1% of the purchase price goes to health care? That sounds like a bargain to me.
- the pizza guy is wrong, it's going to be much bigger than that.
The prices for insurance are going to go through the roof now, that the health insurance industry will be destroyed. There is no concept of 'insurance' if there is no concept of 'pre-existing condition', and since the fine for not having the insurance is going to be low (that's why the SCOTUS ruled it Constitutional, because the fine was too low to make people buy it, so it's not 'legislation through tax', * you can read more in the post I am linking to in my sig *) the people will not buy insurance.
Instead people who have insurance today will be getting rid of it, why pay for it now, if the fine is very low and they can't be denied coverage once they need it? The people who will have insurance will be those, who are subsidised under Obama's plan.
The real costs to the insurance companies will go through the roof, insurance is no longer insurance, people won't buy it and those who have it will cancel it, the insurance model will collapse. The gov't will step in with 'bail outs' and as the case with GM, the insurance industry will become government industry, which to you basically means 'single payer'.
This is the destruction of individual freedoms through what amounts to basically hacking of the political system and the implicit and explicit support by the mob.
No, in fact Huckleberry Finn teaches you that society will condescend to a person it doesn't like that much, call him a nigger, while the society will kiss ass of the most rotten individuals, who pass for 'gentlemen'.
The Nigger in question was the only honest and honourable person in the book (not counting Finn).
It's a way to limit how many CSE degrees are granted.
- which is an artificial way to maintain monopoly, that's how unions work - prevent people from entering that work space.
So instead of having more choices in the engineering and allowing the employers to choose from a wider range of offers, and instead of allowing the employers to employ more people at lower salaries, the students are pushed into stupid degrees and do end up serving burgers or pizza.
As I said earlier, Dr. Hacker is a fraud. If you want to understand his real motives, listen to the audio interview with him.
He has an agenda, and this agenda is about increasing the number of people studying his subject in college settings and to do this he wants more people to stop studying algebra and other math and sciences.
He is interested in arguing in class for Obamacare and he wants to use statistics and no other math, and he wants this to be the environment for the young kids to learn in.
He is talking about indoctrination and dumbing down and at the end it's about money and power.
As a side note, the guy says that statistics should be taught to look at politician's claims (at school, to indoctrinate the kids) but statistics require algebra.
Oh, and by the way, before I get out of here and before somebody posts a nonsense comment about 'robber barons' and freedoms for women and children, etc.
'robber barons' - captains of industry, people who created entire industries, people whose 'crime' was that they were successful at what they were doing while others weren't prevented from doing the same with government regulations. 'robber barons' - people who made America into the rich nation that it became after the Civil war and before 1913.
Children - who were always working. Child labour was as old as the humanity, and no amount of desire, no amount of gov't decree can change it, same as with these mobile phones.
What changed it? Capitalism and free market industrialisation of the economy changed it. The parents of the children became affluent enough, in other words they became productive enough based on the capital that was used to invest in the tools and education by the rich investors, so that these parents didn't have to send their kids to work.
All the government nonsense rules come around only as the actual politics of the question change, when it becomes POPULAR to talk about such things, it becomes a trend, that children didn't have to work anymore, and of-course the few outliers allow the politicians to pretend to solve a non-existing problem and make matters worse.
So if the free market capitalism removed 90% of children from work force, but 10% were still working because their parents didn't yet become productive enough to afford not to send children to work, the politicians then sense blood, step in and prevent these families from having that extra income, which they obviously needed.
Almost no parent wants to send his or her child to work before they are grown enough, and this doesn't have to be dictated to the parents. The liberal agenda is that the parents are stupid and greedy, and their kids have to be 'saved'. Well, as always all agenda backfires, and eventually the government that grows too big on issues like this, destroys the economy and the children WILL be going to work again, because their parents wouldn't be able to afford to put food on the tables, and that's what is happening today.
You are watching it happening right now, and this has nothing to do with 'corporations having a free run', this has to do with destruction of individual liberty that creates the enormous government, which takes away more liberty and creates more government, and this is a vicious cycle, and this destroys the economy, and children WILL be going back to work and the tide that used to lift all boats will go away and the boats will get stuck in the mud.
Actually when government wasn't meddling with individuals doing business in USA, the country became the largest manufacturer, exporter and thus creditor nation in the world. People were paying for what they needed to buy out of pocket, everybody was becoming more affluent while the dollar was gaining value (so the ever feared deflation).
That was before Fed, IRS, FDIC, FDA, FHA, EPA, CIA, FBI, FAA, FCC, HUD, F&F, dep't of education, energy, commerce, interior, agriculture, small business. It was before SS, Medicare, Medicaid, EI, welfare, SNAP (food stamps), etc.etc.
It was before gov't stole even more money through printing, borrowing, it was before gov't meddled with infrastructure. Infrastructure was built that made Americans more productive, not the type of infrastructure that didn't make sense except from point of view of political power.
It was before the undeclared wars.
What governments should be in order to preserve freedoms and allow people to build vibrant economy is not what socialists want to sell, which is the exact opposite - destruction of individual freedoms, command economy and ever growing government.
Indian economy didn't grow just like US economy didn't grow specifically because of inflation that is under-reported and thus is not used to reduce the GDP, which makes the number meaningless. Nobody is coming to India to invest, that's my point.
India can succeed, but it will not succeed as long as it has the type of government that is regulating as heavily as it is doing today. I don't need links, I know what I am talking about from personal experience, not from links.
India is not China, you have no idea what you are talking about. India is having massive problems, it has no competition, it has no economic growth to speak of. Yes, many jobs are done by Indians that otherwise could have been done by Americans or others, but Americans and others have priced themselves out of those jobs, but this specifically does not mean that India is kicking ass of America.
Now, who IS kicking American ass is China. It's China, Hong Kong, Singapore, even Myanmar. Switzerland actually.
Do you know how the liberals like to talk about Scandinavia, because supposedly Scandinavia is socialist? Scandinavian countries don't live on deficit and don't grow their debt. Scandinavian countries have a balanced budget, because 20 years ago they went through massive crises and since then they've been moving away from socialism (too slowly of-course, but they have the right direction).
But again - they have no deficit spending, they aren't living on debt, they are PAYING for what they are using, and that's not your 'socialist' model.
People of a certain race are lazy, but that's OK because it's caused by discrimination
- if any people are lazy, it's only because they are made lazy by the government subsidies, nothing else.
Keynesians aren't economists, they are to economics what astrologist are to astronomy.
'corporations walk all over', yeah, nobody will have anybody 'walk over' them, they'll be stuck in perpetual poverty because nobody will hire them and the economy won't ever grow because there will be no people with purchasing power, because people will be living on subsidies, but nobody will be 'walking over them'.
India isn't kicking your ass, the laws in India actually prevent competition.
The other part of the world where this is a huge problem is South Africa. They have over 24% unemployment and it's all due to the labour market regulations and the government is coming up with more and more, saying: it's hard to find a job, so we'll make it even harder by telling employers that they now have to provide their temporary employees with the same benefits that their permanent employees get.
So there will be much fewer temps hired. They were using temps specifically because it was so hard to hire people in the first place.
Do you know what makes it hard to hire people? Government regulations, like regulations about what compensation and benefits are supposed to be, all types of legislation that gives employees specific gov't power to sue based on various laws, making it very difficult to fire people.
Do you know what really prevents hiring? Inability to fire.
Study of what? What are you talking about? Minimum wage prevents jobs from appearing that cannot exist at such a high level. Is anybody wiping your windshield or bagging your groceries? How many live phone operators do you see instead of an answering machine? What about all those call centre jobs that went to Asia?
Do you know what the highest tax bracket is? Going from paying 0 taxes to paying any amount above it. Giving up leisure for work? Why? You have to be paid maybe 4 times the minimum wage to get off welfare, otherwise it doesn't make any sense.
Giving phone to the poor may be a ridiculous concept to YOU, but that's because you lack the economies of scale or the skills or knowledge the Indian government possess
- you fully missed that point in my comment that addresses this exactly - somebody will be a monopoly phone provider in India, they'll make a killing, the government officials connected to them will make a killing. They will kill the economy of-course.
--
It's like with any government regulation. How about minimum wage? This regulation prevents people from finding jobs and prevents many jobs from appearing. There can be plenty of jobs that people without skills and experience could do for a year or two before moving on, while living in their parent's basements. How many are stuck on welfare because it actually DOES provide a more comfortable existence than a job at a low wage?
Think about it from POV of the employer - they are not allowed to take a better offer.
Turn the tables around, imagine the same law applied to employee. So this would mean there is a MAXIMUM pay that one cannot go above. You are getting an offer for more money, government says: sorry, you can't have it, you can't take it, that job doesn't have the right to exist and you have no right taking it.
It's the same exact thing applied in reverse to the employer: you are getting a better offer for labour from somebody? Sorry, you can't have it. You are not allowed to take that better offer, in fact to prevent better offers in the first place, we are going to tax you and we are going to give money that we taxed you for to people so that they wouldn't even give you better offers.
Every law and regulation that is imposed by the government rather than by the free market is there to serve the politicians, not the economy at all.
The Indian government is solely responsible for the poverty in India at this point - all the insane rules and regulations prevent people from investing in India. Starting a business in India is ridiculously difficult compared to other parts of Asia, especially China. Indian government is extremely corrupt in a way that prevents competition and prevents business.
Government "providing phones to the poor" - what a ridiculous concept.
Do you know who is the best to provide for the poor? The businessmen who are looking for profit. How come the phones were impossible to own when it was a government monopoly with AT&T for most of the last century, but then when the gov't allowed the competition, all of a sudden the people could finally own phones, phones became cheap, ubiquitous, there were all these new features. From answering machines and radio phones to buttons on the phones, different colours (not just your beige). Eventually fax machines, modems and cell phones and now smart phones.
Everybody has more than one phone, while the first cell phones could only be afforded by the top wealthiest individuals, who could pay a few thousand bucks for one and then hundreds or thousands per month in usage fees.
Cell phones are so cheap today, if competition and business was actually allowed to exist in a FREE market (without government interference) in India, there would be even cheaper phones there, maybe a few dollars for a phone, maybe 1 dollar, who knows.
Government is going to do it? How? It's NOT going to create a better cheaper phone, it's going to pay more for some existing phone, it's going to give some monopoly license to some company that has people in government and it's going to overpay obviously, while interfering with the free market further, reducing the competition with this government subsidy.
Eventually the people in India won't PAY for the cell phone, so it means almost no cell phone retailer will exist in India, and so the cell phones in India will be ridiculously expensive - subsidised by taxes and inflation, borrowing (taxes + interest) and so instead of a couple of bucks for a phone it will be the destruction of economy.
Well, they won't destroy the economy just with this program, it's what they do overall that is the same thing as with these phones that will prevent their economy from rising.
Poverty in India? It's the government that causes is, like all poverty around the world. It's the governments of those nations that cause it and prevent it from being reduced by the competition, free market, vibrant businesses started by individual entrepreneurs without gov't interference.
I mean what do you think/. is? Maybe it's something that I don't understand at all, it's a forum, it's an advertising platform, it has themes that are supposedly geared towards technology (but also plenty of flaming... well, that's an advertising technique).
But I don't get it probably, what does Malda mean by 'what it will become'? What could it become, except diluted over time? It's like a newsgroup, maybe it's IRC with memory, but what is he talking about?
People will flat out lie to you about there experience
- where experience? See, you've been asking the wrong questions from these people all the time, they didn't know you wanted THEIR experience, they thought you were talking about some other place.
Every transaction that avoids the official banking records and prevents flow of data to the government is even better, because it prevents the data from being used against the individuals involved.
After all, Capone was thrown to jail not for crimes but because of income tax evasion.
Slashdot Mirror
Precisely.
That's why people so consistently and so passionately attack the messenger of these messages:
people attach this message thoroughly and consistently, they attack the messenger thoroughly and consistently as well.
Evaporizing the Earth in experiments is great, the problem is if you are successful, you won't know it.
1% of the purchase price goes to health care? That sounds like a bargain to me.
- the pizza guy is wrong, it's going to be much bigger than that.
The prices for insurance are going to go through the roof now, that the health insurance industry will be destroyed. There is no concept of 'insurance' if there is no concept of 'pre-existing condition', and since the fine for not having the insurance is going to be low (that's why the SCOTUS ruled it Constitutional, because the fine was too low to make people buy it, so it's not 'legislation through tax', * you can read more in the post I am linking to in my sig *) the people will not buy insurance.
Instead people who have insurance today will be getting rid of it, why pay for it now, if the fine is very low and they can't be denied coverage once they need it? The people who will have insurance will be those, who are subsidised under Obama's plan.
The real costs to the insurance companies will go through the roof, insurance is no longer insurance, people won't buy it and those who have it will cancel it, the insurance model will collapse. The gov't will step in with 'bail outs' and as the case with GM, the insurance industry will become government industry, which to you basically means 'single payer'.
This is the destruction of individual freedoms through what amounts to basically hacking of the political system and the implicit and explicit support by the mob.
PerfectionLost, glodime, stop arguing with yourself.
They figured he was going to watch the new Batman, so he needs some protection.
(too soon?)
No, in fact Huckleberry Finn teaches you that society will condescend to a person it doesn't like that much, call him a nigger, while the society will kiss ass of the most rotten individuals, who pass for 'gentlemen'.
The Nigger in question was the only honest and honourable person in the book (not counting Finn).
It's a way to limit how many CSE degrees are granted.
- which is an artificial way to maintain monopoly, that's how unions work - prevent people from entering that work space.
So instead of having more choices in the engineering and allowing the employers to choose from a wider range of offers, and instead of allowing the employers to employ more people at lower salaries, the students are pushed into stupid degrees and do end up serving burgers or pizza.
As I said earlier, Dr. Hacker is a fraud. If you want to understand his real motives, listen to the audio interview with him.
He has an agenda, and this agenda is about increasing the number of people studying his subject in college settings and to do this he wants more people to stop studying algebra and other math and sciences.
He is interested in arguing in class for Obamacare and he wants to use statistics and no other math, and he wants this to be the environment for the young kids to learn in.
He is talking about indoctrination and dumbing down and at the end it's about money and power.
As a side note, the guy says that statistics should be taught to look at politician's claims (at school, to indoctrinate the kids) but statistics require algebra.
Oh, and by the way, before I get out of here and before somebody posts a nonsense comment about 'robber barons' and freedoms for women and children, etc.
'robber barons' - captains of industry, people who created entire industries, people whose 'crime' was that they were successful at what they were doing while others weren't prevented from doing the same with government regulations. 'robber barons' - people who made America into the rich nation that it became after the Civil war and before 1913.
Children - who were always working. Child labour was as old as the humanity, and no amount of desire, no amount of gov't decree can change it, same as with these mobile phones.
What changed it? Capitalism and free market industrialisation of the economy changed it. The parents of the children became affluent enough, in other words they became productive enough based on the capital that was used to invest in the tools and education by the rich investors, so that these parents didn't have to send their kids to work.
All the government nonsense rules come around only as the actual politics of the question change, when it becomes POPULAR to talk about such things, it becomes a trend, that children didn't have to work anymore, and of-course the few outliers allow the politicians to pretend to solve a non-existing problem and make matters worse.
So if the free market capitalism removed 90% of children from work force, but 10% were still working because their parents didn't yet become productive enough to afford not to send children to work, the politicians then sense blood, step in and prevent these families from having that extra income, which they obviously needed.
Almost no parent wants to send his or her child to work before they are grown enough, and this doesn't have to be dictated to the parents. The liberal agenda is that the parents are stupid and greedy, and their kids have to be 'saved'. Well, as always all agenda backfires, and eventually the government that grows too big on issues like this, destroys the economy and the children WILL be going to work again, because their parents wouldn't be able to afford to put food on the tables, and that's what is happening today.
You are watching it happening right now, and this has nothing to do with 'corporations having a free run', this has to do with destruction of individual liberty that creates the enormous government, which takes away more liberty and creates more government, and this is a vicious cycle, and this destroys the economy, and children WILL be going back to work and the tide that used to lift all boats will go away and the boats will get stuck in the mud.
Actually when government wasn't meddling with individuals doing business in USA, the country became the largest manufacturer, exporter and thus creditor nation in the world. People were paying for what they needed to buy out of pocket, everybody was becoming more affluent while the dollar was gaining value (so the ever feared deflation).
That was before Fed, IRS, FDIC, FDA, FHA, EPA, CIA, FBI, FAA, FCC, HUD, F&F, dep't of education, energy, commerce, interior, agriculture, small business. It was before SS, Medicare, Medicaid, EI, welfare, SNAP (food stamps), etc.etc.
It was before gov't stole even more money through printing, borrowing, it was before gov't meddled with infrastructure. Infrastructure was built that made Americans more productive, not the type of infrastructure that didn't make sense except from point of view of political power.
It was before the undeclared wars.
What governments should be in order to preserve freedoms and allow people to build vibrant economy is not what socialists want to sell, which is the exact opposite - destruction of individual freedoms, command economy and ever growing government.
Indian economy didn't grow just like US economy didn't grow specifically because of inflation that is under-reported and thus is not used to reduce the GDP, which makes the number meaningless. Nobody is coming to India to invest, that's my point.
India can succeed, but it will not succeed as long as it has the type of government that is regulating as heavily as it is doing today. I don't need links, I know what I am talking about from personal experience, not from links.
India is not China, you have no idea what you are talking about. India is having massive problems, it has no competition, it has no economic growth to speak of. Yes, many jobs are done by Indians that otherwise could have been done by Americans or others, but Americans and others have priced themselves out of those jobs, but this specifically does not mean that India is kicking ass of America.
Now, who IS kicking American ass is China. It's China, Hong Kong, Singapore, even Myanmar. Switzerland actually.
Do you know how the liberals like to talk about Scandinavia, because supposedly Scandinavia is socialist? Scandinavian countries don't live on deficit and don't grow their debt. Scandinavian countries have a balanced budget, because 20 years ago they went through massive crises and since then they've been moving away from socialism (too slowly of-course, but they have the right direction).
But again - they have no deficit spending, they aren't living on debt, they are PAYING for what they are using, and that's not your 'socialist' model.
People of a certain race are lazy, but that's OK because it's caused by discrimination
- if any people are lazy, it's only because they are made lazy by the government subsidies, nothing else.
Keynesians aren't economists, they are to economics what astrologist are to astronomy.
'corporations walk all over', yeah, nobody will have anybody 'walk over' them, they'll be stuck in perpetual poverty because nobody will hire them and the economy won't ever grow because there will be no people with purchasing power, because people will be living on subsidies, but nobody will be 'walking over them'.
India isn't kicking your ass, the laws in India actually prevent competition.
The other part of the world where this is a huge problem is South Africa. They have over 24% unemployment and it's all due to the labour market regulations and the government is coming up with more and more, saying: it's hard to find a job, so we'll make it even harder by telling employers that they now have to provide their temporary employees with the same benefits that their permanent employees get.
So there will be much fewer temps hired. They were using temps specifically because it was so hard to hire people in the first place.
Do you know what makes it hard to hire people? Government regulations, like regulations about what compensation and benefits are supposed to be, all types of legislation that gives employees specific gov't power to sue based on various laws, making it very difficult to fire people.
Do you know what really prevents hiring? Inability to fire.
Study of what? What are you talking about? Minimum wage prevents jobs from appearing that cannot exist at such a high level. Is anybody wiping your windshield or bagging your groceries? How many live phone operators do you see instead of an answering machine? What about all those call centre jobs that went to Asia?
Do you know what the highest tax bracket is? Going from paying 0 taxes to paying any amount above it. Giving up leisure for work? Why? You have to be paid maybe 4 times the minimum wage to get off welfare, otherwise it doesn't make any sense.
Giving phone to the poor may be a ridiculous concept to YOU, but that's because you lack the economies of scale or the skills or knowledge the Indian government possess
- you fully missed that point in my comment that addresses this exactly - somebody will be a monopoly phone provider in India, they'll make a killing, the government officials connected to them will make a killing. They will kill the economy of-course.
--
It's like with any government regulation. How about minimum wage? This regulation prevents people from finding jobs and prevents many jobs from appearing. There can be plenty of jobs that people without skills and experience could do for a year or two before moving on, while living in their parent's basements. How many are stuck on welfare because it actually DOES provide a more comfortable existence than a job at a low wage?
Think about it from POV of the employer - they are not allowed to take a better offer.
Turn the tables around, imagine the same law applied to employee. So this would mean there is a MAXIMUM pay that one cannot go above. You are getting an offer for more money, government says: sorry, you can't have it, you can't take it, that job doesn't have the right to exist and you have no right taking it.
It's the same exact thing applied in reverse to the employer: you are getting a better offer for labour from somebody? Sorry, you can't have it. You are not allowed to take that better offer, in fact to prevent better offers in the first place, we are going to tax you and we are going to give money that we taxed you for to people so that they wouldn't even give you better offers.
Every law and regulation that is imposed by the government rather than by the free market is there to serve the politicians, not the economy at all.
The Indian government is solely responsible for the poverty in India at this point - all the insane rules and regulations prevent people from investing in India. Starting a business in India is ridiculously difficult compared to other parts of Asia, especially China. Indian government is extremely corrupt in a way that prevents competition and prevents business.
Government "providing phones to the poor" - what a ridiculous concept.
Do you know who is the best to provide for the poor? The businessmen who are looking for profit. How come the phones were impossible to own when it was a government monopoly with AT&T for most of the last century, but then when the gov't allowed the competition, all of a sudden the people could finally own phones, phones became cheap, ubiquitous, there were all these new features. From answering machines and radio phones to buttons on the phones, different colours (not just your beige). Eventually fax machines, modems and cell phones and now smart phones.
Everybody has more than one phone, while the first cell phones could only be afforded by the top wealthiest individuals, who could pay a few thousand bucks for one and then hundreds or thousands per month in usage fees.
Cell phones are so cheap today, if competition and business was actually allowed to exist in a FREE market (without government interference) in India, there would be even cheaper phones there, maybe a few dollars for a phone, maybe 1 dollar, who knows.
Government is going to do it? How? It's NOT going to create a better cheaper phone, it's going to pay more for some existing phone, it's going to give some monopoly license to some company that has people in government and it's going to overpay obviously, while interfering with the free market further, reducing the competition with this government subsidy.
Eventually the people in India won't PAY for the cell phone, so it means almost no cell phone retailer will exist in India, and so the cell phones in India will be ridiculously expensive - subsidised by taxes and inflation, borrowing (taxes + interest) and so instead of a couple of bucks for a phone it will be the destruction of economy.
Well, they won't destroy the economy just with this program, it's what they do overall that is the same thing as with these phones that will prevent their economy from rising.
Poverty in India? It's the government that causes is, like all poverty around the world. It's the governments of those nations that cause it and prevent it from being reduced by the competition, free market, vibrant businesses started by individual entrepreneurs without gov't interference.
Madoff had all the licenses. Corzine has all the licenses. Etc.etc.
People must be free to start whatever business they wish without asking any governments for permissions.
Slow down there, cowboy, I am writing this down. Left. Right. Up. what was the last one?
I mean what do you think /. is? Maybe it's something that I don't understand at all, it's a forum, it's an advertising platform, it has themes that are supposedly geared towards technology (but also plenty of flaming... well, that's an advertising technique).
But I don't get it probably, what does Malda mean by 'what it will become'? What could it become, except diluted over time? It's like a newsgroup, maybe it's IRC with memory, but what is he talking about?
Jan Weiss - The House of a Thousand Floors.
If you want depression, this is up that valley.
People will flat out lie to you about there experience
- where experience? See, you've been asking the wrong questions from these people all the time, they didn't know you wanted THEIR experience, they thought you were talking about some other place.
Every transaction that avoids the official banking records and prevents flow of data to the government is even better, because it prevents the data from being used against the individuals involved.
After all, Capone was thrown to jail not for crimes but because of income tax evasion.
Not a troll, he has an agenda.
I left this comment explaining his true motives, because he just gave an interview about them today. So you can listen to the interview, the link is there.