Cheering on the activities of a company which comport with their stated purpose is not fanboi-ism especially since they could could have, but chose not to, go the ATT / Comcast / Verizon route and benefit themselves to a greater extent by withdrawing the benefit from others.
Some people are just haters, that's all. You're nothing special, clever or even insightful.
Here's the analogy. We're all on a ship in the ocean. Engineering below has alerted the captain that we're definitely headed for an iceberg. The rich people who are partying on the ship don't want the party to stop.
Since they're the Big Money on board and have the Big Connections , they have outsized say in what the captain decides to do. They shout down the engineers, accusing them of being jealous of the first class passengers.
The rest of the passengers are worried but unable to get captain to change course.
After a while, engineering gets more and more agitated and the passengers can see the panic in their faces. The first class passengers become more even recalcitrant and adamant because now it's a matter of pride.
The rest of the passengers start quietly meeting amongst themselves, talking in low voices, moving about the ship in small groups.
You guess how this movie finishes.
OK times up. It finishes with a lot of well heeled people floating lifelessly in the frigid waters as the ship veers safely past the iceberg with the passengers on board, safe and going home to their loved ones.
No one is going to let deniers crash this ship and kill everyone on board. There comes a time when no one cares what your "rights" are or if SCOTUS has decided that money is speech or even what fucking SCOTUS says. Civilization at its core isn't based on "civil rights" or "free speech" or SCOTUS decisions. We got by without any of that shit for a few, ten thousand years. It's based on survival. Anyone who threatens survival will find themselves outside of the laws of civilization pretty fucking fast.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact. If you make people fight for their survival, if you're identified as one of the deniers who drove civilization to the brink of extinction you can pretty well plan on dying a pretty fucking barbaric death, possibly involving blow torches and such like medieval -level implements of torture . It's nothing I'd wish on anyone, but moderate, peace loving, live and let live liberal bunny people like me aren't going to be able to hold back revenge seekers very well. Prominent personalities deeply involved with denialism may want to take pause here.
My colleagues think we should spare you from the full horror of what's going to happen when, say, the food web in the ocean begins to collapse. They think that because they think by building bridges we can eventually bring you along, but if we paint the full picture of what the future will bring to your flesh, you'll fucking tighten up, become defensive and go full off into denialand and "stand your ground" until the bitter end.
I have another perspective. I think by explicitly laying out for you likely or possible scenarios and what part you'll play in them your brain will start to work in favor of your own survival despite your pansified, airy-fairy post-modernist "you have your experts and I have mine, you have your reality and I have mine" bullshit you learned from cocksucking FoxNews.
Don't think your money or guns or survivalist skills are going to count for jack fucking shit when the world's intelligence agencies collectively decide that you're a clear and present danger to humanity and bring to the party everything in their labs and the kitchen sink to make sure that your dealt with. That's how this is going to go down in the end because you know what? The Constitution is not a suicide pact.
Well you'll be shocked to learn that I actually agree with you. I don't think it excuses Google. I imagine without knowing (since I don't work for them) that Google would rather not do shit like that since it doesn't comport with what I know about them otherwise:
but the point requires an adult mind to bring adult judgement to a real world situation which is not black and white- something you're just not cut for apparently. Comcast and Verizon and ATT have REPEATEDLY shown themselves to be rapacious,exploitative and dishonest. If Google wants to protect NN by laying down fiber and bypassing that group of assholes then I say bully for them and more power to them. You have to be a bigger cynic than I am to just make blanket statements based on one or two selected data points. Sometimes in a war both sides do very bad things, but that doesn't make both sides morally equivalent. Sometimes when you fight a war you have to give a go at engaging Communist China, or save big money the way your competitors are doing , or do something else unsavory That's life in war time. But the real question is not answered by those bad actions unless like ATT and Comcast and Verizon they become so persistent and pervasive that they have, in fact, turned evil. The real question we're trying to get at is "what's in their heads? Where are they trying to get to by doing this?" That is effectively the state in a hidden Markov model and we can only approximate and build more or less good models to try to get at it . My HMM tells me that Google is acting in accordance with their value system in seeking to lay down fiber and establish NN once and for all.
Sorry, but you can't separate me from my well honed capacity to form accurate judgments about the world and people in it by flinging some sophomoric "et tu" feces at me like an angry little monkey.
What's wrong with that is we know what it results in- only the rich having significant access to the media.
This is EXACTLY what we had in broadcast TV- the price of reaching an audience was open to everyone- everyone rich that is.
Right now I can present my website and fill it with all the stuff I want and I can get slashdotted and be the envy of everyone at FoxNews. If we change it so that I can only afford a pipeline that is the equivalent of public access TV, then we're back to square one WRT the democratization of speech.
Right but in other areas of society we do have guards and processes to weed out sociopaths and prevent them from ascending to positions of power, so it's a matter of motivation and values, not capability.
Take policing. These past years, the effects of the systematic professionalization of policing - including psychological testing, requirements for a bachelor degree, extensive background checks has moved us far away from what we had in the 60s when anti-war protests devolved into what amounted to class warfare between college kids and working class policemen. Further back in history the police WERE the criminal gangs that needed to be paid off etc etc.
Even greater effort is applied to excluding sociopaths from the intelligence services since it's been proven over time sociopaths simply can't be trusted under any circumstances. Good luck getting through the CIA's vetting process if you're a sociopath.
Sure , if we permit corporations to operate as what amounts to independent pirate ships then a sociopath has a green field of opportunity before him. But if we come to expect more of corporations then things can change. People carry around with them the unconscious and unexamined idea that privately held corporations are somehow unaccountable to society in their hiring and advancement processes and quite frankly, why should that be so? Corporations are a type of privilege which is ultimately a fiction of law and therefore subject to law. We clearly have a problem with the people in power positions within corporations and apparently they can't be relied upon to self-police.
Anyone who claims we don't have a problem that impinges on society apparently wasn't around in 2008. LIBOR-gate is just more of the same.
With better and better brain imaging abilities coming online yearly, chronic liars and conscienceless predators will soon enough no longer be able to hide behind their smiles, nice suits and easy manner. We have every right and in fact duty to apply relevant science to process of assuming positions of power in society. Tough shit to anyone who doesn't like it.
That's a problem with the system.. if your competitor is doing it then you sort of are forced to do it too. I agree it's wrong. You need to talk to your senator and congressman about it.
There is a sense in which corporations are forced to follow the worst of their lot down a bad road. The reason for this is because too many in Congress wont' close loopholes . The reason for that is because they need rich asshole's money to stay in office. The reason for that is because we don't have publicly funded elections. The reason for that is because that's "socialism" according to SCOTUS and a large number of the posters on this board.
The definition of fanaticism is continuing to follow your agenda even as it leads you off a clearly visible cliff.
I come to that conclusion because 1) I am in that environment and I can see the system working to reward sociopaths and 2) beyond my personal experience, I have the shared experience of friends and 3rd parties accounts. It's really not a piece of introspection, but thanks for the hate.
It's true that corporations are inherently sociopathic (and now in control of our elections thanks to SCOTUS) but don't think in Manichean terms, the world or something in it as purely good or evil,. because it's beneath you; you're smarter than that.
Not every corporation is compelled to interpret "maximizing shareholder value" in the crassest, most short sighted way and many don't. Google can easily make the case that net neutrality is in the long term best interests of the company. In fact, doing the morally right thing can always be cleverly framed as such, just as doing the wrong thing is currently framed as such.
Google (whom I do not work for) does seem to me to be a company apart. When people were trying to get corporations to divest from South Africa, it became apparent to them that some corporations were already doing the right thing. Reagan's "constructive engagement" from that time was just the opposite- an excuse to do the wrong thing. Corporations have the power to make moral choices in this world, don't let them kid you their hands are tied.
Google have pretty much lived up to the "don't be evil" slogan, a bout of WIFI panty-sniffing excepted .
Our job is not just to call them out when we see them but also to see them clearly as they really are. Comcast and Verizon and ATT are purely evil in that they want only money and the larger society can go fuck itself. They have no sense of civic duty nor do they care about the fate of this nation or its peoples , except as a PR move. I'd pay double what I pay now for broadband service from Google just to give them a healthy profit from which to expand. I'd treat it as a form of civic obligation and a kind charitable giving and investment in my own and everyone else's future.
Yeah this supposes that everyone in the world puts money above all other values. In reality, that only describes a subset of humanity. If it described everyone then every opportunity to commit a financially advantageous criminal act would be taken by everyone every chance they got.
The reason civilization holds together isn't because we pass laws and intimidate people into obeying them. The reason civilization holds together is because most people want to live within the boundaries society sets. In fact, the generalized will of the people is where those boundaries came from in the first place. Even draconic enforcement just couldn't coerce a population into overcoming impulses that assail them every hour of every day.
What we have in America and elsewhere is a economic system which fails to punish sociopathy early on. In fact, it does just the opposite, it rewards it differentially with career advancement. The people at the top ARE different- they're worse, much worse, than the average person.
I heard some woman talking on BBC a couple nights ago about how the CEOs involed in the LIBOR scandal are really no better or worse than you or I, they just have bigger opportunities. That is exactly wrong. The bigger the potential to wreak damage on larger numbers of people,. the MORE earnest and conscientious the average person becomes with dispatching his or her duties. That's called "having a conscience"
Of course from a sociobiological point of view, we can forgive her for talking this way. Having been selected as a commentator on the behaviour of the executives of banks means she has had and likely continues to have some opportunities for socializing with them. So of course she's going to use this interview as an opportunity to signal her willingness and availability for copulation with the powerful males in her tribe. Still, if anything other than her limbic system had had control of her mouth and behaviour, any of the above facts might have popped into her head and resulted in a smarter and more insightful interview.
Not everyone is a sociopath and consequently not everyone prioritizes the accumulation of personal wealth above all other values. I count the execs at Google amongst the more morally normal people in business.
Gold is an abstract store of value just like paper money. The only reason it's worth anything isn't because it's rare or inherently valuable, but because people agree through fiat to treat it as an abstract store of value.
The problem with gold or anything similar is that it's deflationary, that is, it's value goes up as more of the world's people assume first world jobs and living standards.
The problem with deflation is that it makes it impossible to be a lender- you're always paid back in something worth less than you loaned.
The reason we went off the gold standard is because it's a fundamentally low-IQ, stupid (barbaric I think is the word that was used at the time) way of establishing a currency. With paper money, we can adjust the monetary supply to better accord with the dynamic economic conditions of the real world.
Notice in the above I didn't call paper money "fiat money", because gold is also "fiat money" as is every type of abstract store of value whose worth derives only from an agreed-upon lie amongst participants.
Paper money no more or less "fake" than the boostrap system that gets your OS going. Something unique has to stand outside the system and be the originating source of rules by which everything else has enjoined to play. The primordial bootstrap system does NOT play by the rules of the OS and is not constrained by those rules. It's a one time only deviation from those yet-to-be-loaded rules which serves a useful function. From the OS's POV, it's an arbitrary act of fiat that makes no sense and is "illegal". But the result is useful- it loads the OS which then establishes the rules by which all program agree to play so we can do useful computing. The Fed and its actions and its ability to make money is the bootstrap. The monetary system and the laws that Congress passes that define it are the rules of the game. The economic players in the economy who abide by those rules and treat them as "real" - accepting paper money as a store of value being chief amongst them- are the programs and the useful work that gets done is the economy as a whole.
We need the "fiat" rules. We need the players to play by the rules and we need a bootstrap system that is "fake" from the POV of the rest of the system to get it all started.
For the absolute physical literalist, only food clothing and shelter broadly construed to include physical protection of all forms is "worth" anything. We have a name for those people- survivalists.
Gold and silver bugs and Ron Paulites are really just survivalists once removed, that's all.
The amusing thing is, survivalists are capable of nothing like survival. The reality is that if civilization and the economy melt down, no one is going to survive. We have created all kinds of things that if left unattended by humans will be released, melt down or otherwise escape which will poison / kill . render uninhabitable most everything and everywhere. Viruses in defense labs, radioactivity in all kinds of settings, super-toxins, super-explosives, diseases etc etc etc , not to mention what life is like without modern medicine even in more benign environmental conditions . We are absolutely and irretrievably wedded to modernity and technology and the continuance and progression thereof however unsuited some literalist subculture of society may be to that reality. We are all of us all in and there's nothing that's going to change that fact.
Every aspect of life is now theoretically weaponizable. The fact is that the number of people it takes to do very big damage to large numbers of people is trending down, has been trending down for centuries and will continue to trend down ever more rapidly.
Basically your freedom and privacy are inversely proportional to the number of people it takes to hurt large number of people in very bad ways. At one end of that scale is the lone nut with a doomsday weapon. In that world, your freedom and privacy go to zero because society will not permit that lone nut to act unobserved.
Getting more realistic doesn't really bring much comfort. A few people working to weaponize some bacterium in some way is not much better. Now we need to watch everyone who orders X from company Y (or worse , didn't) or who went to grad school for major Z (or worse, didn't) .
If you look at Ted Kaszinsky , he already understood that to hide his tracks, he had to make his own shit from everyday things found just everywhere. It's not like this type is so crazy they can't think straight and plan.
Here's an equation that describes the relationship between technology, terrorism and your privacy and freedom as you now know it.
loss of freedom . = the number of people they can do those bad things to ^ (the level of badness they can achieve ) / number of people needed to achieve bad things
So for instance,
virus writer:
number of bad people =1
number of people hurt =10,000,000
level of badness = inconvenience and some money
result- lose just a little freedom
Kazsinski:
number of bad people =1
number of people hurt =10
level of badness = death, dismemberment
result: lose no freedom
9-11 hijackers
number of bad people =19
number of people hurt =3000
level of badness = death
result - lose a lot of freedom
WWII
number of bad people = 18 million
number of people hurt = 60 million
level of badness = death
result - no permanent loss of freedom
So what we see is the three numbers interact strongly and it really takes all three approaching their bad poles for things to really change.
But that's where we're headed now.
Nothing that we've constructed either in law or human conduct or organizing principles for society has prepared us for this.
We have to expect that everything will be and somewhere right now, on paper at least, is being tried.
You don't like it when the phone companies turn over your records to the FBI , but that's the LEAST of what you have to get used to in the face of what progress in technology is going to deliver to your door. All private companies help the intelligence agencies any way they can because the key players understand what's happening. They understand the above even if not explicitly. It's not about enslaving hapless masses; it's about survival and how we're going to be able to achieve that as those three number race towards their respective poles.
No one wanted this, it's no one's fault and no one really knows what to do. Keep that in mind when you're reading tomorrow's headlines. We never evolve to wield the capabilities we are acquiring. It's no one's fault.
Really I only see one way out of this, and you're not going to like it any better than you like any other part of this. We need to genetically engineer people so they don't want to do bad things. We need to genetically engineer people so they are much less greedy, much less anti-social, much less religious, much less concerned with acquiring positions in dominance hierarchies for the purpose of monopolizing resources and access to female reproductive rights. That's what drives most of the world's badness now and throughout history. It's really just that simple.
Our genes evolved to compete fiercely for those limited resources - food, shelter, power and s
Look, the bottom line is this. The basis of civilization is not IP or economics or even freedom of speech or civil rights or even basic personal freedom. The basis of civilization is survival.
Anything that threatens survival, like society's inability to move to sustainable solutions, of which this clown and his organization are a part, is going to die. There is no other way to put that.
. No person, organization , politician, ruler or nation can- where "can" means "is able", and not "should" - put themselves and their individual greed above our collective need to go on living.Society and the legitimate governments they form will kill them to defend themselves and insure their continued survival.
There are effectively now two kinds of people in the world - those that get it, get where we are as a species in history, and those like this fucking grunting pig, who don't.
He shouldn't be worrying about whether his slice bread is going to be larded to his liking; he should be expending his ingenuity to find new ways to disseminate sustainable practices, know-how and technology as widely as possible to everyone everywhere and doing everything he possibly can to avert the ecological disaster that is now hurtling towards our fragile, inter-dependent world.
The age of greed, exploitation, despoilation and fuck-youism is over. Those who try to maintain that mindset in the face of an increasing desperate populace will get what's coming to them courtesy of the duly elected governments of the world.
And I don't care that the company he's now the CEO of works closely with the CIA to achieve needed energy security in the face of unpredictable geopolitical events. The executives of energy companies could perform that useful and patriotic function and at the same time not act as agents of denialism.
If this individual can't perform both of those functions , then someone else who is able both can and will be found.
Let's clear up a few misconceptions. One, if you work closely with US intelligence agencies then you have a free pass to do as you want in this world.
This is false. Ask Saddam Hussein. Ask Assad. Ask Mubarak. The US will work with despots, dictators, mass murderers and anyone else we need to in order to secure the national security of the United States of America and when the benefit of working with those people ends, so does the relationship, and a new relationship is defined, one that can end with the mass murderer and despot in jail or executed.
Another misconception is that a terrorist is someone who thinks of himself as a terrorist. The fact, most homegrown terrorists think of themselves as patriots, engaged in justly defending their version of reality from outside aggression. This was certainly true of alWalaki, McVeigh and the Unabomber.
It doesn't matter how you think of yourself, what matters is what actions you take. You cannot create a weaponized virus for any reason whatsoever and not be a terrorist. You cannot advocate, as alWalaki did, for the extra-judicial deaths of Americans for any reason and not be a terrorist. Similarly, you cannot act to deceive the public that a building is not on fire when it is and attempt to dissuade the fire department from going to the scene. You cannot act as a liar and a saboteur against the national security of the United States of America whether you think you're lying or not.
In this context, lying is not defined by your personal opinion of the veracity of your statements nor even by your intentions. Lying is defined as speaking contrary to an objective reality which impinges materially on the national security of the United States.
Sorry to have to tighten that definition up beyond what you feel comfortable with, but in the real world with one-way, one-time, permanent consequences which this nation will bear into all eternity, we really don't have time, interest or even much sympathy for "what you feel in your heart of hearts".
Whatever he believes in his "heart of hearts" is irrelevant to whether or not he poses a clear and present danger to the long term national security of the United States of America. He should be taken out just like any other terrorist- through whatever means are least disruptive and most conducive to the United States securing it's long term national interests.
I get these guys. They work with people from the CIA et. al. and as a consequence develop a delusion that they are somehow more or less permanently immune from being considered unpatriotic or a threat to national security. Just because your company's short term interests lined up with our nation's short term interest doesn't mean our nation's long term interest are not also in direct opposition to your company's long term interest as is almost certainly the case with ExxonMobil when it falls under the direction of deniers and minimizers who seek to through their deeds and words to forestall necessary action on climate change. Such people and the companies they direct can and will be treated as a the national security threat they compose.
Take him out. Let him find a job with the Heartland Institute. Leave him to his fate. He had a choice in life and he made it. Let him bear the responsibility for the choices he made.
I trust Google not to design in features that make it hard for me to leave, lie to me about how many CPU cycles or I/O I "spent" and just basically rip me off as much as they possibly can
It was obvious for Roberts that if he struck it down, the Democrats would only come back later and make it socialized medicine through taxation - a single payer system- which is obviously legal.. the government "forces you" to "buy" roads all the time.
Single payer is what nearly every other advanced nation has and the reason why their health care costs are less expensive, cover more people and have better outcomes. Sorry, it's just true.
You have only to study the following graphs for a moment to get at the truth: our healthcare system is a kind of social welfare programme for multinationals who leverage the hell out of our refusal to regulate their cost structures.
You're the CEO or sit on the board of say, United . Do you want your customers collectively spending 10% of their nation's GDP (like everyone else) or do you want them spending 16% of GDP? Because your companies income and thus your salary is directly tied to how big that number is.
In the charts on the linked page, the US is conveniently colored orange, or just look for the outlier that is 16-50% away again in which ever direction represents WORSE from the rest of the countries, who all pretty much cluster together together for virtually any given statistic .
The for profit health care system we have is a kind of structural violence where the perpetrators are not easily personally identified and whose everyday-ness ( I regret to inform you that your (life saving) bone marrow transplant has been turned down... ) makes it seem as though literally lethal violence, is not being committed by those in the corporate hierarchy against people who are unable to compete with the campaign contributions those corporate giants can muster. .
This is not a hypothetical. Here's exactly how that violence works:
I dislike such also, however, I think this post pretty well settles which side of the "what do they mean, what does it really say" argument once and for all.
And I will pay more too, as a self conscious act of affirming the long term importance of having a profitable manufacturing base in the US.
We all buy China junk, myself included. If I could buy all Made IN America at three times the price of Slave Labor in China, would I only buy Made in America? Probably not because, like solar panels, buying ONLY Made In America is a political statement I literally can't afford to make ALL the time as of right now. But will I buy what amounts to fun cool stuff like tablets and audio gadgets for 300 instead of 100? Oh hell yeah I will.
Yeah what you originally said was paper money was fake money , that's what you said, in fact here it is:
with things like the Federal reserve with its fake money spigot, fake interest rates, fake insurance by gov't (like FDIC, FHA, SS, Medicare, etc.
and then you said it here:
- a system based on non-existing reserves and fake money.
Then I pointed out that gold and paper money are both only worth something because people agree to treat it as valuable, and for no other reason; they're both "fake" abstractions.
Then you tried to defend gold as "not fake" by rooting around in a sewer and tossing up some totally irrelevant facts about gold each and everyone one of which had no bearing on the fact that the value people attach to gold is, 100%, an abstract fiction, just like money.
Thus from you:
Gold is a real resource, not printed by men, and
it's scarce enough to be mostly inflation neutral,
and
it requires actual work to be done in order to be extracted, and thus there is work attached to its value.
and
Gold is not subject to human desire to print it,
and
it is non-volatile,
and
it's safe to handle,
and
not a gas,
and not radioactive,
and not poisonous,
and not explosive,
and easy to melt down, turn into bars, coins, any small parts.
and It can be stored for long periods of time, retrieved, and it is still unchanged.
and It is easily recognised,
and it's easy to test,
and
it's universally desired.
none of which, except the last one has any bearing on anything at all about why people are willing to treat it as money , and the last one is merely a circular reference to the fact that people are agreed to treat it like money, which is why they want it.
Finally you try this:
.. gold is valuable because HISTORY shows that it is valuable.
Which is not a different way of saying that gold is valuable because people have agreed to the fiction that it's valuable for a long time now....
So in fact, after dragging our poor readers on through very many posts, (if we have any readers left) you punish our stalwart readers by plopping them down only where we all started from. which is the great fact that the value of gold is nothing more than an abstract idea which people have agreed to.
Just like the value of paper money.
See, the foundational beliefs which supposedly animate you are completely vacuous and void of any real point. You rail against "fake money" over and over without ever realizing that gold is as fake as anything and in fact the very concept of money is fake fake fake to its very core as is the concept that your life or your freedom have any intrinsic value.
In fact, throughout most of history, which . you yourself have attempted to make the final arbitrator of what is "real", your precious "freedom" did not exist for the vast vast vast vast majority of people and their lives were essentially worthless to the very few who called the shots, who took said lives on a whim.
The law of the jungle, which according to history is what's "real" , is not something to be longing after.
So this is just another contradiction you have in your libertarian "thinking"- that "what's real" is what history tells us is real.
The things history actually counts as "real": slavery, the worthlessness of individual liberty and rights , are exactly what you ALSO say you're against.
Society is based on a series of very "fake" things and the "faker" they get, the better all our lives become.
So where are we? Well we've exposed the obsession that "goobmint hatin' ", culturally and philosophically retarded libertarians have about gold is self-contradictory at its very core and also that your love of "what history teaches
1. Gold is a real resource, not printed by men, it's scarce enough to be mostly inflation neutral, it requires actual work to be done in order to be extracted, and thus there is work attached to its value.
Sneer. Although abundance can make something less valuable, scarcity does not make something valuable unless people want it. Neither does the work it takes to get it make it valuable. So you have really yet to tell me why, beyond an implicit agreement that people WILL treat it as a store of value, why it is valuable to the average person. Maybe you have another idea. I am interested in that idea, but actually, I don't think you do. Gold is valuable because its value is an agreed upon lie and that is why it has always been valuable.
When Cortez went crazy for the stuff in Mexico and started killing everyone in sight for it, the Aztecs couldn't grasp what it was all about.. sure it was pretty and desirable and all but it had no superlative value to them the way it did to the Europeans. That's because the Europeans had discovered something abstract- that something not too abundant can serve as a store of value that is independent of its "real" value. That's what money is, and that's also why we fight counterfeiters BTW.
It has intrinsic properties that make it a good store of value - people always exchange for it.
From the above, we can conclude that you apparently are not familiar with the idea of "circular logic".
- it's history, it's not a theory that comes out of sitting in a closet, thinking about how the world should work. That's how the Krugmans of the world operate. Austrian school of thought operates on understanding history and human behaviour, and we have plenty of examples to look at and everywhere we look, we see that it is a real world model.
That's what every Marxist says. You're no different Here's a clue- history is not an experiment. It's a one time unrepeatable complex set series of events all of which effect each other and whose causality is not determinable. So you can draw whatever lesson from history you want, and you still haven't done even one second of science and your conclusions are no more valid than the conclusions of the people who read history the opposite way as you and draw the opposite conclusions.
All that infrastructure built by private interests, simply because they wanted to make a buck. Today China is the best approximation to that type of economy
I love it. China is a state run communist command economy where factories get built where and when the Party says they will.
As far as talking to you goes, I am curious to talk to people I consider to be extreme because I am curious about their thinking processes. So I talk to you to elicit responses to questions which highlight the bugs in your thinking.
For instance, you've done nothing whatsoever , I mean zero, to defend the idea that gold has some intrinsic value beyond people's willingness to treat it as though it were valuable, just like paper money . You've said a lot about the wonderful properties of gold and related to everything but the kitchen sink and all this but you've failed to rebut in any way at all the point I made. The answer is , gold is valuable only because people agree to treat it as valuable. It's value is an agreed upon, highly useful lie, like other abstract things such as your rights.
Now the question is, can you see that you've failed to defend this idea or are you blind to it? That's what's interesting.
When people run up against a contradiction in their thinking , in the set of ideas they hold, and blink past it or just deny it- even though they could see it if they wanted to, then that is interesting and it's interesting to watch the mechanisms they use to do it with. You intellectualize your failure and pull what I call a Wall Of Words.. you're
OK so what is non-fake about the value of gold beyond the willingness of people to treat it as valuable? Because that's what money has going for it to. Both are abstract forms of value, so why is gold real and money fake?
The answer you're giving me as to how you know these things is.... you have a theory!!!! Your theory involves this and that and it makes sense to you,and that's how you know.
Do you understand the difference in the validity of knowledge derived from a theory and that arrived at by an empirical experiment that gives you a result? The last one is a valid form of gaining knowledge, the former is what Scholastics did during the Middle Ages and it produces NO knowledge about reality whatsoever, at best it produces only more or less self consistent didactically-based (or so they thought) Theories Of Everything. That is the meaning of Ivory Tower thinking and it's worthless.
Once you want to start arguing about gas prices, you're just citing the merest correlation of multicausal events. In fact, correlation is not causation and presenting a correlation as a manifestation of the workings of empty didactic theorizing does not bring that correlation one inch closer to causation
You know how so many of the world's problems are caused by people who don't know how to reason? I'm sure you do. Yeah, you're one of those people.
Help me out here. What do you think stops the consolidation of corporate power? What do you think stops banks from getting too big to fail and monopolies from forming ?
The problem is it's not their money, its their investor's money because we deregulated the banks from having to separate investing from savings.
We permitted AIG to say that their derivatives were not a form of insurance and thus evade the regulation which exists to insure that insurers are themselves good for the debts under all circumstances. This was clearly a situation where AIG should have been regulated but they gamed the system to get out of it.
So you want to do away with taxes also? So no CDC for you!
Do you know what life was like under the feudal lords in Europe? Do you have any idea about that time in history at all?
Slashdot Mirror
Cheering on the activities of a company which comport with their stated purpose is not fanboi-ism especially since they could could have, but chose not to, go the ATT / Comcast / Verizon route and benefit themselves to a greater extent by withdrawing the benefit from others.
Some people are just haters, that's all. You're nothing special, clever or even insightful.
Oh and just for good measure, this:
http://act.350.org/signup/reckoning/?akid=2086.624457.CWuv92&rd=1&t=2
Here's the analogy. We're all on a ship in the ocean. Engineering below has alerted the captain that we're definitely headed for an iceberg. The rich people who are partying on the ship don't want the party to stop.
Since they're the Big Money on board and have the Big Connections , they have outsized say in what the captain decides to do. They shout down the engineers, accusing them of being jealous of the first class passengers.
The rest of the passengers are worried but unable to get captain to change course.
After a while, engineering gets more and more agitated and the passengers can see the panic in their faces. The first class passengers become more even recalcitrant and adamant because now it's a matter of pride.
The rest of the passengers start quietly meeting amongst themselves, talking in low voices, moving about the ship in small groups.
You guess how this movie finishes.
OK times up. It finishes with a lot of well heeled people floating lifelessly in the frigid waters as the ship veers safely past the iceberg with the passengers on board, safe and going home to their loved ones.
No one is going to let deniers crash this ship and kill everyone on board. There comes a time when no one cares what your "rights" are or if SCOTUS has decided that money is speech or even what fucking SCOTUS says. Civilization at its core isn't based on "civil rights" or "free speech" or SCOTUS decisions. We got by without any of that shit for a few, ten thousand years. It's based on survival. Anyone who threatens survival will find themselves outside of the laws of civilization pretty fucking fast.
The Constitution is not a suicide pact. If you make people fight for their survival, if you're identified as one of the deniers who drove civilization to the brink of extinction you can pretty well plan on dying a pretty fucking barbaric death, possibly involving blow torches and such like medieval -level implements of torture . It's nothing I'd wish on anyone, but moderate, peace loving, live and let live liberal bunny people like me aren't going to be able to hold back revenge seekers very well. Prominent personalities deeply involved with denialism may want to take pause here.
My colleagues think we should spare you from the full horror of what's going to happen when, say, the food web in the ocean begins to collapse. They think that because they think by building bridges we can eventually bring you along, but if we paint the full picture of what the future will bring to your flesh, you'll fucking tighten up, become defensive and go full off into denialand and "stand your ground" until the bitter end.
I have another perspective. I think by explicitly laying out for you likely or possible scenarios and what part you'll play in them your brain will start to work in favor of your own survival despite your pansified, airy-fairy post-modernist "you have your experts and I have mine, you have your reality and I have mine" bullshit you learned from cocksucking FoxNews.
Don't think your money or guns or survivalist skills are going to count for jack fucking shit when the world's intelligence agencies collectively decide that you're a clear and present danger to humanity and bring to the party everything in their labs and the kitchen sink to make sure that your dealt with. That's how this is going to go down in the end because you know what? The Constitution is not a suicide pact.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2012/05/climate-weather-warmest-year-on-record-/1
so I guess people who were motivated by their political ideology to minimize the temperature are what's known as reality-deny fanatics.
Yeah, that's pretty much all there is to say on that topic.
http://www.manufacturing.net/blogs/2012/07/google-made-in-the-usa
http://www.google.org/
http://www.google.com/landing/givesback/2011/
but the point requires an adult mind to bring adult judgement to a real world situation which is not black and white- something you're just not cut for apparently. Comcast and Verizon and ATT have REPEATEDLY shown themselves to be rapacious ,exploitative and dishonest. If Google wants to protect NN by laying down fiber and bypassing that group of assholes then I say bully for them and more power to them. You have to be a bigger cynic than I am to just make blanket statements based on one or two selected data points. Sometimes in a war both sides do very bad things, but that doesn't make both sides morally equivalent. Sometimes when you fight a war you have to give a go at engaging Communist China, or save big money the way your competitors are doing , or do something else unsavory That's life in war time. But the real question is not answered by those bad actions unless like ATT and Comcast and Verizon they become so persistent and pervasive that they have, in fact, turned evil. The real question we're trying to get at is "what's in their heads? Where are they trying to get to by doing this?" That is effectively the state in a hidden Markov model and we can only approximate and build more or less good models to try to get at it . My HMM tells me that Google is acting in accordance with their value system in seeking to lay down fiber and establish NN once and for all.
Sorry, but you can't separate me from my well honed capacity to form accurate judgments about the world and people in it by flinging some sophomoric "et tu" feces at me like an angry little monkey.
What's wrong with that is we know what it results in- only the rich having significant access to the media.
This is EXACTLY what we had in broadcast TV- the price of reaching an audience was open to everyone- everyone rich that is.
Right now I can present my website and fill it with all the stuff I want and I can get slashdotted and be the envy of everyone at FoxNews. If we change it so that I can only afford a pipeline that is the equivalent of public access TV, then we're back to square one WRT the democratization of speech.
That's what's wrong with that.
Take policing. These past years, the effects of the systematic professionalization of policing - including psychological testing, requirements for a bachelor degree, extensive background checks has moved us far away from what we had in the 60s when anti-war protests devolved into what amounted to class warfare between college kids and working class policemen. Further back in history the police WERE the criminal gangs that needed to be paid off etc etc.
Even greater effort is applied to excluding sociopaths from the intelligence services since it's been proven over time sociopaths simply can't be trusted under any circumstances. Good luck getting through the CIA's vetting process if you're a sociopath.
Sure , if we permit corporations to operate as what amounts to independent pirate ships then a sociopath has a green field of opportunity before him. But if we come to expect more of corporations then things can change. People carry around with them the unconscious and unexamined idea that privately held corporations are somehow unaccountable to society in their hiring and advancement processes and quite frankly, why should that be so? Corporations are a type of privilege which is ultimately a fiction of law and therefore subject to law. We clearly have a problem with the people in power positions within corporations and apparently they can't be relied upon to self-police.
Anyone who claims we don't have a problem that impinges on society apparently wasn't around in 2008. LIBOR-gate is just more of the same.
With better and better brain imaging abilities coming online yearly, chronic liars and conscienceless predators will soon enough no longer be able to hide behind their smiles, nice suits and easy manner. We have every right and in fact duty to apply relevant science to process of assuming positions of power in society. Tough shit to anyone who doesn't like it.
There is a sense in which corporations are forced to follow the worst of their lot down a bad road. The reason for this is because too many in Congress wont' close loopholes . The reason for that is because they need rich asshole's money to stay in office. The reason for that is because we don't have publicly funded elections. The reason for that is because that's "socialism" according to SCOTUS and a large number of the posters on this board.
The definition of fanaticism is continuing to follow your agenda even as it leads you off a clearly visible cliff.
I come to that conclusion because 1) I am in that environment and I can see the system working to reward sociopaths and 2) beyond my personal experience, I have the shared experience of friends and 3rd parties accounts. It's really not a piece of introspection, but thanks for the hate.
It's true that corporations are inherently sociopathic (and now in control of our elections thanks to SCOTUS) but don't think in Manichean terms, the world or something in it as purely good or evil,. because it's beneath you; you're smarter than that.
Not every corporation is compelled to interpret "maximizing shareholder value" in the crassest, most short sighted way and many don't. Google can easily make the case that net neutrality is in the long term best interests of the company. In fact, doing the morally right thing can always be cleverly framed as such, just as doing the wrong thing is currently framed as such.
Google (whom I do not work for) does seem to me to be a company apart. When people were trying to get corporations to divest from South Africa, it became apparent to them that some corporations were already doing the right thing. Reagan's "constructive engagement" from that time was just the opposite- an excuse to do the wrong thing. Corporations have the power to make moral choices in this world, don't let them kid you their hands are tied.
Google have pretty much lived up to the "don't be evil" slogan, a bout of WIFI panty-sniffing excepted .
Our job is not just to call them out when we see them but also to see them clearly as they really are. Comcast and Verizon and ATT are purely evil in that they want only money and the larger society can go fuck itself. They have no sense of civic duty nor do they care about the fate of this nation or its peoples , except as a PR move. I'd pay double what I pay now for broadband service from Google just to give them a healthy profit from which to expand. I'd treat it as a form of civic obligation and a kind charitable giving and investment in my own and everyone else's future.
Go Google go.
Yeah this supposes that everyone in the world puts money above all other values. In reality, that only describes a subset of humanity. If it described everyone then every opportunity to commit a financially advantageous criminal act would be taken by everyone every chance they got.
The reason civilization holds together isn't because we pass laws and intimidate people into obeying them. The reason civilization holds together is because most people want to live within the boundaries society sets. In fact, the generalized will of the people is where those boundaries came from in the first place. Even draconic enforcement just couldn't coerce a population into overcoming impulses that assail them every hour of every day.
What we have in America and elsewhere is a economic system which fails to punish sociopathy early on. In fact, it does just the opposite, it rewards it differentially with career advancement. The people at the top ARE different- they're worse, much worse, than the average person.
I heard some woman talking on BBC a couple nights ago about how the CEOs involed in the LIBOR scandal are really no better or worse than you or I, they just have bigger opportunities. That is exactly wrong. The bigger the potential to wreak damage on larger numbers of people,. the MORE earnest and conscientious the average person becomes with dispatching his or her duties. That's called "having a conscience"
Of course from a sociobiological point of view, we can forgive her for talking this way. Having been selected as a commentator on the behaviour of the executives of banks means she has had and likely continues to have some opportunities for socializing with them. So of course she's going to use this interview as an opportunity to signal her willingness and availability for copulation with the powerful males in her tribe. Still, if anything other than her limbic system had had control of her mouth and behaviour, any of the above facts might have popped into her head and resulted in a smarter and more insightful interview.
Not everyone is a sociopath and consequently not everyone prioritizes the accumulation of personal wealth above all other values. I count the execs at Google amongst the more morally normal people in business.
Gold is an abstract store of value just like paper money. The only reason it's worth anything isn't because it's rare or inherently valuable, but because people agree through fiat to treat it as an abstract store of value.
The problem with gold or anything similar is that it's deflationary, that is, it's value goes up as more of the world's people assume first world jobs and living standards.
The problem with deflation is that it makes it impossible to be a lender- you're always paid back in something worth less than you loaned.
The reason we went off the gold standard is because it's a fundamentally low-IQ, stupid (barbaric I think is the word that was used at the time) way of establishing a currency. With paper money, we can adjust the monetary supply to better accord with the dynamic economic conditions of the real world.
Notice in the above I didn't call paper money "fiat money", because gold is also "fiat money" as is every type of abstract store of value whose worth derives only from an agreed-upon lie amongst participants.
Paper money no more or less "fake" than the boostrap system that gets your OS going. Something unique has to stand outside the system and be the originating source of rules by which everything else has enjoined to play. The primordial bootstrap system does NOT play by the rules of the OS and is not constrained by those rules. It's a one time only deviation from those yet-to-be-loaded rules which serves a useful function. From the OS's POV, it's an arbitrary act of fiat that makes no sense and is "illegal". But the result is useful- it loads the OS which then establishes the rules by which all program agree to play so we can do useful computing. The Fed and its actions and its ability to make money is the bootstrap. The monetary system and the laws that Congress passes that define it are the rules of the game. The economic players in the economy who abide by those rules and treat them as "real" - accepting paper money as a store of value being chief amongst them- are the programs and the useful work that gets done is the economy as a whole.
We need the "fiat" rules. We need the players to play by the rules and we need a bootstrap system that is "fake" from the POV of the rest of the system to get it all started.
For the absolute physical literalist, only food clothing and shelter broadly construed to include physical protection of all forms is "worth" anything. We have a name for those people- survivalists.
Gold and silver bugs and Ron Paulites are really just survivalists once removed, that's all.
The amusing thing is, survivalists are capable of nothing like survival. The reality is that if civilization and the economy melt down, no one is going to survive. We have created all kinds of things that if left unattended by humans will be released, melt down or otherwise escape which will poison / kill . render uninhabitable most everything and everywhere. Viruses in defense labs, radioactivity in all kinds of settings, super-toxins, super-explosives, diseases etc etc etc , not to mention what life is like without modern medicine even in more benign environmental conditions . We are absolutely and irretrievably wedded to modernity and technology and the continuance and progression thereof however unsuited some literalist subculture of society may be to that reality. We are all of us all in and there's nothing that's going to change that fact.
Taxes are not criminal, by definition of "law".
Every aspect of life is now theoretically weaponizable. The fact is that the number of people it takes to do very big damage to large numbers of people is trending down, has been trending down for centuries and will continue to trend down ever more rapidly.
Basically your freedom and privacy are inversely proportional to the number of people it takes to hurt large number of people in very bad ways. At one end of that scale is the lone nut with a doomsday weapon. In that world, your freedom and privacy go to zero because society will not permit that lone nut to act unobserved.
Getting more realistic doesn't really bring much comfort. A few people working to weaponize some bacterium in some way is not much better. Now we need to watch everyone who orders X from company Y (or worse , didn't) or who went to grad school for major Z (or worse, didn't) .
If you look at Ted Kaszinsky , he already understood that to hide his tracks, he had to make his own shit from everyday things found just everywhere. It's not like this type is so crazy they can't think straight and plan.
Here's an equation that describes the relationship between technology, terrorism and your privacy and freedom as you now know it.
loss of freedom . = the number of people they can do those bad things to ^ (the level of badness they can achieve ) / number of people needed to achieve bad things
So for instance,
virus writer:
number of bad people =1
number of people hurt =10,000,000
level of badness = inconvenience and some money
result- lose just a little freedom
Kazsinski:
number of bad people =1
number of people hurt =10
level of badness = death, dismemberment
result: lose no freedom
9-11 hijackers
number of bad people =19
number of people hurt =3000
level of badness = death
result - lose a lot of freedom
WWII
number of bad people = 18 million
number of people hurt = 60 million
level of badness = death
result - no permanent loss of freedom
So what we see is the three numbers interact strongly and it really takes all three approaching their bad poles for things to really change.
But that's where we're headed now.
Nothing that we've constructed either in law or human conduct or organizing principles for society has prepared us for this.
We have to expect that everything will be and somewhere right now, on paper at least, is being tried.
You don't like it when the phone companies turn over your records to the FBI , but that's the LEAST of what you have to get used to in the face of what progress in technology is going to deliver to your door. All private companies help the intelligence agencies any way they can because the key players understand what's happening. They understand the above even if not explicitly. It's not about enslaving hapless masses; it's about survival and how we're going to be able to achieve that as those three number race towards their respective poles.
No one wanted this, it's no one's fault and no one really knows what to do. Keep that in mind when you're reading tomorrow's headlines. We never evolve to wield the capabilities we are acquiring. It's no one's fault.
Really I only see one way out of this, and you're not going to like it any better than you like any other part of this. We need to genetically engineer people so they don't want to do bad things. We need to genetically engineer people so they are much less greedy, much less anti-social, much less religious, much less concerned with acquiring positions in dominance hierarchies for the purpose of monopolizing resources and access to female reproductive rights. That's what drives most of the world's badness now and throughout history. It's really just that simple.
Our genes evolved to compete fiercely for those limited resources - food, shelter, power and s
Look, the bottom line is this. The basis of civilization is not IP or economics or even freedom of speech or civil rights or even basic personal freedom. The basis of civilization is survival.
Anything that threatens survival, like society's inability to move to sustainable solutions, of which this clown and his organization are a part, is going to die. There is no other way to put that.
. No person, organization , politician, ruler or nation can- where "can" means "is able", and not "should" - put themselves and their individual greed above our collective need to go on living.Society and the legitimate governments they form will kill them to defend themselves and insure their continued survival.
There are effectively now two kinds of people in the world - those that get it, get where we are as a species in history, and those like this fucking grunting pig, who don't.
He shouldn't be worrying about whether his slice bread is going to be larded to his liking; he should be expending his ingenuity to find new ways to disseminate sustainable practices, know-how and technology as widely as possible to everyone everywhere and doing everything he possibly can to avert the ecological disaster that is now hurtling towards our fragile, inter-dependent world.
The age of greed, exploitation, despoilation and fuck-youism is over. Those who try to maintain that mindset in the face of an increasing desperate populace will get what's coming to them courtesy of the duly elected governments of the world.
And I don't care that the company he's now the CEO of works closely with the CIA to achieve needed energy security in the face of unpredictable geopolitical events. The executives of energy companies could perform that useful and patriotic function and at the same time not act as agents of denialism.
If this individual can't perform both of those functions , then someone else who is able both can and will be found.
Let's clear up a few misconceptions. One, if you work closely with US intelligence agencies then you have a free pass to do as you want in this world.
This is false. Ask Saddam Hussein. Ask Assad. Ask Mubarak. The US will work with despots, dictators, mass murderers and anyone else we need to in order to secure the national security of the United States of America and when the benefit of working with those people ends, so does the relationship, and a new relationship is defined, one that can end with the mass murderer and despot in jail or executed.
Another misconception is that a terrorist is someone who thinks of himself as a terrorist. The fact, most homegrown terrorists think of themselves as patriots, engaged in justly defending their version of reality from outside aggression. This was certainly true of alWalaki, McVeigh and the Unabomber.
It doesn't matter how you think of yourself, what matters is what actions you take. You cannot create a weaponized virus for any reason whatsoever and not be a terrorist. You cannot advocate, as alWalaki did, for the extra-judicial deaths of Americans for any reason and not be a terrorist. Similarly, you cannot act to deceive the public that a building is not on fire when it is and attempt to dissuade the fire department from going to the scene. You cannot act as a liar and a saboteur against the national security of the United States of America whether you think you're lying or not.
In this context, lying is not defined by your personal opinion of the veracity of your statements nor even by your intentions. Lying is defined as speaking contrary to an objective reality which impinges materially on the national security of the United States.
Sorry to have to tighten that definition up beyond what you feel comfortable with, but in the real world with one-way, one-time, permanent consequences which this nation will bear into all eternity, we really don't have time, interest or even much sympathy for "what you feel in your heart of hearts".
Whatever he believes in his "heart of hearts" is irrelevant to whether or not he poses a clear and present danger to the long term national security of the United States of America. He should be taken out just like any other terrorist- through whatever means are least disruptive and most conducive to the United States securing it's long term national interests.
I get these guys. They work with people from the CIA et. al. and as a consequence develop a delusion that they are somehow more or less permanently immune from being considered unpatriotic or a threat to national security. Just because your company's short term interests lined up with our nation's short term interest doesn't mean our nation's long term interest are not also in direct opposition to your company's long term interest as is almost certainly the case with ExxonMobil when it falls under the direction of deniers and minimizers who seek to through their deeds and words to forestall necessary action on climate change. Such people and the companies they direct can and will be treated as a the national security threat they compose.
Take him out. Let him find a job with the Heartland Institute. Leave him to his fate. He had a choice in life and he made it. Let him bear the responsibility for the choices he made.
I trust Google not to design in features that make it hard for me to leave, lie to me about how many CPU cycles or I/O I "spent" and just basically rip me off as much as they possibly can
http://blog.carlmercier.com/2012/01/05/ec2-is-basically-one-big-ripoff/
This is where founders matter. My idea of Google is geeks for the greater good of geekdom to the benefit of the long term good of society as a whole
Amazon fonder, CEO and billionaire many times over Jeff Bezeos "feared pirate Bezeos"
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2395122,00.asp
fought tooth and nail against Washington State establishing a state income tax so as to maximize his chest o' gold..
Go Google, the closest thing we have to a company who gives a shit about something other than more nose candy and ho's for the board and CEO.
Graphs accidentally left out of above post post
http://www.kff.org/insurance/snapshot/oecd042111.cfm
Single payer is what nearly every other advanced nation has and the reason why their health care costs are less expensive, cover more people and have better outcomes. Sorry, it's just true.
You have only to study the following graphs for a moment to get at the truth: our healthcare system is a kind of social welfare programme for multinationals who leverage the hell out of our refusal to regulate their cost structures.
You're the CEO or sit on the board of say, United . Do you want your customers collectively spending 10% of their nation's GDP (like everyone else) or do you want them spending 16% of GDP? Because your companies income and thus your salary is directly tied to how big that number is.
In the charts on the linked page, the US is conveniently colored orange, or just look for the outlier that is 16-50% away again in which ever direction represents WORSE from the rest of the countries, who all pretty much cluster together together for virtually any given statistic .
The for profit health care system we have is a kind of structural violence where the perpetrators are not easily personally identified and whose everyday-ness ( I regret to inform you that your (life saving) bone marrow transplant has been turned down ... ) makes it seem as though literally lethal violence, is not being committed by those in the corporate hierarchy against people who are unable to compete with the campaign contributions those corporate giants can muster. .
This is not a hypothetical. Here's exactly how that violence works:
http://crooksandliars.com/nicole-belle/bill-moyers-journal-cigna-chief-admit
I dislike such also, however, I think this post pretty well settles which side of the "what do they mean, what does it really say" argument once and for all.
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2945547&cid=40487955
Hat tip to the poster of the above comment who did the leg work needed to get to the truth. I can't think of a thing to add.
And I will pay more too, as a self conscious act of affirming the long term importance of having a profitable manufacturing base in the US.
We all buy China junk, myself included. If I could buy all Made IN America at three times the price of Slave Labor in China, would I only buy Made in America? Probably not because, like solar panels, buying ONLY Made In America is a political statement I literally can't afford to make ALL the time as of right now. But will I buy what amounts to fun cool stuff like tablets and audio gadgets for 300 instead of 100? Oh hell yeah I will.
Yeah what you originally said was paper money was fake money , that's what you said, in fact here it is:
with things like the Federal reserve with its fake money spigot, fake interest rates, fake insurance by gov't (like FDIC, FHA, SS, Medicare, etc.
and then you said it here:
- a system based on non-existing reserves and fake money.
Then I pointed out that gold and paper money are both only worth something because people agree to treat it as valuable, and for no other reason; they're both "fake" abstractions.
Then you tried to defend gold as "not fake" by rooting around in a sewer and tossing up some totally irrelevant facts about gold each and everyone one of which had no bearing on the fact that the value people attach to gold is, 100%, an abstract fiction, just like money.
Thus from you: Gold is a real resource, not printed by men, and it's scarce enough to be mostly inflation neutral, and it requires actual work to be done in order to be extracted, and thus there is work attached to its value. and Gold is not subject to human desire to print it, and it is non-volatile, and it's safe to handle, and not a gas, and not radioactive, and not poisonous, and not explosive, and easy to melt down, turn into bars, coins, any small parts. and It can be stored for long periods of time, retrieved, and it is still unchanged. and It is easily recognised, and it's easy to test, and it's universally desired.
none of which, except the last one has any bearing on anything at all about why people are willing to treat it as money , and the last one is merely a circular reference to the fact that people are agreed to treat it like money, which is why they want it.
Finally you try this:
Which is not a different way of saying that gold is valuable because people have agreed to the fiction that it's valuable for a long time now....
So in fact, after dragging our poor readers on through very many posts, (if we have any readers left) you punish our stalwart readers by plopping them down only where we all started from. which is the great fact that the value of gold is nothing more than an abstract idea which people have agreed to.
Just like the value of paper money.
See, the foundational beliefs which supposedly animate you are completely vacuous and void of any real point. You rail against "fake money" over and over without ever realizing that gold is as fake as anything and in fact the very concept of money is fake fake fake to its very core as is the concept that your life or your freedom have any intrinsic value.
In fact, throughout most of history, which . you yourself have attempted to make the final arbitrator of what is "real", your precious "freedom" did not exist for the vast vast vast vast majority of people and their lives were essentially worthless to the very few who called the shots, who took said lives on a whim.
The law of the jungle, which according to history is what's "real" , is not something to be longing after.
So this is just another contradiction you have in your libertarian "thinking"- that "what's real" is what history tells us is real.
The things history actually counts as "real": slavery, the worthlessness of individual liberty and rights , are exactly what you ALSO say you're against.
Society is based on a series of very "fake" things and the "faker" they get, the better all our lives become.
So where are we? Well we've exposed the obsession that "goobmint hatin' ", culturally and philosophically retarded libertarians have about gold is self-contradictory at its very core and also that your love of "what history teaches
1. Gold is a real resource, not printed by men, it's scarce enough to be mostly inflation neutral, it requires actual work to be done in order to be extracted, and thus there is work attached to its value.
Sneer. Although abundance can make something less valuable, scarcity does not make something valuable unless people want it. Neither does the work it takes to get it make it valuable. So you have really yet to tell me why, beyond an implicit agreement that people WILL treat it as a store of value, why it is valuable to the average person. Maybe you have another idea. I am interested in that idea, but actually, I don't think you do. Gold is valuable because its value is an agreed upon lie and that is why it has always been valuable.
When Cortez went crazy for the stuff in Mexico and started killing everyone in sight for it, the Aztecs couldn't grasp what it was all about .. sure it was pretty and desirable and all but it had no superlative value to them the way it did to the Europeans. That's because the Europeans had discovered something abstract- that something not too abundant can serve as a store of value that is independent of its "real" value. That's what money is, and that's also why we fight counterfeiters BTW.
It has intrinsic properties that make it a good store of value - people always exchange for it.
From the above, we can conclude that you apparently are not familiar with the idea of "circular logic".
- it's history, it's not a theory that comes out of sitting in a closet, thinking about how the world should work. That's how the Krugmans of the world operate. Austrian school of thought operates on understanding history and human behaviour, and we have plenty of examples to look at and everywhere we look, we see that it is a real world model.
That's what every Marxist says. You're no different Here's a clue- history is not an experiment. It's a one time unrepeatable complex set series of events all of which effect each other and whose causality is not determinable. So you can draw whatever lesson from history you want, and you still haven't done even one second of science and your conclusions are no more valid than the conclusions of the people who read history the opposite way as you and draw the opposite conclusions.
All that infrastructure built by private interests, simply because they wanted to make a buck. Today China is the best approximation to that type of economy
I love it. China is a state run communist command economy where factories get built where and when the Party says they will.
As far as talking to you goes, I am curious to talk to people I consider to be extreme because I am curious about their thinking processes. So I talk to you to elicit responses to questions which highlight the bugs in your thinking.
For instance, you've done nothing whatsoever , I mean zero, to defend the idea that gold has some intrinsic value beyond people's willingness to treat it as though it were valuable, just like paper money . You've said a lot about the wonderful properties of gold and related to everything but the kitchen sink and all this but you've failed to rebut in any way at all the point I made. The answer is , gold is valuable only because people agree to treat it as valuable. It's value is an agreed upon, highly useful lie, like other abstract things such as your rights.
Now the question is, can you see that you've failed to defend this idea or are you blind to it? That's what's interesting.
When people run up against a contradiction in their thinking , in the set of ideas they hold, and blink past it or just deny it- even though they could see it if they wanted to, then that is interesting and it's interesting to watch the mechanisms they use to do it with. You intellectualize your failure and pull what I call a Wall Of Words .. you're
The answer you're giving me as to how you know these things is .... you have a theory!!!! Your theory involves this and that and it makes sense to you ,and that's how you know.
Do you understand the difference in the validity of knowledge derived from a theory and that arrived at by an empirical experiment that gives you a result? The last one is a valid form of gaining knowledge, the former is what Scholastics did during the Middle Ages and it produces NO knowledge about reality whatsoever, at best it produces only more or less self consistent didactically-based (or so they thought) Theories Of Everything. That is the meaning of Ivory Tower thinking and it's worthless.
Once you want to start arguing about gas prices, you're just citing the merest correlation of multicausal events. In fact, correlation is not causation and presenting a correlation as a manifestation of the workings of empty didactic theorizing does not bring that correlation one inch closer to causation
You know how so many of the world's problems are caused by people who don't know how to reason? I'm sure you do. Yeah, you're one of those people.
The truth is that democracy leads to tyranny
I love it when Ron Paul and libertarians and corporate supremicists drop the veil and accidentally let everyone see what they're really angling for.
You'll get my democracy from me when you pry it from my cold, dead hands...
Help me out here. What do you think stops the consolidation of corporate power? What do you think stops banks from getting too big to fail and monopolies from forming ?
The problem is it's not their money, its their investor's money because we deregulated the banks from having to separate investing from savings.
We permitted AIG to say that their derivatives were not a form of insurance and thus evade the regulation which exists to insure that insurers are themselves good for the debts under all circumstances. This was clearly a situation where AIG should have been regulated but they gamed the system to get out of it.
So you want to do away with taxes also? So no CDC for you!
Do you know what life was like under the feudal lords in Europe? Do you have any idea about that time in history at all?