I am not allowed to store my wealth in gold. If gold appreciates against my country's currency, I am forced to pay a portion of that appreciation in taxes. In other words, because I do not want to store some portion of my money in an alternate money without being forced to pay back to my government some percentage of the devaluation of their money they chose to cause while I was using the alternate money.
I'm sorry, didn't answer the question. The benefit is that the citizens are allowed to save money in a safe and secure manner of their choice, instead of in the currency that a cabal of privately-owned banks can devalue when they make bad bets.
Developed countries with stable currencies? Switzerland? I think it's becoming clear that the dollar and the Euro are no longer considered safe. At least not in the long run.
People should be allowed to choose any money they want, without having to paxes to their sovereign state when that state devalues its money. Get rid of the legal tender laws and allow competing currencies. And don't give me the BS that it's impractical to support multiple currencies. Travel outside the USA and you see it working all over the place. Even in the Dominican Republic you find cash registers that offer three currency operation.
I'm amused and a little alarmed that your perception of the options consists entirely of;
1) increase regulation,
2) remove all regulation altogether.
This is funny to me, and I can understand what you mean.
I subscribe to a particular viewpoint (Rothbard's) that fractional reserve banking is fraud, and should be criminally prosecuted when discovered, and that no bank should have a government-enforced monopoly on money issuance (as the Federal Reserve does). So I want to remove most banking regulations (basically have free banking, with banks caught short of liabilities prosecuted instead of being bailed out), except for the law on fractional reserves (see previous point), and get rid of the government mandated monopoly, and all I get from people who think the banking sector is corrupt is that I'm a crazy person who wants the banks to run everything. They can't even *consider* a different way of doing things.
The only way the corporation grows unchecked is with government help. What you describe is only possible in corporatist/fascist societies (where the USA is heading). Look at all the benefits Microsoft provided the average person in a 1st or even 2nd world country. They were nearly a true monopoly. The antitrust moves against them were weak and meaningless...Apple innovated and found a competitive edge. There's simply no evidence for what you're saying. In fact, it's never ever happened in history except with government assistance, proof that you're dead wrong.
Jim Carrey can keep large numbers of people from laughing. Bieber, well, I think he has some mystical power over young women. But that's not something I know much about.
Maybe not incapable, but unwilling to admit they want the same power. You will not see many OWS protestors calling for an end to deficit spending, money printing, and central banking, because they think everything will be just fine if they throw out the Rothschilds and Rockefellers who currently run things and take over the central planning themselves. No clue that they are just tyrant wannabees.
Social norm adaptation has nothing to do with sexual assault.
Man, if only that were true. The people who run child soldier armies actually create a social norm of slightly older boys raping slightly younger boys (and girls, and women) to create a social norm of violence. It literally brutalizes (i.e. turns into a brute) the child soldiers, and for them, this IS a social norm.
It's not hard to see how "social norm" is just a frame of reference. It's a great credit to you that you can't imagine how sexual assault could be a social norm - says that you're not screwed up - but that doesn't quite mean that really terrible "norms" don't exist somewhere.
I didn't mean to compare the two experiences. What I was getting at was that a person might think I'd be utterly at home in that environment, and I'm not, even though I am obviously not going to be targeted that way. The implication, which I guess I could have been much more explicit about, was that it would of course be a much more antagonistic environment for others (including women, of course).
I have been the subject of unwelcome advances from a dude who wouldn't take "no" for an answer (I'm a straight male, and he wasn't even my type if I were gay - Neil Patrick Harris I might flirt with a little, you know?), and I gotta say I did not like it one bit, and would avoid a situation in which that was likely, and would be real stressed out if I had to be in that situation and not have an escape. Must have been pretty nasty and demeaning for those women who got the harassment.
No, that's going way too far. I'm thinking that there is certainly a tendency to self-select into groups of similar traits. People who write business software tend not to be incredibly interested in penetration testing (my observation, I can hardly get anybody to give a thought to security at a web reporting gig). People who write business software tend to have somewhat better developed people skills due to having to get business requirements and rules out of non-tech folks. Someone who is looking only at technical requirements, i.e. a white-hat hacker, interfaces with the system more. Different drive internally, different skills to interact with the outside world, as the outside world IS different for them.
I'm an average geek. I have to say that when I find myself surrounded by really hardcore geeks, I feel put off. It's like they are in a feeding frenzy, looking for a chance to be king of the hill. I am not surprised at all that they'd act in totally horrible ways towards women. Clearly, part of the game there was to do so (to get the hole punched).
I think in the general area of business software, the stereotype of the hardcore geek is mostly gone. People who write business applications are generally pretty mainstream by geek standards. Perhaps such a concentration of extremely tech-focused geeks like at the conference in question is the last place we see this kind of stereotype, and possibly, for that reason they are all the more poorly behaved.
Ah, that's missing out on a lot. Understanding the way people with limited understanding of the world saw the world is one thing that can be very useful, and reading their accounts of how they understood the world is how you get there. But you're also completely leaving out the analysis of the development of their moral code based on their limited worldly knowledge and the covenant they believed they had with God. And understanding how that moral code changed over time is remarkably enlightening. Particularly when it changed from "kill the enemy" in a very chauvinist, nationalist manner, to "love the enemy". And seeing how the people rejected that message? The most enlightening lesson of all.
Sadly some of us have decided it's not worth fighting the rest of the people in the church to make sure they understand it that way. Though as I'm older now, and starting to feel more of a sense of responsibility to the community and not just seeking my own comfort, I may go back and be intentionally unpopular. Like high school, but with a purpose!
Yeah, but they're using HFCS because ordinary cane sugar's price has been artificially propped up by setting tariffs on foreign sugar producers. So in a way, the sugar tariff is ALSO helping cement Monsanto's corn monopoly.
Wow. I've been asking myself why I'm bothering trying classical piano at 36 - it's a constant, continous source of frustration, with tiny rewards every few months when I get a short piece semi-playable. It fits that pattern perfectly. Funny thing - if I didn't have the experience of knowing this was how it would be from the time 20 years ago when I studied classical clarinet, I'd give up every time a particular passage seemed completely impossible. Amazing what a person of average talent can do when persevering.
It is a little weird. You can find other references to this phenomenon, though. I think what he's saying is that "scientific consensus" can be a lot like religion; it can go from a general agreement on reasonably vetted attempts to understand the natural world into a faith-based, group-membership based mindset, and it's hard to tell sometimes when that happens. It's about scientists being human and social creatures, and the risks that go with it. Scientists are supposed to be above that, and often are, but sometimes are not. They're people.
According to this guy, yes:
http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2011/09/transgenerational-epigenetic.html
I was originally made to be suspicious of this in high school, when my biology teacher, who was really quite excellent, strangely told us a story not in the textbook about how mice were observed to develop webbed feet in one generation when a swamp was flooded. The he got a puzzled look on his face, and explained that it couldn't possibly happen, because evolution and mutation were not single-generational, fully-developed mutation mechanisms. He was great to acknowledge the anecdote (I could never find a citation), but had no explanation.
The scientific community also suppressed evidence of Lamarckian-looking evolution because it didn't fit the consensus view that Darwinian theories were the answer. And now what do we find? OOPS! Consensus was wrong, for something like 150 years, and there is plenty of evidence showing that Lamarck was on to something. He didn't understand the mechanism, but he was right - ACQUIRED TRAITS CAN BE INHERITED. The scientific community can be wrong, and shouting down dissenting views isn't good science. There's a lot more to the world than "scientific consensus" can understand.
It's not the lawn that's the problem. It's the billions of dollars in hearing aids that Medicare and Medicaid will be expected to provide for stupid people who stupidly listened to hoot and thump music being played FAR TOO LOUD. One thing to listen to music, another to listen to it on headphones that can still be heard by people five rows away on a train, or in a car that is audible a half mile away.
Thank you! The "Heartland Institute" is not in any way libertarian or free-market; it is clearly crony capitalist, big-government. Frankly, you see even the CATO institute and the Libertarian Party ignoring Ron Paul because he's "too" libertarian (even though his policies are much more mainstream than most of his supporters' philosophies). And the CATO crowd is, effectively, a GOP-lite variant of mainstream republican attitudes. Big government plus legal pot, I think. Whereas Heartland Institute is big government, playing to a particular set of large corporations.
People actually think that the bank bailouts were a product of the free market. The level of wanton ignorance required to believe this is simply astounding.
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I am not allowed to store my wealth in gold. If gold appreciates against my country's currency, I am forced to pay a portion of that appreciation in taxes. In other words, because I do not want to store some portion of my money in an alternate money without being forced to pay back to my government some percentage of the devaluation of their money they chose to cause while I was using the alternate money.
I'm sorry, didn't answer the question. The benefit is that the citizens are allowed to save money in a safe and secure manner of their choice, instead of in the currency that a cabal of privately-owned banks can devalue when they make bad bets.
Developed countries with stable currencies? Switzerland? I think it's becoming clear that the dollar and the Euro are no longer considered safe. At least not in the long run.
People should be allowed to choose any money they want, without having to paxes to their sovereign state when that state devalues its money. Get rid of the legal tender laws and allow competing currencies. And don't give me the BS that it's impractical to support multiple currencies. Travel outside the USA and you see it working all over the place. Even in the Dominican Republic you find cash registers that offer three currency operation.
I'm amused and a little alarmed that your perception of the options consists entirely of; 1) increase regulation, 2) remove all regulation altogether.
This is funny to me, and I can understand what you mean.
I subscribe to a particular viewpoint (Rothbard's) that fractional reserve banking is fraud, and should be criminally prosecuted when discovered, and that no bank should have a government-enforced monopoly on money issuance (as the Federal Reserve does). So I want to remove most banking regulations (basically have free banking, with banks caught short of liabilities prosecuted instead of being bailed out), except for the law on fractional reserves (see previous point), and get rid of the government mandated monopoly, and all I get from people who think the banking sector is corrupt is that I'm a crazy person who wants the banks to run everything. They can't even *consider* a different way of doing things.
The only way the corporation grows unchecked is with government help. What you describe is only possible in corporatist/fascist societies (where the USA is heading). Look at all the benefits Microsoft provided the average person in a 1st or even 2nd world country. They were nearly a true monopoly. The antitrust moves against them were weak and meaningless...Apple innovated and found a competitive edge. There's simply no evidence for what you're saying. In fact, it's never ever happened in history except with government assistance, proof that you're dead wrong.
Jim Carrey can keep large numbers of people from laughing. Bieber, well, I think he has some mystical power over young women. But that's not something I know much about.
Maybe not incapable, but unwilling to admit they want the same power. You will not see many OWS protestors calling for an end to deficit spending, money printing, and central banking, because they think everything will be just fine if they throw out the Rothschilds and Rockefellers who currently run things and take over the central planning themselves. No clue that they are just tyrant wannabees.
A quick Google didn't return much. Are you referring to embryo adoption? I've not heard of non-destructive IVF.
Social norm adaptation has nothing to do with sexual assault.
Man, if only that were true. The people who run child soldier armies actually create a social norm of slightly older boys raping slightly younger boys (and girls, and women) to create a social norm of violence. It literally brutalizes (i.e. turns into a brute) the child soldiers, and for them, this IS a social norm.
It's not hard to see how "social norm" is just a frame of reference. It's a great credit to you that you can't imagine how sexual assault could be a social norm - says that you're not screwed up - but that doesn't quite mean that really terrible "norms" don't exist somewhere.
I didn't mean to compare the two experiences. What I was getting at was that a person might think I'd be utterly at home in that environment, and I'm not, even though I am obviously not going to be targeted that way. The implication, which I guess I could have been much more explicit about, was that it would of course be a much more antagonistic environment for others (including women, of course).
I have been the subject of unwelcome advances from a dude who wouldn't take "no" for an answer (I'm a straight male, and he wasn't even my type if I were gay - Neil Patrick Harris I might flirt with a little, you know?), and I gotta say I did not like it one bit, and would avoid a situation in which that was likely, and would be real stressed out if I had to be in that situation and not have an escape. Must have been pretty nasty and demeaning for those women who got the harassment.
No, that's going way too far. I'm thinking that there is certainly a tendency to self-select into groups of similar traits. People who write business software tend not to be incredibly interested in penetration testing (my observation, I can hardly get anybody to give a thought to security at a web reporting gig). People who write business software tend to have somewhat better developed people skills due to having to get business requirements and rules out of non-tech folks. Someone who is looking only at technical requirements, i.e. a white-hat hacker, interfaces with the system more. Different drive internally, different skills to interact with the outside world, as the outside world IS different for them.
I'm an average geek. I have to say that when I find myself surrounded by really hardcore geeks, I feel put off. It's like they are in a feeding frenzy, looking for a chance to be king of the hill. I am not surprised at all that they'd act in totally horrible ways towards women. Clearly, part of the game there was to do so (to get the hole punched).
I think in the general area of business software, the stereotype of the hardcore geek is mostly gone. People who write business applications are generally pretty mainstream by geek standards. Perhaps such a concentration of extremely tech-focused geeks like at the conference in question is the last place we see this kind of stereotype, and possibly, for that reason they are all the more poorly behaved.
Ah, that's missing out on a lot. Understanding the way people with limited understanding of the world saw the world is one thing that can be very useful, and reading their accounts of how they understood the world is how you get there. But you're also completely leaving out the analysis of the development of their moral code based on their limited worldly knowledge and the covenant they believed they had with God. And understanding how that moral code changed over time is remarkably enlightening. Particularly when it changed from "kill the enemy" in a very chauvinist, nationalist manner, to "love the enemy". And seeing how the people rejected that message? The most enlightening lesson of all.
Sadly some of us have decided it's not worth fighting the rest of the people in the church to make sure they understand it that way. Though as I'm older now, and starting to feel more of a sense of responsibility to the community and not just seeking my own comfort, I may go back and be intentionally unpopular. Like high school, but with a purpose!
Yeah, but they're using HFCS because ordinary cane sugar's price has been artificially propped up by setting tariffs on foreign sugar producers. So in a way, the sugar tariff is ALSO helping cement Monsanto's corn monopoly.
Wow. I've been asking myself why I'm bothering trying classical piano at 36 - it's a constant, continous source of frustration, with tiny rewards every few months when I get a short piece semi-playable. It fits that pattern perfectly. Funny thing - if I didn't have the experience of knowing this was how it would be from the time 20 years ago when I studied classical clarinet, I'd give up every time a particular passage seemed completely impossible. Amazing what a person of average talent can do when persevering.
It is a little weird. You can find other references to this phenomenon, though. I think what he's saying is that "scientific consensus" can be a lot like religion; it can go from a general agreement on reasonably vetted attempts to understand the natural world into a faith-based, group-membership based mindset, and it's hard to tell sometimes when that happens. It's about scientists being human and social creatures, and the risks that go with it. Scientists are supposed to be above that, and often are, but sometimes are not. They're people.
Interesting read here:
http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2011/09/transgenerational-epigenetic.html
See my other post down a few on my high school bio teacher. Really got me curious.
According to this guy, yes:
http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2011/09/transgenerational-epigenetic.html
I was originally made to be suspicious of this in high school, when my biology teacher, who was really quite excellent, strangely told us a story not in the textbook about how mice were observed to develop webbed feet in one generation when a swamp was flooded. The he got a puzzled look on his face, and explained that it couldn't possibly happen, because evolution and mutation were not single-generational, fully-developed mutation mechanisms. He was great to acknowledge the anecdote (I could never find a citation), but had no explanation.
The scientific community also suppressed evidence of Lamarckian-looking evolution because it didn't fit the consensus view that Darwinian theories were the answer. And now what do we find? OOPS! Consensus was wrong, for something like 150 years, and there is plenty of evidence showing that Lamarck was on to something. He didn't understand the mechanism, but he was right - ACQUIRED TRAITS CAN BE INHERITED. The scientific community can be wrong, and shouting down dissenting views isn't good science. There's a lot more to the world than "scientific consensus" can understand.
Our driver's ed instructor about 20 years said 9 and 3, and specifically said NOT to follow the 10 and 2 advice. Good on him.
Sorry about your lawn.
It's not the lawn that's the problem. It's the billions of dollars in hearing aids that Medicare and Medicaid will be expected to provide for stupid people who stupidly listened to hoot and thump music being played FAR TOO LOUD. One thing to listen to music, another to listen to it on headphones that can still be heard by people five rows away on a train, or in a car that is audible a half mile away.
I can make phone calls with my phone now!
Thank you! The "Heartland Institute" is not in any way libertarian or free-market; it is clearly crony capitalist, big-government. Frankly, you see even the CATO institute and the Libertarian Party ignoring Ron Paul because he's "too" libertarian (even though his policies are much more mainstream than most of his supporters' philosophies). And the CATO crowd is, effectively, a GOP-lite variant of mainstream republican attitudes. Big government plus legal pot, I think. Whereas Heartland Institute is big government, playing to a particular set of large corporations.
People actually think that the bank bailouts were a product of the free market. The level of wanton ignorance required to believe this is simply astounding.