More. Income is not proportional to cost of living. This include luxury, rent/mortgage payment, food, ect. If the money was spread around, would we not all be able to claim we pay our fair share?
Most of the money that rich people have is loaned to other people
Yes. Thus a debtor owes this money back to them, with interest. The law protects those who loan, not so much those who borrow. If you buy a home, you owe a wealthy person for this privilege (through the mechanism of the banking system). If you go to college and require student loans, you owe a wealthy person for this privilege.
You have to define the word "need" first, and have everyone agree with this definition. I'm sure Diogenes's needs were strikingly different from ones of the Sun King
All a person needs is air to breath, water to drink, food to eat, shelter to keep warm, people to have sex with, and things to keep their mind busy, in that order. Needs are not as subjective as you claim.
USSR tried, it didn't work. Cuba tried, it didn't work. NK tried, and it still doesn't work.
You realize every single time communism was attempted, it's philosophies were used as propaganda to incite a rebellion of the working class to the favor of a few who lusted for power. The fact that a true communist society has not been achieved does not refute the communist philosophy. Its more a matter of greed and power lust of the ruling class who are more educated and clever. I do not think people capable of achieving extreme wealth are stupid, on the contrary, they are quite obviously very smart. I just think that more often than not they are selfish regardless of whatever charitable religion they claim to be from, or their shoddy attempts at philanthropy. Furthermore, I am not a communist anyway. Nowhere does "I don't think rich people should be so rich" imply I agree with communism. Im simply stating an observation that extreme-wealth != fair. Sure, the world is not fair, but should we not attempt to make it so?
Of course they don't, because people simply are too greedy. Im not saying that the wealthy (some of them) are not brilliant people that don't deserve more resources allocated to them. They do deserve it simply because they utilize them better otherwise they wouldn't be rich. What I am saying is there is absolutely NO reason for 1 person to have billions of dollars in their own personal assets. You can own several fully furnished houses, a collection of sports cars, hell even race horses with twenty million. However, you cannot argue that even one person on this planet needs even this. Allowing people to accumulate such massive quantities of wealth essentially results over time in an aristocracy. How the hell do you think the Nobility got started in medieval Europe? They started as moderately wealthy people, accumulated more wealth and even some land, then set up a system whereby they protect their wealth and land with arbitrary unfair, usurious laws. They collaborated together to protect their status at the expense of everyone else. Its in the nature of people with like mindsets to cooperate. The wealthy cooperate really well with eachother, otherwise we wouldn't have absolute ridiculous conflicts of interest in government appointments and decisions. They have more resources and access to media infrastructure, so they use them to brainwash the undereducated and one-item voters into voting politicians into office and laws into effect which only stand to benefit the wealthy collaborators. What your problem is, is that you are either a greedy person yourself, or have been sold on the crap pseudo-capitalist propaganda the wealthy in this country spew out every time their is a remote threat to their fat wallets. We don't even have a capitalist society anymore. It is much closer to a Plutocracy or an Oligarchy. This is absolutely evident with the recent bailouts. These banks and investment firms didn't even have to sink or swim through their own efforts, they just got their powerful friends in congress to float them tax payer money. Why would you want this in America by protecting these people?
Machines are an investment. They require maintenance, power, lubricants, ect. If your machine gets damaged, you have a direct assault to your investment. A machine needs regular attention. A human being on an assembly line is not an investment. They require a couple weeks of training which is essentially handled by another human peon. If they get damaged you can fire them without additional cost. You can always find another one and pay them the same thing you paid the one you replaced, or less while they are being trained. You don't care if the human eats enough or has proper medical care because you can always get a new one. A human requires less attention than a machine. Basically, this Foxconn dude is doing something brilliant. It goes:
Agreed. What made America great (when it was great) was the buying power of the US citizen after World War II and Roosevelt's New Deal. Fair wages, fair tax laws, abundance of jobs. 70 percent of the wealth used to be in the hands of 90 percent of the people, now 70 percent of the wealth is in the hands of 10 percent of the people. This is due to reducing taxes on the rich, tax loopholes for the rich, wages not keeping up with inflation, decrease in benefits for American workers, Jobs moving overseas because of cheap labor (and cheap view of lives). It simply is not right that one person should have billions of dollars or even hundreds of millions. Should a corporation have access to billions of dollars? Yes so that they can mobilize resources. One person? Absolutely not. They simply do not spend enough of it on services and products the average person gets paid for to make a difference in the rest of our lives. Philanthropy and true capitalism is dead.
I see. It makes sense. There seems to have been a lot of controversy, even one person in particular resigning over it. From my understanding the mining industry employs a lot of people and if companies like BGB threaten to leave then they effectively force the issue through their workers wanting to stay employed. Perhaps I am reading a biased source.
Ive just read quite a bit about it recently since I have been investing some money in relevant things. From what I have read, it seemed unpopular with your citizens. Im not trying to criticize, I am moreso asking a question which you somewhat answered. So thanks.
I can't believe its still under consideration. I have no business commenting on your politics, but I thought it was so unpopular with Australian citizens it should have been thrown out already.
That's unfortunate for me. I don't really care for the US, and Im a citizen here. I like the people, and the geography in the northwest, but our government is a joke. Its completely ruled by special interests geared at funneling as much money as possible into the hands of a few. We have no such thing as affordable health care. You may as well die rather than burden your family with medical bills if you get any terminal illness, even if its a treatable one. We live in essentially pretty close to an aristocracy. I'm not sure if Australia is much better in that regard, but I can dream.
Actually, with respect to the company we do have free speech, but if someone is disagreeable to them they chose to exercise control of their property and exclude them from it. This whole argument isn't about free speech, its more so about if someone as the right to use someone else's property. Free speech is absolutely inalienable. I can go say anything I want anywhere I want and people can react however they want. If I am on their property, they can forcibly remove me through legal means because I started trespassing the minute they asked me to leave and I didn't. In public they have the right to beat me up or try to murder me but then I have the right to defend myself and the government has the responsibility to enforce consequences for breaking part of the social contract we agree to by being citizens of this country that "we won't physically harm or murder eachother".
We are guaranteed the right to free speech just by existing. There are consequences for our actions, and the Bill of Rights tells the Government that they cannot lay down consequences on people for exercising a inborn right. We have the right to pretty much do whatever we want, but there exists a social contract between citizens which is enforced by what we call "government". I.e. I wont steal your shit if you don't steal mine, I won't kill you if you won't kill me, ect. ect. Government only exists to lay down consequences on people that do not obey the rules of the social contract. My point is that as a human being you are born with all rights, but if you want to continue being a citizen you must agree to the "social contract".
They may be idiots for whacking the bees nest if you will, but so are those that are stupid enough to even be insulted by such an attention whoring group like this Dove World Outreach.
Still not our responsibility to remove despots or harmful regimes from power unless they are directly a threat to us (such as Osama). This being the case, I agree that the invasion of Afghanistan was justified with the goal of catching Osama since the Taliban were not cooperative in the slightest with the US. Beyond Afghanistan, the war in Iraq is totally unjustifiable. Revolution is the sole responsibility of those in the country who wish for it.
Agreed. Nowhere in the US does someone have the right to not be offended. Furthermore, why do people thousands of miles away from Florida even care what these 50 people do? Its a big publicity stunt and the media is playing right into it. Watch more religious zealots on both sides joining extreme groups because media companies thought it was an awesome idea to inform every idiot on the planet about something that actually doesn't matter if you think about it. Burning a single pile of Quran's doesn't delete it from the earth, doesn't detract from its meaning to believers, and even if it angers their god so what? If they truly believe in their god and the Quran then they should assume their god will punish these people by sending them to hell or whatever they think will happen. I.e. They have no reason to give a crap about this.
Unless you can prove me wrong, ethics are totally subjective to culture, and perhaps even our own evolution towards social animals. I.e. perhaps human beings evolved society as a survival mechanism and thus our ethics are culturally biased to whichever culture survived best in our cultural ancestors climate. I am not saying Philosophy is not a valid discipline, but scientists take it with a grain of salt because there is absolutely no way to verify one course of action over the other through some experimental model. E.g. Say if we run biological experiments on 10000 infants which would result in their death 99 percent of the time, we could potentially save 50000 adult humans who are terminally ill. Is ethical to sacrifice 10000 infants to save 50000 adults? Adults can procreate, they can work for the society, they have experience and knowledge an infant does not have. Adults may have families which include children and they provide for these children. An infant can procreate some day, but their future works are an unknown. Perhaps some day collectively the 10000 infants could have have more knowledge or more experience than all of the adults combined, but its taking a risk to society to choose them to survive over the adults since it introduces an unknown. Additionally, they are also innocent and have not done anything "ethically" wrong to deserve this treatment. Most people in the first worlds would probably choose the infants to survive over the adults based on their own maternal and paternal instincts. Most people from 1000 years ago would say, "Screw the infants, its just one more mouth to feed". How can science be applied to situations that change so dramatically between cultures like this? Maybe I have just justified the existence of Philosophy.
Actually, academic papers in scientific journals undergo various levels of rigor of peer review. For a sound academic article, one uses other academic articles as a source that have been deemed useful and correct by a committee of people who generally have quite a bit of knowledge of the subject matter. So, its not like some dickhead in his ivory tower decides what is or isn't, its that a bunch of dickheads sit in an office and decide what should be published based on consensus between their various biases. The group is a better alternative in my opinion.
Do you have any idea how long of a paper say for example a Mathematician PhD, would have to write for the average person to learn from it? Henceforth I will be referring to science fields when I speak about academic papers. Typically academic papers are written for those with a similar understanding of the material. They don't write them at that level to stump everyone, they do it simply because they would have to write several textbooks of material to get anyone up to speed with what they are talking about. Its important to fit your research onto as few pages as possible to summarize what you do. Otherwise, scientific journals would come to you in an entire truck load. Its not that the average person is incapable of learning the material, its just that scientist spend years or even decades of their life learning this stuff. To assume that anyone can do it in an afternoon is preposterous.
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More. Income is not proportional to cost of living. This include luxury, rent/mortgage payment, food, ect. If the money was spread around, would we not all be able to claim we pay our fair share?
Most of the money that rich people have is loaned to other people
Yes. Thus a debtor owes this money back to them, with interest. The law protects those who loan, not so much those who borrow. If you buy a home, you owe a wealthy person for this privilege (through the mechanism of the banking system). If you go to college and require student loans, you owe a wealthy person for this privilege.
You have to define the word "need" first, and have everyone agree with this definition. I'm sure Diogenes's needs were strikingly different from ones of the Sun King
All a person needs is air to breath, water to drink, food to eat, shelter to keep warm, people to have sex with, and things to keep their mind busy, in that order. Needs are not as subjective as you claim.
USSR tried, it didn't work. Cuba tried, it didn't work. NK tried, and it still doesn't work.
You realize every single time communism was attempted, it's philosophies were used as propaganda to incite a rebellion of the working class to the favor of a few who lusted for power. The fact that a true communist society has not been achieved does not refute the communist philosophy. Its more a matter of greed and power lust of the ruling class who are more educated and clever. I do not think people capable of achieving extreme wealth are stupid, on the contrary, they are quite obviously very smart. I just think that more often than not they are selfish regardless of whatever charitable religion they claim to be from, or their shoddy attempts at philanthropy. Furthermore, I am not a communist anyway. Nowhere does "I don't think rich people should be so rich" imply I agree with communism. Im simply stating an observation that extreme-wealth != fair. Sure, the world is not fair, but should we not attempt to make it so?
Of course they don't, because people simply are too greedy. Im not saying that the wealthy (some of them) are not brilliant people that don't deserve more resources allocated to them. They do deserve it simply because they utilize them better otherwise they wouldn't be rich. What I am saying is there is absolutely NO reason for 1 person to have billions of dollars in their own personal assets. You can own several fully furnished houses, a collection of sports cars, hell even race horses with twenty million. However, you cannot argue that even one person on this planet needs even this. Allowing people to accumulate such massive quantities of wealth essentially results over time in an aristocracy. How the hell do you think the Nobility got started in medieval Europe? They started as moderately wealthy people, accumulated more wealth and even some land, then set up a system whereby they protect their wealth and land with arbitrary unfair, usurious laws. They collaborated together to protect their status at the expense of everyone else. Its in the nature of people with like mindsets to cooperate. The wealthy cooperate really well with eachother, otherwise we wouldn't have absolute ridiculous conflicts of interest in government appointments and decisions. They have more resources and access to media infrastructure, so they use them to brainwash the undereducated and one-item voters into voting politicians into office and laws into effect which only stand to benefit the wealthy collaborators. What your problem is, is that you are either a greedy person yourself, or have been sold on the crap pseudo-capitalist propaganda the wealthy in this country spew out every time their is a remote threat to their fat wallets. We don't even have a capitalist society anymore. It is much closer to a Plutocracy or an Oligarchy. This is absolutely evident with the recent bailouts. These banks and investment firms didn't even have to sink or swim through their own efforts, they just got their powerful friends in congress to float them tax payer money. Why would you want this in America by protecting these people?
Machines are an investment. They require maintenance, power, lubricants, ect. If your machine gets damaged, you have a direct assault to your investment. A machine needs regular attention. A human being on an assembly line is not an investment. They require a couple weeks of training which is essentially handled by another human peon. If they get damaged you can fire them without additional cost. You can always find another one and pay them the same thing you paid the one you replaced, or less while they are being trained. You don't care if the human eats enough or has proper medical care because you can always get a new one. A human requires less attention than a machine. Basically, this Foxconn dude is doing something brilliant. It goes :
1. Get human meat
2. Train human meat
3. If human meat fails, discard and go to step 1
4. Profit
There is a simple solution. Make it more expensive to ship products from overseas, and penalize people severely for frivolous lawsuits.
Agreed. What made America great (when it was great) was the buying power of the US citizen after World War II and Roosevelt's New Deal. Fair wages, fair tax laws, abundance of jobs. 70 percent of the wealth used to be in the hands of 90 percent of the people, now 70 percent of the wealth is in the hands of 10 percent of the people. This is due to reducing taxes on the rich, tax loopholes for the rich, wages not keeping up with inflation, decrease in benefits for American workers, Jobs moving overseas because of cheap labor (and cheap view of lives). It simply is not right that one person should have billions of dollars or even hundreds of millions. Should a corporation have access to billions of dollars? Yes so that they can mobilize resources. One person? Absolutely not. They simply do not spend enough of it on services and products the average person gets paid for to make a difference in the rest of our lives. Philanthropy and true capitalism is dead.
I see. It makes sense. There seems to have been a lot of controversy, even one person in particular resigning over it. From my understanding the mining industry employs a lot of people and if companies like BGB threaten to leave then they effectively force the issue through their workers wanting to stay employed. Perhaps I am reading a biased source.
I see. Thanks for clarifying.
Ive just read quite a bit about it recently since I have been investing some money in relevant things. From what I have read, it seemed unpopular with your citizens. Im not trying to criticize, I am moreso asking a question which you somewhat answered. So thanks.
I can't believe its still under consideration. I have no business commenting on your politics, but I thought it was so unpopular with Australian citizens it should have been thrown out already.
That's unfortunate for me. I don't really care for the US, and Im a citizen here. I like the people, and the geography in the northwest, but our government is a joke. Its completely ruled by special interests geared at funneling as much money as possible into the hands of a few. We have no such thing as affordable health care. You may as well die rather than burden your family with medical bills if you get any terminal illness, even if its a treatable one. We live in essentially pretty close to an aristocracy. I'm not sure if Australia is much better in that regard, but I can dream.
I certainly would not agree with the mining tax since it affects your major export.
With their budget surplus, handled economy, and this? I may be moving my ass there.
Actually, with respect to the company we do have free speech, but if someone is disagreeable to them they chose to exercise control of their property and exclude them from it. This whole argument isn't about free speech, its more so about if someone as the right to use someone else's property. Free speech is absolutely inalienable. I can go say anything I want anywhere I want and people can react however they want. If I am on their property, they can forcibly remove me through legal means because I started trespassing the minute they asked me to leave and I didn't. In public they have the right to beat me up or try to murder me but then I have the right to defend myself and the government has the responsibility to enforce consequences for breaking part of the social contract we agree to by being citizens of this country that "we won't physically harm or murder eachother".
We are guaranteed the right to free speech just by existing. There are consequences for our actions, and the Bill of Rights tells the Government that they cannot lay down consequences on people for exercising a inborn right. We have the right to pretty much do whatever we want, but there exists a social contract between citizens which is enforced by what we call "government". I.e. I wont steal your shit if you don't steal mine, I won't kill you if you won't kill me, ect. ect. Government only exists to lay down consequences on people that do not obey the rules of the social contract. My point is that as a human being you are born with all rights, but if you want to continue being a citizen you must agree to the "social contract".
In other news, I just pooped my pants laughing.
Meanwhile Muslims will claim they are the most tolerant religion.
Unfortunately the Government views it the other way around. i.e. You don't have rights unless it says so in the Constitution.
Yes! ^
They may be idiots for whacking the bees nest if you will, but so are those that are stupid enough to even be insulted by such an attention whoring group like this Dove World Outreach.
Still not our responsibility to remove despots or harmful regimes from power unless they are directly a threat to us (such as Osama). This being the case, I agree that the invasion of Afghanistan was justified with the goal of catching Osama since the Taliban were not cooperative in the slightest with the US. Beyond Afghanistan, the war in Iraq is totally unjustifiable. Revolution is the sole responsibility of those in the country who wish for it.
Agreed. Nowhere in the US does someone have the right to not be offended. Furthermore, why do people thousands of miles away from Florida even care what these 50 people do? Its a big publicity stunt and the media is playing right into it. Watch more religious zealots on both sides joining extreme groups because media companies thought it was an awesome idea to inform every idiot on the planet about something that actually doesn't matter if you think about it. Burning a single pile of Quran's doesn't delete it from the earth, doesn't detract from its meaning to believers, and even if it angers their god so what? If they truly believe in their god and the Quran then they should assume their god will punish these people by sending them to hell or whatever they think will happen. I.e. They have no reason to give a crap about this.
Unless you can prove me wrong, ethics are totally subjective to culture, and perhaps even our own evolution towards social animals. I.e. perhaps human beings evolved society as a survival mechanism and thus our ethics are culturally biased to whichever culture survived best in our cultural ancestors climate. I am not saying Philosophy is not a valid discipline, but scientists take it with a grain of salt because there is absolutely no way to verify one course of action over the other through some experimental model. E.g. Say if we run biological experiments on 10000 infants which would result in their death 99 percent of the time, we could potentially save 50000 adult humans who are terminally ill. Is ethical to sacrifice 10000 infants to save 50000 adults? Adults can procreate, they can work for the society, they have experience and knowledge an infant does not have. Adults may have families which include children and they provide for these children. An infant can procreate some day, but their future works are an unknown. Perhaps some day collectively the 10000 infants could have have more knowledge or more experience than all of the adults combined, but its taking a risk to society to choose them to survive over the adults since it introduces an unknown. Additionally, they are also innocent and have not done anything "ethically" wrong to deserve this treatment. Most people in the first worlds would probably choose the infants to survive over the adults based on their own maternal and paternal instincts. Most people from 1000 years ago would say, "Screw the infants, its just one more mouth to feed". How can science be applied to situations that change so dramatically between cultures like this? Maybe I have just justified the existence of Philosophy.
Actually, academic papers in scientific journals undergo various levels of rigor of peer review. For a sound academic article, one uses other academic articles as a source that have been deemed useful and correct by a committee of people who generally have quite a bit of knowledge of the subject matter. So, its not like some dickhead in his ivory tower decides what is or isn't, its that a bunch of dickheads sit in an office and decide what should be published based on consensus between their various biases. The group is a better alternative in my opinion.
Do you have any idea how long of a paper say for example a Mathematician PhD, would have to write for the average person to learn from it? Henceforth I will be referring to science fields when I speak about academic papers. Typically academic papers are written for those with a similar understanding of the material. They don't write them at that level to stump everyone, they do it simply because they would have to write several textbooks of material to get anyone up to speed with what they are talking about. Its important to fit your research onto as few pages as possible to summarize what you do. Otherwise, scientific journals would come to you in an entire truck load. Its not that the average person is incapable of learning the material, its just that scientist spend years or even decades of their life learning this stuff. To assume that anyone can do it in an afternoon is preposterous.