So then you're suggesting that there's a point at which a person who was skilled becomes greedy instead for continuing to exihibit that which made him a success? Who decides when a person is no longer skilled, and is now greedy? Is it those who had neither skill nor ambition, and who never chose to sacrafice and sweat to succeed and now envy those who did?
I'm saying that portraying people who are financially successful as the root of our defecit problems is either dillusional or outright dishonest. I'm saying that focusing on that area of our economy is focusing on a pimple on the elephants butt.
The amount of waste in our goverment both through pet projects and inefficiency is unbelievable, and our entitlements are completely off the scale. Our grandparents saved money for retirement. That concept is completely foreign to the vast majority of Americans, and in fact they are looked at with skepticism by creditors and the IRS if they arent heavily in debt. Now those people who have nothing but dedt are looking to the government to secure their retirements, and you want the people who are actually good and making and keeping money to be the cure. It's pathetic.
Only true if you did not in any form, directly or indirectly, benefit from society. Say, by ever buying anything
You paid taxes on the purchases...
... tied in with that work and its value are layers upon layers of additional worth...
Each layer of which is taxed....
Society is not robbing you - even if you paid 90%, you would still be getting a bargain, compared to how you much you and your time is worth sans society.
I'm a business owner in the equine industry. I work on my business 7 days a week, sometimes topping 15 hours a day. My business employs multiple people, and what I purchase in support of my business supports untold more workers in other businesses.
So you want me to work as much as 100hours a week, and give 90% of what I make to government so that they can support others and then tell me what a bargain I'M getting? Are you out of your mind?
I get taxed when I buy materials to build a shop.
I get taxed on the goods I purchase to sell in the shop.
I get taxed when I open the shop.
I get taxed on the pay I give to my employees.
I get taxed on the goods I sell to others.
I get taxed on the heat in the shop.
I get taxed on the water I use in the shop.
I get taxed on the power consumed by the shop.
I get taxed on the property the shop sits on.
I get taxed by the school district in the county the shop is in.
I get taxed on the hay I grow.
I get taxed on the suppliments that I feed the horses.
I get taxed on the fee for delivery of the hay I bought.
I get taxed on the hay I buy to make up the difference in what I cant grow on my own.
I get taxed on the building I constructed to store the hay in.
I get taxed on the materials to build the hay barn.
I get taxed on the vet bills for the horses.
I get taxed on the services of the farrier.
I get taxed when I charge someone to board their horse.
I get taxed when I charge someone to train their horse.
I get taxed when I charge someone to transport their horse.
I get taxed on the work vehicles I purchase.
I get taxed on the fuel for my business vehicles (tractors, trucks, trailors).
I get taxed on the old vehicles I sell to replace. ...
And THEN I get taxed on what I take for myself out of MY business.
And I get taxed to buy my house.
And I get taxed to STAY in my house.
And taxed to buy food.
And taxed to buy fuel.
And taxed to buy clothes.
And taxed to send my kids to school.
And taxed to go to a movie, or to dinner, or to a ball game, or to a play, or... or... or... or...
The more money I make, the more I put back into SOCIETY. Not only am I consuming more luxuries, which employ people, I am also taxed on ALL OF IT.
I can tell you right now that if I'm told I will be paying 90% of what I make will be taken in the form of taxes, there's no fucking point in me spending 100+ hours a week earning that money. I will lay off my employess, cut all my business contracts, close my doors, and I will go to work for someone else stupid enough to bust their asses every damn day and get almost nothing for it. I'll let someone else invest their life into their business to get very little back. All the taxes that I pay will dry up and be reduced down to the lowest common denominator you seem hell bent on getting everyone in line for. Either you're malicious or completely dillusional. Dear God I hope it's the latter...
I think what the poster was trying to say was that taking every dollar from the evil rich wont close the budget gaps, or even approach paying off our national debt. If there's really an effort to fix the problem you have to reconcile the fact that our government spends far more than it can realisitically get from the populace.
Please see my comments on a 1.3billion person-deep forced military, and accelerating expenditures in that military. When they've fried their land, they can just take yours. Which is even more justifiable when you (or more specifically your government) is wholly incapable of ever repaying the debt you have to them.
I'm not discussing whether or not there is a real environmental threat. I'm not debating what the environmentally sound course of action is. I'm saying that if you produce a better product, for lower cost, and manage it slightly better than a group of monkeys, then the free market will reward you with success. If you produce crap, or your product is expensive as hell, or you are among the monkeys in management, or all of the above, it is in everyone's interest that you fail miserably. Adding a layer of buearocrats that are easily swayed by campaign contributions and who live in the Washington DC bubble, thoroughly protected from real world logic, is not going to produce the best outcome for the people.
They dont care if they kill their own people. Hell, they do it purposefully with regularity.
They dont care if their people protest it. If those insolent little bastards squawk too much they will be beaten back into line.
They dont care if other nations protest, particularly when they own the bulk of the other nation's debts.
They dont care if the UN protests. It's an inneffectual artifact of something that once had a purpose, and it's politically unsavory to denounce communism these days.
They dont fear armed conflict. They are spending massive amounts on military, developing a new stealth fighter and air craft carrier just recently. Not to mention that with a population of 1.3Billion and a policy of forced military service they could easily outman every army in the world combined by better than 10 to 1, and they dont care how many of their own people die. In their minds it'd be a rather beneficial population control mechanism.
They are a governement that fully believes that they are not to be questioned. Ever. They will do what is profitable to them today because that is right. And you will not interfere.
Here's a transcript of the area before and after the quote:
You've heard about the controversy within the bill, the processes about the bill. Or of the items. But I dont know if you have heard that this is a legislation for the future. Not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America. Where preventative care is not something that you have to pay a deductable for, or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention. It's about diet not diabetes. It's going to be very very exciting. But we have to pass the bill so that you can, uh, find out what is in it away from the fog of the controversy.
Furthermore, we believe that health care reform, again I said at the beginning of my remarks, that we sent the three pillars that the President's economic stabilization and job creation initiatives were education and innocation - innovation begins in the classroom- clean energy and climate, addresssing the the climate issues in an innovative way to keep us number one and competitive in the world with the new technology, and the third, first among equals I may ssay, is health care, health insurance reform.
What exactly is out of context?
At the time of that quote, the Democrats were refusing to provide a copy of the Health Care legislation to anyone for review. They were suggesting giving members of the House only 72 hours to review more than 2000 pages before a vote on it. But there's no misdirection in my using the quote alone.
Regardless of anyone's opinion of that particular bill, the bottom line here is that the quote itself, in or out of context, suggests that the citizens of the US are too stupid to be allowed to read a bill before it's passed. We're not allowed an opinion on a proposed legislation. We're to be told what our representatives have passed for our own good after the fact, and not before. It shows contempt for the process, and more importantly for the citizens. Its a perfect example of the elitist attitude congressional figures have who assume they know better than we do and would prefer that we just shut up.
I agree with your basic premise, but not the conclusion. Whether or not you are motivated by politics pointing out only the shortcomings of any one governement has broad global political ramifications. Opponents of that government will not choose to forgo the oppurtunity to use those leaks to their advantage simply because they were not equally condemned for their complicity in, or guilt of the exact same practices.
Providing the world fodder with which to stoke hate against the US government while choosing to withhold equal evidence against their enemies inherently sets a political imbalance. If you're not guilty of political manuevering, then you're guilty of undeniably harmful negligence.
Labeling a civilian informant in Afghanistan who provides information on violent extremists a "freelance spy" is a rather transparent attempt to manipulate the discussion. We're talking about people who simply dont want to live under the oppressive boot of fundimentalist radicals.
By your definition Harriet Tubman was a "freelance spy", deserving of the punishment for her calculated crimes of smuggling black slaves from the south northward to freedom.
Your argument assumes that what Assange has leaked never infringed upon an individual's personal privacy, anonymity or pseudonimity, when in fact it has. Repeatedly.
I dont necessarily disagree with a mission to reveal the ugly secrets that exists behind the curtain of government. But Assange has not limited himself to that. He has a political axe to grind, and he'll burn whomever he needs to in order to achieve his ends. I find great humor at the indignance he shows now that the same standard has been turned on him.
Incremental change is the domain of business, paradigm shifts, especially those requiring substantial investment and/or long term incubation are the domain of governments.
Bill Gates would likely disagree. I think it's a safe statement computers were a paradigm shift in most aspects of life, as well as a long path requiring substantial investment and long term incubation. Henry Ford and Eli Whitney became incredibly wealthy men through their keystone inventions and investments. The list of historical figures rewarded by the free market for breakthrough technologies is a hell of a lot longer than companies with great products under effective management that failed.
So this was a good thing because before it went broke naturally in the free market, we were allowed to spend half a trillion dollars and keep it alive long enough to learn that the tech was a dead-end ?
Or maybe we should consider not encouraging trade with nations that we have hard evidence are guilty of crimes against humanity, rather than kissing their asses, appologizing to them, bowing to their dictators, and groveling to get their loans....
So your argument is this:
Even though this company was given a substantial advantage in the free market (some might say an unfair advantage), it was rejected. Other green companies were able to produce better results with fewer resources, and produced products at lower costs to consumers. The free market directed its support to those better, cheaper alternatives, effectively killing the company in the article. But to you that rejection is evidence that people are too stupid to buy what you think they should buy. Therefore the free market system failed, governement should fully finance companies like the one from the article and require the populace to consume it's products, while giving consumers no chance to support the better, cheaper alternatives....
Yeah, that's a very compelling argument against libertarianism and the free market....
Or more specifically, big green company vs. bigger green company.
Several in this thread have commented on the profit motivation of developing tech or energy sources. I find it interesting that most have condemned fossil fuel companies while wholly failing to recognize that this was a case of green industry canabilism.
There wasnt a suggestion that only $500 billion was invested in green technologies. Just that $500 billion was invested in this one company.
While it might be true that there is profit to be had in green tech (aside from the obvious environmental benefits), one would hope that it'd be apparent that a company was pissing the money down the drain on a dead end or bad management before they recieved half a trillion dollars.
Aside from the fact that your statement is a logic trainwreck (If you spend more than GDP, GDP might grow, but you're still spending more than GDP, which might grow, but you're still spending more than GDP, which might grow.... ), infrastructure spending has almost nothing to do with the rate of GDP growth. Businesses producing goods which are sold is what grows GDP. Government spending money on infrastructure doesnt increase the value of those goods. It grows government, which grows taxes and regulation which retard growth in business. A decline in business growth, and with it a decline in the value of goods produced by business, is by definition a slow of growth in GDP.
How is it that so many people that so know so fucking little about economics have so much to say on the topic? Is it that they just have to have government spoon feed them and put rubber bumpers on everything for them, so they have to figure out how to give it more money?
And the fact that you are nitpicking off-hand remarks as statements to be used in some if/then/else logic exercise is exactly the kind of petty childish bullshit that sys admins deal with day in and day out. I would bet that many you have worked with will have become willfully incompetent because your behavior is precisely the stupid shit that forces someone to not give a shit just so that they dont choke the life out of you.
Actually there are a lot of them. But if they are both competent and remain in sys admin roles they have likely developed the learned response of just not giving a shit anymore as a sanity self-defense.
Depending on the level of stupidity, one person is fully capable of consuming 100% of an admin's time. It's actually relatively common for there to be "that guy" that is constantly fucking something up that the admin has to constantly fix. We actually have a new verb in our office in honor of "that guy". When you have to fix John Jackson's fuckups, you have been Jacksoned. (Name changed to protect the stupid.)
It's also pretty common for company's to buy absolutely shitty hardware, or incompatible hardware, and then blame the IT guy because it doesnt do what it was never designed to do in the first place, let alone do it well. The same can be said for applications and services. The ideal admin could spend every waking moment on 10 shitty servers running 1 piece of incompatible software utilized by 1 complete dipshit, and never make any headway.
Slashdot Mirror
So then you're suggesting that there's a point at which a person who was skilled becomes greedy instead for continuing to exihibit that which made him a success? Who decides when a person is no longer skilled, and is now greedy? Is it those who had neither skill nor ambition, and who never chose to sacrafice and sweat to succeed and now envy those who did?
I'm saying that portraying people who are financially successful as the root of our defecit problems is either dillusional or outright dishonest. I'm saying that focusing on that area of our economy is focusing on a pimple on the elephants butt.
The amount of waste in our goverment both through pet projects and inefficiency is unbelievable, and our entitlements are completely off the scale. Our grandparents saved money for retirement. That concept is completely foreign to the vast majority of Americans, and in fact they are looked at with skepticism by creditors and the IRS if they arent heavily in debt. Now those people who have nothing but dedt are looking to the government to secure their retirements, and you want the people who are actually good and making and keeping money to be the cure. It's pathetic.
Like China? How's that working out for their "workers"?
Only true if you did not in any form, directly or indirectly, benefit from society. Say, by ever buying anything
You paid taxes on the purchases...
... tied in with that work and its value are layers upon layers of additional worth...
Each layer of which is taxed....
Society is not robbing you - even if you paid 90%, you would still be getting a bargain, compared to how you much you and your time is worth sans society.
I'm a business owner in the equine industry. I work on my business 7 days a week, sometimes topping 15 hours a day. My business employs multiple people, and what I purchase in support of my business supports untold more workers in other businesses.
...
... or... or... or...
So you want me to work as much as 100hours a week, and give 90% of what I make to government so that they can support others and then tell me what a bargain I'M getting? Are you out of your mind?
I get taxed when I buy materials to build a shop.
I get taxed on the goods I purchase to sell in the shop.
I get taxed when I open the shop.
I get taxed on the pay I give to my employees.
I get taxed on the goods I sell to others.
I get taxed on the heat in the shop.
I get taxed on the water I use in the shop.
I get taxed on the power consumed by the shop.
I get taxed on the property the shop sits on.
I get taxed by the school district in the county the shop is in.
I get taxed on the hay I grow.
I get taxed on the suppliments that I feed the horses.
I get taxed on the fee for delivery of the hay I bought.
I get taxed on the hay I buy to make up the difference in what I cant grow on my own.
I get taxed on the building I constructed to store the hay in.
I get taxed on the materials to build the hay barn.
I get taxed on the vet bills for the horses.
I get taxed on the services of the farrier.
I get taxed when I charge someone to board their horse.
I get taxed when I charge someone to train their horse.
I get taxed when I charge someone to transport their horse.
I get taxed on the work vehicles I purchase.
I get taxed on the fuel for my business vehicles (tractors, trucks, trailors).
I get taxed on the old vehicles I sell to replace.
And THEN I get taxed on what I take for myself out of MY business.
And I get taxed to buy my house.
And I get taxed to STAY in my house.
And taxed to buy food.
And taxed to buy fuel.
And taxed to buy clothes.
And taxed to send my kids to school.
And taxed to go to a movie, or to dinner, or to a ball game, or to a play, or
The more money I make, the more I put back into SOCIETY. Not only am I consuming more luxuries, which employ people, I am also taxed on ALL OF IT.
I can tell you right now that if I'm told I will be paying 90% of what I make will be taken in the form of taxes, there's no fucking point in me spending 100+ hours a week earning that money. I will lay off my employess, cut all my business contracts, close my doors, and I will go to work for someone else stupid enough to bust their asses every damn day and get almost nothing for it. I'll let someone else invest their life into their business to get very little back. All the taxes that I pay will dry up and be reduced down to the lowest common denominator you seem hell bent on getting everyone in line for. Either you're malicious or completely dillusional. Dear God I hope it's the latter...
Yeah, there's no faster way to get rich than to sit back and just wait for it to roll in ....
I think what the poster was trying to say was that taking every dollar from the evil rich wont close the budget gaps, or even approach paying off our national debt. If there's really an effort to fix the problem you have to reconcile the fact that our government spends far more than it can realisitically get from the populace.
Please see my comments on a 1.3billion person-deep forced military, and accelerating expenditures in that military. When they've fried their land, they can just take yours. Which is even more justifiable when you (or more specifically your government) is wholly incapable of ever repaying the debt you have to them.
You obviously have no idea what I think.
I'm not discussing whether or not there is a real environmental threat. I'm not debating what the environmentally sound course of action is. I'm saying that if you produce a better product, for lower cost, and manage it slightly better than a group of monkeys, then the free market will reward you with success. If you produce crap, or your product is expensive as hell, or you are among the monkeys in management, or all of the above, it is in everyone's interest that you fail miserably. Adding a layer of buearocrats that are easily swayed by campaign contributions and who live in the Washington DC bubble, thoroughly protected from real world logic, is not going to produce the best outcome for the people.
Why?
They dont care if they kill their own people. Hell, they do it purposefully with regularity.
They dont care if their people protest it. If those insolent little bastards squawk too much they will be beaten back into line.
They dont care if other nations protest, particularly when they own the bulk of the other nation's debts.
They dont care if the UN protests. It's an inneffectual artifact of something that once had a purpose, and it's politically unsavory to denounce communism these days.
They dont fear armed conflict. They are spending massive amounts on military, developing a new stealth fighter and air craft carrier just recently. Not to mention that with a population of 1.3Billion and a policy of forced military service they could easily outman every army in the world combined by better than 10 to 1, and they dont care how many of their own people die. In their minds it'd be a rather beneficial population control mechanism.
They are a governement that fully believes that they are not to be questioned. Ever. They will do what is profitable to them today because that is right. And you will not interfere.
http://video.foxnews.com/v/4096283/pelosis-puzzling-health-care-plea
Here's a transcript of the area before and after the quote:
You've heard about the controversy within the bill, the processes about the bill. Or of the items. But I dont know if you have heard that this is a legislation for the future. Not just about health care for America, but about a healthier America. Where preventative care is not something that you have to pay a deductable for, or out of pocket. Prevention, prevention, prevention. It's about diet not diabetes. It's going to be very very exciting. But we have to pass the bill so that you can, uh, find out what is in it away from the fog of the controversy.
Furthermore, we believe that health care reform, again I said at the beginning of my remarks, that we sent the three pillars that the President's economic stabilization and job creation initiatives were education and innocation - innovation begins in the classroom- clean energy and climate, addresssing the the climate issues in an innovative way to keep us number one and competitive in the world with the new technology, and the third, first among equals I may ssay, is health care, health insurance reform.
What exactly is out of context?
At the time of that quote, the Democrats were refusing to provide a copy of the Health Care legislation to anyone for review. They were suggesting giving members of the House only 72 hours to review more than 2000 pages before a vote on it. But there's no misdirection in my using the quote alone.
Regardless of anyone's opinion of that particular bill, the bottom line here is that the quote itself, in or out of context, suggests that the citizens of the US are too stupid to be allowed to read a bill before it's passed. We're not allowed an opinion on a proposed legislation. We're to be told what our representatives have passed for our own good after the fact, and not before. It shows contempt for the process, and more importantly for the citizens. Its a perfect example of the elitist attitude congressional figures have who assume they know better than we do and would prefer that we just shut up.
I dont call it hypocrisy. I call it Karma. This is like Bernie Madoff getting indignant about being the victim of a ponzi scheme.
I agree with your basic premise, but not the conclusion. Whether or not you are motivated by politics pointing out only the shortcomings of any one governement has broad global political ramifications. Opponents of that government will not choose to forgo the oppurtunity to use those leaks to their advantage simply because they were not equally condemned for their complicity in, or guilt of the exact same practices.
Providing the world fodder with which to stoke hate against the US government while choosing to withhold equal evidence against their enemies inherently sets a political imbalance. If you're not guilty of political manuevering, then you're guilty of undeniably harmful negligence.
Labeling a civilian informant in Afghanistan who provides information on violent extremists a "freelance spy" is a rather transparent attempt to manipulate the discussion. We're talking about people who simply dont want to live under the oppressive boot of fundimentalist radicals.
By your definition Harriet Tubman was a "freelance spy", deserving of the punishment for her calculated crimes of smuggling black slaves from the south northward to freedom.
Your argument assumes that what Assange has leaked never infringed upon an individual's personal privacy, anonymity or pseudonimity, when in fact it has. Repeatedly.
I dont necessarily disagree with a mission to reveal the ugly secrets that exists behind the curtain of government. But Assange has not limited himself to that. He has a political axe to grind, and he'll burn whomever he needs to in order to achieve his ends. I find great humor at the indignance he shows now that the same standard has been turned on him.
Incremental change is the domain of business, paradigm shifts, especially those requiring substantial investment and/or long term incubation are the domain of governments.
Bill Gates would likely disagree. I think it's a safe statement computers were a paradigm shift in most aspects of life, as well as a long path requiring substantial investment and long term incubation. Henry Ford and Eli Whitney became incredibly wealthy men through their keystone inventions and investments. The list of historical figures rewarded by the free market for breakthrough technologies is a hell of a lot longer than companies with great products under effective management that failed.
So this was a good thing because before it went broke naturally in the free market, we were allowed to spend half a trillion dollars and keep it alive long enough to learn that the tech was a dead-end ?
Or maybe we should consider not encouraging trade with nations that we have hard evidence are guilty of crimes against humanity, rather than kissing their asses, appologizing to them, bowing to their dictators, and groveling to get their loans....
So your argument is this:
Even though this company was given a substantial advantage in the free market (some might say an unfair advantage), it was rejected. Other green companies were able to produce better results with fewer resources, and produced products at lower costs to consumers. The free market directed its support to those better, cheaper alternatives, effectively killing the company in the article. But to you that rejection is evidence that people are too stupid to buy what you think they should buy. Therefore the free market system failed, governement should fully finance companies like the one from the article and require the populace to consume it's products, while giving consumers no chance to support the better, cheaper alternatives....
Yeah, that's a very compelling argument against libertarianism and the free market....
Or more specifically, big green company vs. bigger green company.
Several in this thread have commented on the profit motivation of developing tech or energy sources. I find it interesting that most have condemned fossil fuel companies while wholly failing to recognize that this was a case of green industry canabilism.
There wasnt a suggestion that only $500 billion was invested in green technologies. Just that $500 billion was invested in this one company.
While it might be true that there is profit to be had in green tech (aside from the obvious environmental benefits), one would hope that it'd be apparent that a company was pissing the money down the drain on a dead end or bad management before they recieved half a trillion dollars.
Aside from the fact that your statement is a logic trainwreck (If you spend more than GDP, GDP might grow, but you're still spending more than GDP, which might grow, but you're still spending more than GDP, which might grow.... ), infrastructure spending has almost nothing to do with the rate of GDP growth. Businesses producing goods which are sold is what grows GDP. Government spending money on infrastructure doesnt increase the value of those goods. It grows government, which grows taxes and regulation which retard growth in business. A decline in business growth, and with it a decline in the value of goods produced by business, is by definition a slow of growth in GDP.
How is it that so many people that so know so fucking little about economics have so much to say on the topic? Is it that they just have to have government spoon feed them and put rubber bumpers on everything for them, so they have to figure out how to give it more money?
And the fact that you are nitpicking off-hand remarks as statements to be used in some if/then/else logic exercise is exactly the kind of petty childish bullshit that sys admins deal with day in and day out. I would bet that many you have worked with will have become willfully incompetent because your behavior is precisely the stupid shit that forces someone to not give a shit just so that they dont choke the life out of you.
Actually there are a lot of them. But if they are both competent and remain in sys admin roles they have likely developed the learned response of just not giving a shit anymore as a sanity self-defense.
Poetry.
I think I may have induced a stroke from laughing so hard.
Depending on the level of stupidity, one person is fully capable of consuming 100% of an admin's time. It's actually relatively common for there to be "that guy" that is constantly fucking something up that the admin has to constantly fix. We actually have a new verb in our office in honor of "that guy". When you have to fix John Jackson's fuckups, you have been Jacksoned. (Name changed to protect the stupid.)
It's also pretty common for company's to buy absolutely shitty hardware, or incompatible hardware, and then blame the IT guy because it doesnt do what it was never designed to do in the first place, let alone do it well. The same can be said for applications and services. The ideal admin could spend every waking moment on 10 shitty servers running 1 piece of incompatible software utilized by 1 complete dipshit, and never make any headway.
Are you your site's John Jackson?