Your calculations can be easily defeated by simply launching many missiles that also carry decoy warheads. Have a 10-20 decoy warheads per missile and then only a small fraction of the warheads and missiles actually have to carry the real charge, and all of a sudden it's possible to overwhelm an ABM system, especially if the warheads themselves have a little bit of intelligence and maybe even network communications between them.
Of-course there is nothing wrong with gambling beyond the fact that government wants to prevent you from doing it the way you feel like, because that creates competition to the legal establishments, which government gets to raid when it comes to the tax time.
People need to bet, people do bet, there is nothing wrong with it. In fact if you are not willing to bet then you are not really making any sort of a prediction.
Samuel Clemens said: " Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform." I bet on everything I believe in, my bets don't necessarily go against any specific people, but they go against the majority. So when I say that the fiat currencies are all collapsing (as all fiat currencies do), I make a bet by not holding currencies and instead holding other things, metals, commodities, some stocks in sectors that I think benefit from inflation.
Of-course intrade makes sense if you want to bet against specific people. Maybe there should be a distributed betting system, decentralised, the question of-course is: who is going to hold the money in escrow while the bets are playing out? How to ensure safety and anonymity?
Those are technical questions, they can be resolved.
The world is full of thieves, you are right about that. That's the only thing you are correct on. The world is full of thieves and they form packs. Everything else you said is complete nonsense.
Not only libertarians do not 'disbelief in social groups' they are the only people who actually BELIEVE in social groups.
They believe that in the search for personal gain majority of activity in social groups will be beneficial for the main actor and for the rest of the society, because to make the most profit one has to find a way to build and distribute products and services that others find useful to them voluntarily.
You, on the other hand, only believe in coercion by threat of violence. You delegate initiation of violence to government thugs and call it 'morality', you are absolutely certain that it is morality, that's the sad part. Freedom is a very novel idea, for the most part of human history people operated based on YOUR belief system - survival by theft, by threat of violence, by coercion, by mobocracy and other forms of tyranny and discrimination.
Your belief structure is based upon violence and destruction and history is on your side, people are violent and destructive. However we evolve and our understanding of society evolves. You think that it means that the future system of gov't will be more collectivized, more centrally planned, more authoritarian (even if through democracy) in nature. You don't believe in individual rights, in private property and all the other rights associated with it.
I think that future is different, I think that USA of 1800 to 1913 shows that it is possible to have a different structure that is based on social cohesion not based on violence, not based on authoritarian ideas, not based on collectivism and not based on central planning. I think that the experiment that USA was (not anymore) shows that it is possible to achieve, but it requires more understanding of how to keep such a system more stable, not allow the rot that comes from basically envy and discrimination, which is propagated into the government to take place.
I think it's possible to do, I think Libertarians are the actually progressive people and those, who believe in government solution are the regressive ones.
(as to your ideas of socialism, time and again the history proves how much of a failure they are everywhere where they are attempted, and it is for a good reason: private property rights are paramount, they are the most important rights, there are no rights more important than private property rights, which, by the way, includes the right to own your body).
They were thinking they would rather work with a new company who has a product consumers want to buy instead of going down with a sinking ship that would bleed them dry on the way down.
- this gets +5? Insightful?
First of all nobody stopped the union members from quitting and moving on to another company before now.
Secondly, what other company? Who is going to hire these people now?
In fact if I ran a company that needed bakers in it you think I wouldn't be making 100% sure that NOBODY out of that union would be hired by my company under any circumstances? Not a single person working for that union should be ever hired again by any straight thinking employer (and it's likely that many won't be).
You are correct, Hostess is bankrupt not because it wants to stick it to the unions, it's bankrupt because its business is no longer profitable. To try and stay profitable Hostess needed an 8% pay cut across the board but the unions said: fuck off, die.
So instead of an 8% pay cut they got 100% pay cut and now they will probably be paid EI even though it is ludicrous, since they themselves walked out on the deal with the employer. It's like they quit instead of allowing the company to keep existing and taking an 8% pay cut and now they will be getting EI (or more likely disability, because that's where all the unemployed end up nowadays not to screw up Obama's unemployment numbers).
Freedom of speech exists to protect your most important freedom: freedom to own and operate private property.
Without private property you do not exist because even your body is your private property and if you do not own it but the government does, then at any moment the government can decide to take it away from you (whatever the reason, for the 'common good' for example, from each by his abilities to each by his need and all that).
If you do own your body it is because after you inherited it from your parents, without your efforts your body would not exist. Your work is the reason that your body is alive. Your body at some point becomes the outcome of your effort. Likewise if without your effort other things would not exist you own them.
So if you work and create a product of some sort that would not exist without your effort, it is yours. You also have the right to use your own effort to try and achieve happiness (a better outcome in life, you have the right to attempt to improve your circumstances).
How does the freedom of speech come into play? It is a way for you to attempt and protect your private property when it is being attacked by forces outside of yourself, such as a government. Maybe you want to improve your circumstances by advertising a product that you have created. If there is somebody who is closer than you are to the government (more politically connected) and they want to get rid of competition in that product space that you are posing, then if you did not have the freedom of speech they could use political power to silence you and thus deny you your attempt at improving your circumstances. (By the way this is the reason that legal entities like companies, corporations also by extension have the freedom of speech, after all, they are a fiction, behind every corporate front there is one or more people. Ability to spend money on political action is also speech, it can be used to buy advertising for example).
Of-course everything that we say has bearing in the real world, a word it is not just an abstract, it nearly always has concrete implications in your life. When it comes to government very often the only power that you have against it is speech. If you are denied that then the government can change the system and also take away your right to private property and then to your body and thus to your life.
What must be understood is that on its own freedom of speech means nothing, it's a curiosity, nothing else. It is only important within the context that it can be used as an extension of your right to own and operate private property. That is because if you do not have the right to private property, then freedom of speech really cannot protect anything for you because you can own nothing.
However if you have the right to private property then you must have freedom of speech, the right to private property is absolutely incomplete without freedom of speech, because without freedom of speech you cannot protect your private property from government.
All of this needs to be understood in a wider context of freedom to self-determination, freedom to live your life without being abused by powers that are bigger than you, collective powers, tyrannical powers that are always in line to abuse you the moment you relax your guard.
More importantly those billions did not have to be extracted from the private sector in the first place.
What is ridiculous about the entire 'fiscal cliff' situation is that the debt has to be fixed, not just deficit. Many believe that during Clinton time the budget was balanced for 2 years of his term, that is nonsense. By looking at the beginning and end of year debt numbers, it is clear that the debt was growing every year, a balanced budget would at least keep the debt from growing (I am not talking about interest that had to be paid on the coupons either).
Fiscal cliff has to happen in order to start working out the deficit and the debt, in fact 'fiscal cliff' is a drop in a bucket, it really is nothing, it doesn't actually stop increase of debt, it doesn't stop deficit. The cliff is actually a grand canyon if you look at how much needs to be cut, but instead the government is taxing more and more, inflating and borrowing more and more, and what are people seeing for it? More military, so more murder, more government and less private sector.
Fiscal cliff is supposed to start fixing the deficit, and why is that important? Why is deficit bad? Because it requires that government borrows money (adds to the debt), but why is that bad (beyond the obvious growth of debt, which means eventually higher taxes)?
Because the credit that is allocated to government ends up crowding out private investments that must take place in order to grow the economy.
But why is increasing taxes (especially taxes on the wealthy) is not the solution but actually worsens the problem? Because both: crowding out credit to private business and taxing private business and businessmen ends up doing exactly the same thing.
You can extract savings and investment capital out of the economy via taxes and you can crowd out the credit that is available to the private business, those are the same problem.
What is needed is more money in the hands of the private sector not in the hands of government to grow the economy. But this cannot be fake money. It cannot be money that is printed, credited out of nowhere, it has to be real money. What I mean to say is that interest must be real, inflation must be stopped in order to have production again. But this also means very specifically real cuts to government spending. Not cuts in proposed increases (like this nonsensical 'fiscal drop in a bucket' is), but actual cuts, which stop growth of debt, that's the important step. Stopping the growth of debt, but this means stopping the deficit, balancing the budget and starting surpluses that would actually decrease debt, not fake surpluses of Clinton administration, which just added more to the debt.
Having a 'surplus' by getting another credit card to charge your spending to is ridiculous, it's not a surplus if it ends up growing your debt rather than decreasing it.
Well, the software that I provide has ERP elements. I wouldn't know what ERP is for military, but I do understand what it is for retail and partially for medical field (dentistry so far).
This is part of my software suite, most of it is analytics, supply chain management, customer relationship management but some of it is planning the resources (but not as an abstract idea that allows to "plan everything", more like planning of the necessary parts, that I determine to be the most important for survival and growth of business). If something can be left outside of the system I don't touch it, I only look at things for which I have enough data and understanding of process and where the return is actually worth it, worth building it, worth training for it, worth paying for it.
There are things like that, but again, I don't believe in all encompassing ERP systems that allow you to do everything and include everything, even the kitchen sink.
I say only build things that actually help business and nothing more and charge a little for it, not millions. I end up charging a few thousand dollars per medium sized organisation per month (like a retail chain), they get everything I can provide but it is what is tested that actually is useful at the end.
So it depends whether the contract is to strip you naked or to give you something that will help your business because it also helps my business.
Of-course in case of gov't (military) they are nearly made of other people's money.
'left-leaning'? She is a full out Marxist. I watched all of the debates, I find her absolutely repugnant. However you are right, she is probably the most 'left-leaning' candidate out there, though the 'Justice' party candidate can give her a run for her money.
My comments after watching her in the debates go like this (in no particular order, I was just thinking about her positions and writing down thought on them):
She is abhorrent, one of the most awful human beings as far as I am concerned. She is promoting discrimination against people based on their ability to make their ticket in life, collectivism, central planning, central authority. She is promoting a state of emergency, draft, various national and international taxes and agreements to control entire population. I cannot imagine being in the same room with her, I am disgusted to breath the same air that sheï breathes.
I like how she insists that her ideology will 'save money'. Jill Stein cannot save money with her ideology, but she can spend much more than even is spent today with her ideas of 'single payer' and 'free education' andï 'weather-risation', etc.
She cannot provide economic security, but she can create an authoritarian totalitarian regime based on collectivism and central planning ideology and destroy the economy complete (well, the economy is being destroyed as is unless there is a complete stop to all gov't spending).
She cannot 'provide jobs', as she says she would. She can destroy jobs by taxing productive jobs and subsidising make belief 'jobs'.
She cannot fix climate as she says she would, she is against the cleanest source of energy we possess - nuclear.
She cannot provide healthy food as she says she would, but she can cause price spikes and food shortages with her policies.
She cannot make health care a 'human right' as she says she would, there is no such thing as a right to take from somebody and give to somebody else, but she can destroy the economy.
This so called 'doctor', Jill Stein, doesn't understand GMO food just like she doesn't understand environment and the fact that nuclear energy is safest and cleanest of all energies we can generate
GMO is a generic term, gene modifications cannot be proven to be 'safe' or 'unsafe' for all GMO foods, because they are different from case to case.
GMO food allows the food supplies to satisfy billions of people demanding food every day.
She is an ideologue, thoughï she likes to pretend and says that she is not.
Jill Stein is looking at the situation, there are people in the wagon and there are people pulling the wagon, and she is telling the people who are pulling the wagon: you are not pulling hard enough, you are not doing your fair share of work here. We are sitting in the wagon, we are consuming whatï you are producing at no cost to us, because we print the money, you are pulling the wagon but you are not doing it good enough. Pull harder and I want a leash to make you pull harder as well.
Jill Stein wants to re-inflate the housing bubble, that's what "weather-risation" colloquialism is. She wants to re-inflate the housing bubble, well, she is not alone. Bernanke wants to do the same with his minimum 40 Billion a month mortgage purchases.
Jill Stein was using the example of "converting car factories into bomber factories" as a good gov't policy. Of course it is a colloquialism for nationalisation.
Never forget what the collectivist, central planner (and an economicï ignoramus), Jill Stein says here. She says:
1. I want an emergency. 2. I want draft. 3. I want nationalisation. 4. I want collectivism for the 'common good'.
This is just another name for a totalitarian dictatorial power grab.
The socialist that Jill Stein is, she can't live without some war, some emergency. Every dictator in the world is justifying his behaviour by some form of 'emergency'.
Quadaffi or Kadafi (or whatever his name was) presidedï
I don't think it is too complex,I think it is too inconvenient for the power establishment. I think it is an unavoidable result of political corruption. Unfortunately the free market capitalism created so much wealth in the system, that it became extremely lucrative to be a politician, who could not resist but get his hands into the pie by setting up rules that would force businesses to pay politicians off just to be able to continue working. But to get that sort of power, the politicians needed to steal it from businesses. They needed the insurance that their corrupted manner of governance wasn't challenged by the courts and by the public.
To achieve that, politicians needed to find a way to villify the business and to get public on their side. What is the easiest quickest way to do it? Class warfare: tell the public that businesses rob them instead of providing them with good products at cheap prices, teach the public that the real producers of wealth are not savers and investors but consumers, teach the public that government has their best interest in mind, so government should be able to regulate and tax in manner that does not correspond to the original intent. Teach the public that Constitution is a 'living breathing document' and not actually the law.
Do this long enough and the public will definitely get on with that program, especially if it expects to get benefit from it and make the business, the minority pay for it.
Eventually this becomes the norm, the norm courts start supporting it because the judges are the same people, not businessmen who they feel must be controlled 'for the common good' and besides, judges want to be political, they like that power.
Then legislature can change the laws, introduce clearly democratic and totally illegal under the Constitution ideas, like the Fed, IRS and income taxes and regulations. When this ends up hurting the economy, the politicians blame business and the public is already taught to jump to that tune. So politicians come up with more regulations, like SS and Medicare and minimum wage, etc. This hurts the economy further, and the government blames it on free market, which by that time hasn't been free for decades.
Everything that the politicians and the public doends up hurting the economy more and more and who gets the blame? You guessed it.
The educational establishment becomes corrupt easily because the government comes up with money for it and respected positions. The more support an institution provides yo the government the easier it is to get funding. This promotes pseudo-economics and economists who do best in that system are those who say 'YES' the loudest.
You can appreciate what this does to the field of economics. We had similar outcomes in the ex-USSR (not limited to economics, any field of study and science can be corrupted this way).
Given this it is not at all surprising how completely confused and clueless people are on economics, it is seeing in every/. discussion.
All of this leads to only one unavoidable outcome.
Yet people have to replace their light fixtures, for example old type dimmers.
As to lifetime, this is pure nonsense. The new bulbs don't last anywhere near what the incandescent ones used to last and yet they are much more expensive and less bright.
Some Philadelphia neighborhoods outdid themselves in Tuesday's presidential election.
In a city where President Obama received more than 85 percent of the votes, in some places he received almost every one. In 13 Philadelphia wards, Obama received 99 percent of the vote or more.....
Campbell is leader of West Philadelphia's Fourth Ward, where Obama received 9,955 votes. Romney? Just 55. That's five fewer than McCain in 2008.
Now, what would it sound like if it were reported that among whites, 99% or more voted for a white candidate in a race with a white and a black candidate on the ticket?
What would be your 'big trouble right now'? Having to replace an appliance that is 50 years old? What if the appliance breaks, will you be in 'big trouble right now'?
Many products have limitations imposed on them by the external circumstances, for example if you have some water filter from ages ago, if the company goes out of business or stops supporting it, eventually you'll have to give it up even though it's not broken, because you won't be able to find replacement filters and parts for it.
So logically speaking you have to be against government involvement in business and money, because 'rent seeking' has to do with special privileges by a government.
However I know that you are not against government involvement in business and money, thus you cannot be using that definition of 'rent seeking', so in reality you are using 'rent seeking' as a general idea that hides your hate towards competitive free market capitalism.
Your words, not mine:
Gouging can be seen as a form of rent seeking based on the sevcere disruption of the market caused by a disaster.
You have REDEFINED 'rent seeking' in that single sentence not to mean: somebody using special access and special privileges with the power brokers to limit competition in a field that is profitable to them (my own words, but that's basically it), you redefined it as free market competitive capitalism.
So don't talk to me about 'missing fundamentals', I see what your real fundamentals look like.
Does alcohol help programming? Does any poison help programming? I don't know, why should a poison or any substance help an activity like that?
You can simply enjoy your poison, especially if it's legal (and all of them should be legal, including heroin and lsd, everything, nothing should be restricted by gov't), but don't try and justify your habits this way.
No, poisons do not help programming. They also do not help engineering or driving.
There supposed to be 3 branches of government, and the 3 branches supposed to be guarding against the other two, preventing any of the branches in usurping power from the people.
- wrong.
The 3 branches are not supposed to be preventing usurpation of power from the people, they are supposed to be preventing usurpation of power from each other and by the people.
The Founders established a Republic (if you could keep it), obviously you could not. You have a mobocracy rule, which is just a type of tyranny. When majority can vote for politicians who will promise popular things (stealing from minority and giving that money to majority) you have lost the principles that the Republic was founded upon.
Republic and not Democracy, that's what is needed. People are stupid and they should not be allowed to vote directly for government. There should be a subset of people voting (that's what the electoral college is) but the problem is that it is corrupted.
The delegates are not allowed to vote their conscience basically, so the actual solution is to demand that everybody votes their conscience and not their party line and any candidate that pushes for partisan vote shouldn't even be allowed to participate.
The real problem is that people are brainwashed to believe that they need parties, that parties represent people.
Parties DO NOT represent people and certainly electoral college shouldn't be beholden to parties.
It was Romney's to lose and he did so spectacularly during the RNC convention, when he presented himself as the bigger Democrat than Obama. Why would Democrats vote for a Democrat running as a Republican rather than for a Democrat running as a Democrat?
Romney can't out-Obama Obama. If he had an ounce of honesty, he would have stepped down and endorsed Ron Paul.
As is, vote for Gary Johnson, voting for Rs or Ds is voting for a 'better' prison guard.
Those would be the people, whose purchasing power was stolen by the Federal reserve, everybody who suffered and suffers lower standard of living because of theft committed with fake money.
You want to guarantee equal outcomes to different people, which absolutely requires different treatment of different people (progressive taxes of any kind are exactly this - discrimination and different application of laws to different people).
All of this throws away the very concept of equality before the law, the concept of formal law is thrown away for the sake of ideology of central planning and collectivism. Slavery for some and subsidy for others. Whichever way this is applied, it is always morally wrong and economically destructive.
I think RMS is wrong. Here is where I think he is wrong:
We can't get rid of software patents, says Richard Stallman
There is no reason why software patents cannot be eventually abolished (and other patents and copyrights actually). Once they are de facto abolished, then it would be a matter of time before they are abolished de jure. The battle of patents is just starting, it will be a war of patents and copyrights and I think there is a chance that the final casualty of that war will be the law itself (not immediately of-course, but nothing happens all at once). It will take an international patent war, one side just may declare that no patents and copyrights should be granted or protected again, because doing so hurts the economy and that may be the beginning of the end for all patents.
So exactly how would we on/. be able to answer that question?
Has Rover smelled something?
Unless the rover posts on/. the question will go unanswered but will provide space for many fart jokes and such, because it's a mature crowd here with serious people.
Slashdot Mirror
Your calculations can be easily defeated by simply launching many missiles that also carry decoy warheads. Have a 10-20 decoy warheads per missile and then only a small fraction of the warheads and missiles actually have to carry the real charge, and all of a sudden it's possible to overwhelm an ABM system, especially if the warheads themselves have a little bit of intelligence and maybe even network communications between them.
Yes, what is described in this story is gambling.
Of-course there is nothing wrong with gambling beyond the fact that government wants to prevent you from doing it the way you feel like, because that creates competition to the legal establishments, which government gets to raid when it comes to the tax time.
People need to bet, people do bet, there is nothing wrong with it. In fact if you are not willing to bet then you are not really making any sort of a prediction.
Samuel Clemens said: " Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform." I bet on everything I believe in, my bets don't necessarily go against any specific people, but they go against the majority. So when I say that the fiat currencies are all collapsing (as all fiat currencies do), I make a bet by not holding currencies and instead holding other things, metals, commodities, some stocks in sectors that I think benefit from inflation.
Of-course intrade makes sense if you want to bet against specific people. Maybe there should be a distributed betting system, decentralised, the question of-course is: who is going to hold the money in escrow while the bets are playing out? How to ensure safety and anonymity?
Those are technical questions, they can be resolved.
The world is full of thieves, you are right about that. That's the only thing you are correct on. The world is full of thieves and they form packs. Everything else you said is complete nonsense.
Not only libertarians do not 'disbelief in social groups' they are the only people who actually BELIEVE in social groups.
They believe that in the search for personal gain majority of activity in social groups will be beneficial for the main actor and for the rest of the society, because to make the most profit one has to find a way to build and distribute products and services that others find useful to them voluntarily.
You, on the other hand, only believe in coercion by threat of violence. You delegate initiation of violence to government thugs and call it 'morality', you are absolutely certain that it is morality, that's the sad part. Freedom is a very novel idea, for the most part of human history people operated based on YOUR belief system - survival by theft, by threat of violence, by coercion, by mobocracy and other forms of tyranny and discrimination.
Your belief structure is based upon violence and destruction and history is on your side, people are violent and destructive. However we evolve and our understanding of society evolves. You think that it means that the future system of gov't will be more collectivized, more centrally planned, more authoritarian (even if through democracy) in nature. You don't believe in individual rights, in private property and all the other rights associated with it.
I think that future is different, I think that USA of 1800 to 1913 shows that it is possible to have a different structure that is based on social cohesion not based on violence, not based on authoritarian ideas, not based on collectivism and not based on central planning. I think that the experiment that USA was (not anymore) shows that it is possible to achieve, but it requires more understanding of how to keep such a system more stable, not allow the rot that comes from basically envy and discrimination, which is propagated into the government to take place.
I think it's possible to do, I think Libertarians are the actually progressive people and those, who believe in government solution are the regressive ones.
(as to your ideas of socialism, time and again the history proves how much of a failure they are everywhere where they are attempted, and it is for a good reason: private property rights are paramount, they are the most important rights, there are no rights more important than private property rights, which, by the way, includes the right to own your body).
They were thinking they would rather work with a new company who has a product consumers want to buy instead of going down with a sinking ship that would bleed them dry on the way down.
- this gets +5? Insightful?
First of all nobody stopped the union members from quitting and moving on to another company before now.
Secondly, what other company? Who is going to hire these people now?
In fact if I ran a company that needed bakers in it you think I wouldn't be making 100% sure that NOBODY out of that union would be hired by my company under any circumstances? Not a single person working for that union should be ever hired again by any straight thinking employer (and it's likely that many won't be).
You are correct, Hostess is bankrupt not because it wants to stick it to the unions, it's bankrupt because its business is no longer profitable. To try and stay profitable Hostess needed an 8% pay cut across the board but the unions said: fuck off, die.
So instead of an 8% pay cut they got 100% pay cut and now they will probably be paid EI even though it is ludicrous, since they themselves walked out on the deal with the employer. It's like they quit instead of allowing the company to keep existing and taking an 8% pay cut and now they will be getting EI (or more likely disability, because that's where all the unemployed end up nowadays not to screw up Obama's unemployment numbers).
Freedom of speech exists to protect your most important freedom: freedom to own and operate private property.
Without private property you do not exist because even your body is your private property and if you do not own it but the government does, then at any moment the government can decide to take it away from you (whatever the reason, for the 'common good' for example, from each by his abilities to each by his need and all that).
If you do own your body it is because after you inherited it from your parents, without your efforts your body would not exist. Your work is the reason that your body is alive. Your body at some point becomes the outcome of your effort. Likewise if without your effort other things would not exist you own them.
So if you work and create a product of some sort that would not exist without your effort, it is yours. You also have the right to use your own effort to try and achieve happiness (a better outcome in life, you have the right to attempt to improve your circumstances).
How does the freedom of speech come into play? It is a way for you to attempt and protect your private property when it is being attacked by forces outside of yourself, such as a government. Maybe you want to improve your circumstances by advertising a product that you have created. If there is somebody who is closer than you are to the government (more politically connected) and they want to get rid of competition in that product space that you are posing, then if you did not have the freedom of speech they could use political power to silence you and thus deny you your attempt at improving your circumstances. (By the way this is the reason that legal entities like companies, corporations also by extension have the freedom of speech, after all, they are a fiction, behind every corporate front there is one or more people. Ability to spend money on political action is also speech, it can be used to buy advertising for example).
Of-course everything that we say has bearing in the real world, a word it is not just an abstract, it nearly always has concrete implications in your life. When it comes to government very often the only power that you have against it is speech. If you are denied that then the government can change the system and also take away your right to private property and then to your body and thus to your life.
What must be understood is that on its own freedom of speech means nothing, it's a curiosity, nothing else. It is only important within the context that it can be used as an extension of your right to own and operate private property. That is because if you do not have the right to private property, then freedom of speech really cannot protect anything for you because you can own nothing.
However if you have the right to private property then you must have freedom of speech, the right to private property is absolutely incomplete without freedom of speech, because without freedom of speech you cannot protect your private property from government.
All of this needs to be understood in a wider context of freedom to self-determination, freedom to live your life without being abused by powers that are bigger than you, collective powers, tyrannical powers that are always in line to abuse you the moment you relax your guard.
More importantly those billions did not have to be extracted from the private sector in the first place.
What is ridiculous about the entire 'fiscal cliff' situation is that the debt has to be fixed, not just deficit. Many believe that during Clinton time the budget was balanced for 2 years of his term, that is nonsense. By looking at the beginning and end of year debt numbers, it is clear that the debt was growing every year, a balanced budget would at least keep the debt from growing (I am not talking about interest that had to be paid on the coupons either).
Fiscal cliff has to happen in order to start working out the deficit and the debt, in fact 'fiscal cliff' is a drop in a bucket, it really is nothing, it doesn't actually stop increase of debt, it doesn't stop deficit. The cliff is actually a grand canyon if you look at how much needs to be cut, but instead the government is taxing more and more, inflating and borrowing more and more, and what are people seeing for it? More military, so more murder, more government and less private sector.
Fiscal cliff is supposed to start fixing the deficit, and why is that important? Why is deficit bad? Because it requires that government borrows money (adds to the debt), but why is that bad (beyond the obvious growth of debt, which means eventually higher taxes)?
Because the credit that is allocated to government ends up crowding out private investments that must take place in order to grow the economy.
But why is increasing taxes (especially taxes on the wealthy) is not the solution but actually worsens the problem? Because both: crowding out credit to private business and taxing private business and businessmen ends up doing exactly the same thing.
You can extract savings and investment capital out of the economy via taxes and you can crowd out the credit that is available to the private business, those are the same problem.
What is needed is more money in the hands of the private sector not in the hands of government to grow the economy. But this cannot be fake money. It cannot be money that is printed, credited out of nowhere, it has to be real money. What I mean to say is that interest must be real, inflation must be stopped in order to have production again. But this also means very specifically real cuts to government spending. Not cuts in proposed increases (like this nonsensical 'fiscal drop in a bucket' is), but actual cuts, which stop growth of debt, that's the important step. Stopping the growth of debt, but this means stopping the deficit, balancing the budget and starting surpluses that would actually decrease debt, not fake surpluses of Clinton administration, which just added more to the debt.
Having a 'surplus' by getting another credit card to charge your spending to is ridiculous, it's not a surplus if it ends up growing your debt rather than decreasing it.
Well, the software that I provide has ERP elements. I wouldn't know what ERP is for military, but I do understand what it is for retail and partially for medical field (dentistry so far).
This is part of my software suite, most of it is analytics, supply chain management, customer relationship management but some of it is planning the resources (but not as an abstract idea that allows to "plan everything", more like planning of the necessary parts, that I determine to be the most important for survival and growth of business). If something can be left outside of the system I don't touch it, I only look at things for which I have enough data and understanding of process and where the return is actually worth it, worth building it, worth training for it, worth paying for it.
There are things like that, but again, I don't believe in all encompassing ERP systems that allow you to do everything and include everything, even the kitchen sink.
I say only build things that actually help business and nothing more and charge a little for it, not millions. I end up charging a few thousand dollars per medium sized organisation per month (like a retail chain), they get everything I can provide but it is what is tested that actually is useful at the end.
So it depends whether the contract is to strip you naked or to give you something that will help your business because it also helps my business.
Of-course in case of gov't (military) they are nearly made of other people's money.
'left-leaning'? She is a full out Marxist. I watched all of the debates, I find her absolutely repugnant. However you are right, she is probably the most 'left-leaning' candidate out there, though the 'Justice' party candidate can give her a run for her money.
My comments after watching her in the debates go like this (in no particular order, I was just thinking about her positions and writing down thought on them):
She is abhorrent, one of the most awful human beings as far as I am concerned. She is promoting discrimination against people based on their ability to make their ticket in life, collectivism, central planning, central authority. She is promoting a state of emergency, draft, various national and international taxes and agreements to control entire population. I cannot imagine being in the same room with her, I am disgusted to breath the same air that sheï breathes.
I like how she insists that her ideology will 'save money'. Jill Stein cannot save money with her ideology, but she can spend much more than even is spent today with her ideas of 'single payer' and 'free education' andï 'weather-risation', etc.
She cannot provide economic security, but she can create an authoritarian totalitarian regime based on collectivism and central planning ideology and destroy the economy complete (well, the economy is being destroyed as is unless there is a complete stop to all gov't spending).
She cannot 'provide jobs', as she says she would. She can destroy jobs by taxing productive jobs and subsidising make belief 'jobs'.
She cannot fix climate as she says she would, she is against the cleanest source of energy we possess - nuclear.
She cannot provide healthy food as she says she would, but she can cause price spikes and food shortages with her policies.
She cannot make health care a 'human right' as she says she would, there is no such thing as a right to take from somebody and give to somebody else, but she can destroy the economy.
This so called 'doctor', Jill Stein, doesn't understand GMO food just like she doesn't understand environment and the fact that nuclear energy is safest and cleanest of all energies we can generate
GMO is a generic term, gene modifications cannot be proven to be 'safe' or 'unsafe' for all GMO foods, because they are different from case to case.
GMO food allows the food supplies to satisfy billions of people demanding food every day.
She is an ideologue, thoughï she likes to pretend and says that she is not.
Jill Stein is looking at the situation, there are people in the wagon and there are people pulling the wagon, and she is telling the people who are pulling the wagon: you are not pulling hard enough, you are not doing your fair share of work here. We are sitting in the wagon, we are consuming whatï you are producing at no cost to us, because we print the money, you are pulling the wagon but you are not doing it good enough. Pull harder and I want a leash to make you pull harder as well.
Jill Stein wants to re-inflate the housing bubble, that's what "weather-risation" colloquialism is. She wants to re-inflate the housing bubble, well, she is not alone. Bernanke wants to do the same with his minimum 40 Billion a month mortgage purchases.
Jill Stein was using the example of "converting car factories into bomber factories" as a good gov't policy. Of course it is a colloquialism for nationalisation.
Never forget what the collectivist, central planner (and an economicï ignoramus), Jill Stein says here. She says:
1. I want an emergency.
2. I want draft.
3. I want nationalisation.
4. I want collectivism for the 'common good'.
This is just another name for a totalitarian dictatorial power grab.
The socialist that Jill Stein is, she can't live without some war, some emergency. Every dictator in the world is justifying his behaviour by some form of 'emergency'.
Quadaffi or Kadafi (or whatever his name was) presidedï
I don't think it is too complex,I think it is too inconvenient for the power establishment. I think it is an unavoidable result of political corruption. Unfortunately the free market capitalism created so much wealth in the system, that it became extremely lucrative to be a politician, who could not resist but get his hands into the pie by setting up rules that would force businesses to pay politicians off just to be able to continue working. But to get that sort of power, the politicians needed to steal it from businesses. They needed the insurance that their corrupted manner of governance wasn't challenged by the courts and by the public.
To achieve that, politicians needed to find a way to villify the business and to get public on their side. What is the easiest quickest way to do it? Class warfare: tell the public that businesses rob them instead of providing them with good products at cheap prices, teach the public that the real producers of wealth are not savers and investors but consumers, teach the public that government has their best interest in mind, so government should be able to regulate and tax in manner that does not correspond to the original intent. Teach the public that Constitution is a 'living breathing document' and not actually the law.
Do this long enough and the public will definitely get on with that program, especially if it expects to get benefit from it and make the business, the minority pay for it.
Eventually this becomes the norm, the norm courts start supporting it because the judges are the same people, not businessmen who they feel must be controlled 'for the common good' and besides, judges want to be political, they like that power.
Then legislature can change the laws, introduce clearly democratic and totally illegal under the Constitution ideas, like the Fed, IRS and income taxes and regulations. When this ends up hurting the economy, the politicians blame business and the public is already taught to jump to that tune. So politicians come up with more regulations, like SS and Medicare and minimum wage, etc. This hurts the economy further, and the government blames it on free market, which by that time hasn't been free for decades.
Everything that the politicians and the public doends up hurting the economy more and more and who gets the blame? You guessed it.
The educational establishment becomes corrupt easily because the government comes up with money for it and respected positions. The more support an institution provides yo the government the easier it is to get funding. This promotes pseudo-economics and economists who do best in that system are those who say 'YES' the loudest.
You can appreciate what this does to the field of economics. We had similar outcomes in the ex-USSR (not limited to economics, any field of study and science can be corrupted this way).
Given this it is not at all surprising how completely confused and clueless people are on economics, it is seeing in every /. discussion.
All of this leads to only one unavoidable outcome.
Yet people have to replace their light fixtures, for example old type dimmers.
As to lifetime, this is pure nonsense. The new bulbs don't last anywhere near what the incandescent ones used to last and yet they are much more expensive and less bright.
A MUCH more telling set of numbers is this
Some Philadelphia neighborhoods outdid themselves in Tuesday's presidential election.
In a city where President Obama received more than 85 percent of the votes, in some places he received almost every one. In 13 Philadelphia wards, Obama received 99 percent of the vote or more. ....
Campbell is leader of West Philadelphia's Fourth Ward, where Obama received 9,955 votes. Romney? Just 55. That's five fewer than McCain in 2008.
Now, what would it sound like if it were reported that among whites, 99% or more voted for a white candidate in a race with a white and a black candidate on the ticket?
What would be your 'big trouble right now'? Having to replace an appliance that is 50 years old? What if the appliance breaks, will you be in 'big trouble right now'?
Many products have limitations imposed on them by the external circumstances, for example if you have some water filter from ages ago, if the company goes out of business or stops supporting it, eventually you'll have to give it up even though it's not broken, because you won't be able to find replacement filters and parts for it.
But what about all the people who will have to replace various lighting fixtures and light bulbs that are in perfect working condition just because governments dictate that the old type light-bulbs can no longer be bought legally?
So logically speaking you have to be against government involvement in business and money, because 'rent seeking' has to do with special privileges by a government.
However I know that you are not against government involvement in business and money, thus you cannot be using that definition of 'rent seeking', so in reality you are using 'rent seeking' as a general idea that hides your hate towards competitive free market capitalism.
Your words, not mine:
Gouging can be seen as a form of rent seeking based on the sevcere disruption of the market caused by a disaster.
You have REDEFINED 'rent seeking' in that single sentence not to mean: somebody using special access and special privileges with the power brokers to limit competition in a field that is profitable to them (my own words, but that's basically it), you redefined it as free market competitive capitalism.
So don't talk to me about 'missing fundamentals', I see what your real fundamentals look like.
Does alcohol help programming? Does any poison help programming? I don't know, why should a poison or any substance help an activity like that?
You can simply enjoy your poison, especially if it's legal (and all of them should be legal, including heroin and lsd, everything, nothing should be restricted by gov't), but don't try and justify your habits this way.
No, poisons do not help programming. They also do not help engineering or driving.
PDF Reader should be appropriately renamed into Yo L337 Komputa OwnZa.
There supposed to be 3 branches of government, and the 3 branches supposed to be guarding against the other two, preventing any of the branches in usurping power from the people.
- wrong.
The 3 branches are not supposed to be preventing usurpation of power from the people, they are supposed to be preventing usurpation of power from each other and by the people.
The Founders established a Republic (if you could keep it), obviously you could not. You have a mobocracy rule, which is just a type of tyranny. When majority can vote for politicians who will promise popular things (stealing from minority and giving that money to majority) you have lost the principles that the Republic was founded upon.
Republic and not Democracy, that's what is needed. People are stupid and they should not be allowed to vote directly for government. There should be a subset of people voting (that's what the electoral college is) but the problem is that it is corrupted.
The delegates are not allowed to vote their conscience basically, so the actual solution is to demand that everybody votes their conscience and not their party line and any candidate that pushes for partisan vote shouldn't even be allowed to participate.
The real problem is that people are brainwashed to believe that they need parties, that parties represent people.
Parties DO NOT represent people and certainly electoral college shouldn't be beholden to parties.
It was Romney's to lose and he did so spectacularly during the RNC convention, when he presented himself as the bigger Democrat than Obama. Why would Democrats vote for a Democrat running as a Republican rather than for a Democrat running as a Democrat?
Romney can't out-Obama Obama. If he had an ounce of honesty, he would have stepped down and endorsed Ron Paul.
As is, vote for Gary Johnson, voting for Rs or Ds is voting for a 'better' prison guard.
Those would be the people, whose purchasing power was stolen by the Federal reserve, everybody who suffered and suffers lower standard of living because of theft committed with fake money.
I wrote a section on 'Basic Income' (not in the English wiki), which explains why it is a bad idea and leads to economic self-destruction.
I have one thing to say about it.
You want to guarantee equal outcomes to different people, which absolutely requires different treatment of different people (progressive taxes of any kind are exactly this - discrimination and different application of laws to different people).
All of this throws away the very concept of equality before the law, the concept of formal law is thrown away for the sake of ideology of central planning and collectivism. Slavery for some and subsidy for others. Whichever way this is applied, it is always morally wrong and economically destructive.
I think RMS is wrong. Here is where I think he is wrong:
We can't get rid of software patents, says Richard Stallman
There is no reason why software patents cannot be eventually abolished (and other patents and copyrights actually). Once they are de facto abolished, then it would be a matter of time before they are abolished de jure. The battle of patents is just starting, it will be a war of patents and copyrights and I think there is a chance that the final casualty of that war will be the law itself (not immediately of-course, but nothing happens all at once). It will take an international patent war, one side just may declare that no patents and copyrights should be granted or protected again, because doing so hurts the economy and that may be the beginning of the end for all patents.
So exactly how would we on /. be able to answer that question?
Has Rover smelled something?
Unless the rover posts on /. the question will go unanswered but will provide space for many fart jokes and such, because it's a mature crowd here with serious people.