Kingdom of Moltz. I wish I read that when I was 9, should have also re-read it at 12, 15, 18, 21 and every three years after that. Would have been much better off if I had that book then.
Neither your comment nor the comment you are replying to have shown what capitalism has to do with any of this. The/.er you are replying to did not use critical thinking but where is yours?
Capitalism is private ownership and operation of resources/property. How is the ability to own and operate property individually (privately) rather than being forced into a collectivist system / having your property being taken by the government related to the issue at hand? It may be related in a very tangential manner.
We are talking about the value of education being eroded in a system that destroys free market and promotes collectivism of various types, so that's maybe the only way that capitalism is involved - government destroys private ownership and operation for individuals and as a result there are all these problems (like rising tuition prices because the value of money itself is destroyed by the inflation - expanding money supply, which is pushed forward by government policies that demand borrowing, printing, taxing income and wealth).
The words like capitalism, communism, socialism, fascism, libertarianism, etc., these words are very often thrown around without full understanding of the concepts and contexts, this probably comes from lack of critical thinking. FWIW I think this lack of understanding is promoted by the power systems.
Lets see if I can add another comment today (this is the second one I think, it may or may not work).
So your position is that individual freedoms are irrelevant given statistics, you believe that the power of the government should be based on information collected from various systems rather than from the right of an individual not to be oppressed by the collective (which I hold as an absolute, AFAIC no amount of suffering on the part of anybody should be alleviated by any amount of oppression of any individual by the collective.) OK, that's your position and this is my position.
I would allow anybody to bleed out on the street though probably knowing that you would bleed out on the street and not be admitted to a hospital emergency room would actually modify behaviour of the people who would bleed out on the street under the current system.
I think that it is also more likely that completely private funds would be allocated completely privately to handle special cases like this and so the hospitals who have to deal with this would be paid out of those funds. However the person without insurance/money and in need of care would have to qualify for that particular private fund handouts.
I would never in a trillion years require that any hospital (or any business or person for that matter) would have to provide anybody with any free service/product, so there is no contradiction here.
Price-gouging Maker of EpiPen Literally Said That Critics Can Go Fuck Themselves
- as he rightfully should have, he is just repeating what the government already said and did even if it was worded differently.
You are told to 'go fuck yourself' when the government uses its power to oppress the individual freedoms in the market by providing government protected patents and copyrights. There shouldn't be such a thing, patents and copyrights should have no government protection, everything should be done either in the open or protected via trade secrets, there is no place for any government in any of it, it is because of the government intervention that your healthcare and medication costs are as high as they are. Same thing applies to education and everything else the government touches.
Over the last decade I have become convinced that nearly all (a vast majority) of Americans don't understand anything about insurance, don't understand what insurance is and how it works as a business.
Lets say I start an insurance company and attract customers by offering car insurance that would have a high deductible and low monthly payments. Say 15,000USD deductible and maybe 50USD/month premium payments, so it makes no sense to approach me until your loss reaches 15,000USD but if it goes over that limit you would be covered. I am not an actuary but maybe this product would make sense and maybe there would be clients for it. Would anybody expect to be able to use this insurance product to buy gas at the gas station? To get oil chances through insurance? Tire rotation and alignment (and replacement)?
I think people would realize that insurance is not for those purposes, it is for cases where you destroy your car, maybe destroy somebody else's car, maybe you face a legal challenge and hospital bills and such. People would buy this insurance product as a lottery ticket, where winning would mean actually pulling a short straw.
So now try to extend this understanding to health insurance, why is it so difficult for people to take that mental leap?
If an insurance company offers health insurance that basically works the same way, maybe it covers 30-50 specific tough conditions, the premiums are low but the deductible is high, most people wouldn't need the payouts but the money would be there for those who pull that short straw.
Now imagine the government says: your high deductible, low monthly premium insurance is also going to cover something that is used daily by half of the population (say birth control pills that are needed regularly), what you are doing telling half of the insurance clients: this is no longer a lottery that has similar odds for all of the participants, this is a subsidy from one half of the participants to another half. If you are a man you are going to be paying for women's birth control under this plan.
How does this make any sense for the men to buy this product? It doesn't, it's a waste of money, a large portion of the bill for the half of the people in the insurance pool will go towards simply buying monthly birth control for another half of the pool participants.
So instead of maybe a 80USD/month high deductible, low premium plan you are now billed 110USD/month, where 30 bucks is simply a cost and can never be used to increase the pool, it's a stupid cost on you so that some other specific person can get their free birth control.
Yet a huge portion of Americans don't understand that this makes 0 sense not only for the insurance companies but for at least half of the insurance clients, after all it is the insurance clients who pay insurance premiums that are used to make payouts.
Except that now rather than having a payout based on some very low odds of very few people in the pool getting sick you are forced to pay something that is guaranteed to be used by half of the people in the pool (and not by you).
Lets take a look at the concept of 'pre-existing condition' from point of view of car insurance. You wreck your car and then you approach an insurer asking to cover your losses and you are offering a month worth of premium payments.... If the insurer cannot deny your demand then there is 0 reason to be a client of an insurance company until you wreck your car.
So the insurer has to get the money from *somewhere* but not from the actual insurance pool, there is no insurance pool.
Now take a look at what USA government did under Obama: it took an actual insurance industry where people actually got their insurance payments out of the insurance pool based on monthly premiums paid by the willing participants and said that you no longer have to participate in the pool prior to getting sick and prior to needing insurance money...
A vast majority of the Americans are looking at it, straight at it and somehow they be
Maybe it's tech innovation that's plaguing the poor? Primitive societies did not suffer from chronic diseases of civilization, and were usually healthier and long lived.
- do you really believe this?
Primitive societies didn't suffer from chronic diseases? How do you know that and another point, to suffer from a chronic disease you need to have a large majority of the population survive to the age that allows you to get a chronic disease. If only the strongest make it to the age of 50 and above then you will have fewer chronic diseases in the older population compared to societies that allow just about anybody to reach that age.
Sure, the primitive societies didn't have people suffer from diabetes and diseases related to prolonged sitting in a chair.... So if we are sitting in chairs for long periods of time because of technology (we are) then yes, the primitive societies didn't have that problem.
It is the government that USA chooses for itself that is the problem. FDR was the most heinous anti-American politician of his time, he was the one that proclaimed that if a business will not pay a living wage it has no right to exist in the USA. FDR was the most unamerican POTUS until then.
So with government like that anybody with a cent worth of common sense would know not to attempt to do anything long term because an asshole like FDR (or Kennedy or Nixon or Obama for that matter) arrives and changes things based on their anti-individualistic, anti-american point of view. In this environment anybody would be a complete fool to attempt investing into a highly regulated business.
This is how it works: the collective deems that somebody has a 'disproportionate amount of wealth' and the collective wants to steal that money so the collective passes 'laws' that make the collective feel all better about the theft because it is 'legal' and it is 'for the common good'. This legalized theft then gets fought against by the people who are on the receiving end of this theft/robbery/extortion/oppression/slavery, they hire lobbyists and they buy the politicians.
The politicians pass laws that help some very wealthy against the rest, creating barriers to entry, creating a completely uneven playing field in business in general. Then the politicians can turn around and buy more votes from the collective by talking about 'fat cats', 'income inequality', etc. The collective gives politicians more power and gradually destroys individual rights, the government gets these powers and of-course this grows the tax bill.
The tax bill cannot be paid by the collective that asks for all this extra powers to be taken away from the individuals and handed over to the government, the very wealthy will not pay for this because they buy their way out of it, the government then prints the money and borrows, destroying the trade balance, getting into gigantic trade deficits, growing gigantic debts.
At the end the collective will suffer the most because the wealthy will find their way out of the predicament that will take down the entire system.
Who benefits? People who manage to squeeze their existence between the beginning and the end of this cycle, politicians benefit, some of the wealthy who get government help benefit. The society gets destroyed of-course because the government growth is cancer that destroys the economy.
The outcome of all this immorality is destruction of the economy and unlimited suffering of the collective but I say the collective deserves this suffering and needs it to clear the collective's heads.
When the question is wrong the answer is meaningless.
The real question is about the morality of oppressing some for the benefit of the many. That's the only question and the answer to that is obvious to me: it is immoral to take anything from anybody based on the ability of the collective to take it by using force, all so that some others can get the proceeds of that theft/robbery/oppression/slavery.
The answer to the question: should anybody be enslaved for the benefit of anybody else to me is clear, no, nobody should be enslaved for any reason and for anybody's gain.
Of-course the majority votes for that exact thing anyway, so the only way to fight against it is not by any moral argumentation but instead by buying power, sabotage, evasion and other similar tactics.
Bullshit. This story is bullshit, Amazon, Apple, MS and Google are full of shit, you are full of shit and all top comments and all moderators here are full of shit.
Here is what the bill says:
(b) A political subdivision may not adopt or enforce an order, ordinance, or other measure that relates to the designation or use of a private entity's bathroom or changing facility or that requires or prohibits the entity from adopting a policy on the designation or use of the entity's bathroom or changing facility.
- this is a *win* for individual freedom, it means that government must not interfere and will have no power to interfere in private affairs of private property owners. This is a win for private property rights against government.
(b) In awarding a contract for the purchase of goods or services, a political subdivision may not consider whether a private entity competing for the contract has adopted a policy relating to the designation or use of the entity's bathroom or changing facility.
- same thing, a win for private property rights.
However I must say that AFAIC there shouldn't be such things as a government awarded contract. That in itself is a problem that is bigger than any 'bathroom bill', the fact that there is any form of a relationship between any private company and the government in the first place. There shouldn't be any government, there shouldn't be any private company being able to receive a contract based on theft that is taxes.
What you are proposing is impossible in the society that does not treat people as adults already. If this society (any society) was capable of treating people as adults there wouldn't be any government around, there wouldn't be any income and wealth related taxes and any welfare in the first place.
You want to have some sort of a threshold over which the people are treated as adults but to reach that threshold they can behave as children... so what makes you think that children will not step over your threshold and what makes them into adults all of a sudden?
You have to admit that this cannot be done, once you treat people as children you cannot go back.
Zuckerberg is a perpetual child. Actually if you read the 25 point manifesto of NSDAP or any such idea where the State is called upon to supply its citizens with means to live you can derive that same conclusion. Perpetual kindergarten is what such ideas are after.
So a government official again says he will "give" something to people who he believes may be his constituents and can be jestured towards. This is as old as is the world and it is always a case of immoral theft and bad economics. Gig economy only exists by competing on price to provide *the poor*, not the wealthy with cheaper and more convenient services. Apply the same labour and business laws and taxes and gig economy will cease (and go underground). Gig economy is the economy in its more pure form, with much less government intrusion and lower costs of doing business. The people that are against it are the establishment, the government who wants to collect ever more taxes and to buy ever more votes while handing out government contracts and protections to its friends.
The gig economy clients gain from it, the gig economy workers gain from it (or they would work somewhere else and if this is the only job they should pray that the government does *not* get its way or the gigs may and will disappear). The government gains by pretending to help while making sure to destroy what people built.
You are correct, government is the leading cause of terrorism. Government funds terrorist organizations by stealing money from individuals in form of income and wealth taxes, government signs and buys military contracts by using that stolen money. The military contracts end up selling weapons to anybody who has the money to pay and in many cases strategically to people who are later declared to be terrorists.
Governments are responsible for installing regimes around the world that can be manipulated, then the governments sell weapons to those regimes in exchange for various contracts (like oil contracts) for the closes to the governments businesses.
Governments then declare emergencies when the moment become opportune for that, starting 'wars on terror', using the terrorist attacks to push for more of power to be allocated to the governments, selling more weapons, signing more military contracts, starting various military excursions.
The rivers of money flow and flow and connect and reconnect and become the sea of money and of blood and behind all of this blood and this stolen wealth and stolen property are the governments of the world, starting with the government of United States of America.
The governments themselves are the terrorist organizations, they are themselves the poison that destroys economies and lives of people, causing class warfare where none was necessary.
Governments of the world have convinced the people of the world that the governments are necessary, maybe evil, but necessary, the Stockholm syndrome of the vast majority of the people of the world (the way they feel they need the governments) is limitless in its absurdity but also in its power, this power comes from the weakness and fear that the vast majority of the people on this planet feel.
The vast majority of the people on this planet feel powerless and incapable of running their own lives, they would rather abdicate all responsibility for their lives to the huge, monstrous, poisonous, mostly faceless organizations that the people believe to be necessary for their protection against the fears that the people have.
The fears are being fuelled and nourished by the government propaganda and various populist handouts, the handouts that come on the backs of those who are targeted by the populous and also on the backs of those who actually end up paying for them - everybody.
Everybody ends up paying for these handouts and for this poison and destruction and constant unending war. Everybody pays. We pay in quality of life itself being diminished and sometimes destroyed by these gigantic terrorist organizations (the governments) fuelled by popular demand and fear.
We pay in form of the future that never happened, what we were unable to accomplish because we have so much stolen from us.
You guys are all insane, comparing electronic records of numbers to a tangible weight of any metal at all.... there is no use for the electronic numbers *except* being money, beyond BitCoin being money it has no other value while metals do.
Markets always work, as in the markets decide where to put the money into and they put money into those fields when necessary without any government interference because there is a reason to pour money into a field - the reason is profit. If there is a profit to be made it means market wants resources to be allocated in that field.
What is so difficult to understand about it? You are complaining about people being against government action - people should be against government action. Government action is not driven by the desires of the market (combined desires of market participants to voluntarily allocate resources to any specific issue/problem/product/service).
If the markets are not trying to solve you particular pet problem it doesn't mean the markets do not work, it means your pet problem is irrelevant to the markets (at least at this time) and even death of 200,000 babies a year is only a question of market priorities.
Markets work, these 200,000 babies are not the priority given the current conditions.
Now, what are the conditions that lead to the markets not building up new types of antibiotics to prevent 200,000 babies from dying? I say these conditions range from:
1. Governments destroying the economy with socialist policies and thus preventing the capital free market formation that could be allocated to such issues. Basically government created inflation (money destruction).
2. Governments meddling with drug research and approval process (government regulations and taxes).
This is a complex problem stemming from all the combined actions of collectivist governments and not a market failure, this is the failure of the economy due to collectivist government interference.
Companies never were in the game of 'taking care' of employees, companies are there for a single purpose: to make the money for the investor/founder/owner, that is the purpose, that is the only purpose, all other activities are maybe means to achieve that end (employees, products, services) or obstacles (competition, taxes, regulations, governments).
A good start would be to stop pretending that governments can or are there to 'take care' of anybody actually. Once this is realised (understood) then the next good step is to get governments out of this game, manipulating money, interest rates, 'providing' products and services, regulating businesses, regulating labour, fixing prices and wages, etc.
No, governments should not be in any business, including business of health care or any other form of insurance. The only sure thing about government 'insurance' is that it is a pyramid scam, every time it is a pyramid scam and every time the long run outcome of pyramid scams is a failure. When we talk about governments the failure is too large to take it lightly. Nobody should be providing anybody with anything free, everything has to be paid for, then the real market is possible, then prices go down, then there is innovation, then there are savings and then there are investments that lead to innovation and new business formation that causes competition and lowering prices.
Governments cause prices to go up with everything that governments do, all laws, taxes, regulations, money printing, interest rate manipulation, all of it is designed to raise prices beyond what the market will bear and then the outcome is a failure of the economic system.
I am pro business and I am anti government and I am not in 'this' country. I think USA used to have the right idea on this topic but it lost that idea since the moment the Sherman act was first used to destroy individual property rights.
I think this 'familiarity' is only a passing one, something on the surface that has nothing to do with real application of the language itself, never mind the infrastructure behind it.
I have a strong suspicion that most comments here bashing java are based on nothing but parroting other comments bashing java. Basically I do not believe that most people spewing this crapola here have ever even touched or seen java.
Knowing that your entire company is a couple of month away from dissolving in case you don't get paid (and you often don't get paid) is at the very least as stressful. A single employee worries about his own survival, the employer worries about the survival of the entire business and losing people because you cannot pay them (on time or as much as others could for example) is at the very least as stressful.
When somebody works as an employee they normally don't have to think about getting paid at the month end (or every 2 weeks, whatever have you). Running a business is nothing like that at all, you may not get paid for months and it so happens that sometimes the money that are owed to you will not be paid at all (while you have to pay your employees and suppliers and rent and utilities and taxes no matter what).
I will address this first, because it seems you are under a weird misunderstanding of what is being taxed.
if manufacturing costs drop say 20 % due to labor costs disappearing, you can increase taxes by anywhere up to that amount without the total price of the product changing.
- if somebody drops their prices by 20%, their revenues fall by 20%. People drop prices to compete with other manufacturers. You can increase your tax by 20% but you will not be taxing the same amount at all.
If a company makes 100 dollars in revenue a year (to make it simple), and it spends 95 dollars while keeping 5 dollars as profits, which are then taxed at the corporate taxation rate of 39.21% or so in USA, then you are taking 39.21% of 5 dollars or 39.21*5/100 = 1.9605USD out of the 5 dollars.
By the way, the 5 dollars are the profits of the company owners, which is why Buffet and such are full of shit when they are saying they only pay 15% dividend tax. They pay 39.21% of corporate taxes BEFORE they pay 15% dividend (as they take the money as their salary). Their actual tax is much higher than 15% because every dollar the company makes in profit belongs to the owner(s).
But lets say that the company finds a way to reduce prices by 20% because of lower labour costs. They are now making 80USD, not a 100.
Now the math is 80$ revenue, 76$ in expenses, 4 dollars in profit.
You can increase the taxes by 20% and here is what you get:
instead of 39.21% in taxes you will decide to collect 47.052% (that's an increase in taxes by 20%).
So now the dollar value of the tax is 47.052% of 4$, which is $1.882
So you used to collect 1.9605USD and now will collect 1.882
In *reality* you will not collect any of it, as the purchasing power of people falls so will the absolute revenues. Also its possible that any of the profits will be eaten up by the costs of setting up the automated manufacturing process, there will be no taxes collected at all.
But back to the rest of your comment
but without the consumer class there's no way coke's going to be able to continue selling the amounts it currently is.
- great, either the prices will drop or the production will shrink to provide the *real* market with the product, but it doesn't mean Coke disappears as a business (if there are still people who are capable of producing something that Coke producers want).
What do you suggest all these people start selling that cannot be already acquired more cheaply from a larger manufacturer?
- actually that's a simple question to answer because I *am* competing with large manufacturers but I figured out a way to provide my products cheaper because my costs are cheaper, because I work in my social strata, I don't try to do what large manufacturers are doing.
Producing something cheaper requires cheaper component and labour costs, if you are a large manufacturer you have certain costs that can be gotten around *if the laws and taxes are not preventing you from incurring those costs*. Do you understand what laws and taxes actually do? Laws are taxes, they are extra costs added on top of what is actually needed to produce something. It's similar to what Uber is doing - going around the laws to provide a cheaper service. Well, they are doing it illegally in some cases because those laws exist. If the government wasn't interfering they would be doing it legally.
However if the large manufacturer provides something to the consumer at the prices that cannot be cheaper by any effort then where is the problem? This means that *nobody* can make it cheaper but that means there is literally nothing to tax.
What are you going to tax from a company that sells their products so cheap nobody can beat them? You are going to do 1 thing only: take the profit from the owner(s), who only have the profit because they are selling something extremely cheaply but are making a tiny percentage
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Kingdom of Moltz. I wish I read that when I was 9, should have also re-read it at 12, 15, 18, 21 and every three years after that. Would have been much better off if I had that book then.
Neither your comment nor the comment you are replying to have shown what capitalism has to do with any of this. The /.er you are replying to did not use critical thinking but where is yours?
Capitalism is private ownership and operation of resources/property. How is the ability to own and operate property individually (privately) rather than being forced into a collectivist system / having your property being taken by the government related to the issue at hand? It may be related in a very tangential manner.
We are talking about the value of education being eroded in a system that destroys free market and promotes collectivism of various types, so that's maybe the only way that capitalism is involved - government destroys private ownership and operation for individuals and as a result there are all these problems (like rising tuition prices because the value of money itself is destroyed by the inflation - expanding money supply, which is pushed forward by government policies that demand borrowing, printing, taxing income and wealth).
The words like capitalism, communism, socialism, fascism, libertarianism, etc., these words are very often thrown around without full understanding of the concepts and contexts, this probably comes from lack of critical thinking. FWIW I think this lack of understanding is promoted by the power systems.
Lets see if I can add another comment today (this is the second one I think, it may or may not work).
So your position is that individual freedoms are irrelevant given statistics, you believe that the power of the government should be based on information collected from various systems rather than from the right of an individual not to be oppressed by the collective (which I hold as an absolute, AFAIC no amount of suffering on the part of anybody should be alleviated by any amount of oppression of any individual by the collective.) OK, that's your position and this is my position.
I would allow anybody to bleed out on the street though probably knowing that you would bleed out on the street and not be admitted to a hospital emergency room would actually modify behaviour of the people who would bleed out on the street under the current system.
I think that it is also more likely that completely private funds would be allocated completely privately to handle special cases like this and so the hospitals who have to deal with this would be paid out of those funds. However the person without insurance/money and in need of care would have to qualify for that particular private fund handouts.
I would never in a trillion years require that any hospital (or any business or person for that matter) would have to provide anybody with any free service/product, so there is no contradiction here.
Price-gouging Maker of EpiPen Literally Said That Critics Can Go Fuck Themselves
- as he rightfully should have, he is just repeating what the government already said and did even if it was worded differently.
You are told to 'go fuck yourself' when the government uses its power to oppress the individual freedoms in the market by providing government protected patents and copyrights. There shouldn't be such a thing, patents and copyrights should have no government protection, everything should be done either in the open or protected via trade secrets, there is no place for any government in any of it, it is because of the government intervention that your healthcare and medication costs are as high as they are. Same thing applies to education and everything else the government touches.
Over the last decade I have become convinced that nearly all (a vast majority) of Americans don't understand anything about insurance, don't understand what insurance is and how it works as a business.
Lets say I start an insurance company and attract customers by offering car insurance that would have a high deductible and low monthly payments. Say 15,000USD deductible and maybe 50USD/month premium payments, so it makes no sense to approach me until your loss reaches 15,000USD but if it goes over that limit you would be covered. I am not an actuary but maybe this product would make sense and maybe there would be clients for it. Would anybody expect to be able to use this insurance product to buy gas at the gas station? To get oil chances through insurance? Tire rotation and alignment (and replacement)?
I think people would realize that insurance is not for those purposes, it is for cases where you destroy your car, maybe destroy somebody else's car, maybe you face a legal challenge and hospital bills and such. People would buy this insurance product as a lottery ticket, where winning would mean actually pulling a short straw.
So now try to extend this understanding to health insurance, why is it so difficult for people to take that mental leap?
If an insurance company offers health insurance that basically works the same way, maybe it covers 30-50 specific tough conditions, the premiums are low but the deductible is high, most people wouldn't need the payouts but the money would be there for those who pull that short straw.
Now imagine the government says: your high deductible, low monthly premium insurance is also going to cover something that is used daily by half of the population (say birth control pills that are needed regularly), what you are doing telling half of the insurance clients: this is no longer a lottery that has similar odds for all of the participants, this is a subsidy from one half of the participants to another half. If you are a man you are going to be paying for women's birth control under this plan.
How does this make any sense for the men to buy this product? It doesn't, it's a waste of money, a large portion of the bill for the half of the people in the insurance pool will go towards simply buying monthly birth control for another half of the pool participants.
So instead of maybe a 80USD/month high deductible, low premium plan you are now billed 110USD/month, where 30 bucks is simply a cost and can never be used to increase the pool, it's a stupid cost on you so that some other specific person can get their free birth control.
Yet a huge portion of Americans don't understand that this makes 0 sense not only for the insurance companies but for at least half of the insurance clients, after all it is the insurance clients who pay insurance premiums that are used to make payouts.
Except that now rather than having a payout based on some very low odds of very few people in the pool getting sick you are forced to pay something that is guaranteed to be used by half of the people in the pool (and not by you).
Lets take a look at the concept of 'pre-existing condition' from point of view of car insurance. You wreck your car and then you approach an insurer asking to cover your losses and you are offering a month worth of premium payments.... If the insurer cannot deny your demand then there is 0 reason to be a client of an insurance company until you wreck your car.
So the insurer has to get the money from *somewhere* but not from the actual insurance pool, there is no insurance pool.
Now take a look at what USA government did under Obama: it took an actual insurance industry where people actually got their insurance payments out of the insurance pool based on monthly premiums paid by the willing participants and said that you no longer have to participate in the pool prior to getting sick and prior to needing insurance money...
A vast majority of the Americans are looking at it, straight at it and somehow they be
Maybe it's tech innovation that's plaguing the poor? Primitive societies did not suffer from chronic diseases of civilization, and were usually healthier and long lived.
- do you really believe this?
Primitive societies didn't suffer from chronic diseases? How do you know that and another point, to suffer from a chronic disease you need to have a large majority of the population survive to the age that allows you to get a chronic disease. If only the strongest make it to the age of 50 and above then you will have fewer chronic diseases in the older population compared to societies that allow just about anybody to reach that age.
Sure, the primitive societies didn't have people suffer from diabetes and diseases related to prolonged sitting in a chair.... So if we are sitting in chairs for long periods of time because of technology (we are) then yes, the primitive societies didn't have that problem.
It is the government that USA chooses for itself that is the problem.
FDR was the most heinous anti-American politician of his time, he was the one that proclaimed that if a business will not pay a living wage it has no right to exist in the USA. FDR was the most unamerican POTUS until then.
So with government like that anybody with a cent worth of common sense would know not to attempt to do anything long term because an asshole like FDR (or Kennedy or Nixon or Obama for that matter) arrives and changes things based on their anti-individualistic, anti-american point of view. In this environment anybody would be a complete fool to attempt investing into a highly regulated business.
This is how it works: the collective deems that somebody has a 'disproportionate amount of wealth' and the collective wants to steal that money so the collective passes 'laws' that make the collective feel all better about the theft because it is 'legal' and it is 'for the common good'. This legalized theft then gets fought against by the people who are on the receiving end of this theft/robbery/extortion/oppression/slavery, they hire lobbyists and they buy the politicians.
The politicians pass laws that help some very wealthy against the rest, creating barriers to entry, creating a completely uneven playing field in business in general. Then the politicians can turn around and buy more votes from the collective by talking about 'fat cats', 'income inequality', etc. The collective gives politicians more power and gradually destroys individual rights, the government gets these powers and of-course this grows the tax bill.
The tax bill cannot be paid by the collective that asks for all this extra powers to be taken away from the individuals and handed over to the government, the very wealthy will not pay for this because they buy their way out of it, the government then prints the money and borrows, destroying the trade balance, getting into gigantic trade deficits, growing gigantic debts.
At the end the collective will suffer the most because the wealthy will find their way out of the predicament that will take down the entire system.
Who benefits? People who manage to squeeze their existence between the beginning and the end of this cycle, politicians benefit, some of the wealthy who get government help benefit. The society gets destroyed of-course because the government growth is cancer that destroys the economy.
The outcome of all this immorality is destruction of the economy and unlimited suffering of the collective but I say the collective deserves this suffering and needs it to clear the collective's heads.
When the question is wrong the answer is meaningless.
The real question is about the morality of oppressing some for the benefit of the many. That's the only question and the answer to that is obvious to me: it is immoral to take anything from anybody based on the ability of the collective to take it by using force, all so that some others can get the proceeds of that theft/robbery/oppression/slavery.
The answer to the question: should anybody be enslaved for the benefit of anybody else to me is clear, no, nobody should be enslaved for any reason and for anybody's gain.
Of-course the majority votes for that exact thing anyway, so the only way to fight against it is not by any moral argumentation but instead by buying power, sabotage, evasion and other similar tactics.
Bullshit. This story is bullshit, Amazon, Apple, MS and Google are full of shit, you are full of shit and all top comments and all moderators here are full of shit.
Here is what the bill says:
(b) A political subdivision may not adopt or enforce an order, ordinance, or other measure that relates to the designation or use of a private entity's bathroom or changing facility or that requires or prohibits the entity from adopting a policy on the designation or use of the entity's bathroom or changing facility.
- this is a *win* for individual freedom, it means that government must not interfere and will have no power to interfere in private affairs of private property owners. This is a win for private property rights against government.
(b) In awarding a contract for the purchase of goods or services, a political subdivision may not consider whether a private entity competing for the contract has adopted a policy relating to the designation or use of the entity's bathroom or changing facility.
- same thing, a win for private property rights.
However I must say that AFAIC there shouldn't be such things as a government awarded contract. That in itself is a problem that is bigger than any 'bathroom bill', the fact that there is any form of a relationship between any private company and the government in the first place. There shouldn't be any government, there shouldn't be any private company being able to receive a contract based on theft that is taxes.
of-course it smells fishy, it's a Chinese traditional recipe, I believe every time I entered any Chinese store it always smelled off somehow...
the only way to tell is to crack open the airplane's POH),
- airplanes don't have a voltmeter or a multimeter tool onboard?
What you are proposing is impossible in the society that does not treat people as adults already. If this society (any society) was capable of treating people as adults there wouldn't be any government around, there wouldn't be any income and wealth related taxes and any welfare in the first place.
You want to have some sort of a threshold over which the people are treated as adults but to reach that threshold they can behave as children... so what makes you think that children will not step over your threshold and what makes them into adults all of a sudden?
You have to admit that this cannot be done, once you treat people as children you cannot go back.
Zuckerberg is a perpetual child. Actually if you read the 25 point manifesto of NSDAP or any such idea where the State is called upon to supply its citizens with means to live you can derive that same conclusion. Perpetual kindergarten is what such ideas are after.
So a government official again says he will "give" something to people who he believes may be his constituents and can be jestured towards. This is as old as is the world and it is always a case of immoral theft and bad economics. Gig economy only exists by competing on price to provide *the poor*, not the wealthy with cheaper and more convenient services. Apply the same labour and business laws and taxes and gig economy will cease (and go underground). Gig economy is the economy in its more pure form, with much less government intrusion and lower costs of doing business. The people that are against it are the establishment, the government who wants to collect ever more taxes and to buy ever more votes while handing out government contracts and protections to its friends.
The gig economy clients gain from it, the gig economy workers gain from it (or they would work somewhere else and if this is the only job they should pray that the government does *not* get its way or the gigs may and will disappear). The government gains by pretending to help while making sure to destroy what people built.
You are correct, government is the leading cause of terrorism. Government funds terrorist organizations by stealing money from individuals in form of income and wealth taxes, government signs and buys military contracts by using that stolen money. The military contracts end up selling weapons to anybody who has the money to pay and in many cases strategically to people who are later declared to be terrorists.
Governments are responsible for installing regimes around the world that can be manipulated, then the governments sell weapons to those regimes in exchange for various contracts (like oil contracts) for the closes to the governments businesses.
Governments then declare emergencies when the moment become opportune for that, starting 'wars on terror', using the terrorist attacks to push for more of power to be allocated to the governments, selling more weapons, signing more military contracts, starting various military excursions.
The rivers of money flow and flow and connect and reconnect and become the sea of money and of blood and behind all of this blood and this stolen wealth and stolen property are the governments of the world, starting with the government of United States of America.
The governments themselves are the terrorist organizations, they are themselves the poison that destroys economies and lives of people, causing class warfare where none was necessary.
Governments of the world have convinced the people of the world that the governments are necessary, maybe evil, but necessary, the Stockholm syndrome of the vast majority of the people of the world (the way they feel they need the governments) is limitless in its absurdity but also in its power, this power comes from the weakness and fear that the vast majority of the people on this planet feel.
The vast majority of the people on this planet feel powerless and incapable of running their own lives, they would rather abdicate all responsibility for their lives to the huge, monstrous, poisonous, mostly faceless organizations that the people believe to be necessary for their protection against the fears that the people have.
The fears are being fuelled and nourished by the government propaganda and various populist handouts, the handouts that come on the backs of those who are targeted by the populous and also on the backs of those who actually end up paying for them - everybody.
Everybody ends up paying for these handouts and for this poison and destruction and constant unending war. Everybody pays. We pay in quality of life itself being diminished and sometimes destroyed by these gigantic terrorist organizations (the governments) fuelled by popular demand and fear.
We pay in form of the future that never happened, what we were unable to accomplish because we have so much stolen from us.
You guys are all insane, comparing electronic records of numbers to a tangible weight of any metal at all.... there is no use for the electronic numbers *except* being money, beyond BitCoin being money it has no other value while metals do.
Markets always work, as in the markets decide where to put the money into and they put money into those fields when necessary without any government interference because there is a reason to pour money into a field - the reason is profit. If there is a profit to be made it means market wants resources to be allocated in that field.
What is so difficult to understand about it? You are complaining about people being against government action - people should be against government action. Government action is not driven by the desires of the market (combined desires of market participants to voluntarily allocate resources to any specific issue/problem/product/service).
If the markets are not trying to solve you particular pet problem it doesn't mean the markets do not work, it means your pet problem is irrelevant to the markets (at least at this time) and even death of 200,000 babies a year is only a question of market priorities.
Markets work, these 200,000 babies are not the priority given the current conditions.
Now, what are the conditions that lead to the markets not building up new types of antibiotics to prevent 200,000 babies from dying? I say these conditions range from:
1. Governments destroying the economy with socialist policies and thus preventing the capital free market formation that could be allocated to such issues. Basically government created inflation (money destruction).
2. Governments meddling with drug research and approval process (government regulations and taxes).
This is a complex problem stemming from all the combined actions of collectivist governments and not a market failure, this is the failure of the economy due to collectivist government interference.
Companies never were in the game of 'taking care' of employees, companies are there for a single purpose: to make the money for the investor/founder/owner, that is the purpose, that is the only purpose, all other activities are maybe means to achieve that end (employees, products, services) or obstacles (competition, taxes, regulations, governments).
A good start would be to stop pretending that governments can or are there to 'take care' of anybody actually. Once this is realised (understood) then the next good step is to get governments out of this game, manipulating money, interest rates, 'providing' products and services, regulating businesses, regulating labour, fixing prices and wages, etc.
No, governments should not be in any business, including business of health care or any other form of insurance. The only sure thing about government 'insurance' is that it is a pyramid scam, every time it is a pyramid scam and every time the long run outcome of pyramid scams is a failure. When we talk about governments the failure is too large to take it lightly. Nobody should be providing anybody with anything free, everything has to be paid for, then the real market is possible, then prices go down, then there is innovation, then there are savings and then there are investments that lead to innovation and new business formation that causes competition and lowering prices.
Governments cause prices to go up with everything that governments do, all laws, taxes, regulations, money printing, interest rate manipulation, all of it is designed to raise prices beyond what the market will bear and then the outcome is a failure of the economic system.
I am pro business and I am anti government and I am not in 'this' country. I think USA used to have the right idea on this topic but it lost that idea since the moment the Sherman act was first used to destroy individual property rights.
I think this 'familiarity' is only a passing one, something on the surface that has nothing to do with real application of the language itself, never mind the infrastructure behind it.
I have a strong suspicion that most comments here bashing java are based on nothing but parroting other comments bashing java. Basically I do not believe that most people spewing this crapola here have ever even touched or seen java.
Knowing that your entire company is a couple of month away from dissolving in case you don't get paid (and you often don't get paid) is at the very least as stressful. A single employee worries about his own survival, the employer worries about the survival of the entire business and losing people because you cannot pay them (on time or as much as others could for example) is at the very least as stressful.
When somebody works as an employee they normally don't have to think about getting paid at the month end (or every 2 weeks, whatever have you). Running a business is nothing like that at all, you may not get paid for months and it so happens that sometimes the money that are owed to you will not be paid at all (while you have to pay your employees and suppliers and rent and utilities and taxes no matter what).
I will address this first, because it seems you are under a weird misunderstanding of what is being taxed.
if manufacturing costs drop say 20 % due to labor costs disappearing, you can increase taxes by anywhere up to that amount without the total price of the product changing.
- if somebody drops their prices by 20%, their revenues fall by 20%. People drop prices to compete with other manufacturers. You can increase your tax by 20% but you will not be taxing the same amount at all.
If a company makes 100 dollars in revenue a year (to make it simple), and it spends 95 dollars while keeping 5 dollars as profits, which are then taxed at the corporate taxation rate of 39.21% or so in USA, then you are taking 39.21% of 5 dollars or 39.21*5/100 = 1.9605USD out of the 5 dollars.
By the way, the 5 dollars are the profits of the company owners, which is why Buffet and such are full of shit when they are saying they only pay 15% dividend tax. They pay 39.21% of corporate taxes BEFORE they pay 15% dividend (as they take the money as their salary). Their actual tax is much higher than 15% because every dollar the company makes in profit belongs to the owner(s).
But lets say that the company finds a way to reduce prices by 20% because of lower labour costs. They are now making 80USD, not a 100.
Now the math is 80$ revenue, 76$ in expenses, 4 dollars in profit.
You can increase the taxes by 20% and here is what you get:
instead of 39.21% in taxes you will decide to collect 47.052% (that's an increase in taxes by 20%).
So now the dollar value of the tax is 47.052% of 4$, which is $1.882
So you used to collect 1.9605USD and now will collect 1.882
In *reality* you will not collect any of it, as the purchasing power of people falls so will the absolute revenues. Also its possible that any of the profits will be eaten up by the costs of setting up the automated manufacturing process, there will be no taxes collected at all.
But back to the rest of your comment
but without the consumer class there's no way coke's going to be able to continue selling the amounts it currently is.
- great, either the prices will drop or the production will shrink to provide the *real* market with the product, but it doesn't mean Coke disappears as a business (if there are still people who are capable of producing something that Coke producers want).
What do you suggest all these people start selling that cannot be already acquired more cheaply from a larger manufacturer?
- actually that's a simple question to answer because I *am* competing with large manufacturers but I figured out a way to provide my products cheaper because my costs are cheaper, because I work in my social strata, I don't try to do what large manufacturers are doing.
Producing something cheaper requires cheaper component and labour costs, if you are a large manufacturer you have certain costs that can be gotten around *if the laws and taxes are not preventing you from incurring those costs*. Do you understand what laws and taxes actually do? Laws are taxes, they are extra costs added on top of what is actually needed to produce something. It's similar to what Uber is doing - going around the laws to provide a cheaper service. Well, they are doing it illegally in some cases because those laws exist. If the government wasn't interfering they would be doing it legally.
However if the large manufacturer provides something to the consumer at the prices that cannot be cheaper by any effort then where is the problem? This means that *nobody* can make it cheaper but that means there is literally nothing to tax.
What are you going to tax from a company that sells their products so cheap nobody can beat them? You are going to do 1 thing only: take the profit from the owner(s), who only have the profit because they are selling something extremely cheaply but are making a tiny percentage
I use OpenBSD for my firewall/router/webserver setup.
Development and testing so far.