Where do those "vendors" get their merchandise. (Not that you're necessarily wrong, but your figures are just the first step in the argument. And aren't an argument that addresses the point of the g.p.)
I agree. Charge and prosecute them for fraud. Probably with aggravating circumstances. (Can it be fraud if it's not for gain?)
And repeal RICO. RICO is a vile law that should never have been passed, and should have immediately been thrown out as blatantly unconstitutional. RICO has two purposes: 1) to let the enforcers steal your wealth without proving anything at all first, and 2) to prevent the accused from having any resources to hire a lawyer. Perhaps there are other parts of the law, but those are the parts most frequently used.
I assume that they would find some kind of crime, probably some sort of conspiracy, and charge them with that. Then by using RICO they can steal all their property and anything they could use to hire a lawyer before they even come to trial.
More to the point, because he's a presidential candidate in a major party. Hillary is also still free, and there's been much more time to prosecute her.
That said, I'm not totally sure that either of them actually committed a crime. IANAL. It seems to be that they both did, and I would be surprised if either of them was prosecuted.
Thank you. I was certain that such a court would have no legal basis, but given what the government has been doing to "legal basis" I wasn't sure that mattered.
Actual long term capital gains SHOULD be rewarded. But by long term I mean 5 years or more. (I'm actually in favor of a linear or quadratic tax whose level varies with the length of time that you held the capital, from 100% at less than 10 minutes to no tax if you hold it for longer than 50 years. Quadratic would probably be better than linear, e.g., tax = r * 1/(ln(t^2)) where t is measured in days) One of the crucial points about this tax is that it is monotonic. Smooth is an additional benefit. There's always an encouragement to hold the investment longer. So you invest in things that will continue to gain in value, not things that rapidly fluctuate.
That's the problem. *SOME* wealthy people will use their wealth in a socially beneficial manner (or at least in a way that explores the possibility of social benefit). But most of them won't.
If you don't have extremely rich people, there will be some options that are never explored. Some of those options will be extremely valuable. Most of them, however,...
Governments and corporations have not be very good at exploring high risk/high payoff scenarios. We need those areas explored. (How rapidly?) What alternative structures will accomplish this? The alternatives wouldn't need to be very efficient to be better than the current approach. A change in the laws to encourage thinks like corporations creating entities like Bell Labs was might suffice, but they need to be able to accumulate stashes of cash that cannot be raided except for advanced projects.
That said, I'm in favor of totally replacing the non-retirement portion of Social Security (and part of that) with a basic income...which everyone gets. Somehow it needs to be tied to the actual cost of living, but "somehow" is dangerously vague. Perhaps the "basic income" should equal the current minimum wage, and then remove all minimum wage rules & laws. (At least in my area the minimum wage is considerably below the actual poverty level. I don't know what the law says the poverty level is.) I believe that *eventually* the basic income should be above the actual poverty level, though not by much. And that education should be free at all levels. So if you want to devote your life to polishing your skills for a decade, you should be able to do so. Perhaps internet access should also be freely available at, say, the speed of a 100 kB/s. Perhaps a bit slower.
The idea here is to be prepared for the (already incipient) future where robots increasingly replace jobs. Eventually, of course, all jobs will be replaced, but that's several decades off. In the mean time SOME people will need to be employed, and will need to prepare themselves for employment, with no guarantee that the job will still be available by the time they are ready. Many people will need to prepare for 10 years for a job that will be automated away shortly before they are qualified (or very soon afterwards). This is already happening to people, but it's still rather uncommon. It won't remain uncommon. A sign of this is the number of articles saying "People should consider the concept of a career to be obsolete" and similar things. They emphasize the need to be always ready to retrain, but many careers require an extensive preparation. Doctor, lawyer, pharmacist, etc. And the initial signs of automation are just that fewer new people are currently being hired. This is almost always disguised in the reported statistics, or attributed to a temporary economic slowdown. And currently much of it is accurately attributed to off-shoring. But new articles seem to be indicating that many of those jobs that were off-shored are being automated because even Javanese workers aren't as cheap as robots. (OK, most factory automation doesn't involve real robots. But that's the way it's being reported.)
There's also the question of how much the Heisenberg, etc., wanted Hitler to win. Some of their calculations may well have been excessively pessimistic. We know that this was the case with Radar, but there's no reason to believe that's the only place this happened.
We never did. That's a problem, but not THE problem. Over-readiness to call in the police is THE problem, but it's not something that occurred in a vacuum. The police are also over-ready to be called in, and over-ready to arrest on scant to no evidence or other reasonable grounds. And there's no penalty for using the police to abuse people, or for the police abusing people.
When I was in school the police weren't even called in for knife fights unless someone got badly hurt. (And I'm not sure about then, because I never heard of that happening in school. Afterwards is a different matter.) I carried a pocket knife all the way up into high school, and nobody ever bothered to find out about it, or appeared to care. (Some kids used them on desks, which *was* frowned upon, but wasn't seen as ground for calling in the police.) I think that since controls have become tighter, schools have become less safe, though I'm not sure.
OTOH, we didn't need to carry around huge sacks of books, either. But, of course, we also didn't carry around valuable electronics. The biggest problem was bicycle theft, and they were generally secured with trivially simple locks.
OTOH, there have been lots of other social changes, fragmenting social structures. Fast and cheap communications and travel have many effects, and some of them are socially disruptive...not, however, as disruptive as having both parents working. The Women's Rights movement has had bad effects as well as good one. If fragmented the family. We used to talk about the "Nuclear Family", but the Women's Rights movement has split the atom, so to speak. The old problem of bored middle class housewives has been replaced by the missing parent. This does bad things to children. And it decreases the glue holding the family together. It's true that the glue was compounded from injustice, but it's not clear that the net social effect hasn't been tremendously negative. (OTOH, it's quite difficult to disentangle the effects of the various changes that have been happening simultaneously.)
But when there is a systematic change, such as the increased readiness of teachers and principles to call in the police, on must look for a systematic cause. And it isn't that teachers are now underpaid, since they've been underpaid since at least the 1700's. (This isn't always true of college professors, and not always true of administrators, but it's always been true of teachers. So that's not the significant variable.)
I'm disagreeing with you in considering that stability, and degree of stability, is an essential component of any working evolutionary system. This is explicitly disagreeing with your post. You said:
Even if we ignore the misuse of the term self-replication, stability is not required along with replication. Stability can be acquired over time and replication can "evolve" (extra-Darwinian) within a set of unstable individuals and a factory. Hence there is no non-arbitrary cutoff.
I am asserting that a marked degree of stability must be present in even the initial stages. This is why most forms of abiogenesis concentrate on how to establish stable conditions (or where they can be found). I do agree that increased stability can be acquired during the course of evolution, but it needs to be present from the start.
Actually, stability is required for evolution to happen. Life, however, is not required. But if a system isn't stable enough, it can't evolve. For this reason the length of a genetic code that is feasible depends upon the error rate of the copying process, the error rate during the non-copying phase, and the error correction processes.
OTOH, I normally use the term "evolution" in a general sense which includes genetic-based evolution as a subset. (I'm not going to call that Darwinian Evolution, because Darwin didn't know about Mendel, and considered many forms of inheritance, most of which would not have worked. Possibly none of them would have worked, but I haven't done an extensive study of this.)
So I consider it perfectly correct to talk about the evolution of atomic frequencies within stellar atmospheres. And to use the same general meaning when talking about biological evolution, albeit the biological evolution has a lot of special features that aren't present in stellar atmospheres (and conversely).
The problem is that "God" is not, in general, a well defined term. This makes either validation or refutation impossible.
FWIW, I have a relatively precise definition that works for me, and which I have empirical evidence for. (It falls well short of proof.) Unfortunately, I don't believe that there's a religion on the planet that would accept my definition...unless you consider a relatively strict Buddhist sect to be a religion (relatively strict meaning they base their beliefs on "The Word" and a relatively few other works of about the same period). Many people would refuse to call them a religion, and prefer to call it a philosophy.
FWIW, I do not accept that sect's beliefs. I believe that they accept some things that were traditional beliefs at that time without questioning them. But they've got a lot going for them. E.g., look up what "The Word" says about "Karma". It's a lot closer to materialism than most people would find comfortable.
You are confusing "A theory of evolution" with "the current theory of evolution". There are clearly theories of evolution that include the origin of life, but that is not a part of the current consensus theory.
It is quite plausible that some future theory of evolution will include a theory of the origin of life on Earth (which might even be Panspermia rather than Abiogenesis), but that's not a part of the current theory.
Current Libertarianism, as with all other current political theories, is too ill defined to admit of evidence either affirming or refuting it. The only exception that I can think of is communism (small c) which has been shown to work reasonably well in small groups (about 13 people or fewer) with close affinities. Most of the evidence comes from smaller groups of closely related individuals (families). In larger groups it can be meta-stable up to around 50 people, but even this level of stability requires a charismatic leader. After that it devolves into some other form.
Examples of well defined forms which do not, and cannot practically, exist is absolute Monarchy. The historical forms which are given that name always contain a strong bureaucratic element with is not a part of the definition. Even an aristocratic hierarchy is not a part of the definition of absolute monarchy. In an actual implementation of an absolute monarchy all decisions would be made by the monarch. Intermediate forms can exist, but are not well-defined. Thus in the pre-revolution French Monarchy there was not only a strong bureaucracy, but there was also a court of nobles that the King could not safely ignore the interests of.
Again, my basic assertion is that no existing political theory that is well defined has any measurable probability of existing under the current situation for any measurable amount of time. Everything that exists is a mix. This makes evidence as to their desirability quite dubious, and also makes attempts to estimate their transition states dubious. One makes educated guesses and does the best one can based on that.
A more reasonable grounds for a political theory would be statistical in nature and would predict how people would react in well defined situations. I don't know whether you'd call that politics, sociology, or psychology, but we don't have a workable theory yet. Only some rules of thumb that usually work, e.g.: If you give people power over other people, and don't have any punishment for bad behavior, many of them will abuse their power for personal gain or even just enjoyment. This has been repeatedly validated, though I don't know of any controlled experiments to find precise limits.
Yes, but as others have pointed out there's a considerable difference between the facts of evolution (which have, indeed, been observed) and the Theory of Evolution, which has been modified several times within my lifetime. E.g., the 1940's Theory could not encompass epigenetic modifications. And the current version of the Theory cannot account for the origin of life on Earth. It can't even rule out Panspermia.
That said, it seems fairly clear that the successor theory to the current Theory of Evolution will only be a slight modification. OTOH, that's what the Newtonian physicists believed.
Two points: 1) You point out a real problem with those who are empowered to write the definitions. 2) You do need clear and certain definitions. I'm sorry but "You know what I mean by search and seizure" doesn't count as clear. There are several corner cases that are ill-defined. What about, e.g., "I only searched and didn't seize"? Common English is notoriously imprecise in handling logical constructs, this is reasonable as it's largely based on the premise that it's dealing with a situation where neither party is intentionally misunderstanding the other, and both are operating with a common understanding of the basics. And it's optimized (not perfectly) for clear understanding in a noisy environment where both ends of the channel are using considerable intelligence to reach common understanding. (Even so it compresses things too much for good understanding. I continually experience this when talking with my wife. Her belief is that if there are two ways to understand something, we will initially hit on opposite interpretations.)
You are vastly oversimplifying the problem for the sake of clean boundaries. I would argue that the real reason is the closing of the frontier. There's essentially nowhere to go to escape oppression.
FWIW, the first overreach were the "Alien and Sedition acts". Another early overreach caused the Whiskey Rebellion. It really started getting underway, however, with the Civil War, when both the North and the South centralized their governments, and increased governmental power beyond the legal limits. This was facilitated by faster transport (railroads) and communication. The telegraph, introduced soon afterwards, further abetted centralization of power. Computers added a third element after transport and communication, enabling larger organizations to be run more effectively. And centralization of power continued.
I've been trying to guess what robots are going to do in this area as they become perfected. Most of my guesses have not been pleasant.
And an interesting thing about that case is that it wasn't the judge that declared corporations to be people. That was added by a law clerk who wrote up the case. For some reason it's become generally accepted anyway.
Blackstone declared that "[a] corporation cannot commit treason, or felony, or other crime." He regarded the point as so obvious that it needed no elaboration.
For some strange reason the persons within corporations who *do* commit such crimes in the name of the corporation are rarely punished.
Well, Obama promised that his administration would be more open. He just didn't mention that this would be due to non-US governmental agents. (OK, Snowden used to be a government agent, but he hasn't been since he started making Obama's promise true.)
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Where do those "vendors" get their merchandise. (Not that you're necessarily wrong, but your figures are just the first step in the argument. And aren't an argument that addresses the point of the g.p.)
I agree. Charge and prosecute them for fraud. Probably with aggravating circumstances. (Can it be fraud if it's not for gain?)
And repeal RICO. RICO is a vile law that should never have been passed, and should have immediately been thrown out as blatantly unconstitutional. RICO has two purposes:
1) to let the enforcers steal your wealth without proving anything at all first, and
2) to prevent the accused from having any resources to hire a lawyer.
Perhaps there are other parts of the law, but those are the parts most frequently used.
I disagree with ALL uses of RICO. But it might be time to prosecute them for fraud.
I assume that they would find some kind of crime, probably some sort of conspiracy, and charge them with that. Then by using RICO they can steal all their property and anything they could use to hire a lawyer before they even come to trial.
More to the point, because he's a presidential candidate in a major party. Hillary is also still free, and there's been much more time to prosecute her.
That said, I'm not totally sure that either of them actually committed a crime. IANAL. It seems to be that they both did, and I would be surprised if either of them was prosecuted.
Thank you. I was certain that such a court would have no legal basis, but given what the government has been doing to "legal basis" I wasn't sure that mattered.
Actual long term capital gains SHOULD be rewarded. But by long term I mean 5 years or more. (I'm actually in favor of a linear or quadratic tax whose level varies with the length of time that you held the capital, from 100% at less than 10 minutes to no tax if you hold it for longer than 50 years. Quadratic would probably be better than linear, e.g., tax = r * 1/(ln(t^2)) where t is measured in days)
One of the crucial points about this tax is that it is monotonic. Smooth is an additional benefit. There's always an encouragement to hold the investment longer. So you invest in things that will continue to gain in value, not things that rapidly fluctuate.
That's the problem. *SOME* wealthy people will use their wealth in a socially beneficial manner (or at least in a way that explores the possibility of social benefit). But most of them won't.
If you don't have extremely rich people, there will be some options that are never explored. Some of those options will be extremely valuable. Most of them, however,...
Governments and corporations have not be very good at exploring high risk/high payoff scenarios. We need those areas explored. (How rapidly?) What alternative structures will accomplish this? The alternatives wouldn't need to be very efficient to be better than the current approach. A change in the laws to encourage thinks like corporations creating entities like Bell Labs was might suffice, but they need to be able to accumulate stashes of cash that cannot be raided except for advanced projects.
That said, I'm in favor of totally replacing the non-retirement portion of Social Security (and part of that) with a basic income...which everyone gets. Somehow it needs to be tied to the actual cost of living, but "somehow" is dangerously vague. Perhaps the "basic income" should equal the current minimum wage, and then remove all minimum wage rules & laws. (At least in my area the minimum wage is considerably below the actual poverty level. I don't know what the law says the poverty level is.) I believe that *eventually* the basic income should be above the actual poverty level, though not by much. And that education should be free at all levels. So if you want to devote your life to polishing your skills for a decade, you should be able to do so. Perhaps internet access should also be freely available at, say, the speed of a 100 kB/s. Perhaps a bit slower.
The idea here is to be prepared for the (already incipient) future where robots increasingly replace jobs. Eventually, of course, all jobs will be replaced, but that's several decades off. In the mean time SOME people will need to be employed, and will need to prepare themselves for employment, with no guarantee that the job will still be available by the time they are ready. Many people will need to prepare for 10 years for a job that will be automated away shortly before they are qualified (or very soon afterwards). This is already happening to people, but it's still rather uncommon. It won't remain uncommon. A sign of this is the number of articles saying "People should consider the concept of a career to be obsolete" and similar things. They emphasize the need to be always ready to retrain, but many careers require an extensive preparation. Doctor, lawyer, pharmacist, etc. And the initial signs of automation are just that fewer new people are currently being hired. This is almost always disguised in the reported statistics, or attributed to a temporary economic slowdown. And currently much of it is accurately attributed to off-shoring. But new articles seem to be indicating that many of those jobs that were off-shored are being automated because even Javanese workers aren't as cheap as robots. (OK, most factory automation doesn't involve real robots. But that's the way it's being reported.)
There's also the question of how much the Heisenberg, etc., wanted Hitler to win. Some of their calculations may well have been excessively pessimistic. We know that this was the case with Radar, but there's no reason to believe that's the only place this happened.
Wouldn't that get the MPAA after them? Or has the trademark for that cartoon character been abandoned?
That'd probably work.
Have you noticed how libraries are being treated recently? I'd hardly call that an honor.
We never did. That's a problem, but not THE problem. Over-readiness to call in the police is THE problem, but it's not something that occurred in a vacuum. The police are also over-ready to be called in, and over-ready to arrest on scant to no evidence or other reasonable grounds. And there's no penalty for using the police to abuse people, or for the police abusing people.
When I was in school the police weren't even called in for knife fights unless someone got badly hurt. (And I'm not sure about then, because I never heard of that happening in school. Afterwards is a different matter.) I carried a pocket knife all the way up into high school, and nobody ever bothered to find out about it, or appeared to care. (Some kids used them on desks, which *was* frowned upon, but wasn't seen as ground for calling in the police.) I think that since controls have become tighter, schools have become less safe, though I'm not sure.
OTOH, we didn't need to carry around huge sacks of books, either. But, of course, we also didn't carry around valuable electronics. The biggest problem was bicycle theft, and they were generally secured with trivially simple locks.
OTOH, there have been lots of other social changes, fragmenting social structures. Fast and cheap communications and travel have many effects, and some of them are socially disruptive...not, however, as disruptive as having both parents working. The Women's Rights movement has had bad effects as well as good one. If fragmented the family. We used to talk about the "Nuclear Family", but the Women's Rights movement has split the atom, so to speak. The old problem of bored middle class housewives has been replaced by the missing parent. This does bad things to children. And it decreases the glue holding the family together. It's true that the glue was compounded from injustice, but it's not clear that the net social effect hasn't been tremendously negative. (OTOH, it's quite difficult to disentangle the effects of the various changes that have been happening simultaneously.)
But when there is a systematic change, such as the increased readiness of teachers and principles to call in the police, on must look for a systematic cause. And it isn't that teachers are now underpaid, since they've been underpaid since at least the 1700's. (This isn't always true of college professors, and not always true of administrators, but it's always been true of teachers. So that's not the significant variable.)
Your prize yearling what? Probably more than the goat. Probably less than the bull. I'm not sure about the pig.
I'm disagreeing with you in considering that stability, and degree of stability, is an essential component of any working evolutionary system. This is explicitly disagreeing with your post.
You said:
I am asserting that a marked degree of stability must be present in even the initial stages. This is why most forms of abiogenesis concentrate on how to establish stable conditions (or where they can be found). I do agree that increased stability can be acquired during the course of evolution, but it needs to be present from the start.
Actually, stability is required for evolution to happen. Life, however, is not required. But if a system isn't stable enough, it can't evolve. For this reason the length of a genetic code that is feasible depends upon the error rate of the copying process, the error rate during the non-copying phase, and the error correction processes.
OTOH, I normally use the term "evolution" in a general sense which includes genetic-based evolution as a subset. (I'm not going to call that Darwinian Evolution, because Darwin didn't know about Mendel, and considered many forms of inheritance, most of which would not have worked. Possibly none of them would have worked, but I haven't done an extensive study of this.)
So I consider it perfectly correct to talk about the evolution of atomic frequencies within stellar atmospheres. And to use the same general meaning when talking about biological evolution, albeit the biological evolution has a lot of special features that aren't present in stellar atmospheres (and conversely).
The problem is that "God" is not, in general, a well defined term. This makes either validation or refutation impossible.
FWIW, I have a relatively precise definition that works for me, and which I have empirical evidence for. (It falls well short of proof.) Unfortunately, I don't believe that there's a religion on the planet that would accept my definition...unless you consider a relatively strict Buddhist sect to be a religion (relatively strict meaning they base their beliefs on "The Word" and a relatively few other works of about the same period). Many people would refuse to call them a religion, and prefer to call it a philosophy.
FWIW, I do not accept that sect's beliefs. I believe that they accept some things that were traditional beliefs at that time without questioning them. But they've got a lot going for them. E.g., look up what "The Word" says about "Karma". It's a lot closer to materialism than most people would find comfortable.
You are confusing "A theory of evolution" with "the current theory of evolution". There are clearly theories of evolution that include the origin of life, but that is not a part of the current consensus theory.
It is quite plausible that some future theory of evolution will include a theory of the origin of life on Earth (which might even be Panspermia rather than Abiogenesis), but that's not a part of the current theory.
Current Libertarianism, as with all other current political theories, is too ill defined to admit of evidence either affirming or refuting it. The only exception that I can think of is communism (small c) which has been shown to work reasonably well in small groups (about 13 people or fewer) with close affinities. Most of the evidence comes from smaller groups of closely related individuals (families). In larger groups it can be meta-stable up to around 50 people, but even this level of stability requires a charismatic leader. After that it devolves into some other form.
Examples of well defined forms which do not, and cannot practically, exist is absolute Monarchy. The historical forms which are given that name always contain a strong bureaucratic element with is not a part of the definition. Even an aristocratic hierarchy is not a part of the definition of absolute monarchy. In an actual implementation of an absolute monarchy all decisions would be made by the monarch. Intermediate forms can exist, but are not well-defined. Thus in the pre-revolution French Monarchy there was not only a strong bureaucracy, but there was also a court of nobles that the King could not safely ignore the interests of.
Again, my basic assertion is that no existing political theory that is well defined has any measurable probability of existing under the current situation for any measurable amount of time. Everything that exists is a mix. This makes evidence as to their desirability quite dubious, and also makes attempts to estimate their transition states dubious. One makes educated guesses and does the best one can based on that.
A more reasonable grounds for a political theory would be statistical in nature and would predict how people would react in well defined situations. I don't know whether you'd call that politics, sociology, or psychology, but we don't have a workable theory yet. Only some rules of thumb that usually work, e.g.:
If you give people power over other people, and don't have any punishment for bad behavior, many of them will abuse their power for personal gain or even just enjoyment.
This has been repeatedly validated, though I don't know of any controlled experiments to find precise limits.
Yes, but as others have pointed out there's a considerable difference between the facts of evolution (which have, indeed, been observed) and the Theory of Evolution, which has been modified several times within my lifetime. E.g., the 1940's Theory could not encompass epigenetic modifications. And the current version of the Theory cannot account for the origin of life on Earth. It can't even rule out Panspermia.
That said, it seems fairly clear that the successor theory to the current Theory of Evolution will only be a slight modification. OTOH, that's what the Newtonian physicists believed.
Two points:
1) You point out a real problem with those who are empowered to write the definitions.
2) You do need clear and certain definitions. I'm sorry but "You know what I mean by search and seizure" doesn't count as clear. There are several corner cases that are ill-defined. What about, e.g., "I only searched and didn't seize"? Common English is notoriously imprecise in handling logical constructs, this is reasonable as it's largely based on the premise that it's dealing with a situation where neither party is intentionally misunderstanding the other, and both are operating with a common understanding of the basics. And it's optimized (not perfectly) for clear understanding in a noisy environment where both ends of the channel are using considerable intelligence to reach common understanding. (Even so it compresses things too much for good understanding. I continually experience this when talking with my wife. Her belief is that if there are two ways to understand something, we will initially hit on opposite interpretations.)
You are vastly oversimplifying the problem for the sake of clean boundaries. I would argue that the real reason is the closing of the frontier. There's essentially nowhere to go to escape oppression.
FWIW, the first overreach were the "Alien and Sedition acts". Another early overreach caused the Whiskey Rebellion. It really started getting underway, however, with the Civil War, when both the North and the South centralized their governments, and increased governmental power beyond the legal limits. This was facilitated by faster transport (railroads) and communication. The telegraph, introduced soon afterwards, further abetted centralization of power. Computers added a third element after transport and communication, enabling larger organizations to be run more effectively. And centralization of power continued.
I've been trying to guess what robots are going to do in this area as they become perfected. Most of my guesses have not been pleasant.
And an interesting thing about that case is that it wasn't the judge that declared corporations to be people. That was added by a law clerk who wrote up the case. For some reason it's become generally accepted anyway.
http://scholarlycommons.law.no...
For some strange reason the persons within corporations who *do* commit such crimes in the name of the corporation are rarely punished.
Well, Obama promised that his administration would be more open. He just didn't mention that this would be due to non-US governmental agents. (OK, Snowden used to be a government agent, but he hasn't been since he started making Obama's promise true.)