yes, it is relevant that I read the book in Russian, not in English, because I don't know what the English variant sounds like. Yes, English is not my first language. However I don't have to apologize to anybody for my spelling and grammar, buddy.
In the short term by not trading with China, USA will feel much more pain than China, because USA has no production capacity to satisfy its demand. 90% of sea food is imported into USA from Asia. USA even orders bridges to be made in China. China will see standard of living rise inside the country if US dollar collapses and Chinese can then buy more for their money, they are a much bigger market than USA and they can actually pay, because they work for money.
In the long run USA becoming self sustaining again is a good thing for everybody.
However creating artificial barriers to trade is not a good thing for anybody.
I LOVE free market capitalism. That's capitalism where government is constrained and is not allowed to grab power, which it then can sell, and that's what any of the business regulations laws are (including patents/copyrights.)
Go back to trade secrets and keep them while you can, but don't attack me because I came up with the same idea as you did and implemented something similar. You don't deserve any government protected privilege just because you were first and I was second to come up with the same idea, it only means that I had the necessity to come up with it later in life than you did.
OTOH even if I took your idea and re-implemented it doesn't shouldn't mean that again, you deserve any government privilege of protection. It only means that I find your idea to be valid and I have my implementation, which will now compete in the same space, which is what actually drives innovation, as you try to outcompete me with your implementation. Well, you had a head start, so I need to be more innovative even with the same idea in my implementation, which is again - good for the market of ideas and implementation, because again, I am competing with you, who already had a head start, so the customers are again - better off.
And at the end, the government pretends that it protects the customers by licenses and patents and copyright, but in reality it's not about customers. Customers don't pay governments all those bribes. It's about companies who want monopoly power.
Government granted patents and copyrights are all about creating monopolies and providing governments with revenue streams, nothing else.
But Jobs probably read Fyodor Dostoyevsky's books, including The Brothers Karamazov (I never read it in English, only in the original), and Dostoyevsky was once charged as a conspirator (was he or wasn't he is not important, but he was charged and was nearly killed for that, but instead spent time in Siberia.)
Why am I bringing this up? Because that's a book that explains this phenomena to a very fine degree, how from point of view of socialists the society is responsible for the failings of the men, and not the men themselves. The men are not responsible for their behavior in the minds of Socialists, it's the system that causes them to be 'bad' or 'wrong', whatever. But the idea then is that the system needs to be changed, the society needs to be changed, and once you change the society, the men will become better.
The books explores that this ideology is utter nonsense.
There is no such thing as society, there are only individuals, and it is up to individuals to be 'good' or 'bad', and we all have in us ability to be 'good'/'bad' (whatever that means, depends on the perspective). And so there is no way to change the society and then to adopt the people to that changed society, but it's the convenient idea, because it puts a target on individuals, requires individuals to become part of collective for 'common good', but then the goal becomes bigger than anything, because the goal is so wonderful, it's so righteous (in the minds of Socialists), that it doesn't matter what the means are taken to achieve that goal.
It's about pushing the 'society' to be righteous and good, it doesn't matter if you end up hurting a lot of individuals in the process, because the end goal is that everybody is happy and equal somehow and equally wealthy (in reality equally poor of-course), and basically it's like creating the heaven on earth. What wouldn't an ideologue sacrifice for that? Is it OK to kill 1 person to reach that goal?
So it's a similar situation, saying that a society or an ideology is responsible for something, where in reality it is the individuals themselves who are mostly responsible for what is happening around them.
US federal Constitution was a pretty significant attempt at trying to keep the corruption out of politics. It was eventually cracked (it was cracked a number of times, a few times the problems have been fixed, but eventually it was cracked for good.)
The way they cracked it finally is by ensuring that not only Congress and Senate and White house had trojans introducing viruses, but they also broke the court system, especially the Supreme Court.
They used a distributed denial of law attack from all levels of government, including the Supreme Court and they were able to introduce all of the necessary 'back orifice' style tools into the system to make sure it cannot be patched again. They appealed to the self interest of the majority (employees) in order to pass legislature that at first only undermined the rights of minority (employers), allowing the government to grow faster and to take up more resources. They eventually used these back doors to grab enough power that they couldn't be stopped. They redefined money, government power, introduced regulations of businesses that were unauthorized allowing to sell more power to the highest bidders, destroying competition and creating monopolies/oligopolies. They violated every law that there is, every human right, every bit of Constitution and every bit of law.
Eventually the unavoidable thing happened, the resource consumption became 100% of what was available and the system started spreading its disease around the world, forcing/letting other systems (nations to pick up the slack of processing power - useful production). The system is now poisoned, no more useful production can happen in it, it's impossible to reform the existing government and it has to be formatted and reinstalled but it also needs a lot of patching, to ensure that the next version is less penetrable to these sorts of attacks.
Unfortunately the current batch of coders (the population) is so deaf blind and dumb it can't understand even what happened, never mind understanding the necessary steps that must be taken to fix the problem.
Well, nobody has a right to a job by anybody else. Just because they want a job doesn't mean they can get a job or they should be able to get a job in an environment that is hostile to job creation.
That's right, the environment is hostile to job creation. I wouldn't hire anybody in USA or most of Europe. It's only large monopolies that can afford to do that nowadays, because they already bought the government. Small firms outsource (and large firms do too), because cost of doing business in USA and most of Europe is too high because of the socialist state that was built and now turned into a fascist state.
Saying 'businesses must be playing fair' means nothing. What's fair? Since when is it fair that a person that is hired gets special entitlements enforced by government upon the employer to provide this this and that, not what's negotiated in a contract, but rather what's enforced by government?
All those so called 'civil rights' - yeah, it makes sense that government should be treating everybody equally. But it doesn't make sense that government says: if you are an employee, you have these special privileges and if you feel that your employer doesn't give them to you, then you have the right to sue. That increases the cost of doing business.
Same with all the special rights regarding 'equal opportunity employment' ideology. Those are obligations imposed upon the employers regardless of the contract between them and the employees. Those are ways to incur expenses upon employers that employees don't have to negotiate for.
In the system that has 14-25 million people unemployed/underemployed having minimum wage laws and all the rules and regulations that enforce specific ways in which people must be hired and how they can't be fired and all various privileges the people get enforced by government, not by a private contract - all of this is nonsense and if Obama was serious about job creation, he would have reduced the federal register by repealing all of these laws.
Customers have a choice not to be with a bank and maybe being nickeled and dimed didn't entice them, because it wasn't them, who was nickeled and dimed, it were the stores where they shopped. So government came out enforcing a price control - cutting by half the debit card transaction fee that merchants payed resulted in that dep't of the bank that deals with transaction fees to raise the account fee to $5.
Well, that's a change, but depending on how often one uses the debit card in a store it's a small change but there is no monopoly. Nobody forces a person to use that bank, nobody forces a person to use that bank's debit card, etc.etc.
As I said: people are upset about a 5 dollar fee, but they don't have a problem with government raising taxes to enforce price controls upon merchants, or whatever else, because 50% of the people don't pay income taxes, and I am willing to bet that majority of those, upset with the banks about this 5 dollar fee are in that 50 percent (majority).
However it's a system that allows 50% of people to vote on raising taxes that they don't pay. This goes completely opposite to the way gov't is allowed to collect taxes, which are supposed to be apportioned to the States. There shouldn't be a situation where a large part of population doesn't pay a specific tax yet they are allowed to vote on issues including the issue of how much those taxes are supposed to be.
Just because some people prefer to use government force to steal from others it doesn't change the fact of stealing, and this is exactly that - they are uncomfortable doing the stealing themselves, so they outsource it to government force.
All taxes should be paid by everybody. If there is an income tax, it should be applied equally, the rates shouldn't change depending on the amount of money one makes. This would really make it UNPOPULAR to raise income taxes, which is the way it should be, because if it's popular to raise a tax among people because they don't pay it, then it's legalized theft.
That's why estate taxes are also unconstitutional by the way. Make everybody pay them don't do this thing where 99% are for those taxes because their net worth is under 5 million (or whatever the cut out is) or their net worth is insignificantly over that amount.
One more thing about high earners: they don't spend most of their money on themselves, which makes them benefactors of the economy.
Steve Jobs never had to work ever again when Apple fired him. He already had more money than he EVER SPENT in his entire life! So why did he bother continue working until 6 weeks before death? He was not benefiting himself with any of the extra earnings.
However every single dollar he didn't spend on himself, he re-invested into the economy. Gov't coming out saying that the rich are not doing their 'fair share' is full of shit. Steve Jobs benefited the economy much more than any government ever did.
He created actual products that hundreds of millions want and use. He created jobs that pay salaries and pay taxes (gov't can pretend all it wants that it can create jobs, but it cant. It has to rob people's incomes to create their worthless jobs.)
He created business opportunities for thousands of people building and selling apps in his app store.
He created investment opportunities for millions of people (whoever benefits from owning Apple stock.)
He did more for the economy than anybody else who worked for him or even majority of people before he paid a single cent in taxes.
Every single cent he paid in taxes was to the detriment of the economy, because that money was taken away from his investments and given to government to be wasted.
It's worse than waste, there is a multiplier effect there as well. Gov't steals income from people, doesn't allow them to invest themselves, makes them poorer, makes economy less productive, because that money isn't used for business.
Gov't then spends that money by doling out less than efficient contracts, preventing competition.
This is ridiculous. People are crying over a 5 dollar fee, which is in fact an absolute right for a bank to charge for an account, but these same people want government to collect more taxes, so that what? More wars and more bank bail outs could be done?
The politicians are 'outraged' by bank raising a fee, so they will raise taxes to 'protect' the consumer from this?
A 5 dollar fee for a service, that nobody has to use, for a service that has plenty of competition - checks, credit cards, cash, other banks. This is nonsense.
The OWS protesters want more government! Figures. 50% of Americans don't pay income taxes, and this is a problem - a system that allows a large part of the population to escape a tax, that another large part of the population pays will be voted for, because those who don't pay those specific taxes will vote to raise them any time.
But the OWS protesters are ridiculous for a very specific reason - many of them believe that they will be better off in some sort of a socialist state, while it is SOCIALISM that is collapsing because it turned into FASCISM.
That's right, all this socialism, which allows the government to regulate businesses to appease the largest voting block - employees, provides entitlements to employees, while hitting the employers with all the obligations. The worst thing one can do is hire somebody in USA or other Western nations, where this socialism exists, because once you hire somebody, you lose your rights and they gain entitlements.
So the government grabbed this power for a reason - so it could sell it. Gov't sells power that it steals from the people by abusing the laws and going above its authority (Constitution) and the gov't creates motive and opportunity for businesses to buy the power that gov't has over businesses, thus creating monopolies and destroying competition, which means that only FEW people will have most of the power, because real democracy is not in the ballot box, it's in business and ability to use your own money to buy products that you want without any obstacles. Because that's the ultimate vote in an economy - who wins and who loses.
Instead the socialist ideology allows gov't to steal and sell power, creating powerful entities, that eventually take over the government obviously with all that bought power.
From printing of the fiat currency and taxing income as opposed to using excise taxes, and regulating businesses, which is unauthorized, to creating all these ponzi schemes - SS, Medicare, and forcing them upon people and to running insane illegal wars forever. All of this destroys the economy and creates small number of large monopolies/oligopolies that destroy economy and are the cause of this 'inequality'. Well, the real cause of inequality and the rise of the fascism is socialism that leads to this.
And people are complaining about 5 dollar fee. Ignorance is a bliss but it also leads to slavery.
Well, I switched to only OpenBSD and GNU/Linux about a year ago, before that I mostly worked on Windows and deployed on Unix.
However I do NOT like either Gnome, I do NOT like KDE, I do NOT like XFCE, I cannot stand Unity.
I don't like ANY of the windowing environments that Unix/GNU Linux offer.
I HATE Mac.
So in reality I only like Windows Windowing environment, specifically Windows 2000 or Windows XP. I think those are very solidly done and they FEEL solid. They are very integrated, all of the cut/paste, all of the menu looks, all of the fonts, borders.... It's no contest.
I HATE the way the non-Windows windowing systems are done, but I use them anyway, because I have to, because the underlying technology is what I need in GNU/Linux or Unix, not in Windows, and again, I don't like anything from Apple.
So unfortunately for me, I have to suffer through this.
Hey, they were just following the standard government procedures and Keynesian charlatanism of printing money to fight recession because they weren't productive to offset high debt. Don't worry about Zimbabwe, worry about USD. Zimbabwe dollar used to be 1 to 1 to USD.
Technology and innovation and invention causes prices to DROP not to rise and this is true for all fields and medical field is not an exception, however the paradox is in - the prices keep going up.
Again: the reason that prices in western medicine are going up has nothing to do with innovation, technology and invention. Those things do push prices down.
Any pill that prevents a surgery causes prices to go down.
Yet the prices are going up. The reason why prices in health care and health insurance are going up is government money in it. Government creates, supports, subsidizes, promotes, stimulates and bails out monopolies, this is true for all monopolies, including the large pharma.
FDA is standing there not to save you in any way, it's there to create a barrier to entry to any innovator who would otherwise come out with new technology. The innovator wants to make profit. There is plenty of profit to be made in health care and health insurance because there is plenty of things to innovate with. Plenty of new drugs, procedures, tools, instruments, data integration systems, etc.etc., all of this can be built. Most of it is not built, because the cost of entering the field is horrendous.
Who has 500 million dollars to pay for whatever FDA wants and requires? All the the stuff that is being worked on - it has to overcome a major hurdle of sinking half a billion dollars initially, before even starting the sales.
So first you have to spend time and money to create something, you HAVE to make sure it works. But then you have to pay everything that FDA requires for, and this goes into hundreds of millions. If you target a small time problem, where there are maybe a few tens of thousands of cases only to be helped, you are out of luck. You can't make any money, you can't overcome this hurdle of having to sink hundreds of millions of dollars.
--/. crowd can't seem to comprehend that, and it's funny, because they are capable of understanding at least some of the principle of initial investment. There were all these comments on the few people who make a lot of money by selling iPad and iPhone apps, and some HERE were arguing that it's impossible to turn a profit due to 'high cost of entry', which is 99 dollars.
That's right, they are complaining that they have to sink 99 dollars of investment capital (as if they don't have to spend their actual time, which supposedly is worth more than that to write an app.)
So they understand overcoming the 99 dollar barrier. How come they can't comprehend the difficulties involved in overcoming just the licensing costs of say half a billion (never mind the problems with all other gov't regulations, start with patents and end with drug distribution regulations).
--
This story is good, somebody came out with an innovation. I am sure in FREE market he could make a difference.
I've never understood why is it so important for so many Christians that they feel there is 24/7 someone loving them. Is it insecurity? Would you be depressed if there wasn't? I am genuinely curious about this.
- religion is not just a way to 'fill in the voids in knowledge', but it is a political instrument, which in the hands of the political elite is used to control the herd, which they are using to live off of (so they tax them, they use their labor to do nothing themselves but to be in power over them, they send them to prisons and to wars and control their speech, business, reproduction, entertainment and thus culture).
So for the political elite the thought of an omnipotent god that loves them 24/7 is important, because they cause evil. The do real evil in the world and since they do evil they need the reassurance that no matter how evil they are, god loves them anyway, otherwise - hell, right?
The herd on the other hand is so beat up, it's made poor by this elite, who steal their fruits of their labor, their freedoms and liberties, business, entertainment, rights, culture... it's useful to make them believe that no matter how low they allow themselves to be beaten, no matter how many blows they take, no matter how little DIGNITY they have and how little they love themselves, because they KNOW they don't have dignity - they are slaves, that regardless of this truth the god loves them.
The TOP wants god to love them because they do evil things to the bottom.
The BOTTOM wants god to love them because they allow the evil things to be done and they don't love themselves because they allow themselves to be deprived of dignity, instead of fighting for it, so they want god to love them instead.
(I am an atheist and I am looking at this purely theoretically, I may be wrong.)
Yes, a large number of people DO consume drugs that are literally created in garages, and it would be much more appropriate to legalize all of this activity, to stop the Drug War in the process, to pardon all of the non-violent drug related prisoners.
The other parts of the world that I am talking about are (in no order) Europe, Russia, China. There are different regulations of-course even in those places, however nothing compares to FDA in cost of doing business with the government.
Lemoniz Nuclear Power Plant was a nuclear power plant under construction in Lemoniz, Spain in 1983 when the Spanish nuclear power expansion program was cancelled following a change of government. Its two PWRs, each of 900MWe, were almost complete but were never operated.
- they should realized as soon as the location was chosen - it was doomed to failure.
You don't build something that works in a place called Lemoniz (or in Spain).
Slashdot Mirror
yes, it is relevant that I read the book in Russian, not in English, because I don't know what the English variant sounds like. Yes, English is not my first language. However I don't have to apologize to anybody for my spelling and grammar, buddy.
ask my signature and watch the response right there.
In the short term by not trading with China, USA will feel much more pain than China, because USA has no production capacity to satisfy its demand. 90% of sea food is imported into USA from Asia. USA even orders bridges to be made in China. China will see standard of living rise inside the country if US dollar collapses and Chinese can then buy more for their money, they are a much bigger market than USA and they can actually pay, because they work for money.
In the long run USA becoming self sustaining again is a good thing for everybody.
However creating artificial barriers to trade is not a good thing for anybody.
Unions are not a bad thing in themselves, anybody should have the freedom to association.
Unions are a bad thing when exactly like other entities, they take a hold of government power.
the Spanish Inquisition.
Of-course the Spanish Inquisition didn't by default assume that everybody is a terrorist, unlike DHS.
DHS shall be ironically known as Department of Honor and Selflessness.
I LOVE free market capitalism. That's capitalism where government is constrained and is not allowed to grab power, which it then can sell, and that's what any of the business regulations laws are (including patents/copyrights.)
I am for abolition of the entire patent system.
Go back to trade secrets and keep them while you can, but don't attack me because I came up with the same idea as you did and implemented something similar. You don't deserve any government protected privilege just because you were first and I was second to come up with the same idea, it only means that I had the necessity to come up with it later in life than you did.
OTOH even if I took your idea and re-implemented it doesn't shouldn't mean that again, you deserve any government privilege of protection. It only means that I find your idea to be valid and I have my implementation, which will now compete in the same space, which is what actually drives innovation, as you try to outcompete me with your implementation. Well, you had a head start, so I need to be more innovative even with the same idea in my implementation, which is again - good for the market of ideas and implementation, because again, I am competing with you, who already had a head start, so the customers are again - better off.
And at the end, the government pretends that it protects the customers by licenses and patents and copyright, but in reality it's not about customers. Customers don't pay governments all those bribes. It's about companies who want monopoly power.
Government granted patents and copyrights are all about creating monopolies and providing governments with revenue streams, nothing else.
I had a little bird,
Its name was Enza.
I opened the window,
And in-flu-enza.
But Jobs probably read Fyodor Dostoyevsky's books, including The Brothers Karamazov (I never read it in English, only in the original), and Dostoyevsky was once charged as a conspirator (was he or wasn't he is not important, but he was charged and was nearly killed for that, but instead spent time in Siberia.)
Why am I bringing this up? Because that's a book that explains this phenomena to a very fine degree, how from point of view of socialists the society is responsible for the failings of the men, and not the men themselves. The men are not responsible for their behavior in the minds of Socialists, it's the system that causes them to be 'bad' or 'wrong', whatever. But the idea then is that the system needs to be changed, the society needs to be changed, and once you change the society, the men will become better.
The books explores that this ideology is utter nonsense.
There is no such thing as society, there are only individuals, and it is up to individuals to be 'good' or 'bad', and we all have in us ability to be 'good'/'bad' (whatever that means, depends on the perspective). And so there is no way to change the society and then to adopt the people to that changed society, but it's the convenient idea, because it puts a target on individuals, requires individuals to become part of collective for 'common good', but then the goal becomes bigger than anything, because the goal is so wonderful, it's so righteous (in the minds of Socialists), that it doesn't matter what the means are taken to achieve that goal.
It's about pushing the 'society' to be righteous and good, it doesn't matter if you end up hurting a lot of individuals in the process, because the end goal is that everybody is happy and equal somehow and equally wealthy (in reality equally poor of-course), and basically it's like creating the heaven on earth. What wouldn't an ideologue sacrifice for that? Is it OK to kill 1 person to reach that goal?
How about 100 people?
10,000 people?
20,000,000 to 40,000,000 people?
So it's a similar situation, saying that a society or an ideology is responsible for something, where in reality it is the individuals themselves who are mostly responsible for what is happening around them.
Of-course I would add that many people did do a lot of damage to the education system over the years, that's not a revelation, it's only a testament that federal government should not have a monopoly on education and shouldn't be allowed to set goals and standards and programs. There needs to be competition in this, otherwise when people like those described in the linked video put their hands all over the government, the monopoly that they get into their hands becomes especially detrimental.
You are right and here is why public high schools do not prepare you for anything more than being a cog in a machine.
well, you'd have to kill actual people, like me to stop having more and more Java code around. You are welcome to come and try it.
US federal Constitution was a pretty significant attempt at trying to keep the corruption out of politics. It was eventually cracked (it was cracked a number of times, a few times the problems have been fixed, but eventually it was cracked for good.)
The way they cracked it finally is by ensuring that not only Congress and Senate and White house had trojans introducing viruses, but they also broke the court system, especially the Supreme Court.
They used a distributed denial of law attack from all levels of government, including the Supreme Court and they were able to introduce all of the necessary 'back orifice' style tools into the system to make sure it cannot be patched again. They appealed to the self interest of the majority (employees) in order to pass legislature that at first only undermined the rights of minority (employers), allowing the government to grow faster and to take up more resources. They eventually used these back doors to grab enough power that they couldn't be stopped. They redefined money, government power, introduced regulations of businesses that were unauthorized allowing to sell more power to the highest bidders, destroying competition and creating monopolies/oligopolies. They violated every law that there is, every human right, every bit of Constitution and every bit of law.
Eventually the unavoidable thing happened, the resource consumption became 100% of what was available and the system started spreading its disease around the world, forcing/letting other systems (nations to pick up the slack of processing power - useful production). The system is now poisoned, no more useful production can happen in it, it's impossible to reform the existing government and it has to be formatted and reinstalled but it also needs a lot of patching, to ensure that the next version is less penetrable to these sorts of attacks.
Unfortunately the current batch of coders (the population) is so deaf blind and dumb it can't understand even what happened, never mind understanding the necessary steps that must be taken to fix the problem.
Well, nobody has a right to a job by anybody else. Just because they want a job doesn't mean they can get a job or they should be able to get a job in an environment that is hostile to job creation.
That's right, the environment is hostile to job creation. I wouldn't hire anybody in USA or most of Europe. It's only large monopolies that can afford to do that nowadays, because they already bought the government. Small firms outsource (and large firms do too), because cost of doing business in USA and most of Europe is too high because of the socialist state that was built and now turned into a fascist state.
Saying 'businesses must be playing fair' means nothing. What's fair? Since when is it fair that a person that is hired gets special entitlements enforced by government upon the employer to provide this this and that, not what's negotiated in a contract, but rather what's enforced by government?
All those so called 'civil rights' - yeah, it makes sense that government should be treating everybody equally. But it doesn't make sense that government says: if you are an employee, you have these special privileges and if you feel that your employer doesn't give them to you, then you have the right to sue. That increases the cost of doing business.
Same with all the special rights regarding 'equal opportunity employment' ideology. Those are obligations imposed upon the employers regardless of the contract between them and the employees. Those are ways to incur expenses upon employers that employees don't have to negotiate for.
In the system that has 14-25 million people unemployed/underemployed having minimum wage laws and all the rules and regulations that enforce specific ways in which people must be hired and how they can't be fired and all various privileges the people get enforced by government, not by a private contract - all of this is nonsense and if Obama was serious about job creation, he would have reduced the federal register by repealing all of these laws.
Customers have a choice not to be with a bank and maybe being nickeled and dimed didn't entice them, because it wasn't them, who was nickeled and dimed, it were the stores where they shopped. So government came out enforcing a price control - cutting by half the debit card transaction fee that merchants payed resulted in that dep't of the bank that deals with transaction fees to raise the account fee to $5.
Well, that's a change, but depending on how often one uses the debit card in a store it's a small change but there is no monopoly. Nobody forces a person to use that bank, nobody forces a person to use that bank's debit card, etc.etc.
As I said: people are upset about a 5 dollar fee, but they don't have a problem with government raising taxes to enforce price controls upon merchants, or whatever else, because 50% of the people don't pay income taxes, and I am willing to bet that majority of those, upset with the banks about this 5 dollar fee are in that 50 percent (majority).
However it's a system that allows 50% of people to vote on raising taxes that they don't pay. This goes completely opposite to the way gov't is allowed to collect taxes, which are supposed to be apportioned to the States. There shouldn't be a situation where a large part of population doesn't pay a specific tax yet they are allowed to vote on issues including the issue of how much those taxes are supposed to be.
Just because some people prefer to use government force to steal from others it doesn't change the fact of stealing, and this is exactly that - they are uncomfortable doing the stealing themselves, so they outsource it to government force.
All taxes should be paid by everybody. If there is an income tax, it should be applied equally, the rates shouldn't change depending on the amount of money one makes. This would really make it UNPOPULAR to raise income taxes, which is the way it should be, because if it's popular to raise a tax among people because they don't pay it, then it's legalized theft.
That's why estate taxes are also unconstitutional by the way. Make everybody pay them don't do this thing where 99% are for those taxes because their net worth is under 5 million (or whatever the cut out is) or their net worth is insignificantly over that amount.
One more thing about high earners: they don't spend most of their money on themselves, which makes them benefactors of the economy.
Steve Jobs never had to work ever again when Apple fired him. He already had more money than he EVER SPENT in his entire life! So why did he bother continue working until 6 weeks before death? He was not benefiting himself with any of the extra earnings.
However every single dollar he didn't spend on himself, he re-invested into the economy. Gov't coming out saying that the rich are not doing their 'fair share' is full of shit. Steve Jobs benefited the economy much more than any government ever did.
He created actual products that hundreds of millions want and use. He created jobs that pay salaries and pay taxes (gov't can pretend all it wants that it can create jobs, but it cant. It has to rob people's incomes to create their worthless jobs.)
He created business opportunities for thousands of people building and selling apps in his app store.
He created investment opportunities for millions of people (whoever benefits from owning Apple stock.)
He did more for the economy than anybody else who worked for him or even majority of people before he paid a single cent in taxes.
Every single cent he paid in taxes was to the detriment of the economy, because that money was taken away from his investments and given to government to be wasted.
It's worse than waste, there is a multiplier effect there as well. Gov't steals income from people, doesn't allow them to invest themselves, makes them poorer, makes economy less productive, because that money isn't used for business.
Gov't then spends that money by doling out less than efficient contracts, preventing competition.
Ridiculous.
This is ridiculous. People are crying over a 5 dollar fee, which is in fact an absolute right for a bank to charge for an account, but these same people want government to collect more taxes, so that what? More wars and more bank bail outs could be done?
The politicians are 'outraged' by bank raising a fee, so they will raise taxes to 'protect' the consumer from this?
A 5 dollar fee for a service, that nobody has to use, for a service that has plenty of competition - checks, credit cards, cash, other banks. This is nonsense.
The OWS protesters want more government! Figures. 50% of Americans don't pay income taxes, and this is a problem - a system that allows a large part of the population to escape a tax, that another large part of the population pays will be voted for, because those who don't pay those specific taxes will vote to raise them any time.
But the OWS protesters are ridiculous for a very specific reason - many of them believe that they will be better off in some sort of a socialist state, while it is SOCIALISM that is collapsing because it turned into FASCISM.
That's right, all this socialism, which allows the government to regulate businesses to appease the largest voting block - employees, provides entitlements to employees, while hitting the employers with all the obligations. The worst thing one can do is hire somebody in USA or other Western nations, where this socialism exists, because once you hire somebody, you lose your rights and they gain entitlements.
So the government grabbed this power for a reason - so it could sell it. Gov't sells power that it steals from the people by abusing the laws and going above its authority (Constitution) and the gov't creates motive and opportunity for businesses to buy the power that gov't has over businesses, thus creating monopolies and destroying competition, which means that only FEW people will have most of the power, because real democracy is not in the ballot box, it's in business and ability to use your own money to buy products that you want without any obstacles. Because that's the ultimate vote in an economy - who wins and who loses.
Instead the socialist ideology allows gov't to steal and sell power, creating powerful entities, that eventually take over the government obviously with all that bought power.
From printing of the fiat currency and taxing income as opposed to using excise taxes, and regulating businesses, which is unauthorized, to creating all these ponzi schemes - SS, Medicare, and forcing them upon people and to running insane illegal wars forever. All of this destroys the economy and creates small number of large monopolies/oligopolies that destroy economy and are the cause of this 'inequality'. Well, the real cause of inequality and the rise of the fascism is socialism that leads to this.
And people are complaining about 5 dollar fee. Ignorance is a bliss but it also leads to slavery.
Well, I switched to only OpenBSD and GNU/Linux about a year ago, before that I mostly worked on Windows and deployed on Unix.
However I do NOT like either Gnome, I do NOT like KDE, I do NOT like XFCE, I cannot stand Unity.
I don't like ANY of the windowing environments that Unix/GNU Linux offer.
I HATE Mac.
So in reality I only like Windows Windowing environment, specifically Windows 2000 or Windows XP. I think those are very solidly done and they FEEL solid. They are very integrated, all of the cut/paste, all of the menu looks, all of the fonts, borders.... It's no contest.
I HATE the way the non-Windows windowing systems are done, but I use them anyway, because I have to, because the underlying technology is what I need in GNU/Linux or Unix, not in Windows, and again, I don't like anything from Apple.
So unfortunately for me, I have to suffer through this.
This Universe is getting old and tired. This site is getting old and tired. Let's do this. Let's tear the Universe a new one.
By the way, can the same tearing be achieve with a nuke I wonder?
Puerile is currently in the top 20% of lookups on Merriam-Webster.com.
- so 1/5th of all Merriam-Webster.com lookups came from this single comment.
Congrats.
Siriously!
Hey, they were just following the standard government procedures and Keynesian charlatanism of printing money to fight recession because they weren't productive to offset high debt. Don't worry about Zimbabwe, worry about USD. Zimbabwe dollar used to be 1 to 1 to USD.
Just like a comment a couple of days ago, same here:
Technology and innovation and invention causes prices to DROP not to rise and this is true for all fields and medical field is not an exception, however the paradox is in - the prices keep going up.
Again: the reason that prices in western medicine are going up has nothing to do with innovation, technology and invention. Those things do push prices down.
Any pill that prevents a surgery causes prices to go down.
Yet the prices are going up. The reason why prices in health care and health insurance are going up is government money in it. Government creates, supports, subsidizes, promotes, stimulates and bails out monopolies, this is true for all monopolies, including the large pharma.
FDA is standing there not to save you in any way, it's there to create a barrier to entry to any innovator who would otherwise come out with new technology. The innovator wants to make profit. There is plenty of profit to be made in health care and health insurance because there is plenty of things to innovate with. Plenty of new drugs, procedures, tools, instruments, data integration systems, etc.etc., all of this can be built. Most of it is not built, because the cost of entering the field is horrendous.
Who has 500 million dollars to pay for whatever FDA wants and requires? All the the stuff that is being worked on - it has to overcome a major hurdle of sinking half a billion dollars initially, before even starting the sales.
So first you have to spend time and money to create something, you HAVE to make sure it works. But then you have to pay everything that FDA requires for, and this goes into hundreds of millions. If you target a small time problem, where there are maybe a few tens of thousands of cases only to be helped, you are out of luck. You can't make any money, you can't overcome this hurdle of having to sink hundreds of millions of dollars.
-- /. crowd can't seem to comprehend that, and it's funny, because they are capable of understanding at least some of the principle of initial investment. There were all these comments on the few people who make a lot of money by selling iPad and iPhone apps, and some HERE were arguing that it's impossible to turn a profit due to 'high cost of entry', which is 99 dollars.
That's right, they are complaining that they have to sink 99 dollars of investment capital (as if they don't have to spend their actual time, which supposedly is worth more than that to write an app.)
So they understand overcoming the 99 dollar barrier. How come they can't comprehend the difficulties involved in overcoming just the licensing costs of say half a billion (never mind the problems with all other gov't regulations, start with patents and end with drug distribution regulations).
--
This story is good, somebody came out with an innovation. I am sure in FREE market he could make a difference.
I've never understood why is it so important for so many Christians that they feel there is 24/7 someone loving them. Is it insecurity? Would you be depressed if there wasn't? I am genuinely curious about this.
- religion is not just a way to 'fill in the voids in knowledge', but it is a political instrument, which in the hands of the political elite is used to control the herd, which they are using to live off of (so they tax them, they use their labor to do nothing themselves but to be in power over them, they send them to prisons and to wars and control their speech, business, reproduction, entertainment and thus culture).
So for the political elite the thought of an omnipotent god that loves them 24/7 is important, because they cause evil. The do real evil in the world and since they do evil they need the reassurance that no matter how evil they are, god loves them anyway, otherwise - hell, right?
The herd on the other hand is so beat up, it's made poor by this elite, who steal their fruits of their labor, their freedoms and liberties, business, entertainment, rights, culture... it's useful to make them believe that no matter how low they allow themselves to be beaten, no matter how many blows they take, no matter how little DIGNITY they have and how little they love themselves, because they KNOW they don't have dignity - they are slaves, that regardless of this truth the god loves them.
The TOP wants god to love them because they do evil things to the bottom.
The BOTTOM wants god to love them because they allow the evil things to be done and they don't love themselves because they allow themselves to be deprived of dignity, instead of fighting for it, so they want god to love them instead.
(I am an atheist and I am looking at this purely theoretically, I may be wrong.)
Yes, a large number of people DO consume drugs that are literally created in garages, and it would be much more appropriate to legalize all of this activity, to stop the Drug War in the process, to pardon all of the non-violent drug related prisoners.
The other parts of the world that I am talking about are (in no order) Europe, Russia, China. There are different regulations of-course even in those places, however nothing compares to FDA in cost of doing business with the government.
Tell you what, I used a number of drugs that are not FDA approved but are used legally in other parts of the world. Is that good enough for you?
Lemoniz Nuclear Power Plant was a nuclear power plant under construction in Lemoniz, Spain in 1983 when the Spanish nuclear power expansion program was cancelled following a change of government. Its two PWRs, each of 900MWe, were almost complete but were never operated.
- they should realized as soon as the location was chosen - it was doomed to failure.
You don't build something that works in a place called Lemoniz (or in Spain).