You can add Larry Ellison, Sheldon Adelson, Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump... every bankster on wall street. In fact absolutely every rich person who has ever spent more on political lobbying than you earn in a year. Do you think they would keep spending that money if they did not get something worthwhile for it ? What they are buying is laws. And if there is one thing the founding fathers did not want its rich aristocrats making the laws.
And what other sense would you like us to consider ? There is only one meaning to the term 'financial independence' and that is 'having an income independent from work'. In the current system this is only available to those with sufficient excess capital to invest it in profitable non-labour investments, whether that be funds or buying houses to rent out or whatever. UBI makes that available to all comers.
But it would be equally viable to just put all people into the investment class - pool the money, buy into an index-tracking fund and have a share of the profits payed out monthly to all citizens, the remainder gets added to grow the fund so that there will be more profit in future. This has a bigger management burden - but it would be a viable form of UBI, and it doesn't even require a tax to keep funding it as it's funded by investing in business activity, property etc. - it just expands the pool of investors to *everybody* and removes *stupid investment choices* as a problem which keeps killing off small investors (who simply lack the capital to invest widely enough to be risk protected). You do need a large initial capital injection to start the process - but that could literally be a one-time thing, dump all the taxes for one year into a fund and start payouts the next year.
The basic concept is proven by an unrelated system already in place in Brazil. Brazil has one of the highest monthly income tax rates in the world - and an annual nett rate of ZERO. Nobody actually PAYS taxes ?! See what Brazil does is - it takes all the tax money and invests it. At the end of the year, they give you back everything you paid. The run the government using the profits on that investment - that funds all the government programs, their free university, their free universal healthcare for next year. To go from there to "self-funded entirely" would be a leap - but they at least prove it's possible to fund a government entirely on the returns of invested taxes with a nett-zero real tax rate.*
*This was the system when I was married to a Brazilian but we divorced ten years ago now - it's not impossible it has changed since then, I hope it hasn't because it was a brilliant idea.
>that they require additional support, and the political optics of providing financial support to very rich people Clinton raised that same issue when she debated free college with Sanders - but I believe she was wrong. Globally so-called universal programs have been far more successful than means-tested programs. There are two key reasons for this. The first is that it is simply cheaper -the administrative cost of doing means-testing tends to be higher than whatever you save by not making the program available to everybody (not to mention being more intrusive, making government bigger, invading privacy etc. etc.) the second is that they have proven EASIER to defend politically. This is because the people most likely to be opposed to any government program is generally those people who do not benefit from it - and the wealthy tend to have outsize political influence. With a means-tested program you have a lot of influential rich people paying for a program, who can never benefit from it - and thus they actively lobby against it forever (and eventually - they win). With a universal program - that lobbying all but disappears. Sure they may be paying more in taxes to FUND free college than their kids tuition was ever going to cost - but at least they get to send their kids to college without having to write ANOTHER cheque. Globally universal programs have consistently proven to be far more politically resilient than means tested ones.
Actually that wasn't quite the 'original' UBI experiment - it was one of the first really big ones run in the 20th century, but the LBJ/Nixon one in America happened around the same time and none of those were the first. There are proposals dating back to the early 16th century - but the first actual basic income experiment was the Speenhamland experiment in the late 18th to early 19th century.
That experiment was followed by a massive report, the same report would later doom Nixon's experiments - as it was held above the results of the experiment he ran. Hundreds of interviews that formed a 13000 page report. It denigrated basic income as a massive failure that had led to a complete decay in sexual mores, nobody working and other the effectual destruction of the working class. The Speenhamland report was the first of it's kind - the first time government relied on big data to inform policy, and it led to the instant dismantling of the system. Unfortunately - the report was a fake. It turned out that it was written, in it's entirety, before any of the research was even done - containing nothing but the prejudices of the authors (what they thought would happen) and the actual data was never considered or even read. It would take nearly a century for anybody to compare the data to the report supposedly based on it and discover the deception -by then it was too late.
"In our research we have found no evidence that lead levels in the atmosphere is higher than the natural level nor that atmospheric lead is harmful to human health" "You wouldn't, since you're in the business of selling lead".
That actual conversation happened in front of congress in congressional hearings about whether lead in gasoline should be banned. The second speaker was Claire Cameron Paterson. Paterson had, several years earlier - set out to determine the age of the earth by doing uranium dating on an asteroid dating from the earliest days of the solar system. Uranium dating works by figuring out what percentage of uranium had turned to lead. But he ran into a problem - the lead levels were impossibly high, as in the earth was apparently created last Tuesday high. He realized that lead pollution was interfering with the results. To actually get the answer he had to produce a lead-free environment to do the testing in - and to do that he had, had to become the world's top expert on detecting trace amounts of lead. He did just that- and along the way realized that lead levels in the atmosphere was astronomically high (a big problem for something known to be a deadly poison that made people crazy and violent). The lead industry argued that lead in the atmosphere wasn't harmful and was, in fact, normal. Paterson proved (using ice core samples) that, prior to leaded gasoline being introduced, the lead level in the atmosphere was ZERO. He also collaborated with numerous doctors and proved there is no safe dosage of lead - a single lead atom is harmful to humans.
That hearing happened in 1955 with Paterson presenting his evidence to congress and begging them to ban leaded gasoline for the sake of the health of all Americans. The industry experts, despite their clear incentive for manipulating and lying about their data, won. In fact they won for another 30 years. Leaded gasoline wasn't banned in the USA until 1985. Many other countries didn't follow suit until a decade later.
Thirty years during which millions of people needlessly died - to make a few companies a little richer. The person who is going to be regulated by something CANNOT have a say in the regulations because is NEVER in his best interest NOT to flat out lie. If you ask him "if X harmful" he will lie if he makes money out of X. If you ask him "how much will banning X cost" - he will lie and pretend it's a trillion times the real number, pretend he'll have to fire more people than he actually employs and tell you that fart goblins will crawl up the toilet and bite your asshole if you ban X. He'll say ANYTHING to ensure X keeps making him money - and he won't care who dies so he can do it.
Look I like the occasional anal as much as the next guy but how any straight guy can choose an asshole over a vagina on a permanent basis for four years I don't get.
And if the asshole you're about to enter is orange, do not proceed - fake a sudden upset tummy and get the hell out of there !
Yes, most lotteries are incredibly corrupt, and yes Native American casinos are as corrupt as white owned ones are - though I'm more forgiving of them - they are in the business to feed their kids after the resources that had done so for tens of thousands of years were taken from them by an occupying force from an invading army - very few white casino owners can seriously say if they didn't start robbery-palaces they would have starved instead.
Consumers benefit from prioritising traffic based on TYPE. They are HARMED by prioritizing it based on SOURCE. Consumers are doubly harmed when the ISPs can sell higher prioritization to sources that can afford it (since that automatically creates the incentive for ISPs to deprioritize everything else to gridlock levels).
They are not THE beneficiaries. They are however likely to benefit - the primary beneficiaries remain the cable companies.
That said whenever a corporation makes a political statement you know for an absolute fact that the policy they are promoting will benefit them. Promoting a policy that will harm them would lead to being sued by shareholders and a policy that doesn't affect them they won't say anything at all about. The only question is HOW will it benefit them.
Of course they never admit what they are doing. Thats why, for EVERY policy you will find corporations speaking for and against it and on both sides they will claim that it will benefit consumers to listen to them. Neither side gives a fuck about consumers - they are promoting/opposing a policy because of it's likely impact on their bottom line, consumers is a smokescreen - used by both sides on every issue.
Your best bet is to look at what the organisations that exist specifically to protect consumers have said about the same policy - their the only groups whose interest is served by actually representing consumers. In this case that includes guys like the E.F.F. every actual consumer organisation has spoken in favor of net neutrality (be careful of astroturfing though - just because an organisation claims to be a grassroots consumers protection group doesn't mean it's true).
And before that, a contractor to CISCO - trust me, whatever side these companies are on, on any issue, is never the side that you should support. These companies evil incorporated.
Thanks, it's always nice to get the fine details from my favorite slashdot scientist (especially when I had them wrong - it's amazing how the mind can muddle related things together that don't belong together sometimes).
Yep, that was sort of my point - if it's a violation then it's a civil violation and should be treated as such, with the court's focus on restoring the harm. Hence my proposed setting for the fine too. If you're really, really bad -they can tripple it so there is punitive damages too.
Allow me to introduce you to one of the most fundamental principles of justice: the punishment should fit the crime. Watching Game of Thrones from a dodgy website does not warrant a ten year jail sentence. It does not warrant any jail sentence at all. At most it warrants being forced to pay HBO damages equal to one months' subscription to their own streaming service (which is more than enough to bingewatch every episode of GoT they ever made - at a price THEY set).
It's amazing what the past held. Inside the human genome lies, snipped into three separated pieces so it cannot become active the full dna of a virus. An ancient virus - very ancient because it appears to have no living relatives. But what we know about it suggests that, when this virus was active, it may well have been one of the deadliest virusses to ever exist. We know that because it is capable of completely and utterly masking itself from the human immune system. That's why it's there actually - we couldn't survive without it. The genes from that virus are uses by human fetuses to hide from their mother's immune system and avoid being attacked as foreign DNA. This also suggests that it exists throughout the mammal line and has been around as long as internal-birth. Perhaps it was acquired soon after in an evolutionary step that made internal-birth much more reliable, or perhaps it was already there and when the womb-mutation occurred it was easy for evolution to grab it as a solution. The cut up and neutralized virus was probably present in morganocodontid (the first known mammal - from the late Jurassic) but the plague could well have been around much earlier. It could have been plaguing dinosaurs, or even their predecessors.
Now imagine if that thing was reconstituted and escaped today... a virus no immune system can even see let alone develop a response to. Impossible to vaccinate again, impossible to defend against - even anti-virals may not work on it. And this plague of plagues... is kept like the pieces of a museum fossil in every cell in your body right now.
But it was geographically contained - which is why it never spread further, the mutation effectively neutralized it - and frankly it gave the book a rather anticlimactic ending. All the super-smart scientists fighting to find anything that can fight back against this extra-terrestrial contagion, hoping against hope to figure out some way to treat the infected... and suddenly it downs a fighter jet, has no way to spread further and is harmless to humans (including those already infected).
There was a story a few years ago about scientists digging up frozen bodies in the arctic circle that were infected with the 1918 flu (the one that killed a huge percentage of the earth's population) in order to get samples of the virus to study. I don't know what became of it since though. In that case though it wasn't burried or unearthed by melting - they just became accessible again thanks to more advanced modern technologies for traversing the frozen wastes.
Same here, on those occasions where I feel a bit of salt is needed - I would rather add it in the form of a savoury ingredient with other flavours. The weirdest thing in the world though to me is people sprinkling salt on seafood... seafood is already salty !
I did upgrade to a G-Force 1050TI when they launched last year -it's a phenomenal card for it's price. I was on a 560TX before that, which used about three times as much power for far worse performance and with much lesser capabilities.
And then the judge would be quite happy to help you refresh your memory with a few days off work for some much needed R&R at a resort of his choosing at taxpayers expense by means of a contempt of court finding.
Slashdot Mirror
You can add Larry Ellison, Sheldon Adelson, Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump... every bankster on wall street. In fact absolutely every rich person who has ever spent more on political lobbying than you earn in a year. Do you think they would keep spending that money if they did not get something worthwhile for it ?
What they are buying is laws. And if there is one thing the founding fathers did not want its rich aristocrats making the laws.
Actually, yes, it really IS the world we live in. But they have very successfully created the illusion that it's not.
And what other sense would you like us to consider ?
There is only one meaning to the term 'financial independence' and that is 'having an income independent from work'.
In the current system this is only available to those with sufficient excess capital to invest it in profitable non-labour investments, whether that be funds or buying houses to rent out or whatever. UBI makes that available to all comers.
But it would be equally viable to just put all people into the investment class - pool the money, buy into an index-tracking fund and have a share of the profits payed out monthly to all citizens, the remainder gets added to grow the fund so that there will be more profit in future.
This has a bigger management burden - but it would be a viable form of UBI, and it doesn't even require a tax to keep funding it as it's funded by investing in business activity, property etc. - it just expands the pool of investors to *everybody* and removes *stupid investment choices* as a problem which keeps killing off small investors (who simply lack the capital to invest widely enough to be risk protected). You do need a large initial capital injection to start the process - but that could literally be a one-time thing, dump all the taxes for one year into a fund and start payouts the next year.
The basic concept is proven by an unrelated system already in place in Brazil. Brazil has one of the highest monthly income tax rates in the world - and an annual nett rate of ZERO. Nobody actually PAYS taxes ?!
See what Brazil does is - it takes all the tax money and invests it. At the end of the year, they give you back everything you paid. The run the government using the profits on that investment - that funds all the government programs, their free university, their free universal healthcare for next year.
To go from there to "self-funded entirely" would be a leap - but they at least prove it's possible to fund a government entirely on the returns of invested taxes with a nett-zero real tax rate.*
*This was the system when I was married to a Brazilian but we divorced ten years ago now - it's not impossible it has changed since then, I hope it hasn't because it was a brilliant idea.
>that they require additional support, and the political optics of providing financial support to very rich people
Clinton raised that same issue when she debated free college with Sanders - but I believe she was wrong. Globally so-called universal programs have been far more successful than means-tested programs. There are two key reasons for this. The first is that it is simply cheaper -the administrative cost of doing means-testing tends to be higher than whatever you save by not making the program available to everybody (not to mention being more intrusive, making government bigger, invading privacy etc. etc.) the second is that they have proven EASIER to defend politically. This is because the people most likely to be opposed to any government program is generally those people who do not benefit from it - and the wealthy tend to have outsize political influence. With a means-tested program you have a lot of influential rich people paying for a program, who can never benefit from it - and thus they actively lobby against it forever (and eventually - they win). With a universal program - that lobbying all but disappears. Sure they may be paying more in taxes to FUND free college than their kids tuition was ever going to cost - but at least they get to send their kids to college without having to write ANOTHER cheque.
Globally universal programs have consistently proven to be far more politically resilient than means tested ones.
Actually that wasn't quite the 'original' UBI experiment - it was one of the first really big ones run in the 20th century, but the LBJ/Nixon one in America happened around the same time and none of those were the first.
There are proposals dating back to the early 16th century - but the first actual basic income experiment was the Speenhamland experiment in the late 18th to early 19th century.
That experiment was followed by a massive report, the same report would later doom Nixon's experiments - as it was held above the results of the experiment he ran. Hundreds of interviews that formed a 13000 page report. It denigrated basic income as a massive failure that had led to a complete decay in sexual mores, nobody working and other the effectual destruction of the working class.
The Speenhamland report was the first of it's kind - the first time government relied on big data to inform policy, and it led to the instant dismantling of the system.
Unfortunately - the report was a fake. It turned out that it was written, in it's entirety, before any of the research was even done - containing nothing but the prejudices of the authors (what they thought would happen) and the actual data was never considered or even read.
It would take nearly a century for anybody to compare the data to the report supposedly based on it and discover the deception -by then it was too late.
"In our research we have found no evidence that lead levels in the atmosphere is higher than the natural level nor that atmospheric lead is harmful to human health"
"You wouldn't, since you're in the business of selling lead".
That actual conversation happened in front of congress in congressional hearings about whether lead in gasoline should be banned. The second speaker was Claire Cameron Paterson. Paterson had, several years earlier - set out to determine the age of the earth by doing uranium dating on an asteroid dating from the earliest days of the solar system. Uranium dating works by figuring out what percentage of uranium had turned to lead.
But he ran into a problem - the lead levels were impossibly high, as in the earth was apparently created last Tuesday high. He realized that lead pollution was interfering with the results. To actually get the answer he had to produce a lead-free environment to do the testing in - and to do that he had, had to become the world's top expert on detecting trace amounts of lead.
He did just that- and along the way realized that lead levels in the atmosphere was astronomically high (a big problem for something known to be a deadly poison that made people crazy and violent). The lead industry argued that lead in the atmosphere wasn't harmful and was, in fact, normal. Paterson proved (using ice core samples) that, prior to leaded gasoline being introduced, the lead level in the atmosphere was ZERO. He also collaborated with numerous doctors and proved there is no safe dosage of lead - a single lead atom is harmful to humans.
That hearing happened in 1955 with Paterson presenting his evidence to congress and begging them to ban leaded gasoline for the sake of the health of all Americans. The industry experts, despite their clear incentive for manipulating and lying about their data, won.
In fact they won for another 30 years. Leaded gasoline wasn't banned in the USA until 1985. Many other countries didn't follow suit until a decade later.
Thirty years during which millions of people needlessly died - to make a few companies a little richer.
The person who is going to be regulated by something CANNOT have a say in the regulations because is NEVER in his best interest NOT to flat out lie. If you ask him "if X harmful" he will lie if he makes money out of X.
If you ask him "how much will banning X cost" - he will lie and pretend it's a trillion times the real number, pretend he'll have to fire more people than he actually employs and tell you that fart goblins will crawl up the toilet and bite your asshole if you ban X.
He'll say ANYTHING to ensure X keeps making him money - and he won't care who dies so he can do it.
Several hundred years ago.
Look I like the occasional anal as much as the next guy but how any straight guy can choose an asshole over a vagina on a permanent basis for four years I don't get.
And if the asshole you're about to enter is orange, do not proceed - fake a sudden upset tummy and get the hell out of there !
Yes, most lotteries are incredibly corrupt, and yes Native American casinos are as corrupt as white owned ones are - though I'm more forgiving of them - they are in the business to feed their kids after the resources that had done so for tens of thousands of years were taken from them by an occupying force from an invading army - very few white casino owners can seriously say if they didn't start robbery-palaces they would have starved instead.
Consumers benefit from prioritising traffic based on TYPE. They are HARMED by prioritizing it based on SOURCE. Consumers are doubly harmed when the ISPs can sell higher prioritization to sources that can afford it (since that automatically creates the incentive for ISPs to deprioritize everything else to gridlock levels).
Only the latter is prohibited by net neutrality.
They are not THE beneficiaries. They are however likely to benefit - the primary beneficiaries remain the cable companies.
That said whenever a corporation makes a political statement you know for an absolute fact that the policy they are promoting will benefit them. Promoting a policy that will harm them would lead to being sued by shareholders and a policy that doesn't affect them they won't say anything at all about.
The only question is HOW will it benefit them.
Of course they never admit what they are doing. Thats why, for EVERY policy you will find corporations speaking for and against it and on both sides they will claim that it will benefit consumers to listen to them.
Neither side gives a fuck about consumers - they are promoting/opposing a policy because of it's likely impact on their bottom line, consumers is a smokescreen - used by both sides on every issue.
Your best bet is to look at what the organisations that exist specifically to protect consumers have said about the same policy - their the only groups whose interest is served by actually representing consumers. In this case that includes guys like the E.F.F. every actual consumer organisation has spoken in favor of net neutrality (be careful of astroturfing though - just because an organisation claims to be a grassroots consumers protection group doesn't mean it's true).
And before that, a contractor to CISCO - trust me, whatever side these companies are on, on any issue, is never the side that you should support. These companies evil incorporated.
Thanks, it's always nice to get the fine details from my favorite slashdot scientist (especially when I had them wrong - it's amazing how the mind can muddle related things together that don't belong together sometimes).
Yep, that was sort of my point - if it's a violation then it's a civil violation and should be treated as such, with the court's focus on restoring the harm. Hence my proposed setting for the fine too. If you're really, really bad -they can tripple it so there is punitive damages too.
Best get packing now then - while you can still emigrate to anywhere in the EU with ease.
Allow me to introduce you to one of the most fundamental principles of justice: the punishment should fit the crime.
Watching Game of Thrones from a dodgy website does not warrant a ten year jail sentence. It does not warrant any jail sentence at all. At most it warrants being forced to pay HBO damages equal to one months' subscription to their own streaming service (which is more than enough to bingewatch every episode of GoT they ever made - at a price THEY set).
In HIS keyboard ? I'm guessing large colonies of whatever eats discarded sperm cells..
It's amazing what the past held. Inside the human genome lies, snipped into three separated pieces so it cannot become active the full dna of a virus. An ancient virus - very ancient because it appears to have no living relatives. But what we know about it suggests that, when this virus was active, it may well have been one of the deadliest virusses to ever exist. We know that because it is capable of completely and utterly masking itself from the human immune system. That's why it's there actually - we couldn't survive without it. The genes from that virus are uses by human fetuses to hide from their mother's immune system and avoid being attacked as foreign DNA. This also suggests that it exists throughout the mammal line and has been around as long as internal-birth. Perhaps it was acquired soon after in an evolutionary step that made internal-birth much more reliable, or perhaps it was already there and when the womb-mutation occurred it was easy for evolution to grab it as a solution. The cut up and neutralized virus was probably present in morganocodontid (the first known mammal - from the late Jurassic) but the plague could well have been around much earlier. It could have been plaguing dinosaurs, or even their predecessors.
Now imagine if that thing was reconstituted and escaped today... a virus no immune system can even see let alone develop a response to. Impossible to vaccinate again, impossible to defend against - even anti-virals may not work on it.
And this plague of plagues... is kept like the pieces of a museum fossil in every cell in your body right now.
But it was geographically contained - which is why it never spread further, the mutation effectively neutralized it - and frankly it gave the book a rather anticlimactic ending. All the super-smart scientists fighting to find anything that can fight back against this extra-terrestrial contagion, hoping against hope to figure out some way to treat the infected... and suddenly it downs a fighter jet, has no way to spread further and is harmless to humans (including those already infected).
There was a story a few years ago about scientists digging up frozen bodies in the arctic circle that were infected with the 1918 flu (the one that killed a huge percentage of the earth's population) in order to get samples of the virus to study.
I don't know what became of it since though. In that case though it wasn't burried or unearthed by melting - they just became accessible again thanks to more advanced modern technologies for traversing the frozen wastes.
Same here, on those occasions where I feel a bit of salt is needed - I would rather add it in the form of a savoury ingredient with other flavours. The weirdest thing in the world though to me is people sprinkling salt on seafood... seafood is already salty !
You'll be fine. Nobody arrested Bob Marley for singing "I shot the sherrif" you know.
I did upgrade to a G-Force 1050TI when they launched last year -it's a phenomenal card for it's price. I was on a 560TX before that, which used about three times as much power for far worse performance and with much lesser capabilities.
And then the judge would be quite happy to help you refresh your memory with a few days off work for some much needed R&R at a resort of his choosing at taxpayers expense by means of a contempt of court finding.
I agree with you. Apparently though - not everybody does.