In a capitalist economy, the banks would have failed, the mortgages would be refinanced, and we'd all be fine
Except that all the financial institutions were tied together. They insured themselves and spread out the risk. And as this practice was quite profitable for a little while, they all started doing it, least their competitors get ahead. So "the bankers" who wouldn't be fine includes ALL of them. The entire US financial system.
But the world moves on, who cares about those guys right? Oh, you want to refinance? Well, it will take a little while (and during that interim, business will close, most everyone will lose everything, and people will starve. The depression will be long, hard, and deep) but you WILL be able to refinance eventually. With a bank in China. Or Venezuela. Or maybe Britian. Who knows, the death throes of the worlds biggest economy could change a lot of things. But China can make things, and Venezuela has oil. But since our financial sector just committed sepuku, if you want a loan, you'll have to look elsewhere.
That costs money you know, and those other nations would profit while the USA diminishes. Possibly even losing it's super-power status.
Dear Plammox, the point of AC's post is that the child might not have autism, but is just socially stunted with a parent fishing for an excuse. Why would the kid be socially stunted? Hey, maybe his mother sucks at being a mother.
I'm not saying they're poisoning your tap water. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that fluoride is poisonous. Toxic even. And they're putting it in your tap water. Here's a long and complicated list and connections that could be their motivation. Again, I highly doubt you're being poisoned. I'm just saying that the government is putting poison in your water. That's why I buy all my bottled water from Fox News.
Purely factual. Not lying in the least. And yet it's clearly FUD.
The only reason a modern company "works" is because there is usually one guy at the top
Who is right under the board of trustees, who represent/are the shareholders, who split and branch on political decisions all the time.
Holy hell boy, it's like you think communist nations wouldn't have a figurehead.
Go on, tell me the difference between an employee owned company like Hyvee and a setup where the workers are running the factory.
For example, if the goal of a corporation is to engage in commercial activity and use the profits to operate soup kitchens and homeless shelter
Lovely, but why would they do that? What's the motivational force that encourages them to do so?
Latter in your story, it's pretty obvious that it's to dodge taxes. In that case, you're only operating soup kitchens to the extent that you qualify as non-profit. There are a lot of ways to move money and power around as you see fit without making technical corporate profit. Since power and influence can be transformed into money, you're still operating under good old fashion capitalistic greed.
You need a system that provides a reason to be altruistic. A real reason, not a gimmick like tax exemption that will be abused by anyone with a clue.
Or on a boat. There's no real reason it needs to be on solid ground. Maybe if you want to deliver power over transmission lines? But if the ground station is mobile, you have some additional freedom to dodge things. Yeah. Very Slow Dodge. Like the ISS dodging space junk. But even slower.
Well, yes it is. Because you're a company man. Or you believe in the product. Or because your boss is watching. Because this is "encouraged". You benefit from the proliferation of Jive. It's not part of your job description, but wink wink, nod, say the word. When I worked at a security company, they frowned upon eating lunch at a business that didn't do business with them. It's a sort of low-grade corruption sort of thing.
But if I can add to the conversation
The only thing you're really adding here is advertisement for Jive. This stuff you're saying *IS* the best stuff to say... When you're selling something.
But I don't particularly want to be sold to. I want to be informed.
And there's no conspiracy. You're being very upfront about it. You work at Jive. Jive encourages you, and all their employees, to talk about Jive. The ones that care about the company and have a future there anyway. The forces at play are all out in the open. Which is leaps and bounds better then being secret. That would make you just another shill.
So thank you for the insight that, yes, "letting" employees collaborate socially saves companies time, money, and energy. And that Jive Software provides a sandbox environment, which facebook doesn't do, to protect users from privacy issues. Not that you're saying facebook has any issues mind you, you're totally not saying anything negative about Facebook(TM)(pleasedon'tsuejive)).
Yeah, thanks for that. Good to know. So glad that's +5 interesting.
I'm sorry. "Real space combat" doesn't mesh with "capital ship". If you want to look at real space combat, look at what's been done with launching missiles at satellites. There's also been some examples of blinding satellites with lasers from ground. THAT is reality for you. If you're looking at near-future scenarios, it'll be the same damn thing, but on mars or the moon. If the target is farther away, it will be a larger and more expensive missile. The target will not have counter-measures. That would be ludicrously expensive with a low chance of effectiveness. The counter-measure equivalent will be a fully armed nation back on Earth that will kick the shit out of anyone that messes with their satellites/probes/colonies. But I imagine that by and far anything that is outside of orbit will be immune to aggression.
If you're looking for space combat in the far future where people hop about the system at FTL speeds, then hell if I know what it'll be like.
I'm sorry, I don't really know what "upselling" is, but if you're buying diapers, milk, pencils, etc from Target instead of Walmat, then the market weasels have already made a buck on you.
I've got to agree with the others. You come off as a marketer. You might not be one, but I'd stop hanging around them if I were you. Or it could be a side effect of working in the "social" industry.
I mean, you use terms like "testimonials" "when significant and concrete cost savings can be proven" "tangible and measurable benefits" "an uphill battle" "get on the bandwagon and realize the benefits for themselves".
It's your tone. It's worse then marketer, you come off as a salesman. I'm sorry, but it's true. To stop that, well, you'd have to stop trying to sell Jive. But it looks like you're paid push the company motto. Or at least expected to.
And this is my problem with companies getting their weedly little fingers into social sites. Corporations aren't social, they just want to push their goods and make a buck. If they get their employees to be their own 50cent army, it degrades the social scene. Tragedy of the commons.
And this got voted up? Why? Hell, at this point I'm paranoid enough that I suspect your fellow Jive employees are responsible. It's "encouraged" after all. So can I trust Slashdot moderation?
You have to remember the source. "They cannot tolerate even a minute of downtime". This is coming from IT. Their customers bitched about downtime. His manager made it seem like the end of the world. Which, well, it might be. When the competitors offer their service for free, (because the users are the product) then any little thing will turn away potential income.
Can people in business tolerate a minute of downtime with one of their tools? Yeah.
Is the IT guy going to catch hell for it anyway? Definitely.
It's mixing another specie's DNA into our own DNA that we propagate through our kids. It's exactly the same thing as mixing genes from animals into plants. It's happened in the past and it's happening now. What makes you think the last retrovirus died off millions of years ago?
Ah, but the entire point of marketing is NOT to save you a buck. It's to get you to burn your buck at the exotic, exclusive, and luxurious, shopping experience that is... wherever the hell they're hocking that day.
They're paying a team of people to convince you to come into their store rather then no frill's discount bob's shit-bag emporium.
Remember that marketeers and salesmen don't actually contribute to society. Theirs is a zero-sum game where every dollar they make is a dollar taken away from competition. Or it's convincing you to buy more then you really need to.
Well, yeah, personality development and all that jazz is pretty much settled (although there's still a lot of maturing to do). And lhmhi came off a little heavy handed. And I certainly don't have much room to speak as a non-breeder so far.
...But, uh, as a fellow member of society, do you think you could at least help your offspring out now and then? You know, in general? I'm all for phased independence, but that stretches all the way to the 40's where dependency starts to swing the other way. You really shouldn't just ignore them when they hit 16.
Teen pregnancy is the topic, and it's implied that you're mutually agreeing to be ignorant of who is banging who, but really, the topic of sex doesn't have to be taboo. If anything that just makes it more of a reason to go out and be a rebel.
Plus what co-evolution there has been more along the lines of an arms race. The spices we use to season our food are an attempt to make an unedible posion to scare off preditors. Ever try to chow down on a whole clove of garlic? Raw ginger root?
And spicy peppers? Come on, it's the plant's way of telling you to bugger off.
Our survival has rested on the ability to stomach them being one step ahead of at least one common food source.
And if you're looking at the evolutionary timescale, even things like the domesticated cow is fairly new.
Relative to what? One particular coastline? Sand gets washed away you know.
Call me when you measure the average sea level relative to the center of the earth.
Oh look, your link is to a blog of someone selling a book. That would be fine, except he doesn't say where he got his data. There's no source. His charts and comments aren't backed up by anything. It would be interesting stuff, if I could give it an ounce of trust.
I personally feel that search engine manipulation is a problem, and while I commend Google's position on their neutrality - I feel some precedence should be given when it involves peoples names. If you have a unique name and somebody blogs bad things about you, you are stuck with those results *for life* every time someone Google's you.
I too commend Google for their neutrality. It's a good thing and one of the reasons I prefer it over Bing.
But you're arguing that they should break that neutrality, enter the the ring of politicizing their search results, because it's a politicians name. I really don't think we should have long-term negative behavior is exchange for short-term or niche fixes.
And if someone blogs something bad about you, and that blog is more important (per page-rank's algorithm) than you are yourself (or your rebuttal), then YES, it should be stuck there for the rest of your life. That's a little thing we call reputation. It sucks if you have a bad one. It kind of encourages people to play nice.
But only if it's true. Hence the defaming law. It's an ok law. Sadly, laws that protect you are generally only for the wealthy. To censor a message it needs to go to court. As long as court costs money, it will only be an option for the wealthy. I don't see a way around this. Either people are restricted as to what they can say, or people are given unmitigated power to censor whomever they want. Ideally, going to court would be cheap. So I guess we need to automate lawyers and judges.
While I agree with you morally, we can't have a "civilized" society as we know it without the things we have from other countries at Walmart prices.
What? Yes we can. We exploited the third-world nations of Korea, Tiawan, and Japan after WWII and
now they're first world nations. China looks like they're moving the same way. Oh so slowely they're
developing a middle class, who won't tolerate oppressive abuse.
But that's talking about cheap goods. The topic is the repressive oil-producing countries. That's cheap gas, not goods. And again, YES, we can have our "civilization as we know it" without cheap gas. There are alternatives, expensive gas, and jesus christ dude, taking the bus will not be the end of our civilization. Flying internationally may return to being a thing for the upper crust. oh noes.
We have too many problems to sort out before we can even think about pushing our influence to "better the world."
This is just so wrong on two levels. First, we will always have problems, crisis, and things to distract us.
A few years ago the complaint would be that we're too freaked out from a couple buildings falling over. Before that
would be that we're too busy seeing if our leader got a blowjob. Important stuff. Apparently.
No, we will never be more ready to deal with the world's problems then we are right now. There will ALWAYS be this level of problems.
They come in different flavors, but there will always be this amount.
But this statement of your is wrong in a different way: We don't WANT to "push our influence to make a better world". We just want to stop sucking on the teet of oil nations. We most certainly don't want to invade oil-rich nations, that's turns out to be an absolutely retarded idea. Who would have guessed. (Me and most of my political party, that's who). We don't even particularly want to have the soft push that diplomats and businessmen have behind close doors. Or the cultural victory of having McDonalds and Starbucks on every corner.
No. What we want to do is to stop empowering these oppressive nations. Set ourselves up to use alternatives to oil.
But if you want to preach, you had better start convincing the foot soldiers who make it all possible to stop serving "the bad guys." Problem with that is if you were to convince the US foot soldiers to stop supporting the bad guys, there will be some OTHER really bad guys who have some guys you can't reach to convince will come over here and start pushing their will all over us.
Whoa whoa whoa.
You're saying that if we convince people to stop enlisting to exert pressure for a change in our foreign policy... that "other really bad guys" will come and "push their will all over us"? You mean Canada is going to see a dip in our troop enrollment and take that opportunity to invade us? Really? Did that make sense when you typed it?
It's one thing to boycott products which are not necessary. It's another to boycott the world's life blood. There's more riding on this than you can possibly imagine or want to consider.
Come on, we want to stop having a "world life blood" and start using alternatives. There are plenty of ways to power the grid. There are ways to store that power make use it portable. There are a bucketload of technical, logistical, political, and social problems. What I'm working on in this post is the social one. The world would be a better place if we didn't use so much oil. Do you honestly believe otherwise?
How does a libertarian society account for the externality of businesses?
Paper mill produces and sells paper. But the factory dumps X_byproduct into the air, it stinks. Town has less tourism because of the smell.
So the carnival's business is being hurt because of the paper mill, but the paper mill isn't about to simply hand over money to anyone claiming some lost sales.
Pollution is an externality that that has very long reaching consequences that's difficult to see in the short term. It affects us all.
Slashdot Mirror
Except it's my neighbor snoozing, but I still lose.
We're a society and we're all in this boat together.
In a capitalist economy, the banks would have failed, the mortgages would be refinanced, and we'd all be fine
Except that all the financial institutions were tied together. They insured themselves and spread out the risk. And as this practice was quite profitable for a little while, they all started doing it, least their competitors get ahead. So "the bankers" who wouldn't be fine includes ALL of them. The entire US financial system.
But the world moves on, who cares about those guys right? Oh, you want to refinance? Well, it will take a little while (and during that interim, business will close, most everyone will lose everything, and people will starve. The depression will be long, hard, and deep) but you WILL be able to refinance eventually. With a bank in China. Or Venezuela. Or maybe Britian. Who knows, the death throes of the worlds biggest economy could change a lot of things. But China can make things, and Venezuela has oil. But since our financial sector just committed sepuku, if you want a loan, you'll have to look elsewhere.
That costs money you know, and those other nations would profit while the USA diminishes. Possibly even losing it's super-power status.
Dear Plammox, the point of AC's post is that the child might not have autism, but is just socially stunted with a parent fishing for an excuse. Why would the kid be socially stunted? Hey, maybe his mother sucks at being a mother.
Was it around Valentine's day? Study some sociology before you get freaked out. They don't have to know anything about you to have well placed ads.
I'm not saying they're poisoning your tap water. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that fluoride is poisonous. Toxic even. And they're putting it in your tap water. Here's a long and complicated list and connections that could be their motivation. Again, I highly doubt you're being poisoned. I'm just saying that the government is putting poison in your water. That's why I buy all my bottled water from Fox News.
Purely factual. Not lying in the least. And yet it's clearly FUD.
These words have definitions. Know them.
The only reason a modern company "works" is because there is usually one guy at the top
Who is right under the board of trustees, who represent/are the shareholders, who split and branch on political decisions all the time.
Holy hell boy, it's like you think communist nations wouldn't have a figurehead.
Go on, tell me the difference between an employee owned company like Hyvee and a setup where the workers are running the factory.
For example, if the goal of a corporation is to engage in commercial activity and use the profits to operate soup kitchens and homeless shelter
Lovely, but why would they do that? What's the motivational force that encourages them to do so?
Latter in your story, it's pretty obvious that it's to dodge taxes. In that case, you're only operating soup kitchens to the extent that you qualify as non-profit. There are a lot of ways to move money and power around as you see fit without making technical corporate profit. Since power and influence can be transformed into money, you're still operating under good old fashion capitalistic greed.
You need a system that provides a reason to be altruistic. A real reason, not a gimmick like tax exemption that will be abused by anyone with a clue.
Everyone stop laughing right now and they'll only go 12 years past their initial projection.
Clarke was a genius about these things.
Or on a boat. There's no real reason it needs to be on solid ground. Maybe if you want to deliver power over transmission lines? But if the ground station is mobile, you have some additional freedom to dodge things. Yeah. Very Slow Dodge. Like the ISS dodging space junk. But even slower.
My job is not to convince you to do so,
Well, yes it is. Because you're a company man. Or you believe in the product. Or because your boss is watching. Because this is "encouraged". You benefit from the proliferation of Jive. It's not part of your job description, but wink wink, nod, say the word. When I worked at a security company, they frowned upon eating lunch at a business that didn't do business with them. It's a sort of low-grade corruption sort of thing.
But if I can add to the conversation
The only thing you're really adding here is advertisement for Jive. This stuff you're saying *IS* the best stuff to say... When you're selling something.
But I don't particularly want to be sold to. I want to be informed.
And there's no conspiracy. You're being very upfront about it. You work at Jive. Jive encourages you, and all their employees, to talk about Jive. The ones that care about the company and have a future there anyway. The forces at play are all out in the open. Which is leaps and bounds better then being secret. That would make you just another shill.
So thank you for the insight that, yes, "letting" employees collaborate socially saves companies time, money, and energy. And that Jive Software provides a sandbox environment, which facebook doesn't do, to protect users from privacy issues. Not that you're saying facebook has any issues mind you, you're totally not saying anything negative about Facebook(TM)(pleasedon'tsuejive)).
Yeah, thanks for that. Good to know. So glad that's +5 interesting.
I'm sorry. "Real space combat" doesn't mesh with "capital ship". If you want to look at real space combat, look at what's been done with launching missiles at satellites. There's also been some examples of blinding satellites with lasers from ground. THAT is reality for you. If you're looking at near-future scenarios, it'll be the same damn thing, but on mars or the moon. If the target is farther away, it will be a larger and more expensive missile. The target will not have counter-measures. That would be ludicrously expensive with a low chance of effectiveness. The counter-measure equivalent will be a fully armed nation back on Earth that will kick the shit out of anyone that messes with their satellites/probes/colonies. But I imagine that by and far anything that is outside of orbit will be immune to aggression.
If you're looking for space combat in the far future where people hop about the system at FTL speeds, then hell if I know what it'll be like.
I'm sorry, I don't really know what "upselling" is, but if you're buying diapers, milk, pencils, etc from Target instead of Walmat, then the market weasels have already made a buck on you.
I've got to agree with the others. You come off as a marketer. You might not be one, but I'd stop hanging around them if I were you. Or it could be a side effect of working in the "social" industry.
I mean, you use terms like "testimonials" "when significant and concrete cost savings can be proven" "tangible and measurable benefits" "an uphill battle" "get on the bandwagon and realize the benefits for themselves".
It's your tone. It's worse then marketer, you come off as a salesman. I'm sorry, but it's true. To stop that, well, you'd have to stop trying to sell Jive. But it looks like you're paid push the company motto. Or at least expected to.
And this is my problem with companies getting their weedly little fingers into social sites. Corporations aren't social, they just want to push their goods and make a buck. If they get their employees to be their own 50cent army, it degrades the social scene. Tragedy of the commons.
And this got voted up? Why? Hell, at this point I'm paranoid enough that I suspect your fellow Jive employees are responsible. It's "encouraged" after all. So can I trust Slashdot moderation?
You have to remember the source. "They cannot tolerate even a minute of downtime". This is coming from IT. Their customers bitched about downtime. His manager made it seem like the end of the world. Which, well, it might be. When the competitors offer their service for free, (because the users are the product) then any little thing will turn away potential income.
Can people in business tolerate a minute of downtime with one of their tools? Yeah.
Is the IT guy going to catch hell for it anyway? Definitely.
It's mixing another specie's DNA into our own DNA that we propagate through our kids. It's exactly the same thing as mixing genes from animals into plants. It's happened in the past and it's happening now. What makes you think the last retrovirus died off millions of years ago?
Ah, but the entire point of marketing is NOT to save you a buck. It's to get you to burn your buck at the exotic, exclusive, and luxurious, shopping experience that is... wherever the hell they're hocking that day.
They're paying a team of people to convince you to come into their store rather then no frill's discount bob's shit-bag emporium.
Remember that marketeers and salesmen don't actually contribute to society. Theirs is a zero-sum game where every dollar they make is a dollar taken away from competition. Or it's convincing you to buy more then you really need to.
Well, yeah, personality development and all that jazz is pretty much settled (although there's still a lot of maturing to do). And lhmhi came off a little heavy handed. And I certainly don't have much room to speak as a non-breeder so far.
...But, uh, as a fellow member of society, do you think you could at least help your offspring out now and then? You know, in general? I'm all for phased independence, but that stretches all the way to the 40's where dependency starts to swing the other way. You really shouldn't just ignore them when they hit 16.
Teen pregnancy is the topic, and it's implied that you're mutually agreeing to be ignorant of who is banging who, but really, the topic of sex doesn't have to be taboo. If anything that just makes it more of a reason to go out and be a rebel.
Tru dat.
Plus what co-evolution there has been more along the lines of an arms race. The spices we use to season our food are an attempt to make an unedible posion to scare off preditors. Ever try to chow down on a whole clove of garlic? Raw ginger root?
And spicy peppers? Come on, it's the plant's way of telling you to bugger off.
Our survival has rested on the ability to stomach them being one step ahead of at least one common food source.
And if you're looking at the evolutionary timescale, even things like the domesticated cow is fairly new.
And humanities DNA has been mixed with viruses. Retroviruses. Interesting stuff. It's perfectly normal and natural.
Just like snake venom.
I didn't say that. I'm speaking in general,
Well you're certainly trying hard to not point fingers here.
Lakes in Maine have high concentrations of mercury and other pollutants that have killed off most of the fresh water fish.
Which is JUST AS LIKELY, given your evidence, a side-effect of organic farming done in Maine!
Hippy business as usual.
Relative to what? One particular coastline? Sand gets washed away you know.
Call me when you measure the average sea level relative to the center of the earth.
Oh look, your link is to a blog of someone selling a book. That would be fine, except he doesn't say where he got his data. There's no source. His charts and comments aren't backed up by anything. It would be interesting stuff, if I could give it an ounce of trust.
I personally feel that search engine manipulation is a problem, and while I commend Google's position on their neutrality - I feel some precedence should be given when it involves peoples names. If you have a unique name and somebody blogs bad things about you, you are stuck with those results *for life* every time someone Google's you.
I too commend Google for their neutrality. It's a good thing and one of the reasons I prefer it over Bing.
But you're arguing that they should break that neutrality, enter the the ring of politicizing their search results, because it's a politicians name. I really don't think we should have long-term negative behavior is exchange for short-term or niche fixes.
And if someone blogs something bad about you, and that blog is more important (per page-rank's algorithm) than you are yourself (or your rebuttal), then YES, it should be stuck there for the rest of your life. That's a little thing we call reputation. It sucks if you have a bad one. It kind of encourages people to play nice.
But only if it's true. Hence the defaming law. It's an ok law. Sadly, laws that protect you are generally only for the wealthy. To censor a message it needs to go to court. As long as court costs money, it will only be an option for the wealthy. I don't see a way around this. Either people are restricted as to what they can say, or people are given unmitigated power to censor whomever they want. Ideally, going to court would be cheap. So I guess we need to automate lawyers and judges.
What? Yes we can. We exploited the third-world nations of Korea, Tiawan, and Japan after WWII and now they're first world nations. China looks like they're moving the same way. Oh so slowely they're developing a middle class, who won't tolerate oppressive abuse.
But that's talking about cheap goods. The topic is the repressive oil-producing countries. That's cheap gas, not goods. And again, YES, we can have our "civilization as we know it" without cheap gas. There are alternatives, expensive gas, and jesus christ dude, taking the bus will not be the end of our civilization. Flying internationally may return to being a thing for the upper crust. oh noes.
We have too many problems to sort out before we can even think about pushing our influence to "better the world."
This is just so wrong on two levels. First, we will always have problems, crisis, and things to distract us. A few years ago the complaint would be that we're too freaked out from a couple buildings falling over. Before that would be that we're too busy seeing if our leader got a blowjob. Important stuff. Apparently. No, we will never be more ready to deal with the world's problems then we are right now. There will ALWAYS be this level of problems. They come in different flavors, but there will always be this amount.
But this statement of your is wrong in a different way: We don't WANT to "push our influence to make a better world". We just want to stop sucking on the teet of oil nations. We most certainly don't want to invade oil-rich nations, that's turns out to be an absolutely retarded idea. Who would have guessed. (Me and most of my political party, that's who). We don't even particularly want to have the soft push that diplomats and businessmen have behind close doors. Or the cultural victory of having McDonalds and Starbucks on every corner.
No. What we want to do is to stop empowering these oppressive nations. Set ourselves up to use alternatives to oil.
But if you want to preach, you had better start convincing the foot soldiers who make it all possible to stop serving "the bad guys." Problem with that is if you were to convince the US foot soldiers to stop supporting the bad guys, there will be some OTHER really bad guys who have some guys you can't reach to convince will come over here and start pushing their will all over us.
Whoa whoa whoa.
You're saying that if we convince people to stop enlisting to exert pressure for a change in our foreign policy... that "other really bad guys" will come and "push their will all over us"? You mean Canada is going to see a dip in our troop enrollment and take that opportunity to invade us? Really? Did that make sense when you typed it?
It's one thing to boycott products which are not necessary. It's another to boycott the world's life blood. There's more riding on this than you can possibly imagine or want to consider.
Come on, we want to stop having a "world life blood" and start using alternatives. There are plenty of ways to power the grid. There are ways to store that power make use it portable. There are a bucketload of technical, logistical, political, and social problems. What I'm working on in this post is the social one. The world would be a better place if we didn't use so much oil. Do you honestly believe otherwise?
How does a libertarian society account for the externality of businesses?
Paper mill produces and sells paper. But the factory dumps X_byproduct into the air, it stinks. Town has less tourism because of the smell.
So the carnival's business is being hurt because of the paper mill, but the paper mill isn't about to simply hand over money to anyone claiming some lost sales.
Pollution is an externality that that has very long reaching consequences that's difficult to see in the short term. It affects us all.
The value of making part of your life public: $25.00.
The value of making part of your life private: Priceless.