If only abortion was an issue decided at the state level as well....
Just imagine, people who vote for a president based upon just that issue,(and many do, though I'm not one of them), would have to actually think a bit harder about who to vote for, and for that we might actually elevate our debates to a slightly higher level.
That's another reason to vote for Ron Paul. He's pro-life, but as far as he's concrened it only applies in Texas, his home state. Wish it were that way for all of the clowns.
(re)Register as a Republican today and let's get him through the primary.
I actually should have fired this back at you with my previous post.:) Anyway, here it is, even if a bit belated. Again thanks for the great quotation.
No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.
There's no reason to be responsible for ourselves and our behavior or anything like that. This is just another symptom of how we'll all end up basically enslaved. The less responsibility we take for ourselves the more the government will, until we are all wards of the state. Uggg. It's disgusting really.
I agree with all of that. Joining a professional organization like The ACM or The IEEE and reading their journals is also a good place to get informed about some of the broader trends in the industry. This is not necessarily writing of code, but learning about the things that underly the code. Core ideas IMHO are much more important than code itself. When you reach a certain level the act of coding should become trivial, like picking up a book and reading it. Its the ideas behind the code that are interesting and what keeps us moving forward. I can't speak for IEEE personally, but I've been a member of ACM since my college days and have learned a lot from reading "Communications of the ACM".
It's worth reading The Law for a fuller discussion.
To quote an insightful bit: But, generally, the law is made by one man or one class of men. And since law cannot operate without the sanction and support of a dominating force, this force must be entrusted to those who make the laws.
This fact, combined with the fatal tendency that exists in the heart of man to satisfy his wants with the least possible effort, explains the almost universal perversion of the law. Thus it is easy to understand how law, instead of checking injustice, becomes the invincible weapon of injustice. It is easy to understand why the law is used by the legislator to destroy in varying degrees among the rest of the people, their personal independence by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by plunder. This is done for the benefit of the person who makes the law, and in proportion to the power that he holds.
It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.
What are the consequences of such a perversion? It would require volumes to describe them all. Thus we must content ourselves with pointing out the most striking.
In the first place, it erases from everyone's conscience the distinction between justice and injustice.
No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law. These two evils are of equal consequence, and it would be difficult for a person to choose between them.
Now this- you have 1% benefit for 30% misery- is obviously the good of the individuals in the 1%, not the good of the community AS A WHOLE.
Okay big advantage for the 1% and severe disadvantage for the 30%. What if it is a win situation for the other 69%? Is it okay then?
Granted- but then again, ALL of the social engineering I've seen so far has had as either a goal or an outcome the good of the individual, not the community. In other words, it's either been a bad goal or an engineering failure.
Or a select group. Aristocracies have been like this. The Soviet Union was like this. Actually most if not all governments are in the business of enriching the ruling class at the expense of everyone else. Regardless of economic system.
human beings are just cogs in the big machine
Yes, in an economic sense you are correct. Some are certainly more important and harder to replace than others, but still it's true at the highest level. Once you start to dip down you see everything is based upon human relationships, without which nothing would function.
It is a big mistake to divorce economics from some sort of morality. That this is common place is rather unfortunate. Still it is an individual's right to make moral or immoral decisions and it is not my place to force another to either. I could go on about this, but the point is, greed is bad.
My own utopian delusion is a sort of "compassionate capitalism". This would not be forced upon anyone from above, but would spring naturally from all individuals. Again this is a delusion because it goes against human nature, which at its worst is shamelessly self-serving and at the expense of anything.
Not in any of the big, wide reaching systems.
From the macro level I suppose your right. Isn't there some intrinsic value to life though, regardless of economics, perhaps even in spite of economics?
Ah yes, property taxes. You're right. If you don't pay your property taxes then once you are 2 years delinquent your land can be sold at auction. This is the law in New Mexico anyway.
On to the more interesting stuff. Here's a question:
What if what was best for the community was for 10% of the community to be executed outright and for another 30% to be reduced to bondage under another 1% of the community?
What in my opinion has been wrong with much of the social engineering is that it is so often contrary to human rights. Is the individual simply a cog in the whole, a cog that can be replaced at the whim of the engineer? Does life not hold more value than that?
Perhaps I am reading you incorrectly.
I am, at least to some extent one of those Austrians...;) That philosophy has its problems as well.
What's this west of the Mississippi crap? I've never heard of that before. You have a reference. I'd be interested in learning some more about that.
If I was out of work for 5-6 years, assuming my wife wasn't, then yes we'd still own it. If both of us lost our jobs and we were out of work for more than about three months we'd be in trouble right now. The upside is that she's a nurse and so that's pretty unlikely...
I have to comment on your handle. The utopian fantasy that is Marxism is completely incompatible with human nature and as such is simply not a practical philosophy. How could you possibly count yourself as a Marxist?
I tend to agree. Government employees tend to be the laziest of the bunch and the longer they have been there the lazier they are and the harder they are to break of the habit. I was one, I know... Luckily for only 9 months. Government sucks.
Oh and by the way I work in the private sector and I own a house!
The Taiwanese understand this argument... They are not recognized by the UN, as you may know. Both China a Taiwan claim to be the "real China" by the way... The Taiwanese lack of territory, i.e. the rest of China is basically what keeps them from being recognized.
I do not recall this in Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention. The electoral college seems to stem directly from the "Great Compromise", which gave equal representation to the States in the Senate and proportional representation to the States in the House. I could be wrong. It's been a few years since I've read Madison's notes, which are by the way, the authoritative source for what happend in Philadelphia in 1787.:)
Senators would also have to raise much less money to get elected and in that sense be much more independent of they money they grub for these days.
There is a basic political theory: the idea that each branch of government should sit on a different foundation. The House of Representatives sets on the people of each State. The Senate used to sit on the legislatures. There was a different source and a different set of prejudices that informed each branch. With everything resting directly on the people we do not have this diversity of source and every branch starts to behave the same way, bringing us closer to a less diverse government. Less diversity of opinion means less fit opinions. Anyway, I've done a poor job of explaning this. Read Federalist #10 and #53. James Madison does a much better job!:)
Without this compromise the United States would never have been created. States such as Rhode Island, Conneticut, New Hampshire, basically the smaller states would never have ratified the constitution without these provisions.
Federalism is about the states having power. It's also about the Federal Government being limited in its scope, something that most of us ignore these days. See the 10th Amendment to the constitution sometime. Revel in the fact it is a dead letter.
States do matter. Without the states there would be no United States. Sometimes one really wishes the South won the War of the States... Certainly not for the sake of salvery, but because it was a war about a limited federal government. Oh well...
Absolutely. The Maine/Nebraska system maintains Federalism, which too many of us in this country have either disregarded or are completely ignorant of.
I really wish Presidents were as important as they were in the late 19th century. Then we wouldn't give a damn who the President was... Oh well...
No political party will be content with stopping the growth of government. They are both into buying votes with tax payer money. The budget will increase and either we will get much further into debt or be taxed to death to support said budget. Most likely we will see a combination of both.
The only solution is a drastic, but paced reduction in the size and scope of the federal government. I'm thinking on the order of 40% or more. That will mean lots of pet programs get tossed, that's true. If they matter that much state or local governments can take up the slack because the feds would not be spending as much. This also means that the people the programs affect the most will have the most control over them.
There is no constitutional basis for Social Security or Medicare and many many other things our government does. Now, you can argue that all of those things are good and they may well be, but they should have required constitutional amendements to authorize. So the danger is that, even though perhaps those programs were good, we've gotten into the habit of subverting the Constitution and that can only lead to evil. It can equally be subverted for bad things.
The constitution has already been subverted in so many ways that it is not a real check on power any longer. Other than the structure of government the Constitution is a dead letter. Article I, Section 9 is a total joke. The 9th and 10th Amendments, (IMHO the most important ones), are similarly futile.
Individuals need to start acting locally and quit trying to impose their will upon the entire nation. We're a big country with lots of diversity. What works in one place does not necessarily work in another. I'm not interested in what the federal government (congress, the president or SCOTUS) has to say about a whole host of issues, for example education. They are not omnipotent and they need to realize this. We need to re-embrace the federalist principle and cut them down to size.
One of three things must happen: 1. The people have to stop electing their representatives based upon the favors they expect to garner at the public's expense. Instead they must start electing politicians that are willing to cut the federal government even if that means facing some hardship. Better a little now than a lot later. Moreover, there has to be a breed of politician willing to stick their neck out to this end. 2. The people must call a constitutional convention through their state legislatures and eviscerate the federal government thereby bringing it back in line with federalist principles. This would hopefully include a way for state legislatures to nullify, if 2/3 of states agree, supreme court rulings or laws passed by congress. 3. We get a dictator. Eventually the profilgate nature of this republic, if not corrected, will result in us begging for a single person to step up and fix the problems. What worries me is that this is the fate that all democracies have faced.
Alot of those guys who didn't work with you didn't work with you because you were a woman, but it's not what you think. They were simply too shy to approach you because they had had little experience interacting with women for any reason what so ever... They simply did not feel comfortable, not because they were discriminating against you because of you, but because of their own social ineptitude.
In fact my wife went to Nursing school. A group of her friends did an outreach, as a class project, to recruit men.
But I think you're right. People will choose what they choose. Their parents should encourage them toward different things, perhaps their teachers, but ultimately a person makes their own choices. Maybe there are less women in computers because women don't like them as much. I really think more women like jobs where there is interaction with people more of the time. That's just a personal observation. But really maybe there are less women in computer science because they don't want to be there.
Diversity based upon sex and race is garbage. It's just another kind of discrimination. Diversity of ideas and thinking is what is really important. If a black guy, a white guy, an Indian woman, a Russian woman and a Japanese man all think the same thoughts, who cares what they look like. Now that's not often the case, but after a generation or two in the US the groups lose much of the cultural difference and become Americans. So then really the possibility that all of them think similarly is much more possible. At anyrate diversity of ideas is what is most important. I wish the schmucks on college campuses and in government understood that.
The gnome guys and gals should have picked the six best projects and just went with that. Who cares who is doing the work. The work is what is most important. Again, the ideas....
Slashdot Mirror
If only abortion was an issue decided at the state level as well....
Just imagine, people who vote for a president based upon just that issue,(and many do, though I'm not one of them), would have to actually think a bit harder about who to vote for, and for that we might actually elevate our debates to a slightly higher level.
That's another reason to vote for Ron Paul. He's pro-life, but as far as he's concrened it only applies in Texas, his home state. Wish it were that way for all of the clowns.
(re)Register as a Republican today and let's get him through the primary.
Wow! Someone else gets it! :)
I actually should have fired this back at you with my previous post. :) Anyway, here it is, even if a bit belated.
Again thanks for the great quotation.
No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.
-Frederic Bastiat
The Law
Awesome quote. Thanks!
There's no reason to be responsible for ourselves and our behavior or anything like that. This is just another symptom of how we'll all end up basically enslaved. The less responsibility we take for ourselves the more the government will, until we are all wards of the state. Uggg. It's disgusting really.
I agree with all of that. Joining a professional organization like The ACM or The IEEE and reading their journals is also a good place to get informed about some of the broader trends in the industry. This is not necessarily writing of code, but learning about the things that underly the code. Core ideas IMHO are much more important than code itself. When you reach a certain level the act of coding should become trivial, like picking up a book and reading it. Its the ideas behind the code that are interesting and what keeps us moving forward. I can't speak for IEEE personally, but I've been a member of ACM since my college days and have learned a lot from reading "Communications of the ACM".
In two words, Legal Plunder.
It's worth reading The Law for a fuller discussion.
To quote an insightful bit:
But, generally, the law is made by one man or one class of men. And since law cannot operate without the sanction and support of a dominating force, this force must be entrusted to those who make the laws.
This fact, combined with the fatal tendency that exists in the heart of man to satisfy his wants with the least possible effort, explains the almost universal perversion of the law. Thus it is easy to understand how law, instead of checking injustice, becomes the invincible weapon of injustice. It is easy to understand why the law is used by the legislator to destroy in varying degrees among the rest of the people, their personal independence by slavery, their liberty by oppression, and their property by plunder. This is done for the benefit of the person who makes the law, and in proportion to the power that he holds.
It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.
What are the consequences of such a perversion? It would require volumes to describe them all. Thus we must content ourselves with pointing out the most striking.
In the first place, it erases from everyone's conscience the distinction between justice and injustice.
No society can exist unless the laws are respected to a certain degree. The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law. These two evils are of equal consequence, and it would be difficult for a person to choose between them.
Welcome to the government-sponsored corporate survailence society.
Now this- you have 1% benefit for 30% misery- is obviously the good of the individuals in the 1%, not the good of the community AS A WHOLE.
Okay big advantage for the 1% and severe disadvantage for the 30%. What if it is a win situation for the other 69%? Is it okay then?
Granted- but then again, ALL of the social engineering I've seen so far has had as either a goal or an outcome the good of the individual, not the community. In other words, it's either been a bad goal or an engineering failure.
Or a select group. Aristocracies have been like this. The Soviet Union was like this. Actually most if not all governments are in the business of enriching the ruling class at the expense of everyone else. Regardless of economic system.
human beings are just cogs in the big machine
Yes, in an economic sense you are correct. Some are certainly more important and harder to replace than others, but still it's true at the highest level. Once you start to dip down you see everything is based upon human relationships, without which nothing would function.
It is a big mistake to divorce economics from some sort of morality. That this is common place is rather unfortunate. Still it is an individual's right to make moral or immoral decisions and it is not my place to force another to either. I could go on about this, but the point is, greed is bad.
My own utopian delusion is a sort of "compassionate capitalism". This would not be forced upon anyone from above, but would spring naturally from all individuals. Again this is a delusion because it goes against human nature, which at its worst is shamelessly self-serving and at the expense of anything.
Not in any of the big, wide reaching systems.
From the macro level I suppose your right. Isn't there some intrinsic value to life though, regardless of economics, perhaps even in spite of economics?
Interesting ideas.
;) That philosophy has its problems as well.
Ah yes, property taxes. You're right. If you don't pay your property taxes then once you are 2 years delinquent your land can be sold at auction. This is the law in New Mexico anyway.
On to the more interesting stuff.
Here's a question:
What if what was best for the community was for 10% of the community to be executed outright and for another 30% to be reduced to bondage under another 1% of the community?
What in my opinion has been wrong with much of the social engineering is that it is so often contrary to human rights. Is the individual simply a cog in the whole, a cog that can be replaced at the whim of the engineer? Does life not hold more value than that?
Perhaps I am reading you incorrectly.
I am, at least to some extent one of those Austrians...
The bank owns it. You've got your point. :)
What's this west of the Mississippi crap? I've never heard of that before. You have a reference. I'd be interested in learning some more about that.
If I was out of work for 5-6 years, assuming my wife wasn't, then yes we'd still own it. If both of us lost our jobs and we were out of work for more than about three months we'd be in trouble right now. The upside is that she's a nurse and so that's pretty unlikely...
I have to comment on your handle. The utopian fantasy that is Marxism is completely incompatible with human nature and as such is simply not a practical philosophy. How could you possibly count yourself as a Marxist?
I tend to agree. Government employees tend to be the laziest of the bunch and the longer they have been there the lazier they are and the harder they are to break of the habit. I was one, I know... Luckily for only 9 months. Government sucks.
Oh and by the way I work in the private sector and I own a house!
There would be nothing to mine...
It's a balance and that is something we have....
They have territory, just very very little.
The Taiwanese understand this argument... They are not recognized by the UN, as you may know. Both China a Taiwan claim to be the "real China" by the way... The Taiwanese lack of territory, i.e. the rest of China is basically what keeps them from being recognized.
I do not recall this in Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention. The electoral college seems to stem directly from the "Great Compromise", which gave equal representation to the States in the Senate and proportional representation to the States in the House. I could be wrong. It's been a few years since I've read Madison's notes, which are by the way, the authoritative source for what happend in Philadelphia in 1787. :)
Because land means something and we in the small Western states own most of the land in this country. A government is nothing without territory.
Senators would also have to raise much less money to get elected and in that sense be much more independent of they money they grub for these days.
:)
There is a basic political theory: the idea that each branch of government should sit on a different foundation. The House of Representatives sets on the people of each State. The Senate used to sit on the legislatures. There was a different source and a different set of prejudices that informed each branch. With everything resting directly on the people we do not have this diversity of source and every branch starts to behave the same way, bringing us closer to a less diverse government. Less diversity of opinion means less fit opinions. Anyway, I've done a poor job of explaning this. Read Federalist #10 and #53. James Madison does a much better job!
Without this compromise the United States would never have been created. States such as Rhode Island, Conneticut, New Hampshire, basically the smaller states would never have ratified the constitution without these provisions.
Federalism is about the states having power. It's also about the Federal Government being limited in its scope, something that most of us ignore these days. See the 10th Amendment to the constitution sometime. Revel in the fact it is a dead letter.
States do matter. Without the states there would be no United States. Sometimes one really wishes the South won the War of the States... Certainly not for the sake of salvery, but because it was a war about a limited federal government. Oh well...
Absolutely. The Maine/Nebraska system maintains Federalism, which too many of us in this country have either disregarded or are completely ignorant of.
I really wish Presidents were as important as they were in the late 19th century. Then we wouldn't give a damn who the President was... Oh well...
The fact of the matter is this:
No political party will be content with stopping the growth of government. They are both into buying votes with tax payer money. The budget will increase and either we will get much further into debt or be taxed to death to support said budget. Most likely we will see a combination of both.
The only solution is a drastic, but paced reduction in the size and scope of the federal government. I'm thinking on the order of 40% or more. That will mean lots of pet programs get tossed, that's true. If they matter that much state or local governments can take up the slack because the feds would not be spending as much. This also means that the people the programs affect the most will have the most control over them.
There is no constitutional basis for Social Security or Medicare and many many other things our government does. Now, you can argue that all of those things are good and they may well be, but they should have required constitutional amendements to authorize. So the danger is that, even though perhaps those programs were good, we've gotten into the habit of subverting the Constitution and that can only lead to evil. It can equally be subverted for bad things.
The constitution has already been subverted in so many ways that it is not a real check on power any longer. Other than the structure of government the Constitution is a dead letter. Article I, Section 9 is a total joke. The 9th and 10th Amendments, (IMHO the most important ones), are similarly futile.
Individuals need to start acting locally and quit trying to impose their will upon the entire nation. We're a big country with lots of diversity. What works in one place does not necessarily work in another. I'm not interested in what the federal government (congress, the president or SCOTUS) has to say about a whole host of issues, for example education. They are not omnipotent and they need to realize this. We need to re-embrace the federalist principle and cut them down to size.
One of three things must happen:
1. The people have to stop electing their representatives based upon the favors they expect to garner at the public's expense. Instead they must start electing politicians that are willing to cut the federal government even if that means facing some hardship. Better a little now than a lot later. Moreover, there has to be a breed of politician willing to stick their neck out to this end.
2. The people must call a constitutional convention through their state legislatures and eviscerate the federal government thereby bringing it back in line with federalist principles. This would hopefully include a way for state legislatures to nullify, if 2/3 of states agree, supreme court rulings or laws passed by congress.
3. We get a dictator. Eventually the profilgate nature of this republic, if not corrected, will result in us begging for a single person to step up and fix the problems. What worries me is that this is the fate that all democracies have faced.
Alot of those guys who didn't work with you didn't work with you because you were a woman, but it's not what you think. They were simply too shy to approach you because they had had little experience interacting with women for any reason what so ever... They simply did not feel comfortable, not because they were discriminating against you because of you, but because of their own social ineptitude.
It still comes down to government intrusion where government does not belong.
That's all fine and good, but I simply don't buy the idea that government should be responsible for any of this. Sorry.
In fact my wife went to Nursing school. A group of her friends did an outreach, as a class project, to recruit men.
:)
But I think you're right. People will choose what they choose. Their parents should encourage them toward different things, perhaps their teachers, but ultimately a person makes their own choices. Maybe there are less women in computers because women don't like them as much. I really think more women like jobs where there is interaction with people more of the time. That's just a personal observation. But really maybe there are less women in computer science because they don't want to be there.
Diversity based upon sex and race is garbage. It's just another kind of discrimination. Diversity of ideas and thinking is what is really important. If a black guy, a white guy, an Indian woman, a Russian woman and a Japanese man all think the same thoughts, who cares what they look like. Now that's not often the case, but after a generation or two in the US the groups lose much of the cultural difference and become Americans. So then really the possibility that all of them think similarly is much more possible. At anyrate diversity of ideas is what is most important. I wish the schmucks on college campuses and in government understood that.
The gnome guys and gals should have picked the six best projects and just went with that. Who cares who is doing the work. The work is what is most important. Again, the ideas....
We agree.