I thought the most interesting thing about this was Negroponte saying "The hundred-dollar laptop is an educaton project. It's not a laptop project."
What I think is interesting is that people are thinking about this like it's philanthropy. Is it? There are 3 to 5 billion people who live outside the western world. A mere profit margin of $1 per laptop is one hell of a lot of money. A $100 laptop times 3 billion people is a third of a trillion dollars worth of economic activity. That is nothing to sneeze at in any industry. Maybe that's why Bill's so mad, he won't get the chance to put the screws to billions of third world needy people like he did to the rest of us.
Agreed. You touched on why Sony is probably in a death spiral. Their DRM turns off a bunch of customers, that in turn causes them to loose a bunch of hardware sales, that in turn causes them to rely more on the content side of the business and give them more leverage over Sony corp, which in turn will lead to more restrictions and turn off even more customers.
Sony needs to understand that they can either be a doomed content company or a electronics company, but not both. It simply amazes me to see how hard they have tried to kill their electronics sales in the name of content. I hope it's not lost on them that all this bad will surely has an impact on all Sony products. Somebody up there is clearly out of touch. If I were a Sony share holder, I would be pissed.
The central government is very strong, and it does a lot to keep the infrastructure of China solid and the people fed. Furthermore, there are millions of people living in many cities. By the nature of cities ideas can spread very fast. The main concern of the government is stability, they dont want hundreds of thousands of protestors upsetting the core of the country because they want a luxury like democracy.
Well the funny thing is that when these same inland Chineese move to Hong Kong, or to the United States where fredom isn't restricted as much, then why it it that they seem to have no problem adjusting to this "culturally disruptive" freedom in a matter of days? Sure HK is rich now, but it had almost nothing (but a huge amount of people and freedom) just after WW2. Was there chaos? sure, disorder? Sure - but it was mostle directed into productive activities because people had the freedoms to direct in into productive activities. It simply amazes me how many ways are there for people to say that rights are subjective and dependent on circumstances. It simply amazes me that when others judge by facts, history, and what is known to work that they are called closed minded or kneejerk - I think those would be more appropiate lables for the Chineese government. FYI, since people who are free are more efficient and more productive, what we should really be saying is that China can't afford the "luxury" of communisim.
There are an infinite number of nice sounding excuses to shit on peoples freedoms. We've herd them all before: how protestantisim would rip the western world apart. How free press had to be controlled to ensure order. How people need to be disarmed to stop violence. Like usual, they are all shit. If China really really needs stability, then what they really really need is democracy so that people can change government when it needs to change without a violent revolt.
I imagine someone who wanted to could buy enough equiptment to record all known quasar emmissions and store them or try them against encrypted data streams. A million quasars with 5000 possible frequencies each, wouldn't be that much for a computer to churn thru. In a way, it almost seems like security thru obscurity.
When the hell are you fucking morons going to realize that intellectual property protects the EXPRESSION of an idea, not the idea itself? This is a very basic concept and withoutunderstanding it we get the mindless crap often repeated on Slashdot like that from the parent thread.
property? protects? EXPRESSION? mindless crap? I think you need to re-evaluate your statement.
This is half the problem, too many people just think that the patnet and copyright issues are just semantic issues. they are not. Intellectual property is not "property" in any sense of the word, a monopoly backed by the full coercive force of the government is not "protection", the fact that it's an expression vs an idea is irrelavent because no matter how you look at it - people who apply the ideas or information are coerced, and "mindless crap" is what happens when people believe all the bullshit that has been spoonfed to them about copyrights and patents without question.
Patnets and copyrights are about real coercion, and that coercion has real consequences. In the scientific world, theories and awkward labeling are irrelavent - what matters are the measurable results. In the political and business world, it still seems they have some catching up to do.
Believe that patents and copyrights are sewage, and act on that belief accordingly.
If you did, you would have seen that the internet is more than a passing fad (1992), that Linux was more than a "toy" os (1996), that the x86 architecture and the IBM compatable PC was going to take over the market place(2000) inspite of it's original inherent design flaws. That p2p was going to explode in usage, that ethernet would win out over Novell, and Token-Ring despite being "technically" inferior. Plus you would have been able to anticipate the technology explosion that happens every few years when a new technologies 18th annaversary approaches and patents start to run out.
All to often, a companies version of a great idea is something that they can patent, sit on, and collect royalities on without any real application usage or work. Well, bullshit - it's just the opposite. A great idea is something that proliferates and spreads in usage freely, without restriction.
What will happen is that people will create all these "dark nets" where you cant find out who the real originator or the real destination is. Implementing these "dark nets" will likely be done at the expense of more telco bandwidth.
Lets not forget that Linux, Linux users, and the Linux community have held themselves as accountable to being free as in freedom because of the underpinnings of the GPL. However, Microsoft is accountable to "intellectual property" being their "crown jules" as I think Bill Gates once put it, but that kind of proprietary controll simply won't work in the information age. It's like mixing oil and water - if you shake it up real hard it might work for awhile, but over the long term one will float to the top and the other to the bottom.
This is intentional, a standard divide and conquer tactic. Instead of people choosing economic freedoms AND personal freedoms, all to often the enemies of freedom try to force one to fignt against the other.
But now we have the internet, and dividing culture that way is becomming a lot harder. That most likely means that the contention and divisions are going to be more international (like islam vs the west), and that there will be a major shakeup in the two party system.
I wouldn't be supprised if the Democratic party got killed, the libertarian democrats and the libertarian rebuplicans join into a new party, and the religious right stays Republican.
Switching the license of OpenBSD would compromise the integrity of the team and the quality of the software as well as the most important aspect, freedom.
This is a logical fallacy, sorta like the logical fallacy "people should have the freedom to own slaves" or "prople should have the freedom to controll other peoples speech". In this case, there is an implicit assumption that denying other's the right to fork off their own copyright controlled code is denying a freedom. It is not. Controlling copyrights do not grant freedom, all they do is offer the right to use or criminalise people who create down stream modifications.
Switching would also be in violation of the rights of those who contributed code under the assumption of BSD; switching thus isn't legally viable.
If someone is permitted to fork off to a proprietary licence, then I cant imagine any reason in the world why they wouldn't be able to fork off a GPL license - from which the BSD team could contribute from there.
OK, I apologize in advance because I already know this is going to piss some people off, but why don't they try going all GPL. That would make it so that proprietary development couldn't fork off the code base and so would probably make the project leads a center point for support, services, and custom jobs. Lots of other people like Red Hat are making money this way, I don't see why the OpenBSD team couldn't do it too. The fact that the free software movement is exploding in cash while Open BSD is suffering - shouldn't that be telling us something?
[nuttiness]Personally, I'd rather take the risk of starving. If I've been of sufficient value to society to be worth the cost of my upkeep, I'll either have accrued sufficient assets to live off of, or have third parties willing to voluntarily pay said costs. If I haven't, the extent to which I am a detriment to society obviously outweighs my benefit. Isn't making such optimal decisions precisely what the free market is best at?[/nuttiness]
I'm with you. I would rather be a poor worthless beggar in a society with economic freedom, than a drone in a welfare state any day. But then again, I guess people with that kind of attitude aren't likely to become poor worthless beggars - are they?:)
You talk in general terms but really don't address SS itself. And your previous post which had no more substance is still moderated insightful.
This is because the fundamental problem isn't how the conclusion is drawn, the fundamental problem is the premise. Get the freakin premises right about SSI, and I'll have no problem arguing about how things will draw out. Untill then, it is a waste of time.
Unless people like Bush manage to turn back the clock to 19th century conditions with people starving in the streets, one way or another, the government will provide minimal food and health care for old people. After all, old people vote.
People voting didn't prevent the great depression, nor the inflation in the 80's. You can't vote something that is inherently insolvent to become inherently solvent. If people like Bush don't manage to shut down SSI, the dollar will likely become insolvent.
If right wing nuts didn't keep interfering in the deployment of a secure national ID system, you wouldn't have to worry about that.
If left wing nuts didn't create the SSI system/number to begin with, we wouldn't need to worry about neither.
Your kids will pay for your retirement--it doesn't matter how you dress it up: privat retirement accounts, social security, whatever. Even if you stuff money under a mattress, when you use it to buy services once you're retired, you're still depriving your kids of the same amount of goods and services. It's not a "Ponzi scheme", it's a simple economic truth.
This makes an implicit assumption that money forcefully invested in government IOU's would provide people a better future than money invested by individuals. That assumption is a lie. Also, if it deprives them of the same goods and services either way - a loving parent would rather they be given savings in return for those goods and services, than taxes.
The problem isn't the social security system. It's the men and women of the Executive and Legislative branch that balloon the deficit with pork barrel spending. Even if we remove the SS blanket, there's no gaurantee that these people wouldn't spend the money elsewhere. Before we talk about changing social security, we need to have people that would be fiscally responsible.
This is wrong on so many levels, I don't even know where to start. FYI, the SSI program is moral and intellectual sewage. Even if we could coax politicians to make the thing solvent, it is still intellectual and moral sewage. The fact is, in the real world, things like that have consequences and if the consequences didn't show up this form they would show up in another form. So name one financial projection from the government in the last 100 years that has been correct. There is none, so you can talk CBO projections all you want, but I am talking consequences.
First, ponzi schemes don't work and are not productive ways to use or save money! This is a fact of life, it is a God given truth... that's why any financial planner in the US who started one would be thrown in the can and sued into oblivian. It amazes me that the same people who can see that these ponzi schemes are predestined to become failueres when a company does it, but suddenly when the government does it then they think that all the potential consequences just magically go away.
Second, governments do not save or use resources as wisely on average as individuals do. This is also a God given truth... it is a fact of life. This is why every government in the history of human kind that has had a centrally planned economy has failed their people badly. People should take a lesson from the old soviet union... just because the government promised them free bread, didn't mean that mean that you had a secure food supply. Just because the government promises people social security, doesn't mean that people are going to be socially secure.
I'm going to leave the rest of the rant alone, other than to point out that, for every "failed" derivatives contract, the entity on the other side of the contract wins...
That's the problem though. A big investor might might have a 10 billion bet on derivatives that interest rates will go down and a 10.1 billion bet on derivatives that interest rates will go up. He presumes that his liability is 0.1 billion or 100 million. This scheme works very nicely assuming that everyone in the world who has derivatives is solvent. But as soon as someone has financial troubbles, then they are not able to pay him, and he is not able to pay the 10 billion on the side of the bet that was wrong. And all the people that he owes that 10 billion to are not able to pay on their obligations, and pretty soon the whole system collapses.
This is exactly what happened with LTCM, but the Fed jumped in and payed up and a cascading chain of defaults was avoided. Unfortunately, what the companies learned from this was that they could be reckless with derivatives because the Fed will always come along and bail them out. Well, that works out nicely, but now that the interest rate derivatives are 17 trillion and total derivatives are 270 trillion (compaired to a US gdp of 12 trillion) - if the fed bails them out (which it will half to) the whole economy goes to satanic hell.
The truth is that all too often the government taxes people too much, and then they find themselves needing to give "tax credits" back to spurr innovation, retirement savings, house savings, college savings, and medical savings. Well bullshit. All that does is give the government more controll in my life to decide what is a priority and what is not.
How about if they quit freakin taxing me so much to begin with. A nice start would be SSI, anyone under 40 must surely know that they'll never see a peny of it anyhow (unless the dollar is hyperinflated out of existence). Not only that, but we pay for it twice: once before you get your paycheck, and then it's deducted again after you get your paycheck. I especially resent using that number that dog tags me and makes it a cakewalk to steal my ID, I resent being forced into a ponzi scheme, and especially resent coercing my kids to pay for my retirement.
Right now the US is what they call the "high end" market. Where corporations try and herd them in like cattle, and nail it to them when they're not expecting. However, what these companies don't know is that while the economic freedom and the infrastructure of the US economy is very nice, the health of the US dollar as a currency is very very very bad.
Between a crashing housing market, and over extended debt in the US economic system, and too much US currency (liquitidy) floating arround overseas, and 270 trillion with a T in derivatives contracts out there (17 trillion of which are interest rate related and doomed to fail).
Between all these, the US economy is pretty much pre-destined to fall of a hyperinflationary debt cliff (and will likely take Japan and Europe with it). When that happens, you can better believe that all the high end crap that they are trying to reem down everybodys throat will get scrapped for the stuff where they can make up profit on volume.
Anyway do you think that if welfare was done away with tomorrow, all those lazy scroungers would go get a job? No, some of them would take your money at gunpoint instead.
Well, that's a self correcting problem in a society where an individuals right to bear arms is respected. But in truth, there are billions of non violent people in the world who live in extreme poverty. It's pretty well understood that there do not exist coorelations between poverty and violence, but very strong ones between poverty and lack of freedoms.
You're already assuming that the government isn't already doing the most that they can letitimately get away with to take away peoples economic freedoms. You are also assuming that the government *could* coerce more money if they applied themselves better. Well, the government is finite.
If you want to live in a civilized society and benefit from government services that benefit ALL of us, then pay your damn taxes and quit bitching. Maybe you don't agree with what the government is spending your money on. Most of us don't 100%. So get your ass out and vote, and make some calls to your representatives
That's bullshit. People have rights and the right to secure their rights wether they can effectively work the system or not. Rosa Parks not going to the back of the bus was civilized, Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad was civilized, Phil Zimmerman who releases PGP contrary to legal interperation at the time was civilized. Civilized societies come from individuals who work to secure their rights, not from being passive little good boys and girls who do things the way the system tells them to.
Wait - protect whose rights? Which rights are you referring to? Our right to not be taxed on income? I don't think that's a right...
But it is. That income is my property, and I worked honestly to get it. I earned it, not the government. I took risks to get it, not the government. It is free people like me doing hard work that make success and prosperity in society possible - government owes it to me to respect my rights - that's the vary justification for it's existence. I owe the government nothing.
Now perhaps I'm willing to let the government violate that right some if I feel the risk of being violated is greater from some external outside force that I have less controll over. But if it isn't, or if they're coercing my hard earned income to just give it away as a freebie to someone else, then all bets are off. It's amazing the good deeds you can proclaim to do when it is done with someone elses money.
Anyhow, the bottom line is that the right for people to secure their rights, is a right. That is what's driving wealth and income offshore, and a lack of respect of individual rights from the powers that be are what's driving government to try and crutail it. It is an escalating battle, and people who don't undersand that will eventually find themselves in a real bind when it's too late.
IMHO, this bill has nothing to do with gambling. It has to do with controlling the flow of offshore funds and gambling is just a nice sounding excuse sorta like terrorisim and the war on drugs. The real fear of the government is that people will protect their rights because it is so easy to move money and funds offshore outside IRS controll. In the old days, the war on drugs was enough to hold most average people in check, but now with the information age they need to resort to more desperate measures.
This is bullshit. Respect of the human dignity and free will of a Chineese person is just as important as the respect of human dignity and free will of an American one. The notion that rights are opinions and mutual agreements worked out with a government died over 200 years ago. Today it is widely understood that individuals have rights with or without government, and that those rights are inaliable, and that the puspose of government is to help secure those rights. If the government can't do it, then it is a failure - plain and simple. This isn't rocket science, the history of rights has been well tested out and is only misunderstood by those who would want to ignore it and abuse it.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the most interesting thing about this was Negroponte saying "The hundred-dollar laptop is an educaton project. It's not a laptop project."
What I think is interesting is that people are thinking about this like it's philanthropy. Is it? There are 3 to 5 billion people who live outside the western world. A mere profit margin of $1 per laptop is one hell of a lot of money. A $100 laptop times 3 billion people is a third of a trillion dollars worth of economic activity. That is nothing to sneeze at in any industry. Maybe that's why Bill's so mad, he won't get the chance to put the screws to billions of third world needy people like he did to the rest of us.
Straight Talk About Copyrights
Hope the messg gets thru.
Agreed. You touched on why Sony is probably in a death spiral. Their DRM turns off a bunch of customers, that in turn causes them to loose a bunch of hardware sales, that in turn causes them to rely more on the content side of the business and give them more leverage over Sony corp, which in turn will lead to more restrictions and turn off even more customers.
Sony needs to understand that they can either be a doomed content company or a electronics company, but not both. It simply amazes me to see how hard they have tried to kill their electronics sales in the name of content. I hope it's not lost on them that all this bad will surely has an impact on all Sony products. Somebody up there is clearly out of touch. If I were a Sony share holder, I would be pissed.
The central government is very strong, and it does a lot to keep the infrastructure of China solid and the people fed. Furthermore, there are millions of people living in many cities. By the nature of cities ideas can spread very fast. The main concern of the government is stability, they dont want hundreds of thousands of protestors upsetting the core of the country because they want a luxury like democracy.
Well the funny thing is that when these same inland Chineese move to Hong Kong, or to the United States where fredom isn't restricted as much, then why it it that they seem to have no problem adjusting to this "culturally disruptive" freedom in a matter of days? Sure HK is rich now, but it had almost nothing (but a huge amount of people and freedom) just after WW2. Was there chaos? sure, disorder? Sure - but it was mostle directed into productive activities because people had the freedoms to direct in into productive activities. It simply amazes me how many ways are there for people to say that rights are subjective and dependent on circumstances. It simply amazes me that when others judge by facts, history, and what is known to work that they are called closed minded or kneejerk - I think those would be more appropiate lables for the Chineese government. FYI, since people who are free are more efficient and more productive, what we should really be saying is that China can't afford the "luxury" of communisim.
There are an infinite number of nice sounding excuses to shit on peoples freedoms. We've herd them all before: how protestantisim would rip the western world apart. How free press had to be controlled to ensure order. How people need to be disarmed to stop violence. Like usual, they are all shit. If China really really needs stability, then what they really really need is democracy so that people can change government when it needs to change without a violent revolt.
I imagine someone who wanted to could buy enough equiptment to record all known quasar emmissions and store them
or try them against encrypted data streams. A million quasars with 5000 possible frequencies each, wouldn't be that
much for a computer to churn thru. In a way, it almost seems like security thru obscurity.
When the hell are you fucking morons going to realize that intellectual property protects the EXPRESSION of an idea, not the idea itself? This is a very basic concept and withoutunderstanding it we get the mindless crap often repeated on Slashdot like that from the parent thread.
property? protects? EXPRESSION? mindless crap? I think you need to re-evaluate your statement.
This is half the problem, too many people just think that the patnet and copyright issues are just semantic issues. they are not. Intellectual property is not "property" in any sense of the word, a monopoly backed by the full coercive force of the government is not "protection", the fact that it's an expression vs an idea is irrelavent because no matter how you look at it - people who apply the ideas or information are coerced, and "mindless crap" is what happens when people believe all the bullshit that has been spoonfed to them about copyrights and patents without question.
Patnets and copyrights are about real coercion, and that coercion has real consequences. In the scientific world, theories and awkward labeling are irrelavent - what matters are the measurable results. In the political and business world, it still seems they have some catching up to do.
Believe that patents and copyrights are sewage, and act on that belief accordingly.
If you did, you would have seen that the internet is more than a passing fad (1992), that Linux
was more than a "toy" os (1996), that the x86 architecture and the IBM compatable PC was going
to take over the market place(2000) inspite of it's original inherent design flaws. That p2p was going
to explode in usage, that ethernet would win out over Novell, and Token-Ring despite being
"technically" inferior. Plus you would have been able to anticipate the technology explosion
that happens every few years when a new technologies 18th annaversary approaches and patents start to
run out.
All to often, a companies version of a great idea is something that they can patent, sit on,
and collect royalities on without any real application usage or work. Well, bullshit - it's just
the opposite. A great idea is something that proliferates and spreads in usage freely, without
restriction.
Essay: Straight Talk about Copyrights
What will happen is that people will create all these "dark nets" where you cant find out who the real originator or the real destination is. Implementing these "dark nets" will likely be done at the expense of more telco bandwidth.
Lets not forget that Linux, Linux users, and the Linux community have held themselves as accountable to being free as in freedom because of the underpinnings of the GPL. However, Microsoft is accountable to "intellectual property" being their "crown jules" as I think Bill Gates once put it, but that kind of proprietary controll simply won't work in the information age. It's like mixing oil and water - if you shake it up real hard it might work for awhile, but over the long term one will float to the top and the other to the bottom.
This is intentional, a standard divide and conquer tactic. Instead of people choosing economic freedoms AND personal freedoms, all to often the enemies of freedom try to force one to fignt against the other.
But now we have the internet, and dividing culture that way is becomming a lot harder. That most likely means that the contention and divisions are going to be more international (like islam vs the west), and that there will be a major shakeup in the two party system.
I wouldn't be supprised if the Democratic party got killed, the libertarian democrats and the libertarian rebuplicans join into a new party, and the religious right stays Republican.
Switching the license of OpenBSD would compromise the integrity of the team and the quality of the software as well as the most important aspect, freedom.
This is a logical fallacy, sorta like the logical fallacy "people should have the freedom to own slaves" or "prople should have the freedom to controll other peoples speech". In this case, there is an implicit assumption that denying other's the right to fork off their own copyright controlled code is denying a freedom. It is not. Controlling copyrights do not grant freedom, all they do is offer the right to use or criminalise people who create down stream modifications.
Switching would also be in violation of the rights of those who contributed code under the assumption of BSD; switching thus isn't legally viable.
If someone is permitted to fork off to a proprietary licence, then I cant imagine any reason in the world why they wouldn't be able to fork off a GPL license - from which the BSD team could contribute from there.
OK, I apologize in advance because I already know this is going to piss some people off, but why don't they try going all GPL. That would make it so that proprietary development couldn't fork off the code base and so would probably make the project leads a center point for support, services, and custom jobs. Lots of other people like Red Hat are making money this way, I don't see why the OpenBSD team couldn't do it too. The fact that the free software movement is exploding in cash while Open BSD is suffering - shouldn't that be telling us something?
[nuttiness]Personally, I'd rather take the risk of starving. If I've been of sufficient value to society to be worth the cost of my upkeep, I'll either have accrued sufficient assets to live off of, or have third parties willing to voluntarily pay said costs. If I haven't, the extent to which I am a detriment to society obviously outweighs my benefit. Isn't making such optimal decisions precisely what the free market is best at?[/nuttiness]
I'm with you. I would rather be a poor worthless beggar in a society with economic freedom, than a drone in a welfare state any day. But then again, I guess people with that kind of attitude aren't likely to become poor worthless beggars - are they? :)
You talk in general terms but really don't address SS itself. And your previous post which had no more substance is still moderated insightful.
This is because the fundamental problem isn't how the conclusion is drawn, the fundamental problem is the premise. Get the freakin premises right about SSI, and I'll have no problem arguing about how things will draw out. Untill then, it is a waste of time.
How Sad
Indeed.
Unless people like Bush manage to turn back the clock to 19th century conditions with people starving in the streets, one way or another, the government will provide minimal food and health care for old people. After all, old people vote.
People voting didn't prevent the great depression, nor the inflation in the 80's. You can't vote something that is inherently insolvent to become inherently solvent. If people like Bush don't manage to shut down SSI, the dollar will likely become insolvent.
If right wing nuts didn't keep interfering in the deployment of a secure national ID system, you wouldn't have to worry about that.
If left wing nuts didn't create the SSI system/number to begin with, we wouldn't need to worry about neither.
Your kids will pay for your retirement--it doesn't matter how you dress it up: privat retirement accounts, social security, whatever. Even if you stuff money under a mattress, when you use it to buy services once you're retired, you're still depriving your kids of the same amount of goods and services. It's not a "Ponzi scheme", it's a simple economic truth.
This makes an implicit assumption that money forcefully invested in government IOU's would provide people a better future than money invested by individuals. That assumption is a lie. Also, if it deprives them of the same goods and services either way - a loving parent would rather they be given savings in return for those goods and services, than taxes.
The problem isn't the social security system. It's the men and women of the Executive and Legislative branch that balloon the deficit with pork barrel spending. Even if we remove the SS blanket, there's no gaurantee that these people wouldn't spend the money elsewhere. Before we talk about changing social security, we need to have people that would be fiscally responsible.
This is wrong on so many levels, I don't even know where to start. FYI, the SSI program is moral and intellectual sewage. Even if we could coax politicians to make the thing solvent, it is still intellectual and moral sewage. The fact is, in the real world, things like that have consequences and if the consequences didn't show up this form they would show up in another form. So name one financial projection from the government in the last 100 years that has been correct. There is none, so you can talk CBO projections all you want, but I am talking consequences.
First, ponzi schemes don't work and are not productive ways to use or save money! This is a fact of life, it is a God given truth ... that's why any financial planner in the US who started one would be thrown in the can and sued into oblivian. It amazes me that the same people who can see that these ponzi schemes are predestined to become failueres when a company does it, but suddenly when the government does it then they think that all the potential consequences just magically go away.
Second, governments do not save or use resources as wisely on average as individuals do. This is also a God given truth ... it is a fact of life. This is why every government in the history of human kind that has had a centrally planned economy has failed their people badly. People should take a lesson from the old soviet union ... just because the government promised them free bread, didn't mean that mean that you had a secure food supply. Just because the government promises people social security, doesn't mean that people are going to be socially secure.
I'm going to leave the rest of the rant alone, other than to point out that, for every "failed" derivatives contract, the entity on the other side of the contract wins...
That's the problem though. A big investor might might have a 10 billion bet on derivatives that interest rates will go down and a 10.1 billion bet on derivatives that interest rates will go up. He presumes that his liability is 0.1 billion or 100 million. This scheme works very nicely assuming that everyone in the world who has derivatives is solvent. But as soon as someone has financial troubbles, then they are not able to pay him, and he is not able to pay the 10 billion on the side of the bet that was wrong. And all the people that he owes that 10 billion to are not able to pay on their obligations, and pretty soon the whole system collapses.
This is exactly what happened with LTCM, but the Fed jumped in and payed up and a cascading chain of defaults was avoided. Unfortunately, what the companies learned from this was that they could be reckless with derivatives because the Fed will always come along and bail them out. Well, that works out nicely, but now that the interest rate derivatives are 17 trillion and total derivatives are 270 trillion (compaired to a US gdp of 12 trillion) - if the fed bails them out (which it will half to) the whole economy goes to satanic hell.
The truth is that all too often the government taxes people too much, and then they find themselves needing to give "tax credits" back to spurr innovation, retirement savings, house savings, college savings, and medical savings. Well bullshit. All that does is give the government more controll in my life to decide what is a priority and what is not.
How about if they quit freakin taxing me so much to begin with. A nice start would be SSI, anyone under 40 must surely know that they'll never see a peny of it anyhow (unless the dollar is hyperinflated out of existence). Not only that, but we pay for it twice: once before you get your paycheck, and then it's deducted again after you get your paycheck. I especially resent using that number that dog tags me and makes it a cakewalk to steal my ID, I resent being forced into a ponzi scheme, and especially resent coercing my kids to pay for my retirement.
Right now the US is what they call the "high end" market. Where corporations try and herd them in like cattle, and nail it to them when they're not expecting. However, what these companies don't know is that while the economic freedom and the infrastructure of the US economy is very nice, the health of the US dollar as a currency is very very very bad.
Between a crashing housing market, and over extended debt in the US economic system, and too much US currency (liquitidy) floating arround overseas, and 270 trillion with a T in derivatives contracts out there (17 trillion of which are interest rate related and doomed to fail).
Between all these, the US economy is pretty much pre-destined to fall of a hyperinflationary debt cliff (and will likely take Japan and Europe with it). When that happens, you can better believe that all the high end crap that they are trying to reem down everybodys throat will get scrapped for the stuff where they can make up profit on volume.
Anyway do you think that if welfare was done away with tomorrow, all those lazy scroungers would go get a job? No, some of them would take your money at gunpoint instead.
Well, that's a self correcting problem in a society where an individuals right to bear arms is respected. But in truth, there are billions of non violent people in the world who live in extreme poverty. It's pretty well understood that there do not exist coorelations between poverty and violence, but very strong ones between poverty and lack of freedoms.
You're already assuming that the government isn't already doing the most that they can letitimately get away with to take away peoples economic freedoms. You are also assuming that the government *could* coerce more money if they applied themselves better. Well, the government is finite.
If you want to live in a civilized society and benefit from government services that benefit ALL of us, then pay your damn taxes and quit bitching. Maybe you don't agree with what the government is spending your money on. Most of us don't 100%. So get your ass out and vote, and make some calls to your representatives
That's bullshit. People have rights and the right to secure their rights wether they can effectively work the system or not. Rosa Parks not going to the back of the bus was civilized, Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad was civilized, Phil Zimmerman who releases PGP contrary to legal interperation at the time was civilized. Civilized societies come from individuals who work to secure their rights, not from being passive little good boys and girls who do things the way the system tells them to.
Wait - protect whose rights? Which rights are you referring to? Our right to not be taxed on income? I don't think that's a right...
But it is. That income is my property, and I worked honestly to get it. I earned it, not the government. I took risks to get it, not the government. It is free people like me doing hard work that make success and prosperity in society possible - government owes it to me to respect my rights - that's the vary justification for it's existence. I owe the government nothing.
Now perhaps I'm willing to let the government violate that right some if I feel the risk of being violated is greater from some external outside force that I have less controll over. But if it isn't, or if they're coercing my hard earned income to just give it away as a freebie to someone else, then all bets are off. It's amazing the good deeds you can proclaim to do when it is done with someone elses money.
Anyhow, the bottom line is that the right for people to secure their rights, is a right. That is what's driving wealth and income offshore, and a lack of respect of individual rights from the powers that be are what's driving government to try and crutail it. It is an escalating battle, and people who don't undersand that will eventually find themselves in a real bind when it's too late.
IMHO, this bill has nothing to do with gambling. It has to do with controlling the flow of offshore funds and gambling is just a nice sounding excuse sorta like terrorisim and the war on drugs. The real fear of the government is that people will protect their rights because it is so easy to move money and funds offshore outside IRS controll. In the old days, the war on drugs was enough to hold most average people in check, but now with the information age they need to resort to more desperate measures.
Chinese affairs are not always the way you think
This is bullshit. Respect of the human dignity and free will of a Chineese person is just as important as the respect of human dignity and free will of an American one. The notion that rights are opinions and mutual agreements worked out with a government died over 200 years ago. Today it is widely understood that individuals have rights with or without government, and that those rights are inaliable, and that the puspose of government is to help secure those rights. If the government can't do it, then it is a failure - plain and simple. This isn't rocket science, the history of rights has been well tested out and is only misunderstood by those who would want to ignore it and abuse it.