> I'm starting to think this is a requirement if you do not want a society that doesn't devolve into a small, private group that owns and controls all the resources, natural and human.
I'm not arguing against it. All societies will have some people paying more in, and some people pulling more money out of government.
I'm arguing against the nonsense said on here that the rich are "leeches".
It's like when Mitt Romney's taxes came out and people accused him of immorally not paying enough in taxes. (In fact, the thumbnail for this story on HuffPo today is... Mitt Romney's face.) The method he used to pay less in taxes? He fucking gave away millions of dollars to charity (both to the Mormon church and to actual charity.) When you look at the tax on the money he actually, you know, kept for himself, he paid a normal rate.
>On the flip side, the average commuter's consumption of JP 8 for his private jet, flown in airspace overseen by the FAA, and the amount of public servicing provided to him by his municipality for his less than 66,000 square foot home probably doesn't approach Mr. Gate's usage.
Private jets have to pay into the FAA's pot. They also pay taxes on AvGas. Gates pays water and power for his home like everyone else, and his artificially higher rates subsidize the poor there as well.
>Protip: Warren Buffet drives himself to work in Utah every morning, just like us plebs.
Great. He also pays roughly 32,213,103 times more in taxes than his pleb neighbors. Is he getting 32,213,103 better service on the road for his money? Can he even drive in the carpool lane? No.
Note I'm not arguing that he should, just that all this "rich people are leeches" bullshit I see going around is just that - bullshit.
>Except in the disproportionate amount of blood spilled when they go to war, especially young and poor. Do you even realize how offensive that statement is?
We do not have a draft any more. Try again next year.
>The way the system works, is that everybody pays into the system.
On a per-capita basis, the rich pay in far, far more into the system than the poor. As a group, too. They do this to subsidize the poor, who take far more out than they put in.
>Please, counter how a given billionaire isn't going to be a rich person in the absence of a stable society that creates, denominates, and backs the very billions he has, including all the very infrastructure, governance, and defence that protects its value?
We had a stable society before Microsoft. Microsoft added a very minimal marginal increase to the government's burden in providing a stable and safe society. It has paid far more to the government than it has received in exchange.
All these Elizabeth Warren arguments are based on the fallacy that if Microsoft isn't paying enough in taxes to subsidize the entire American Government (and the states besides), then it's not paying it's "fair share".
>...Because Bill Gates is secretly just a less rugged-looking Snake Plissken?...because the marginal increase of cost to providing military and police services to Microsoft is far more than paid for by the taxes Microsoft, its owners, and employees, pay every year.
These Elizabeth Warren type arguments rely on the fallacy that if Microsoft doesn't pay 100% of all social services in America, then it "didn't do it alone" and needs to put more "fair share" money into the pot.
> However, the "knowingly committed" part is something that is not infrequently in the laws, so in the end, you might have done technically illegal acts, but not be criminally liable for them under the law.
Unfortunately, mens rea is missing from a lot of federal statues. (I don't know if it is or isn't from the statues you cited above.)
So a US Attorney can wave his hands, claim that you "recklessly damaged a protected computer" by downloading "too much" from it, and presto! Get charged for 35 years in jail, even though nobody (even the prosecution) thinks you were deliberately committing a crime.
This is also a failed argument, because you'd make a single business responsible for the entire social net, whereas in reality they are only responsible for the marginal added cost.
And even then, corporations are a net win to society:
All the income paid to the employees gets taxed and put back into the system to train new kids up to be employees. Retained corporate earnings get taxed. Everything the corporation buys in states with sales tax gets taxed.
Microsoft pours far more into police, military, and social services than the negligible marginal cost it adds to society's costs.
>Since these folks enjoy the same public roads, military, police and fire protection, etc as everyone else, then they can help pay for them
I'm pretty sure Bill Gates has paid far more into public roads, military, police and fire protection than in dollars he has drawn from them. If anything, he probably drives less than your average commuter.
A poor person, by contrast, pays in nothing to, say, the military, but draws the same benefit (a stable society).
The way our system works: the rich subsidize the social benefits to the poor.
Before you make some sort of idiotic "well, he wouldn't have been able to be rich if it weren't for the stable society" bullshit, I'm just going to stop you right there.
>Everything that you do, every day is against the law. All the time.
>All it needs is a motivated prosecutor or enforcement agent, to activate your infraction.
Not everything, but yeah. A US Attorney can make your life a living nightmare if they get a bug up their ass about you. It's happening to a friend of mine. He owns land, and leases it out to farmers. Farmers grew pot on it without his knowledge. Now US Attorney Wagner is trying to take his land, and, you know, why not? All his other assets too. And all his family's assets. Just because he wants to make an example out of them.
If you want a book that will simultaneously enlighten and enrage you, I highly recommend Harvey Silverglate's "Three Felonies a Day". In it, he talks about how DAs and other prosecutors will laugh and joke about all the different ways they can throw completely innocent people into prison, and runs through hundreds of case studies showing how they abuse their power in conjunction with ambiguous laws to throw people into jail who had no idea they were committing a crime, and even the prosecutors didn't try to argue had a mens rea.
What needs to be done: 1) Decriminalize a lot of things. Aaron's Law (which is the polar opposite of the law in TFA) would be a good step in this direction - make violations of EULAs civil, not criminal, cases. And do this for a whole set of things. (In the book, one artist was thrown in jail because his scientist friend bought some stuff for him - got sent to jail because arguably the wrong name was on the application). 2) Require a mens rea ("guilty mind") to go to jail for most things. Right now, many statues operate on strict liability that really should require intent to commit a crime instead. 3) Eliminate or clarify ambiguous laws. While it sounds nice to be able to make something nice and vague, in reality it means that US Attorneys can warp or twist the wording to bring a life-ending case against a person or business they don't like. 4) Eliminate prosecutoral bribery. A defense attorney would get disbarred if he offered a witness a million bucks to tell a certain story in court, but prosecutors can and do do this all the time. They approach some underling in a business, arrest them, threaten them with a life in prison for having the gall to work for Enron as a middle manager... but then offer to let them off if they only tell a certain story in court against the Big Fish they're trying to land. It shouldn't be constitutional, but SCOTUS ruled it is, because it would otherwise destroy the "justice" system as it stands right now.
>Listen to a set of music until it's nearly worn-out, and use that as your noise-cancellation
Yep, very familiar albums will fade into the background and not draw attention.
Certain kinds of lyric-less music work the same way. You just need to experiment and find songs that you don't want to focus your attention on. More Clair de lune, less 1812 Overture.
>>Would you seriously have ignored Mexican or Canadian armed anti-US revolutionaries funded by the USSR?
Uh, I don't know how to break this to you, but Mexico was controlled, for the vast majority of the 20th Century, by somewhat anti-US socialists that were part of the Socialist International. We never invaded them during that time.
>Of course Daoud Khan was not actually a democratically elected president though was he?
I didn't say he was. It was the GP that was promoting some myth of the US trying to undermine a democratically elected government. Daoud was better than the commie stooges, though.
>The communists who then shot and overthrew him were at least made up of commoners rather than royalty who felt they were entitled to rule from birth.
It was the communists that were in the leadership of the army that overthrew him. Doesn't make them "democratically elected" somehow, when they took power by shooting Daoud and his brother, and imposing martial law on the country.
Being "in the sphere of influence" doesn't justify an invasion, let alone allow someone to make the claim that the Soviets focused solely on 'internal' matters and had no interest in world domination.
Communist stooges overthrew the prime minister of Afghanistan when he moved to increase ties with the West, and then called for help to support their new regime that was pissing everyone off. It's hardly a case of the Soviets just "supporting" a friendly country against "insurgents".
>The one where the democratically elected Afghani government
Since when are coup d'etats "democratically-elected"? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saur_Revolution)
You are an idiot. The coup took place after the former prime minister of Afghanistan (Daoud Khan) moved to increase ties with the West, and to distance itself from the USSR. It was the commie stooges that overthrew the government that called for help from Moscow, not some democratically-elected nonsense. And did so after their disastrous policies alienated the entire country. The US poured aid money into the opponents after the communist coup.
>Yeah, US funding/training for those great up-and-coming Anti-Communist Freedom Fighters like Osama Bin Laden
Osama wasn't funded or trained by the US. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_%E2%80%93_al-Qaeda_controversy)
>Soviet internal focus (at least "internal" within a limited sphere of influence, which quite reasonably includes *border countries* with Soviet-aligned governments)
Ah, so by "internal" and not invading other people or taking over the world, you conveniently allow external countries, invading them because they're in your sphere of influence, and taking over the world.
>>The problem is that the prosecution has a very strong incentive to get a conviction, even if that means not playing fair: They have every reason to manipulate, intimidate, hide evidence, outright lie to the defendant, seize everything they possibly can on any grounds and seal bank accounts so the defendant cannot afford a competent defense, and in general do anything and everything they can in order to secure a conviction: Because their job is no longer to search for the truth: Their job is to get that conviction. Their careers depend upon it.
Right. And it's asymmetrical. If the defense offered some schlub in their corporation a million dollars to testify that they never saw any criminal wrongdoing inside of Enron, or whatever, this would be illegal.
But when a US Attorney does bribery, it's called a "plea bargain". They can come into a corporation, threaten some random joe with life in prison unless they testify against their boss, and then surprise, surprise! All this damning evidence magically appears against the boss, much of which is probably made-up, but impossible to prove. "Oh, yes, Mr. Jones once told me he'd go to jail if this scheme was found out!"
Unfortunately, there was a lawsuit on this very issue, and the justices ruled that this wasn't bribery, because if it was bribery, the legal system would fall apart.
Bozo The Redneck has a 5GHz unit that he has "improved." To get away from all of his neighbors' emissions, he found a little screw inside that would lower his frequency to 4.5GHz. Hey, there wasn't anyone else there! He then discovered that it would "put out more better" if he removed that silver can on the output (i.e., the filter). Harmonics are simply multiples of the fundamental frequency, so now he's radiating junk at 9GHz, 13.5GHz, and 18GHz.
This sounds exactly like every redneck I've known.
Talk your ear off for hours about the advantages of different kinds of notch filters.
Slashdot Mirror
> I'm starting to think this is a requirement if you do not want a society that doesn't devolve into a small, private group that owns and controls all the resources, natural and human.
I'm not arguing against it. All societies will have some people paying more in, and some people pulling more money out of government.
I'm arguing against the nonsense said on here that the rich are "leeches".
It's like when Mitt Romney's taxes came out and people accused him of immorally not paying enough in taxes. (In fact, the thumbnail for this story on HuffPo today is... Mitt Romney's face.) The method he used to pay less in taxes? He fucking gave away millions of dollars to charity (both to the Mormon church and to actual charity.) When you look at the tax on the money he actually, you know, kept for himself, he paid a normal rate.
>On the flip side, the average commuter's consumption of JP 8 for his private jet, flown in airspace overseen by the FAA, and the amount of public servicing provided to him by his municipality for his less than 66,000 square foot home probably doesn't approach Mr. Gate's usage.
Private jets have to pay into the FAA's pot. They also pay taxes on AvGas. Gates pays water and power for his home like everyone else, and his artificially higher rates subsidize the poor there as well.
>Protip: Warren Buffet drives himself to work in Utah every morning, just like us plebs.
Great. He also pays roughly 32,213,103 times more in taxes than his pleb neighbors. Is he getting 32,213,103 better service on the road for his money? Can he even drive in the carpool lane? No.
Note I'm not arguing that he should, just that all this "rich people are leeches" bullshit I see going around is just that - bullshit.
>Except in the disproportionate amount of blood spilled when they go to war, especially young and poor. Do you even realize how offensive that statement is?
We do not have a draft any more. Try again next year.
>The way the system works, is that everybody pays into the system.
On a per-capita basis, the rich pay in far, far more into the system than the poor. As a group, too. They do this to subsidize the poor, who take far more out than they put in.
>Please, counter how a given billionaire isn't going to be a rich person in the absence of a stable society that creates, denominates, and backs the very billions he has, including all the very infrastructure, governance, and defence that protects its value?
We had a stable society before Microsoft. Microsoft added a very minimal marginal increase to the government's burden in providing a stable and safe society. It has paid far more to the government than it has received in exchange.
All these Elizabeth Warren arguments are based on the fallacy that if Microsoft isn't paying enough in taxes to subsidize the entire American Government (and the states besides), then it's not paying it's "fair share".
Ok.
1) How much does copyright enforcement on *just Microsoft software* cost the US Government every year?
2) How much does Microsoft add to the marginal burden of the local constabulary (and other government services), in dollars?
3) How much does Microsoft, its employees, and owners, pay into the government each year?
If 3 is greater than 1+2, then Microsoft is not a "leech" as people are saying on here, but something contributing more than its "fair share".
>...Because Bill Gates is secretly just a less rugged-looking Snake Plissken? ...because the marginal increase of cost to providing military and police services to Microsoft is far more than paid for by the taxes Microsoft, its owners, and employees, pay every year.
These Elizabeth Warren type arguments rely on the fallacy that if Microsoft doesn't pay 100% of all social services in America, then it "didn't do it alone" and needs to put more "fair share" money into the pot.
> However, the "knowingly committed" part is something that is not infrequently in the laws, so in the end, you might have done technically illegal acts, but not be criminally liable for them under the law.
Unfortunately, mens rea is missing from a lot of federal statues. (I don't know if it is or isn't from the statues you cited above.)
So a US Attorney can wave his hands, claim that you "recklessly damaged a protected computer" by downloading "too much" from it, and presto! Get charged for 35 years in jail, even though nobody (even the prosecution) thinks you were deliberately committing a crime.
This is also a failed argument, because you'd make a single business responsible for the entire social net, whereas in reality they are only responsible for the marginal added cost.
And even then, corporations are a net win to society:
All the income paid to the employees gets taxed and put back into the system to train new kids up to be employees.
Retained corporate earnings get taxed.
Everything the corporation buys in states with sales tax gets taxed.
Microsoft pours far more into police, military, and social services than the negligible marginal cost it adds to society's costs.
>Since these folks enjoy the same public roads, military, police and fire protection, etc as everyone else, then they can help pay for them
I'm pretty sure Bill Gates has paid far more into public roads, military, police and fire protection than in dollars he has drawn from them. If anything, he probably drives less than your average commuter.
A poor person, by contrast, pays in nothing to, say, the military, but draws the same benefit (a stable society).
The way our system works: the rich subsidize the social benefits to the poor.
Before you make some sort of idiotic "well, he wouldn't have been able to be rich if it weren't for the stable society" bullshit, I'm just going to stop you right there.
Let me know how well your policy works out for France, Mr. Hollande.
>Everything that you do, every day is against the law. All the time.
>All it needs is a motivated prosecutor or enforcement agent, to activate your infraction.
Not everything, but yeah. A US Attorney can make your life a living nightmare if they get a bug up their ass about you. It's happening to a friend of mine. He owns land, and leases it out to farmers. Farmers grew pot on it without his knowledge. Now US Attorney Wagner is trying to take his land, and, you know, why not? All his other assets too. And all his family's assets. Just because he wants to make an example out of them.
If you want a book that will simultaneously enlighten and enrage you, I highly recommend Harvey Silverglate's "Three Felonies a Day". In it, he talks about how DAs and other prosecutors will laugh and joke about all the different ways they can throw completely innocent people into prison, and runs through hundreds of case studies showing how they abuse their power in conjunction with ambiguous laws to throw people into jail who had no idea they were committing a crime, and even the prosecutors didn't try to argue had a mens rea.
http://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229
What needs to be done:
1) Decriminalize a lot of things. Aaron's Law (which is the polar opposite of the law in TFA) would be a good step in this direction - make violations of EULAs civil, not criminal, cases. And do this for a whole set of things. (In the book, one artist was thrown in jail because his scientist friend bought some stuff for him - got sent to jail because arguably the wrong name was on the application).
2) Require a mens rea ("guilty mind") to go to jail for most things. Right now, many statues operate on strict liability that really should require intent to commit a crime instead.
3) Eliminate or clarify ambiguous laws. While it sounds nice to be able to make something nice and vague, in reality it means that US Attorneys can warp or twist the wording to bring a life-ending case against a person or business they don't like.
4) Eliminate prosecutoral bribery. A defense attorney would get disbarred if he offered a witness a million bucks to tell a certain story in court, but prosecutors can and do do this all the time. They approach some underling in a business, arrest them, threaten them with a life in prison for having the gall to work for Enron as a middle manager... but then offer to let them off if they only tell a certain story in court against the Big Fish they're trying to land. It shouldn't be constitutional, but SCOTUS ruled it is, because it would otherwise destroy the "justice" system as it stands right now.
>If you really believe nuclear is green power then I cordially invite you to move right next to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.
Are you that stupid?
I'd much prefer to have someone build a nuclear plant near my house than coal. In fact, I am supporting an effort to bring nuclear in here.
If it's highly radioactive, then you can extract usable energy from it. If it's not highly radioactive, then it's easy to store.
Nuclear is really the only green replacement for coal and NG we have right now.
But mongers of fear will do everything they can to kill people and wreck the environment.
>, one guy, a developer, (we'll call him "D") raised his hand and said "So, how are not a warez site, then?"
Brian Degenhardt?
>Listen to a set of music until it's nearly worn-out, and use that as your noise-cancellation
Yep, very familiar albums will fade into the background and not draw attention.
Certain kinds of lyric-less music work the same way. You just need to experiment and find songs that you don't want to focus your attention on. More Clair de lune, less 1812 Overture.
He'll do his best to ignore reality, and crawl back under whatever rock he calls his computer.
>>Would you seriously have ignored Mexican or Canadian armed anti-US revolutionaries funded by the USSR?
Uh, I don't know how to break this to you, but Mexico was controlled, for the vast majority of the 20th Century, by somewhat anti-US socialists that were part of the Socialist International. We never invaded them during that time.
>Of course Daoud Khan was not actually a democratically elected president though was he?
I didn't say he was. It was the GP that was promoting some myth of the US trying to undermine a democratically elected government. Daoud was better than the commie stooges, though.
>The communists who then shot and overthrew him were at least made up of commoners rather than royalty who felt they were entitled to rule from birth.
It was the communists that were in the leadership of the army that overthrew him. Doesn't make them "democratically elected" somehow, when they took power by shooting Daoud and his brother, and imposing martial law on the country.
Being "in the sphere of influence" doesn't justify an invasion, let alone allow someone to make the claim that the Soviets focused solely on 'internal' matters and had no interest in world domination.
Communist stooges overthrew the prime minister of Afghanistan when he moved to increase ties with the West, and then called for help to support their new regime that was pissing everyone off. It's hardly a case of the Soviets just "supporting" a friendly country against "insurgents".
>The one where the democratically elected Afghani government
Since when are coup d'etats "democratically-elected"? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saur_Revolution)
You are an idiot. The coup took place after the former prime minister of Afghanistan (Daoud Khan) moved to increase ties with the West, and to distance itself from the USSR. It was the commie stooges that overthrew the government that called for help from Moscow, not some democratically-elected nonsense. And did so after their disastrous policies alienated the entire country. The US poured aid money into the opponents after the communist coup.
>Yeah, US funding/training for those great up-and-coming Anti-Communist Freedom Fighters like Osama Bin Laden
Osama wasn't funded or trained by the US. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_%E2%80%93_al-Qaeda_controversy)
You, sir, are a dancing fucking moron.
>Soviet internal focus (at least "internal" within a limited sphere of influence, which quite reasonably includes *border countries* with Soviet-aligned governments)
Ah, so by "internal" and not invading other people or taking over the world, you conveniently allow external countries, invading them because they're in your sphere of influence, and taking over the world.
Stalin would be proud, comrade.
>Communist doctrine held by the Soviet leadership was focused on dealing with all the internal difficulties of managing their own economy
Which is exactly why they invaded Afghanistan, right comrade? It was already part of the Soviet world, they just didn't accept it!
>>The problem is that the prosecution has a very strong incentive to get a conviction, even if that means not playing fair: They have every reason to manipulate, intimidate, hide evidence, outright lie to the defendant, seize everything they possibly can on any grounds and seal bank accounts so the defendant cannot afford a competent defense, and in general do anything and everything they can in order to secure a conviction: Because their job is no longer to search for the truth: Their job is to get that conviction. Their careers depend upon it.
Right. And it's asymmetrical. If the defense offered some schlub in their corporation a million dollars to testify that they never saw any criminal wrongdoing inside of Enron, or whatever, this would be illegal.
But when a US Attorney does bribery, it's called a "plea bargain". They can come into a corporation, threaten some random joe with life in prison unless they testify against their boss, and then surprise, surprise! All this damning evidence magically appears against the boss, much of which is probably made-up, but impossible to prove. "Oh, yes, Mr. Jones once told me he'd go to jail if this scheme was found out!"
Unfortunately, there was a lawsuit on this very issue, and the justices ruled that this wasn't bribery, because if it was bribery, the legal system would fall apart.
This sounds exactly like every redneck I've known.
Talk your ear off for hours about the advantages of different kinds of notch filters.
Sounds good to me, in all honesty.
I used to work for a company doing VR arcade games.
Dactyl Nightmare was the big kid in a very small playground.
"... or slow their Internet speeds to a crawl."
So, pretty much business as usual then?