"(For example: gay marriage, abortion rights, fuel MPG). I don't see the sense of arguing that MPG should be regulated on a state-by-state basis"
So the things *you* hold hold dear should be enforced on everyone else via the federal government? Gotcha.
Then again if abortion is to be *banned* at the federal level I'm sure you'd sing a different tune. More along the lines of "well in california it's legal! the feds can't override their laws1!!"
If gay marriage is banned at the federal level you'll be happy?
No you just want to use the federal government to force your will onto 200 million people of varying beliefs and ideals.
Be careful though, what goes for the goose goes for the gander and the republicans will gain power again sooner or later, and you might wish you hadn't given *them* (Texas, Alabama, etc) that sort of power over *you*.
The states as individuals created the legal entity know as the US Federal Government. Federalism is designed to protect *you* from people over the hill who think the opposite that you do on many things. It also protects *them* from you. If one side breaks the contract then it's a free for all, and I would have thought that eight years of *them* having power was enough to show you why an ultra powerful federal government isn't a good thing.
Do they complain when they pay 2k for an apple and it doesn't work with half the printers that you pick up from wallmart?
Or when the printer that was working perfectly fine under 98,2k,XP doesn't work anymore with their shiny new computer? Whos fault is that? I bet you don't blame Microsoft do you? I bet you don't say it's MICROSOFTS FAULT that there's no drivers for Vista for that printer!
How is it even possible to do that what you demand anyway? If I make a printer and sell it and make a new secret communication protocol for it and only ship a windows driver how is it possible for that to "just work" in ANYTHING? Until someone reverse engineers it that is. It's not a failing of the OS world, or Apple anymore than if I wrote a broken driver and it crashes windows is it a fault of Microsoft.
Not to mention wtf are talking about anyway? I just installed Kubuntu last week on this very machine and didn't even have to INSTALL drivers. Hell I don't even know what type of video card or soundcard this MB has! I plugged my POS USB printer in and print no problems.
Windows on the other hand wants me to go searching around on the internet, search through dodgy spyware ridden drivers sites and offers absolutely no help whatsoever except useless yellow question marks.
"At least Win98 supports the damned printers at Walmart."
No, no it doesn't I think you're talking from some sort of anti-ideology ideology here. Stop making shit up.
And lol, you think it's thanks to Novell that Linux is solid on the server. There's a looong list of people first and companies second to thank for that. Novell's somewhere near the bottom.
You're right and the mental gymnastics that so many people perform to back date their extremely modern cultural mores to 99.9999% of humanities existence is almost depressing.
No kids, people haven't always sat in indulgent comfort all day pushing buttons in front of computer screens, never seeing a wild animal and picking food up from the building full of food that's been 'humanely' killed and packaged by people who you would prefer to not think about doing jobs that you couldn't stomach seeing.
There was a long long time where we *were* out there just like all the other animals. And sometimes we were even on the menu for other animals as well.
I think people just don't like thinking about what they may be capable of.
"you can feel morally repulsed by that diea, but the human stomach outweighs your moral compass when push comes to shove, and famine was not an uncommon thing in human history"
In the immortal words of nineteenth century Australias most infamous convict escapee:
"A full belly is prerequisite to all manner of good. Without that, no man knows what hunger will make him do. " - Alexander Pearce.
Eight convicts escaped into the Tasmanian wilds together. As they wandered around for weeks and starved they started killing off the injured and sick members of the group, then the weak, then the ones nobody liked, until only two remained. Mr Pearce obviously won that fight.
Unfortunately he seemed to gain a taste for human flesh as on his next escape attempt he killed his mate before they had even run out of food...
D-day was kept quiet, as was the Manhattan project. The bluebird was a secret and how many thousands of men were involved in the design and production of that? The 9/11 Hijackers managed to keep their plans to themselves.
In fact your pretty much saying that state secrets, NDAs, sworn oaths and trade secrets don't exist. Yet reality shows that they clearly do.
What's the exact recipe for Coke a Cola? By your logic it would be out in the open by now. There's thousands of people who would have knowledge of it.
In any case what makes you think that something like this needs large numbers of people? One person could just as easily pull it off, even if only a crackpot scientist ala the anthrax scares.
There's plenty of things that happen because of incompetence or just sheer bad luck. But there's plenty of things that happen that were indeed planned (if only guided) by men.
Saying that there's never a conspiracy is naive and ridiculous especially when it's based on some trite self-styled conventional wisdom that people can't keep secrets when with the correct motivation they clearly can.
Actually perfectly rational events being labeled 'conspiracy theories' by smug self entitled 'intellectuals' who sit inside and push buttons to make other people rich all day and night is the best part of Slashdot.
Here's a 'crazy conspiracy theory' example:
A big pharma company released a drug that it knew caused more heart attacks than it stopped and when scientists started critising the drug the company drew up a hit list and set out to discredit and destroy the careers and lives of anybody on the list.
Slashdots initial response...
-1 crazed conspiracy theory
Then again the collective "wisdom" of Slashdot was 110% certain that the Ipod was going to be a complete flop so I guess that should say something of the level of understanding about reality here.
You know there's two things I've learned in my nearly 30 years on this earth.
Men often do evil things for money. Always have and always will. Now there's various scales of 'evilness' but near everyone does something at some stage that could be called evil by someone.
$5000 on the line will make some people murder and everyone accepts that.
Here's the weird thing:
$100,000,000 dollars on the line and a certain type of person thinks that *nobody* would kill for it. It's crazy! I mean you wouldn't even consider releasing a weak little flu on the world to get a taste of that sort of cash? If not that's great! Your a man of values. But there's a million men on the planet who *would* do it without a single shred of remorse.
Rapid anti-conspiracy nuts are as bad as rabid pro-conspiracy nuts. Both are absolutely delusional about the equally beautiful and grotesque mess that is called humanity.
And for god sakes man do you have *any* idea of some of the shit that big pharma has pulled over the years?? Something like this would hardly even be a stretch.
I mentioned this when the media was powering up the hysteria machine.
Many government stockpiles of Tamiflu from the last pandemic that according to the "experts" was dead set going to "wipe us out" (lol) are expiring right now. Many governments were *not* going to restock to previous levels due to the enourmous cost.
Guess that's changed now huh?
Roche might just have the best marketing department in the world. Even better than Merck - Just incase *anybody* tries to make excuses that nobody would stoop so low as to do as the article suggests on purpose, there's the type of entity being dealt with so check your "never attribute incompetence to malice" mindless drek at the door thanks (just preempting, sorry).
- Works a little to close to big pharma for comfort.
You don't know what the hell are you're talking about do you?
HONG KONG - Reversing its role as the world's fastest-growing buyer of United States Treasuries and other foreign bonds, the Chinese government actually sold bonds heavily in January and February before resuming purchases in March, according to data released during the weekend by China's central bank.
As for your bloviating about nowhere else to put money:
Last week, China announced that the amount of gold in its reserves has climbed to 1,054 tons from 600 tons in 2003.
And
SHANGHAI -- Chinese companies have been on a shopping spree in the past month, snapping up tens of billions of dollars' worth of key assets in Iran, Brazil, Russia, Venezuela, Australia and France in a global fire sale set off by the financial crisis.
The deals have allowed China to lock up supplies of oil, minerals, metals and other strategic natural resources it needs to continue to fuel its growth. The sheer scope of the agreements marks a shift in global finance, roiling energy markets and feeding worries about the future availability and prices of those commodities in other countries that compete for them, including the United States. "
China plays a long game and if they have to hurt themselves to kill their opponent why wouldn't they? The Chinese government is not answerable to the people and will do what's necesary in the long term to come out on top.
Witness...pretty much all of history in Asia. When that country gets rolling it's pretty much unstoppable.
That's without even touching on the complacency of the average American. Do you have *any* idea of what your government is doing to your country right now? There is a limit to how much you can devalue other peoples investments before they'll cut their losses. And we won't even talk about China's recent thinly veiled threats and real new found ability to alter US policy by simply saying it won't buy more debt.
Companies did this right before the big crash in 1933. Markets appeared to be rallying and capital became available again so companies got a hold of as much as they could before it all went to hell.
And went to hell it did.
People who think that in the current atmosphere companies are looking to embark on dangerous and expensive new acquisitions or projects rather than trying to simply get into a position to protect themselves for the next few years appear to have no idea of how unsteady things are in the various economies right now.
Read a damned bit people! You're supposed to be intellectuals!
If the expert witness is creating a mirror of the harddrive, why is he not infringing on the copyright of the owners of everything else on the harddrive? All of the software on there, any MP3s that the RIAA doesn't hold the copyright on personal files, emails etc.
It would seem in the pursuit of filing lawsuits for their own works they become 'criminals' and completely and willfully disregard everyone elses copyrights. By their own argument no less!
Where do you think the land to build the rail comes from?
A private railway can never be truly private as it has to make use of public land. And will use the government to force people to give up their private land.
Not to mention if it was possible, why does nobody - without the help of the 'evil government' start a better company lay new track and compete with and dominate the existing service?
Because it's impossible to do so without the government, that is, outside of the fantasy land that exists in fanatics heads.
Geez I wouldn't use Python dictionaries and lists as an example to belittle PHPs hash arrays.
I've developed monstrous apps in both, and working with arrays in Python is like trying to keep a big PHP project maintable. A total PITA.
Your contrite example forgets about len(myArray), why not myArray.len()? Python's isn't immune from that sort of design on the fly rubbish.
Does a method pass back a list, or a dict or a list of dicts; who knows it's like a lucky dip! And then there's the terrible Python documentation...I do not wish to have to do ctrl-f on a 10 screen long page that lists five or six semi-related modules to find a method and then be told everything except wtf the method actually does.
PHP is hardly the only language that makes your brain bleed, Python is *worse*, not to mention it's missing half the stuff any decent scripting language has had for ten years. Such as the 1990s era manner of handling web based apps. Actually having to think about CGI, having to print headers, manual cookie handling. The GOD AWFUL cookie module, the insanity of urllib. Oh that's right nobody actually uses Pythons implementation of *any* of that. To write a Python app for the web you need to install 100MB of one of a million shoddy frameworks, hacked together *custom* 'webservers' and rubbish to do it in a manner even approaching PHPs ease of use in that environment. And what do you end up with after installing and customising and introducing that maintentance nightmare into your world? Python that looks an awful lot like...PHP! It's more trouble than using Java/Tomcat with half the benefits!
Well "gee" who knew that there's hundreds of thousands of American employees working, eating and living in the cayman islands.
Must be getting crowded with 18000+ US corps multiplied by hundreds of employees each.
Or not.
Kinda the point of the article...they *don't* live there. The corp shifts its paperwork out of the nice cushy western country where all the executive live to some pathetic third world country, but still maintains 100% of its physical presence *in* the nice cushy western country. If your business is 100% physically in the country, hiding behind the government, using the infrastructure and courts and mooching off the public resources that allow you to operate that have been paid for by OTHER MORE UPSTANDING BUSINESSES without paying your share for all those things then your a parasite and deserve everything you get from people who pay their share!
They're nothing but parasites and not long ago such unpatriotic behavior was scorned publicly by both sides of the aisle.
Now the western world has the lick-spittle, power worshipers who enable them...
"Otherwise we all might as well head for hermit cabins and shoot each other on sight for "trespassing" (which by the way is many a "libertarian" fantasy)."
Yes and at the other end of the spectrum is the people who fantasize about the central government controling every aspect of every persons lives (except their own of course) according to how *they* see fit, all in the name of "society" (200 million is not a "society"). This includes taking the vast majority of peoples income to fund their pet programs and huge bureaucracies to enable their grand dreams and visions.
At the moment the the entire western world has swung toward the big all encompassing government fanatics ideologies. I think it's safe to say that both ends of the spectrum suck for the average man on the street, whether it be hiding in caves or living in government run estates. But make no mistake about it, you can easily argue point for point on what should and shouldn't be provided by government, but when you look at everything *as a whole* being argued for and implemented, realistically it leaves little room for the ideal of individual before the "community".
And we've seen what happens when big central governments begin to hold the ideal of community before the individual.
Not only that, why does your federal government even need to provide health care when your states are bigger and more economically well off than most countries that *already* have it? Why isn't it left to the people in their own states to decide and implement it? They easily have the funds and the populations. If California wants it then they can implement it, they're certainly big and rich enough to do it by world standards! Oh wait what? They can't afford to? So if its done at the federal level which state and it's people are going to fork out for californians to have it? Who's going to pay for the states in the midwest with all it's fatties to have it? Will you be happy with 80% of heart bypasses and transplant resources going to morbidly obese individuals in the midwest? Does that fit into your grand egalitarian dream?
We here in Australia *have* federal healthcare and it works a treat, but we're only twenty million. As a country we're still small enough to be a functioning society, but if we had ten times more people there's no *way* it'd work and would have to be done closer to home. Even now it's starting to creak a little.
Fear the drive towards an all powerful federal government. The average man on the street won't like what it is when it arrives.
Slashdot Mirror
"(For example: gay marriage, abortion rights, fuel MPG). I don't see the sense of arguing that MPG should be regulated on a state-by-state basis"
So the things *you* hold hold dear should be enforced on everyone else via the federal government? Gotcha.
Then again if abortion is to be *banned* at the federal level I'm sure you'd sing a different tune. More along the lines of "well in california it's legal! the feds can't override their laws1!!"
If gay marriage is banned at the federal level you'll be happy?
No you just want to use the federal government to force your will onto 200 million people of varying beliefs and ideals.
Be careful though, what goes for the goose goes for the gander and the republicans will gain power again sooner or later, and you might wish you hadn't given *them* (Texas, Alabama, etc) that sort of power over *you*.
The states as individuals created the legal entity know as the US Federal Government. Federalism is designed to protect *you* from people over the hill who think the opposite that you do on many things. It also protects *them* from you. If one side breaks the contract then it's a free for all, and I would have thought that eight years of *them* having power was enough to show you why an ultra powerful federal government isn't a good thing.
If not perhaps the next eight will.
I dunno,
Do they complain when they pay 2k for an apple and it doesn't work with half the printers that you pick up from wallmart?
Or when the printer that was working perfectly fine under 98,2k,XP doesn't work anymore with their shiny new computer? Whos fault is that? I bet you don't blame Microsoft do you? I bet you don't say it's MICROSOFTS FAULT that there's no drivers for Vista for that printer!
How is it even possible to do that what you demand anyway? If I make a printer and sell it and make a new secret communication protocol for it and only ship a windows driver how is it possible for that to "just work" in ANYTHING? Until someone reverse engineers it that is. It's not a failing of the OS world, or Apple anymore than if I wrote a broken driver and it crashes windows is it a fault of Microsoft.
Not to mention wtf are talking about anyway? I just installed Kubuntu last week on this very machine and didn't even have to INSTALL drivers. Hell I don't even know what type of video card or soundcard this MB has! I plugged my POS USB printer in and print no problems.
Windows on the other hand wants me to go searching around on the internet, search through dodgy spyware ridden drivers sites and offers absolutely no help whatsoever except useless yellow question marks.
"At least Win98 supports the damned printers at Walmart."
No, no it doesn't I think you're talking from some sort of anti-ideology ideology here. Stop making shit up.
And lol, you think it's thanks to Novell that Linux is solid on the server. There's a looong list of people first and companies second to thank for that. Novell's somewhere near the bottom.
How do you know the Neanderthals weren't the aggressors? But Humans being more intelligent were able to beat them into submission?
You frame your post like the big bad humans came in and exterminated the poor gentle defenseless Neanderthals because Humans are just so awful.
The swan song of the self deprececating urban 'intellectual'.
Nature's produced a hell of a lot worse and more blood thirsty killers than Humans.
You're right and the mental gymnastics that so many people perform to back date their extremely modern cultural mores to 99.9999% of humanities existence is almost depressing.
No kids, people haven't always sat in indulgent comfort all day pushing buttons in front of computer screens, never seeing a wild animal and picking food up from the building full of food that's been 'humanely' killed and packaged by people who you would prefer to not think about doing jobs that you couldn't stomach seeing.
There was a long long time where we *were* out there just like all the other animals. And sometimes we were even on the menu for other animals as well.
I think people just don't like thinking about what they may be capable of.
"you can feel morally repulsed by that diea, but the human stomach outweighs your moral compass when push comes to shove, and famine was not an uncommon thing in human history"
In the immortal words of nineteenth century Australias most infamous convict escapee:
"A full belly is prerequisite to all manner of good. Without that, no man knows what hunger will make him do. " - Alexander Pearce.
Eight convicts escaped into the Tasmanian wilds together. As they wandered around for weeks and starved they started killing off the injured and sick members of the group, then the weak, then the ones nobody liked, until only two remained. Mr Pearce obviously won that fight.
Unfortunately he seemed to gain a taste for human flesh as on his next escape attempt he killed his mate before they had even run out of food...
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/11/21/2426730.htm
That's why I put experts in quotes, because experts they weren't, they were still all over the media.
Comprehension is good.
Explain to me what is ignorant about the facts I presented thanks.
D-day was kept quiet, as was the Manhattan project. The bluebird was a secret and how many thousands of men were involved in the design and production of that? The 9/11 Hijackers managed to keep their plans to themselves.
In fact your pretty much saying that state secrets, NDAs, sworn oaths and trade secrets don't exist. Yet reality shows that they clearly do.
What's the exact recipe for Coke a Cola? By your logic it would be out in the open by now. There's thousands of people who would have knowledge of it.
In any case what makes you think that something like this needs large numbers of people? One person could just as easily pull it off, even if only a crackpot scientist ala the anthrax scares.
There's plenty of things that happen because of incompetence or just sheer bad luck. But there's plenty of things that happen that were indeed planned (if only guided) by men.
Saying that there's never a conspiracy is naive and ridiculous especially when it's based on some trite self-styled conventional wisdom that people can't keep secrets when with the correct motivation they clearly can.
Actually perfectly rational events being labeled 'conspiracy theories' by smug self entitled 'intellectuals' who sit inside and push buttons to make other people rich all day and night is the best part of Slashdot.
Here's a 'crazy conspiracy theory' example:
A big pharma company released a drug that it knew caused more heart attacks than it stopped and when scientists started critising the drug the company drew up a hit list and set out to discredit and destroy the careers and lives of anybody on the list.
Slashdots initial response...
-1 crazed conspiracy theory
Then again the collective "wisdom" of Slashdot was 110% certain that the Ipod was going to be a complete flop so I guess that should say something of the level of understanding about reality here.
Why?
I can think of half a dozen reasons why it would be a good idea.
First would be so people say "creating a mild flu in a lab and then transported out to Colillacarajo, Mexico? That's just dumb."
Just sayin...
You know there's two things I've learned in my nearly 30 years on this earth.
Men often do evil things for money. Always have and always will. Now there's various scales of 'evilness' but near everyone does something at some stage that could be called evil by someone.
$5000 on the line will make some people murder and everyone accepts that.
Here's the weird thing:
$100,000,000 dollars on the line and a certain type of person thinks that *nobody* would kill for it. It's crazy! I mean you wouldn't even consider releasing a weak little flu on the world to get a taste of that sort of cash? If not that's great! Your a man of values. But there's a million men on the planet who *would* do it without a single shred of remorse.
Rapid anti-conspiracy nuts are as bad as rabid pro-conspiracy nuts. Both are absolutely delusional about the equally beautiful and grotesque mess that is called humanity.
And for god sakes man do you have *any* idea of some of the shit that big pharma has pulled over the years?? Something like this would hardly even be a stretch.
I mentioned this when the media was powering up the hysteria machine.
Many government stockpiles of Tamiflu from the last pandemic that according to the "experts" was dead set going to "wipe us out" (lol) are expiring right now. Many governments were *not* going to restock to previous levels due to the enourmous cost.
Guess that's changed now huh?
Roche might just have the best marketing department in the world. Even better than Merck - Just incase *anybody* tries to make excuses that nobody would stoop so low as to do as the article suggests on purpose, there's the type of entity being dealt with so check your "never attribute incompetence to malice" mindless drek at the door thanks (just preempting, sorry).
- Works a little to close to big pharma for comfort.
HONG KONG - Reversing its role as the world's fastest-growing buyer of United States Treasuries and other foreign bonds, the Chinese government actually sold bonds heavily in January and February before resuming purchases in March, according to data released during the weekend by China's central bank.
As for your bloviating about nowhere else to put money:
Last week, China announced that the amount of gold in its reserves has climbed to 1,054 tons from 600 tons in 2003.
And
SHANGHAI -- Chinese companies have been on a shopping spree in the past month, snapping up tens of billions of dollars' worth of key assets in Iran, Brazil, Russia, Venezuela, Australia and France in a global fire sale set off by the financial crisis.
The deals have allowed China to lock up supplies of oil, minerals, metals and other strategic natural resources it needs to continue to fuel its growth. The sheer scope of the agreements marks a shift in global finance, roiling energy markets and feeding worries about the future availability and prices of those commodities in other countries that compete for them, including the United States. "
China plays a long game and if they have to hurt themselves to kill their opponent why wouldn't they? The Chinese government is not answerable to the people and will do what's necesary in the long term to come out on top.
Witness...pretty much all of history in Asia. When that country gets rolling it's pretty much unstoppable.
That's without even touching on the complacency of the average American. Do you have *any* idea of what your government is doing to your country right now? There is a limit to how much you can devalue other peoples investments before they'll cut their losses. And we won't even talk about China's recent thinly veiled threats and real new found ability to alter US policy by simply saying it won't buy more debt.
I wouldn't be so cocky if I was you.
Companies did this right before the big crash in 1933. Markets appeared to be rallying and capital became available again so companies got a hold of as much as they could before it all went to hell.
And went to hell it did.
People who think that in the current atmosphere companies are looking to embark on dangerous and expensive new acquisitions or projects rather than trying to simply get into a position to protect themselves for the next few years appear to have no idea of how unsteady things are in the various economies right now.
Read a damned bit people! You're supposed to be intellectuals!
If the expert witness is creating a mirror of the harddrive, why is he not infringing on the copyright of the owners of everything else on the harddrive? All of the software on there, any MP3s that the RIAA doesn't hold the copyright on personal files, emails etc.
It would seem in the pursuit of filing lawsuits for their own works they become 'criminals' and completely and willfully disregard everyone elses copyrights. By their own argument no less!
If I handwrite a document such as a letter and write it in some sort of code, can they force me to tell them what it means?
What if I just say it's just meaningless doodling?
That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever read.
Where do you think the land to build the rail comes from?
A private railway can never be truly private as it has to make use of public land. And will use the government to force people to give up their private land.
Not to mention if it was possible, why does nobody - without the help of the 'evil government' start a better company lay new track and compete with and dominate the existing service?
Because it's impossible to do so without the government, that is, outside of the fantasy land that exists in fanatics heads.
You go first then ey?
"example to belittle PHPs hash arrays."
Doh, I meant *hash tables*
How on earth do you get an 88MB string?
Please don't tell me it's from reading an 88MB file into memory at once.
If that *is* what you're going to say, then fopen and a while loop are your friends.
Geez I wouldn't use Python dictionaries and lists as an example to belittle PHPs hash arrays.
I've developed monstrous apps in both, and working with arrays in Python is like trying to keep a big PHP project maintable. A total PITA.
Your contrite example forgets about len(myArray), why not myArray.len()? Python's isn't immune from that sort of design on the fly rubbish.
Does a method pass back a list, or a dict or a list of dicts; who knows it's like a lucky dip! And then there's the terrible Python documentation...I do not wish to have to do ctrl-f on a 10 screen long page that lists five or six semi-related modules to find a method and then be told everything except wtf the method actually does.
PHP is hardly the only language that makes your brain bleed, Python is *worse*, not to mention it's missing half the stuff any decent scripting language has had for ten years. Such as the 1990s era manner of handling web based apps. Actually having to think about CGI, having to print headers, manual cookie handling. The GOD AWFUL cookie module, the insanity of urllib. Oh that's right nobody actually uses Pythons implementation of *any* of that. To write a Python app for the web you need to install 100MB of one of a million shoddy frameworks, hacked together *custom* 'webservers' and rubbish to do it in a manner even approaching PHPs ease of use in that environment. And what do you end up with after installing and customising and introducing that maintentance nightmare into your world? Python that looks an awful lot like...PHP! It's more trouble than using Java/Tomcat with half the benefits!
Off to write more Python...
Why on earth would you accept someone else holding power over your life like that, just because they are in "business"?
Absolutely crazy. You Americans; your life certainly isn't your own anymore is it?
A tragedy.
Well "gee" who knew that there's hundreds of thousands of American employees working, eating and living in the cayman islands.
Must be getting crowded with 18000+ US corps multiplied by hundreds of employees each.
Or not.
Kinda the point of the article...they *don't* live there. The corp shifts its paperwork out of the nice cushy western country where all the executive live to some pathetic third world country, but still maintains 100% of its physical presence *in* the nice cushy western country. If your business is 100% physically in the country, hiding behind the government, using the infrastructure and courts and mooching off the public resources that allow you to operate that have been paid for by OTHER MORE UPSTANDING BUSINESSES without paying your share for all those things then your a parasite and deserve everything you get from people who pay their share!
They're nothing but parasites and not long ago such unpatriotic behavior was scorned publicly by both sides of the aisle.
Now the western world has the lick-spittle, power worshipers who enable them...
Breaks down even worse when China starts getting rather cranky about that overspending and "growth" devaluing their colony(ahem)..investment.
Aliquis confirms it: The BSD dying joke is dying...
"Otherwise we all might as well head for hermit cabins and shoot each other on sight for "trespassing" (which by the way is many a "libertarian" fantasy)."
Yes and at the other end of the spectrum is the people who fantasize about the central government controling every aspect of every persons lives (except their own of course) according to how *they* see fit, all in the name of "society" (200 million is not a "society"). This includes taking the vast majority of peoples income to fund their pet programs and huge bureaucracies to enable their grand dreams and visions.
At the moment the the entire western world has swung toward the big all encompassing government fanatics ideologies. I think it's safe to say that both ends of the spectrum suck for the average man on the street, whether it be hiding in caves or living in government run estates. But make no mistake about it, you can easily argue point for point on what should and shouldn't be provided by government, but when you look at everything *as a whole* being argued for and implemented, realistically it leaves little room for the ideal of individual before the "community".
And we've seen what happens when big central governments begin to hold the ideal of community before the individual.
Not only that, why does your federal government even need to provide health care when your states are bigger and more economically well off than most countries that *already* have it? Why isn't it left to the people in their own states to decide and implement it? They easily have the funds and the populations. If California wants it then they can implement it, they're certainly big and rich enough to do it by world standards! Oh wait what? They can't afford to? So if its done at the federal level which state and it's people are going to fork out for californians to have it? Who's going to pay for the states in the midwest with all it's fatties to have it? Will you be happy with 80% of heart bypasses and transplant resources going to morbidly obese individuals in the midwest? Does that fit into your grand egalitarian dream?
We here in Australia *have* federal healthcare and it works a treat, but we're only twenty million. As a country we're still small enough to be a functioning society, but if we had ten times more people there's no *way* it'd work and would have to be done closer to home. Even now it's starting to creak a little.
Fear the drive towards an all powerful federal government. The average man on the street won't like what it is when it arrives.
- Not a libertarian