People worried about rising prices: 41% People worried about unemployment: 24% People worried about taxes: 19% People worried about housing market: 7%
If this poll is anywhere near correct, then twice as many people are worried about rising prices (resulting at the minimum from inflation) than there are people worried about unemployment or taxes. 6 times more people worry about rising prices than about housing market.
Yet the Fed's policies are all aimed at 'curbing deflation' and creating inflation by buying more and more mortgages (40 billion a month now or more forever, "until the economy gets better").
And really, if the rising prices is such a good thing in housing (according to the Fed), why is it then something that worries so many people?
Of-course people are worried about rising prices in energy, food and other things that they have to buy all the time. All the stupid 'economic data' that the news like to show right now display 'rise in consumer confidence' based on people spending more.
Nobody in the news is paying attention that people are spending more to buy the same or even less, because things cost more. Is inflation a problem? Not if the Fed has to say anything about it, yet 41% of people think rising prices are a problem.
This is a farce. 2 sides of the same exact coin are arguing about who is made of a purer metal. Give a fucking break, if you have half a brain cell for each 10 people, you still should be able to see through this charade.
Forfeiture of private property is clearly Unconstitutional, it is resulted from gov't dumping the Constitution while running the Drug War (and now everything else, the war on terrorism, etc.) You can listen to that show, it's talking about it in more detail.
AFAIC Free Speech is a supplementary right, which you must have in order to be able to protect your right to own and operate private property without interference by the government.
The right to own and operate private property is the first and most fundamental right, all other rights are descended from this one most important right that a person can have. The right to free speech (speech that cannot be silenced by threat of government violence) is your ability to protect your most important right - right to own and operate private property.
Your private property starts with your body, every part of it and the entire body itself, you inherit it from your parents, who produce it for you (thus the right to leave inheritance, as a consequence of the right to private property) and you provide for your body, which cannot exist without you working to maintain it in every way.
Ownership of property that is external of your body is the extension of the right of property that applies to your body, it means you have the right to own products, which would not exist without your work.
The right to Free Speech gives you ability to make a case, which is always a political and an economic case, that you must be able to maintain your right to own and operate private property.j
Of-course being able to produce something and then run a commercial about the product without interference by the government also falls under the same category, so that your ability to pursue happiness would not be diminished by government limiting your ability to exchange the property that you possess currently for other property that somebody is willing to exchange with you for voluntarily.
Everything is about private property ownership, everything is about your ability pursue happiness in life by doing whatever work that you do, everything is about being able to keep the fruits of your labour and all of this is the same exact right as your right to self-determination.
Didn't you hear, Rockefeller, Carnegie, they didn't build that. It was government and everybody who built that but them, it was the consumer who built that but them.
Wait, there was almost no government back in 19th century? Well, then it must have been slave labour.
Wait, industrialisation made hired labour more productive and competitive than slave labour?
Well, it was probably the proletariat that built that, didn't you know? Marx himself.
He is anti-drug war, pro legalisation of drugs, he reformed education system with voucher programs, he climbed the freaking Mount Everest (literally). He is pro free-market, against illegal foreign invasions, etc.
It's INSANE that this guy (and Ron Paul) are not in the elections. Actually Johnson said that if Ron Paul got the nomination he wouldn't run on the Libertarian ticket.
The game is rigged and it should be ended abruptly and it will be.
And so the crowd cheers as it gets its bread and circuses, while the government is going absolutely crazy, attacking successful business because it's successful and it doesn't 'share' enough with the government obviously.
Just like the cases of Standard Oil (the company that over the stretch of 30 years brought prices of oil down from 30 cents per gallon of refined oil in 1869 to 5.9 cents in 1899, and by the time it was broken up in 1911, there were 150 competitors, and since it was broken up the prices for oil never went down again, thus gov't ended up hurting the consumer), Alcoa Aluminium (again, the same thing - a large business giving its customers the best deal in the market for years, so the gov't saw an opportunity to make tons of money by allowing fake competition to emerge by preventing the successful business from being so successful) the same thing with many companies.
The same thing is happening here. What is Google? One of the worlds search engines, a successful advertising platform, an Internet app provider, a researcher and developer, etc.etc., one of the (if not the most) coveted employees.
It is obviously stepping on too many toes for it not to be attacked by the government dogs, and they are dogs.
Actually, personally, I have more reasons to be upset at Google than gov't does. I have problems with their advertising, but not because they push their own services more, or whatever, but because of their stupid policy on advertising, I don't want to get into details, but basically I have to advertise with their various competitors and not with them, but that's too sad for me. But AFAIC there are alternatives.
And even if there were no alternatives, while Google was highly profitable and problematic for some advertisers, what it would tell me is that there is a good opportunity in that space, not that government should be used by me to attack Google.
Yeah, I could use government to attack Google, in fact it would be a good business practice for me to attack Google by using the government, it makes perfect sense for a business to use the path of least resistance, and if that means using government, paying off some politicians to promote my business, I should do that.
Who really should be pissed off and upset are the people who get something from Google rather than from government. Whether you call them the clients, the consumers, even 'the product', they should be upset.
Right now Google is providing a good product, it provides a good platform, it provides people with what they want, and in case of the home users, they don't have to pay for it! What if government does get something from Google that it wants? What does it mean?
It means more money going to the government, it means reduction of money that Google has to spend on its own initiatives, on its own development and research, on its own business. It means reduction of service.
Does it mean that the quality of searches will increase? BY GOVERNMENT DECREE? Of-course not. It means that there may be new laws and regulations, it means there may be new licences, it means there may be new government positions, it means that Google may even be broken up into pieces! That's what it means!
Why would ANY of it be good for the consumer? It never is! Just like breaking Standard Oil or Alcoa was NOT good for the end consumer, this won't be either.
As an end consumer, do you give a shit that there is more artificial "competition" created by government in some field, with licenses, with taxes, with breaking of successful business apart? Why would you care if what YOU get is reduction of services, higher prices, less options?
What about investors, they are going to take a hit! In this economy.
What about employees? They are going to take a hit. In this economy.
Does this mean it's good for the government? Well, for SOMEBODY in gov't it may be good, but the overall situation will be bad. Google may outsource more of its operations into other countri
I will tell you another thing, Mozilla has already figured out how to block freaking adons in its browsers. I wrote a few SIMPLE ADONS that Mozilla finds a way to break with half of the releases. I am just not interested in maintaining such simple functionality in every version, where in fact no new functionality is added. They are very very fucking simple they shouldn't break, it's frustrating. The users complain: your adon doesn't work. NO! It's the latest fucking Firefox that doesn't work!
The only reasonable thing to do is to deny all future patents and cut the current existing patent terms to 5 years, and so anybody with a patent older than that loses the gov't racket protection and nobody else can ever apply for another patent again.
You want to invent something and build a business around it? Fine, do it, but nobody should be given special privileges by the governments, to give them monopoly on whatever it is, even if they invented it. You don't like it? Don't show your invention to anybody, let others re-invent it and make a business out of it. Was that easy?
Another point is: there are still trade secrets and non-disclosure agreements, which are just contracts between private parties and they have nothing to do with governments.
Oh, and by the way, same thing about copyright, only their terms should be cut right now to 3 years in total and no new copyrights should be granted.
You have your moral rights of-course, but those have nothing to do with government protection racket and artificial monopoly status.
--
Now that is a sensible solution and it doesn't require anything to be done by anybody, on the contrary, it requires less government and allows for a nice way to cut on various government spending as well.
That was actually a really good thing to do. Instead of profiteering, they tried to make the best of a bad situation for everyone.
- no, it was a stupid move by Costco. They got exactly what was expected to happen with this:
Then a bunch of dicks like this figure that they're more important than everyone else and that they should be able to get more than enyone else.
What Costco should have done (what is the correct thing to do) is to maximise efficiency in the market by raising the price to the level where the customers who truly needed the drives for productive reasons would be still willing to buy them, while those, who are not being as productive with the new drives would just have to wait.
It's the same exact thing as rationing, except it basically queues up the people who need the drives by priority, and those who need the drives most would buy them at a higher price, because those drives even at higher prices would be a justified purchase, because it would make the buyers more productive.
Those who are not being as productive with the drives wouldn't be able to justify the purchase at higher prices and would just wait until the prices come down.
That would certainly deter me from buying products that were manufactured or contained parts that were manufactured abroad.
- maybe what it should do, instead of deterring you from making your own choices in life regarding your property and earnings and basic economic freedoms, maybe it should change your mind in terms of what exactly you see as the role for government at this point, because if a government can tell you that your property is actually not your property, then is it a government you actually want to have? Do you really accept that government making such decisions on your behalf?
You must be able to own private property. It starts with your body and it extends to everything that cannot be produced without your effort. The freedom of speech and all other freedoms only matter as long as they exist within the context of this one freedom: being able to own and command private property. All other freedoms really only exist to allow you to protect that one supreme freedom to your utmost ability.
The right to private property equals the freedom of self-determination, ability to attempt to raise yourself to the next level, whatever it is, without any government preventing you from this. Your speech must be protected because it allows you to make a case to protect your freedom to property and self-determination. Without the right to private property you lose everything, you stop being an independent individual, you become a dependent, a ward of the State, and a State that would take care of your material needs is also the State that would completely control every aspect of your life.
It is a liability, you have to put all your liabilities, debts, expenses, accounts payable on the other side of your balance sheet, that is opposite to your revenues, equity, accounts receivable and assets. Of-course in reality the gov't will create inflation and will monetise all debts, so from that perspective it's a wash, because the gov't will return the nominal debts.
Of-course real debts will never be returned, nobody will get gold as opposed to fiat paper and if fiat currency will end up buying nothing, many people will still not understand where the problem came from (government) and will end up blaming the 'free market', as if free market controls the value of things, including interest rates and currency.
By the way, you are missing part of the formula for GDP, it's the deflator that they are supposed to apply to discount inflation. Of-course their deflators are ridiculously low, I have an 'informative' post with many numbers and links in it here, which shows a few things about inflation and GDP. AFAIC GDP has been shrinking for a long time now in 2 ways.
1. The 'production' part of GDP is shrinking all the time. Look at the trade deficit numbers, here is a page with history on it in PDF or text. For the year 2011 the trade deficit was 559Billion dollars and it's growing all he time. Of-course the total personal consumption in USA is mostly on services, not on goods, in fact 2/3 of all consumption is services and only 1/3 is goods. 11Trillion was spent by US consumers in 2011, so about 3 Trillion was spent on goods and the rest was energy, food and services (like healthcare and education for example), so in that sense US consumer consumes mostly 'US' service. However if you look at the goods (go to Walmart and compare how many things are made in USA vs foreign made, like China), you'll find that most of the goods bought and sold (and even food, 90% of sea food comes from Asia) is made elsewhere.
2. The deflator that is used is reverse engineered to fit the propaganda. With the nominal and pre-deflator GDP being 2.9%, the deflator is set to be 1.6. (read the linked comment, I give quotes and links there), that's GDP revised down from 1.7% to 1.3% (post deflator) for the second quarter.
70% of GDP could very well be consumption, at least in countries with unusually low government spending
- I am sorry, this sentence makes no sense. 70% of GDP is consumption, that's not because of low gov't consumption, the exact opposite is the case, that's because of very high consumption stimulated by gov't (especially non-existing interest rates and free money allocated by the Fed to the member banks, who then buy T-bills and bonds and allow gov't to keeps spending). It's low production that is the problem, that's why GDP is 70% personalconsumption, it's the actual number, whatcan I say? You see, when the production portion of GDP shrinks, the consumption portion becomes bigger and bigger part of the number, and if the consumption is stimulated artificially with fake money and 0% interest rates, and as long as the foreigners are willing to take dollars for their exports, then consumption even grows, doesn't just stay the same.
The reason that the consumption is mostly of foreign goods is exactly because the production part of GDP is disappearing.
That's because people burn mostly oil, if many of them lose access to oil, they'll burn what they can, and this means going back to coal as well as other, worse resources, like heavy oils.
Your guess is wrong (and by the way, GDP is 70% consumption of mostly foreign goods).
It's the fake money that is created out of thin air by the Fed and it's about all the gov't 'stimulus' that uses the fake money and borrowing to promote consumption.
Here is the actual sad part: with all the consumption based on inflation and borrowing, none of it goes towards investment into actual productive activities, it all gets burned (foreign goods are bought and consumed, gas is consumed), it's all about stimulating consumption and once the fake money is no longer accepted, that's when austerity will set in.
However will austerity mean less CO2? Well, if people cut down on driving their cars because they can't buy gas for any amount of dollars, then sure, however there will be more CO2 produced as people go back to heating with coal and heavy oils, so it may be a wash.
What is an NPC? How are 'cities dead'? Should everybody know what esoteric abbreviations and meanings are? If a city is dead, does it mean people lost their game characters or something (I really don't know anything about this game). Maybe a better summary is in order or is this story aimed at the gamers in that game only?
"wealthy on paper" - you can call your fiat system that. You think you are wealthy if you have cash? Dollars? Let me tell you something, I rather have no dollars or any other fiat currencies at all and have stake in dividend paying companies and various assets, it's a much better plan than holding fiat currencies, whose value can only go down, because the control over them is in the hands of politicians.
However you are forgetting something: death tax. If you have a company and you die, the IRS (and State gov't) wants your heirs to give them cash, for that they want you to liquidate the company, which often means at firesale prices. That's why Warren Buffet loves that tax, his company, BH, comes in and buys the equity at a depressed value because of and then later makes money by reselling it.
lots of employees jobs at risk and whatnot. there are probably all sorts of legalities associated with selling out
- well, if it's a post-IPO company, then there SEC rules when you can sell your shares, if it is a private company it's nobody's business, if you can sell it and you want to, you sell it. People don't sell because they want to keep running their business.
what a load of shit that is. maybe compared to someone that doesn't work at all (as in zero work)
- no, they are millions of times more productive than any one particular employee if they build a company that sells to millions of people.
If you can build a product and sell to millions of people, that's being productive on the scale of millions. If you can satisfy millions of customers, then that's your productivity. An employee is interchangeable, he has a specific function, a business owner who built the business made the company that satisfied millions of customers.
It's the same thing as building millions of products and providing them to millions of people all on your own, your employees matter, but they are part of the machine that you built.
Yes it is true, Constitution is a firewall, like PF on a BSD server, which by default blocks all ports. Politicians are like terrible admins, who are trying to open every port possible so that your system will be under threat of all the attacks possible. Constitution is the way to protect your servers by denying politicians the access.
No, Constitution doesn't 'forbid' anything actually (except for amendments, which are a way to confuse the issue). Constitution allows government certain functions and everything else is forbidden. Whatever is not expressly allowed is not allowed and running a committee on space etc., it's not expressly allowed.
Broun also said that he believes the Earth is about 9,000 years old and that it was made in six days. Those beliefs are held by fundamentalist Christians who believe the creation accounts in the Bible to be literally true.
- DAMN! Is the inflation so high today it even devalued the 6000 time years to mean 9000? I mean I remember seeing stories saying that it's 6000 just 1 year ago, so that's 50% increase in 1 freaking year, if this stuff compounds soon enough this creationist belief will catch up with the actual Earth's age and then shoot right past it.
In only 33 years with kind of inflation 6000 years will exceed 5.8 billion, which is 1.3 billion years more than the actual Earth's age!
what really should make you depressed and angry is that there is such a thing as 'House Committee on Science, Space and Technology' in the first place. None of it is Constitutional and none of it belongs in government.
you've got enough to live a very comfortable life, and there's no relationship between comfort and a desire to create. In fact, quite the opposite is true: It's adversity that is the mother of invention.
- why did Steve Jobs not quit in 1985? He never spent the money that he even made by that time in his life, so why did he bother?
Why does anybody bother once they make enough to live off of for the rest of their lives comfortably? It's because people who are good at this do not want to stop doing it, it becomes an incentive in itself. Being able to take an idea to a full implementation and see it succeed is something great in itself.
Of-course if you are always an employee you don't see it that way, you want to retire as soon as you possibly can, but of-course as an employee your value is limited by what the market says you are worth with millions of others just like you being available to do the same thing as you are applying to. When you apply for a job, you are asking one of the people who you think are not more productive and valuable than others to hire you.
But really, you are making a 'moral' argument about something where your morals clearly do not belong. What does it mean somebody is not 'millions of times more productive' than somebody else? Of-course they are.
Not everybody who makes more money is more productive, but many people are millions of times more productive than many other people. A person who started and developed a successful business that sells millions in products or services is clearly more productive than somebody who is hired as an employee, that's because without them that business wouldn't exist in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
And here is a prediction:
there will be no question about inflation, there will be no question about the trade deficit.
A poll was conducted by Fox "News", still, their numbers show the following:
People worried about rising prices: 41%
People worried about unemployment: 24%
People worried about taxes: 19%
People worried about housing market: 7%
If this poll is anywhere near correct, then twice as many people are worried about rising prices (resulting at the minimum from inflation) than there are people worried about unemployment or taxes. 6 times more people worry about rising prices than about housing market.
Yet the Fed's policies are all aimed at 'curbing deflation' and creating inflation by buying more and more mortgages (40 billion a month now or more forever, "until the economy gets better").
And really, if the rising prices is such a good thing in housing (according to the Fed), why is it then something that worries so many people?
Of-course people are worried about rising prices in energy, food and other things that they have to buy all the time. All the stupid 'economic data' that the news like to show right now display 'rise in consumer confidence' based on people spending more.
Nobody in the news is paying attention that people are spending more to buy the same or even less, because things cost more. Is inflation a problem? Not if the Fed has to say anything about it, yet 41% of people think rising prices are a problem.
This is a farce. 2 sides of the same exact coin are arguing about who is made of a purer metal. Give a fucking break, if you have half a brain cell for each 10 people, you still should be able to see through this charade.
Gary Johnson 2012.
Forfeiture of private property is clearly Unconstitutional, it is resulted from gov't dumping the Constitution while running the Drug War (and now everything else, the war on terrorism, etc.) You can listen to that show, it's talking about it in more detail.
Free Speech is understood to be a right, but what kind of a right is it?
AFAIC Free Speech is a supplementary right, which you must have in order to be able to protect your right to own and operate private property without interference by the government.
The right to own and operate private property is the first and most fundamental right, all other rights are descended from this one most important right that a person can have. The right to free speech (speech that cannot be silenced by threat of government violence) is your ability to protect your most important right - right to own and operate private property.
Your private property starts with your body, every part of it and the entire body itself, you inherit it from your parents, who produce it for you (thus the right to leave inheritance, as a consequence of the right to private property) and you provide for your body, which cannot exist without you working to maintain it in every way.
Ownership of property that is external of your body is the extension of the right of property that applies to your body, it means you have the right to own products, which would not exist without your work.
The right to Free Speech gives you ability to make a case, which is always a political and an economic case, that you must be able to maintain your right to own and operate private property.j
Of-course being able to produce something and then run a commercial about the product without interference by the government also falls under the same category, so that your ability to pursue happiness would not be diminished by government limiting your ability to exchange the property that you possess currently for other property that somebody is willing to exchange with you for voluntarily.
Everything is about private property ownership, everything is about your ability pursue happiness in life by doing whatever work that you do, everything is about being able to keep the fruits of your labour and all of this is the same exact right as your right to self-determination.
Didn't you hear, Rockefeller, Carnegie, they didn't build that. It was government and everybody who built that but them, it was the consumer who built that but them.
Wait, there was almost no government back in 19th century? Well, then it must have been slave labour.
Wait, industrialisation made hired labour more productive and competitive than slave labour?
Well, it was probably the proletariat that built that, didn't you know? Marx himself.
--
The best kept secret of these coming elections is the record of Gary Johnson as the 29th governor of New Mexico (balanced the budget, turned it to surplus actually, Vetoed more regulations and laws than anybody else ever and more than all other governors combined together, cut taxes 14 times, cut gov't jobs etc,etc.) and his business record, which he grew from just himself to the largest construction company in New Mexico.
He is anti-drug war, pro legalisation of drugs, he reformed education system with voucher programs, he climbed the freaking Mount Everest (literally). He is pro free-market, against illegal foreign invasions, etc.
It's INSANE that this guy (and Ron Paul) are not in the elections. Actually Johnson said that if Ron Paul got the nomination he wouldn't run on the Libertarian ticket.
The game is rigged and it should be ended abruptly and it will be.
Yeah, exactly.
Remember the story about Khan academy? I think they (or somebody else) can start a certification business, just testing people for a few weeks (a couple of months, maybe 2-4) and certifying their actual knowledge, their skills, their aptitude and attitude. I think it would be actually a more useful piece of information to potential employers (who could even pay for most of the certification, because they could be looking for people, who do not necessarily have higher education, but who still would be good employees, because they are knowledgeable and or skilled and or capable of learning and or has the attitude towards work that employers are looking for).
And yes, students are overdebted for no good reason. It's an education bubble and it will also burst eventually.
What is your degree really worth if you simultaneously end up with a mortgage and no house?
And so the crowd cheers as it gets its bread and circuses, while the government is going absolutely crazy, attacking successful business because it's successful and it doesn't 'share' enough with the government obviously.
Just like the cases of Standard Oil (the company that over the stretch of 30 years brought prices of oil down from 30 cents per gallon of refined oil in 1869 to 5.9 cents in 1899, and by the time it was broken up in 1911, there were 150 competitors, and since it was broken up the prices for oil never went down again, thus gov't ended up hurting the consumer), Alcoa Aluminium (again, the same thing - a large business giving its customers the best deal in the market for years, so the gov't saw an opportunity to make tons of money by allowing fake competition to emerge by preventing the successful business from being so successful) the same thing with many companies.
The same thing is happening here. What is Google? One of the worlds search engines, a successful advertising platform, an Internet app provider, a researcher and developer, etc.etc., one of the (if not the most) coveted employees.
It is obviously stepping on too many toes for it not to be attacked by the government dogs, and they are dogs.
Actually, personally, I have more reasons to be upset at Google than gov't does. I have problems with their advertising, but not because they push their own services more, or whatever, but because of their stupid policy on advertising, I don't want to get into details, but basically I have to advertise with their various competitors and not with them, but that's too sad for me. But AFAIC there are alternatives.
And even if there were no alternatives, while Google was highly profitable and problematic for some advertisers, what it would tell me is that there is a good opportunity in that space, not that government should be used by me to attack Google.
Yeah, I could use government to attack Google, in fact it would be a good business practice for me to attack Google by using the government, it makes perfect sense for a business to use the path of least resistance, and if that means using government, paying off some politicians to promote my business, I should do that.
Who really should be pissed off and upset are the people who get something from Google rather than from government. Whether you call them the clients, the consumers, even 'the product', they should be upset.
Right now Google is providing a good product, it provides a good platform, it provides people with what they want, and in case of the home users, they don't have to pay for it! What if government does get something from Google that it wants? What does it mean?
It means more money going to the government, it means reduction of money that Google has to spend on its own initiatives, on its own development and research, on its own business. It means reduction of service.
Does it mean that the quality of searches will increase? BY GOVERNMENT DECREE? Of-course not. It means that there may be new laws and regulations, it means there may be new licences, it means there may be new government positions, it means that Google may even be broken up into pieces! That's what it means!
Why would ANY of it be good for the consumer? It never is! Just like breaking Standard Oil or Alcoa was NOT good for the end consumer, this won't be either.
As an end consumer, do you give a shit that there is more artificial "competition" created by government in some field, with licenses, with taxes, with breaking of successful business apart? Why would you care if what YOU get is reduction of services, higher prices, less options?
What about investors, they are going to take a hit! In this economy.
What about employees? They are going to take a hit. In this economy.
Does this mean it's good for the government? Well, for SOMEBODY in gov't it may be good, but the overall situation will be bad. Google may outsource more of its operations into other countri
I will tell you another thing, Mozilla has already figured out how to block freaking adons in its browsers. I wrote a few SIMPLE ADONS that Mozilla finds a way to break with half of the releases. I am just not interested in maintaining such simple functionality in every version, where in fact no new functionality is added. They are very very fucking simple they shouldn't break, it's frustrating. The users complain: your adon doesn't work. NO! It's the latest fucking Firefox that doesn't work!
Cold fusion?
Well, if I am reading the story headline correctly, you may be onto something:
Best Approach To Reenergize an Old Programmer?
I was thinking about suggesting a USB port, it carries 5 volts up to 100mA (standard), but I think your idea is better.
The only way to break the 2 party, one establishment system is to vote for somebody else, who represents an actual choice for real freedoms.
Gary Johnson is on every ballot.
The only reasonable thing to do is to deny all future patents and cut the current existing patent terms to 5 years, and so anybody with a patent older than that loses the gov't racket protection and nobody else can ever apply for another patent again.
You want to invent something and build a business around it? Fine, do it, but nobody should be given special privileges by the governments, to give them monopoly on whatever it is, even if they invented it. You don't like it? Don't show your invention to anybody, let others re-invent it and make a business out of it. Was that easy?
Another point is: there are still trade secrets and non-disclosure agreements, which are just contracts between private parties and they have nothing to do with governments.
Oh, and by the way, same thing about copyright, only their terms should be cut right now to 3 years in total and no new copyrights should be granted.
You have your moral rights of-course, but those have nothing to do with government protection racket and artificial monopoly status.
--
Now that is a sensible solution and it doesn't require anything to be done by anybody, on the contrary, it requires less government and allows for a nice way to cut on various government spending as well.
That was actually a really good thing to do. Instead of profiteering, they tried to make the best of a bad situation for everyone.
- no, it was a stupid move by Costco. They got exactly what was expected to happen with this:
Then a bunch of dicks like this figure that they're more important than everyone else and that they should be able to get more than enyone else.
What Costco should have done (what is the correct thing to do) is to maximise efficiency in the market by raising the price to the level where the customers who truly needed the drives for productive reasons would be still willing to buy them, while those, who are not being as productive with the new drives would just have to wait.
It's the same exact thing as rationing, except it basically queues up the people who need the drives by priority, and those who need the drives most would buy them at a higher price, because those drives even at higher prices would be a justified purchase, because it would make the buyers more productive.
Those who are not being as productive with the drives wouldn't be able to justify the purchase at higher prices and would just wait until the prices come down.
That would certainly deter me from buying products that were manufactured or contained parts that were manufactured abroad.
- maybe what it should do, instead of deterring you from making your own choices in life regarding your property and earnings and basic economic freedoms, maybe it should change your mind in terms of what exactly you see as the role for government at this point, because if a government can tell you that your property is actually not your property, then is it a government you actually want to have? Do you really accept that government making such decisions on your behalf?
Your right to own private property is paramount, AFAIC without this right all other rights are meaningless, that's because all other rights really only supplement this fundamental right.
You must be able to own private property. It starts with your body and it extends to everything that cannot be produced without your effort. The freedom of speech and all other freedoms only matter as long as they exist within the context of this one freedom: being able to own and command private property. All other freedoms really only exist to allow you to protect that one supreme freedom to your utmost ability.
The right to private property equals the freedom of self-determination, ability to attempt to raise yourself to the next level, whatever it is, without any government preventing you from this. Your speech must be protected because it allows you to make a case to protect your freedom to property and self-determination. Without the right to private property you lose everything, you stop being an independent individual, you become a dependent, a ward of the State, and a State that would take care of your material needs is also the State that would completely control every aspect of your life.
It is a liability, you have to put all your liabilities, debts, expenses, accounts payable on the other side of your balance sheet, that is opposite to your revenues, equity, accounts receivable and assets. Of-course in reality the gov't will create inflation and will monetise all debts, so from that perspective it's a wash, because the gov't will return the nominal debts.
Of-course real debts will never be returned, nobody will get gold as opposed to fiat paper and if fiat currency will end up buying nothing, many people will still not understand where the problem came from (government) and will end up blaming the 'free market', as if free market controls the value of things, including interest rates and currency.
By the way, you are missing part of the formula for GDP, it's the deflator that they are supposed to apply to discount inflation. Of-course their deflators are ridiculously low, I have an 'informative' post with many numbers and links in it here, which shows a few things about inflation and GDP. AFAIC GDP has been shrinking for a long time now in 2 ways.
1. The 'production' part of GDP is shrinking all the time. Look at the trade deficit numbers, here is a page with history on it in PDF or text. For the year 2011 the trade deficit was 559Billion dollars and it's growing all he time. Of-course the total personal consumption in USA is mostly on services, not on goods, in fact 2/3 of all consumption is services and only 1/3 is goods. 11Trillion was spent by US consumers in 2011, so about 3 Trillion was spent on goods and the rest was energy, food and services (like healthcare and education for example), so in that sense US consumer consumes mostly 'US' service. However if you look at the goods (go to Walmart and compare how many things are made in USA vs foreign made, like China), you'll find that most of the goods bought and sold (and even food, 90% of sea food comes from Asia) is made elsewhere.
2. The deflator that is used is reverse engineered to fit the propaganda. With the nominal and pre-deflator GDP being 2.9%, the deflator is set to be 1.6. (read the linked comment, I give quotes and links there), that's GDP revised down from 1.7% to 1.3% (post deflator) for the second quarter.
70% of GDP could very well be consumption, at least in countries with unusually low government spending
- I am sorry, this sentence makes no sense. 70% of GDP is consumption, that's not because of low gov't consumption, the exact opposite is the case, that's because of very high consumption stimulated by gov't (especially non-existing interest rates and free money allocated by the Fed to the member banks, who then buy T-bills and bonds and allow gov't to keeps spending). It's low production that is the problem, that's why GDP is 70% personal consumption, it's the actual number, what can I say? You see, when the production portion of GDP shrinks, the consumption portion becomes bigger and bigger part of the number, and if the consumption is stimulated artificially with fake money and 0% interest rates, and as long as the foreigners are willing to take dollars for their exports, then consumption even grows, doesn't just stay the same.
The reason that the consumption is mostly of foreign goods is exactly because the production part of GDP is disappearing.
That's because people burn mostly oil, if many of them lose access to oil, they'll burn what they can, and this means going back to coal as well as other, worse resources, like heavy oils.
Your guess is wrong (and by the way, GDP is 70% consumption of mostly foreign goods).
It's the fake money that is created out of thin air by the Fed and it's about all the gov't 'stimulus' that uses the fake money and borrowing to promote consumption.
Here is the actual sad part: with all the consumption based on inflation and borrowing, none of it goes towards investment into actual productive activities, it all gets burned (foreign goods are bought and consumed, gas is consumed), it's all about stimulating consumption and once the fake money is no longer accepted, that's when austerity will set in.
However will austerity mean less CO2? Well, if people cut down on driving their cars because they can't buy gas for any amount of dollars, then sure, however there will be more CO2 produced as people go back to heating with coal and heavy oils, so it may be a wash.
What is an NPC? How are 'cities dead'? Should everybody know what esoteric abbreviations and meanings are? If a city is dead, does it mean people lost their game characters or something (I really don't know anything about this game). Maybe a better summary is in order or is this story aimed at the gamers in that game only?
"wealthy on paper" - you can call your fiat system that. You think you are wealthy if you have cash? Dollars? Let me tell you something, I rather have no dollars or any other fiat currencies at all and have stake in dividend paying companies and various assets, it's a much better plan than holding fiat currencies, whose value can only go down, because the control over them is in the hands of politicians.
However you are forgetting something: death tax. If you have a company and you die, the IRS (and State gov't) wants your heirs to give them cash, for that they want you to liquidate the company, which often means at firesale prices. That's why Warren Buffet loves that tax, his company, BH, comes in and buys the equity at a depressed value because of and then later makes money by reselling it.
lots of employees jobs at risk and whatnot. there are probably all sorts of legalities associated with selling out
- well, if it's a post-IPO company, then there SEC rules when you can sell your shares, if it is a private company it's nobody's business, if you can sell it and you want to, you sell it. People don't sell because they want to keep running their business.
what a load of shit that is. maybe compared to someone that doesn't work at all (as in zero work)
- no, they are millions of times more productive than any one particular employee if they build a company that sells to millions of people.
If you can build a product and sell to millions of people, that's being productive on the scale of millions. If you can satisfy millions of customers, then that's your productivity. An employee is interchangeable, he has a specific function, a business owner who built the business made the company that satisfied millions of customers.
It's the same thing as building millions of products and providing them to millions of people all on your own, your employees matter, but they are part of the machine that you built.
Yes it is true, Constitution is a firewall, like PF on a BSD server, which by default blocks all ports. Politicians are like terrible admins, who are trying to open every port possible so that your system will be under threat of all the attacks possible. Constitution is the way to protect your servers by denying politicians the access.
No, Constitution doesn't 'forbid' anything actually (except for amendments, which are a way to confuse the issue). Constitution allows government certain functions and everything else is forbidden. Whatever is not expressly allowed is not allowed and running a committee on space etc., it's not expressly allowed.
Broun also said that he believes the Earth is about 9,000 years old and that it was made in six days. Those beliefs are held by fundamentalist Christians who believe the creation accounts in the Bible to be literally true.
- DAMN! Is the inflation so high today it even devalued the 6000 time years to mean 9000? I mean I remember seeing stories saying that it's 6000 just 1 year ago, so that's 50% increase in 1 freaking year, if this stuff compounds soon enough this creationist belief will catch up with the actual Earth's age and then shoot right past it.
In only 33 years with kind of inflation 6000 years will exceed 5.8 billion, which is 1.3 billion years more than the actual Earth's age!
Porn? You should have started with porn. If it's a war they want, then it's a war they'll get!
what really should make you depressed and angry is that there is such a thing as 'House Committee on Science, Space and Technology' in the first place. None of it is Constitutional and none of it belongs in government.
you've got enough to live a very comfortable life, and there's no relationship between comfort and a desire to create. In fact, quite the opposite is true: It's adversity that is the mother of invention.
- why did Steve Jobs not quit in 1985? He never spent the money that he even made by that time in his life, so why did he bother?
Why does anybody bother once they make enough to live off of for the rest of their lives comfortably? It's because people who are good at this do not want to stop doing it, it becomes an incentive in itself. Being able to take an idea to a full implementation and see it succeed is something great in itself.
Of-course if you are always an employee you don't see it that way, you want to retire as soon as you possibly can, but of-course as an employee your value is limited by what the market says you are worth with millions of others just like you being available to do the same thing as you are applying to. When you apply for a job, you are asking one of the people who you think are not more productive and valuable than others to hire you.
But really, you are making a 'moral' argument about something where your morals clearly do not belong. What does it mean somebody is not 'millions of times more productive' than somebody else? Of-course they are.
Not everybody who makes more money is more productive, but many people are millions of times more productive than many other people. A person who started and developed a successful business that sells millions in products or services is clearly more productive than somebody who is hired as an employee, that's because without them that business wouldn't exist in the first place.