as a non-Texan libertarian, I find it unacceptable that any government official should be able to interfere with anybody's choice on doing or not doing abortion, but I do believe that there has to be some rule about the length of term, once that term passes, abortion is no longer just a concern of the woman, there is actually a living organism inside of her that could live outside and thus should get protection under law. Maybe that's 6 or 7 month, I am not a doctor to tell. Regardless, it is beyond the authorisation of the federal government powers to legislate such things.
So, at what point do we wake up and realize that current models of hardware and software development are fundamentally flawed in terms of having products which by their very nature introduce unacceptable security risks to store any data or information?
- at no point, because it's not true.
There is nothing flawed about our hardware and software models, nothing more flawed than for example our own replication machinery built into each one of us, and it is complex and it sometimes produces unfortunate results.
It is all a cost benefit analysis and basically if we were to scrap our current models and to throw away the hardware and the software and to start from scratch (or whatever you are talking about), the results would be similar to us giving up all of our technology and going back to the caveman ages because we don't have the perfect technology and perfect outcomes and perfect solutions.
Cost benefit tells us that we put as much energy as we can to build up these systems and we are getting a very good use of them and that if we tried to spend every waking moment of every day just trying to build the most perfect solutions, the benefit would be very marginal and not actually worth the effot (not that we would succeed, by the way, that's not a guarantee at all).
Security researchers tore holes through all major web browsers, breaking Windows 8 and Java, too (though the latter feat is not remarkable).
- at this point I have to wonder what are the underlying reasons for the obvious bias present on/. against Java, because clearly there is something at work here, so where does the money trail lead? Is Dice holding a short position against Oracle or something? Is there something else going on? Is it a pro-Apple product and anti-Android stand?
Personally I dislike Oracle as a company because of their insidious penetration of all facets of medium to large businesses (everything must be Oracle), but not Java as a language or as a VM. Obviously the sandboxed JVM browser plugin has various issues, but the slander against the entire Java platform is getting repetitive.
While a Java browser plugin may have security problems, I fail to see how this relates to server side Java usage (as an example).
OTOH even/. comments are so confused, mixing terms, mixing notions such as Java and Javascript and browser plugin, etc., permanently labelling JVM (or Java, I don't know which anymore) as a 'slow language' or 'slow platform' (again, there are too many of these too keep track) and whenever somebody says something to this effect without upfront stating exactly what they are talking about, it leads to page long threads that can't even agree on teh terms they are using.
If you won't have military tanks on the streets of LA or NY or any city, then you can't have military drones in the skies.
Of-course OTOH this may be just a semantics then, once the local police and FBI acquire these weapons (and they do have some of them already, at some point they will be armed).
But then can't the local police sheriff buy some F-15s? If not why not? If yes, then can he use them to attack somebody? Attack somebody that is not imminent threat to anybody (as Rand Paul said a number of times 'sitting in a cafe)
Your local cops are not allowed to kill people on a hunch that they may be dangerous at some point, because maybe they cheer for some 'bad people', instead a judge is asked for an arrest warrant and the cops are supposed to bring the person in for interrogation, and the person should get all the protections allowed by the Law.
The cops are not allowed to do this, the judge is not allowed to kill anybody without due process either, so the real question here is NOT about any specific weapon, military or not.
This is the question about GOVERNMENT - what can it really do, what is it really allowed to do, what rights do you really have?
USA government doesn't believe in the Constitution, but this is not a surprise, the American mob doesn't believe in the Constitution. The moment there is any discrimination enforced by government is the moment when the government elevates itself above the law.
Yes, I am talking about the slippery slope argument, the camel's nose under the tent, but it is true. At some point the mob allowed the government to step over many of the individual rights supposedly for the purpose of 'social justice', but there is a conflict there, contradiction in terms. You can't have 'justice' if you argue for discrimination.
Arguing for higher taxes on some bracket of population while arguing for subsidies for yourself is discrimination, that's the type of discrimination that the mob cheers for, but eventually it goes full circle and takes away all rights from all individuals.
You can't give up just SOME rights, once you give up ANY rights, you give up ALL rights.
It reminds me of the credit-rating agencies:P private companies that somehow are magically authorized to suck up all of your financial information and sell it. At least the US finally added the ability for you to "freeze" your credit data. That's the wrong way around - they ought to have to actively ask for permission, but it's better than nothing.
- wait a moment, you may want to HIDE that you are a terrible credit risk, but how is that good for the economy and for the potential lenders that also don't want to lose money if they give you credit?
In case of your credit score, this is not just your private information, you are mistaken about that. This is information that concerns your creditors much more than you, because if you steal or lose their money, then they are the victim and any potential creditor wants to prevent becoming a victim. This actually makes perfect sense, if somebody gives you credit, they may provide information to a rating agency on whether you paid the credit back or not.
this entire story... 9.7" should be enough for everybody.
But I got Samsung Note, and it is a bit unwieldy as a mobile phone and it is a bit small as a tablet. However I primarily use it as a phone, watch some videos, listen to some sound (some talk shows) and also I read email on it and sometimes browse a few sites, that's pretty much all I do with it and it works.
The thing that bothers me about this device is the short battery life. I mean for the size of the device, they could have also made it a bit thicker but used a battery that would hold the charge for at least 5 days or something, the 2 days that I get with it is just very annoying.
You know what is interesting about doublethink? It's that while Orwell presented the idea that it is imposed upon the population by the Party (and the Big Brother), so that the population is sedated, the current reality is much more disturbing, it's much worse than that.
The doublethink (without which the doublespeak is not really possible) seems to be innate in the mob without any actual force applied to it from the above. The mob LOVES to doublethink.
Freedom is slavery - that's the slogan of the mob. It's the socialist utopian idea, which is based on discrimination against a minority and theft from a minority by the majority, and this is presented as 'freedom'.
Turning people into slaves and calling it freedom is the most insidious example of doublethink that people (the mob) induce upon themselves and they justify it to themselves as well, they call it 'social justice'. To steal and discriminate against a minority of people is 'social justice'. Orwell didn't come up with it, he just recorded the reality around him, and the Big Brother is not on the top of they pyramid, it's inside every one of these mob members.
not the high-end, were the best performers in this test.
- for whatever reason I couldn't find the actual brands and models of the SSDs that were tested, but at least from POV of server hardware it makes sense not to add extra batteries on the components themselves, since the servers will have their own power backup, while laptops are most often used while both plugged in and on battery power.
The moral of the story: get a UPS for your desktop.
What the problem actually is that the American politicians backed by the American mob are uninterested in investors.
USA is now a socialist state, which means it's a state that discriminates against people who save and produce and subsidises people who spend and consume.
This does not work for people who want to ensure that their savings and investments grow rather than being destroyed by the mob and the inflation, so people moved their productive capacity elsewhere.
I have explained this on this very site for a decade.
Maybe the amount of work has done down in the past 60 years because the governments of the world have been pumping out liquidity an thus producing massive amounts of inflation, causing people to move capital investments somewhere else, meaning that jobs would be eventually lost.
Maybe the amount of work has gone down in the past 60 years because of massive growth of income taxes. I guess people don't actually understand that the more you tax something the less of it you get, this includes work.
There is nothing wrong with the government providing a lot of employment and spending a lot. Plenty of successful countries that have avoided the global recession do.
- everything is wrong with government "providing" a lot of employment and spending. Somebody has to pay for it, government does not provide anything to anybody that it did not originally take from somebody else, government can take existing wealth and shift it around to different people, but it can't create new wealth.
New wealth is only created by actual investors, who risk their money, time and effort in order to make profit. They build new products and services and the market may reward them with good profits, if they are doing the right thing by the market.
Government never does the right thing by the market, by its very definition gov't is a form of violence, it prevents people dealing with each other based on their own preferences and it forces its own ideas upon the people for the reasons that are completely orthogonal to anything that market actually needs and wants. Those reasons are political, the politicians want to keep power and their friends want to enjoy the proceeds from the stolen goods.
A recession is caused by a reduction in spending due to lack of confidence.
- Keynesian nonsense. A recession is caused by lack of balance that is introduced by the violence of government rules, regulations, taxes and money printing.
Recession is a normal immune response of the economy to the virus or bacteria that the government introduces: misallocation of resources. A gov't law makes creates the moral hazards for some to get into more spending and possibly debts then they would otherwise, the taxes take the money away from real investors, who are rewarded by the market, so the money is taken away from the productive sectors of the economy. The gov't uses the tax revenue and inflation (money printing) to grow itself, rules and regulations are created that favour some sectors over others, while giving them preferential treatment and eventually various unproductive sectors of the economy inflate and the productive ones starve.
The recession is simply an attempt by the market to rebalance the equation, to force the debtors to liquidate and go bankrupt, to release scarce resources, which then can be reallocated productively.
That's what recession is, the 'confidence' is not a fundamental reason for recession, it adds short term volatility but it has nothing to do with the root causes of the recession. The gov't that never listens to what the economy is telling via the recession and tries to fight it with more and more gov't spending, money printing, taxes, laws, price fixing, etc., eventually ends up destroying the underlying economy.
The more a gov't does to push the recession into the future by printing money, the bigger the eventual crash. UK never cut anything, Europe never cut anything. Cutting gov't spending is essential to allow the economy to restructure, instead the politicians try to scare people with deflation and unemployment and use this nonsense to justify printing even more, borrowing even more, spending even more. UK isn't cutting anything, Japan, Europe, USA are not cutting anything and they need DRASTIC cuts.
They are not getting any cuts and thus they are only prolonging the current suffering and increasing the size of the coming collapse.
You are also completely wrong on what Japan did. Over the last 2 decades Japan has been doing exactly what you are proposing - inflation, money printing, doing everything to try and prevent restructuring and the necessary bankruptcy of the banks and various companies that are in fact bankrupt - they are zombies. They are zombies that are held afloat only by the massive money destruction, devaluation, printing by the Japanese gov't.
Instead of having the companies that fail actually fail, instead of lowering the prices for their export they are devaluing the curr
1. Not every economist's worst nightmare, only the mainstream Keynesian charlatans, who are there only to justify endless money printing and spending by government defend inflation.
2. Politicians definitely don't want money value to be stable or even to grow, politically it's extremely easy to promise free stuff if you don't actually tell people how much this 'free' stuff truly costs (if normal taxes were collected to pay for it) when you can just print the difference. So yes, politician's worst nightmare is deflation, it's both scary to them in real terms and in nominal terms, because with higher value money, the transactions are done with lesser amounts to get the same value out of products, and this means lower nominal tax collections. Politicians don't like people actually to enjoy their lives, to be able to retire on their own savings, politicians want you to transact, transact, transact, so that they could keep taxing you with everything you do.
Deflation is an excellent economic driver, USA lived through its most productive age (the first 124 years of existence) in a slightly deflationary environment, when money was gradually increasing in value and productivity of the people allowed them to get more and more for the same amount of dollars (or fewer) over time. Yes, prices used to fall on all things (and they still fall on many things, where the gains in productivity actually outweigh the inflation created by government).
Deflation is only scary to the politicians, not to people who get more and more purchasing power and their savings increase in value over time allowing them to work less and get more.
1. The proposed cuts in the sequestration are not cuts to spending, they are cuts to the increases that are happening anyway. In other words the total amount of money that gov't will spend this year will be GREATER than the total amount of money spent last year regardless of this so called 'cut'.
2. Your definition is wrong, the gov't is not there to regulate the means of exchange, not even close and it's not supposed to be. Why would it be? The gov't is there (at least in USA) to protect and defend the Constitution (not the people, not the gov't, the document, the law, without which there is no 'united' States).
3. You are correct, the government prints money.
4. You are wrong, the gov't cannot regulate worth of money, it can only debase it by printing.
5. Price fixing only achieves shortages and black markets, but it cannot force people who are unwilling to sell a product or a resource at an artificially low price to sell it (unless the gov't actually confiscates that property, which obviously means breaking the law by gov't).
6. You are right, the gov't does not pay the bills.
7. You are wrong, the question of budget is applicable as much as it is to a family. A large country can borrow more than a family can and it can keep up the charade longer than a family can, especially if that country's currency is counted to be 'reserve'. But using it as backing (as a reserve) is silly and dangerous if it is itself not backed by anything (and it's not, it was defaulted upon in 1971)
8. The gov't is responsible for the value of currency falling, but the only way it can be responsible for value of currency rising is by the government diminishing, decreasing in size, shrinking, disappearing.
9. A family uses money that buys stuff. If the gov't manages to fully destroy value of a currency it prints, then the family will have no choice but to use some other form of money to buy things it needs to survive.
10. The amount of economic ignorance in that one comment was pretty typical.
It's a bill of goods sold to you by the government, which pumps the liquidity into the 'education' market, propping up banks with this bad debt, propping up the 'education' establishment with this stimulus money all while using the students as the collateral.
Don't do it, don't buy into it, don't bother with this type of 'education' unless you are actually going for PhD and into a research position (if you think you are good enough to get there).
Instead drop out as soon as you wake up from this nonsense, approach a company in your preferred industry and offer your services for free (they can't do it for nominal pay, the minimum wage is a huge barrier in this case, but if you work part time then you can probably get around that tax). Start with a company, do what they need, learn on the go, become valuable.
4 years later you have experience that the 'education' wouldn't give you and you won't have the mortgage that your peers will accrue (and no house to show for it), you won't be working for free 4 years later, you'll be making more money than somebody fresh out of college. Basically you'll be way ahead if you can land that first job without getting into this debt.
They say that over the life of a person, the ones with college degree make more money by a million or so, however this completely overlooks the little issue of debt, which to the poor students can become as insurmountable as a million.
Universal health care should be provided privately and without any gov't money, and it would be if there was no government involvement. It was provided this way in USA before gov't involvement. It was universal in the sense that it was cheap and getting cheaper, same applies to health care to any type of insurance, education, etc.
Pollution is a government created problem, with gov't not doing its job protecting private property rights and not meddling with business, not allowing business to use so called "public property" (which is an oxymoron) to do business. All property should be private, public property is synonymous with "free for all to do anything to" and actually gov't gives a go ahead to companies to do whatever they like (similar to that 75Million USD liability cap for deep water oil drilling).
Any individual must be able to buy any weapon he can afford, including all weapons that are designated "weapons of mass destruction". If you can afford it, you should be able to have it. Gov't having weapons that individuals cannot possess is an indicator of an oppressive society that should be dismantled because it trumps the rights of individuals. Individuals are above the collective, collective means absolutely nothing if an individual has to become a slave to its goals (goals that are in a 'collective' set by technocrats, authoritative, even democratically elected dictators).
Unemployment is a gov't created problem in the first place. The less gov't there is, the fewer regulations there are, without fake fiat printed money, with real interest rates, with real savings and investments, the society achieves its goal: as little work as possible to get as much gain out of it as possible.
We shouldn't be so blind to think that people want 'work'. People want 'stuff', and if people want 'work' it means they are doing something that they enjoy anyway. 'Work' is the means, 'stuff' (or satisfaction of doing something you like) is the end goal. In the current perverted Keynesian gov't ideology, the work is the goal and that's nonsense.
The free market gives people the best stuff at the lowest price (the least amount of work needed to buy the best stuff). In totalitarian regimes (USSR, Red China...) the people get all the work their Dear Leaders can come up with, but they get no stuff they want and no satisfaction as a result of all that work.
If "social programs" are "the cheapest way" to provide something, then it simply means that there is no free market initiative left, the free individuals are no longer the driver of the economy, the gov't and the most politically connected corporations are the actual political driving force, not the people, not the individuals.
Given the current USA situation of wild socialist promises and obvious fascist implementation there is basically no way to have actual free market providing products and services. First the current government must be dismantled and only then the free market can do what it does best - provide the cheapest possible solutions at the highest possible quality due to competition and absence of threat of gov't violence.
However social programs are a much worse proposal when compared to the actual free market, this is just as true for computers, mobile phones, as it is for all other products and services including food, energy, health care, any type of insurance, financial products, etc.
Gov't solutions are always much more expensive and lower quality than private solutions provided in a competitive market driven by free individuals looking for profit.
Profit is the most moral, least discriminating and most efficient motivator and engine of the economy.
Elaborate tax avoidance schemes represent positive economic activity by actively denying government even more revenue and by allowing the individual to keep his own productive output, giving him ability to spend and reinvest his own money.
I don't actually have a problem with transaction taxes applied on final consumer goods, import duties, but I do have a huge problem with any scheme that taxes productivity, wealth, savings. I have a huge problem with inflation, so anybody who finds effective means to avoid these helps the economy and anybody who pays more taxes than he absolutely can hurts it. Of-course AFAIC income taxes, wealth taxes, property taxes, all of these types of confiscatory taxes based on productivity and savings are immoral and should be illegal and actually they are.
Society is hurt by every penny that is extracted from the productive population and is funnelled to the unproductive, to the governments, to the consumers that get government subsidies.
Society is helped by people with actual productive capacity and savings that can be used as investments. Society is not built with taxes, taxes become possible because enterprising individuals build their own productive economy and allow the society to form around them.
What you are describing is theft and discrimination (majority voting for politicians who promise to steal from a minority based on the difference between their earning, and of-course the majority of people don't have a problem using gov't to steal from somebody who is richer than they are, that's why democracy destroys wealth and degenerates into an oppressive autocracy), what I am talking about is sound economics based on individual freedoms.
People must not be coerced by threat of gov't violence to give up their own property. The world needs more people like that guy and fewer people like you.
I hope you are diversified out of USD denominated assets though, you should actually have foreign assets (you already have a Cayman Island corp., it's possible for you to open a bearer corporation in UK and use it as a holding company to set up an offshore that disconnects your holdings from you personally, so this way you can actually own foreign assets without the IRS being able to pick on you and this allows you to have foreign bank accounts). A foreign bank account for a US citizen or even a resident who is not a citizen is problematic. It's better to have another citizenship of-course, but even a foreign passport holder who is US residents will have problems opening a foreign bank account, so instead a corporation can do it. St. Vincent no longer allows bearer certificates for corporations though, but UK does.
I am not a professor, I am looking at this problem from the point of view of economics and the society that makes the economy around it and I see that there is NO reason for huge number of people in USA to have education of any kind right now.
Why should people care about education? On the one hand there is no productive requirement for it, there are no factories, no manufacturing facilities, no employers that need an educated worker, very few do.
On the other hand the gov't promises an easy life based on the social welfare state. The masses are brainwashed to believe that the government is there to help them, to cuddle them from cradle to grave. They are part of the mob that votes for any politician that promises more money to be stolen from people who produce it (money is wealth, not paper, it must be produced and saved, not printed) and the money is then redistributed to the recipients. Whether they are the bankers and financiers and failed car manufacturers or military industrial complex contractors and such or whether they are social security and medicare and medicaid and SNAP and other form of welfare recipients.
It doesn't matter to them how their consumption is financed. It doesn't matter that the time is running out, that this is all an illusion that cannot last forever, that USD being a reserve currency is a fluke and that the gov't with the printing press (through the Fed and the member banks) is destroying the value of money stealing from all USD denominated asset holders while inflating various bubbles.
Education is in a bubble, the degrees are not worth the paper they are printed on, the employers are the primary reason for people to have desire to be educated and if there are no employers that require education there will be no meaningful education. There will be no research and no development, there will be no requirement for solving new engineering problems and scientific discoveries (safe for military purposes, which is all that despotic, oppressive gov't really understands and cares for).
The money that the gov't guarantees to the students as loans gives the universities the perverse incentive to raise tuition prices, while in reality prices should be falling (in education and in health care and food production and other markets where gov't is pumping the money into to keep prices up).
The universities don't have any incentive to compete with each other, there is only a push to pump more students through the system, not to compete. Why compete? There are MILLIONS OF GUARANTEED CUSTOMERS, the demand is inflated with the gov't guaranteed money just like it is in health care, just like it was in housing, in stock markets in bond markets of today.
People go through the universities and don't learn a damn thing, they end up without any useful education and with a huge mortgage but no house.
Well, one thing we know about the mob - it loves bail outs, so expect a huge student loan bail out. Of-course the economy is fucked, but hey, they say Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned, and who the fuck am I to question that?
If you want an actual answer to this question, you can read the rest of the comments on/. story or you can stop and think: which side is the bread buttered?
With gov't giving out loan guarantees to anybody who wants them, with gov't promoting "education" as a way to "grow the economy" (they call it 'investing', which is complete nonsense, investing comes from a saver who risks something, like his own money to make a profit, not this gov't bullshit, which can only spend but pretends it's called investing) eventually what happens is that universities and colleges have the growing incentive to DROP QUALITY and to grow quantity.
Why would you have stringent quality requirements? Your university is competing for this huge source of 'free money' that is provided by the gov't to the 'education' establishment with the students that get the loans being used as collateral.
There is no incentive to provide good, valuable education, everybody is getting a degree, there is no difference between people who go through the education factory, at the end the employer can't differentiate any longer.
What, you have a primary school behind your back? Secondary? High school? College? University? Who gives a fuck! Now you need a PhD to be different. This is inflation in education, it's a bubble that the gov't inflated and it's no different from the housing bubble and the stock market bubble that came before it, it's no different from the bond bubble, USD bubble and generally the gov't credit bubble that is being inflated now.
The money says: do not fail anybody, just lower your standard and push as many kids (any students) through your system as possible, it's an excellent money making machine. It provides no value but it uses the gov't loan guarantee to suck the scarce savings and any ability to grow the economy out of the economy and pushes it into all these bubbles that gov't is creating.
You already did and many investors but also a number of techies have ran away and more will run. You did a piss poor cloning job though, got the colours all wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
as a non-Texan libertarian, I find it unacceptable that any government official should be able to interfere with anybody's choice on doing or not doing abortion, but I do believe that there has to be some rule about the length of term, once that term passes, abortion is no longer just a concern of the woman, there is actually a living organism inside of her that could live outside and thus should get protection under law. Maybe that's 6 or 7 month, I am not a doctor to tell. Regardless, it is beyond the authorisation of the federal government powers to legislate such things.
So, at what point do we wake up and realize that current models of hardware and software development are fundamentally flawed in terms of having products which by their very nature introduce unacceptable security risks to store any data or information?
- at no point, because it's not true.
There is nothing flawed about our hardware and software models, nothing more flawed than for example our own replication machinery built into each one of us, and it is complex and it sometimes produces unfortunate results.
It is all a cost benefit analysis and basically if we were to scrap our current models and to throw away the hardware and the software and to start from scratch (or whatever you are talking about), the results would be similar to us giving up all of our technology and going back to the caveman ages because we don't have the perfect technology and perfect outcomes and perfect solutions.
Cost benefit tells us that we put as much energy as we can to build up these systems and we are getting a very good use of them and that if we tried to spend every waking moment of every day just trying to build the most perfect solutions, the benefit would be very marginal and not actually worth the effot (not that we would succeed, by the way, that's not a guarantee at all).
Security researchers tore holes through all major web browsers, breaking Windows 8 and Java, too (though the latter feat is not remarkable).
- at this point I have to wonder what are the underlying reasons for the obvious bias present on /. against Java, because clearly there is something at work here, so where does the money trail lead? Is Dice holding a short position against Oracle or something? Is there something else going on? Is it a pro-Apple product and anti-Android stand?
Personally I dislike Oracle as a company because of their insidious penetration of all facets of medium to large businesses (everything must be Oracle), but not Java as a language or as a VM. Obviously the sandboxed JVM browser plugin has various issues, but the slander against the entire Java platform is getting repetitive.
While a Java browser plugin may have security problems, I fail to see how this relates to server side Java usage (as an example).
OTOH even /. comments are so confused, mixing terms, mixing notions such as Java and Javascript and browser plugin, etc., permanently labelling JVM (or Java, I don't know which anymore) as a 'slow language' or 'slow platform' (again, there are too many of these too keep track) and whenever somebody says something to this effect without upfront stating exactly what they are talking about, it leads to page long threads that can't even agree on teh terms they are using.
This is destructive, not constructive.
If you won't have military tanks on the streets of LA or NY or any city, then you can't have military drones in the skies.
Of-course OTOH this may be just a semantics then, once the local police and FBI acquire these weapons (and they do have some of them already, at some point they will be armed).
But then can't the local police sheriff buy some F-15s? If not why not? If yes, then can he use them to attack somebody? Attack somebody that is not imminent threat to anybody (as Rand Paul said a number of times 'sitting in a cafe)
Your local cops are not allowed to kill people on a hunch that they may be dangerous at some point, because maybe they cheer for some 'bad people', instead a judge is asked for an arrest warrant and the cops are supposed to bring the person in for interrogation, and the person should get all the protections allowed by the Law.
The cops are not allowed to do this, the judge is not allowed to kill anybody without due process either, so the real question here is NOT about any specific weapon, military or not.
This is the question about GOVERNMENT - what can it really do, what is it really allowed to do, what rights do you really have?
USA government doesn't believe in the Constitution, but this is not a surprise, the American mob doesn't believe in the Constitution. The moment there is any discrimination enforced by government is the moment when the government elevates itself above the law.
Yes, I am talking about the slippery slope argument, the camel's nose under the tent, but it is true. At some point the mob allowed the government to step over many of the individual rights supposedly for the purpose of 'social justice', but there is a conflict there, contradiction in terms. You can't have 'justice' if you argue for discrimination.
Arguing for higher taxes on some bracket of population while arguing for subsidies for yourself is discrimination, that's the type of discrimination that the mob cheers for, but eventually it goes full circle and takes away all rights from all individuals.
You can't give up just SOME rights, once you give up ANY rights, you give up ALL rights.
I agree with you, Canada Geese are drones, they are unmanned areal vehicles and they are armed with biological weapons. They must be eliminated.
Some, like Canada, are more socialistic than the US and I don't see them using guns up there to enforce it.
- ever tried NOT paying income taxes?
It reminds me of the credit-rating agencies:P private companies that somehow are magically authorized to suck up all of your financial information and sell it. At least the US finally added the ability for you to "freeze" your credit data. That's the wrong way around - they ought to have to actively ask for permission, but it's better than nothing.
- wait a moment, you may want to HIDE that you are a terrible credit risk, but how is that good for the economy and for the potential lenders that also don't want to lose money if they give you credit?
In case of your credit score, this is not just your private information, you are mistaken about that. This is information that concerns your creditors much more than you, because if you steal or lose their money, then they are the victim and any potential creditor wants to prevent becoming a victim. This actually makes perfect sense, if somebody gives you credit, they may provide information to a rating agency on whether you paid the credit back or not.
Who doesn't say that 9.7" is enough?
this entire story... 9.7" should be enough for everybody.
But I got Samsung Note, and it is a bit unwieldy as a mobile phone and it is a bit small as a tablet. However I primarily use it as a phone, watch some videos, listen to some sound (some talk shows) and also I read email on it and sometimes browse a few sites, that's pretty much all I do with it and it works.
The thing that bothers me about this device is the short battery life. I mean for the size of the device, they could have also made it a bit thicker but used a battery that would hold the charge for at least 5 days or something, the 2 days that I get with it is just very annoying.
You know what is interesting about doublethink? It's that while Orwell presented the idea that it is imposed upon the population by the Party (and the Big Brother), so that the population is sedated, the current reality is much more disturbing, it's much worse than that.
The doublethink (without which the doublespeak is not really possible) seems to be innate in the mob without any actual force applied to it from the above. The mob LOVES to doublethink.
Freedom is slavery - that's the slogan of the mob. It's the socialist utopian idea, which is based on discrimination against a minority and theft from a minority by the majority, and this is presented as 'freedom'.
Turning people into slaves and calling it freedom is the most insidious example of doublethink that people (the mob) induce upon themselves and they justify it to themselves as well, they call it 'social justice'. To steal and discriminate against a minority of people is 'social justice'. Orwell didn't come up with it, he just recorded the reality around him, and the Big Brother is not on the top of they pyramid, it's inside every one of these mob members.
not the high-end, were the best performers in this test.
- for whatever reason I couldn't find the actual brands and models of the SSDs that were tested, but at least from POV of server hardware it makes sense not to add extra batteries on the components themselves, since the servers will have their own power backup, while laptops are most often used while both plugged in and on battery power.
The moral of the story: get a UPS for your desktop.
What the problem actually is that the American politicians backed by the American mob are uninterested in investors.
USA is now a socialist state, which means it's a state that discriminates against people who save and produce and subsidises people who spend and consume.
This does not work for people who want to ensure that their savings and investments grow rather than being destroyed by the mob and the inflation, so people moved their productive capacity elsewhere.
I have explained this on this very site for a decade.
unions?
Maybe the amount of work has done down in the past 60 years because the governments of the world have been pumping out liquidity an thus producing massive amounts of inflation, causing people to move capital investments somewhere else, meaning that jobs would be eventually lost.
Maybe the amount of work has gone down in the past 60 years because of massive growth of income taxes. I guess people don't actually understand that the more you tax something the less of it you get, this includes work.
But no, it's the Sun spots.
There is nothing wrong with the government providing a lot of employment and spending a lot. Plenty of successful countries that have avoided the global recession do.
- everything is wrong with government "providing" a lot of employment and spending. Somebody has to pay for it, government does not provide anything to anybody that it did not originally take from somebody else, government can take existing wealth and shift it around to different people, but it can't create new wealth.
New wealth is only created by actual investors, who risk their money, time and effort in order to make profit. They build new products and services and the market may reward them with good profits, if they are doing the right thing by the market.
Government never does the right thing by the market, by its very definition gov't is a form of violence, it prevents people dealing with each other based on their own preferences and it forces its own ideas upon the people for the reasons that are completely orthogonal to anything that market actually needs and wants. Those reasons are political, the politicians want to keep power and their friends want to enjoy the proceeds from the stolen goods.
A recession is caused by a reduction in spending due to lack of confidence.
- Keynesian nonsense. A recession is caused by lack of balance that is introduced by the violence of government rules, regulations, taxes and money printing.
Recession is a normal immune response of the economy to the virus or bacteria that the government introduces: misallocation of resources. A gov't law makes creates the moral hazards for some to get into more spending and possibly debts then they would otherwise, the taxes take the money away from real investors, who are rewarded by the market, so the money is taken away from the productive sectors of the economy. The gov't uses the tax revenue and inflation (money printing) to grow itself, rules and regulations are created that favour some sectors over others, while giving them preferential treatment and eventually various unproductive sectors of the economy inflate and the productive ones starve.
The recession is simply an attempt by the market to rebalance the equation, to force the debtors to liquidate and go bankrupt, to release scarce resources, which then can be reallocated productively.
That's what recession is, the 'confidence' is not a fundamental reason for recession, it adds short term volatility but it has nothing to do with the root causes of the recession. The gov't that never listens to what the economy is telling via the recession and tries to fight it with more and more gov't spending, money printing, taxes, laws, price fixing, etc., eventually ends up destroying the underlying economy.
The more a gov't does to push the recession into the future by printing money, the bigger the eventual crash. UK never cut anything, Europe never cut anything. Cutting gov't spending is essential to allow the economy to restructure, instead the politicians try to scare people with deflation and unemployment and use this nonsense to justify printing even more, borrowing even more, spending even more. UK isn't cutting anything, Japan, Europe, USA are not cutting anything and they need DRASTIC cuts.
They are not getting any cuts and thus they are only prolonging the current suffering and increasing the size of the coming collapse.
You are also completely wrong on what Japan did. Over the last 2 decades Japan has been doing exactly what you are proposing - inflation, money printing, doing everything to try and prevent restructuring and the necessary bankruptcy of the banks and various companies that are in fact bankrupt - they are zombies. They are zombies that are held afloat only by the massive money destruction, devaluation, printing by the Japanese gov't.
Instead of having the companies that fail actually fail, instead of lowering the prices for their export they are devaluing the curr
1. Not every economist's worst nightmare, only the mainstream Keynesian charlatans, who are there only to justify endless money printing and spending by government defend inflation.
2. Politicians definitely don't want money value to be stable or even to grow, politically it's extremely easy to promise free stuff if you don't actually tell people how much this 'free' stuff truly costs (if normal taxes were collected to pay for it) when you can just print the difference. So yes, politician's worst nightmare is deflation, it's both scary to them in real terms and in nominal terms, because with higher value money, the transactions are done with lesser amounts to get the same value out of products, and this means lower nominal tax collections. Politicians don't like people actually to enjoy their lives, to be able to retire on their own savings, politicians want you to transact, transact, transact, so that they could keep taxing you with everything you do.
Deflation is an excellent economic driver, USA lived through its most productive age (the first 124 years of existence) in a slightly deflationary environment, when money was gradually increasing in value and productivity of the people allowed them to get more and more for the same amount of dollars (or fewer) over time. Yes, prices used to fall on all things (and they still fall on many things, where the gains in productivity actually outweigh the inflation created by government).
Deflation is only scary to the politicians, not to people who get more and more purchasing power and their savings increase in value over time allowing them to work less and get more.
1. The proposed cuts in the sequestration are not cuts to spending, they are cuts to the increases that are happening anyway. In other words the total amount of money that gov't will spend this year will be GREATER than the total amount of money spent last year regardless of this so called 'cut'.
2. Your definition is wrong, the gov't is not there to regulate the means of exchange, not even close and it's not supposed to be. Why would it be? The gov't is there (at least in USA) to protect and defend the Constitution (not the people, not the gov't, the document, the law, without which there is no 'united' States).
3. You are correct, the government prints money.
4. You are wrong, the gov't cannot regulate worth of money, it can only debase it by printing.
5. Price fixing only achieves shortages and black markets, but it cannot force people who are unwilling to sell a product or a resource at an artificially low price to sell it (unless the gov't actually confiscates that property, which obviously means breaking the law by gov't).
6. You are right, the gov't does not pay the bills.
7. You are wrong, the question of budget is applicable as much as it is to a family. A large country can borrow more than a family can and it can keep up the charade longer than a family can, especially if that country's currency is counted to be 'reserve'. But using it as backing (as a reserve) is silly and dangerous if it is itself not backed by anything (and it's not, it was defaulted upon in 1971)
8. The gov't is responsible for the value of currency falling, but the only way it can be responsible for value of currency rising is by the government diminishing, decreasing in size, shrinking, disappearing.
9. A family uses money that buys stuff. If the gov't manages to fully destroy value of a currency it prints, then the family will have no choice but to use some other form of money to buy things it needs to survive.
10. The amount of economic ignorance in that one comment was pretty typical.
It's a bill of goods sold to you by the government, which pumps the liquidity into the 'education' market, propping up banks with this bad debt, propping up the 'education' establishment with this stimulus money all while using the students as the collateral.
Don't do it, don't buy into it, don't bother with this type of 'education' unless you are actually going for PhD and into a research position (if you think you are good enough to get there).
Instead drop out as soon as you wake up from this nonsense, approach a company in your preferred industry and offer your services for free (they can't do it for nominal pay, the minimum wage is a huge barrier in this case, but if you work part time then you can probably get around that tax). Start with a company, do what they need, learn on the go, become valuable.
4 years later you have experience that the 'education' wouldn't give you and you won't have the mortgage that your peers will accrue (and no house to show for it), you won't be working for free 4 years later, you'll be making more money than somebody fresh out of college. Basically you'll be way ahead if you can land that first job without getting into this debt.
They say that over the life of a person, the ones with college degree make more money by a million or so, however this completely overlooks the little issue of debt, which to the poor students can become as insurmountable as a million.
Universal health care should be provided privately and without any gov't money, and it would be if there was no government involvement. It was provided this way in USA before gov't involvement. It was universal in the sense that it was cheap and getting cheaper, same applies to health care to any type of insurance, education, etc.
Pollution is a government created problem, with gov't not doing its job protecting private property rights and not meddling with business, not allowing business to use so called "public property" (which is an oxymoron) to do business. All property should be private, public property is synonymous with "free for all to do anything to" and actually gov't gives a go ahead to companies to do whatever they like (similar to that 75Million USD liability cap for deep water oil drilling).
Any individual must be able to buy any weapon he can afford, including all weapons that are designated "weapons of mass destruction". If you can afford it, you should be able to have it. Gov't having weapons that individuals cannot possess is an indicator of an oppressive society that should be dismantled because it trumps the rights of individuals. Individuals are above the collective, collective means absolutely nothing if an individual has to become a slave to its goals (goals that are in a 'collective' set by technocrats, authoritative, even democratically elected dictators).
Unemployment is a gov't created problem in the first place. The less gov't there is, the fewer regulations there are, without fake fiat printed money, with real interest rates, with real savings and investments, the society achieves its goal: as little work as possible to get as much gain out of it as possible.
We shouldn't be so blind to think that people want 'work'. People want 'stuff', and if people want 'work' it means they are doing something that they enjoy anyway. 'Work' is the means, 'stuff' (or satisfaction of doing something you like) is the end goal. In the current perverted Keynesian gov't ideology, the work is the goal and that's nonsense.
The free market gives people the best stuff at the lowest price (the least amount of work needed to buy the best stuff). In totalitarian regimes (USSR, Red China...) the people get all the work their Dear Leaders can come up with, but they get no stuff they want and no satisfaction as a result of all that work.
If "social programs" are "the cheapest way" to provide something, then it simply means that there is no free market initiative left, the free individuals are no longer the driver of the economy, the gov't and the most politically connected corporations are the actual political driving force, not the people, not the individuals.
Given the current USA situation of wild socialist promises and obvious fascist implementation there is basically no way to have actual free market providing products and services. First the current government must be dismantled and only then the free market can do what it does best - provide the cheapest possible solutions at the highest possible quality due to competition and absence of threat of gov't violence.
However social programs are a much worse proposal when compared to the actual free market, this is just as true for computers, mobile phones, as it is for all other products and services including food, energy, health care, any type of insurance, financial products, etc.
Gov't solutions are always much more expensive and lower quality than private solutions provided in a competitive market driven by free individuals looking for profit.
Profit is the most moral, least discriminating and most efficient motivator and engine of the economy.
Elaborate tax avoidance schemes represent positive economic activity by actively denying government even more revenue and by allowing the individual to keep his own productive output, giving him ability to spend and reinvest his own money.
I don't actually have a problem with transaction taxes applied on final consumer goods, import duties, but I do have a huge problem with any scheme that taxes productivity, wealth, savings. I have a huge problem with inflation, so anybody who finds effective means to avoid these helps the economy and anybody who pays more taxes than he absolutely can hurts it. Of-course AFAIC income taxes, wealth taxes, property taxes, all of these types of confiscatory taxes based on productivity and savings are immoral and should be illegal and actually they are.
Society is hurt by every penny that is extracted from the productive population and is funnelled to the unproductive, to the governments, to the consumers that get government subsidies.
Society is helped by people with actual productive capacity and savings that can be used as investments. Society is not built with taxes, taxes become possible because enterprising individuals build their own productive economy and allow the society to form around them.
What you are describing is theft and discrimination (majority voting for politicians who promise to steal from a minority based on the difference between their earning, and of-course the majority of people don't have a problem using gov't to steal from somebody who is richer than they are, that's why democracy destroys wealth and degenerates into an oppressive autocracy), what I am talking about is sound economics based on individual freedoms.
People must not be coerced by threat of gov't violence to give up their own property. The world needs more people like that guy and fewer people like you.
Good work.
I hope you are diversified out of USD denominated assets though, you should actually have foreign assets (you already have a Cayman Island corp., it's possible for you to open a bearer corporation in UK and use it as a holding company to set up an offshore that disconnects your holdings from you personally, so this way you can actually own foreign assets without the IRS being able to pick on you and this allows you to have foreign bank accounts). A foreign bank account for a US citizen or even a resident who is not a citizen is problematic. It's better to have another citizenship of-course, but even a foreign passport holder who is US residents will have problems opening a foreign bank account, so instead a corporation can do it. St. Vincent no longer allows bearer certificates for corporations though, but UK does.
I am not a professor, I am looking at this problem from the point of view of economics and the society that makes the economy around it and I see that there is NO reason for huge number of people in USA to have education of any kind right now.
Why should people care about education? On the one hand there is no productive requirement for it, there are no factories, no manufacturing facilities, no employers that need an educated worker, very few do.
On the other hand the gov't promises an easy life based on the social welfare state. The masses are brainwashed to believe that the government is there to help them, to cuddle them from cradle to grave. They are part of the mob that votes for any politician that promises more money to be stolen from people who produce it (money is wealth, not paper, it must be produced and saved, not printed) and the money is then redistributed to the recipients. Whether they are the bankers and financiers and failed car manufacturers or military industrial complex contractors and such or whether they are social security and medicare and medicaid and SNAP and other form of welfare recipients.
It doesn't matter to them how their consumption is financed. It doesn't matter that the time is running out, that this is all an illusion that cannot last forever, that USD being a reserve currency is a fluke and that the gov't with the printing press (through the Fed and the member banks) is destroying the value of money stealing from all USD denominated asset holders while inflating various bubbles.
Education is in a bubble, the degrees are not worth the paper they are printed on, the employers are the primary reason for people to have desire to be educated and if there are no employers that require education there will be no meaningful education. There will be no research and no development, there will be no requirement for solving new engineering problems and scientific discoveries (safe for military purposes, which is all that despotic, oppressive gov't really understands and cares for).
The money that the gov't guarantees to the students as loans gives the universities the perverse incentive to raise tuition prices, while in reality prices should be falling (in education and in health care and food production and other markets where gov't is pumping the money into to keep prices up).
The universities don't have any incentive to compete with each other, there is only a push to pump more students through the system, not to compete. Why compete? There are MILLIONS OF GUARANTEED CUSTOMERS, the demand is inflated with the gov't guaranteed money just like it is in health care, just like it was in housing, in stock markets in bond markets of today.
People go through the universities and don't learn a damn thing, they end up without any useful education and with a huge mortgage but no house.
Well, one thing we know about the mob - it loves bail outs, so expect a huge student loan bail out. Of-course the economy is fucked, but hey, they say Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned, and who the fuck am I to question that?
If you want an actual answer to this question, you can read the rest of the comments on /. story or you can stop and think: which side is the bread buttered?
With gov't giving out loan guarantees to anybody who wants them, with gov't promoting "education" as a way to "grow the economy" (they call it 'investing', which is complete nonsense, investing comes from a saver who risks something, like his own money to make a profit, not this gov't bullshit, which can only spend but pretends it's called investing) eventually what happens is that universities and colleges have the growing incentive to DROP QUALITY and to grow quantity.
Why would you have stringent quality requirements? Your university is competing for this huge source of 'free money' that is provided by the gov't to the 'education' establishment with the students that get the loans being used as collateral.
There is no incentive to provide good, valuable education, everybody is getting a degree, there is no difference between people who go through the education factory, at the end the employer can't differentiate any longer.
What, you have a primary school behind your back? Secondary? High school? College? University? Who gives a fuck! Now you need a PhD to be different. This is inflation in education, it's a bubble that the gov't inflated and it's no different from the housing bubble and the stock market bubble that came before it, it's no different from the bond bubble, USD bubble and generally the gov't credit bubble that is being inflated now.
The money says: do not fail anybody, just lower your standard and push as many kids (any students) through your system as possible, it's an excellent money making machine. It provides no value but it uses the gov't loan guarantee to suck the scarce savings and any ability to grow the economy out of the economy and pushes it into all these bubbles that gov't is creating.
You already did and many investors but also a number of techies have ran away and more will run. You did a piss poor cloning job though, got the colours all wrong.
The strategic response to this type of stalking initiatives shall be known as the Unified Posting Yield Obfuscating Response System.