Trayvon was not the victim, the victim in this case was George Zimmerman, who did not do anything illegal or even questionable and was attacked by a violent person and defended himself. Clearly the cop who was fired for not giving in and not bringing charges against Zimmerman, because there was no case and the jury as well understand something that you do not.
Of-course this is a criminal case, the crime being that the State is trying to convict an innocent man for a made up crime for political reasons and nothing else.
Had Zimmerman been convicted of anything (he is found not guilty), he would have been nothing but a political prisoner in USA.
Of-course it is relevant what kind of a person Trayvon was, because the ENTIRE case by the prosecution is built up on what kind of person Zimmerman supposedly was.
Zimmerman's teacher in some self defence class was used as a witness, no Trayvon's teachers could be called to testify about Trayvon's character.
Zimmerman's past was dug up and put on trial, Trayvon's past was carefully hidden by the system, with the kangaroo court 'judge' preventing any such evidence from appearing.
The entire case was: "Zimmerman is a racist that is out to kill black kids, chased and murdered an innocent black child with skittles and ice-tea", this entire nonsensical idea was constructed by the prosecution only based on various details from Zimmerman's past and it failed, there was nothing there, quite the opposite.
OTOH if any of the past on Trayvon was allowed into court, jury wouldn't even have to deliberate.
The real interesting story here is just how much the USA political system is using racism for its own purpose, even the fucking POTUS is getting mixed in this, using it for political campaigning.
You think your parents are the ones that fucked USA up? No, it started with Teddy Fucking Roosevelt, every idea that came out of that proletariat minded fuckhead resonated with the mob and so all sorts of government agencies were created, property rights were destroyed (anti-trust laws), illegal taxes were introduced (all income related taxes), control money was given into the hands of the government via proxy, Federal reserve, eventually price of money became fixed and so that's how the collapse of the free society started, with Teddy Piece Of Shit Roosevelt, one of the more unamerican presidents out there, similar to Hoover and FDR and Nixon and either Bush and Clinton and Obama and yes, Kennedy and more.
Any one of those fuckers that came there and said that he wanted 'to lead', he had some 'vision', great society, any form of welfare, any form of subsidy, any form of control of private property rights, of individuals, those are the most unamerican concepts.
Well, those who are not aware of history are bound to repeat it.
Quote:
equity The theory in Igalia is that we pay everyone the same. Everyone should be working with approximately the same effort, and everyone should be working on something that is valuable to the business (whether in the short-, medium-, or long-term), and so everyone should share in the income to an equal extent.
end quote.
Looks to me that the people involved should have studied history, real history, real economics and real politics. They would have immediately understood that they were trying to implement a communist experiment on a smaller scale and it was obviously going to fail, you don't need to try it to realise it. They could have learned this from history of American pilgrims that tried this with disastrous consequences, and every other attempt at this failed before and since that time. Obviously people have written about this extensively. Again, not paying attention to history ends up biting you in the ass.
The government isn't just regulating stock markets because they want a cut.
- correct, there is a secondary reason, which is buying votes of the idiots, that believe that the government must regulate everything because some of them are corner cases, and some of them got conned and because 1-10% may lead to some loss or there is a con artist in 5% cases, now 100% of businesses must suffer through regulations.
Of-course it's worse for things like Patriot Act, all of a sudden all freedoms are suspended indefinitely, and useful idiots, like the ones I am normally 'conversing' here with believe that it should be that way.
The fraud is not a problem that is worthy of destroying freedoms of all people, fraud has always existed and WITH government intervention, fraud is much more pronounced and severe and of much greater magnitude. Too big to fail does not happen in the free market, it requires enormous amount of money being printed by the Fed, enormous amounts of backstops, various fake insurances by the government, programs that push for lower and lower lending standards, artificially low interest rates.
AAA debt is only marked AAA because of the monopoly status that government grants to the rating agencies, the moment one of those agencies even dares to suggest that the gov't is NOT AAA in fact, it gets investigated, licenses get suspended (Egan Jones), there is only corruption in government, government exists to corrupt.
Politicians manipulate the markets, in fact the biggest insider traders are politicians, be it Congressmen or Senators or their staff members. The real corruption happens at the behest of the government officials and departments, not despite but because of it.
well, this is absolutely normal human behaviour, finding ways to satisfy market demand at a price that is much lower than the official, government regulated, centrally planned (and can be argued government manipulated) market provides.
Whether the government enforces prohibition or imposes high taxes on cigarettes or anything at all for that matter, people find ways to find the products at a cheaper price and the government 'cracks down' on that because it wants a much bigger cut (be it from taxes and or from sales through the only legal, government supported monopolistic markets, which is the case here).
What does it cost to comply with all government regulations to run a stock exchange? Supposedly simple question, how much does the compliance with the Patriot Act cost?
There is nothing wrong with any type of discrimination, age, sex, race, whatever, when it's not discrimination by government forces, government laws. Private people discriminate all the time, we discriminate who we work for, who works for us, who we let the apartments to, who we lease apartments from, what neighbourhood we live in, who we date, where we go out, where we buy food, etc.etc.etc.
The politicians want you to vote for them, so they promise to give you special entitlements, you being the majority, the mob, the employees. The employers are the minority that PAY for the promises of the politicians, so they have rights taken away and obligations enforced upon them to give you the entitlements, that's how all these nonsensical 'non-discrimination' laws came into effect and they are 1/3 of the problem that is destroying productivity in the West (the other 2 being taxes and inflation).
As private individuals (and businesses are just private individuals, whether you understand it or not) we have the right to discriminate against other private individuals, what we must not allow is the collective, the government with the power to destroy us to discriminate us. In case of government we must demand equality of opportunity, equality under law, equality of treatment and non-discrimination, there it's crucial. Demanding that government imposes those types of obligations upon some people with the explicit benefit to other people means destroying individual rights and at the same time hurting the economy.
The moment a group of people gets a special privilege from government, in my eyes that group of people becomes unemployable and I don't care who they are before the government gives them that privilege, women, children, disabled, retarded, stupid, fat, ugly, white or black, etc.etc. The moment a group gets a special entitlement is the moment I don't want to have to deal with that group at all, they become too expensive for me to do business with, they are dangerous and costly with no benefit to me at all.
Your assumption is gigantic (and wrong there) that raising taxes is what is needed to 'save the country', when the exact opposite is the case!
The taxes must be lowered, but they can't be lowered without first lowering government spending. Lowering the tax rates without lowering spending is not lowering taxes, it's deferring taxes into the future with the added 'bonus' of having to pay an interest on it.
To save USA what needs to be done is the exact opposite of what the mob wants, that means disassembling the modern welfare state, taking apart all government agencies that have nothing to do with what the government is for directly, which is 1 thing actually: protecting the citizens against foreign invasion.
There is nothing else a federal government should be authorised to do.
Well, the current depression is not accidental in the sense that all the policies and all the political winds, movements, the mob and the politicians agreed to take the path of least resistance, to avoid working, to shift responsibility and blame and the payments to somebody else. I absolutely agree that creating a welfare society is good for the political system to remain in power, the poor, the stupid, the uneducated always want somebody else to do it all for them at the expense of anybody, doesn't matter who becomes the sacrificial lamb. Here is a great piece of satire explaining some of this in simplest terms.
However when it comes to the three letter agencies, I think from their perspective there is no push to worsen the economic situation on purpose to push people into totalitarianism. They (3LAs) are certainly part of the problem from the POV that they are a huge cost centre (and also they are helping the uncompetitive monopolies to have an upper hand in negotiations, which is really what this spying is ALL about - money that can be made by spying on people).
But while I don't think 3LAs are pushing for a worse economic situation, they are part of the problem that causes it and they certainly wouldn't let a crisis to go to waste.
That is just sad. I don't want an easier life for my children, I want a richer life, a more interesting life, life with more opportunities, more ways to apply themselves productively and more opportunities to achieve what they set out to do.
I can subsidise a small army of children sitting around doing nothing, but why would I want that? Doing nothing? They may as well be dead at that point.
However if it were anybody else but the Winklevoss, who hold a gigantic amount of Bitcoins, I would not view it in the same way. If an ETF was set up that had a specific purpose of trading Bitcoins in a centralised way where borrowing and shorting was possible, but the ETF itself did not start with a huge percentage of the entire Bitcoin market that it would be selling to the ETF buyers from its own wallet, then I could I guess see a potential for business there, but with these 2 holding on to a large percentage of all the actual Bitcoins in existence, I can't imagine that it would be a good deal for the ETF clients, it's just not, the twins are setting this up to sell you THEIR Bitcoins outside of the rest of the market.
While personally I view Bitcoins as a great experiment, first step out of many that will be taken that will in fact free the individuals from the oppression of governments by giving many viable, easy to use and very attractive alternatives to all of the things that governments have usurped to themselves as monopoly power, there is currently something else that is happening with Bitcoins.
Winklevoss twins are trying to get out of their gigantic position without crashing the market, they want to make tens of millions of dollars by selling a million or so Bitcoins by offering them via an ETF.
This is one thing that would separate the complete financial nubes from the rest: participating in this ETF.
There is not a single reason to buy ETFs if you want to bet on Bitcoins, all you need to do is buy Bitcoins themselves. An ETF makes sense when it is based around a commodity for example that has other costs associated with it, like cost of warehousing something. Say you want to buy coffee beans, you want 10 tons of them because you think the conditions are good for the prices to go up and you are going to make some money, but you don't want to store 10 tons of coffee beans and you don't want to pay various delivery fees, taxes maybe, etc. So then you can buy an ETF.
There is no such problem with Bitcoins, you store them in a file, the cost is already amortised into you owning a computer and an Internet connection and spending some time learning and installing some Bitcoin software. There is no reason for an ETF like that to exist but for the founders of it to get rid of their large position while trying to prevent market from collapsing in a short time period if they set a large sell order. So instead they create an ETF and have a pool of people buy the Bitcoins from them, it's all in that pool, outside of the rest of the market, that's their idea.
DO NOT FALL FOR IT, it's a stupid thing to do in case of Bitcoins.
well, you can always use my silly FF extension or many other keyboard layout switching tools (including the ones actually built into every OS) to type with DVORAK, who is stopping you?
It's 'harder' out there and yet millions of people are able to LIVE without even going outside of their house? Interesting theory, so what is feeding, clothing, taking care of them if not the wealth that the generations have accumulated and they are spending?
In reality of-course this problem has nothing to do with porn and tentacles and video games, those are just fine escape routes, the reality is that this problem started at the same time as Japan went off the competitive road into inflation driven Keynesian nightmare of an 'economy' that destroyed their real productive economy, prevented the necessary deflation (prevented prices from falling sharply and from many zombie banks and companies shutting down and restructuring). This is the result of a society that is eating itself from the inside with inflation (money printing) policies that keep an otherwise productive population from being much more productive, from being able to do with their productivity what THEY would want to do with it and instead having huge government spending programs that keep failed businesses afloat (all of which are tied to the government structures, that's Japan unfortunately) and so the productive nature of Japanese worker has been used completely inefficiently to grind gears rather than to excel in some interesting enterprises, experiments, attempts to do better than being stuck in 12 hour a day jobs that are more like military divisions rather than places where creativity drives forward the economy by increasing efficiency and creating products that actually improve people's lives.
I don't need you or anybody else to hold my hand when I want to get from point A to point B, and I mean all of this hand holding is completely unnecessary to me. I travel so much that I have tried almost every type of public and private transport there is, when I choose to go somewhere I choose how to get there, I don't need any government to do any of that for me, which is why I often use illegal cabs and such.
No, what defeats the entire point of having insurance is Obamacare, of-course the geniuses on this site don't understand long term consequences of any actions, but especially of government violence committed against individual rights of people, this includes any type of violence, be it income taxes or business regulations or forced mandates for things people are not interested in 'buying' and would rather buy something else if they think it's a good deal.
Works for computer industry, the gov't isn't there subsidising computers (or mobile phones), so the industry is thriving and everybody has a phone.
There is NO difference between that and health care and insurance products, the competitive market in a free society provides the best, cheapest products and services.
As to 'who pays' - precisely. The people that buy insurance against a SPECIFIC problem pay as a pool for that problem occurring in the population that buys that insurance. Having ALL people pay that is economically retarded, it doesn't correspond to the need, it clearly abuses the resources of the people and gives insurance companies the kind of profit that they couldn't dream of, this has nothing to do with ability to pay on claims, the profit in a non-competitive industry via gov't fiat is magnitudes greater than it would be if the industry had actual competition, and services would be better, because competing companies are there to fight FOR their customers.
Of-course I am sure this will go right over your head and straight into -1 Troll whatever.
Which is why you need more of free market, not less, so that the gov't is NOT regulating new starting up HCPs out of business to maintain the oligopoly and you should also be able to shop for ANYTHING around the world, including health insurance.
You may want to buy one from an insurer in Singapore, so why shouldn't you be able to? I have a number of passports and health insurance from a country I am not actually a citizen of though I spend some time there over the year, I shop for such things, why can't Americans?
I guess what we need is universal health care with the ability for short-sighted individual assholes to opt out.
- yes please, yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes please. Of-course you are the one being short-sighted, as you said yourself:
I have tried and tried and tried, but I just don't get it.
- obviously.
The collective is fine by me as long as it does not impede on my individual rights, and every type of income tax, business profit tax, property tax, health care or pension or employment 'insurance' tax, every type of subsidy that comes out of that money that grows government and gives it more power than it would have otherwise is what impedes on my individual rights.
Only individuals matter, we are born and we die alone, the collective is an abstract (and a dangerous violent power) and cannot be put above an individual life and rights.
As to health care, it has gotten to where it is in USA from being top health care system in the world in about 50 years since Medicare, Medicaid were started that should have never been. Of-course neither should have IRS or FBI or Federal reserve or FDIC or HUD or FHA or dep't of education or dep't of energy or commerce or interior or agriculture or FDA or FCC or FAA, etc.etc.
None of it should have ever been started, NONE of it is Constitutional in USA though the corrupt system (corrupt people) just say it's "legal" anyway. Well, guess what, so are NSA taps by gov't definition.
On the side note, it's funny that people respond to me explaining that gov't destroys the economy with taxes, business regulations and money printing (inflation) by saying: there is no inflation.
Yeah, Ok, there is no inflation. Except for the stock market, housing market, education gov't 'insured' loan market, health care and thus insurance markets, energy and food... except for that... electronics you can buy cheaper or at the nearly same prices as before, so there is no inflation, why, the gov't statistics would never be used to create a picture that is not actual reality for the benefit of the ruling class.
Yes, corporations, businesses in general do want to minimize costs, that's how they can provide cheapest, most affordable products to the widest audience. Look at WalMart, the owners are billionaires, yet the store provides cheapest products to the masses of poorest in the society.
Obviously they do this by minimizing every cost that can be minimized and in the NON FREE society, like the USA is (non free because of government regulations, monopoly creation and support, money printing, bailouts for the friends of politicians, etc.etc.), this means that certain people will not find better jobs than working for WalMart, because they are not needed anywhere else at those salaries (the people working for WalMart).
They are not economically viable in the poor, non-free society outside of WalMart (well, they could do worse).
However in a free market society resources are used efficiently, this includes labor, but this also means that the free market sets price of everything, including price of labour. There shouldn't be any minimum wage laws, income taxes, money printing, most of what gov't does today (from pension handling and medical payments to student or house or any type of loan guarantees, meddling with businesses, regulating businesses, not the act of interstate commerce itself to maximize competition, but manipulating the market, preventing some businesses from working, giving others huge advantages via tax code, bailouts, fake insurance, etc.etc.)
Basically the system is broken, you are looking from inside a broken system and everything is confusing to you, so you can't understand what's white and what's black, what's up and what's down, and it's not without intent that you are so confused. There is huge amount of money that is made by politicians and politically connected as long as you stay confused and allow the government authority to go beyond the law, beyond what the Constitution allows it to do.
Singapore, Switzerland, Hong Kong, China, USA in 19th century. Those are easy examples. You better think of an example where is the economy today NOT falling apart in the world of socialism, theft and redistribution, central banking, where people are actually living free as individuals and not as a herd to be slaughtered or used as voting chips on the political table.
False choice. In free market capitalism the top few percent become extremely wealthy by providing everybody below them with best value, best possible product at lowest possible price. Your idea is that wealth is 'taken' from majority and 'given' to the wealthiest has no basis in reality in the free market. When gov't interferes with the freedom of the people, that is when your thesis becomes a real possibility as it is today, be it inflation created by the federal reserve or taxes, rules and regulations that destroy competition.
We should get people to encrypt traffic and if that takes self-signed certs then that's what we should be promoting and browsers using ridiculous warnings for self signed certificates do not promote using more of them.
Now, if every connection already had a self signed certificate except for some, that would choose CAs, then I would be talking about something else - how to add actual security to the encryption and security requires that the involved parties know who they are before they can communicate in a secure way (which is what encryption would provide once the identities are established).
However what we have today is a mostly unencrypted Internet traffic, unencrypted emails, unencrypted messages, most things are not encrypted.
As to CAs, I do not trust CAs not to work with governments and I care much more about government destroying individual freedoms than about somebody getting scammed on the Internet. How should identities be established? I think it should be done by consensus, not with someone specifically authorised and thus prone to government attack, but by many people confirming the identity that needs confirming.
I agree that the SECURITY portion of the https is screwed up, it's out of date, it's not working. However I am not talking about delivering security, I am talking about encrypting all traffic across the entire Internet with as many certificates as possible.
AFAIC it is more relevant today to encrypt all traffic and prevent government from having access to any plain text communications than provide 'security' (or whatever we see as 'security') in the current sense of the word. The security model is broken already as it is and with the government doing what it does, the real threat is the government and the security is just as much a theatre as TSA lines in airports.
Slashdot Mirror
Trayvon was not the victim, the victim in this case was George Zimmerman, who did not do anything illegal or even questionable and was attacked by a violent person and defended himself. Clearly the cop who was fired for not giving in and not bringing charges against Zimmerman, because there was no case and the jury as well understand something that you do not.
Of-course this is a criminal case, the crime being that the State is trying to convict an innocent man for a made up crime for political reasons and nothing else.
Had Zimmerman been convicted of anything (he is found not guilty), he would have been nothing but a political prisoner in USA.
Of-course it is relevant what kind of a person Trayvon was, because the ENTIRE case by the prosecution is built up on what kind of person Zimmerman supposedly was.
Zimmerman's teacher in some self defence class was used as a witness, no Trayvon's teachers could be called to testify about Trayvon's character.
Zimmerman's past was dug up and put on trial, Trayvon's past was carefully hidden by the system, with the kangaroo court 'judge' preventing any such evidence from appearing.
The entire case was: "Zimmerman is a racist that is out to kill black kids, chased and murdered an innocent black child with skittles and ice-tea", this entire nonsensical idea was constructed by the prosecution only based on various details from Zimmerman's past and it failed, there was nothing there, quite the opposite.
OTOH if any of the past on Trayvon was allowed into court, jury wouldn't even have to deliberate.
The real interesting story here is just how much the USA political system is using racism for its own purpose, even the fucking POTUS is getting mixed in this, using it for political campaigning.
Teddy Roosevelt?
You think your parents are the ones that fucked USA up? No, it started with Teddy Fucking Roosevelt, every idea that came out of that proletariat minded fuckhead resonated with the mob and so all sorts of government agencies were created, property rights were destroyed (anti-trust laws), illegal taxes were introduced (all income related taxes), control money was given into the hands of the government via proxy, Federal reserve, eventually price of money became fixed and so that's how the collapse of the free society started, with Teddy Piece Of Shit Roosevelt, one of the more unamerican presidents out there, similar to Hoover and FDR and Nixon and either Bush and Clinton and Obama and yes, Kennedy and more.
Any one of those fuckers that came there and said that he wanted 'to lead', he had some 'vision', great society, any form of welfare, any form of subsidy, any form of control of private property rights, of individuals, those are the most unamerican concepts.
Ignoring your customers/followers works for gods, so that's what Apple has become apparently.
Well, those who are not aware of history are bound to repeat it.
Quote:
equity
The theory in Igalia is that we pay everyone the same. Everyone should be working with approximately the same effort, and everyone should be working on something that is valuable to the business (whether in the short-, medium-, or long-term), and so everyone should share in the income to an equal extent.
end quote.
Looks to me that the people involved should have studied history, real history, real economics and real politics. They would have immediately understood that they were trying to implement a communist experiment on a smaller scale and it was obviously going to fail, you don't need to try it to realise it. They could have learned this from history of American pilgrims that tried this with disastrous consequences, and every other attempt at this failed before and since that time. Obviously people have written about this extensively. Again, not paying attention to history ends up biting you in the ass.
The government isn't just regulating stock markets because they want a cut.
- correct, there is a secondary reason, which is buying votes of the idiots, that believe that the government must regulate everything because some of them are corner cases, and some of them got conned and because 1-10% may lead to some loss or there is a con artist in 5% cases, now 100% of businesses must suffer through regulations.
Of-course it's worse for things like Patriot Act, all of a sudden all freedoms are suspended indefinitely, and useful idiots, like the ones I am normally 'conversing' here with believe that it should be that way.
The fraud is not a problem that is worthy of destroying freedoms of all people, fraud has always existed and WITH government intervention, fraud is much more pronounced and severe and of much greater magnitude. Too big to fail does not happen in the free market, it requires enormous amount of money being printed by the Fed, enormous amounts of backstops, various fake insurances by the government, programs that push for lower and lower lending standards, artificially low interest rates.
AAA debt is only marked AAA because of the monopoly status that government grants to the rating agencies, the moment one of those agencies even dares to suggest that the gov't is NOT AAA in fact, it gets investigated, licenses get suspended (Egan Jones), there is only corruption in government, government exists to corrupt.
Politicians manipulate the markets, in fact the biggest insider traders are politicians, be it Congressmen or Senators or their staff members. The real corruption happens at the behest of the government officials and departments, not despite but because of it.
well, this is absolutely normal human behaviour, finding ways to satisfy market demand at a price that is much lower than the official, government regulated, centrally planned (and can be argued government manipulated) market provides.
Whether the government enforces prohibition or imposes high taxes on cigarettes or anything at all for that matter, people find ways to find the products at a cheaper price and the government 'cracks down' on that because it wants a much bigger cut (be it from taxes and or from sales through the only legal, government supported monopolistic markets, which is the case here).
What does it cost to comply with all government regulations to run a stock exchange? Supposedly simple question, how much does the compliance with the Patriot Act cost?
There is nothing wrong with any type of discrimination, age, sex, race, whatever, when it's not discrimination by government forces, government laws. Private people discriminate all the time, we discriminate who we work for, who works for us, who we let the apartments to, who we lease apartments from, what neighbourhood we live in, who we date, where we go out, where we buy food, etc.etc.etc.
The politicians want you to vote for them, so they promise to give you special entitlements, you being the majority, the mob, the employees. The employers are the minority that PAY for the promises of the politicians, so they have rights taken away and obligations enforced upon them to give you the entitlements, that's how all these nonsensical 'non-discrimination' laws came into effect and they are 1/3 of the problem that is destroying productivity in the West (the other 2 being taxes and inflation).
As private individuals (and businesses are just private individuals, whether you understand it or not) we have the right to discriminate against other private individuals, what we must not allow is the collective, the government with the power to destroy us to discriminate us. In case of government we must demand equality of opportunity, equality under law, equality of treatment and non-discrimination, there it's crucial. Demanding that government imposes those types of obligations upon some people with the explicit benefit to other people means destroying individual rights and at the same time hurting the economy.
The moment a group of people gets a special privilege from government, in my eyes that group of people becomes unemployable and I don't care who they are before the government gives them that privilege, women, children, disabled, retarded, stupid, fat, ugly, white or black, etc.etc. The moment a group gets a special entitlement is the moment I don't want to have to deal with that group at all, they become too expensive for me to do business with, they are dangerous and costly with no benefit to me at all.
Your assumption is gigantic (and wrong there) that raising taxes is what is needed to 'save the country', when the exact opposite is the case!
The taxes must be lowered, but they can't be lowered without first lowering government spending. Lowering the tax rates without lowering spending is not lowering taxes, it's deferring taxes into the future with the added 'bonus' of having to pay an interest on it.
To save USA what needs to be done is the exact opposite of what the mob wants, that means disassembling the modern welfare state, taking apart all government agencies that have nothing to do with what the government is for directly, which is 1 thing actually: protecting the citizens against foreign invasion.
There is nothing else a federal government should be authorised to do.
Well, the current depression is not accidental in the sense that all the policies and all the political winds, movements, the mob and the politicians agreed to take the path of least resistance, to avoid working, to shift responsibility and blame and the payments to somebody else. I absolutely agree that creating a welfare society is good for the political system to remain in power, the poor, the stupid, the uneducated always want somebody else to do it all for them at the expense of anybody, doesn't matter who becomes the sacrificial lamb. Here is a great piece of satire explaining some of this in simplest terms.
However when it comes to the three letter agencies, I think from their perspective there is no push to worsen the economic situation on purpose to push people into totalitarianism. They (3LAs) are certainly part of the problem from the POV that they are a huge cost centre (and also they are helping the uncompetitive monopolies to have an upper hand in negotiations, which is really what this spying is ALL about - money that can be made by spying on people).
But while I don't think 3LAs are pushing for a worse economic situation, they are part of the problem that causes it and they certainly wouldn't let a crisis to go to waste.
That is just sad. I don't want an easier life for my children, I want a richer life, a more interesting life, life with more opportunities, more ways to apply themselves productively and more opportunities to achieve what they set out to do.
I can subsidise a small army of children sitting around doing nothing, but why would I want that? Doing nothing? They may as well be dead at that point.
I'd like to add by linking to my comment from a while back about the need to be able to short Bitcoins in the market to smooth out volatility and increase market penetration. It is possible that ETF could be used for such a purpose, being able to borrow Bitcoins from people because ETF holds all the wallets and so giving the loans back would be centralised because storage is centralised.
However if it were anybody else but the Winklevoss, who hold a gigantic amount of Bitcoins, I would not view it in the same way. If an ETF was set up that had a specific purpose of trading Bitcoins in a centralised way where borrowing and shorting was possible, but the ETF itself did not start with a huge percentage of the entire Bitcoin market that it would be selling to the ETF buyers from its own wallet, then I could I guess see a potential for business there, but with these 2 holding on to a large percentage of all the actual Bitcoins in existence, I can't imagine that it would be a good deal for the ETF clients, it's just not, the twins are setting this up to sell you THEIR Bitcoins outside of the rest of the market.
While personally I view Bitcoins as a great experiment, first step out of many that will be taken that will in fact free the individuals from the oppression of governments by giving many viable, easy to use and very attractive alternatives to all of the things that governments have usurped to themselves as monopoly power, there is currently something else that is happening with Bitcoins.
Winklevoss twins are trying to get out of their gigantic position without crashing the market, they want to make tens of millions of dollars by selling a million or so Bitcoins by offering them via an ETF.
This is one thing that would separate the complete financial nubes from the rest: participating in this ETF.
There is not a single reason to buy ETFs if you want to bet on Bitcoins, all you need to do is buy Bitcoins themselves. An ETF makes sense when it is based around a commodity for example that has other costs associated with it, like cost of warehousing something. Say you want to buy coffee beans, you want 10 tons of them because you think the conditions are good for the prices to go up and you are going to make some money, but you don't want to store 10 tons of coffee beans and you don't want to pay various delivery fees, taxes maybe, etc. So then you can buy an ETF.
There is no such problem with Bitcoins, you store them in a file, the cost is already amortised into you owning a computer and an Internet connection and spending some time learning and installing some Bitcoin software. There is no reason for an ETF like that to exist but for the founders of it to get rid of their large position while trying to prevent market from collapsing in a short time period if they set a large sell order. So instead they create an ETF and have a pool of people buy the Bitcoins from them, it's all in that pool, outside of the rest of the market, that's their idea.
DO NOT FALL FOR IT, it's a stupid thing to do in case of Bitcoins.
If you want terrorism to stop, then just don't participate in it.
The same exact thing applies to NSA and all other government terrorist organisations.
well, you can always use my silly FF extension or many other keyboard layout switching tools (including the ones actually built into every OS) to type with DVORAK, who is stopping you?
It's 'harder' out there and yet millions of people are able to LIVE without even going outside of their house? Interesting theory, so what is feeding, clothing, taking care of them if not the wealth that the generations have accumulated and they are spending?
In reality of-course this problem has nothing to do with porn and tentacles and video games, those are just fine escape routes, the reality is that this problem started at the same time as Japan went off the competitive road into inflation driven Keynesian nightmare of an 'economy' that destroyed their real productive economy, prevented the necessary deflation (prevented prices from falling sharply and from many zombie banks and companies shutting down and restructuring). This is the result of a society that is eating itself from the inside with inflation (money printing) policies that keep an otherwise productive population from being much more productive, from being able to do with their productivity what THEY would want to do with it and instead having huge government spending programs that keep failed businesses afloat (all of which are tied to the government structures, that's Japan unfortunately) and so the productive nature of Japanese worker has been used completely inefficiently to grind gears rather than to excel in some interesting enterprises, experiments, attempts to do better than being stuck in 12 hour a day jobs that are more like military divisions rather than places where creativity drives forward the economy by increasing efficiency and creating products that actually improve people's lives.
This is Keynesian collectivism in action.
I don't need you or anybody else to hold my hand when I want to get from point A to point B, and I mean all of this hand holding is completely unnecessary to me. I travel so much that I have tried almost every type of public and private transport there is, when I choose to go somewhere I choose how to get there, I don't need any government to do any of that for me, which is why I often use illegal cabs and such.
No, what defeats the entire point of having insurance is Obamacare, of-course the geniuses on this site don't understand long term consequences of any actions, but especially of government violence committed against individual rights of people, this includes any type of violence, be it income taxes or business regulations or forced mandates for things people are not interested in 'buying' and would rather buy something else if they think it's a good deal.
Works for computer industry, the gov't isn't there subsidising computers (or mobile phones), so the industry is thriving and everybody has a phone.
There is NO difference between that and health care and insurance products, the competitive market in a free society provides the best, cheapest products and services.
As to 'who pays' - precisely. The people that buy insurance against a SPECIFIC problem pay as a pool for that problem occurring in the population that buys that insurance. Having ALL people pay that is economically retarded, it doesn't correspond to the need, it clearly abuses the resources of the people and gives insurance companies the kind of profit that they couldn't dream of, this has nothing to do with ability to pay on claims, the profit in a non-competitive industry via gov't fiat is magnitudes greater than it would be if the industry had actual competition, and services would be better, because competing companies are there to fight FOR their customers.
Of-course I am sure this will go right over your head and straight into -1 Troll whatever.
Which is why you need more of free market, not less, so that the gov't is NOT regulating new starting up HCPs out of business to maintain the oligopoly and you should also be able to shop for ANYTHING around the world, including health insurance.
You may want to buy one from an insurer in Singapore, so why shouldn't you be able to? I have a number of passports and health insurance from a country I am not actually a citizen of though I spend some time there over the year, I shop for such things, why can't Americans?
I guess what we need is universal health care with the ability for short-sighted individual assholes to opt out.
- yes please, yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes please. Of-course you are the one being short-sighted, as you said yourself:
I have tried and tried and tried, but I just don't get it.
- obviously.
The collective is fine by me as long as it does not impede on my individual rights, and every type of income tax, business profit tax, property tax, health care or pension or employment 'insurance' tax, every type of subsidy that comes out of that money that grows government and gives it more power than it would have otherwise is what impedes on my individual rights.
Only individuals matter, we are born and we die alone, the collective is an abstract (and a dangerous violent power) and cannot be put above an individual life and rights.
As to health care, it has gotten to where it is in USA from being top health care system in the world in about 50 years since Medicare, Medicaid were started that should have never been. Of-course neither should have IRS or FBI or Federal reserve or FDIC or HUD or FHA or dep't of education or dep't of energy or commerce or interior or agriculture or FDA or FCC or FAA, etc.etc.
None of it should have ever been started, NONE of it is Constitutional in USA though the corrupt system (corrupt people) just say it's "legal" anyway. Well, guess what, so are NSA taps by gov't definition.
On the side note, it's funny that people respond to me explaining that gov't destroys the economy with taxes, business regulations and money printing (inflation) by saying: there is no inflation.
Yeah, Ok, there is no inflation. Except for the stock market, housing market, education gov't 'insured' loan market, health care and thus insurance markets, energy and food... except for that... electronics you can buy cheaper or at the nearly same prices as before, so there is no inflation, why, the gov't statistics would never be used to create a picture that is not actual reality for the benefit of the ruling class.
Yes, corporations, businesses in general do want to minimize costs, that's how they can provide cheapest, most affordable products to the widest audience. Look at WalMart, the owners are billionaires, yet the store provides cheapest products to the masses of poorest in the society.
Obviously they do this by minimizing every cost that can be minimized and in the NON FREE society, like the USA is (non free because of government regulations, monopoly creation and support, money printing, bailouts for the friends of politicians, etc.etc.), this means that certain people will not find better jobs than working for WalMart, because they are not needed anywhere else at those salaries (the people working for WalMart).
They are not economically viable in the poor, non-free society outside of WalMart (well, they could do worse).
However in a free market society resources are used efficiently, this includes labor, but this also means that the free market sets price of everything, including price of labour. There shouldn't be any minimum wage laws, income taxes, money printing, most of what gov't does today (from pension handling and medical payments to student or house or any type of loan guarantees, meddling with businesses, regulating businesses, not the act of interstate commerce itself to maximize competition, but manipulating the market, preventing some businesses from working, giving others huge advantages via tax code, bailouts, fake insurance, etc.etc.)
Basically the system is broken, you are looking from inside a broken system and everything is confusing to you, so you can't understand what's white and what's black, what's up and what's down, and it's not without intent that you are so confused. There is huge amount of money that is made by politicians and politically connected as long as you stay confused and allow the government authority to go beyond the law, beyond what the Constitution allows it to do.
Singapore, Switzerland, Hong Kong, China, USA in 19th century. Those are easy examples. You better think of an example where is the economy today NOT falling apart in the world of socialism, theft and redistribution, central banking, where people are actually living free as individuals and not as a herd to be slaughtered or used as voting chips on the political table.
False choice. In free market capitalism the top few percent become extremely wealthy by providing everybody below them with best value, best possible product at lowest possible price. Your idea is that wealth is 'taken' from majority and 'given' to the wealthiest has no basis in reality in the free market. When gov't interferes with the freedom of the people, that is when your thesis becomes a real possibility as it is today, be it inflation created by the federal reserve or taxes, rules and regulations that destroy competition.
We should get people to encrypt traffic and if that takes self-signed certs then that's what we should be promoting and browsers using ridiculous warnings for self signed certificates do not promote using more of them.
Now, if every connection already had a self signed certificate except for some, that would choose CAs, then I would be talking about something else - how to add actual security to the encryption and security requires that the involved parties know who they are before they can communicate in a secure way (which is what encryption would provide once the identities are established).
However what we have today is a mostly unencrypted Internet traffic, unencrypted emails, unencrypted messages, most things are not encrypted.
As to CAs, I do not trust CAs not to work with governments and I care much more about government destroying individual freedoms than about somebody getting scammed on the Internet. How should identities be established? I think it should be done by consensus, not with someone specifically authorised and thus prone to government attack, but by many people confirming the identity that needs confirming.
I agree that the SECURITY portion of the https is screwed up, it's out of date, it's not working. However I am not talking about delivering security, I am talking about encrypting all traffic across the entire Internet with as many certificates as possible.
AFAIC it is more relevant today to encrypt all traffic and prevent government from having access to any plain text communications than provide 'security' (or whatever we see as 'security') in the current sense of the word. The security model is broken already as it is and with the government doing what it does, the real threat is the government and the security is just as much a theatre as TSA lines in airports.