An Apple-1 computer, made in 1976, sold for a record $671,400 on Saturday at an auction in Germany, including all fees and taxes, said Uwe Breker, the German auctioneer.
That surpassed the $640,000 record for an Apple-1, set last November at a sale at the same auction house in Cologne, Germany, Auction Team Breker. The fall 2012 sale was a sharp rise from the previous record price for an Apple-1 of $374,500, set in June 2012 at Sothebyâ(TM)s in New York.
- I thought 640K was enough for everybody, apparently not until zee Germans get here.
---
As a side note
some irrational exuberance in the prices, for a machine that can do very little and originally sold for $666 (about $2,700 in current dollars).
- isn't that funny, how the official inflation (666 becomes 2700) is so far off the actual bubbles forming in various asset classes, that reflect the actual rate of inflation (666 becomes 641K) and almost none the wiser.
He is considered the fastest chizzler in his circles, uses a bleeding stone age technology, applying appropriate amount of force by his mallet to his chisel to carve the zeros and ones into a stone tablet and then run it through a special punch card reader to produce C code. Wait, that's not chizzler, that's wanker. He wanks the chizzle, not the chisel.
the real base of any economy is consumption not production
- you are mistaking inflation for the economy. Fake economy based on inflation (theft) and borrowing money from the productive people (debt) can seem like an economy based on consumption, but the truth is that the economy is only about production. Consumption is secondary and trivial consequence of production.
Yeah, governments are special alright. They are special in that they are vile, violent entities by the mob for the mob but as always the very fact that the mob votes for discrimination against a minority (anybody making more money than the majority of the mob) it creates lawless system that eventually destroys the economy and that fucked up society that 100% deserves that outcome.
By the way, if a private entity will not engage in a project it means that project should absolutely, without any doubt NOT be funded. ONLY private funding is a meaningful investment (and if it fails the failures is limited to that investor and the larger economy and society are not involved in that failure, at least not if the government is small enough that it cannot steal and redistribute to that failure).
I want to see complete deterioration of all government initiatives hopefully sooner rather than later, we need this cold shower to wake us up.
User: open valves 12 through 84 for 12 minutes. System: opening valves 12 through 84 for 12 minutes will dump 3012 tons of H2SO4 into the reactor core, which will result in fatal system failure and cause a massive explosion.
User: fuck you, I am the user.
System: opening valves 12 through 84, 11:59 minutes until valve shutdown...... 12 minutes later:
Isn't it fascinating how much people hate paying their taxes while loving to impose higher taxes on others, especially on those, that make more than they do?
AFAIC all income and wealth related taxes are immoral and must be illegal. All wealth transfer schemes are immoral and must be illegal. All taxes on income are also bad from POV of economics and must be stopped for that reason as well.
Any scheme that uses violence (government power) to take away property (savings, wealth) and productive output (income, earnings, dividends, capital gains, rent) from people is immoral and must be stopped. If the government evil is necessary, it must be minimised by using direct apportioned and excise taxes in a completely transparent and open way that would allow people to vote away government for raising taxes.
The whole game is set up so that a few accumulate a lot that could otherwise be feeding the many.
- this entire story is of-course full of socialists envious (jealous) of more successful people, socialists that completely miss the entire point that wealthy individuals like Gates created that wealth, without them that wealth doesn't exist and it doesn't pay for anybody's food because it is not brought into existence in the first place.
Also this topic is filled with completely ignorant people that don't understand anything about economics, believing that money that Gates and other like him have money that is not in fact being used by the economy, as if it is outside of the economy. His money is being used productively, that's why he is able to grow it while donating huge amounts to charity.
Given the attitude of the mob in his place I would probably convert my money into gold or commodities, like oil or food and then shoot it into space with space rockets rather than donating it to anybody, it's immeasurable how sick and ignorant you all are.
Not a baby but a rotten corpse. You don't have to sign any contract with a publisher, very few would, so to sell books they would not ask you to. Ever been to countries where they don't care about copyright? Publishers are in business there as well.
AFAIC all patents and copyright should be abolished on a general principle that government has no authority to protect or promote any business (or private protection scheme of any ideas or implementations) in the first place and all of a sudden the problem disappears. You want protection? It's your private business, use trade secrets and contracts.
It should be noticed that the decision in the story does not do that. You can patent your business idea or implementation, but it should be an idea or implementation that is not a pure math. So you can't patent a theorem on faster signal transformation but probably can patent business idea on using your faster formula to achieve a specific result.
The point that you're missing is that every time there was any resource contention, any conflict whatsoever, the larger, more organized group of people won out.
- I am not missing anything, the entire point of USA Constitution is to ensure that individuals are not treated by the government in that exact manner - where the federal government exercises its power to destroy any freedoms of individuals (and when we talk about State rights, we are not automatically giving authority to State governments, we are talking about individual rights).
The point (and which you're missing again) is that there's always a power center. If government is weak - whether it is by design, or because it is too local - it is overtaken by private power
- no, you are missing the point. With local decisions being made locally (and for all I care even your street shouldn't be forced into a scheme of government that it objects to) there is competition and thus you have huge number of choices, real choices that you can make as to how you prefer your locality to be governed if at all. I am not talking about restricting your ability to gang together with a bunch of likeminded neighbours and to come up with your own system of local government if you want one.
The problem with that ridiculous assertion is that the only people who think that way are those whose basic needs are fulfilled, aren't threatened by government overreach or warlord terror
- so you know all about all "those people" and you know all of their personal conditions. By the way, your personal conditions are not supposed to change the way a government treats you under law, whatever your personal circumstances are, you shouldn't be getting any special treatment. That's the only way to achieve a society that does not discriminate against people while creating the most diverse market, market where individuals are not obstructed from actually creating new wealth and are not punished for that either.
Holy crap. I had no idea that you could so completely misread Stalin.
- I didn't misread a thing. He was happy he could control people easier because to them very large numbers stop being personal and become abstract.
Of-course Stalin and every ruler like him and every government employee under him should be tried for every case of murder, every case of maiming, every case of destruction and confiscation of private property.
Millions upon millions of cases because these government kill, maim, steal from millions and millions of individuals. That's what is lost when people think of others as just of large numbers - the fact that they are individuals.
That's it. If something has the slightest negative effect on you, it is terrible, regardless of how much it helps others.
- millions of people were killed by Stalin's government. I don't know where you see positive effects in that, positive effects for the entire country in fact, that was robbed of the most incentivized, most individually entrepreneurial people.
Considering how badly you mangled the Stalin quote, I'm waiting for the entire paragraph in Mein Kampf where you got that quote from. In German.
- I am in Germany. I spend enough time here over the last 3 years that I can easily give you the necessary paragraphs, but will YOU be able to read them?
Der Foderalismus als Maske...
Die Bedeutung der Einzelstaaten wird kunftig uberhaupt nicht mehr auf staats- und machtpolitischem Gebiet liegen; ich erblicke sie entweder auf stammesmassigem oder auf kulturpolitischem Gebiete. Allein selbst hier wird Heer und Einzelstaaten die Zeit nivellierende wirken. Die Leichtigkeit des modernen Verkehrs schuttelt die Menschen derart durcheinander, dass langsam und stetig die Stammesgrenzen verwischt werden und so selbst das kulturelle Bild sich allmahli
there hasn't been a single group of people operating without a central government that has made a mark on history.
- I see, so what you are looking for is an empire, you can't just have people living without being oppressed by an empire because you are looking for "historic marks". Well, that's your idea - there should be 'historic marks' and the human cost is irrelevant.
But we know of historic marks, Stalin was historically remarkable. So was Lenin. Hitler. Mao. Pol Pot. Nixon. Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy. FDR. Hoover. Teddy Roosevelt. Bush the first. Clinton. W. Obama. Genghis Khan. Alexander. many more, I do not consider them to be good for people as a general principle though they left their marks alright.
OTOH I consider people like Martin van Buren to be historically significant because they did NOT leave marks like that and instead allowed the PEOPLE to live their lives in a much freer society because of much smaller government intrusion. He was for complete separation of government from banking, from money, from business in general and he did not sell out for more power. He strengthened peace with the British instead of pursuing war.
Warren Harding would be another case, he was the POTUS when USA went through its first Federal reserve inflated bubble crash that cause a depression. He did not do anything and instead cut government spending by 70% and the problem dissipated in 1.5 years.
(you still haven't defined where central government stops and local government starts, by the way)
- good question. As with everything there are grey areas here, but at the least with local governments you know the people that are elected, they live in your town probably and they do their business in the town, they are responsible to people in the town. I suppose the real difference is proximity to power, the more central the power is the further away you are from it, the more abstract it is, the more institutionalised it is, the less you can have direct influence on the outcomes for your locality. Ideally there is enough competition that you can choose to live in a town with central government or in a town where there is no government of any kind at all and all decisions are completely on individual and business levels.
the ones with a larger or more effective central governments always won out.
- you find this to be desirable, I do not.
the largest and most successful nations/organizations in history were marked by highly effective, pervasive and very large central governments.
- I disagree with your definition of the word 'successful'.
AFAIC any system that destroys individual rights is unsuccessful by definition. What is the success for an individual in that scenario? Ability to steal from a minority by using a huge institutionalised authority that has enough apparatus at hand that crashing an individual is not even an afterthought, I disagree that this is even remotely a success story.
Just for fun, show me nation-wide numbers.
I will do better. Stalin said something I agree with: when a person is killed people see it as a tragedy. When millions are killed, that's just statistics.
Governments are the biggest criminals and harbour the biggest criminals in history of humanity. Every government that started a war for power and resources and egos are criminal by definition. In the eyes of history the only difference between war criminals and heroes is who lives to tell the story.
I don't need to talk about hundreds of millions killed by central governments over the millennia, how about Iraq to make this simple? What local government, what private institution or individual can boast up to a million people dead over 10 years of murder and destruction?
Did you know that in Mein Kampf, Hitler specifically argued that the State power must be diminished for the explicit purpose of increasin
So people cannot handle criminal cases without central gov't so is central gov't made of Martians? BTW kangaroo court is central gov't specialty. Should I bother typing up names, name after name after name of people tried by central gov't kangaroos? Worse than court, how is that Gitmo this time of year?
People don't need government, especially central gov't to carry out justice for criminal acts. Given that central gov't more often than not protects real criminals and creates moral hazards that provide incentives to increase acts of criminality, central gov't is actually counter productive to preventing crimes. Cost benefit analysis? It's on you to prive that big gov't reduces crime and increases prosperity, all facts show that the very opposite is the case.
Of-course Australian government will block your Internet access to materials it finds inappropriate, whatever that means, you have given your government enough power to do things like that. Gun control was implemented in the same way, taxing income on a graduated scale, telling people what they can and cannot do with their private property, same for people running businesses, all of this grows and emboldens the government and when governments grow and become emboldened people shrink and become scared little nothings.
Wait wait, are you forcing those B&M businesses to collect sales taxes from customers who set a foot in their stores for cases where the customers crossed city and maybe State lines?
Are you also forcing these B&M businesses to send the checks to all the governments that must now receive that tax money?
No no, while the federal gov't can legally tax transactions in a uniform manner, this is different. This is federal gov't saying that businesses must collect taxes from customers based on the customer origin, home State even home municipality ( county maybe ).
The precedent here is terrible actually. This allows States that have no business of some kind to force businesses from other States to collect transaction taxes on their behalf.
Think about a couple of simple examples: Hollywood is where? Right, in California. So now this type of legislation means that all of a sudden Michigan gov't can force Hollywood companies to collect taxes from people watching movies and send the money to Michigan.
NY has stock exchange but maybe Alaska does not, so can Alaska now force NY stock exchanges to collect sales taxes and send the money to Alaska? And why wouldn't Alaska want that, and it wouldn't even affect business in Alaska (but it would have an chilling effect in NY and for Alaska residents and for the greater economy).
AND if this seems to you like an 'equaliser', riddle me this: why is federal gov't in business of 'equalising' competition?
Only because the "gold wackos" hoard it and keep trying to convince everyone else to hoard it.
- actually quite the opposite. People are accumulating bonds and dollars, should I call them 'paper wackos'? Who do you think ends up in a better position due to inflation? What happens to 'paper wackos' when the inevitable bond market collapse and thus dollar collapse happens? The house of cards in the housing market (not really a pun, just a coincidental turn of phrase) collapsed eventually, it was fiat money printed, chasing approximately the same number of assets (houses) and a belief that there can be such a thing as 'consumer based economy'. Well, people didn't really learn anything, so they still believe that but now instead of houses a new stock market bubble and of-course the bond bubble are being inflated.
Who is going to be worse off at the end, well, I am not an oracle, but I already placed my bet.
- if the people in power like "shiny rocks,"
- quite the opposite, you are still under the wrong impression. People in power HATE gold, people in power want to stay in power by creating inflation and expanding their power with 'money' that they never have to work for, they never have to save, it's not their money, it's not real money. People in power want to squish every alternative to their preferred way of taking your purchasing power away from you, and that's how it's done - with inflation.
I'm NOT saying that it's likely that all the powerful people in the world will suddenly stop liking "shiny rocks."
- as I said, they hate real money. As a famous banker said some time ago: give me the control over nation's currency supply and I don't care who comes up with what laws.
But clearly gold's value has fluctuated over time as people have temporarily changed their investment strategies, both to and from the "shiny rock strategy."
- gold is not investment, it's money. A dividend paying business is investment, gold is money. You don't invest in money, but you can store value in real money (but not in paper).
specified a RARE type of bottle cap, so it would not be subject to inflation
- bottle caps are not universally accepted, maybe only among collectors. Gold is understood and recognised by people, bottle caps are not. At the end any bottle cap can be manufactured, you can't just manufacture gold like you can any other product, you have to mine for it and that means you have serious physical constraints on the new amount that you can get.
If you have power and control over significant resources, you can dictate what functions as currency. Gold is only a solution as long as you keep convincing those people that it is... otherwise, it has little inherent value. Any other random rare item could function just as well.
- no, you are still confusing fiat with people's choice.
fiat currencies and gold operate on the same ultimate basis of value, though, in that they are only valuable because people are willing to take them in exchange for other goods that they actually need -- and that requires a collective social "faith" in the inherent value of an item of ultimately little real value.
- while I agree with you that everything depends on whether we ultimately accept it or not, I am only looking at history of this world and making a rational argument based on that history, nothing else.
Slashdot Mirror
An Apple-1 computer, made in 1976, sold for a record $671,400 on Saturday at an auction in Germany, including all fees and taxes, said Uwe Breker, the German auctioneer.
That surpassed the $640,000 record for an Apple-1, set last November at a sale at the same auction house in Cologne, Germany, Auction Team Breker. The fall 2012 sale was a sharp rise from the previous record price for an Apple-1 of $374,500, set in June 2012 at Sothebyâ(TM)s in New York.
- I thought 640K was enough for everybody, apparently not until zee Germans get here.
---
As a side note
some irrational exuberance in the prices, for a machine that can do very little and originally sold for $666 (about $2,700 in current dollars).
- isn't that funny, how the official inflation (666 becomes 2700) is so far off the actual bubbles forming in various asset classes, that reflect the actual rate of inflation (666 becomes 641K) and almost none the wiser.
He is considered the fastest chizzler in his circles, uses a bleeding stone age technology, applying appropriate amount of force by his mallet to his chisel to carve the zeros and ones into a stone tablet and then run it through a special punch card reader to produce C code. Wait, that's not chizzler, that's wanker. He wanks the chizzle, not the chisel.
given the choice between candidate A, where you can find those mistakes on line, and B, where you can't, B will generally win.
- good, selective pressure in action.
Â
the real base of any economy is consumption not production
- you are mistaking inflation for the economy. Fake economy based on inflation (theft) and borrowing money from the productive people (debt) can seem like an economy based on consumption, but the truth is that the economy is only about production. Consumption is secondary and trivial consequence of production.
Yeah, governments are special alright. They are special in that they are vile, violent entities by the mob for the mob but as always the very fact that the mob votes for discrimination against a minority (anybody making more money than the majority of the mob) it creates lawless system that eventually destroys the economy and that fucked up society that 100% deserves that outcome.
By the way, if a private entity will not engage in a project it means that project should absolutely, without any doubt NOT be funded. ONLY private funding is a meaningful investment (and if it fails the failures is limited to that investor and the larger economy and society are not involved in that failure, at least not if the government is small enough that it cannot steal and redistribute to that failure).
I want to see complete deterioration of all government initiatives hopefully sooner rather than later, we need this cold shower to wake us up.
User: open valves 12 through 84 for 12 minutes.
System: opening valves 12 through 84 for 12 minutes will dump 3012 tons of H2SO4 into the reactor core, which will result in fatal system failure and cause a massive explosion.
User: fuck you, I am the user.
System: opening valves 12 through 84, 11:59 minutes until valve shutdown. ..... 12 minutes later:
User: UNDO UNDO.... ... BAM...
Isn't it fascinating how much people hate paying their taxes while loving to impose higher taxes on others, especially on those, that make more than they do?
AFAIC all income and wealth related taxes are immoral and must be illegal. All wealth transfer schemes are immoral and must be illegal. All taxes on income are also bad from POV of economics and must be stopped for that reason as well.
Any scheme that uses violence (government power) to take away property (savings, wealth) and productive output (income, earnings, dividends, capital gains, rent) from people is immoral and must be stopped. If the government evil is necessary, it must be minimised by using direct apportioned and excise taxes in a completely transparent and open way that would allow people to vote away government for raising taxes.
The whole game is set up so that a few accumulate a lot that could otherwise be feeding the many.
- this entire story is of-course full of socialists envious (jealous) of more successful people, socialists that completely miss the entire point that wealthy individuals like Gates created that wealth, without them that wealth doesn't exist and it doesn't pay for anybody's food because it is not brought into existence in the first place.
Also this topic is filled with completely ignorant people that don't understand anything about economics, believing that money that Gates and other like him have money that is not in fact being used by the economy, as if it is outside of the economy. His money is being used productively, that's why he is able to grow it while donating huge amounts to charity.
Given the attitude of the mob in his place I would probably convert my money into gold or commodities, like oil or food and then shoot it into space with space rockets rather than donating it to anybody, it's immeasurable how sick and ignorant you all are.
twenty-four years old... keep these kids off my lawn
- let me be one (maybe first right at this second) to say: ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haaa! nice troll
And it was a mistake.
Not a baby but a rotten corpse. You don't have to sign any contract with a publisher, very few would, so to sell books they would not ask you to. Ever been to countries where they don't care about copyright? Publishers are in business there as well.
AFAIC all patents and copyright should be abolished on a general principle that government has no authority to protect or promote any business (or private protection scheme of any ideas or implementations) in the first place and all of a sudden the problem disappears. You want protection? It's your private business, use trade secrets and contracts.
It should be noticed that the decision in the story does not do that. You can patent your business idea or implementation, but it should be an idea or implementation that is not a pure math. So you can't patent a theorem on faster signal transformation but probably can patent business idea on using your faster formula to achieve a specific result.
He is French and came 5o the USA for opportunities but he never dropper his innate socialist ideology, his mind is a mess.
The point that you're missing is that every time there was any resource contention, any conflict whatsoever, the larger, more organized group of people won out.
- I am not missing anything, the entire point of USA Constitution is to ensure that individuals are not treated by the government in that exact manner - where the federal government exercises its power to destroy any freedoms of individuals (and when we talk about State rights, we are not automatically giving authority to State governments, we are talking about individual rights).
The point (and which you're missing again) is that there's always a power center. If government is weak - whether it is by design, or because it is too local - it is overtaken by private power
- no, you are missing the point. With local decisions being made locally (and for all I care even your street shouldn't be forced into a scheme of government that it objects to) there is competition and thus you have huge number of choices, real choices that you can make as to how you prefer your locality to be governed if at all. I am not talking about restricting your ability to gang together with a bunch of likeminded neighbours and to come up with your own system of local government if you want one.
The problem with that ridiculous assertion is that the only people who think that way are those whose basic needs are fulfilled, aren't threatened by government overreach or warlord terror
- so you know all about all "those people" and you know all of their personal conditions. By the way, your personal conditions are not supposed to change the way a government treats you under law, whatever your personal circumstances are, you shouldn't be getting any special treatment. That's the only way to achieve a society that does not discriminate against people while creating the most diverse market, market where individuals are not obstructed from actually creating new wealth and are not punished for that either.
Holy crap. I had no idea that you could so completely misread Stalin.
- I didn't misread a thing. He was happy he could control people easier because to them very large numbers stop being personal and become abstract.
Of-course Stalin and every ruler like him and every government employee under him should be tried for every case of murder, every case of maiming, every case of destruction and confiscation of private property.
Millions upon millions of cases because these government kill, maim, steal from millions and millions of individuals. That's what is lost when people think of others as just of large numbers - the fact that they are individuals.
That's it. If something has the slightest negative effect on you, it is terrible, regardless of how much it helps others.
- millions of people were killed by Stalin's government. I don't know where you see positive effects in that, positive effects for the entire country in fact, that was robbed of the most incentivized, most individually entrepreneurial people.
Considering how badly you mangled the Stalin quote, I'm waiting for the entire paragraph in Mein Kampf where you got that quote from. In German.
- I am in Germany. I spend enough time here over the last 3 years that I can easily give you the necessary paragraphs, but will YOU be able to read them?
Der Foderalismus als Maske ...
Die Bedeutung der Einzelstaaten wird kunftig uberhaupt nicht mehr auf staats- und machtpolitischem Gebiet liegen; ich erblicke sie entweder auf stammesmassigem oder auf kulturpolitischem Gebiete. Allein selbst hier wird
Heer und Einzelstaaten die Zeit nivellierende wirken. Die Leichtigkeit des modernen Verkehrs schuttelt die Menschen derart durcheinander, dass langsam und stetig die Stammesgrenzen verwischt werden und so selbst das kulturelle Bild sich allmahli
there hasn't been a single group of people operating without a central government that has made a mark on history.
- I see, so what you are looking for is an empire, you can't just have people living without being oppressed by an empire because you are looking for "historic marks". Well, that's your idea - there should be 'historic marks' and the human cost is irrelevant.
But we know of historic marks, Stalin was historically remarkable. So was Lenin. Hitler. Mao. Pol Pot. Nixon. Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy. FDR. Hoover. Teddy Roosevelt. Bush the first. Clinton. W. Obama. Genghis Khan. Alexander. many more, I do not consider them to be good for people as a general principle though they left their marks alright.
OTOH I consider people like Martin van Buren to be historically significant because they did NOT leave marks like that and instead allowed the PEOPLE to live their lives in a much freer society because of much smaller government intrusion. He was for complete separation of government from banking, from money, from business in general and he did not sell out for more power. He strengthened peace with the British instead of pursuing war.
Warren Harding would be another case, he was the POTUS when USA went through its first Federal reserve inflated bubble crash that cause a depression. He did not do anything and instead cut government spending by 70% and the problem dissipated in 1.5 years.
(you still haven't defined where central government stops and local government starts, by the way)
- good question. As with everything there are grey areas here, but at the least with local governments you know the people that are elected, they live in your town probably and they do their business in the town, they are responsible to people in the town. I suppose the real difference is proximity to power, the more central the power is the further away you are from it, the more abstract it is, the more institutionalised it is, the less you can have direct influence on the outcomes for your locality. Ideally there is enough competition that you can choose to live in a town with central government or in a town where there is no government of any kind at all and all decisions are completely on individual and business levels.
the ones with a larger or more effective central governments always won out.
- you find this to be desirable, I do not.
the largest and most successful nations/organizations in history were marked by highly effective, pervasive and very large central governments.
- I disagree with your definition of the word 'successful'.
AFAIC any system that destroys individual rights is unsuccessful by definition. What is the success for an individual in that scenario? Ability to steal from a minority by using a huge institutionalised authority that has enough apparatus at hand that crashing an individual is not even an afterthought, I disagree that this is even remotely a success story.
Just for fun, show me nation-wide numbers.
I will do better. Stalin said something I agree with: when a person is killed people see it as a tragedy. When millions are killed, that's just statistics.
Governments are the biggest criminals and harbour the biggest criminals in history of humanity. Every government that started a war for power and resources and egos are criminal by definition. In the eyes of history the only difference between war criminals and heroes is who lives to tell the story.
I don't need to talk about hundreds of millions killed by central governments over the millennia, how about Iraq to make this simple? What local government, what private institution or individual can boast up to a million people dead over 10 years of murder and destruction?
Did you know that in Mein Kampf, Hitler specifically argued that the State power must be diminished for the explicit purpose of increasin
So people cannot handle criminal cases without central gov't so is central gov't made of Martians? BTW kangaroo court is central gov't specialty. Should I bother typing up names, name after name after name of people tried by central gov't kangaroos? Worse than court, how is that Gitmo this time of year?
People don't need government, especially central gov't to carry out justice for criminal acts. Given that central gov't more often than not protects real criminals and creates moral hazards that provide incentives to increase acts of criminality, central gov't is actually counter productive to preventing crimes. Cost benefit analysis? It's on you to prive that big gov't reduces crime and increases prosperity, all facts show that the very opposite is the case.
Don't forget I'm also part jewish (mother side), that should really twist your panties into a knot.
Confusing individual freedoms and criminal negligence on your part I can understand, but confusing Australia and Bangladesh is something new.
No, you'll get the real 'oops' when you will realise that you didn't check that 'Post Anonymously' box.... twice.
Of-course Australian government will block your Internet access to materials it finds inappropriate, whatever that means, you have given your government enough power to do things like that. Gun control was implemented in the same way, taxing income on a graduated scale, telling people what they can and cannot do with their private property, same for people running businesses, all of this grows and emboldens the government and when governments grow and become emboldened people shrink and become scared little nothings.
(Pro-Tip: The Federal Reserve, despite its name, is not a government entity.)
- then show us one time (1) in the last 20 years when the Fed refused to monetise government debt please.
Wait wait, are you forcing those B&M businesses to collect sales taxes from customers who set a foot in their stores for cases where the customers crossed city and maybe State lines?
Are you also forcing these B&M businesses to send the checks to all the governments that must now receive that tax money?
No no, while the federal gov't can legally tax transactions in a uniform manner, this is different. This is federal gov't saying that businesses must collect taxes from customers based on the customer origin, home State even home municipality ( county maybe ).
The precedent here is terrible actually. This allows States that have no business of some kind to force businesses from other States to collect transaction taxes on their behalf.
Think about a couple of simple examples: Hollywood is where? Right, in California. So now this type of legislation means that all of a sudden Michigan gov't can force Hollywood companies to collect taxes from people watching movies and send the money to Michigan.
NY has stock exchange but maybe Alaska does not, so can Alaska now force NY stock exchanges to collect sales taxes and send the money to Alaska? And why wouldn't Alaska want that, and it wouldn't even affect business in Alaska (but it would have an chilling effect in NY and for Alaska residents and for the greater economy).
AND if this seems to you like an 'equaliser', riddle me this: why is federal gov't in business of 'equalising' competition?
Read these words:
Java.
Malware.
Security.
Flaw.
Now watch this interview (and maybe the blooper reel as well)
and then read these words once again:
Java.
Malware.
Security.
Flaw.
I bet you are reading these in that zombie voice now.
Only because the "gold wackos" hoard it and keep trying to convince everyone else to hoard it.
- actually quite the opposite. People are accumulating bonds and dollars, should I call them 'paper wackos'? Who do you think ends up in a better position due to inflation? What happens to 'paper wackos' when the inevitable bond market collapse and thus dollar collapse happens? The house of cards in the housing market (not really a pun, just a coincidental turn of phrase) collapsed eventually, it was fiat money printed, chasing approximately the same number of assets (houses) and a belief that there can be such a thing as 'consumer based economy'. Well, people didn't really learn anything, so they still believe that but now instead of houses a new stock market bubble and of-course the bond bubble are being inflated.
Who is going to be worse off at the end, well, I am not an oracle, but I already placed my bet.
- if the people in power like "shiny rocks,"
- quite the opposite, you are still under the wrong impression. People in power HATE gold, people in power want to stay in power by creating inflation and expanding their power with 'money' that they never have to work for, they never have to save, it's not their money, it's not real money. People in power want to squish every alternative to their preferred way of taking your purchasing power away from you, and that's how it's done - with inflation.
I'm NOT saying that it's likely that all the powerful people in the world will suddenly stop liking "shiny rocks."
- as I said, they hate real money. As a famous banker said some time ago: give me the control over nation's currency supply and I don't care who comes up with what laws.
But clearly gold's value has fluctuated over time as people have temporarily changed their investment strategies, both to and from the "shiny rock strategy."
- gold is not investment, it's money. A dividend paying business is investment, gold is money. You don't invest in money, but you can store value in real money (but not in paper).
specified a RARE type of bottle cap, so it would not be subject to inflation
- bottle caps are not universally accepted, maybe only among collectors. Gold is understood and recognised by people, bottle caps are not. At the end any bottle cap can be manufactured, you can't just manufacture gold like you can any other product, you have to mine for it and that means you have serious physical constraints on the new amount that you can get.
If you have power and control over significant resources, you can dictate what functions as currency. Gold is only a solution as long as you keep convincing those people that it is... otherwise, it has little inherent value. Any other random rare item could function just as well.
- no, you are still confusing fiat with people's choice.
fiat currencies and gold operate on the same ultimate basis of value, though, in that they are only valuable because people are willing to take them in exchange for other goods that they actually need -- and that requires a collective social "faith" in the inherent value of an item of ultimately little real value.
- while I agree with you that everything depends on whether we ultimately accept it or not, I am only looking at history of this world and making a rational argument based on that history, nothing else.