.
No, that's the strawman with the "capitalism" sign hanging on it. Capitalism is simply a system whereby control of the means of production is for sale, and so largely accrues to those with a history of efficiently controlling the means of production.
It's a nice feedback loop with a huge built-in incentive for technological progress, but one that is unfortunately sabotaged by bailouts. Still it's less sensitive to political corruption than a system whereby control of the means of production is awarded by government decision.
Oh, slang is often moronic. Slang mostly exists as deliberate language mis-use an in-group identifier. And groups of morons have slang too.
But this is technical jargon (a specific kind of slang), and technical jargon is definitely stupid when simpler common English works in place of the jargon, as technical jargon isn't only deliberate language mis-use an in-group identifier, but is needed to communicate with little ambiguity. "Utilize" is stupid jargon because "use" works fine.
By that measure is "compute" stupid? You make a decent argument that it's not. But I certainly take issue with the notion that "shorter is better" - spoken language is plump with redundancy for good reason.
Defense is certainly in the pie chart. Defense cuts - well, they're a certainty, but as to where and how there are better forums to discuss that.
So, it sounds like you're OK with the government selecting one particular group of people to say "you're less deserving than others, we're going to take more of your stuff than we take from other groups". Does that seems like a safe sort of power to give the government? The government will always be corrupt, so are you really OK with a corrupt government picking groups to punish?
Would you be OK with the government saying "you're part of group X, so you have to pay for insurance, but we'll keep the benefits of that insurance for the common good, not for you"? Serious question.
Userspace is entirely broken on Android today. I have uninstalled every app, except a couple of big commercial apps, because everything wants to fondle every part of my phone. The design of Android is fundamentally flawed because I have to worry about this.
Hillary will definitely be the "establishment" candidate for the 2016 election. Vote for her for more of the same. Sadly, most Democrats will. And the GOP will run yet another boring old rich white guy to lose to her.
And keep the peace, and to keep that big ugly thug in check*, and to keep China from invading, and to keep Monsanto from creating weevils, and to stop Kraft from dumping their toxic waste into the river, and to make sure that your place of employment actually pays you, and to keep all those people with the power to do all those thing from being too powerful themselves. Hey, no joke, it costs money to keep it all running smoothly. (And yeah, they could be doing a lot better job of it)
Let me set aside defense from your rant. Defense is a very distinct subject, and/. isn't a great forum to discuss it. Lets use the numbers from the link in my sig - they'r well sourced.
62% - Money sent directly to the poor and to the old (many of whom aren't poor) 17% - Defense and wars 7% - Interest on the debt 14% - Everything else the government does
Can you see that the 14% is a rhetorical distraction from the real issue? If you're tricked into debating that part, well, you've been tricked.
The US Government is a pension plan with a military. The actual "roads and police" part is a minor (14%) sideline business.
Again, you fail to prevent a reasonable alternative that doesn't restrict First Amendment freedoms. Do you just not like that amendment? You wave your hands a lot and repeat the same talking points we've heard ten thousand times, but that's not very interesting.
Where would you draw the line on my political speech, exactly? Can I not take out an ad to support a position I believe in. Heinlein once paid for a full page ad in the NYT warning of the dangers of the Communist Threat. Legal, or no? The likes of Forbes and Perot have self-financed runs for the presidency before, paying out of his own pocket to get their message hear - legal or no? If I'm the owner of a newspaper, can I use that paper to express my political opinions - yes or no? Can I print flyers on my home printer and distribute them - yes or no?
Have you actually thought any of this through, or are you a talking-points parrot?
Because you drove there on a road that requires taxes, and have a reasonable amount of saftey, that requires taxes, and the bankers are regulated to not steal from you, which takes taxes.
Always with this straw man. Enough with it - the strawman is dead, bereft of life it rests in peace. It has shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the straw choir invisible!
The amount of taxes needed to fund roads and regulate banks an such is a trivially small and unobjectionable fraction of current taxation. The majority of taxation is money collected from less-politically-favored groups and mailed directly to members of more-politically-favored groups, plus the military.
No one is trying to take your roads. No amount of cuts to road build and regulation could possibly balance the budget in the first place. That's not what the debate is even about.
Money is certainly "political expression" when used to pay for political expression. You seem to think that's foolish, but fail to provide an alternative for consideration. Should political newspaper ads be outlawed, such that only those who can buy an entire newspaper company have freedom of the press? Where do you draw the line, without outright censorship of some means of political expression?
I have stock certificates, laminated and framed, from a former start-up. They do exist, and in general your broker can send some to you if for some crazy reason you want them.
And "money laundering" laws should have a floor. Sure, make the business track if a given customer does more than $10,000 in business in a month and report that - that's fine at that scale - but how is this different from, say, restaurant gift cards?
They haven't announced anything, of course, but as a heavy user of the service it's very obvious. I'm regularly shipped the 20th+ item in my queue because the first 19+ are unavailable that week (with no indication of that). "Short Wait" for older titles now means "6 months if you're lucky, unavailable before you get it if not". They clearly aren't replacing lost/broken DVDs for older titles, and simply letting them slide to "unavailable" as inventory falls.
That's all new: Netflix used to be awesome for their back catalog for older and obscure titles. Now it's a race to see stuff before it's gone from Netflix forever. To pick a randomish recent example: the Doctor Who 50th special had Zygons, but if you want to watch "Terror of the Zygons" to remember/discover what that alien is, you won't be doing it through Netflix (where once they had every Doctor Who episode that had made it to DVD).
Netflix seems to be becoming "Redbox by mail" , which I find very disappointing.
HAM was great for scrolling a hi-res background gradually to the left. I was amazed how few side-scroller games took advantage of that: I can only remember a couple, but they had astonishing graphics by the standards of the time.
Starcraft 2 & Diablo 3 are why I'm surprised Blizzard is still a brand. Any company with 2 releases that bad would be dead, if not for the WoW cashcow. And that's fading slowly. I was once a big fan, but now that brand means "dull uninspired gameplay set in a world of dull, uninspired artwork". That seems to be the consensus about the new CCG as well.
That's pretty nuts, but I don't have the experience of AZ to contradict you. Texas and Florida get pretty hot, but those with $400 electric bills are doing something to earn it.
Isn't the 24-hour average temp reasonable for most of the year, in the desert (too cold at night, too hot in the afternoon)? You'd think thermal mass and insulation would even that out nicely, but I guess not.
Sure, but the combination is nice - the narrow selection of streaming doesn't bother me because of the (soon to be former) breadth of the DVD plan. They compliment each other well, while streaming by itself probably wouldn't be worth the effort.
The burden is on the creatures without a powerful military to justify their personhood to the creatures with a powerful military. Arguing the morality of it all is just navel-gazing.
No, the idea is to have any excuse for a brutal police state where the government has no boundaries at all on the violence it can commit against its citizens. We're really back to medieval times now, where the king's troops could get away with behaving like this.
I mostly get Netflix through the mail myself. I pay for their streaming service, but I likely wouldn't if I wasn't already subscribing - it's far too limited.
Now that the DVD business is winding down and many/most older titles are becoming unavailable, I'm not sure what I'll do for TV, maybe just listen to a lot of (non-commercial) radio until TV has its own "iTunes store revolution".
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Seems like your judging everything not by any consistent ideology but only by whether it hurt or helps people you like or hate - which is my definition of "evil".
The rich is a minority group - it's just one you're clearly comfortable with hurting. The arguments you give are the same arguments that have been used against other minority groups in the past, groups you wouldn't be comfortable targeting. For the same process, you like it when it hurts the rich but hate it if it hurts the Jews? I'm assuming so (though the average American Jewish income is >$100K, but less than the average Hindu income, so I'm not sure you're being consistent even there).
You're really trusting the government not to be corrupt when you give it a power that you would be upset if it used on group A, because you want it used on group B. History suggests this is an unwise approach.
Sure, but you cannot fix the "government corruption" problem by "giving the government more control". That should be as obvious as any other tautology, but people seem to have a hard time seeing that.
I have a real problem with that definition of "Fascism", though, because it would mean that Nazi Germany wasn't a fascist state, and so doesn't fit with common usage - instead, it's a blatant and obvious attempt to Godwin any sensible discussion of economic politics.
No, that's the strawman with the "capitalism" sign hanging on it. Capitalism is simply a system whereby control of the means of production is for sale, and so largely accrues to those with a history of efficiently controlling the means of production.
It's a nice feedback loop with a huge built-in incentive for technological progress, but one that is unfortunately sabotaged by bailouts. Still it's less sensitive to political corruption than a system whereby control of the means of production is awarded by government decision.
Oil and nuclear don't compete. Natural gas and nuclear compete, but energy needs will keep growing fast enough to keep all providers happy.
Oh, slang is often moronic. Slang mostly exists as deliberate language mis-use an in-group identifier. And groups of morons have slang too.
But this is technical jargon (a specific kind of slang), and technical jargon is definitely stupid when simpler common English works in place of the jargon, as technical jargon isn't only deliberate language mis-use an in-group identifier, but is needed to communicate with little ambiguity. "Utilize" is stupid jargon because "use" works fine.
By that measure is "compute" stupid? You make a decent argument that it's not. But I certainly take issue with the notion that "shorter is better" - spoken language is plump with redundancy for good reason.
Defense is certainly in the pie chart. Defense cuts - well, they're a certainty, but as to where and how there are better forums to discuss that.
So, it sounds like you're OK with the government selecting one particular group of people to say "you're less deserving than others, we're going to take more of your stuff than we take from other groups". Does that seems like a safe sort of power to give the government? The government will always be corrupt, so are you really OK with a corrupt government picking groups to punish?
Would you be OK with the government saying "you're part of group X, so you have to pay for insurance, but we'll keep the benefits of that insurance for the common good, not for you"? Serious question.
Userspace is entirely broken on Android today. I have uninstalled every app, except a couple of big commercial apps, because everything wants to fondle every part of my phone. The design of Android is fundamentally flawed because I have to worry about this.
Hillary will definitely be the "establishment" candidate for the 2016 election. Vote for her for more of the same. Sadly, most Democrats will. And the GOP will run yet another boring old rich white guy to lose to her.
And keep the peace, and to keep that big ugly thug in check*, and to keep China from invading, and to keep Monsanto from creating weevils, and to stop Kraft from dumping their toxic waste into the river, and to make sure that your place of employment actually pays you, and to keep all those people with the power to do all those thing from being too powerful themselves. Hey, no joke, it costs money to keep it all running smoothly. (And yeah, they could be doing a lot better job of it)
Let me set aside defense from your rant. Defense is a very distinct subject, and /. isn't a great forum to discuss it. Lets use the numbers from the link in my sig - they'r well sourced.
62% - Money sent directly to the poor and to the old (many of whom aren't poor)
17% - Defense and wars
7% - Interest on the debt
14% - Everything else the government does
Can you see that the 14% is a rhetorical distraction from the real issue? If you're tricked into debating that part, well, you've been tricked.
The US Government is a pension plan with a military. The actual "roads and police" part is a minor (14%) sideline business.
Again, you fail to prevent a reasonable alternative that doesn't restrict First Amendment freedoms. Do you just not like that amendment? You wave your hands a lot and repeat the same talking points we've heard ten thousand times, but that's not very interesting.
Where would you draw the line on my political speech, exactly? Can I not take out an ad to support a position I believe in. Heinlein once paid for a full page ad in the NYT warning of the dangers of the Communist Threat. Legal, or no? The likes of Forbes and Perot have self-financed runs for the presidency before, paying out of his own pocket to get their message hear - legal or no? If I'm the owner of a newspaper, can I use that paper to express my political opinions - yes or no? Can I print flyers on my home printer and distribute them - yes or no?
Have you actually thought any of this through, or are you a talking-points parrot?
Because you drove there on a road that requires taxes, and have a reasonable amount of saftey, that requires taxes, and the bankers are regulated to not steal from you, which takes taxes.
Always with this straw man. Enough with it - the strawman is dead, bereft of life it rests in peace. It has shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the straw choir invisible!
The amount of taxes needed to fund roads and regulate banks an such is a trivially small and unobjectionable fraction of current taxation. The majority of taxation is money collected from less-politically-favored groups and mailed directly to members of more-politically-favored groups, plus the military.
No one is trying to take your roads. No amount of cuts to road build and regulation could possibly balance the budget in the first place. That's not what the debate is even about.
Money is certainly "political expression" when used to pay for political expression. You seem to think that's foolish, but fail to provide an alternative for consideration. Should political newspaper ads be outlawed, such that only those who can buy an entire newspaper company have freedom of the press? Where do you draw the line, without outright censorship of some means of political expression?
The only form of "money transfer" that isn't so heavily monitored is the flow of funds into campaign coffers. Funny how that works.
I have stock certificates, laminated and framed, from a former start-up. They do exist, and in general your broker can send some to you if for some crazy reason you want them.
And "money laundering" laws should have a floor. Sure, make the business track if a given customer does more than $10,000 in business in a month and report that - that's fine at that scale - but how is this different from, say, restaurant gift cards?
They haven't announced anything, of course, but as a heavy user of the service it's very obvious. I'm regularly shipped the 20th+ item in my queue because the first 19+ are unavailable that week (with no indication of that). "Short Wait" for older titles now means "6 months if you're lucky, unavailable before you get it if not". They clearly aren't replacing lost/broken DVDs for older titles, and simply letting them slide to "unavailable" as inventory falls.
That's all new: Netflix used to be awesome for their back catalog for older and obscure titles. Now it's a race to see stuff before it's gone from Netflix forever. To pick a randomish recent example: the Doctor Who 50th special had Zygons, but if you want to watch "Terror of the Zygons" to remember/discover what that alien is, you won't be doing it through Netflix (where once they had every Doctor Who episode that had made it to DVD).
Netflix seems to be becoming "Redbox by mail" , which I find very disappointing.
HAM was great for scrolling a hi-res background gradually to the left. I was amazed how few side-scroller games took advantage of that: I can only remember a couple, but they had astonishing graphics by the standards of the time.
Starcraft 2 & Diablo 3 are why I'm surprised Blizzard is still a brand. Any company with 2 releases that bad would be dead, if not for the WoW cashcow. And that's fading slowly. I was once a big fan, but now that brand means "dull uninspired gameplay set in a world of dull, uninspired artwork". That seems to be the consensus about the new CCG as well.
That's pretty nuts, but I don't have the experience of AZ to contradict you. Texas and Florida get pretty hot, but those with $400 electric bills are doing something to earn it.
Isn't the 24-hour average temp reasonable for most of the year, in the desert (too cold at night, too hot in the afternoon)? You'd think thermal mass and insulation would even that out nicely, but I guess not.
Sure, but the combination is nice - the narrow selection of streaming doesn't bother me because of the (soon to be former) breadth of the DVD plan. They compliment each other well, while streaming by itself probably wouldn't be worth the effort.
Only if your house has poor insulation, or you set your thermostats at some "impress the neighbors" value like 72.
And how would you validate the hash? Once you're properly paranoid, there's no good answer.
The burden is on the creatures without a powerful military to justify their personhood to the creatures with a powerful military. Arguing the morality of it all is just navel-gazing.
No, the idea is to have any excuse for a brutal police state where the government has no boundaries at all on the violence it can commit against its citizens. We're really back to medieval times now, where the king's troops could get away with behaving like this.
Hey, I saw that movie. Turns out the paranoid guy was right. Funny old world.
I mostly get Netflix through the mail myself. I pay for their streaming service, but I likely wouldn't if I wasn't already subscribing - it's far too limited.
Now that the DVD business is winding down and many/most older titles are becoming unavailable, I'm not sure what I'll do for TV, maybe just listen to a lot of (non-commercial) radio until TV has its own "iTunes store revolution".