That's the beauty of it, not it's flaw. I WANT to be in a society I do not understand anymore. I want to be amazed. I want to be enthralled and overwhelmed.
I want the future, even if it's for a few days. And currently, this is the best way to do it.
This. I'd very much be curious to hear more info about python in the browser. It's an environment that's been pretty much taken over by Javascript. Even searching for information yields very little information on the topic, as if it's being drowned out by all the Javascript noise.
I'm sure there are a lot of bright economists out there that might know a whole lot more than I do on this. But to me, it seems as if a lot of the greedy profit motive these days is being driven by a fear of losing out on inflation. Especially the short time frame aspect you speak of.
If our currency is constantly reducing in value, then we are going to try very very hard to make sure that every single piece of capital we have lying around is making us money, in order to "beat" inflation. Even more so when so many of these actual "stocks" aren't owned by individual people. They're probably mostly owned by funds, which have an incentive to drive up the value of their stocks. And they do that because most people pick funds in their individual category by their "growth" in value. Again, the only reason why people want 'growth' in their portfolios/funds is because they have to beat inflation.
Stop externalizing responsibility by blaming others for the situations of the poor... There are many many examples of people working hard and getting out of poverty. They may be poor because of external factors, but only internal factors are the things KEEPING them poor.
The pro-state people want to have their cake and eat it at the same time. Scenarios such as this are prime examples of how infrastructure can and will work without a supposed "do good" entity driving it. It's being solved by a private company, with profit motives. Motives which are often touted as being "greedy" and "selfish".
"Your business model does not have a right to exist," is not the same as saying "Your business model should not be allowed to exist." It's saying, "Your business model does not possess any entitlement that requires anyone else to protect its existence."
And:
This is what regulations are for.
Either way, regulations are not really required because if it's really morally wrong it's probably already covered by the existence of property rights.
Starvation is everyone's problem. Capitalism is just an economic system. Regardless of what Ayn Rand may have told you in her nonsensical and contrived books, there is no moral basis behind it. It's just one way to run an economy that works reasonably well for some things but very poorly for others.
I never said capitalism had a moral basis behind it. What I will say is that it has a better moral standing than coercive government systems, which almost always boil down to some form of mob-rule at their core. Also, I have no idea why you're bringing up capitalism, as I never mentioned it in my post. And I've never read Ayn Rand, but don't let that stop you from justifying your anger towards me.
Turns out health care costs less and has better outcomes in countries where it's funded entirely by taxpayers.
Sure, that may be true. But we're not arguing efficiency, as you brought up the moral basis of things in your first few lines: Collective pooling of resources is only moral if you have the active consent of all parties, free from manipulation and coercion.
OMG BUT EMERGENCY ROOM WAIT TIMES
Turns out that if there's a bad wait time at an ER in a country where they have socialized medicine, you can go to a competing hospital, just like you can here. Only difference is that it won't drive you into bankruptcy. Outcomes are still better in other countries.
Yes, but none of the different hospitals have any monetary incentive to improve on those response times in reaction to your decisions not to use them. Sure, there may be social and moral incentives by the individuals running those hospitals to improve, but as an institution that may well be drowned out.
The fact that the threat of violence and jail time are required to get you to do good deeds is very telling. You're most likely the sort of person who treats people who work in the service industry as lower life forms.
If it was not necessary, then it wouldn't be the norm. However, saying that it's necessary to get even "me" to do good deeds is telling of the kind of morals you have. You're perfectly okay talking about "moral basis", but when it comes down to the fundamental moral issue of freedom, you switch around and claim that my wishes do not matter, and that it's perfectly okay to use the threat of violence and jail time to make me do good deeds. Good deeds being whatever you and the majority deem is "good".
Your logic most likely goes something like this:
If someone is rich, they must have worked hard, so they deserve to be rich. We know they deserve to be rich, because you get rich by working hard, and they're rich, so clearly they worked hard. If someone is poor, they deserve to be poor, because they are lazy. We know that laziness results in poverty because poor people are all lazy, and we know this because laziness results in poverty. If someone claims that there is a hard working poor person, we know that this is false because hard work makes you rich, and if they are poor, they must be lazy. Likewise, if someone was born into money, they must be a hard worker, because they have money. If they were lazy, it would be impossible for them to be born into money, because laziness makes you poor. If everyone worked hard, everyone would be multimillionaires.
I made no such argument, you must be mistaking me with someone else. However, I'll bite. You seem to think that I have some sort of leap in logic from poor/rich to deserving/not-deserving. On the contrary, I think that people have a moral and natural right of ownership over themselves, and the product of their labor. If they choose to be lazy, that is their choice. If they work hard, or they are lazy makes no difference. The main point is that no one has any right over another person's labor without mutually agreed compensation without coercion.
millions of people who need it and wouldn't otherwise be able to get it.
That's YOUR problem, not mine. If you want to help those that need stuff and can't get it otherwise, then you'll have to fork over out of your own pocket, not mine. The fact that you have to threaten people with imprisonment and violence to get them to give to your "social good" deeds is very telling.
The truth is, without a large nanny state, people will still be fine. Charity will flourish, and the ONLY people losing out are government employees who have evolved a giant, wasteful ecosystem of largely non-functional processes.
Be honest. Don't go down the "perhaps there's more to this..." route to add some semblance of legitimacy to your patently self-serving speculation. It'd be less disingenuous if you simply came out and said that you feel she is doing this because of x. I agree, there may be more to this, so what will I do? I'll research it, and maybe I'll find some additional background for this story. What I won't do is to pull stuff out of my arse.
Are you saying I'm "pulling stuff out of my arse"? I posed a possible explanation as to why she's desperate to get back to her job. What, am I supposed to list every single possible silly and slightly plausible explanation of her motives just so that I could pose an opinion on this?
I really don't get what you're going on about, really. But it sounds like a bunch of your friends and/or slashdotters really like what you're saying in your response. Good for you. Too bad, you didn't actually add anything of substance to the conversation.
It's hard to read the nutrition labels if you're too busy looking at the price tag.
But I do agree with you. Our schools need a whole lot of reform. Simple things such as nutrition and basic health should be taught in the schools instead of useless subjects with no real application to 90%+ of the population. Instead, we watch them rot the children's brains with useless geography, history, chemistry, high-level math. Those subjects may be interesting and good for someone interested in advancing their education, but for the rest of them it's a bore and chore. If you have to force something down your child's brain, make sure it's useful. And explain to them why it's useful.
So she goes whining to daddy government. Seriously, she would be better off spending her free time looking for a new job. At a place that accepts and actively needs/wants her. She was apparently NOT welcome or wanted at the place she's trying to get back in to. So it sounds like there is more to the story than what we're told. Perhaps she had a cushy job doing nothing, and getting paid a very good amount? People will fight to keep that. But companies will fight against it, because it's wastage.
I just opened up ThePirateBay, and I didn't see any ads. Just disable ads with whatever means you have available, and donate if you feel the site is worthy of your money. Just one donation of a few dollars will offset probably hundreds of casual users that disable ads. Let's be honest, you weren't really going to click any of those ads, so you might as well disable them.
Newsflash, we're part of the SAME society. You see what I mean about group-think? Most people abhor selfishness when in public, yet seldom refuse to admit that nationalism and groupthink is exactly that, just projected onto a bigger scale.
Sorry, but what you're talking about is the benefit to society as a whole, and not the individual and his genes. Overpopulation will just be another external pressure that determines which genes pass on and which don't.
But I do agree with you about the overpopulation. It's causing a whole lot more problems, particularly with our asinine obsession with pining over other peoples' suffering. People see orphans in Africa starving and think we have to help. That's horrible, and I wish they weren't going through that. But when I see orphans starving in Africa the only thing I feel is sheer anger at the parents that did not have the foresight to stop that problem before it became one.
Maybe the real problem is that we're using email. That piece of technology is decades old, and from a time that was much different to the one we are in now.
We need an alternative that is as easily embraced by third parties as email.
Here's an idea, if people are so hepped up on making sure someone else has healthcare, why don't they give the money directly to that person and write it off on their taxes as a charitable contribution?
Because we already pay the state to do that. I'm not going out of pocket to pay for shit the state promised it would provide. What about the "social contract" and "social good". I don't see the state keeping up to that, and as such I refuse to double-down and give money to fix stuff that the state will steal credit for anyways.
I'm a developer + geek, and I have a 60GB SSD running as my main OS harddrive, and space is only rarely an issue. You're not supposed to be installing anything but the most critical applications onto your SSD. The rest you just junction off onto the spinning harddrive that you need to have for non speed-critical data.
Click on her name, and go to her Slashdot profile. Then in the top right next to her Slashdot ID, you'll see the same G+ icon. Clicking on it will take you to the Google+ profile.
For normal middle class folks, it tends to only hit folks that have largish investment portfolios (with passive income) or have high value deductions relative to their W2 income.
Of course rich folks have many ways to avoid paying taxes, the primary one is to avoid having any salary at all since income from passive investments is taxed at a lower rate than being paid a salary.
Emphasis mine. I really don't know much about the tax laws over there, so I'm genuinely curious in the discrepancy highlighted above. Can you explain?
Slashdot Mirror
That's the beauty of it, not it's flaw. I WANT to be in a society I do not understand anymore. I want to be amazed. I want to be enthralled and overwhelmed.
I want the future, even if it's for a few days. And currently, this is the best way to do it.
This. I'd very much be curious to hear more info about python in the browser. It's an environment that's been pretty much taken over by Javascript. Even searching for information yields very little information on the topic, as if it's being drowned out by all the Javascript noise.
I'm sure there are a lot of bright economists out there that might know a whole lot more than I do on this. But to me, it seems as if a lot of the greedy profit motive these days is being driven by a fear of losing out on inflation. Especially the short time frame aspect you speak of.
If our currency is constantly reducing in value, then we are going to try very very hard to make sure that every single piece of capital we have lying around is making us money, in order to "beat" inflation. Even more so when so many of these actual "stocks" aren't owned by individual people. They're probably mostly owned by funds, which have an incentive to drive up the value of their stocks. And they do that because most people pick funds in their individual category by their "growth" in value. Again, the only reason why people want 'growth' in their portfolios/funds is because they have to beat inflation.
Stop externalizing responsibility by blaming others for the situations of the poor... There are many many examples of people working hard and getting out of poverty. They may be poor because of external factors, but only internal factors are the things KEEPING them poor.
The pro-state people want to have their cake and eat it at the same time. Scenarios such as this are prime examples of how infrastructure can and will work without a supposed "do good" entity driving it. It's being solved by a private company, with profit motives. Motives which are often touted as being "greedy" and "selfish".
Oh my God! I don't use transit! Why should MY taxes pay for THOSE fucks to use transit?!
If I didn't use it, you STOLE it.
"Your business model does not have a right to exist," is not the same as saying "Your business model should not be allowed to exist." It's saying, "Your business model does not possess any entitlement that requires anyone else to protect its existence."
And:
This is what regulations are for.
Either way, regulations are not really required because if it's really morally wrong it's probably already covered by the existence of property rights.
Starvation is everyone's problem. Capitalism is just an economic system. Regardless of what Ayn Rand may have told you in her nonsensical and contrived books, there is no moral basis behind it. It's just one way to run an economy that works reasonably well for some things but very poorly for others.
I never said capitalism had a moral basis behind it. What I will say is that it has a better moral standing than coercive government systems, which almost always boil down to some form of mob-rule at their core. Also, I have no idea why you're bringing up capitalism, as I never mentioned it in my post. And I've never read Ayn Rand, but don't let that stop you from justifying your anger towards me.
Turns out health care costs less and has better outcomes in countries where it's funded entirely by taxpayers.
Sure, that may be true. But we're not arguing efficiency, as you brought up the moral basis of things in your first few lines: Collective pooling of resources is only moral if you have the active consent of all parties, free from manipulation and coercion.
OMG BUT EMERGENCY ROOM WAIT TIMES
Turns out that if there's a bad wait time at an ER in a country where they have socialized medicine, you can go to a competing hospital, just like you can here. Only difference is that it won't drive you into bankruptcy. Outcomes are still better in other countries.
Yes, but none of the different hospitals have any monetary incentive to improve on those response times in reaction to your decisions not to use them. Sure, there may be social and moral incentives by the individuals running those hospitals to improve, but as an institution that may well be drowned out.
The fact that the threat of violence and jail time are required to get you to do good deeds is very telling. You're most likely the sort of person who treats people who work in the service industry as lower life forms.
If it was not necessary, then it wouldn't be the norm. However, saying that it's necessary to get even "me" to do good deeds is telling of the kind of morals you have. You're perfectly okay talking about "moral basis", but when it comes down to the fundamental moral issue of freedom, you switch around and claim that my wishes do not matter, and that it's perfectly okay to use the threat of violence and jail time to make me do good deeds. Good deeds being whatever you and the majority deem is "good".
Your logic most likely goes something like this:
If someone is rich, they must have worked hard, so they deserve to be rich. We know they deserve to be rich, because you get rich by working hard, and they're rich, so clearly they worked hard. If someone is poor, they deserve to be poor, because they are lazy. We know that laziness results in poverty because poor people are all lazy, and we know this because laziness results in poverty. If someone claims that there is a hard working poor person, we know that this is false because hard work makes you rich, and if they are poor, they must be lazy. Likewise, if someone was born into money, they must be a hard worker, because they have money. If they were lazy, it would be impossible for them to be born into money, because laziness makes you poor. If everyone worked hard, everyone would be multimillionaires.
I made no such argument, you must be mistaking me with someone else. However, I'll bite. You seem to think that I have some sort of leap in logic from poor/rich to deserving/not-deserving. On the contrary, I think that people have a moral and natural right of ownership over themselves, and the product of their labor. If they choose to be lazy, that is their choice. If they work hard, or they are lazy makes no difference. The main point is that no one has any right over another person's labor without mutually agreed compensation without coercion.
millions of people who need it and wouldn't otherwise be able to get it.
That's YOUR problem, not mine. If you want to help those that need stuff and can't get it otherwise, then you'll have to fork over out of your own pocket, not mine. The fact that you have to threaten people with imprisonment and violence to get them to give to your "social good" deeds is very telling.
The truth is, without a large nanny state, people will still be fine. Charity will flourish, and the ONLY people losing out are government employees who have evolved a giant, wasteful ecosystem of largely non-functional processes.
Oh you have it all wrong, we know exactly why people like it. That's precisely why we think it's pretty much pointless.
Step 3: "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him."
Ok, we got it. You chose to ignore most of the references to "God" in the official 12-steps. There are four references, by the way.
Be honest. Don't go down the "perhaps there's more to this..." route to add some semblance of legitimacy to your patently self-serving speculation. It'd be less disingenuous if you simply came out and said that you feel she is doing this because of x. I agree, there may be more to this, so what will I do? I'll research it, and maybe I'll find some additional background for this story. What I won't do is to pull stuff out of my arse.
Are you saying I'm "pulling stuff out of my arse"? I posed a possible explanation as to why she's desperate to get back to her job. What, am I supposed to list every single possible silly and slightly plausible explanation of her motives just so that I could pose an opinion on this?
I really don't get what you're going on about, really. But it sounds like a bunch of your friends and/or slashdotters really like what you're saying in your response. Good for you. Too bad, you didn't actually add anything of substance to the conversation.
It's hard to read the nutrition labels if you're too busy looking at the price tag.
But I do agree with you. Our schools need a whole lot of reform. Simple things such as nutrition and basic health should be taught in the schools instead of useless subjects with no real application to 90%+ of the population. Instead, we watch them rot the children's brains with useless geography, history, chemistry, high-level math. Those subjects may be interesting and good for someone interested in advancing their education, but for the rest of them it's a bore and chore. If you have to force something down your child's brain, make sure it's useful. And explain to them why it's useful.
So she goes whining to daddy government. Seriously, she would be better off spending her free time looking for a new job. At a place that accepts and actively needs/wants her. She was apparently NOT welcome or wanted at the place she's trying to get back in to. So it sounds like there is more to the story than what we're told. Perhaps she had a cushy job doing nothing, and getting paid a very good amount? People will fight to keep that. But companies will fight against it, because it's wastage.
I just opened up ThePirateBay, and I didn't see any ads. Just disable ads with whatever means you have available, and donate if you feel the site is worthy of your money. Just one donation of a few dollars will offset probably hundreds of casual users that disable ads. Let's be honest, you weren't really going to click any of those ads, so you might as well disable them.
Newsflash, we're part of the SAME society. You see what I mean about group-think? Most people abhor selfishness when in public, yet seldom refuse to admit that nationalism and groupthink is exactly that, just projected onto a bigger scale.
Sorry, but what you're talking about is the benefit to society as a whole, and not the individual and his genes. Overpopulation will just be another external pressure that determines which genes pass on and which don't.
But I do agree with you about the overpopulation. It's causing a whole lot more problems, particularly with our asinine obsession with pining over other peoples' suffering. People see orphans in Africa starving and think we have to help. That's horrible, and I wish they weren't going through that. But when I see orphans starving in Africa the only thing I feel is sheer anger at the parents that did not have the foresight to stop that problem before it became one.
Maybe the real problem is that we're using email. That piece of technology is decades old, and from a time that was much different to the one we are in now.
We need an alternative that is as easily embraced by third parties as email.
They're "subpar" because they prevent the individual from passing them on to his progeny. That's an evolutionary failure, or dead-end.
I really don't understand why everyone is getting so damn hostile over this.
Ahh, the rule of tyranny. Gotta love it.
Here's an idea, if people are so hepped up on making sure someone else has healthcare, why don't they give the money directly to that person and write it off on their taxes as a charitable contribution?
Because we already pay the state to do that. I'm not going out of pocket to pay for shit the state promised it would provide. What about the "social contract" and "social good". I don't see the state keeping up to that, and as such I refuse to double-down and give money to fix stuff that the state will steal credit for anyways.
I'm a developer + geek, and I have a 60GB SSD running as my main OS harddrive, and space is only rarely an issue. You're not supposed to be installing anything but the most critical applications onto your SSD. The rest you just junction off onto the spinning harddrive that you need to have for non speed-critical data.
Click on her name, and go to her Slashdot profile. Then in the top right next to her Slashdot ID, you'll see the same G+ icon. Clicking on it will take you to the Google+ profile.
For normal middle class folks, it tends to only hit folks that have largish investment portfolios (with passive income) or have high value deductions relative to their W2 income.
Of course rich folks have many ways to avoid paying taxes, the primary one is to avoid having any salary at all since income from passive investments is taxed at a lower rate than being paid a salary.
Emphasis mine. I really don't know much about the tax laws over there, so I'm genuinely curious in the discrepancy highlighted above. Can you explain?
Just report her profile, Google will ban it eventually.