I agree, talking to the cops is stupid in every which way, but I am not suggesting somebody should talk to cops. Get your lawyer obviously.
I am saying that invoking fifth amendment while being questioned by the Congress is meaningless and that the judge in this case with the encrypted harddrive just may be literally incorrect, because the data is already present, the defendant is not being forced, punished into, tortured into say anything new, create any new data, the data is there in a form independent of the suspect.
By the way, in case somebody doesn't understand what the 'fifth' is, it's the lack of authority by the government to force somebody to testify against themselves.
To understand its roots, you have to look back at when kings and other rulers would capture and torture somebody to get a 'confession'. When people are tortured, most will confess to just about anything, so torturing is a very simple way to get a conviction (or to murder somebody, whichever comes first) and using torture to get a conviction can often lead to murder at the end of torture anyway.
But that is the origin, when somebody says: "I take the fifth", what they mean is that they will not testify against themselves. But to testify against yourself you have to be a suspect, you have to be the one on trial, that's why Lois Lerner, the IRS director "taking the fifth" makes no sense, she wasn't on trial.
Saying: 'I am taking the fifth' only makes sense when you are on trial or a suspect of a police investigation, but it doesn't make sense to say "fifth" when you are testifying to Congress.
You can refuse to answer questions, but invoking the fifth amendment has no meaning in that context, AFAIC she admits her guilt and/or lack of understanding of the law when she says that.
OTOH in this case I am NOT convinced that the fifth amendment is relevant in cases of encrypted data!
Forcing somebody to unlock their data is not the same as forcing somebody to sign a statement. After all, it's real data, it's already there. By being forced to unlock the data you are not being forced to say something new, it's not new information that is on the disk, it's not like you are forced to say: I am guilty, here is the body.
You are forced to open a box that may have data providing that you are guilty, but that information is already there and it's not new, you weren't forced to first create that data and then give it up, you are forced to open the data that existed already in a form that is not attached to you, it's independent of you, it is already existing outside of you.
How is that equivalent of being tortured (or punished) into saying the words: I am guilty, here is the stuff you are looking for?
I am just being pedantic here, the fifth is not necessarily a protection against being forced to give up data that already exists that you do not have to create or produce at the moment of giving it up.
Sorry Roman, I just couldn't resist. Sometimes the target is so easy you just have to shoot it.
- you missed, as you always do. In fact you are waaaay off.
Those drones have no purpose but military, so it's a government operation, it is not profitable venture by definition, so WTF are you yapping about?
Now, if you said that government shouldn't be starting any conflicts where those drones have to be used, then yes, you would have a point. Those drones have no legitimate (Constitutional) purpose where they are used, but they are GERMAN drones, you drone. The country where I am right now, preparing for yet another long trip....
So it's not like the drone is a robot that decides where and when to fly on its own, this is not hugely different from just 2 normal large passengers jets being directed at each other by ground control.
I only wonder if there is anything like ACAS / TCAS on the drone and is the drone allowed to maneuver away from collision on its own?
No, I completely disagree with you, there is no place for government in any price setting decisions and schemes.
It's not up to the government to fix any of these real or perceived problems, it is up to the market place. If Apple truly charges 'too much', then it is nothing but an opportunity for an enterprising individual to start a competing business and provide better prices.
At the end of the day, if everything else fails that's what illegal sharing of copyrighted materials (piracy) is for, and again, government must not be allowed to make it illegal in the first place.
Copyrights and patents are the real monopoly provided by the governments.
The so called 'anti-monopoly' stance by any government in the world at any moment in time is nothing but corruption and abuse of power.
Just another case of government shakedown. It's amazing how easy it is to manipulate the public to make the public believe that there is anything behind any of this than just a case of politicians forcing a company to pay more bribes through the legalised bribery system.
This is about bribes, corruption, government corruption, politicians fishing for money by using the power that they are not actually authorised to have at all. There is no place for government in the market place telling others how to price anything.
How about DOJ actually looks at the REAL PRICE MANIPULATION AT THE FEDERAL RESERVE BANK?
The money. The real price manipulation. Half of every transaction is fixed at an artificial level by the government and you all are confused into thinking that this illegal (AFAIC, because it's unconstitutional) shakedown is something to concentrate on.
'There is now a menace which is called Twitter,' Erdogan said. 'The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society.'
- no, the social media, the information that can be spread over the Internet, the Bitcoins, the videos, the text, the sound, anything, even prices on things around the world.... all of this is a menace TO GOVERNMENT.
It's not a menace to society unless your definition of society is a herd that you are taking to the slaughterhouse.
The society does not need you, the society does not need the government, the government is an appendage that outlived its purpose.
The government is what stands in the way of freedom of an individual.
The INDIVIDUAL IS THE KING, not the government, not the collective. There is no society if the individual is not free.
No, wrong. Here is what WILL happen (and I am starting to get signals that the bottom is dropping out even as we speak), there will be a massive interest rates spike, this will completely disrupt all government spending, because yields will have to rise sharply to correspond to sharply falling bond prices. You are NOT financing that worthless crowd, at least not the way you think you are. It's not about your tax rate, whatever it is, it's about the debt, the borrowing that was done to pay for SS and Medicare and wars, etc. This borrowing caused massive increase in debt and this debt has been financed for 15 years or so with artificially low short term rates.
At these rates, the current debt 'only' costs about 300 Billion a year to USA Treasury. However I expect the interest rates to spike up sharply and then the bond and the stock markets (and housing, and education) to take a dive, however I expect MASSIVE infusion of ever more fake cash into the system by the Fed, which will happen even if not right away (they'll get confused and scared and stop for a moment, but then the political pressure will increase massively and they will restart with ever more vengeance).
Basically I am expecting (in a short time period from now) a massive interest rate spike and then collapse in government spending.
You will not be subsidising anybody, you'll be hard pressed to buy food and energy for your own consumption. This party is coming to a completely predictable conclusion and people will HAVE to find something useful to do with themselves, something productive, or they will be starving for real this time.
I feel the only cure is a guaranteed minimum income.
- provided by??? You already have that, you have tens of millions of people on food stamps (snap), you have tens of millions of people not working ever, whether welfare or disability (real or imagined) or the never ending 'employment insurance', etc.
What is it that you want more of, you want people to be born and raised into perpetually doing nothing at all with themselves?
You already have that, many people end up killing themselves because of this nothingness.
It's not true at all that there is this 'limited' amount of work out there, there are literally BILLIONS of people on this planet whose needs are NOT SATISFIED in more ways than one. How come you don't want your fellow citizens to work towards satisfying those needs in the free market and would rather see all those potential resources being wasted just because your ideology makes you feel good (because you are obviously not going to be the one being directly forced to subsidise this worthless crowd, and it's worthless if it does nothing of any use to other people).
You are giving examples of companies that HAVE savings, it's their money, that's not what I am talking about. The people who have savings because they already run successful businesses are more likely to expand their successful business model than invest in your weird long shot that nobody see succeed before.
You are not giving any example to the contrary, you are proving my point: if there are savings there is investment. The people you are talking about have savings (whatever wasn't taken away from them by the socialist / fascist State).
But there are no real savings in the system, the interest rates are artificially low, savings rate is probably at historic lows, people are paying historic high prices for things and government calls that "economic growth". It's not economic growth if the consumers have to spend more to buy fewer consumables this year than they paid for more consumables last year.
There are no real savings in the banks, banks post record profits from the carry trade between the fake money given out by the Fed and the low yielding papers sold by the Treasury, this carry trade gives creates the bond market inflation and gives them enough revenue to pump inflation into the stock market as well, while the Fed is also pumping inflation into the housing market (and other gov't guaranteed loan markets, like education, health care, etc.).
But there are no savings in the banks, there is no real money, nobody is saving when they have to pay more and more for the same goods this year that cost less last year.
There are people that are able to live on a wider margin because of the Fed, that's why there are all these hedge funds buying up single family homes in USA, bidding up prices, hoping to rent them. So it's the same money that comes to Treasury market and to stock market, actually in USA the Bond, the Stock and the Housing markets are the same market, they have the same exact risk rating in reality! There is no difference.
If somebody has real savings they can still expand their business, but why would they take a risk in this low savings environment to invest into new businesses, into your ideas?
It's about lack of real savings, it's about lack of investment, not abundance of 'dumb idea' chasers.
If there was much more savings in the system then there would be much more diversity in what businesses can get capital, but as is there same few investors are getting chased by a huge number of potential 'facebooks' or 'tumblers', etc.
So in reality what is happening is that smart people are choosing the most obvious path, they are simply chasing the very small amount of capital savings that exist and today the belief is that you need 'eyeballs' and that's it. Profits don't matter, as long as you can show revenues and eyeballs you can be the next billionaire.
But you can't be a billionaire if there is no investor willing to put a sizable chunk of money aside for your business to run debts for 5-10 years. The risk of losing that money is enormous in the system that basically punishes real capitalism and promotes socialism or fascism, whatever you want to call this system of collectivism and lack of individual rights. It's the freedoms that are the missing ingredient. Lack of freedom, huge collective that took over all the powers, enormous amount of regulation and extreme taxes and inflation. This is killing any business opportunity, carefully examine what happened to every real business in America (and Europe as well) since at least 1971, when the gold was no longer money and the entire world switched to fiat paper overnight.
The governments grew, so the spending grew, the taxes grew, the regulations grew, the number of various inspectors and regulators, the amount of legislation that businesses have to comply with, the new departments... all of this created enough barriers to businesses that they started looking for new ways to survive and they moved on to other, less regulated locations.
The inflation, the artificial unreal interest rates destroyed incentives to save, the entire policy of the modern Keynesian state is: spend, spend, spend, borrow, borrow, borrow, spend, spend, spend, print, print print what you can't borrow to spend.
There is NO PLACE there for: produce. Nothing about production, it's all about consumption, debt, spending and printing. There is nothing there that does NOT stand in the way of production.
With that in mind reassess the story here, the story here is not about smart people doing dumb things, the story here is that there are no savings, there are no investments to try something different. So people only try what they saw work the last time and they are very averse trying anything that did not already make money hand over fist for SOMEBODY, never mind how many failures this type of economy has produced trying to do the same thing over and over.
and yet the USA was set up to be a free Republic, not a monarchy, with people who set it up explicitly limiting their own power in more ways than ANY previous OR subsequent government on this planet has ever done.
Those are questions that he should answer before I bring back the main point, those are leading questions.
It is impossible to argue (unless you are a mainstream Nobel prise economist, of-course) that consumption is the driving engine of the economy rather than production. Production is the primary mover, production requires savings to be used as investments.
Paying taxes reduces the pool of savings available for investments and it grows the government, which means growing the number of the bureaucrats, who in turn do more to undermine the real economy by working towards more regulations and higher taxes and bigger government, it's a self perpetuating death spiral.
Yes, paying taxes rather than avoiding and evading them allows government to grow and function and by that very fact paying taxes is destructive to the economy.
Which are all in the hands of business. Hence the monopolization
- the governments first have to know that they have the power that is not explicitly granted to them, powers not authorised to the governments, and it's not businesses that give governments these types of power, it's the mob that votes for politicians specifically because they promise to break the law and go above and beyond any legal authorisation to steal from minorities and subsidise the mob.
Only when the government is emboldened by the mob, and enough time passes, which gives the governments enough argument for this status quo is when certain businesses can step in and use governments by bribing the politicians and even the process.
It's nonsense because nobody CAN legitimately state that their food absolutely does not contain ANY GMO material. How can you say that? How can anybody say that?
The best one can do is say that he TRIES to keep GMOs out, but from point of view of gov't and legislation and lawsuits this is not going to fly, so it will cause even more distortion and destruction of the competition in the food market and will promote more monopolisation, and it's all in the hands of governments.
Winkelmann told police their complaints about the cost and time of the exercise were effectively their own fault for indiscriminately seizing material in the first place.
- wouldn't it be something if the pigs sued Kim for them spending too much time and money in his case?
It would be a perfect trifecta, not only was he violated, his rights, his private property, not only was he threatened with deadly force for... nothing at all, they should add this one more thing: suing him for wasting THEIR time and resources.
- of-course taxes are theft, but most importantly taxes on income and property (savings, wealth) are theft.
There is a gigantic fundamental difference between income taxes and transaction or capitation taxes. The difference is enormous, it is not even close.
Capitation tax, a direct apportioned tax, it's levied upon the States proportionately to the population of different States, but before it can be levied the amount of money that government needs must be calculated and the exact amounts must be apportioned to the States to be collected!
First of all that's already gigantic difference, it requires government that actually KNOWS its spending! It requires government to announce its spending and to account for it. It requires huge restraint on how much will be collected, because if you try to take too much you'll be voted out, but what it does not allow to do is hide spending.
As to transaction taxes vs income taxes: absolutely there is a huge difference, you do not have to engage in transactions. The government wants all people to transact all the time because gov't loves collecting taxes. How much money is your leisure worth to you? To government your leisure is worthless, it doesn't add anything to the nominal GDP but it gives YOU PLEASURE.
Your pleasure cannot be added to the GDP but I implore you that your pleasure is more important to YOU than GDP:) but not to the government. I mean do you live to work or do you work so that you can enjoy something like leisure time?
Taxing your income is fundamentally different from taxing your transactions, because it reduces your savings regardless of what you do. Even if you transact to a minimum, the very moment you earn a dollar you owe taxes. With transaction taxes you can avoid them, if the gov't sets very high uniform excise taxes, import and duties, you can substitute, you can avoid that product, you can do without.
I mean the difference is enormous, how you do not see is amazing! In one case you are a FREE person, who can avoid things that are too expensive (maybe because gov't makes it too expensive). In the other situation you are a SLAVE, you are not working for yourself, you are only ALLOWED to keep some portion of the fruits of your own labour and your property that government deems appropriate.
You are allowed to keep something that you earn, if you are allowed to keep something that you earn, while the rest is taken from you, that's very different, extremely different from being taxed upon transactions that you may or may not engage in voluntarily.
Government that taxes income and property is government that grows beyond its means because there are no restraints. What do you do if you lose a job? You cut your expenses to make ends meet before you find another job, you minimise your expenditures, certainly you cut the luxury items first.
Government is a luxury item and you need to cut it when things are tough, you need to cut it first. Taxes is what you need to cut when things are tough. If it's not you, personally that loses a job, but if the entire economy is extremely unproductive, allowing the luxury portion of the spending to grow disproportionately to your earnings (and it doesn't even stay on the same level, it grows year to year), while the economy is struggling due to lack of savings and investments, well, that's the prescription for the economic meltdown, which is what is happening.
Some would point out that Bush and others cut tax rates as if that proves me wrong somehow, because "trickle down economics doesn't work".
Nothing is further from the truth, Bush and the rest never cut taxes. The tax is not the rate, the tax is what the government spends. If the gov't grows spending year to year while cutting taxes, the difference is debt and inflation (money printing), and those things go towards consumption, all that government is is consumption. Those things again, are the exact opposite o
. In the first case, the system is biased towards the ruling class. In the later, it should be beneficial to the majority of people.
- it doesn't matter who comes to steal from you, 1 person or an entire crowd. It doesn't change anything if 1 'noble' person is stealing from you or 1000 dirtbags from a ditch do that, that's irrelevant. Supporting either one is immoral and economically stupid, because it promotes consumption and not production, growth of government and not growth of business, borrowing, debt, fake money.
All disputes are solved between individuals owning private property. It's all about private property and contract law. I am not 100% against all forms of government simply because they tend to form, so I understand the reality of the situation. There WILL BE government.
The only question is (rightly) what type? A democratic republic, where the government is authorised certain powers but only limited to them and is watched closely not to go beyond those powers, that's what USA was started as over 200 years ago. That's a good form, but it only really worked until about 1913 or so.
If you are asking me for all the solutions, well, it would be presumptuous for me to offer all solutions, but I am looking at Bitcoin and I see what is possible. The governments also see it and they are scared of it, the mob sees it and it is scared of the loss of the status quo that this type of FREEDOM brings, because AFAIC the most important thing about Bitcoin is not its transactions and protocols, whatever. It's the FREEDOM to deal in a currency that is NOT created and controlled by any monopoly.
So who will decide anything in a system without total control? WHO decides how many bitcoins it takes to buy a TV? A burger? Who decides anything of any real importance?
Those come down to individual decisions of all people, maybe that's the TRUE democracy - decisions are made by individuals and their totality sets various prices in the market, and that's how we regulate, by having democratically decided PRICES.
That's the main power that gov't wants to steal from people - deciding prices on all things.
No one is forcing anyone to hold money in USD, even US citizens
- that's bending the truth, putting it mildly.
There are enough laws on the books that prevent various pension funds from investing into anything but government bonds and various 'low risk' assets that are packaged by people like JPMorgan into something they call 'sacks of shit'
but at least they tend to be more moderate than what you could expect if they didn't exist.
- you don't think theft is immoral? I will give you the economic reason in a moment, but you really think it is a moral thing to have a government that has authority to discriminate against some people and take the fruits of their labour away from them. Note, I am not talking about transaction taxes, import taxes and even capitation taxes.
There are really good ideas in USA Constitution, a direct apportioned tax (capitation tax), a uniform excise tax, those are valid means of taxing people and paying for whatever minimum government that they consent to.
Using government to set tax rates on income and wealth means that people in fact do not own anything, neither their labour nor their property, that's because that tax in its very principle a tax on property and work, that's ownership of people. The word is slavery. People shouldn't put up with slavery, they should want better for themselves than that, I consider slavery to be immoral, that's all. Government taxing income and property is slavery, because it's not simply theft.
They don't come under the cover of the night and take from you something you don't see, they set laws such that violation of those laws means you will lose your property and freedom anyway, they call that 'voluntary compliance'. There is nothing voluntary about that. However the SCOTUS deemed that providing IRS with your information on the tax return is voluntary by definition, because you are not forced to testify against yourself (the reasons are historic, you'd be tortured by some king of feudal until you testified against yourself). If you call IRS office and ask them whether submitting your information is voluntary or mandatory, they will tell you it is voluntary.
However if you do not file, you'll end up in court and possibly in jail, that's because lower courts always side with the IRS and IRS is above the law in any court.
It is impossible to have a government without funding.
- yes, but that doesn't mean that those taxes must be income and property related at all, they CAN be legitimate transaction and capitation taxes (uniform excise and direct apportioned).
However I disagree with the very premise that government needs funding because I think governments have outlived their use (if there was any ever). That's why Bitcoin is so dangerous to the governments, it is revealing the truth - there is no need for governments to deal with money at all, actually there is no need for governments, that's why Bitcoin is dangerous, it sets precedent.
Without a government, the strong will force their will on the weak and you will get a de-facto government. They won't have any qualms about taking all your stuff.
- the oldest excuse, and the reality is that there is no difference who is perpetrating the violence, a dictator or the mob via democratic elections that end up doing the same exact thing as a dictator, except it's worse, because you can't put your finger on the exact source of the problem unlike with a dictator.
What do you count as an offensive war? Waiting until you're attacked (see e.g. the UK in 1939) would be too late.
- yeah, well USA joined the WWI and helped to defeat the Kaiser, which inevitably led to the economic sanctions that pushed Germany into a serious economic downturn, which as it often does, ended up creating a worse political problem in the years before the thirties, allowing he, whose name ends threads come to power.
My point is that you should stay out of all wars, most importantly not start new wars but if a war doesn't concern you, you shouldn't get involved. You get involved and eventually it causes more war down the road. Th
Those are not things i personally approve of, those are things society as whole approves of in democratic processes.
- there is no difference from the point of view of individual who loses his rights how exactly that is done, whether it is done by a king or via democratic elections. Democracy leads to totalitarian outcomes just as well, that's why USA wasn't formed a democracy, that's why suffrage should be limited to people who actually stand to lose something that they themselves create. People who gain from the system by using democratic elections to vote for politicians that promise to take property away from a minority (and it is always a minority that suffers, the majority wouldn't vote against its own interests) are the problem.
Democracy is one form of evil, totalitarian system that ends up discriminating and subjugating the individual to the collective. Democracy is on par with dictatorship, except for a specific dictator individuals have the system go against them, so they can't even stop that type of violence by targeting a specific dictator. Can't easily kill a hydra, take one head of, 2 new ones grow back.
As to the second part of your statement, it's tied to democracy. If you do not directly benefit but you agree, do you mean that you still VOTE for those things?
If you do, then it doesn't matter if you benefit directly, you are part of the mob. The question is why you are part of the mob, but that's for you to know. Maybe you know somebody who you want to see get those benefits that are paid from the proceeds of the theft, I don't know.
Wouldn't inflation in the education-loan market mean that interest rates were high?
- let me quote Babbage here
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
1. Inflation is expansion of monetary supply. 2. Rising prices are a response to imbalance between supply and demand, where either the supply is dropping first or the demand is going up before the supply can catch up. 3. High interest rates prevent inflation.
So you see, it's hard for me to make any sense out of your comment, it's too loopy, don't know where to start but from the first principles.
Also, is the clean-energy market mature enough to have stable price indices?
- there is very little clean energy market, and what there is, is subsidised with gov't money, it's either borrowed or printed or taxed, but there is basically no real demand. The demand is being propped from the central planners with fake money, there are no price indicators there at all. It's like in a war, the private sector doesn't need tanks, the government doesn't pay market prices, it pays monopoly prices.
And how is social networking experiencing high prices?
- that's the money that people spend on 'investing' in these types of companies, money that wouldn't otherwise exist or be spent in an economy that didn't conjure up so much fake money.
Most people consider high stock prices to be a good thing.
- and as I said, I would quote Babbage again, but basically most people are morons.
Rising prices for existing assets are not indicators of a growing economy, they are indicators of an economy that is either not growing fast enough to meet the increasing demand or they are an indicator of inflation (more and more money chasing the same or shrinking pool of goods).
Inflation cannot be controlled the Fed can only create it, but it can't force it into one particular area and NOT into another.
Yes, they can buy mortgages and bonds and the gov't can guarantee loans and the banks can make the spread between the fake interest rate set by the Fed at the discount window and the fake interest on the worthless bonds and use the difference to pump up asset prices in the stock market.
NO, none of it is good at all and none of it is economic growth, all of it indicates bubbles inflated with fake money, all of it indicates sick economy, very very sick economy that is underproducing and overconsuming with fake credit.
Most people didn't see the stock market bubble in the nineties, the housing bubble in the last decade, most people are not seeing this either. As you said: most people... as I added: are idiots.
So elaborate please, you think that using government violence to take property (income or savings, I am not talking about taxing transactions here) from people in order to spend on things that you personally approve of is not theft, but you don't consider yourself to be part of the mob? How does that work exactly?
Tell me, do you also believe that somebody consuming a product is adding to the economy and somebody producing a product is not? Do you believe that consumption is more important in the economy than the production rather than being a trivial consequence of production?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, talking to the cops is stupid in every which way, but I am not suggesting somebody should talk to cops. Get your lawyer obviously.
I am saying that invoking fifth amendment while being questioned by the Congress is meaningless and that the judge in this case with the encrypted harddrive just may be literally incorrect, because the data is already present, the defendant is not being forced, punished into, tortured into say anything new, create any new data, the data is there in a form independent of the suspect.
By the way, in case somebody doesn't understand what the 'fifth' is, it's the lack of authority by the government to force somebody to testify against themselves.
To understand its roots, you have to look back at when kings and other rulers would capture and torture somebody to get a 'confession'. When people are tortured, most will confess to just about anything, so torturing is a very simple way to get a conviction (or to murder somebody, whichever comes first) and using torture to get a conviction can often lead to murder at the end of torture anyway.
But that is the origin, when somebody says: "I take the fifth", what they mean is that they will not testify against themselves. But to testify against yourself you have to be a suspect, you have to be the one on trial, that's why Lois Lerner, the IRS director "taking the fifth" makes no sense, she wasn't on trial.
Saying: 'I am taking the fifth' only makes sense when you are on trial or a suspect of a police investigation, but it doesn't make sense to say "fifth" when you are testifying to Congress.
You can refuse to answer questions, but invoking the fifth amendment has no meaning in that context, AFAIC she admits her guilt and/or lack of understanding of the law when she says that.
OTOH in this case I am NOT convinced that the fifth amendment is relevant in cases of encrypted data!
Forcing somebody to unlock their data is not the same as forcing somebody to sign a statement. After all, it's real data, it's already there. By being forced to unlock the data you are not being forced to say something new, it's not new information that is on the disk, it's not like you are forced to say: I am guilty, here is the body.
You are forced to open a box that may have data providing that you are guilty, but that information is already there and it's not new, you weren't forced to first create that data and then give it up, you are forced to open the data that existed already in a form that is not attached to you, it's independent of you, it is already existing outside of you.
How is that equivalent of being tortured (or punished) into saying the words: I am guilty, here is the stuff you are looking for?
I am just being pedantic here, the fifth is not necessarily a protection against being forced to give up data that already exists that you do not have to create or produce at the moment of giving it up.
Sorry Roman, I just couldn't resist. Sometimes the target is so easy you just have to shoot it.
- you missed, as you always do. In fact you are waaaay off.
Those drones have no purpose but military, so it's a government operation, it is not profitable venture by definition, so WTF are you yapping about?
Now, if you said that government shouldn't be starting any conflicts where those drones have to be used, then yes, you would have a point. Those drones have no legitimate (Constitutional) purpose where they are used, but they are GERMAN drones, you drone. The country where I am right now, preparing for yet another long trip....
You don't have to identify as a flying death machine...
So it's not like the drone is a robot that decides where and when to fly on its own, this is not hugely different from just 2 normal large passengers jets being directed at each other by ground control.
I only wonder if there is anything like ACAS / TCAS on the drone and is the drone allowed to maneuver away from collision on its own?
No, I completely disagree with you, there is no place for government in any price setting decisions and schemes.
It's not up to the government to fix any of these real or perceived problems, it is up to the market place. If Apple truly charges 'too much', then it is nothing but an opportunity for an enterprising individual to start a competing business and provide better prices.
At the end of the day, if everything else fails that's what illegal sharing of copyrighted materials (piracy) is for, and again, government must not be allowed to make it illegal in the first place.
Copyrights and patents are the real monopoly provided by the governments.
The so called 'anti-monopoly' stance by any government in the world at any moment in time is nothing but corruption and abuse of power.
Just another case of government shakedown. It's amazing how easy it is to manipulate the public to make the public believe that there is anything behind any of this than just a case of politicians forcing a company to pay more bribes through the legalised bribery system.
This is about bribes, corruption, government corruption, politicians fishing for money by using the power that they are not actually authorised to have at all. There is no place for government in the market place telling others how to price anything.
How about DOJ actually looks at the REAL PRICE MANIPULATION AT THE FEDERAL RESERVE BANK?
The money. The real price manipulation. Half of every transaction is fixed at an artificial level by the government and you all are confused into thinking that this illegal (AFAIC, because it's unconstitutional) shakedown is something to concentrate on.
Pathetic.
'There is now a menace which is called Twitter,' Erdogan said. 'The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society.'
- no, the social media, the information that can be spread over the Internet, the Bitcoins, the videos, the text, the sound, anything, even prices on things around the world.... all of this is a menace TO GOVERNMENT.
It's not a menace to society unless your definition of society is a herd that you are taking to the slaughterhouse.
The society does not need you, the society does not need the government, the government is an appendage that outlived its purpose.
The government is what stands in the way of freedom of an individual.
The INDIVIDUAL IS THE KING, not the government, not the collective. There is no society if the individual is not free.
No, wrong. Here is what WILL happen (and I am starting to get signals that the bottom is dropping out even as we speak), there will be a massive interest rates spike, this will completely disrupt all government spending, because yields will have to rise sharply to correspond to sharply falling bond prices. You are NOT financing that worthless crowd, at least not the way you think you are. It's not about your tax rate, whatever it is, it's about the debt, the borrowing that was done to pay for SS and Medicare and wars, etc. This borrowing caused massive increase in debt and this debt has been financed for 15 years or so with artificially low short term rates.
At these rates, the current debt 'only' costs about 300 Billion a year to USA Treasury. However I expect the interest rates to spike up sharply and then the bond and the stock markets (and housing, and education) to take a dive, however I expect MASSIVE infusion of ever more fake cash into the system by the Fed, which will happen even if not right away (they'll get confused and scared and stop for a moment, but then the political pressure will increase massively and they will restart with ever more vengeance).
Basically I am expecting (in a short time period from now) a massive interest rate spike and then collapse in government spending.
You will not be subsidising anybody, you'll be hard pressed to buy food and energy for your own consumption. This party is coming to a completely predictable conclusion and people will HAVE to find something useful to do with themselves, something productive, or they will be starving for real this time.
I feel the only cure is a guaranteed minimum income.
- provided by??? You already have that, you have tens of millions of people on food stamps (snap), you have tens of millions of people not working ever, whether welfare or disability (real or imagined) or the never ending 'employment insurance', etc.
What is it that you want more of, you want people to be born and raised into perpetually doing nothing at all with themselves?
You already have that, many people end up killing themselves because of this nothingness.
It's not true at all that there is this 'limited' amount of work out there, there are literally BILLIONS of people on this planet whose needs are NOT SATISFIED in more ways than one. How come you don't want your fellow citizens to work towards satisfying those needs in the free market and would rather see all those potential resources being wasted just because your ideology makes you feel good (because you are obviously not going to be the one being directly forced to subsidise this worthless crowd, and it's worthless if it does nothing of any use to other people).
You are giving examples of companies that HAVE savings, it's their money, that's not what I am talking about. The people who have savings because they already run successful businesses are more likely to expand their successful business model than invest in your weird long shot that nobody see succeed before.
You are not giving any example to the contrary, you are proving my point: if there are savings there is investment. The people you are talking about have savings (whatever wasn't taken away from them by the socialist / fascist State).
But there are no real savings in the system, the interest rates are artificially low, savings rate is probably at historic lows, people are paying historic high prices for things and government calls that "economic growth". It's not economic growth if the consumers have to spend more to buy fewer consumables this year than they paid for more consumables last year.
There are no real savings in the banks, banks post record profits from the carry trade between the fake money given out by the Fed and the low yielding papers sold by the Treasury, this carry trade gives creates the bond market inflation and gives them enough revenue to pump inflation into the stock market as well, while the Fed is also pumping inflation into the housing market (and other gov't guaranteed loan markets, like education, health care, etc.).
But there are no savings in the banks, there is no real money, nobody is saving when they have to pay more and more for the same goods this year that cost less last year.
There are people that are able to live on a wider margin because of the Fed, that's why there are all these hedge funds buying up single family homes in USA, bidding up prices, hoping to rent them. So it's the same money that comes to Treasury market and to stock market, actually in USA the Bond, the Stock and the Housing markets are the same market, they have the same exact risk rating in reality! There is no difference.
If somebody has real savings they can still expand their business, but why would they take a risk in this low savings environment to invest into new businesses, into your ideas?
It's about lack of real savings, it's about lack of investment, not abundance of 'dumb idea' chasers.
If there was much more savings in the system then there would be much more diversity in what businesses can get capital, but as is there same few investors are getting chased by a huge number of potential 'facebooks' or 'tumblers', etc.
So in reality what is happening is that smart people are choosing the most obvious path, they are simply chasing the very small amount of capital savings that exist and today the belief is that you need 'eyeballs' and that's it. Profits don't matter, as long as you can show revenues and eyeballs you can be the next billionaire.
But you can't be a billionaire if there is no investor willing to put a sizable chunk of money aside for your business to run debts for 5-10 years. The risk of losing that money is enormous in the system that basically punishes real capitalism and promotes socialism or fascism, whatever you want to call this system of collectivism and lack of individual rights. It's the freedoms that are the missing ingredient. Lack of freedom, huge collective that took over all the powers, enormous amount of regulation and extreme taxes and inflation. This is killing any business opportunity, carefully examine what happened to every real business in America (and Europe as well) since at least 1971, when the gold was no longer money and the entire world switched to fiat paper overnight.
The governments grew, so the spending grew, the taxes grew, the regulations grew, the number of various inspectors and regulators, the amount of legislation that businesses have to comply with, the new departments... all of this created enough barriers to businesses that they started looking for new ways to survive and they moved on to other, less regulated locations.
The inflation, the artificial unreal interest rates destroyed incentives to save, the entire policy of the modern Keynesian state is: spend, spend, spend, borrow, borrow, borrow, spend, spend, spend, print, print print what you can't borrow to spend.
There is NO PLACE there for: produce. Nothing about production, it's all about consumption, debt, spending and printing. There is nothing there that does NOT stand in the way of production.
With that in mind reassess the story here, the story here is not about smart people doing dumb things, the story here is that there are no savings, there are no investments to try something different. So people only try what they saw work the last time and they are very averse trying anything that did not already make money hand over fist for SOMEBODY, never mind how many failures this type of economy has produced trying to do the same thing over and over.
and yet the USA was set up to be a free Republic, not a monarchy, with people who set it up explicitly limiting their own power in more ways than ANY previous OR subsequent government on this planet has ever done.
Those are questions that he should answer before I bring back the main point, those are leading questions.
It is impossible to argue (unless you are a mainstream Nobel prise economist, of-course) that consumption is the driving engine of the economy rather than production. Production is the primary mover, production requires savings to be used as investments.
Paying taxes reduces the pool of savings available for investments and it grows the government, which means growing the number of the bureaucrats, who in turn do more to undermine the real economy by working towards more regulations and higher taxes and bigger government, it's a self perpetuating death spiral.
Yes, paying taxes rather than avoiding and evading them allows government to grow and function and by that very fact paying taxes is destructive to the economy.
Which are all in the hands of business. Hence the monopolization
- the governments first have to know that they have the power that is not explicitly granted to them, powers not authorised to the governments, and it's not businesses that give governments these types of power, it's the mob that votes for politicians specifically because they promise to break the law and go above and beyond any legal authorisation to steal from minorities and subsidise the mob.
Only when the government is emboldened by the mob, and enough time passes, which gives the governments enough argument for this status quo is when certain businesses can step in and use governments by bribing the politicians and even the process.
No, but the governments are preparing a full frontal assault on all market participants that are NOT selling GMOs.
That's what the bills are that are supposed to force food sellers to 'clearly label' their products as GMO or not, all that nonsense.
It's nonsense because nobody CAN legitimately state that their food absolutely does not contain ANY GMO material. How can you say that? How can anybody say that?
The best one can do is say that he TRIES to keep GMOs out, but from point of view of gov't and legislation and lawsuits this is not going to fly, so it will cause even more distortion and destruction of the competition in the food market and will promote more monopolisation, and it's all in the hands of governments.
Winkelmann told police their complaints about the cost and time of the exercise were effectively their own fault for indiscriminately seizing material in the first place.
- wouldn't it be something if the pigs sued Kim for them spending too much time and money in his case?
It would be a perfect trifecta, not only was he violated, his rights, his private property, not only was he threatened with deadly force for ... nothing at all, they should add this one more thing: suing him for wasting THEIR time and resources.
I don't think taxes are theft.
- of-course taxes are theft, but most importantly taxes on income and property (savings, wealth) are theft.
There is a gigantic fundamental difference between income taxes and transaction or capitation taxes. The difference is enormous, it is not even close.
Capitation tax, a direct apportioned tax, it's levied upon the States proportionately to the population of different States, but before it can be levied the amount of money that government needs must be calculated and the exact amounts must be apportioned to the States to be collected!
First of all that's already gigantic difference, it requires government that actually KNOWS its spending! It requires government to announce its spending and to account for it. It requires huge restraint on how much will be collected, because if you try to take too much you'll be voted out, but what it does not allow to do is hide spending.
As to transaction taxes vs income taxes: absolutely there is a huge difference, you do not have to engage in transactions. The government wants all people to transact all the time because gov't loves collecting taxes. How much money is your leisure worth to you? To government your leisure is worthless, it doesn't add anything to the nominal GDP but it gives YOU PLEASURE.
Your pleasure cannot be added to the GDP but I implore you that your pleasure is more important to YOU than GDP :) but not to the government. I mean do you live to work or do you work so that you can enjoy something like leisure time?
Taxing your income is fundamentally different from taxing your transactions, because it reduces your savings regardless of what you do. Even if you transact to a minimum, the very moment you earn a dollar you owe taxes. With transaction taxes you can avoid them, if the gov't sets very high uniform excise taxes, import and duties, you can substitute, you can avoid that product, you can do without.
I mean the difference is enormous, how you do not see is amazing! In one case you are a FREE person, who can avoid things that are too expensive (maybe because gov't makes it too expensive). In the other situation you are a SLAVE, you are not working for yourself, you are only ALLOWED to keep some portion of the fruits of your own labour and your property that government deems appropriate.
You are allowed to keep something that you earn, if you are allowed to keep something that you earn, while the rest is taken from you, that's very different, extremely different from being taxed upon transactions that you may or may not engage in voluntarily.
Government that taxes income and property is government that grows beyond its means because there are no restraints. What do you do if you lose a job? You cut your expenses to make ends meet before you find another job, you minimise your expenditures, certainly you cut the luxury items first.
Government is a luxury item and you need to cut it when things are tough, you need to cut it first. Taxes is what you need to cut when things are tough. If it's not you, personally that loses a job, but if the entire economy is extremely unproductive, allowing the luxury portion of the spending to grow disproportionately to your earnings (and it doesn't even stay on the same level, it grows year to year), while the economy is struggling due to lack of savings and investments, well, that's the prescription for the economic meltdown, which is what is happening.
Some would point out that Bush and others cut tax rates as if that proves me wrong somehow, because "trickle down economics doesn't work".
Nothing is further from the truth, Bush and the rest never cut taxes. The tax is not the rate, the tax is what the government spends. If the gov't grows spending year to year while cutting taxes, the difference is debt and inflation (money printing), and those things go towards consumption, all that government is is consumption. Those things again, are the exact opposite o
. In the first case, the system is biased towards the ruling class. In the later, it should be beneficial to the majority of people.
- it doesn't matter who comes to steal from you, 1 person or an entire crowd. It doesn't change anything if 1 'noble' person is stealing from you or 1000 dirtbags from a ditch do that, that's irrelevant. Supporting either one is immoral and economically stupid, because it promotes consumption and not production, growth of government and not growth of business, borrowing, debt, fake money.
All disputes are solved between individuals owning private property. It's all about private property and contract law. I am not 100% against all forms of government simply because they tend to form, so I understand the reality of the situation. There WILL BE government.
The only question is (rightly) what type? A democratic republic, where the government is authorised certain powers but only limited to them and is watched closely not to go beyond those powers, that's what USA was started as over 200 years ago. That's a good form, but it only really worked until about 1913 or so.
If you are asking me for all the solutions, well, it would be presumptuous for me to offer all solutions, but I am looking at Bitcoin and I see what is possible. The governments also see it and they are scared of it, the mob sees it and it is scared of the loss of the status quo that this type of FREEDOM brings, because AFAIC the most important thing about Bitcoin is not its transactions and protocols, whatever. It's the FREEDOM to deal in a currency that is NOT created and controlled by any monopoly.
So who will decide anything in a system without total control? WHO decides how many bitcoins it takes to buy a TV? A burger? Who decides anything of any real importance?
Those come down to individual decisions of all people, maybe that's the TRUE democracy - decisions are made by individuals and their totality sets various prices in the market, and that's how we regulate, by having democratically decided PRICES.
That's the main power that gov't wants to steal from people - deciding prices on all things.
No one is forcing anyone to hold money in USD, even US citizens
- that's bending the truth, putting it mildly.
There are enough laws on the books that prevent various pension funds from investing into anything but government bonds and various 'low risk' assets that are packaged by people like JPMorgan into something they call 'sacks of shit'
but at least they tend to be more moderate than what you could expect if they didn't exist.
- I fully disagree with this.
Legetimate question: why not?
- you don't think theft is immoral? I will give you the economic reason in a moment, but you really think it is a moral thing to have a government that has authority to discriminate against some people and take the fruits of their labour away from them. Note, I am not talking about transaction taxes, import taxes and even capitation taxes.
There are really good ideas in USA Constitution, a direct apportioned tax (capitation tax), a uniform excise tax, those are valid means of taxing people and paying for whatever minimum government that they consent to.
Using government to set tax rates on income and wealth means that people in fact do not own anything, neither their labour nor their property, that's because that tax in its very principle a tax on property and work, that's ownership of people. The word is slavery. People shouldn't put up with slavery, they should want better for themselves than that, I consider slavery to be immoral, that's all. Government taxing income and property is slavery, because it's not simply theft.
They don't come under the cover of the night and take from you something you don't see, they set laws such that violation of those laws means you will lose your property and freedom anyway, they call that 'voluntary compliance'. There is nothing voluntary about that. However the SCOTUS deemed that providing IRS with your information on the tax return is voluntary by definition, because you are not forced to testify against yourself (the reasons are historic, you'd be tortured by some king of feudal until you testified against yourself). If you call IRS office and ask them whether submitting your information is voluntary or mandatory, they will tell you it is voluntary.
However if you do not file, you'll end up in court and possibly in jail, that's because lower courts always side with the IRS and IRS is above the law in any court.
I have a more detailed comment on this issue here, it's lengthy, but it cites some court cases and decisions and the way IRS violates the law.
It is impossible to have a government without funding.
- yes, but that doesn't mean that those taxes must be income and property related at all, they CAN be legitimate transaction and capitation taxes (uniform excise and direct apportioned).
However I disagree with the very premise that government needs funding because I think governments have outlived their use (if there was any ever). That's why Bitcoin is so dangerous to the governments, it is revealing the truth - there is no need for governments to deal with money at all, actually there is no need for governments, that's why Bitcoin is dangerous, it sets precedent.
Without a government, the strong will force their will on the weak and you will get a de-facto government. They won't have any qualms about taking all your stuff.
- the oldest excuse, and the reality is that there is no difference who is perpetrating the violence, a dictator or the mob via democratic elections that end up doing the same exact thing as a dictator, except it's worse, because you can't put your finger on the exact source of the problem unlike with a dictator.
What do you count as an offensive war? Waiting until you're attacked (see e.g. the UK in 1939) would be too late.
- yeah, well USA joined the WWI and helped to defeat the Kaiser, which inevitably led to the economic sanctions that pushed Germany into a serious economic downturn, which as it often does, ended up creating a worse political problem in the years before the thirties, allowing he, whose name ends threads come to power.
My point is that you should stay out of all wars, most importantly not start new wars but if a war doesn't concern you, you shouldn't get involved. You get involved and eventually it causes more war down the road. Th
Those are not things i personally approve of, those are things society as whole approves of in democratic processes.
- there is no difference from the point of view of individual who loses his rights how exactly that is done, whether it is done by a king or via democratic elections. Democracy leads to totalitarian outcomes just as well, that's why USA wasn't formed a democracy, that's why suffrage should be limited to people who actually stand to lose something that they themselves create. People who gain from the system by using democratic elections to vote for politicians that promise to take property away from a minority (and it is always a minority that suffers, the majority wouldn't vote against its own interests) are the problem.
Democracy is one form of evil, totalitarian system that ends up discriminating and subjugating the individual to the collective. Democracy is on par with dictatorship, except for a specific dictator individuals have the system go against them, so they can't even stop that type of violence by targeting a specific dictator. Can't easily kill a hydra, take one head of, 2 new ones grow back.
As to the second part of your statement, it's tied to democracy. If you do not directly benefit but you agree, do you mean that you still VOTE for those things?
If you do, then it doesn't matter if you benefit directly, you are part of the mob. The question is why you are part of the mob, but that's for you to know. Maybe you know somebody who you want to see get those benefits that are paid from the proceeds of the theft, I don't know.
Wouldn't inflation in the education-loan market mean that interest rates were high?
- let me quote Babbage here
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
1. Inflation is expansion of monetary supply.
2. Rising prices are a response to imbalance between supply and demand, where either the supply is dropping first or the demand is going up before the supply can catch up.
3. High interest rates prevent inflation.
So you see, it's hard for me to make any sense out of your comment, it's too loopy, don't know where to start but from the first principles.
Also, is the clean-energy market mature enough to have stable price indices?
- there is very little clean energy market, and what there is, is subsidised with gov't money, it's either borrowed or printed or taxed, but there is basically no real demand. The demand is being propped from the central planners with fake money, there are no price indicators there at all. It's like in a war, the private sector doesn't need tanks, the government doesn't pay market prices, it pays monopoly prices.
And how is social networking experiencing high prices?
- that's the money that people spend on 'investing' in these types of companies, money that wouldn't otherwise exist or be spent in an economy that didn't conjure up so much fake money.
Most people consider high stock prices to be a good thing.
- and as I said, I would quote Babbage again, but basically most people are morons.
Rising prices for existing assets are not indicators of a growing economy, they are indicators of an economy that is either not growing fast enough to meet the increasing demand or they are an indicator of inflation (more and more money chasing the same or shrinking pool of goods).
Inflation cannot be controlled the Fed can only create it, but it can't force it into one particular area and NOT into another.
Yes, they can buy mortgages and bonds and the gov't can guarantee loans and the banks can make the spread between the fake interest rate set by the Fed at the discount window and the fake interest on the worthless bonds and use the difference to pump up asset prices in the stock market.
NO, none of it is good at all and none of it is economic growth, all of it indicates bubbles inflated with fake money, all of it indicates sick economy, very very sick economy that is underproducing and overconsuming with fake credit.
Most people didn't see the stock market bubble in the nineties, the housing bubble in the last decade, most people are not seeing this either. As you said: most people... as I added: are idiots.
So elaborate please, you think that using government violence to take property (income or savings, I am not talking about taxing transactions here) from people in order to spend on things that you personally approve of is not theft, but you don't consider yourself to be part of the mob? How does that work exactly?
You are funny.
Tell me, do you also believe that somebody consuming a product is adding to the economy and somebody producing a product is not? Do you believe that consumption is more important in the economy than the production rather than being a trivial consequence of production?