I'm sorry if you've devoted your life so thoroughly to one particular career that you can't feasibly find another way to support yourself, and I'm sorry that you're so deeply entrenched in your current lifestyle that you can't feasibly reduce your expenses.
I can sympathise with someone who's made poor choices in his life. But that fact doesn't give anyone the right to impose the cost of their misjudgements on others. Attempting to interfere with the voluntary arrangements of strangers by forcibly insinuating yourself into their business dealings -- making them buy from you and not your competitors, against their will -- is utterly abhorrent, and is at best extortion.
If you're truly unable to provide value to others on the open market, don't force people to buy from you just to assuage your pride by keeping up the pretense of actually participating in the economy. Do the honorable thing: admit that you're unable to support yourself, and appeal for charity from those in a position to offer it.
Adam Smith's models don't work? But Smith wasn't trying to posit a model of how an economy ought to work, he was positing a model, based on empirical observation, of how an economy does work. His conclusions about what ought to be done by governments, entrpereneurs, etc. are for the purpose of maximising economic potential according to the laws of how economies actually work.
Marx, and other socialists, on the other hand, were not economists at all, but rather moralists, who were positing a vision of a utopian society rather than a meaningful economic model.
The reality of it is that economies are dynamic things; the values of products fluctuate greatly over time, and some industries go into decline while others prosper. Some regions and cultures have a comparative advantage in certain industries, such as India in the IT sector now, and industries will naturally gravitate toward them.
If you want to introduce a moralist argument into it, how about this: If I want to purchase my IT services from Rajesh instead of Billy-Bob, what right does Billy-Bob have to force me to purchase from him? What right does he have to use the force of the state to edge out his competition?
The only argument in favor of this is based on petty nationalism - Billy-Bob and I are both Americans so I should naturally prefer to buy from him, regardless of whether Rajesh might give me better service at a lower price. Ironically, I find this concept quite un-American.
In fact, as far as the nationalism argument goes, I'd go so far to say that if Billy-Bob is trying to strongarm me into buying his services at above-market rates by influencing the state into interfering with the economy, but Rajesh is trying to persuade me to purchase his services by offering me high quality at low prices, then my cultural affinity aligns more with Rajesh than Billy-Bob.
And 1024 *is* the "correct" coversion factor. All measuring units are arbitrary and are defined to serve particular purposes in particular contexts. In the context of computer science, the generally-accepted standard conversion factor is 1024, because binary factors are useful when working with digital computers, and decimal factors are not.
The people trying to re-define existing language in order to make things consistent with how they're done in other contexts not relevant to computing are the ones who are creating confusion and breaking standards.
Many states have sales tax; where I live, it's 6%.
But some states do not have sales tax at all. I've heard about how people in Massachussetts, which has high taxes all around, often do much of their shopping in neighboring New Hampshire, which has no sales tax.
Abit makes a product that sits between the IDE port on your motherboard and the hard drive. It encrypts all of the data on-the-fly and requires a small dongle to be plugged in externally to work. Combine that with a good case lock, and you should be all set.
ATI's VCR format is in fact MPEG2 in a proprietary wrapper, with the closed captions in a text stream.
You can demux the VCR file with the Media Library component of MMC, and get a text file with the captions, which can in turn be used with VobSub to create DVD-style subtitles.
I've managed to capture a few TV shows to VCR format with the captions and convert them to DivX with a subtitles stream.
If you use Graphedit, you can manually stream the Line21 output from your capture card to the DriectShow Line21 decoder and get the closed captions that way.
ATI's software is only compatible with ATI hardware -- You can't use the Media Center and Eazylook without an All-in-Wonder or a TV wonder card.
And the AIW doesn't have hardware MPEG encoding. I presume you could use SnapStream with an All-in-Wonder card, but the hardware requirements for the PC would be much higher since it'd be using software encoding.
If if I were going to set up an HTPC with SnapStream, I'd probably get a Hauppauge PVR card for video capture and get a cheap 8MB AGP card for VGA.
In fact the Constitution explicitly grants the government the right to levy income tax.
Thanks to the 16th amendment, which is arguably diametrically opposed to the spirit of the first ten.
the income tax is not "a new animal". There was income tax over a hundred years ago.
The 16th amendment was passed in 1913 - 91 years ago. There were attempts during the late 19th century, post-Civil War, to enact income tax, all of which were struck down by the courts; the 13th amendment was passed largely to get around the courts.
And lets not forget that even in 1913, the original income tax claimed a miniscule portion of the GDP; no one could have imagined then that the average taxpayer would have a third of his income confiscated. It wasn't until the 'New Deal' that the sort of large-scale weath redistibution projects we now take for granted were begun.
most Americans wouldn't trade basic order for the anarchy of no federal government. They just wouldn't.
No, but I think most would happily trade the despotism of an unrestrained government for a return to basic constitutional order.
Not having access to 911 doesn't 'engander' anyone, it only reduces by one the number of possible resolutions to an emergency. Lacking 911 does not create new emergencies.
Don't get me wrong, 911 is a worthwhile service; but having access to 911 is not a guarantee of safety. In fact, in can be just the opposite: if a fire extinguisher or a first-aid kit or a gun can resolve a given situation immediately, running for the phone and waiting for a third party to arrive might cause a delay long enough for things to worsen significantly. Conditioning people to dial 911 as the initial means of dealing with dangerous circumstances can often make things more dangerous.
And requiring people to have access to 911 whether they want it or not, if they have a phone line, seems a bit bizzare considering that no one is required to have a phone line.
The whole point to electronic markets is to reduce the cost of doing business, not increase it by creating a new class of merchant-middlemen, without whom business doesn't get done - and in those terms, barter is a huge step backwards.
But even with abstracted money, merchant middlemen still exist; eBay is doing quite a good business, as is Amazon and just about every retail shop out there, etc. There's also no need to have a centrally-planned eBay-type system; a barter economy could be run on a P2P-type network without a single central server. All you're doing is searching for particular entries and matching them with similar entries on other systems.
Plus, the longer and more complicated those transaction chains are, the more likely it is that the whole thing will get fucked up by one person deciding to back out of the deal.
Yes, but this can and does often happen with money transactions as well; it's called breach of contract. And if networked bartering became an established practice, I'm sure customs and laws would evolve to consider joining barter loops tantamout to entering into a contract.
And finally, having a universal medium of exchange makes the objective valuation of goods and services much more efficient and understandable than with a barter system.... How can we rationally value the services we both provide against one another in the absence of some independent yardstick like a cash price?
But value is intrinsically subjective and circumstance-specific. The value of a particular good at a particular time is realative to the individual doing the valuing, his needs at that time, and all of the market conditions that apply at that instant in his location. Attempting to create an objective valuation scheme actually introduces inefficiencies into the market and can prevent the proper equilibrium price in a given circumstance from being reached. Market distortions like inflation and deflation, etc. are a side effect of money's role as an objective value unit, and wouldn't exist under a networked barter system.
And of course it's legal to have win98 boot disks. Any Win98 system can create as many boot floppies as you want it to buy doing a "format/s" or by selecting "make MS-DOS boot disk" in the GUI format dialog. Neiter option makes you accept a EULA or anything similar.
The original problem with barter as such was the limited knowledge of each party regarding market conditions as a whole. In the above scenario General_re and CaptainTux use money to abstract the transaction because they're only communicating directly with each other; if Mr. X happened by and so too did several other third parties who could complete a chain of trades such that each party was able to exchange what they had for what they wanted, all of the transactions would take place.
The problem in the past was that those chains bringing all of the traders together at once were almost impossible to build on the fly. Thats why money was created; it allows all of the above trades to take place independently and asychronously.
But thanks to modern communications technology, it's becoming more and more possible to create those instantaneous transaction chains; imagine something like eBay where people post items they're willing to trade and items they seek in exchange. Whenever the system detects a complete loop, it 'locks it in' and instructs each party to send his goods to the next. No money need be involved.
Re:The problem is not a failure of the market
on
Homogenized Music
·
· Score: 1
Why even bother having music on the radio at all, then? It would be much more economically sensible to simply broadcast advertisements 24/7. Since people's tastes are determined by what's on the radio and not the other way around, they'll surely listen, won't they?
The American political system owes noting to the Greeks that didn't come by way of England. Our system is entirely Enlgish in origin, in fucntion and in form.
Regardless of what philisophical principles advenced by various ancient Greeks may have appealed to the framers of the US Constitution, they in essence framed a system that was more-or-less a clone of the state of affairs in England in the late 18th century, with minor modifications to acommodate federalism and republicanism.
Compare the structure and powers of the Senate to the House of Lords, the House of Representatives to the Commons, and the Presidency to the Monarchy. Then compare the Bill of Rights incorporated into the US Constitution to the Bill of Rights of 1689, and to Magna Carta. Finally, compare our system of common law to Britain's, and contrast both of them against the civil-code legal systems predominant everywhere else.
After you do a bit of studying, the origins of American political and legal culture will be readily apparent.
If you don't beleive me now, you will when you attempt to run for Archon and discover that no such office exists in America.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry if you've devoted your life so thoroughly to one particular career that you can't feasibly find another way to support yourself, and I'm sorry that you're so deeply entrenched in your current lifestyle that you can't feasibly reduce your expenses.
I can sympathise with someone who's made poor choices in his life. But that fact doesn't give anyone the right to impose the cost of their misjudgements on others. Attempting to interfere with the voluntary arrangements of strangers by forcibly insinuating yourself into their business dealings -- making them buy from you and not your competitors, against their will -- is utterly abhorrent, and is at best extortion.
If you're truly unable to provide value to others on the open market, don't force people to buy from you just to assuage your pride by keeping up the pretense of actually participating in the economy. Do the honorable thing: admit that you're unable to support yourself, and appeal for charity from those in a position to offer it.
Adam Smith's models don't work? But Smith wasn't trying to posit a model of how an economy ought to work, he was positing a model, based on empirical observation, of how an economy does work. His conclusions about what ought to be done by governments, entrpereneurs, etc. are for the purpose of maximising economic potential according to the laws of how economies actually work.
Marx, and other socialists, on the other hand, were not economists at all, but rather moralists, who were positing a vision of a utopian society rather than a meaningful economic model.
The reality of it is that economies are dynamic things; the values of products fluctuate greatly over time, and some industries go into decline while others prosper. Some regions and cultures have a comparative advantage in certain industries, such as India in the IT sector now, and industries will naturally gravitate toward them.
If you want to introduce a moralist argument into it, how about this: If I want to purchase my IT services from Rajesh instead of Billy-Bob, what right does Billy-Bob have to force me to purchase from him? What right does he have to use the force of the state to edge out his competition?
The only argument in favor of this is based on petty nationalism - Billy-Bob and I are both Americans so I should naturally prefer to buy from him, regardless of whether Rajesh might give me better service at a lower price. Ironically, I find this concept quite un-American.
In fact, as far as the nationalism argument goes, I'd go so far to say that if Billy-Bob is trying to strongarm me into buying his services at above-market rates by influencing the state into interfering with the economy, but Rajesh is trying to persuade me to purchase his services by offering me high quality at low prices, then my cultural affinity aligns more with Rajesh than Billy-Bob.
Words that correspond to collective singulars, such as companies, can be properly referred to in either the singlar or the plural.
Only if there's also a shortage of fire.
Somehow I doubt this is the case.
Because 1 TB is 1024 GB, not 1000 GB.
And 1024 *is* the "correct" coversion factor. All measuring units are arbitrary and are defined to serve particular purposes in particular contexts. In the context of computer science, the generally-accepted standard conversion factor is 1024, because binary factors are useful when working with digital computers, and decimal factors are not.
The people trying to re-define existing language in order to make things consistent with how they're done in other contexts not relevant to computing are the ones who are creating confusion and breaking standards.
But the government often *is* a harmful monopoly!
There is no US sales tax.
Many states have sales tax; where I live, it's 6%.
But some states do not have sales tax at all. I've heard about how people in Massachussetts, which has high taxes all around, often do much of their shopping in neighboring New Hampshire, which has no sales tax.
Abit makes a product that sits between the IDE port on your motherboard and the hard drive. It encrypts all of the data on-the-fly and requires a small dongle to be plugged in externally to work. Combine that with a good case lock, and you should be all set.
ATI's VCR format is in fact MPEG2 in a proprietary wrapper, with the closed captions in a text stream.
You can demux the VCR file with the Media Library component of MMC, and get a text file with the captions, which can in turn be used with VobSub to create DVD-style subtitles.
I've managed to capture a few TV shows to VCR format with the captions and convert them to DivX with a subtitles stream.
If you use Graphedit, you can manually stream the Line21 output from your capture card to the DriectShow Line21 decoder and get the closed captions that way.
ATI's software is only compatible with ATI hardware -- You can't use the Media Center and Eazylook without an All-in-Wonder or a TV wonder card.
And the AIW doesn't have hardware MPEG encoding. I presume you could use SnapStream with an All-in-Wonder card, but the hardware requirements for the PC would be much higher since it'd be using software encoding.
If if I were going to set up an HTPC with SnapStream, I'd probably get a Hauppauge PVR card for video capture and get a cheap 8MB AGP card for VGA.
The 16th amendment was passed in 1913 - 91 years ago. There were attempts during the late 19th century, post-Civil War, to enact income tax, all of which were struck down by the courts; the 13th amendment was passed largely to get around the courts.
And lets not forget that even in 1913, the original income tax claimed a miniscule portion of the GDP; no one could have imagined then that the average taxpayer would have a third of his income confiscated. It wasn't until the 'New Deal' that the sort of large-scale weath redistibution projects we now take for granted were begun.
No, but I think most would happily trade the despotism of an unrestrained government for a return to basic constitutional order.
Actually, it's impossible under the current system for a president to be elected without recieving an actual majority of the votes.
I think it's safe to assume that POTS service would be availalbe at both locations.
You may have meant to say "Planes and Automobiles."
:)
Still arguable, but not at least not brazenly false.
*cough*Amtrak*cough*
Not having access to 911 doesn't 'engander' anyone, it only reduces by one the number of possible resolutions to an emergency. Lacking 911 does not create new emergencies.
Don't get me wrong, 911 is a worthwhile service; but having access to 911 is not a guarantee of safety. In fact, in can be just the opposite: if a fire extinguisher or a first-aid kit or a gun can resolve a given situation immediately, running for the phone and waiting for a third party to arrive might cause a delay long enough for things to worsen significantly. Conditioning people to dial 911 as the initial means of dealing with dangerous circumstances can often make things more dangerous.
And requiring people to have access to 911 whether they want it or not, if they have a phone line, seems a bit bizzare considering that no one is required to have a phone line.
He should at least upgrade to EGA...
No, that's a statement of fact, the accuracy of which is dependent upon how precisely "secure" is defined.
"Linux has the best UI" would be a statement of opinion as there's no empirical basis for defining what "best UI" is.
And of course it's legal to have win98 boot disks. Any Win98 system can create as many boot floppies as you want it to buy doing a "format /s" or by selecting "make MS-DOS boot disk" in the GUI format dialog. Neiter option makes you accept a EULA or anything similar.
Actually, the title of this article is "Good, Affordable PC Diagnostic Software?"
This isn't strictly true anymore, though.
The original problem with barter as such was the limited knowledge of each party regarding market conditions as a whole. In the above scenario General_re and CaptainTux use money to abstract the transaction because they're only communicating directly with each other; if Mr. X happened by and so too did several other third parties who could complete a chain of trades such that each party was able to exchange what they had for what they wanted, all of the transactions would take place.
The problem in the past was that those chains bringing all of the traders together at once were almost impossible to build on the fly. Thats why money was created; it allows all of the above trades to take place independently and asychronously.
But thanks to modern communications technology, it's becoming more and more possible to create those instantaneous transaction chains; imagine something like eBay where people post items they're willing to trade and items they seek in exchange. Whenever the system detects a complete loop, it 'locks it in' and instructs each party to send his goods to the next. No money need be involved.
If I am the answer, WTF was the question?
Why even bother having music on the radio at all, then? It would be much more economically sensible to simply broadcast advertisements 24/7. Since people's tastes are determined by what's on the radio and not the other way around, they'll surely listen, won't they?
The American political system owes noting to the Greeks that didn't come by way of England. Our system is entirely Enlgish in origin, in fucntion and in form.
:)
Regardless of what philisophical principles advenced by various ancient Greeks may have appealed to the framers of the US Constitution, they in essence framed a system that was more-or-less a clone of the state of affairs in England in the late 18th century, with minor modifications to acommodate federalism and republicanism.
Compare the structure and powers of the Senate to the House of Lords, the House of Representatives to the Commons, and the Presidency to the Monarchy. Then compare the Bill of Rights incorporated into the US Constitution to the Bill of Rights of 1689, and to Magna Carta. Finally, compare our system of common law to Britain's, and contrast both of them against the civil-code legal systems predominant everywhere else.
After you do a bit of studying, the origins of American political and legal culture will be readily apparent.
If you don't beleive me now, you will when you attempt to run for Archon and discover that no such office exists in America.