The idea that SS taxes shouldn't be applied to capital gains and other forms of income is basically a huge giveaway to the rich.
It's not a "huge giveaway" to the rich. It's a "take-less-away" from them. They're not gaining by paying less taxes; they're simply not losing as much as the rest of us are.
Taxing them more won't make it any easier for me to save for my retirement. Taxing me less will. (I clearly have no confidence that Social Security will do anything useful for me when I retire.)
I'd sign up with comcast for IPv6, provided I got my own static IP block. As it is now, I tend to be a DSL guy, because:
a) I don't like sharing my bandwidth with the entire neighbourhood without my own traffic-shaping in place b) DSL works when the power goes out. What good are UPS's if you can't stay online?;)
If you guys offered me IPv6 with static IP's, I'd go with you in a heartbeat. (at least until Verizon brings FIOS to my town:)
You can also play tunes in the order of the playlist. You don't -have- to shuffle them. The slider on the back has three positions: Off, Play In Order, and Shuffle.
I doubt he knows (or MS does, for that matter). If they had the top MS techs on-site and had to rebuild the entire server room from bare metal to magically fix the problem, it implies some sort of Windows Wonkiness[tm]. I've seen more than enough of that to believe him.
This is an interesting argument. The US national debt is a nifty conundrum, largely because a good deal of it is owed to internal entities (eg, Social Security), and because most of the rest of it is secured to the land making up the US, or so I've read.
What happens if the US defaults?
Any attempt to claim the collateral (the physical landmass making up the US) would be treated as an act of war. Going to war with the US is a bad idea, doubly-so on its own soil. The natural response would be trade penalties of all kinds, but the US is also one of the few nations on earth that is large enough and has sufficient natural resources to ride that out (oil being the obvious exception, which a strong military presence in the middle-east and a cash & carry policy could handle). Further, the pain of any embargo would be almost as great on the other side, since the US imports a substantial percentage of many countries' exports.
I find this scenario to be highly interesting (not that I think it'd be a great idea, in spite of being an american capitalist pig-dog;).
I readily admit I never took the Network+ exam. As I said to management after returning from the class, "I'd be embarrassed to have a cert saying I know this stuff. It'd be the networking equivalent of having a cert that says I know how to add single-digit numbers.".
I don't mean to knock your experience in the class. Depending on your background, you may very well need that cert to get you an interview. For somebody who's already in the field though, it's a waste of time. The MS certification path is harder, from what I've heard. I've taken a bunch of those classes, too (my employer is big on training & education), and found that the MCSE track material is much more difficult than the Network+ stuff. I'm not saying the MS stuff is incredibly difficult (aside from having to accept the MS way as correct for the purposes of the exam), but it's hugely more difficult than the CompTIA stuff.
I'm not sure CompTIA will add a requirement for previous employment, though. From the snapshot of the Network+ class I took, I was the only one who was working in the business. Everybody else was looking to break in, and had apparently seen advertising saying that this was the way to do it. They were woefully unprepared for anything but the most junior positions, and even then, would require constant oversight.
To add some completely unsolicited advice, if you find the Network+ exam to be as hard as you're predicting, you're not ready for a job in the field. If you can get one, great, but to really understand what's going on, I'd recommend getting a few spare PC's and setting up your own network. Use Linux From Scratch for one of the machines, FreeBSD for another, and Windows XP for the third. Get the machines up and running DNS, NTP, mail (using postfix or sendmail), SMB/CIFS (samba on the non-windows boxen), HTTP (via Apache), and play with Squid for proxying. Also try out firewalling using both Linux & iptables and FreeBSD & pf.
None of those things should cost you anything (except maybe a WinXP licence). After making all that stuff work together, you'll start to realise how networks are really layered and how services talk to each other. It's important to realise the dependencies between network services. I've found people who "learned" networking in exclusively Windows networks think of too much as magic and have some pretty serious gaps in their knowledge. This stuff should help you out if, as I surmise from your post, you're looking to learn about and get into the business. Good luck.:)
CompTIA's certs are worthless, in my opinion. I've seen the people that come out of them and sat through their Network+ class, and I'd never do it again. It was easily one of the biggest wastes of time I've ever experienced. The trainer actually taught a bunch of stuff flat-out wrong.
The poster could easily walk in and teach any of their network classes. I'd recommend he look elsewhere.
I think it's a lousy idea, too, but if it doesn't piss you off enough to shut off the television, they win, don't they?
I've found an approach that works great for me. I don't watch television, and can honestly say I'm happier for it (and have been for 4-5 years). I'm not trying to get all preachy or anything, but if they're treating you poorly, why don't you exercise your right as a consumer and stop buying their services?
Nah, more just taking the opportunity to kvetch about one of my most-despised features of Excel. I'll keep an eye out for a copy of Lotus Improv, though, and see if their implementation of pivot tables allows them to actually be useful.
I work in IT and finance, and -every- person I've ever discussed these things with hates them. They're nifty enough in concept, but there are two major problems with them:
1) They work great until you start adding data to 'em, and then they blow up in your face right before your deadline. This means you have to recreate your pivot table from scratch -every- time you want to use it. You can't add data to your source sheet and expect it to work consistently.
2) They're irritating as hell, largely because Excel's interface for them sucks. It's faster to do it up quickly in SQL than to use a pivot table. Hell, it's often faster to rearrange the data by hand using formulae and such than to use the damned pivot tables.
It's good to know from reading here that some folks actually seem to use them successfully, but they've quickly become the bane of my existence every time I've stumbled into them. I'd be pretty pleased if MS would just rip them out wholesale from Excel, and I can point to a whole bunch of finance/actuarial types who'd be right there with me cheering if they did.
One of the things I love most is the difference in sound between out of the water and underwater. Why would anyone want to interrupt that rare peace with noise from the terrestrial world?
You'd want to do so because lap-swimming is incredibly boring, and if you're at a practice or are swimming to work out, you're probably just hearing whatever music the lifeguard's got on, or noise from whomever's in the pool area. There's a huge transformation that takes place when you go from being a recreational swimmer to a competitive one. Largely, you don't tend to just "play" in the water anymore, because you're conditioned to get in and do laps. You tend to trade one sort of fun for another, but that generally comes during meets. Practice is still boring.
I used to swim competitively, and now do so just to stay in shape. I'd love one of these things, if the price came down a little and the sound was good. I find that stroke-stroke-stroke-flip gets boring after the first mile or so.;)
I reached the same conclusion by the end of the article. I don't have any previous knowledge about the writer, but that whole article reeks of incredibility.
In her final paragraph: "See, IBM - having produced one single PowerPoint presentation - contends that there are no other e-mails, memos, business plans or presentations about Linux anywhere in the joint.."
Talk about rubbish "reporting". As another poster so kindly pointed out, they don't have to produce -everything- about linux, only the stuff relevant to SCO that SCO's requested. That she'd even make such a loaded statement, or worse, be sufficiently gullible as to believe that IBM's attorneys would make such an obvious misstatement, instantly destroys any credibility she ever hoped of having.
I've added her to my "don't give a second glance" list, along with DiDio, Enderle, and Piquepaille.
I overheard an interesting conversation today, in which a gentleman discussed this exact statistic. I'm pretty sure he's an actuary, and apparently wrote an article about this data for some unnamed publication.
He mentioned that the 2% number is bogus, and went on to explain why. He commented that the numerator in that division was comprised of all doctors' malpractice costs, and that the denominator was all costs of all health care institutions, including doctors' offices, nursing homes, hospitals, etc. His conclusion was that if you corrected either the numerator or denominator of that equation so that they both measured costs for the same group of individuals/institutions, the picture wouldn't look appear quite so insignificant.
This wouldn't surprise me in the least, given the inaccuracies and misleading-at-best statistics that seem to run rampant in what we hear from politicians and the media. I sometimes wish there was a group of non-partisan accountants and statisticians who could analyse all this stuff for us and point out the glaring omissions we don't often see until reading the full text of such reports ourselves.
They didn't crash my Firefox 1.0PR. I ran through them all, and could continue browsing with no problem. When I closed firefox, it seemed to hang, and I killed it via the task manager (I'm at work on WinXP w/ SP2).
Here's my useragent string: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10
It's certainly interesting that it doesn't seem to crash consistently..
the very first thing any real lawyer does when discussing legal issues in a non-professional context (such as Slashdot) is prefix their entire comment with a disclaimer stating to the effect of "the following is not legal advice and should not be taken as such."
This is not always the case. Plenty of very good attorneys do not bother prefixing their comments with such boilerplate, because the idea that reading a message board posting or editorial constitutes the establishment of an attorney/client relationship is, quite frankly, ludicrous. They recognise this as such and don't bother with the paranoid CYA bit.
I could argue that slavery was the prime reason for the Civil War. But I don't even need to, because you made the ludicrous claim that "slavery wasn't even remotely related". To disprove that particular little lie, I only need to show one place where it was related, even remotely.
This is looking more to me like a pissing contest and less like an actual discussion of history with every passing moment.
The original comment with which I took issue stated that "Over 360,000 Union soldiers died during the Civil War, largely to put an end to slavery.". I'll concede that my phrasing "not even remotely related" was perhaps too strong for this context.
We may still disagree on the issues supporting the war, but as I'm leaving in 3 minutes and won't be near a computer until after this thread is closed, you're welcome to the last word. I don't have the time right now to spend on a dissection of your train of logic.
Did you read those articles of secession you linked to?
"slaveholding" occurs once, and "slave-holding" occurs twice. There is no other occurrence of "slav" in the document. I used firefox's search feature to make extra sure I didn't miscount. In each of those cases, it is used in the context of '[state] and the slaveholding States of the South' or similar, as a description of which states the writer is referring to. Alabama mentions "domestic institutions" once also, which could be taken to mean "slavery".
So, out of 13 states that passed Ordinances of Secession, since 4 of them mentioned something that might be construed as referring to slavery in some fashion, that must mean it's a main reason for the war?
I won't debate that the South wasn't in fear of eventually losing slavery, and therefore, a large part of their economy, because it's pretty clear that was the case. The main problem however, according to everything I've seen was that the Federal (Nationalist) government was taking upon itself the -ability- to regulate such things in their states, and they felt that such expansion of powers was in violation of the Constitution.
Further, according to original sources--and by "original sources", I'm referring to letters written in Lincoln's own hand--, he didn't care one way or the other about slavery; his only goal was to salvage the Union. Lincoln went to war over the division between States' rights and the powers of the Federal government. He wrote it himself. How much more authoritative would you like to get?
Over 360,000 Union soldiers died during the Civil War, largely to put an end to slavery. How much more can possibly be said?
Well, how 'bout the bit about the War between the States not being even remotely related to slavery? You know, that whole thing about it being a federal gov't vs. states' rights thing, and Lincoln using the elimination of slavery as a tool to win that war.
I was raised in the North, and didn't fully grasp the lies I was taught as a child in school until I read a letter in Lincoln's own hand spelling out his feelings on the slavery issue (the letter I read is currently part of the collection at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT). I don't mean to imply that I'm in favour of reparations--I'm not, doubly-so since my ancestors weren't even in this country during the time period in question. I do think it's important to do things for the right reasons, though.:)
You're right. I have no clue what the distribution of my tax dollars is. You'll probably note that I am compelled by force to pay my taxes, whereas investing in a corporation is wholly voluntary, though.;)
I agree that it really sucks to be in the shoes of that smalltime investor who gets taken. That's not in dispute. The issue is that there needs to be a mechanism for liability to move through the entire organisation, as opposed to being limited to a select few who can easily be turned into scapegoats.
In truth, while the smalltime investor may not know precisely what's going on, he is partly responsible, just by contributing money. It doesn't mean that's a pleasant thought, but it does mean he deserves some measure of liability (think manslaughter vs. murder 1). I'm not saying J. Random Investor should be held solely liable for a $4.3 billion settlement--far from it. He's liable for the amount of control he has. If he's got one share of 100 million, he's only responsible for $43 worth of that settlement, assuming the company isn't paying any of it out of its own coffers. That's enough to make him sit up and take notice of the effect his money is having, but not enough that he's being unduly burdened.
This strikes me as the best way to make sure EVERYBODY involved has a stake in ensuring the good behaviour of a corporation. I don't like the idea of corporations having the rights of individuals, largely for the reasons you listed. I'd be hard-pressed to think of a privilege you could take away from a corporation that would have a serious impact on it without effectively putting it out of business.
I'm not aware of a better way to ensure fair distribution of responsibility than the one I've described. I'd be happy to hear a better suggestion, though..:)
I'd suspect the issues you raise would lead people to more local investment, where they could keep a watchful eye on the goings-on much moreso than with the global behemoths we have today. I think this is a pretty nifty side-effect, but you're of course welcome to your own opinion.
As to the unlimited liability issues, in such a system you'd be responsible financially to precisely the degree you're in control. If you share control with 16 million other shareholders, you're also only responsible for 1 16-millionth of the potential liability. Such a system would help keep large investors involved, since they'd have the most to gain -and- lose, and would help mitigate the risk for smaller investors.
Make no mistake, though. If you don't pay attention to the actions your money is supporting, under the system I'm suggesting you're quite likely to get bitten. I see this as an inherent advantage, as it -strongly- encourages responsible behaviours. I believe many of the problems in our society are caused by people having the ability to "milk the system" and/or shirk responsibility for their actions. This would be one big step towards rectifying that.:)
I recognise that altering the liability structure would have effects on all sorts of financial vehicles that people have come to know and trust today. Doing so will likely restrict the number of companies you can invest in, and may make mutual funds and annuities really bad ideas (assuming that fund managers aren't willing to contract for responsibility for the companies they invest in).
The next thing to realise is that in the Libertarian financial world (as I understand it), the rampant inflation that effectively forces you to invest or lose purchasing power wouldn't exist (due to financial policies explained at length elsewhere). Without that constant inflation, the money you earned 20 years ago would be worth just as much as the money you earned yesterday, and therefore you could stick it in a bank or under your mattress, and wouldn't incur a loss of purchasing power.
These days, everybody sees numbers saying they MUST invest, or else they won't hit that $1.5 million they need to survive their estimated 30 years of retirement starting in whatever year. Insurance companies are very good at making a convincing case that you need to buy their products in order to have a comfortable retirement. This is largely predicated upon inflation, which puts the fear of $DEITY into people.
Get rid of inflation, and your need for those 401k's goes down, and you gain the ability to be more judicious with your investments--allowing you to pay attention to the companies you invest in and their actions. I agree that company management should have responsibility for (mis)deeds, but I believe it's important that shareholders also retain responsibility for the actions committed in their name and with their money.
Badnorak[sic], in his response to free trade, proposed that shareholders be responsible for the company's liabilities beyond their investment in the company. I take this to mean an end to limited liability.
What a horrendous idea. It's not enough that a shareholder lose their investment. They have to lose their house as well.
You seem to be missing a pretty fundamental concept here, namely that we're each responsible for our own actions. It's all well and good to pretend that public corporations are vehicles strictly for financial gain, but this becomes highly dangerous when you remove responsibility for their actions, as we largely have here in the US.
If I pay somebody money to kill you or to dump toxic waste on your land, I'm responsible for doing so. How am I less responsible by paying money into a corporation that does the same?
You can complain all you want about not being able to accurately assess risk, but if you can't accurately figure out where your money is going or what it's doing, you shouldn't be trusting it to somebody else. Ending the limitations on liability and restructuring the corporate veil would promote corporate responsibility on a scale I'm not sure I can even fathom anymore.
Although this might improve accountability, this would drive the small investor right out of the stock market.
There is no entitlement to double-digit gains in the market. If you want to achieve gains in the market, you'd have to do 2 things:
Take the risk that you'd lose the money, just as you do today.
Pay attention to what your money is doing. If the corporation is behaving badly, PULL YOUR MONEY OUT. Nothing motivates corporate types like investors running the other way.
A world where people are held responsible for their actions and corporations have motivation not to do underhanded things? That sounds pretty good to me..
Slashdot Mirror
The idea that SS taxes shouldn't be applied to capital gains and other forms of income is basically a huge giveaway to the rich.
It's not a "huge giveaway" to the rich. It's a "take-less-away" from them. They're not gaining by paying less taxes; they're simply not losing as much as the rest of us are.
Taxing them more won't make it any easier for me to save for my retirement. Taxing me less will. (I clearly have no confidence that Social Security will do anything useful for me when I retire.)
I'd sign up with comcast for IPv6, provided I got my own static IP block. As it is now, I tend to be a DSL guy, because:
;)
:)
a) I don't like sharing my bandwidth with the entire neighbourhood without my own traffic-shaping in place
b) DSL works when the power goes out. What good are UPS's if you can't stay online?
If you guys offered me IPv6 with static IP's, I'd go with you in a heartbeat. (at least until Verizon brings FIOS to my town
You can also play tunes in the order of the playlist. You don't -have- to shuffle them. The slider on the back has three positions: Off, Play In Order, and Shuffle.
It says this on the first page.. http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/
I doubt he knows (or MS does, for that matter). If they had the top MS techs on-site and had to rebuild the entire server room from bare metal to magically fix the problem, it implies some sort of Windows Wonkiness[tm]. I've seen more than enough of that to believe him.
No single app can crash windows 2000/XP.
Um...you didn't really just type that, did you?
This is an interesting argument. The US national debt is a nifty conundrum, largely because a good deal of it is owed to internal entities (eg, Social Security), and because most of the rest of it is secured to the land making up the US, or so I've read.
;).
What happens if the US defaults?
Any attempt to claim the collateral (the physical landmass making up the US) would be treated as an act of war. Going to war with the US is a bad idea, doubly-so on its own soil. The natural response would be trade penalties of all kinds, but the US is also one of the few nations on earth that is large enough and has sufficient natural resources to ride that out (oil being the obvious exception, which a strong military presence in the middle-east and a cash & carry policy could handle). Further, the pain of any embargo would be almost as great on the other side, since the US imports a substantial percentage of many countries' exports.
I find this scenario to be highly interesting (not that I think it'd be a great idea, in spite of being an american capitalist pig-dog
What do you think?
I readily admit I never took the Network+ exam. As I said to management after returning from the class, "I'd be embarrassed to have a cert saying I know this stuff. It'd be the networking equivalent of having a cert that says I know how to add single-digit numbers.".
:)
I don't mean to knock your experience in the class. Depending on your background, you may very well need that cert to get you an interview. For somebody who's already in the field though, it's a waste of time. The MS certification path is harder, from what I've heard. I've taken a bunch of those classes, too (my employer is big on training & education), and found that the MCSE track material is much more difficult than the Network+ stuff. I'm not saying the MS stuff is incredibly difficult (aside from having to accept the MS way as correct for the purposes of the exam), but it's hugely more difficult than the CompTIA stuff.
I'm not sure CompTIA will add a requirement for previous employment, though. From the snapshot of the Network+ class I took, I was the only one who was working in the business. Everybody else was looking to break in, and had apparently seen advertising saying that this was the way to do it. They were woefully unprepared for anything but the most junior positions, and even then, would require constant oversight.
To add some completely unsolicited advice, if you find the Network+ exam to be as hard as you're predicting, you're not ready for a job in the field. If you can get one, great, but to really understand what's going on, I'd recommend getting a few spare PC's and setting up your own network. Use Linux From Scratch for one of the machines, FreeBSD for another, and Windows XP for the third. Get the machines up and running DNS, NTP, mail (using postfix or sendmail), SMB/CIFS (samba on the non-windows boxen), HTTP (via Apache), and play with Squid for proxying. Also try out firewalling using both Linux & iptables and FreeBSD & pf.
None of those things should cost you anything (except maybe a WinXP licence). After making all that stuff work together, you'll start to realise how networks are really layered and how services talk to each other. It's important to realise the dependencies between network services. I've found people who "learned" networking in exclusively Windows networks think of too much as magic and have some pretty serious gaps in their knowledge. This stuff should help you out if, as I surmise from your post, you're looking to learn about and get into the business. Good luck.
CompTIA's certs are worthless, in my opinion. I've seen the people that come out of them and sat through their Network+ class, and I'd never do it again. It was easily one of the biggest wastes of time I've ever experienced. The trainer actually taught a bunch of stuff flat-out wrong.
The poster could easily walk in and teach any of their network classes. I'd recommend he look elsewhere.
Does anybody else see a problem with a laptop you can't use outside of the office?
It's not like you'd buy a laptop so you could TAKE IT WITH YOU and work outside of the office, or anything..
I think it's a lousy idea, too, but if it doesn't piss you off enough to shut off the television, they win, don't they?
I've found an approach that works great for me. I don't watch television, and can honestly say I'm happier for it (and have been for 4-5 years). I'm not trying to get all preachy or anything, but if they're treating you poorly, why don't you exercise your right as a consumer and stop buying their services?
Nah, more just taking the opportunity to kvetch about one of my most-despised features of Excel. I'll keep an eye out for a copy of Lotus Improv, though, and see if their implementation of pivot tables allows them to actually be useful.
Thanks!
I work in IT and finance, and -every- person I've ever discussed these things with hates them. They're nifty enough in concept, but there are two major problems with them:
:)
1) They work great until you start adding data to 'em, and then they blow up in your face right before your deadline. This means you have to recreate your pivot table from scratch -every- time you want to use it. You can't add data to your source sheet and expect it to work consistently.
2) They're irritating as hell, largely because Excel's interface for them sucks. It's faster to do it up quickly in SQL than to use a pivot table. Hell, it's often faster to rearrange the data by hand using formulae and such than to use the damned pivot tables.
It's good to know from reading here that some folks actually seem to use them successfully, but they've quickly become the bane of my existence every time I've stumbled into them. I'd be pretty pleased if MS would just rip them out wholesale from Excel, and I can point to a whole bunch of finance/actuarial types who'd be right there with me cheering if they did.
In closing, I HATE THOSE FUCKING THINGS.
One of the things I love most is the difference in sound between out of the water and underwater. Why would anyone want to interrupt that rare peace with noise from the terrestrial world?
;)
You'd want to do so because lap-swimming is incredibly boring, and if you're at a practice or are swimming to work out, you're probably just hearing whatever music the lifeguard's got on, or noise from whomever's in the pool area. There's a huge transformation that takes place when you go from being a recreational swimmer to a competitive one. Largely, you don't tend to just "play" in the water anymore, because you're conditioned to get in and do laps. You tend to trade one sort of fun for another, but that generally comes during meets. Practice is still boring.
I used to swim competitively, and now do so just to stay in shape. I'd love one of these things, if the price came down a little and the sound was good. I find that stroke-stroke-stroke-flip gets boring after the first mile or so.
I reached the same conclusion by the end of the article. I don't have any previous knowledge about the writer, but that whole article reeks of incredibility.
In her final paragraph: "See, IBM - having produced one single PowerPoint presentation - contends that there are no other e-mails, memos, business plans or presentations about Linux anywhere in the joint.."
Talk about rubbish "reporting". As another poster so kindly pointed out, they don't have to produce -everything- about linux, only the stuff relevant to SCO that SCO's requested. That she'd even make such a loaded statement, or worse, be sufficiently gullible as to believe that IBM's attorneys would make such an obvious misstatement, instantly destroys any credibility she ever hoped of having.
I've added her to my "don't give a second glance" list, along with DiDio, Enderle, and Piquepaille.
I overheard an interesting conversation today, in which a gentleman discussed this exact statistic. I'm pretty sure he's an actuary, and apparently wrote an article about this data for some unnamed publication.
He mentioned that the 2% number is bogus, and went on to explain why. He commented that the numerator in that division was comprised of all doctors' malpractice costs, and that the denominator was all costs of all health care institutions, including doctors' offices, nursing homes, hospitals, etc. His conclusion was that if you corrected either the numerator or denominator of that equation so that they both measured costs for the same group of individuals/institutions, the picture wouldn't look appear quite so insignificant.
This wouldn't surprise me in the least, given the inaccuracies and misleading-at-best statistics that seem to run rampant in what we hear from politicians and the media. I sometimes wish there was a group of non-partisan accountants and statisticians who could analyse all this stuff for us and point out the glaring omissions we don't often see until reading the full text of such reports ourselves.
They didn't crash my Firefox 1.0PR. I ran through them all, and could continue browsing with no problem. When I closed firefox, it seemed to hang, and I killed it via the task manager (I'm at work on WinXP w/ SP2).
Here's my useragent string: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10
It's certainly interesting that it doesn't seem to crash consistently..
the very first thing any real lawyer does when discussing legal issues in a non-professional context (such as Slashdot) is prefix their entire comment with a disclaimer stating to the effect of "the following is not legal advice and should not be taken as such."
This is not always the case. Plenty of very good attorneys do not bother prefixing their comments with such boilerplate, because the idea that reading a message board posting or editorial constitutes the establishment of an attorney/client relationship is, quite frankly, ludicrous. They recognise this as such and don't bother with the paranoid CYA bit.
I could argue that slavery was the prime reason for the Civil War. But I don't even need to, because you made the ludicrous claim that "slavery wasn't even remotely related". To disprove that particular little lie, I only need to show one place where it was related, even remotely.
This is looking more to me like a pissing contest and less like an actual discussion of history with every passing moment.
The original comment with which I took issue stated that "Over 360,000 Union soldiers died during the Civil War, largely to put an end to slavery.". I'll concede that my phrasing "not even remotely related" was perhaps too strong for this context.
We may still disagree on the issues supporting the war, but as I'm leaving in 3 minutes and won't be near a computer until after this thread is closed, you're welcome to the last word. I don't have the time right now to spend on a dissection of your train of logic.
Did you read those articles of secession you linked to?
"slaveholding" occurs once, and "slave-holding" occurs twice. There is no other occurrence of "slav" in the document. I used firefox's search feature to make extra sure I didn't miscount. In each of those cases, it is used in the context of '[state] and the slaveholding States of the South' or similar, as a description of which states the writer is referring to. Alabama mentions "domestic institutions" once also, which could be taken to mean "slavery".
So, out of 13 states that passed Ordinances of Secession, since 4 of them mentioned something that might be construed as referring to slavery in some fashion, that must mean it's a main reason for the war?
I won't debate that the South wasn't in fear of eventually losing slavery, and therefore, a large part of their economy, because it's pretty clear that was the case. The main problem however, according to everything I've seen was that the Federal (Nationalist) government was taking upon itself the -ability- to regulate such things in their states, and they felt that such expansion of powers was in violation of the Constitution.
Further, according to original sources--and by "original sources", I'm referring to letters written in Lincoln's own hand--, he didn't care one way or the other about slavery; his only goal was to salvage the Union. Lincoln went to war over the division between States' rights and the powers of the Federal government. He wrote it himself. How much more authoritative would you like to get?
So.. who's practicing revisionist history again?
Over 360,000 Union soldiers died during the Civil War, largely to put an end to slavery. How much more can possibly be said?
:)
Well, how 'bout the bit about the War between the States not being even remotely related to slavery? You know, that whole thing about it being a federal gov't vs. states' rights thing, and Lincoln using the elimination of slavery as a tool to win that war.
I was raised in the North, and didn't fully grasp the lies I was taught as a child in school until I read a letter in Lincoln's own hand spelling out his feelings on the slavery issue (the letter I read is currently part of the collection at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT). I don't mean to imply that I'm in favour of reparations--I'm not, doubly-so since my ancestors weren't even in this country during the time period in question. I do think it's important to do things for the right reasons, though.
You're right. I have no clue what the distribution of my tax dollars is. You'll probably note that I am compelled by force to pay my taxes, whereas investing in a corporation is wholly voluntary, though. ;)
:)
I agree that it really sucks to be in the shoes of that smalltime investor who gets taken. That's not in dispute. The issue is that there needs to be a mechanism for liability to move through the entire organisation, as opposed to being limited to a select few who can easily be turned into scapegoats.
In truth, while the smalltime investor may not know precisely what's going on, he is partly responsible, just by contributing money. It doesn't mean that's a pleasant thought, but it does mean he deserves some measure of liability (think manslaughter vs. murder 1). I'm not saying J. Random Investor should be held solely liable for a $4.3 billion settlement--far from it. He's liable for the amount of control he has. If he's got one share of 100 million, he's only responsible for $43 worth of that settlement, assuming the company isn't paying any of it out of its own coffers. That's enough to make him sit up and take notice of the effect his money is having, but not enough that he's being unduly burdened.
This strikes me as the best way to make sure EVERYBODY involved has a stake in ensuring the good behaviour of a corporation. I don't like the idea of corporations having the rights of individuals, largely for the reasons you listed. I'd be hard-pressed to think of a privilege you could take away from a corporation that would have a serious impact on it without effectively putting it out of business.
I'm not aware of a better way to ensure fair distribution of responsibility than the one I've described. I'd be happy to hear a better suggestion, though..
I'd suspect the issues you raise would lead people to more local investment, where they could keep a watchful eye on the goings-on much moreso than with the global behemoths we have today. I think this is a pretty nifty side-effect, but you're of course welcome to your own opinion.
:)
As to the unlimited liability issues, in such a system you'd be responsible financially to precisely the degree you're in control. If you share control with 16 million other shareholders, you're also only responsible for 1 16-millionth of the potential liability. Such a system would help keep large investors involved, since they'd have the most to gain -and- lose, and would help mitigate the risk for smaller investors.
Make no mistake, though. If you don't pay attention to the actions your money is supporting, under the system I'm suggesting you're quite likely to get bitten. I see this as an inherent advantage, as it -strongly- encourages responsible behaviours. I believe many of the problems in our society are caused by people having the ability to "milk the system" and/or shirk responsibility for their actions. This would be one big step towards rectifying that.
I recognise that altering the liability structure would have effects on all sorts of financial vehicles that people have come to know and trust today. Doing so will likely restrict the number of companies you can invest in, and may make mutual funds and annuities really bad ideas (assuming that fund managers aren't willing to contract for responsibility for the companies they invest in).
The next thing to realise is that in the Libertarian financial world (as I understand it), the rampant inflation that effectively forces you to invest or lose purchasing power wouldn't exist (due to financial policies explained at length elsewhere). Without that constant inflation, the money you earned 20 years ago would be worth just as much as the money you earned yesterday, and therefore you could stick it in a bank or under your mattress, and wouldn't incur a loss of purchasing power.
These days, everybody sees numbers saying they MUST invest, or else they won't hit that $1.5 million they need to survive their estimated 30 years of retirement starting in whatever year. Insurance companies are very good at making a convincing case that you need to buy their products in order to have a comfortable retirement. This is largely predicated upon inflation, which puts the fear of $DEITY into people.
Get rid of inflation, and your need for those 401k's goes down, and you gain the ability to be more judicious with your investments--allowing you to pay attention to the companies you invest in and their actions. I agree that company management should have responsibility for (mis)deeds, but I believe it's important that shareholders also retain responsibility for the actions committed in their name and with their money.
What a horrendous idea. It's not enough that a shareholder lose their investment. They have to lose their house as well.
You seem to be missing a pretty fundamental concept here, namely that we're each responsible for our own actions. It's all well and good to pretend that public corporations are vehicles strictly for financial gain, but this becomes highly dangerous when you remove responsibility for their actions, as we largely have here in the US.
If I pay somebody money to kill you or to dump toxic waste on your land, I'm responsible for doing so. How am I less responsible by paying money into a corporation that does the same?
You can complain all you want about not being able to accurately assess risk, but if you can't accurately figure out where your money is going or what it's doing, you shouldn't be trusting it to somebody else. Ending the limitations on liability and restructuring the corporate veil would promote corporate responsibility on a scale I'm not sure I can even fathom anymore.
Although this might improve accountability, this would drive the small investor right out of the stock market.
There is no entitlement to double-digit gains in the market. If you want to achieve gains in the market, you'd have to do 2 things:
A world where people are held responsible for their actions and corporations have motivation not to do underhanded things? That sounds pretty good to me..