All money is just 'shiny pebbles'. It has no value except in the fact that other people value it.
Not really true. The value of a currency lies in both the willingness and requirement to make use of it.
That is why you aren't allowed to declare your incoming in ounces of gold, and why dollars are legal tender for all debt. To force you to use the currency for some things, giving it a direct value that isn't purely based on faith in the market.
i wonder what "genius" figured out a nation could lone money in the first place, and at interest, no less.
It is just one big scam. A left over from the feudal era, where the country and the king was the same thing. In modern politics it simply doesn't make any sense. Every 4 years there is an election and a complete new rulership comes to power. Why should they be obligated to pay the debts of the previous rulership?
If a government needs resources, it should go and tax its constituents for. If the government needs more resources than the constituents have, it is the constituents themselves who should loan to pay the government, since they elected that specific government. When the government loans it is simply taxing future generations, and that is the definition of taxation without representation.
Statistics show that most small businesses fail, well guess what, its really, really hard to start and run a business,
Yeah, keep making up excuses. But don't expect those with some real life experience to actually believe it. Running a small business is about contacts, luck and hard work (and generally in that specific order). Only 1/3 of that combination has anything to do with deserving anything.
Meanwhile, jack up the inheritance taxes. A governments job should be to lower the barriers to success
How is capitalism lowering barriers to success when 9 out of 10 fails? Looks like you are just talking out of your ass now.
Nothing stopping any of them from starting their own business.
lol.
You actually think a worker in China can manage start a business without capital. You know, the same capital that is owned by the nobles.
Sure, in countries like the US, there is a chance of being able to lend capital, so you can become a small business renter (small business owner is an oxymoron). That way you can work your ass off to pay the nobles their rent.
And if you are really lucky, you may even be among the small percentage that manage to grow a business and start building their own capita. But it is far more likely that you will work your ass off, and either stay small with just as bad a salary that you had before you started renting your business, or worse lose everything.
And if you fail it is of course your own fault, so says the noble class. Really, the "start a business" excuse makes me sick because it nothing more than a sweet lie. Statistics shows it a lie, and yet you hear it repeated again and again.
Some companies do offer 'profit-sharing', but that definitely not the norm.
Of course not.
Rule number one in any Aristocratic system is that you need to suppress the worker class, since otherwise they may start to get strange expectations, like actually getting a greater part of the wealth production that they are actually responsible for.
And if there is one thing you don't want in an Aristocratic system, it is to have those who actual produce the wealth, starting to question those at the top leeching.
Not enough to stop using their software, hence not enough to matter.
Just like someone who never intends to buy their products because of ideological reasons doesn't matter.
The only people who matter for businesses/politicians are the customers who may take their business elsewhere and the non-customers that are considering to become customers. And only if they exist in large enough amounts to be noticeable statistically.
That is why monopolies are bad. They make customers matter less.
The funny thing about that signature is that the historical truth is quite the opposite.
Socialism has its own problems, mainly having to do with corruption (redirection of revenue streams) and favoring central planning. (socialist countries that use the free market to its advantage do better than those that use central planning)
But it is Capitalism that generally have a problem with running out of other people's money, because of Capitalism inherently allowing the accumulation of wealth into a few people's hands. Once the wealth concentration is high enough, the economy simply collapses.
Of course, all of this depends on not using the Fox news definition of Socialism.
I don't get why you think Slashdot is pro GPL. There are a lot of people here who don't really like the GPL license, and often for the same reason that they don't like commercial copyright.
I do see where people who like GPL are coming from, but personally I disagree completely with them. I don' t agree with their vision of what counts as "Free".
1. The phrase "You cannot" can imply that something is impossible. 2. We know it isn't actually impossible, so we have to examine the context 3. The current context is law.
Final interpretation: In the context of law, inducing others to violate their contracts is an impossibility.
And yes, like the grandparent I did notice this upon the first reading, ending up with two contradictory interpretations, causing me to stop and consider the true meaning in the greater context. All stemming from the careless use of the word cannot.
I also dislike this argument "Oh, but we've never had true Socialism, just every single time someone tried to establish it it led to military dictatorship and starvation". It has a faint ring of no true Scotsman to it.
Agreed. Just like when you hear someone say "we have never had a real free market".
In reality, there have been huge successes and huge failures to both socialist and capitalist theories. Now, if only we could pick the good parts out from the bad and learn from out mistakes. But that is probably too much to ask.
Actually, in two sentences I have shown why Pascal's wager is fundamentally flawed. Christians love to threaten "you won't go to heaven" and yet that threat is based on nothing. Even in the cases where there is a god (or many gods, and there is a heaven, you can't say anything about the conditions under which you get to enter heaven.
I think its quite obvious that you don't understand the Christian religion.
I understand Christian religion pretty well. It is one of the more funny religions to watch, as it is incredibly contradictory in content and practices. God as in the monotheistic god commonly believed in, is one big evil bastard. Even if we entertain the idea that he is real, I would belong to the resistance working to bring him down.
Fortunately, most Christians don't follow the bible, which is just fine with me. But I get really annoyed with how they keep cheery picking the parts that they do follow, and then claim that it is the word of God, while they simultaneously reject the parts they don't like claiming that it is a left over from old times.
But, your belief is your belief - I just don't think its helping you.
If you took my above post as serious belief, then you failed to actually read between the lines. If you want, I can state it more clearly. I reject the ideas of any religion who says "believe or you won't go to heaven when you die" without providing overwhelming proof for their case (something that all religions fail miserably at). Why should I gamble on your religion when there are an infinite amount of possible gods out there who would throw me into hell for doing so.
But if the Christians are right, and there is an afterlife to contend with, then the shoulder of Jesus suddenly becomes much more attractive.
I am a firm believer that if God exists, he is an intelligent being who would not want to associate with people who spent their lives believing in him without adequate proof. Therefore, he will only allow atheists into heaven.
Nothing like the ambiance of the mountains, day after day of dehydrated crud for food to make anything different a tasty feast fit for the gods.
The taste of food is intrinsically linked to how much your body needs it. And it even goes down in more detail as to what kind of food your body needs. It is fascinating really. Especially how quickly the taste adepts once you get the needed mineral/vitamin into your system.
. If education needs to do one thing, then that should be to give students a broader view instead of limiting them to some false impressions. In that sense, UNIX is a much better tool because of its rich history
Agreed. Show them programming using emacs/vi combined with command line compilers.
After they have learned that rich history, they will truly appreciate the advances in development that has occurred in the last 15 years.
Except of course that 1.0 and 1.2 are not real numbers. They are in fact two numbers separated by a dot. With real numbers 1.4 > 1.38. With version 1.4 1.38.
I highly doubt that the majority of Slashdot, who are largely developers who rely on copyright's protections for their income, say that copyright should not exist
Most developers work on custom solutions and programs (providing services), and aren't really benefiting at all from copyright protection.
In 24 hours everybody's Bankrupt Ford stock will be worth $0.00 (or mere pennies).
No. The stocks will be worthless immediately as soon as Ford announces the bankruptcy.
when he has advanced knowledge of Ford's bankruptcy,
The whole point of 1-day trading is to prevent people from exploiting information asymmetry, and your only excuse is that you want to continue to exploit it? It looks like you kind of didn't get the point of the grandparent at all.
The way this is done is by granting a temporary monopoly to an inventor for the singular purpose of encouraging more inventions.
And yet, over and over again, people seem to come up with very similar inventions independently. It is almost like inventions happen because the right prerequisites are there, and not because of some monetary incentive.
And you're conveniently ignoring the fact that patents are socialism.
This is quite an ignorant claim. The whole idea of socialism is that private ownership should be minimized in favor of public/shared ownership. Patents are a mechanism that puts something into the ownership of a private interest. It may be many things, but it is in no way socialism or socialist policy.
That is unless you are using a Fox News style definition of Socialism, which seems to be "Anything that we think is bad is Socialism. And if we think it is really bad it is Communism".
No, patents is just a basic capitalist idea (note: I didn't say free market). Creating a new type of capital that can be owned and traded.
It is the paradox of the free market. A free market requires an even playing field, but a free market inevitably leads to an uneven playing field.
The solution is to introduce factors that works against the creation of an uneven playing field. One of the main factors is the progressive taxing. Of course, in the last years there has been a huge anti progressive taxing movement in western countries, and the result is what we see today.
Slashdot Mirror
So all buyers are dumb?
With the P/E values in todays stock markets there are only two categories of buyers. Idiots and Gamblers.
All money is just 'shiny pebbles'. It has no value except in the fact that other people value it.
Not really true. The value of a currency lies in both the willingness and requirement to make use of it.
That is why you aren't allowed to declare your incoming in ounces of gold, and why dollars are legal tender for all debt. To force you to use the currency for some things, giving it a direct value that isn't purely based on faith in the market.
You may use the excuse for the first time they opened fire, even though the RPG excuse is lame at best.
However, when they shot at people trying to help already wounded people, they committed murder, plain and simple.
You are only a criminal if you can't bribe or lawyer your way out of a conviction.
i wonder what "genius" figured out a nation could lone money in the first place, and at interest, no less.
It is just one big scam. A left over from the feudal era, where the country and the king was the same thing. In modern politics it simply doesn't make any sense. Every 4 years there is an election and a complete new rulership comes to power. Why should they be obligated to pay the debts of the previous rulership?
If a government needs resources, it should go and tax its constituents for. If the government needs more resources than the constituents have, it is the constituents themselves who should loan to pay the government, since they elected that specific government. When the government loans it is simply taxing future generations, and that is the definition of taxation without representation.
Statistics show that most small businesses fail, well guess what, its really, really hard to start and run a business,
Yeah, keep making up excuses. But don't expect those with some real life experience to actually believe it. Running a small business is about contacts, luck and hard work (and generally in that specific order). Only 1/3 of that combination has anything to do with deserving anything.
Meanwhile, jack up the inheritance taxes. A governments job should be to lower the barriers to success
How is capitalism lowering barriers to success when 9 out of 10 fails? Looks like you are just talking out of your ass now.
Nothing stopping any of them from starting their own business.
lol.
You actually think a worker in China can manage start a business without capital. You know, the same capital that is owned by the nobles.
Sure, in countries like the US, there is a chance of being able to lend capital, so you can become a small business renter (small business owner is an oxymoron). That way you can work your ass off to pay the nobles their rent.
And if you are really lucky, you may even be among the small percentage that manage to grow a business and start building their own capita. But it is far more likely that you will work your ass off, and either stay small with just as bad a salary that you had before you started renting your business, or worse lose everything.
And if you fail it is of course your own fault, so says the noble class. Really, the "start a business" excuse makes me sick because it nothing more than a sweet lie. Statistics shows it a lie, and yet you hear it repeated again and again.
Some companies do offer 'profit-sharing', but that definitely not the norm.
Of course not.
Rule number one in any Aristocratic system is that you need to suppress the worker class, since otherwise they may start to get strange expectations, like actually getting a greater part of the wealth production that they are actually responsible for.
And if there is one thing you don't want in an Aristocratic system, it is to have those who actual produce the wealth, starting to question those at the top leeching.
Not enough to stop using their software, hence not enough to matter.
Just like someone who never intends to buy their products because of ideological reasons doesn't matter.
The only people who matter for businesses/politicians are the customers who may take their business elsewhere and the non-customers that are considering to become customers. And only if they exist in large enough amounts to be noticeable statistically.
That is why monopolies are bad. They make customers matter less.
The funny thing about that signature is that the historical truth is quite the opposite.
Socialism has its own problems, mainly having to do with corruption (redirection of revenue streams) and favoring central planning. (socialist countries that use the free market to its advantage do better than those that use central planning)
But it is Capitalism that generally have a problem with running out of other people's money, because of Capitalism inherently allowing the accumulation of wealth into a few people's hands. Once the wealth concentration is high enough, the economy simply collapses.
Of course, all of this depends on not using the Fox news definition of Socialism.
I don't get why you think Slashdot is pro GPL. There are a lot of people here who don't really like the GPL license, and often for the same reason that they don't like commercial copyright.
I do see where people who like GPL are coming from, but personally I disagree completely with them. I don' t agree with their vision of what counts as "Free".
1. The phrase "You cannot" can imply that something is impossible.
2. We know it isn't actually impossible, so we have to examine the context
3. The current context is law.
Final interpretation: In the context of law, inducing others to violate their contracts is an impossibility.
And yes, like the grandparent I did notice this upon the first reading, ending up with two contradictory interpretations, causing me to stop and consider the true meaning in the greater context. All stemming from the careless use of the word cannot.
I also dislike this argument "Oh, but we've never had true Socialism, just every single time someone tried to establish it it led to military dictatorship and starvation". It has a faint ring of no true Scotsman to it.
Agreed. Just like when you hear someone say "we have never had a real free market".
In reality, there have been huge successes and huge failures to both socialist and capitalist theories. Now, if only we could pick the good parts out from the bad and learn from out mistakes. But that is probably too much to ask.
Actually, in two sentences I have shown why Pascal's wager is fundamentally flawed. Christians love to threaten "you won't go to heaven" and yet that threat is based on nothing. Even in the cases where there is a god (or many gods, and there is a heaven, you can't say anything about the conditions under which you get to enter heaven.
I think its quite obvious that you don't understand the Christian religion.
I understand Christian religion pretty well. It is one of the more funny religions to watch, as it is incredibly contradictory in content and practices. God as in the monotheistic god commonly believed in, is one big evil bastard. Even if we entertain the idea that he is real, I would belong to the resistance working to bring him down.
Fortunately, most Christians don't follow the bible, which is just fine with me. But I get really annoyed with how they keep cheery picking the parts that they do follow, and then claim that it is the word of God, while they simultaneously reject the parts they don't like claiming that it is a left over from old times.
But, your belief is your belief - I just don't think its helping you.
If you took my above post as serious belief, then you failed to actually read between the lines. If you want, I can state it more clearly. I reject the ideas of any religion who says "believe or you won't go to heaven when you die" without providing overwhelming proof for their case (something that all religions fail miserably at). Why should I gamble on your religion when there are an infinite amount of possible gods out there who would throw me into hell for doing so.
But if the Christians are right, and there is an afterlife to contend with, then the shoulder of Jesus suddenly becomes much more attractive.
I am a firm believer that if God exists, he is an intelligent being who would not want to associate with people who spent their lives believing in him without adequate proof. Therefore, he will only allow atheists into heaven.
Nothing like the ambiance of the mountains, day after day of dehydrated crud for food to make anything different a tasty feast fit for the gods.
The taste of food is intrinsically linked to how much your body needs it. And it even goes down in more detail as to what kind of food your body needs. It is fascinating really. Especially how quickly the taste adepts once you get the needed mineral/vitamin into your system.
. If education needs to do one thing, then that should be to give students a broader view instead of limiting them to some false impressions. In that sense, UNIX is a much better tool because of its rich history
Agreed. Show them programming using emacs/vi combined with command line compilers.
After they have learned that rich history, they will truly appreciate the advances in development that has occurred in the last 15 years.
Bah, forgot about slashcodes complete lack of functionality. Should be "With versions 1.4 < 1.38"
Except of course that 1.0 and 1.2 are not real numbers. They are in fact two numbers separated by a dot. With real numbers 1.4 > 1.38. With version 1.4 1.38.
Sigh at simple minded people who can't see anything but black and white.
* Is it commercial profiteering or noncommercial copying?
* Are the images attributed back to the source or not?
With just those two questions, you have four different types of copyright violation where people can disagree on some while agree on others.
I highly doubt that the majority of Slashdot, who are largely developers who rely on copyright's protections for their income, say that copyright should not exist
Most developers work on custom solutions and programs (providing services), and aren't really benefiting at all from copyright protection.
In 24 hours everybody's Bankrupt Ford stock will be worth $0.00 (or mere pennies).
No. The stocks will be worthless immediately as soon as Ford announces the bankruptcy.
when he has advanced knowledge of Ford's bankruptcy,
The whole point of 1-day trading is to prevent people from exploiting information asymmetry, and your only excuse is that you want to continue to exploit it? It looks like you kind of didn't get the point of the grandparent at all.
The way this is done is by granting a temporary monopoly to an inventor for the singular purpose of encouraging more inventions.
And yet, over and over again, people seem to come up with very similar inventions independently. It is almost like inventions happen because the right prerequisites are there, and not because of some monetary incentive.
And you're conveniently ignoring the fact that patents are socialism.
This is quite an ignorant claim. The whole idea of socialism is that private ownership should be minimized in favor of public/shared ownership. Patents are a mechanism that puts something into the ownership of a private interest. It may be many things, but it is in no way socialism or socialist policy.
That is unless you are using a Fox News style definition of Socialism, which seems to be "Anything that we think is bad is Socialism. And if we think it is really bad it is Communism".
No, patents is just a basic capitalist idea (note: I didn't say free market). Creating a new type of capital that can be owned and traded.
It is the paradox of the free market. A free market requires an even playing field, but a free market inevitably leads to an uneven playing field.
The solution is to introduce factors that works against the creation of an uneven playing field. One of the main factors is the progressive taxing. Of course, in the last years there has been a huge anti progressive taxing movement in western countries, and the result is what we see today.