No, the woman expected that like most cups, if she took the lid off it would not immediately fall apart in her lap. That is a reasonable assumption to make. How was she to know this cup was built differently, some would say defectively?
You haven't explained why you think that those who don't do anything of value will be cast aside in your system. It is just taken as a given that all things will be better, without evidence or explanation.
All you are doing here is saying, "Yeah, what you said? It isn't about the free market, its about government!" No. Sorry, you've refuted nothing I've written.
I am not a communist. I am an anarchist, like you, but a social anarchist, not an individualist anarchist. I don't believe in government by coercion, but by direct agreement of the governed. But I also don't believe in absolute individual rights to natural resources or an unregulated free market.
Not regulating the free market guarantees it will become non-free as the largest players gain advantage and exploit it. If money does not provide advantage, why seek it? If it does, then it is a form of power and may be used to oppress others, just as any other form of power is.
Power is force. Money is power. Money can be used to influence the market. A poor persons spending decisions have little individual impact compared to a rich persons.
A rich person can buy up all the competition, and without competition, there is no free market. They can then use this monopoly to prevent others from entering the market. They could, for instance, buy up all the land surrounding a poor neighborhood, essentially trapping the residents. How would other sellers traverse their property to get to the poor neighborhood? How would the poor people leave without trespassing? The captive market will pay whatever is charged.
Nope. No one has heard of that book.
on
Running Xen
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· Score: 3, Informative
On the other hand, most of us have read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Which still doesn't tell you how to fix your motorcycle, that's what's so Zen about it.
"What's the sound of one hand adjusting a timing belt?"
I'm unfamiliar with that unit of measurement. Could someone convert that to Libraries of Congress, or failing that, to metric buttloads and I can convert from there to LoCs.
The hot coffee incident. Everyone thinks this was a perversion of justice, thanks to McDonalds' PR team. In reality, they had reduced the amount of material in the cups to the point where they weren't structurally stable without a lid to save a few pennies, and they were keeping the coffee too hot, to make it last longer.
In a libertarian system, this lady would have been screwed.
How does an unregulated free market stay free? Wouldn't money accumulate in fewer and fewer hands? The more money you have, the more power you have to affect the value of things. The more power you have to make more money without doing anything of value, by screwing people economically.
You could spend a lot of money to screw over people, say, by buying up all the land around them. They can't go on your property, and neither can anyone else. They have to pay whatever you charge for anything, as no one else has a right to traverse your land to sell to them.
I'm not even mentioning the merket failure modes of natural monopoly, imbalance of information, and externalities. How would libertarianism handle these cases?
Money is power. Coercion can be economic, not just at the point of a gun.
Wrong. People need food. If all the food sellers in an area collude to raise the price, then people who have no other options (like the poor) will have to pay that price. You see it in poor neighborhoods the world over. They can't physically get to cheaper markets, and they don't have the money to leave, so they get screwed.
What you claim is only true in theory. Look at the real world for many more examples of exactly how your theory fails.
Idiot, there's no point in karma whoring this far down a thread. Only an egotist like yourself would assume people other than those already involved in the conversation are reading this.
Money is power, and power can get you more money. Where is the balance to that fact? Those with money will use it to exclude those who seek to disrupt.
Not everyone in government or corporations are sociopaths, but I'd venture that high functioning sociopaths or borderline personalities are over represented in those groups. It's a problem with any system that concentrates power and reduces or hides responsibility. Power without consequences draws those types like shit does flies.
We are talking systems analysis here. By "let" I do not mean to imply that government has the ultimate authority and "permits" people to participate. I mean, what sort of system both protects the participation of regular folks, protects their freedoms, yet does not allow manipulation by sociopaths?
You have added absolutely nothing of value to the discussion, but thanks for trying.
Now that is good advice. Educate, and teach people critical thinking. Create a system with checks and balances. The 'blood of tyrants' quote may have been mere cheerleading (still, very necessary) but our founding fathers were brilliant men who cared deeply for human freedom, and gave the issue a lot of thought.
The problem, as I see it, is that our current corporate 'free market' system allows an end run around the checks and balances. A free market contains no checks or balances against the consolidation of power.
Yes, but what do you do when the sociopaths are telling the regular folks that you are the tyrant? What do you do when, in the course of overthrowing a tyrant, another tyrant rises to the top of your organization, as tyrants tend to do in times of violent revolution?
In short, its a nice quote, but I've thought about it a lot, and it was just a cheerleading slogan. It doesn't give any real advice on how to deal with the problem.
Fundamentally, the problem is dealing with sociopaths without reducing the freedoms of the majority of decent folks. How do you let decent folks participate in self governance, and give them freedoms, without ceding control to the sociopaths?
It means the Yuan is not allowed to fluctuate in open currency markets. It is fixed in value relative to the dollar. Meaning, America can have a huge trade deficit with China without changing the relative value of Dollars to Yuan.
Normally when a country has a trade deficit, the value of its currency will slip in relation to the value of its trading partners currency, making it more expensive to buy goods from those trading partners, and less expensive for the partners to buy its goods.
No, this is China. They'll just pack the building full of political dissidents. Overseers with cattle prods will call out opcodes for them to process with abacuses.
Sorry, we don't do separate ads nowadays. Consumers have gotten too savvy, there are Tivos and Ad blockers and whatnot. You want ad supported content, you will fucking well look at our ads, capiche? I don't care if we have to pack every story, every TV show, every song, every painting, every fucking poem full of ads, you will look at them. I don't care if we have to pay random people on the street to talk about our products. If we could beam our ads into your heads, we'd do that too. Because you aren't our customer, you are our product.
Now be a good little product and sit there passively absorbing the ads without critical thought so we can get paid for delivering you to our real customers. If you don't then you don't love America or the Free Market and the terrorists have already won. You don't want that, do you?
Okay, let me present an example. In Tibet during times of famine, a few Buddhist monks would go into caves and eat bark, then starve themselves to death. The tannins in the bark would turn them into mummies, and their bodies would last for hundreds of years, mute testimony to the fact that starvation does not have to turn a human being into a desperate animal.
Another more recent Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, protested back in '63 against suppression of Buddhism by sitting calmly in an intersection and lighting himself on fire. He burnt completely without moving a muscle, a serene look on his face the entire time. Millions, if not billions of people have heard of this guy.
I mean, that is making a STATEMENT right there. The formerly frightened and passive citizens of Saigon poured into the streets in protest. Several months later, the regime was ousted, and most historians see this monk's death as the turning point.
But is pacifism always the best answer? No, just ask some other famous Buddhists, the Shaolin monks, who fought off the entire imperial Chinese army for years. The answer is, it depends.
The goal is the overall reduction of violence. The methods used to achieve this goal must necessarily vary with circumstance.
Okay, sorry for being a dick, but I thought you came down on the OP a little hard, and I was defending his right to state his opinion.
Honestly I don't know if the Bible is true or not. Same goes for any other holy book. It doesn't make much sense to me, but I've asked for any kind of sign, feeling, or whatever it is that people get with religion anyway. I got nothing, so I can only conclude its not for me. Doesn't mean its wrong, or not for other people.
To be fair, because I HAVE been a dick, I'll admit that I happen to like most of the honestly religious people I've met, be they Christians or Buddhists or Sufis or what have you. I tend to think that's more because religion attracts decent people than because of any great power religion has to turn bad people good, but you never know.
Right, how do we know the source is God? Because the Bible says so. But parts of the Bible might be figurative. Including the part about the source. I mean, when the Bible claims it is the word of God, maybe it means that it came entirely from the god-like part of regular old humans.
That is the issue that any intelligent person has with people who pick and choose what parts of the Bible are literal, and what parts are figurative.
Your transparent rationalizations will win you no points with intelligent folks. I'm sure in your head, the things you do are always justified, and the things done against you are always unwarranted. But that is your personal delusion, not shared by the rest of the world.
My insults are not tangential. You completely failed to understand what I was saying. You said I was a pacifist when I clearly made arguments against pacifism. The only conclusion that I can reach from such a blatant inability to comprehend simple sentences is that you are mentally deficient. You insult me, and then whine about being insulted. The only conclusion that I can logically draw from that is that you are, or are akin to, a whiny four year old.
I have no hope that you can comprehend these points any better than you did my original points, though, and in your own delusional world, you probably think you've won this argument. Have fun with that.
Well, I'd love to stay7 and debate with you further, but that's impossible, as you can't debate worth shit and you make up stories about things you know nothing about, as is typical of the right wing Neanderthals I've met.
To illustrate, let me debate in your style, "I win because I read that all people who go by the moniker 'straif' are actually neo nazi pedophiles and because you said mean things to me." Wow, it's so easy to win an argument when you don't give a shit about the truth.
Here's why, specifically, Christian's don't get to pick and choose: the whole basis of the authority of the Bible is that the Bible claims the Bible is the literal word of God. If you start to pick and choose, the Bible looses ALL authority. I mean, maybe the part of the Bible that claims the Bible is the literal word of God is just figurative? Maybe the part about Jesus rising form the dead is figurative? Maybe ALL of it is figurative? After you stop believing that part where the Bible says the Bible is infallible, why stop there? Why believe ANY of what it says?
You remind me of the type of people who believe in psychics. When shown how a particular psychic is a fraud, they say, "okay, but that was just that one guy. Some of them have GOT to be for real!" No, they are all frauds.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yes, I got that. Poor, sad little humor impaired moderators.
No, the woman expected that like most cups, if she took the lid off it would not immediately fall apart in her lap. That is a reasonable assumption to make. How was she to know this cup was built differently, some would say defectively?
You haven't explained why you think that those who don't do anything of value will be cast aside in your system. It is just taken as a given that all things will be better, without evidence or explanation.
All you are doing here is saying, "Yeah, what you said? It isn't about the free market, its about government!" No. Sorry, you've refuted nothing I've written.
I am not a communist. I am an anarchist, like you, but a social anarchist, not an individualist anarchist. I don't believe in government by coercion, but by direct agreement of the governed. But I also don't believe in absolute individual rights to natural resources or an unregulated free market.
Not regulating the free market guarantees it will become non-free as the largest players gain advantage and exploit it. If money does not provide advantage, why seek it? If it does, then it is a form of power and may be used to oppress others, just as any other form of power is.
Power is force. Money is power. Money can be used to influence the market. A poor persons spending decisions have little individual impact compared to a rich persons.
A rich person can buy up all the competition, and without competition, there is no free market. They can then use this monopoly to prevent others from entering the market. They could, for instance, buy up all the land surrounding a poor neighborhood, essentially trapping the residents. How would other sellers traverse their property to get to the poor neighborhood? How would the poor people leave without trespassing? The captive market will pay whatever is charged.
On the other hand, most of us have read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Which still doesn't tell you how to fix your motorcycle, that's what's so Zen about it.
"What's the sound of one hand adjusting a timing belt?"
I'm unfamiliar with that unit of measurement. Could someone convert that to Libraries of Congress, or failing that, to metric buttloads and I can convert from there to LoCs.
The hot coffee incident. Everyone thinks this was a perversion of justice, thanks to McDonalds' PR team. In reality, they had reduced the amount of material in the cups to the point where they weren't structurally stable without a lid to save a few pennies, and they were keeping the coffee too hot, to make it last longer.
In a libertarian system, this lady would have been screwed.
How does an unregulated free market stay free? Wouldn't money accumulate in fewer and fewer hands? The more money you have, the more power you have to affect the value of things. The more power you have to make more money without doing anything of value, by screwing people economically.
You could spend a lot of money to screw over people, say, by buying up all the land around them. They can't go on your property, and neither can anyone else. They have to pay whatever you charge for anything, as no one else has a right to traverse your land to sell to them.
I'm not even mentioning the merket failure modes of natural monopoly, imbalance of information, and externalities. How would libertarianism handle these cases?
Money is power. Coercion can be economic, not just at the point of a gun.
Wrong. People need food. If all the food sellers in an area collude to raise the price, then people who have no other options (like the poor) will have to pay that price. You see it in poor neighborhoods the world over. They can't physically get to cheaper markets, and they don't have the money to leave, so they get screwed.
What you claim is only true in theory. Look at the real world for many more examples of exactly how your theory fails.
Idiot, there's no point in karma whoring this far down a thread. Only an egotist like yourself would assume people other than those already involved in the conversation are reading this.
Better luck next troll? Worked on you.
Money is power, and power can get you more money. Where is the balance to that fact? Those with money will use it to exclude those who seek to disrupt.
Yeah, that's me, a suck up. Prove the Bible isn't true, you stupid shit.
What is it that is keeping people from wanting to learn?
Depends on who you ask, though, doesn't it? Some people claim that the only free market is an unregulated market.
Not everyone in government or corporations are sociopaths, but I'd venture that high functioning sociopaths or borderline personalities are over represented in those groups. It's a problem with any system that concentrates power and reduces or hides responsibility. Power without consequences draws those types like shit does flies.
We are talking systems analysis here. By "let" I do not mean to imply that government has the ultimate authority and "permits" people to participate. I mean, what sort of system both protects the participation of regular folks, protects their freedoms, yet does not allow manipulation by sociopaths?
You have added absolutely nothing of value to the discussion, but thanks for trying.
Now that is good advice. Educate, and teach people critical thinking. Create a system with checks and balances. The 'blood of tyrants' quote may have been mere cheerleading (still, very necessary) but our founding fathers were brilliant men who cared deeply for human freedom, and gave the issue a lot of thought.
The problem, as I see it, is that our current corporate 'free market' system allows an end run around the checks and balances. A free market contains no checks or balances against the consolidation of power.
Yes, but what do you do when the sociopaths are telling the regular folks that you are the tyrant? What do you do when, in the course of overthrowing a tyrant, another tyrant rises to the top of your organization, as tyrants tend to do in times of violent revolution?
In short, its a nice quote, but I've thought about it a lot, and it was just a cheerleading slogan. It doesn't give any real advice on how to deal with the problem.
Fundamentally, the problem is dealing with sociopaths without reducing the freedoms of the majority of decent folks. How do you let decent folks participate in self governance, and give them freedoms, without ceding control to the sociopaths?
It means the Yuan is not allowed to fluctuate in open currency markets. It is fixed in value relative to the dollar. Meaning, America can have a huge trade deficit with China without changing the relative value of Dollars to Yuan.
Normally when a country has a trade deficit, the value of its currency will slip in relation to the value of its trading partners currency, making it more expensive to buy goods from those trading partners, and less expensive for the partners to buy its goods.
No, this is China. They'll just pack the building full of political dissidents. Overseers with cattle prods will call out opcodes for them to process with abacuses.
Sorry, we don't do separate ads nowadays. Consumers have gotten too savvy, there are Tivos and Ad blockers and whatnot. You want ad supported content, you will fucking well look at our ads, capiche? I don't care if we have to pack every story, every TV show, every song, every painting, every fucking poem full of ads, you will look at them. I don't care if we have to pay random people on the street to talk about our products. If we could beam our ads into your heads, we'd do that too. Because you aren't our customer, you are our product.
Now be a good little product and sit there passively absorbing the ads without critical thought so we can get paid for delivering you to our real customers. If you don't then you don't love America or the Free Market and the terrorists have already won. You don't want that, do you?
Okay, let me present an example. In Tibet during times of famine, a few Buddhist monks would go into caves and eat bark, then starve themselves to death. The tannins in the bark would turn them into mummies, and their bodies would last for hundreds of years, mute testimony to the fact that starvation does not have to turn a human being into a desperate animal.
Another more recent Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, protested back in '63 against suppression of Buddhism by sitting calmly in an intersection and lighting himself on fire. He burnt completely without moving a muscle, a serene look on his face the entire time. Millions, if not billions of people have heard of this guy.
I mean, that is making a STATEMENT right there. The formerly frightened and passive citizens of Saigon poured into the streets in protest. Several months later, the regime was ousted, and most historians see this monk's death as the turning point.
But is pacifism always the best answer? No, just ask some other famous Buddhists, the Shaolin monks, who fought off the entire imperial Chinese army for years. The answer is, it depends.
The goal is the overall reduction of violence. The methods used to achieve this goal must necessarily vary with circumstance.
Okay, sorry for being a dick, but I thought you came down on the OP a little hard, and I was defending his right to state his opinion.
Honestly I don't know if the Bible is true or not. Same goes for any other holy book. It doesn't make much sense to me, but I've asked for any kind of sign, feeling, or whatever it is that people get with religion anyway. I got nothing, so I can only conclude its not for me. Doesn't mean its wrong, or not for other people.
To be fair, because I HAVE been a dick, I'll admit that I happen to like most of the honestly religious people I've met, be they Christians or Buddhists or Sufis or what have you. I tend to think that's more because religion attracts decent people than because of any great power religion has to turn bad people good, but you never know.
Right, how do we know the source is God? Because the Bible says so. But parts of the Bible might be figurative. Including the part about the source. I mean, when the Bible claims it is the word of God, maybe it means that it came entirely from the god-like part of regular old humans.
That is the issue that any intelligent person has with people who pick and choose what parts of the Bible are literal, and what parts are figurative.
Your transparent rationalizations will win you no points with intelligent folks. I'm sure in your head, the things you do are always justified, and the things done against you are always unwarranted. But that is your personal delusion, not shared by the rest of the world.
My insults are not tangential. You completely failed to understand what I was saying. You said I was a pacifist when I clearly made arguments against pacifism. The only conclusion that I can reach from such a blatant inability to comprehend simple sentences is that you are mentally deficient. You insult me, and then whine about being insulted. The only conclusion that I can logically draw from that is that you are, or are akin to, a whiny four year old.
I have no hope that you can comprehend these points any better than you did my original points, though, and in your own delusional world, you probably think you've won this argument. Have fun with that.
Well, I'd love to stay7 and debate with you further, but that's impossible, as you can't debate worth shit and you make up stories about things you know nothing about, as is typical of the right wing Neanderthals I've met.
To illustrate, let me debate in your style, "I win because I read that all people who go by the moniker 'straif' are actually neo nazi pedophiles and because you said mean things to me." Wow, it's so easy to win an argument when you don't give a shit about the truth.
Here's why, specifically, Christian's don't get to pick and choose: the whole basis of the authority of the Bible is that the Bible claims the Bible is the literal word of God. If you start to pick and choose, the Bible looses ALL authority. I mean, maybe the part of the Bible that claims the Bible is the literal word of God is just figurative? Maybe the part about Jesus rising form the dead is figurative? Maybe ALL of it is figurative? After you stop believing that part where the Bible says the Bible is infallible, why stop there? Why believe ANY of what it says?
You remind me of the type of people who believe in psychics. When shown how a particular psychic is a fraud, they say, "okay, but that was just that one guy. Some of them have GOT to be for real!" No, they are all frauds.