That's nothing new, though. Seed license agreements long predate modern transgenics and farmers go along with them for a lot of reasons. Keeping seeds is not as common as most people think. Very often, the traits that they want don't breed true anyway, so your next generation is a total mess. Just buying seeds every year gives you a consistent product with consistent yields without a lot of headache. Obviously, whether you can save seeds depends on the type of crop you're growing, but if seed saving was really a big thing across the board, seed companies would have been out of business a long time ago.
Having nukes is also a much cheaper way to maintain military deterrence. If you're a country that can barely feed itself, trying to keep up and equip a massive conventional military is a charade you can't keep going forever at scale. Once you have nukes hidden somewhere, you always have a viable military threat, even if you can no longer afford to put on big parades with zillions of troops and tanks on display. It's a very rational plan.
That's the reason we want them. But the reason police unions can't find a politically viable reason to oppose them is that they'll protect the good cops that they assure us are 99.999999999% of all officers. Especially since the statistics seem to show that cameras reduce complaints against officers. Whether that's because they're mostly acting better or because people were mostly making up those complaints isn't something we ever even need to know. The fact that the cameras have that effect is reason enough for the unions to acquiesce.
The courts are generally smart enough to know when something was intentionally written to have the practical effect of violating the constitution without obviously violating it in the text. The idea that you'd put one over on the Supreme Court by banning gunpowder is self-deception.
If something can't go on forever, it will stop. If the lawsuits are climbing and the payouts are getting bigger and more frequent, the money will eventually dry up and somebody will start asking questions about why police departments are so expensive. Yes, they get way more leeway than they should, but budgets are still finite and police administrators still need to balance them or go back to the local government to get more cash and explain why. Just keep turning up the heat and it will eventually get hot enough.
No, rights are inherent and granted by magic. If you try to exercise your right to free speech and I try to stop you, the Universe Itself will prevent me from doing so. Nothing whatsoever to do with conventions we as a society have agreed upon. They're fundamental, I tells ya, like gravity and magnetism.
Ultimately, though, the question is how is he going to end up with *more* money than when he started. Let's say his good friend's charity gets the full $45B in shares. Then what? There are rules about what a charity can do with that cash, and giving it back to Mark Zuckerberg and his family isn't really on the list. Likewise with SuperPACs. He's lost direct access to the 45B and will only be able to get his hands on a small percentage of it under weird circumstances, but now he has political influence to... do what exactly? Somehow earn another $45B to make it worth the investment?
The problem with all of these stories is that they lack actual numbers to illustrate how the perpetual motion machine is supposed to work. Yes, the tax code has a lot of holes in it, but I'm very skeptical of a lot of these just-so stories.
I'm looking for the way it's self serving on the net. Right now he has about $45B in Facebook stock. At ordinary income rates, he could walk away with $25B easily. At capital gains rates, he'd walk away with substantially more than that. So now he moves the stock into a place where he can't enjoy the money directly. He uses it to do some sort of self-serving lobbying. Then whatever is left gets donated to charity or used for child murder or whatever.
OK, maybe he can move some of that money around and get a multi-million dollar salary for himself for administering it. Maybe it will buy something from another company that he owns. But at the end of the day, it seems like no matter what he does he's going to have a shitton less money than he would have had if he'd just sold the stock and paid the taxes. How does Zuckerberg end up ahead on this deal?
The only times I can think of when a Baron genuinely turned to charity are at the end of their lives when a few of them got the fear of God (and more importantly hell) in 'em.
I don't know--The Gates Foundation seems to have been doing a lot of charitable work well before Bill reached the end of his days. I've seen people try to argue that the Gates Foundation is somehow self-serving, but those arguments tend to be word salad from people who are missing some pretty basic accounting details. It's very hard to get richer by giving away your fortune, even if you're giving it to an entity that will give lots of it back to you. I could see how it would be possible *in theory* to do, but most of the "examples" are people just positing paranoid hypotheticals.
So if the LLC donates, say, $100M in Facebook stock to a charity, Zuckerberg gives up an asset worth $100M, the charity gets an asset worth $100M, and Zuckerberg writes off $100M because he gave away an asset worth $100M. I'm missing the Crime Against Humanity here.
Could it be that astronomers are just more easily picked on than soldiers?
I think you're on the right track, but the phrasing is backward. People with guns an pick on whomever they want. People with telescopes have to ask permission.
I don't know...there are a lot of pretty gross and demeaning jobs out there. There are certainly plenty of jobs that are more dangerous for the same pay. Singling out prostitution in particular seems a little bit strange.
That's not terribly surprising, but it's also not something that's necessarily inherent in prostitution. The same thing goes on in manufacturing--filling sweatshops with people who were lured in with false promises or owe ridiculous sums of money to the traffickers. The problem isn't with the product itself but rather with lax enforcement of labor laws.
You can make the argument that what two consenting adults do in private is THEIR business, and I'd be willing to entertain such a view if this was actually done in private. But it generally isn't. Oh sure, the actual act usually is, but the solicitation is decidedly public, at least on the few occasions when I've actually noticed such activity. So, come up with a way to keep it out of sight, and I'm prepared to leave each to their own.
It seems likely to me that the main reason for that sort of solicitation is that there's no way for a legitimate business to advertise. You can't set up an office or a store. You can't put an ad in the paper and stay at a fixed location. You need to move around and proposition people who seem like they're not likely to be cops. I don't think any legitimate business would advertise that way, given the choice. It's not like dentists or hairdressers solicit in the streets.
However, the problem with this "activity" is that it encourages things like human trafficking, which is far from a victimless crime.
This seems again to be primarily a problem with it being a criminal activity to begin with. People don't get trafficked and sold into slavery as office workers. So what is it specifically about prostitution that makes it special? I'd say it's primarily because it's an illegal profession and people who go into it have two choices: 1) Do it alone and hope you don't get murdered by a client or by the organized criminal who stakes a claim to your territory. 2) Join up with a pimp who is an organized criminal and very likely a dangerous sociopath. Blaming prostitution for human trafficking of prostitutes is a little bit like blaming drugs for drug smuggling drive by shootings. Those things are a natural consequence of a profitable business being completely run by criminals without any oversight.
Remember, we've had quasi legal prostitution (still do in some places) in the past where the police colluded with brothel operators and it didn't work out all that great for the average worker, but made boatloads of cash for the owners. Consider Chicago in the 1920's, I don't think we want to do that again.
Can you flesh this out a bit? Are the problems of Chicago in the 20s still something we observe today in, say, Nevada? Without knowing more details, this still sounds like a problem with having entrenched organized criminals running an industry.
Being able to open a cheap ass lock that is used in 3 places per city is nowhere near as useful as being able to open a cheap ass lock that's used in 90% of all low security padlock installations. It's like finding an exploit in Windows 10 vs finding an exploit in OS2 Warp. Both are interesting, but one is much more practically useful.
Just as importantly, it gets you past the resume filter, "Must have a degree." Most of the time, if you don't get a job it's because they never even bothered to call you.
So it's curious why -- out of all the things that Dawkins could have been upset by -- he chooses to be upset by a cinema not displaying an ad for an Anglican Church. Would Dawkins be as upset as he is if it were an ad for a Jewish organization, or a Hindu one... or a Muslim one? I'm going to go out on a limb and say no.
Maybe Dawkins is the one who is being biased here.
Did you just make up a thing that he didn't actually do and then shit on him for the inappropriate response you fabricated on his behalf?
That's true today. Not in a few years. Don't let your hatred for Tesla blind you to the fact that the big auto companies will not be the only game in town forever. Well...maybe they will, but only if they succeed in keeping stupid regulations like the franchise requirement in order to minimize innovation and keep the auto retail market stagnant.
Dude, I was saYing they'd have to sell them to retailers, not that they couldn't sell them at all. The question was how to prevent a hypothetical manufacturer from monopolizing the repair business if it wanted to. Chill the fuck out.
you sure are big into regulation to set the rules of the game. why don't you let the market sort itself out?
Wow, that's an interesting reading of this thread. I thought I was responding to the hypothetical idea that nobody would repair cars if we didn't have a state-mandated dealer system. Apparently not.
I think you find that it will settle to exactly where it is now. Aside from some high end boutiques, all the OEMs will sell through a dealer network.
I think that's somewhat true, but I also think that what the dealers will look like will be somewhat different. They'll end up competing with the few OEMs (like Tesla) that control their buying experience, and frankly, the buying experience through those operations is superior. There's not a human on earth who enjoys dealing with car dealers, so as soon as any cracks in the system show, they'll have to change their ways. They definitely won't go away (for reasons you mentioned), but they'll probably start looking more like retailers and less like the hellscapes they currently are. Toyota will be saying, "We have to compete with Tesla on price and quality, but we also have to deal with the hit that comes from a miserable buying experience." The threat that Toyota will start selling directly will definitely put pressure on Toyota dealers to up their game.
And the car buying process continues to get easier and more transparent.
I think this will be the game changer. I bought 2 of my last 3 cars through CarsDirect. Reasonable straightforward price that's easy to check, no negotiation or games. My last car was delivered to me at my office with the paperwork. If I had to guess, I'd say we're going to move more and more toward that model and the only people who haggle at the dealer are going to be the real sharks who aren't profitable to haggle with. Once that starts to happen, the incentive for having a staff of professional hagglers goes away. Eventually, I expect prices will normalize and dealers will have to differentiate on other factors.
Slashdot Mirror
And onions are deadly to dogs! Why do you hate America, onion eaters???
Yeah, that's not actually anywhere near any case that has ever happened.
That's nothing new, though. Seed license agreements long predate modern transgenics and farmers go along with them for a lot of reasons. Keeping seeds is not as common as most people think. Very often, the traits that they want don't breed true anyway, so your next generation is a total mess. Just buying seeds every year gives you a consistent product with consistent yields without a lot of headache. Obviously, whether you can save seeds depends on the type of crop you're growing, but if seed saving was really a big thing across the board, seed companies would have been out of business a long time ago.
Having nukes is also a much cheaper way to maintain military deterrence. If you're a country that can barely feed itself, trying to keep up and equip a massive conventional military is a charade you can't keep going forever at scale. Once you have nukes hidden somewhere, you always have a viable military threat, even if you can no longer afford to put on big parades with zillions of troops and tanks on display. It's a very rational plan.
That's the reason we want them. But the reason police unions can't find a politically viable reason to oppose them is that they'll protect the good cops that they assure us are 99.999999999% of all officers. Especially since the statistics seem to show that cameras reduce complaints against officers. Whether that's because they're mostly acting better or because people were mostly making up those complaints isn't something we ever even need to know. The fact that the cameras have that effect is reason enough for the unions to acquiesce.
Having something in your hand when a cop things you're not his friend can be dangerous. Pointing that thing at the cop is probably not a good idea.
The courts are generally smart enough to know when something was intentionally written to have the practical effect of violating the constitution without obviously violating it in the text. The idea that you'd put one over on the Supreme Court by banning gunpowder is self-deception.
If something can't go on forever, it will stop. If the lawsuits are climbing and the payouts are getting bigger and more frequent, the money will eventually dry up and somebody will start asking questions about why police departments are so expensive. Yes, they get way more leeway than they should, but budgets are still finite and police administrators still need to balance them or go back to the local government to get more cash and explain why. Just keep turning up the heat and it will eventually get hot enough.
No, rights are inherent and granted by magic. If you try to exercise your right to free speech and I try to stop you, the Universe Itself will prevent me from doing so. Nothing whatsoever to do with conventions we as a society have agreed upon. They're fundamental, I tells ya, like gravity and magnetism.
(The fact that there are so many people making these arguments with a straight face that they don't come across as joking is very, very sad.)
That's right. Also, taking sex slaves and throwing gays off of rooftops are things they're only doing out of necessity to fight off the invaders.
Come on, you know that nobody would have come up with that whole caliphate idea if it weren't for western imperialism.
Ultimately, though, the question is how is he going to end up with *more* money than when he started. Let's say his good friend's charity gets the full $45B in shares. Then what? There are rules about what a charity can do with that cash, and giving it back to Mark Zuckerberg and his family isn't really on the list. Likewise with SuperPACs. He's lost direct access to the 45B and will only be able to get his hands on a small percentage of it under weird circumstances, but now he has political influence to... do what exactly? Somehow earn another $45B to make it worth the investment?
The problem with all of these stories is that they lack actual numbers to illustrate how the perpetual motion machine is supposed to work. Yes, the tax code has a lot of holes in it, but I'm very skeptical of a lot of these just-so stories.
OK, maybe he can move some of that money around and get a multi-million dollar salary for himself for administering it. Maybe it will buy something from another company that he owns. But at the end of the day, it seems like no matter what he does he's going to have a shitton less money than he would have had if he'd just sold the stock and paid the taxes. How does Zuckerberg end up ahead on this deal?
I don't know--The Gates Foundation seems to have been doing a lot of charitable work well before Bill reached the end of his days. I've seen people try to argue that the Gates Foundation is somehow self-serving, but those arguments tend to be word salad from people who are missing some pretty basic accounting details. It's very hard to get richer by giving away your fortune, even if you're giving it to an entity that will give lots of it back to you. I could see how it would be possible *in theory* to do, but most of the "examples" are people just positing paranoid hypotheticals.
So if the LLC donates, say, $100M in Facebook stock to a charity, Zuckerberg gives up an asset worth $100M, the charity gets an asset worth $100M, and Zuckerberg writes off $100M because he gave away an asset worth $100M. I'm missing the Crime Against Humanity here.
I think you're on the right track, but the phrasing is backward. People with guns an pick on whomever they want. People with telescopes have to ask permission.
I don't know...there are a lot of pretty gross and demeaning jobs out there. There are certainly plenty of jobs that are more dangerous for the same pay. Singling out prostitution in particular seems a little bit strange.
That's not terribly surprising, but it's also not something that's necessarily inherent in prostitution. The same thing goes on in manufacturing--filling sweatshops with people who were lured in with false promises or owe ridiculous sums of money to the traffickers. The problem isn't with the product itself but rather with lax enforcement of labor laws.
It seems likely to me that the main reason for that sort of solicitation is that there's no way for a legitimate business to advertise. You can't set up an office or a store. You can't put an ad in the paper and stay at a fixed location. You need to move around and proposition people who seem like they're not likely to be cops. I don't think any legitimate business would advertise that way, given the choice. It's not like dentists or hairdressers solicit in the streets.
This seems again to be primarily a problem with it being a criminal activity to begin with. People don't get trafficked and sold into slavery as office workers. So what is it specifically about prostitution that makes it special? I'd say it's primarily because it's an illegal profession and people who go into it have two choices: 1) Do it alone and hope you don't get murdered by a client or by the organized criminal who stakes a claim to your territory. 2) Join up with a pimp who is an organized criminal and very likely a dangerous sociopath. Blaming prostitution for human trafficking of prostitutes is a little bit like blaming drugs for drug smuggling drive by shootings. Those things are a natural consequence of a profitable business being completely run by criminals without any oversight.
Can you flesh this out a bit? Are the problems of Chicago in the 20s still something we observe today in, say, Nevada? Without knowing more details, this still sounds like a problem with having entrenched organized criminals running an industry.
Being able to open a cheap ass lock that is used in 3 places per city is nowhere near as useful as being able to open a cheap ass lock that's used in 90% of all low security padlock installations. It's like finding an exploit in Windows 10 vs finding an exploit in OS2 Warp. Both are interesting, but one is much more practically useful.
Just as importantly, it gets you past the resume filter, "Must have a degree." Most of the time, if you don't get a job it's because they never even bothered to call you.
Did you just make up a thing that he didn't actually do and then shit on him for the inappropriate response you fabricated on his behalf?
That's true today. Not in a few years. Don't let your hatred for Tesla blind you to the fact that the big auto companies will not be the only game in town forever. Well. ..maybe they will, but only if they succeed in keeping stupid regulations like the franchise requirement in order to minimize innovation and keep the auto retail market stagnant.
Dude, I was saYing they'd have to sell them to retailers, not that they couldn't sell them at all. The question was how to prevent a hypothetical manufacturer from monopolizing the repair business if it wanted to. Chill the fuck out.
Wow, that's an interesting reading of this thread. I thought I was responding to the hypothetical idea that nobody would repair cars if we didn't have a state-mandated dealer system. Apparently not.
I think that's somewhat true, but I also think that what the dealers will look like will be somewhat different. They'll end up competing with the few OEMs (like Tesla) that control their buying experience, and frankly, the buying experience through those operations is superior. There's not a human on earth who enjoys dealing with car dealers, so as soon as any cracks in the system show, they'll have to change their ways. They definitely won't go away (for reasons you mentioned), but they'll probably start looking more like retailers and less like the hellscapes they currently are. Toyota will be saying, "We have to compete with Tesla on price and quality, but we also have to deal with the hit that comes from a miserable buying experience." The threat that Toyota will start selling directly will definitely put pressure on Toyota dealers to up their game.
I think this will be the game changer. I bought 2 of my last 3 cars through CarsDirect. Reasonable straightforward price that's easy to check, no negotiation or games. My last car was delivered to me at my office with the paperwork. If I had to guess, I'd say we're going to move more and more toward that model and the only people who haggle at the dealer are going to be the real sharks who aren't profitable to haggle with. Once that starts to happen, the incentive for having a staff of professional hagglers goes away. Eventually, I expect prices will normalize and dealers will have to differentiate on other factors.