Isn't it odd that "free trade" agreements are never that? The more and more countries stop making their own laws with their elected officials and start offshoring lawmaking to para-governmental organizations with no oversight, the more and more countries slip into tyranny.
They've tried that in things like L4D but the problem is, you are either new and stuck in an elite group in which case you get mocked for not knowing the map like the back of your hand, you are stuck with a new person when the rest of the team knows what they want to do, you get stuck with that one team-killing asshole or you end up with a sucky team where everyone is just bad at the game.
Its great to play with your friends, its just really crappy to play online with random people.
Except for the fact there is a difference between simply losing and being told you suck repeatedly from people who have no life other than the game.
The problem is, unless you are part of the "community" and can devote a lot of time to a game, you aren't going to have fun because the majority of people online are assholes.
There is a line between simply being bad at a game and 14 year old kids cursing you out because you can't devote 8 hours a day to the game.
We, as the developed world (US, Russia, China, India, UK, EU, etc.) might not develop them but chances are, North Korea and Iran would use them given the chance.
Well, no, you will never benefit from life insurance. Bad example:).
Well, the same thing could be said for health insurance, after all, I'm healthy I'm never going to get sick, etc.
Even assuming that fiat currency collapses, wouldn't it make more sense to buy stock? It's backed by actual production capability, actually makes you some money on average (unlike insurance), and any economic collapse serious enough to destroy said stocks value will certainly devalue pretty metals as well.
Yes and no. The problem with stocks are you've got to have good knowledge of the company and such. For example, several years ago GM was considered to be a very safe stock to invest in with constant gains. Several bailouts later and GM has emerged as possibly recovering but sickly. Even in a very healthy economy it is hard to pick which stocks will be good.
Stocks are a gamble, the yields are a whole lot better than precious metals and the like but the risks are a lot greater too. If there is a company which you think will grow like crazy, go ahead and invest in it, the problem is, mismanagement can bring even the greatest companies down.
It takes a lot more research to avoid losing money in stocks when compared to something like precious metals. If you do the research, the results are usually a lot greater, but the risks are greater too.
And the time will come when someone finds a large enough deposit or enough people are selling at the same time to completely collapse the value of gold. What's your point?
But we haven't found a large enough deposit of gold. Other than aluminum which was already really, really abundant and just needed a practical way of extracting it, there have been no metals which this has happened to. On the other hand, just look at the list of hyperinflated currencies:
Confederate Dollar
Continental Currency
Angola Kwanza
Argentine Peso
Austrian Krone
Belarus Ruble
Bolivian Peso
Brazilian cruzeiro
Bulgarian Lev
Chilean Peso
Chinese Yuan Dynasty
Chinese Yuan
Georgian Coupons
German Mark
Greek Drachma
Hungarian Pengo
Israeli Shekel
Japanese Yen
Mozambican Metical
Nicaragua Cortoba
Peruvian Sol
Philippine Peso when under Japanese control
Polish Zotoly
Romanian Leu
Russian Ruble
Taiwanese Dollar
Turkish Lira
Yugoslav Dinar
and of course the infamous Zimbabwe Dollar.
Something tells me I'll take my chances with a metal which has been searched for 4,000 years for massive deposits than currency with a long history of failings.
There is nothing inherently valuable about gold. It's a convenient medium for exchange. We use fiat currency because it's a more convenient medium for exchange. If something apocalyptic happens tomorrow and destroys civilization, the survivors will find both dollars and gold worthless. The only things of value will be bullets and food.
While that is true, gold has been a valuable currency for over 4,000 years. Gold can't be manipulated to the extent that fiat currency can. I can't start up a printing press and make one ounce gold bars out of nothing.
However, in many war-torn regions gold is the currency that is in demand in places that we would call pretty apocalyptic. If people believe that thing will ever get better, gold is still a useful currency. If people don't think so, then gold is useless.
However, the collapse of the dollar won't be "apocalyptic" what will happen is that prices keep on rising and people will turn to alternate currencies if they are still stable (Mexican Peso in the south, Canadian Dollar in the north) along with pre-1965 US coins made of silver, and bullion. If you look, the people who had precious metals during historic hyperinflation scenarios ended up rather unscathed compared to the people who had a lot of paper money.
Well, first of all you don't understand US treasuries. We are already repaying on every treasury. They have a fixed yield. So no, they won't "come due" sometime. They're already due and we're already paying.
And how are we paying? We're paying by printing more money. Which is inflation. When our tax revenue comes in and its not enough to pay for our debt, we still need to pay it so we print more money.
Second, you have to understand why China bought so much debt. It wasn't because they wanted to finance the US. They bought treasuries in order to inflate the US dollar relative to their currency. China's economic boom means that their currency should rise relative to the dollar. But if it does, their exports will be more expensive and thus go down. So China buys US debit and keeps their currency low and exports up. China can't "dump" their US debit without destroying their own economy.
Except for the fact that China is a secretive, communist nation run under a near dictatorship. China wouldn't mind ruining their people's own economies at the prospect of ruining a rival's. After all, what are the people in China going to do? Vote for a different candidate in their one-party elections? Heck, look at China's "Cultural Revolution", China doesn't care about their people.
Actually, what we need to worry about is deflation right now. Our economy is running at about 80% capacity. That's enormous deflationary pressure. That's why we currently have ~0% inflation despite all the inflationary things the Fed has been doing. Yes, if we keep doing inflationary things after the output gap is closed, we'll have an inflation problem. But there's no particular reason to believe we won't change policy when the economy has recovered.
...Deflation from who's perspective?
Other than gasoline which fell sharply in the recession, prices for most other essentials, food, clothing, etc. have all increased or remained constant.
While we might have a "technical" deflation, what is happening is like what happened in post-WWI Germany, massive deflation. So the government printed, and printed and the economy wasn't getting better so they printed a bit too much and it hit hyperinflation stage. Something tells me that this is the direction the US is heading. We'll print some money here, print some money there, because people don't -want- to spend in a recession they save it away and then when the time comes and the economy recovers.... Bam immediate increases in price which triggers a panic of inflation so people take out their money from savings and the economy is hi
By that logic I shouldn't need life insurance should I? Even though I've observed other people die, I haven't died yet and some of those people were younger than me so the logical conclusion is that I'm immortal.
Buying gold, silver, platinum and the like is like buying insurance, you might not like buying it, you might wish you could spend the money on something else, but you will, based on observation, eventually need it.
Governments throughout history have always overprinted fiat currency or debased their money, often times when they are in a war they can't afford to fight (sound familiar?) or to pay off debts.
The time is coming where the US will experience hyperinflation just like every fiat currency before it. To say that it won't is akin to saying you are immortal and don't need life insurance. Just look at the dramatic rise in prices over the last few years.
While we probably won't see hyperinflation tomorrow or perhaps even several years down the road, saying that it will never happen is like saying because you haven't died yet you don't need to get life insurance.
Something tells me that the value of fiat currencies are going to plummet to nothing before a major advancement such as mining gold on the moon happens.
History is filled with stories of lands filled with gold, alchemists and the like and yet none of them have ever turned out to be practical.
On the other hand, history is filled with empires and countries that the debasement of their currencies lead to mass poverty for many citizens.
This idea that a currency based on nothing can survive is laughable, our nation's currency is no better off than a gum wrapper with a logo printed on it.
While, eventually, mankind may advance to the point where gold no longer has enough scarcity to be used as currency, I don't see it happening anytime soon considering its worked quite well for the past 4,000 some odd years with a new "breakthrough" is proclaimed every year.
I wouldn't laugh at the doomsday prophets too much, their history is pretty solid.
Its silly to think that the US is immune to the laws of economics, we owe a shitload of money to China, we're fighting two wars which we can't really pay for, we think we need to 'bail out' any large company in financial trouble, etc. Eventually China is going to want payment on our loan, and when that happens because our debt is expressed in US dollars, the only way to settle that debt is to print a lot more dollars just like what happened in Post-WWI Germany.
Its been 38 years since the last manned moon landing. In that time the world has changed immensely. Think about it, in 1972, all the computing power in the world back then would fit into a cell phone today. But we haven't even been back to the moon despite it being easier to do than in the 60s.
A lot. First off is the fact to even send something to the moon requires a pretty big rocket, something like the Saturn V isn't cheap. Secondly, mining robots aren't hardly even used on earth, let alone on the moon. Thirdly we've found some water and some rare elements, not that we've found a lake and huge gold nuggets so we'd have to send many more missions to locate a suitable "mine".
Will we eventually mine the moon? Yes. Will it happen in the next 5 decades? Probably not and even then, the materials mined would make more sense to be used on something like a lunar colony, not for export back to Earth.
Can someone come and build a road into my backyard even if I don't want them to? Can I contract someone to build a road straight from my house to Vegas?
Of course not, you have your own property rights and no one, not even the government should be able to take them.
Now that the road is built, who owns it? Do I own it? Do I maintain it? Who is responsible for it? If someone gets into an accident on my road, due to poor maintenance, am I responsible? Can I collect the money for maintaining it without actually maintaining it?
Um, there are plenty of private roads already.
And the idea isn't necessarily private roads, but simply a more accurate way of funding public roads. The government should only be a service provider.
But yes, if you build it, you own what you've built, now, if it was built on government-owned land, you are simply leasing that land and have a contract to provide services.
Like all contracts, things are subject to conditions. Can you collect your paycheck without actually working? Of course you really can't. Same thing with this, if you aren't doing a good enough job maintaining the roads, they can terminate your contract.
Same thing with lawsuits, there should be conditions detailing liability and the like as we do with everything else.
I think what you want is a tax reform where people still pay taxes, but only for the services they wish to use.
Yes, which is basically what I said. The government should be a service provider, not the service provider. If a large company wishes to build private roads spanning the nation, they can do that, there shouldn't be legal monopolies like we have in the US with first-class mail.
The example that I gave wasn't with an entire roads system, such a thing could, at one time, been done privately, and quite honestly probably should have been done privately, but since we have taxpayer funded roads, we should settle for what we have while not disallowing private enterprise to have their own solutions.
When you privatize it, you get issues where people take the money and keep it - Like corporations funneling money to avoid taxes, you can't trust whoever built the road to maintain the road, even after paying them to maintain it.
...Because we can trust the government? Corporations have to balance the books while maintaining a competitive edge. The government doesn't. When the government gives sub-par schools, they still get all the funding because even those who choose to go to an alternate school still have to pay for it. If a private school on the other hand is sub-par, it simply closes because no one will go there.
Given a free enough economy, this basic principle keeps consumers on top and allows them to control corporations in an effective manner while allowing them to choose who they support. It is only when government intervenes beyond preventing force and fraud that consumers lose to the power of corporations.
If I don't support a corporation, I don't have to buy things and they don't get my money. If I don't support the government, I still have to pay my taxes. Even worse, we don't decide where our money goes, if we are to have taxation, we need to be able to choose what we "purchase" with that money in the most direct and most individual way possible. If you wish to pay for the war in Iraq, go ahead and fund it. If you don't want to, don't. Granted, there should be a per-household tax for the defense of the country, but it should be very minimal because there are very little real threats that exist of invasion and the like.
In short, taxation should be voluntary and based on the services you want. If you wish to use the government's roads you pay a fee. If you wish to use your town's garbage pick-up, you pay a fee. Etc.
This idea that someone or a corporation who makes $100,000 a year costs more to defend, maintain their roads and the like than an identical person/corporation that makes $40,000 a year is silly.
If it costs X amount of dollars to build a road, and that money has to come from the collective pool of taxes, and the system is designed so that a good portion of that money is taken from corporations making massive profits, and the rest is evenly distributed amongst the rest of the people - but the corporation doesn't pay its share, that means 1 of 2 things will happen. More of the people's tax money has to go into the road, or the road doesn't get built.
Which makes no sense.
What makes sense is that if you drive on the roads, you pay for the upkeep on the roads. Similarly, corporations who use roads must pay the same proportional to their use of the roads (for example, a semi-truck that is nearly constantly on the road and is large is going to cost more to be able to use the road than someone in a SUV or car) which they can then use to pass the cost of that to the consumers.
If you don't use the roads, you don't have to pay, however, when you use a service that uses the roads you pay a bit there too. This makes sense because someone who doesn't drive, doesn't use public transit that uses the roads is paying a lot less than someone who, say, runs a trucking business.
Thing is, a lot of services we can't simply "Go Without" - many people take advantage of the Garbage pickup in their neighbourhood. In Canada we sure do like the roads cleared of snow. Things like that.
Garbage pick up can, and should, be provided by a private company with contracts to either the city or the residents. If you don't pay your fee, you don't have your garbage picked up. If you want to take your own trash to the dump yourself, recycle your trash separately or use a different service, you are free to.
Same thing with roads being cleared of snow, if you use the roads, a portion of that "tax" charged to all cars and the like in licensing would be used to provide for the removing of snow.
If your idea is "Why should Google have to pay those taxes to cover those services?" - it's because the elected representatives created those laws and thats the cost of doing business in that country. If you want to Operate in America, where you have a lot of consumers that have a lot of money to spend, the laws dicatate you have to support that system.
But that doesn't dismiss the fact it makes no sense.
People should pay for the services that they use, those who wish to use a lot of the services should have to pay a lot more than the people who rarely if ever use the service.
This idea of taxes based on income makes no fiscal sense, the roads are going to need the same level of upkeep if you have an armored car carrying gold bars and making a lot more money, or if there was the same size of cars with the same level of traffic on the bars carrying close to worthless lead bars.
Depends if you count providing services to the employable population as "doing something" for Google.
The last time I checked, I had to pay taxes. A shitload of taxes. If we are going to charge corporations for taxes which will end up being passed on to its consumers, I shouldn't have to pay taxes.
It doesn't take a lot of money to keep people safe. I would have no problems paying taxes if thats all it goes to. But it doesn't. It gets wasted on trivial things.
The only sane method of having taxes is having them be just like going to the store or buying any other good or service. When I go to Wal-Mart and buy a gallon of milk, they don't force me to buy 3 liters of soda for their employees for the company party. Now, they can increase the price of milk to pay for some of that, but I am also free to go to any other store for the gallon of milk and find the best/cheapest. But that is exactly what our current system of taxation is like, you only want the gallon of milk and yet the government is forcing you to pay for unneeded, unwanted things.
When people avoid paying taxes they get an unfair competitive advantage by taking from that work force that other people paid to keep safe, healthy, and educated.
No they don't. If taxes were sane and you paid for what you used along with a small fee to pay for things like defense and to keep the court system going they gain no advantage.
It comes back to the main question, why do we deserve the income from someone else? Our tax code needs to be reformed so Google, you, me, Microsoft and every other person and corporation pays for simply what they use.
The point is though, content makers are giving a benefit to pirates.
Think back to the era of VHS tapes, the only advantage to buying a pirated tape was cost, you could fast-forward the ads with minimal effort on legitimate tapes, there was generally a reduction in image quality with pirated tapes and there was no other format that you needed to shift the content to.
Today, you get a better product pirating.
With a legitimate product along with legitimate player software you get:
A) Forced ads you can't skip
B) An inability to format-shift easily. You can't just put a DVD easily on your iPod without having to resort to shady methods.
With a pirated product you get:
A) No ads
B) An easily changeable, easily accessible format which can be transferred to an iPod, cell-phone, game console, DVR, disk, etc.
C) The assurance of a digital copy which you can back-up easily, if your DVD breaks you are SOL unless you have a back up which fall into a legal grey area.
D) The assurance that your copy is safe and that if Apple/Sony/Microsoft/etc. go bankrupt, your copy will still play
Lets face it, the pirates have the better copy available in the 21st century. If media execs would realize this like they eventually sorta realized with music, they will have increased sales. If there is a legitimate way to download the artists I like via iTunes or Amazon MP3 in a DRM-free format, I will do that. I haven't pirated a song that I can buy in a usable format.
What makes you, or anyone else feel entitled to income from someone else? The only fair "taxation" is voluntary "taxation" where you purchase a good or service. For example, if you drive a car, you would have to pay a fee to drive on government-provided roads. The problem is, what has the government done that entitles themselves to Google's income? Very little. Something tells me that the US government didn't spend $60 billion to help Google.
Google hasn't taken anything from me, Google has taken a little bit from the government, yes. But very little, not $60 billion worth. This idea that somehow Google owes the US government or the people of the US money, is silly to say the least and borders on theft at the most.
...Except for the fact to actually use the crap you paid for you usually have to break the law. Want to actually -watch- that DVD without having to watch ads? You usually have to use something like libdvdcss to break the encryption, same thing with format transfer. Games are often times nearly unplayable without cracks and the like.
I have no problems buying media, but its become to the point where in order to actually use what you paid for you end up breaking the law in some way or another.
When pirates not only are offering a free copy but a better copy, the sales for the legitimate copy will naturally slow.
...Except for the fact that Facebook has an elevated self-worth at the moment. Social networks really only have a lifespan of a few years before they are no longer used by the masses.
If Apple wanted to buy Facebook, they should have done it a few years ago, or perhaps a few years in the future. If Apple buys it now, they have a very limited amount of time before the feature is still a feature.
FB has very little IP, the only thing they have is users and brand recognition but MySpace also had that but essentially lost it.
The NES is not dead because it is still being produced. It might not have the Nintendo name, it might not have the "toaster" design, it might not have identical controllers, but it still is a NES.
Its not "internet terrorism" its just the same thing as if people were protesting outside a record label, the goal is to cut off access to it. Its not "hacking", Anonymous "hacked" the RIAA using SQL injection to erase the site.
The "real-world" equivalent to a DDoS isn't blowing up a building, but simply having a large amount of people in front of a building. The causes are the same (lots of people trying to get into the building/site) and the results are the same (few people can get in the site/building).
...Except for the fact the NES isn't dead or abandoned.
Nintendo sells NES Roms for $5 a piece on the Wii, the NES still has a thriving homebrew scene, new versions of the NES/Famicom hardware shows up nearly daily from replicas of other systems made to con unwary buyers (PolyStation anyone?)to portable consoles.
Just about every one of Nintendo's NES titles have gone on to spawn successful franchises the majority of which continue to this day (Mario Bros, Zelda, Punch-Out, Metroid, etc.)
I don't think there has been an older system with as healthy of a community and such surrounding it. Just because Nintendo isn't churning out any more NES consoles doesn't mean the NES is dead.
No, my PSX disks got scratched to oblivion after about a decade.
Plus, I've never had a loading screen on an NES, with a PS1/2 I swear I've spent several days of my life looking at nothing but loading screens.
If Nintendo decided to make a console without the lockout chip and a top-loading console like the NES2 or Famicom, things would have been a whole lot better for us retrogamers.
The thing is, games for the NES and that era were -made- to be abstract, when we got to the N64/PS1 era, developers started releasing "realistic" games which end up looking like crap when the next generation of games come out.
Graphics were secondary to making an entertaining game, the game was developed with the concept first then the graphics followed and the graphics were what made sense. For example, the look of Mario wasn't developed to look like a specific person, but rather to compensate for the lack of advanced hardware. Today, developers take graphics first, take a storyline first, then let the game fill in the cracks.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it odd that "free trade" agreements are never that? The more and more countries stop making their own laws with their elected officials and start offshoring lawmaking to para-governmental organizations with no oversight, the more and more countries slip into tyranny.
They've tried that in things like L4D but the problem is, you are either new and stuck in an elite group in which case you get mocked for not knowing the map like the back of your hand, you are stuck with a new person when the rest of the team knows what they want to do, you get stuck with that one team-killing asshole or you end up with a sucky team where everyone is just bad at the game.
Its great to play with your friends, its just really crappy to play online with random people.
Except for the fact there is a difference between simply losing and being told you suck repeatedly from people who have no life other than the game.
The problem is, unless you are part of the "community" and can devote a lot of time to a game, you aren't going to have fun because the majority of people online are assholes.
There is a line between simply being bad at a game and 14 year old kids cursing you out because you can't devote 8 hours a day to the game.
As far as I know though, that is a dome-switch and not mechanical-switch keyboard.
We, as the developed world (US, Russia, China, India, UK, EU, etc.) might not develop them but chances are, North Korea and Iran would use them given the chance.
Well, no, you will never benefit from life insurance. Bad example :).
Well, the same thing could be said for health insurance, after all, I'm healthy I'm never going to get sick, etc.
Even assuming that fiat currency collapses, wouldn't it make more sense to buy stock? It's backed by actual production capability, actually makes you some money on average (unlike insurance), and any economic collapse serious enough to destroy said stocks value will certainly devalue pretty metals as well.
Yes and no. The problem with stocks are you've got to have good knowledge of the company and such. For example, several years ago GM was considered to be a very safe stock to invest in with constant gains. Several bailouts later and GM has emerged as possibly recovering but sickly. Even in a very healthy economy it is hard to pick which stocks will be good.
Stocks are a gamble, the yields are a whole lot better than precious metals and the like but the risks are a lot greater too. If there is a company which you think will grow like crazy, go ahead and invest in it, the problem is, mismanagement can bring even the greatest companies down.
It takes a lot more research to avoid losing money in stocks when compared to something like precious metals. If you do the research, the results are usually a lot greater, but the risks are greater too.
And the time will come when someone finds a large enough deposit or enough people are selling at the same time to completely collapse the value of gold. What's your point?
But we haven't found a large enough deposit of gold. Other than aluminum which was already really, really abundant and just needed a practical way of extracting it, there have been no metals which this has happened to. On the other hand, just look at the list of hyperinflated currencies:
Confederate Dollar
Continental Currency
Angola Kwanza
Argentine Peso
Austrian Krone
Belarus Ruble
Bolivian Peso
Brazilian cruzeiro
Bulgarian Lev
Chilean Peso
Chinese Yuan Dynasty
Chinese Yuan
Georgian Coupons
German Mark
Greek Drachma
Hungarian Pengo
Israeli Shekel
Japanese Yen
Mozambican Metical
Nicaragua Cortoba
Peruvian Sol
Philippine Peso when under Japanese control
Polish Zotoly
Romanian Leu
Russian Ruble
Taiwanese Dollar
Turkish Lira
Yugoslav Dinar
and of course the infamous Zimbabwe Dollar.
Something tells me I'll take my chances with a metal which has been searched for 4,000 years for massive deposits than currency with a long history of failings.
There is nothing inherently valuable about gold. It's a convenient medium for exchange. We use fiat currency because it's a more convenient medium for exchange. If something apocalyptic happens tomorrow and destroys civilization, the survivors will find both dollars and gold worthless. The only things of value will be bullets and food.
While that is true, gold has been a valuable currency for over 4,000 years. Gold can't be manipulated to the extent that fiat currency can. I can't start up a printing press and make one ounce gold bars out of nothing.
However, in many war-torn regions gold is the currency that is in demand in places that we would call pretty apocalyptic. If people believe that thing will ever get better, gold is still a useful currency. If people don't think so, then gold is useless.
However, the collapse of the dollar won't be "apocalyptic" what will happen is that prices keep on rising and people will turn to alternate currencies if they are still stable (Mexican Peso in the south, Canadian Dollar in the north) along with pre-1965 US coins made of silver, and bullion. If you look, the people who had precious metals during historic hyperinflation scenarios ended up rather unscathed compared to the people who had a lot of paper money.
Well, first of all you don't understand US treasuries. We are already repaying on every treasury. They have a fixed yield. So no, they won't "come due" sometime. They're already due and we're already paying.
And how are we paying? We're paying by printing more money. Which is inflation. When our tax revenue comes in and its not enough to pay for our debt, we still need to pay it so we print more money.
Second, you have to understand why China bought so much debt. It wasn't because they wanted to finance the US. They bought treasuries in order to inflate the US dollar relative to their currency. China's economic boom means that their currency should rise relative to the dollar. But if it does, their exports will be more expensive and thus go down. So China buys US debit and keeps their currency low and exports up. China can't "dump" their US debit without destroying their own economy.
Except for the fact that China is a secretive, communist nation run under a near dictatorship. China wouldn't mind ruining their people's own economies at the prospect of ruining a rival's. After all, what are the people in China going to do? Vote for a different candidate in their one-party elections? Heck, look at China's "Cultural Revolution", China doesn't care about their people.
Actually, what we need to worry about is deflation right now. Our economy is running at about 80% capacity. That's enormous deflationary pressure. That's why we currently have ~0% inflation despite all the inflationary things the Fed has been doing. Yes, if we keep doing inflationary things after the output gap is closed, we'll have an inflation problem. But there's no particular reason to believe we won't change policy when the economy has recovered.
Other than gasoline which fell sharply in the recession, prices for most other essentials, food, clothing, etc. have all increased or remained constant.
While we might have a "technical" deflation, what is happening is like what happened in post-WWI Germany, massive deflation. So the government printed, and printed and the economy wasn't getting better so they printed a bit too much and it hit hyperinflation stage. Something tells me that this is the direction the US is heading. We'll print some money here, print some money there, because people don't -want- to spend in a recession they save it away and then when the time comes and the economy recovers.... Bam immediate increases in price which triggers a panic of inflation so people take out their money from savings and the economy is hi
By that logic I shouldn't need life insurance should I? Even though I've observed other people die, I haven't died yet and some of those people were younger than me so the logical conclusion is that I'm immortal.
Buying gold, silver, platinum and the like is like buying insurance, you might not like buying it, you might wish you could spend the money on something else, but you will, based on observation, eventually need it.
Governments throughout history have always overprinted fiat currency or debased their money, often times when they are in a war they can't afford to fight (sound familiar?) or to pay off debts.
The time is coming where the US will experience hyperinflation just like every fiat currency before it. To say that it won't is akin to saying you are immortal and don't need life insurance. Just look at the dramatic rise in prices over the last few years.
While we probably won't see hyperinflation tomorrow or perhaps even several years down the road, saying that it will never happen is like saying because you haven't died yet you don't need to get life insurance.
Something tells me that the value of fiat currencies are going to plummet to nothing before a major advancement such as mining gold on the moon happens.
History is filled with stories of lands filled with gold, alchemists and the like and yet none of them have ever turned out to be practical.
On the other hand, history is filled with empires and countries that the debasement of their currencies lead to mass poverty for many citizens.
This idea that a currency based on nothing can survive is laughable, our nation's currency is no better off than a gum wrapper with a logo printed on it.
While, eventually, mankind may advance to the point where gold no longer has enough scarcity to be used as currency, I don't see it happening anytime soon considering its worked quite well for the past 4,000 some odd years with a new "breakthrough" is proclaimed every year.
I wouldn't laugh at the doomsday prophets too much, their history is pretty solid.
Its silly to think that the US is immune to the laws of economics, we owe a shitload of money to China, we're fighting two wars which we can't really pay for, we think we need to 'bail out' any large company in financial trouble, etc. Eventually China is going to want payment on our loan, and when that happens because our debt is expressed in US dollars, the only way to settle that debt is to print a lot more dollars just like what happened in Post-WWI Germany.
Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation#Examples_of_hyperinflation do you really think that the US is immune to these forces?
Its been 38 years since the last manned moon landing. In that time the world has changed immensely. Think about it, in 1972, all the computing power in the world back then would fit into a cell phone today. But we haven't even been back to the moon despite it being easier to do than in the 60s.
A lot. First off is the fact to even send something to the moon requires a pretty big rocket, something like the Saturn V isn't cheap. Secondly, mining robots aren't hardly even used on earth, let alone on the moon. Thirdly we've found some water and some rare elements, not that we've found a lake and huge gold nuggets so we'd have to send many more missions to locate a suitable "mine".
Will we eventually mine the moon? Yes. Will it happen in the next 5 decades? Probably not and even then, the materials mined would make more sense to be used on something like a lunar colony, not for export back to Earth.
Can someone come and build a road into my backyard even if I don't want them to? Can I contract someone to build a road straight from my house to Vegas?
Of course not, you have your own property rights and no one, not even the government should be able to take them.
Now that the road is built, who owns it? Do I own it? Do I maintain it? Who is responsible for it? If someone gets into an accident on my road, due to poor maintenance, am I responsible? Can I collect the money for maintaining it without actually maintaining it?
Um, there are plenty of private roads already.
And the idea isn't necessarily private roads, but simply a more accurate way of funding public roads. The government should only be a service provider.
But yes, if you build it, you own what you've built, now, if it was built on government-owned land, you are simply leasing that land and have a contract to provide services.
Like all contracts, things are subject to conditions. Can you collect your paycheck without actually working? Of course you really can't. Same thing with this, if you aren't doing a good enough job maintaining the roads, they can terminate your contract.
Same thing with lawsuits, there should be conditions detailing liability and the like as we do with everything else.
I think what you want is a tax reform where people still pay taxes, but only for the services they wish to use.
Yes, which is basically what I said. The government should be a service provider, not the service provider. If a large company wishes to build private roads spanning the nation, they can do that, there shouldn't be legal monopolies like we have in the US with first-class mail.
The example that I gave wasn't with an entire roads system, such a thing could, at one time, been done privately, and quite honestly probably should have been done privately, but since we have taxpayer funded roads, we should settle for what we have while not disallowing private enterprise to have their own solutions.
When you privatize it, you get issues where people take the money and keep it - Like corporations funneling money to avoid taxes, you can't trust whoever built the road to maintain the road, even after paying them to maintain it.
Given a free enough economy, this basic principle keeps consumers on top and allows them to control corporations in an effective manner while allowing them to choose who they support. It is only when government intervenes beyond preventing force and fraud that consumers lose to the power of corporations.
If I don't support a corporation, I don't have to buy things and they don't get my money. If I don't support the government, I still have to pay my taxes. Even worse, we don't decide where our money goes, if we are to have taxation, we need to be able to choose what we "purchase" with that money in the most direct and most individual way possible. If you wish to pay for the war in Iraq, go ahead and fund it. If you don't want to, don't. Granted, there should be a per-household tax for the defense of the country, but it should be very minimal because there are very little real threats that exist of invasion and the like.
In short, taxation should be voluntary and based on the services you want. If you wish to use the government's roads you pay a fee. If you wish to use your town's garbage pick-up, you pay a fee. Etc.
This idea that someone or a corporation who makes $100,000 a year costs more to defend, maintain their roads and the like than an identical person/corporation that makes $40,000 a year is silly.
If it costs X amount of dollars to build a road, and that money has to come from the collective pool of taxes, and the system is designed so that a good portion of that money is taken from corporations making massive profits, and the rest is evenly distributed amongst the rest of the people - but the corporation doesn't pay its share, that means 1 of 2 things will happen. More of the people's tax money has to go into the road, or the road doesn't get built.
Which makes no sense.
What makes sense is that if you drive on the roads, you pay for the upkeep on the roads. Similarly, corporations who use roads must pay the same proportional to their use of the roads (for example, a semi-truck that is nearly constantly on the road and is large is going to cost more to be able to use the road than someone in a SUV or car) which they can then use to pass the cost of that to the consumers.
If you don't use the roads, you don't have to pay, however, when you use a service that uses the roads you pay a bit there too. This makes sense because someone who doesn't drive, doesn't use public transit that uses the roads is paying a lot less than someone who, say, runs a trucking business.
Thing is, a lot of services we can't simply "Go Without" - many people take advantage of the Garbage pickup in their neighbourhood. In Canada we sure do like the roads cleared of snow. Things like that.
Garbage pick up can, and should, be provided by a private company with contracts to either the city or the residents. If you don't pay your fee, you don't have your garbage picked up. If you want to take your own trash to the dump yourself, recycle your trash separately or use a different service, you are free to.
Same thing with roads being cleared of snow, if you use the roads, a portion of that "tax" charged to all cars and the like in licensing would be used to provide for the removing of snow.
If your idea is "Why should Google have to pay those taxes to cover those services?" - it's because the elected representatives created those laws and thats the cost of doing business in that country. If you want to Operate in America, where you have a lot of consumers that have a lot of money to spend, the laws dicatate you have to support that system.
But that doesn't dismiss the fact it makes no sense.
People should pay for the services that they use, those who wish to use a lot of the services should have to pay a lot more than the people who rarely if ever use the service.
This idea of taxes based on income makes no fiscal sense, the roads are going to need the same level of upkeep if you have an armored car carrying gold bars and making a lot more money, or if there was the same size of cars with the same level of traffic on the bars carrying close to worthless lead bars.
Depends if you count providing services to the employable population as "doing something" for Google.
The last time I checked, I had to pay taxes. A shitload of taxes. If we are going to charge corporations for taxes which will end up being passed on to its consumers, I shouldn't have to pay taxes.
It doesn't take a lot of money to keep people safe. I would have no problems paying taxes if thats all it goes to. But it doesn't. It gets wasted on trivial things.
The only sane method of having taxes is having them be just like going to the store or buying any other good or service. When I go to Wal-Mart and buy a gallon of milk, they don't force me to buy 3 liters of soda for their employees for the company party. Now, they can increase the price of milk to pay for some of that, but I am also free to go to any other store for the gallon of milk and find the best/cheapest. But that is exactly what our current system of taxation is like, you only want the gallon of milk and yet the government is forcing you to pay for unneeded, unwanted things.
When people avoid paying taxes they get an unfair competitive advantage by taking from that work force that other people paid to keep safe, healthy, and educated.
No they don't. If taxes were sane and you paid for what you used along with a small fee to pay for things like defense and to keep the court system going they gain no advantage.
It comes back to the main question, why do we deserve the income from someone else? Our tax code needs to be reformed so Google, you, me, Microsoft and every other person and corporation pays for simply what they use.
The point is though, content makers are giving a benefit to pirates.
Think back to the era of VHS tapes, the only advantage to buying a pirated tape was cost, you could fast-forward the ads with minimal effort on legitimate tapes, there was generally a reduction in image quality with pirated tapes and there was no other format that you needed to shift the content to.
Today, you get a better product pirating.
With a legitimate product along with legitimate player software you get:
A) Forced ads you can't skip
B) An inability to format-shift easily. You can't just put a DVD easily on your iPod without having to resort to shady methods.
With a pirated product you get:
A) No ads
B) An easily changeable, easily accessible format which can be transferred to an iPod, cell-phone, game console, DVR, disk, etc.
C) The assurance of a digital copy which you can back-up easily, if your DVD breaks you are SOL unless you have a back up which fall into a legal grey area.
D) The assurance that your copy is safe and that if Apple/Sony/Microsoft/etc. go bankrupt, your copy will still play
Lets face it, the pirates have the better copy available in the 21st century. If media execs would realize this like they eventually sorta realized with music, they will have increased sales. If there is a legitimate way to download the artists I like via iTunes or Amazon MP3 in a DRM-free format, I will do that. I haven't pirated a song that I can buy in a usable format.
Incorrect.
What makes you, or anyone else feel entitled to income from someone else? The only fair "taxation" is voluntary "taxation" where you purchase a good or service. For example, if you drive a car, you would have to pay a fee to drive on government-provided roads. The problem is, what has the government done that entitles themselves to Google's income? Very little. Something tells me that the US government didn't spend $60 billion to help Google.
Google hasn't taken anything from me, Google has taken a little bit from the government, yes. But very little, not $60 billion worth. This idea that somehow Google owes the US government or the people of the US money, is silly to say the least and borders on theft at the most.
...Except for the fact to actually use the crap you paid for you usually have to break the law. Want to actually -watch- that DVD without having to watch ads? You usually have to use something like libdvdcss to break the encryption, same thing with format transfer. Games are often times nearly unplayable without cracks and the like.
I have no problems buying media, but its become to the point where in order to actually use what you paid for you end up breaking the law in some way or another.
When pirates not only are offering a free copy but a better copy, the sales for the legitimate copy will naturally slow.
Exactly. Limiting free trade does absolutely nothing to help a country but harms both countries.
...Except for the fact that Facebook has an elevated self-worth at the moment. Social networks really only have a lifespan of a few years before they are no longer used by the masses.
If Apple wanted to buy Facebook, they should have done it a few years ago, or perhaps a few years in the future. If Apple buys it now, they have a very limited amount of time before the feature is still a feature.
FB has very little IP, the only thing they have is users and brand recognition but MySpace also had that but essentially lost it.
...Except for the fact that NES consoles are still being made, just not by Nintendo.
Take this for instance http://www.amazon.com/Retron-Genesis-Triple-System-Nintendo-Entertainment/dp/B003O3EFY2/ref=pd_sbs_t_4 it is a third-party NES, third-party SNES and third-party Sega Genesis (MegaDrive outside of the US). Or the "FC Mobile" a third-party portable NES ( http://www.amazon.com/Mobile-Portable-System-White-Nintendo-DS/dp/B0027ESBCG/ref=pd_sim_sbs_vg_2 ).
The NES is not dead because it is still being produced. It might not have the Nintendo name, it might not have the "toaster" design, it might not have identical controllers, but it still is a NES.
Its not "internet terrorism" its just the same thing as if people were protesting outside a record label, the goal is to cut off access to it. Its not "hacking", Anonymous "hacked" the RIAA using SQL injection to erase the site.
The "real-world" equivalent to a DDoS isn't blowing up a building, but simply having a large amount of people in front of a building. The causes are the same (lots of people trying to get into the building/site) and the results are the same (few people can get in the site/building).
...Except for the fact the NES isn't dead or abandoned.
Nintendo sells NES Roms for $5 a piece on the Wii, the NES still has a thriving homebrew scene, new versions of the NES/Famicom hardware shows up nearly daily from replicas of other systems made to con unwary buyers (PolyStation anyone?)to portable consoles.
Just about every one of Nintendo's NES titles have gone on to spawn successful franchises the majority of which continue to this day (Mario Bros, Zelda, Punch-Out, Metroid, etc.)
I don't think there has been an older system with as healthy of a community and such surrounding it. Just because Nintendo isn't churning out any more NES consoles doesn't mean the NES is dead.
No, my PSX disks got scratched to oblivion after about a decade.
Plus, I've never had a loading screen on an NES, with a PS1/2 I swear I've spent several days of my life looking at nothing but loading screens.
If Nintendo decided to make a console without the lockout chip and a top-loading console like the NES2 or Famicom, things would have been a whole lot better for us retrogamers.
The thing is, games for the NES and that era were -made- to be abstract, when we got to the N64/PS1 era, developers started releasing "realistic" games which end up looking like crap when the next generation of games come out.
Graphics were secondary to making an entertaining game, the game was developed with the concept first then the graphics followed and the graphics were what made sense. For example, the look of Mario wasn't developed to look like a specific person, but rather to compensate for the lack of advanced hardware. Today, developers take graphics first, take a storyline first, then let the game fill in the cracks.
Duck hunt was fun... till you eventually realized you could just shoot at a lightbulb and hit every single time.