Actually, it's not; you just failed to understand where I was going with it, but oh, well.
when and how much should be taken in the form of taxes.
And they have no moral right to do that, since it's mine and not theirs.
That you believe it is wrong doesn't mean others also are required to agree with you.
It'd be wrong regardless of whether I believed it or not, since it's an objective fact.
And yeah, they're entitled to reject objective reality all they want, but they're still obligated to respect my sacred individual rights, just like I am theirs. They can think they have every right to steal from and enslave me all they want as long as they don't act on it.
The problem with that argument is twofold: (1) They're not free to choose to do without if they decide it's not in their interests (2) That someone benefits from something does not confer upon him an obligation to pay for it. See my blog post on the idiocy of the "social contract" and "free rider" arguments at http://blog.outwardhosting.com/?p=9
Neither Google nor any other corporation or individual has any moral obligation to pay taxes. The only proper role of government is to enforce contracts and punish violent criminals--and those violent criminals and contract breakers should be the ones who pay for government, through heavy punitive fines, since those are the ones whose actions necessitate a government in the first place.
A government that collects taxes is nothing more than a protection racket writ large.
It's hard to see how things such as the National Health Service and free education (I'm in the UK) would work without taxes.
They wouldn't exist. It's not government's place to be involved in health care or brainwashing.
unless you force people to take out insurance - which not everyone can afford
If they can't afford insurance, or can't afford to pay for it directly out of their own pocket, well, tough shit for them. As the eminent 20th-century Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand proved, their need does not give them a claim on the property of others. The individual is an end in himself, and properly exists solely for his own sake--he has no obligation to provide for others or "the collective" or "the common good".
Just because you might not be able to get away with it does not make it right.
Neither Google nor any other corporation or individual has any moral obligation to pay taxes. The only proper role of government is to enforce contracts and punish violent criminals--and those violent criminals and contract breakers should be the ones who pay for government, through heavy punitive fines, since those are the ones whose actions necessitate a government in the first place.
A government that collects taxes is nothing more than a protection racket writ large.
All it takes is a few drives whose reliability is sky-high to compensate for the many clustered around the bottom of the barrel.
There's nothing fraudulent or corrupt about this. You can, certainly, question whether MTBF is a useful metric for measuring reliability, but it takes someone ignorant of high-school statistics to claim that just because the vast majority of drives fail BEFORE the "mean time to failure" means the numbers released are dishonest or fraudulent somehow.
Geez...and y'all wonder how the American public gets whipped into such a frenzy about "terrorism" and whatnot. Y'all are the same way, just for different topics.
Similarly, kmweber's twin assertions that the USA is all about individualism and that people should oppose any acts that counter such "individualism" are just that - axioms chosen to justify a desired conclusion.
The writings of the Founders of the principles behind the Revolution and the Constitution bear me out on this point. It's not a mere assertion, though it is fashionable to say as much.
You could equally well assume that the USA is about a balance of individual freedom and respect for other citizens' rights.
Properly understood, there is no distinction or conflict between the two.
Or that one is quite justified in opposing what the USA (or any state) is "about", if it is "wrong" or "harmful to the people" or "bad for the environment" or whatever. It's a matter of belief.
But not opinion. Nothing is EVER a matter of opinion--everything, no matter how mundane or trivial, is a matter of objective fact. Any statement, whether normative or descriptive, is either objectively correct or objectively incorrect.
(or you pick a...philosophy that tells you).
No, you don't.
Philosophy isn't just a botique of unconnected assertions and platitudes where you pick the one that conforms to your preexisting biases. Philosophy is the rigorous study of the fundamental nature of reality, and as such makes statements that are either correct or incorrect. One must be willing to reject his preconceived notions if he finds better arguments for another set.
Just don't pretend it's about logic or proof!
But that's what philosophy is--using logic to prove true or false any of a number of statements about the Universe.
There is a contract between you and your provider. Either side may legitimately require whatever terms it wishes of the other, because the other party is always free to refuse the deal if he does not like it.
....the fact that a corporation was holding its own interests over that of its founding nation?
I mean, hey, great - I'm really glad this guy got the compensation very much due him. What worries me more is that the article didn't read "Corporation ignores serious national security concerns because there was no obvious profit."
I always wonder... do businesses really think they're immune to the affairs of their "mother country?" I'm quite sure any corporation that sees most of its factories razed would find their bottom line hit pretty hard.
That's their decision to make. You see, as the eminent 20th-century Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand proved, the individual properly has no obligation to "society" or the state or the "collective" but only to his own rational self-interest. If they deem their actions to be in their own rational self-interest, not only do they have every right to pursue them, but they are morally obligated to do so.
The selfish pursuit of private profit is the most moral act there is.
Patriotism isn't an archaic concept; it's a survivalist one.
The United States isn't a government; it's a principle--that principle being individualism. When our government acts against that principle, the patriotic thing to do is oppose it.
I would suggest that it doesn't even need to do that.
Remember how public-domain land was allocated during the westward expansion?
Government simply made the initial sale and then got out of the way.
This is what they should be doing with RF allocation. Simply sell someone the rights to a given frequency range over a defined area, and be done with it. After that, anyone can buy, sell, or trade at his pleasure. You can subdivide (either frequency ranges or areas) or combine "lots" into larger ones. Just like real estate.
If someone's signals exceed the bandwidth or area he owns, he's trespassing--so you'll probably want to make sure you keep your power to a reasonable level.
Is stopping a 17 year old from buying a stupid game that bad of a thing?
When government does it, yes!
That is none of government's business.
If I own a business and want to refuse to deal with you, that is my prerogative--it is a logical consequence of my freedom of association and rights of property. But for government to come in and pre-empt any such decision is slavery.
I would like to compromise some and get these politicos off our backs before they do something truly draconian, like ban red blood,
That's precisely what the NRA does, which is why I support GOA.
If you let the state know you'll compromise once, it gives it incentive to do it again. If we followed your advice--which is the same as the NRA's--then pretty soon we'll all be disarmed and have no means of carrying out a revolt.
"Reasonable adults" do NOT compromise on matters of principle. To do so is despicable and absurd. I am not willing to accept ANY infringement on my fundamental individual rights, whose source is not some invisible man in the sky or some government fiat, but simply the mere fact of my existence.
Wikipedia will fail, yes, but its content model has nothing to do with it.
It is the organization of the project itself that cannot last.
Wikipedia is fraught with pretentiousness, which attracts uptight anal-retentives who simply like to power trip and enforce every last minute consequence of every obscure policy rather than, and sometimes to the detriment of, creating good content--and even if the situation to which they were responding wasn't actually hurting anything.
I believe in the idea of Wikipedia, but the idea of Wikipedia needs to be saved from Wikipedia. To that end, I have created an alternative encyclopedia, Opencycle, that I believe will fix those problems.
Okay, we'll blame people who insist on interfering with the free market. So that would also include the corn lobby, the pesticide lobby, charities, people who want the U.S. to provide any sort of foreign aid, militant organizations and other assorted hoodlums in those impoverished countries, the U.N., the concept of government itself, etc.
Happy now?
Yup.
Not the answer you were expecting to get, is it?
First of all, you're going to have to cite a source on that before I believe you.
I submit that you already do believe me. You would not have said "The world has plenty of food (even if it were grown organically)" unless you accept that total organic food production would result in less food being produced.
Second, the point I was trying to make was that the world produces enough food even with lower yields
Certainly, more food is produced at present than is needed to feed the entire world population at current levels. So, yes, food production could be diminished somewhat and still suffice.
But, obviously, there's a limit to that. If food production is lowered enough, it will fall below that level. Without modern agricultural technology, and without increasing the land devoted to agriculture, the amount of food produced if all food was grown organically would be WAY below that level.
You can cut down the rainforest, or you can use modern technology. It's a trade-off. It's reality. You can choose to accept it or not, but reality has a way of biting you in the ass if you choose to reject it.
DDT breaks down chemically and leaves the food chain after a few days.
The other concerns have been simply shown to be not true, or based on flawed methodology (yeah, studies have statistically correlated DDT and thinner eggshells, but only when the mothers have been deprived of calcium).
In the end, it's another trade-off. No, it's not perfectly safe. It's not totally risk-free. But that's life--get used to it. The lives it will save vastly outnumber the lives it will take. And there's no solution that will save the same or more lives while taking fewer.
DDT and other pesticides have these little side effects like birth defects and increased cancer rates.
Simply not true.
Chemical pesticides and fertilizers, along with things like Bovine Growth Hormone, simply aren't needed for there to be an adequate food supply.
Not if you're willing to settle for less rainforest or wilderness--and more crowding in the cities--to compensate for reduced crop yields, no. Not to mention higher land prices and more labor required for agriculture, taking it away from other endeavors.
And the United States is only one country. It is those same chemicals you decry that enable the US to export foodstuffs worldwide, by keeping food fresh and allowing it to be grown in large enough quantities to make export worthwhile. Without the US's massive agricultural output, prices would go up even higher than they are now that they are propped up by the subsidies (which I oppose on moral grounds anyway, but that's beside the point).
Dealing with the political realities of the places with lots of starving people is how to solve most of the food shortage problem. Letting Monsanto get rich selling seeds for infertile plants is not.
But that's how to solve it--free markets, technology, and strong IP protections.
There can't be any reasonable objection that it's happening, no--that's a matter of simple observation.
But the collectivists go further, saying that (a) man is causing it, (b) we can stop or reverse it, and (c) if we don't we're all going to die.
That's where it becomes ridiculous.
The common argument is "global temperatures have been rising since the Industrial Revolution". What that doesn't tell you is that the systems and technology to record and collate the data necessary to be able to legitimately make such a claim has also only been around since the Industrial Revolution--so for all we know, it's been going on for much longer than that.
As George Will pointed out in a recent column (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16960409/site/newswee k/), "Over the millennia, the planet has warmed and cooled for reasons that are unclear but clearly were unrelated to SUVs." No, Will's not a climatologist. But no special education is required to figure out that if X happened before Y ever existed, you can't blame X on Y.
What it comes down to, is a trade-off. In this particular instance, it's a trade of a known value (economic development and knowledge that has produced so much wealth) for an unknown value (trying to fix something that may be impossible to fix that might not have been caused by us, even though fixing it may be unnecessary or even harmful). What sane, moral individual would make such a trade-off?
Slashdot Mirror
Do they have a plan for updating the positions stored for these stations as the plates they are on move two or three inches every year?
Actually, it's not; you just failed to understand where I was going with it, but oh, well.
And they have no moral right to do that, since it's mine and not theirs.
It'd be wrong regardless of whether I believed it or not, since it's an objective fact.
And yeah, they're entitled to reject objective reality all they want, but they're still obligated to respect my sacred individual rights, just like I am theirs. They can think they have every right to steal from and enslave me all they want as long as they don't act on it.
In other words, you can't come up with anything to refute it but you're too dishonest to admit it.
Wonderful.
The problem with that argument is twofold:
(1) They're not free to choose to do without if they decide it's not in their interests
(2) That someone benefits from something does not confer upon him an obligation to pay for it. See my blog post on the idiocy of the "social contract" and "free rider" arguments at http://blog.outwardhosting.com/?p=9
Neither Google nor any other corporation or individual has any moral obligation to pay taxes. The only proper role of government is to enforce contracts and punish violent criminals--and those violent criminals and contract breakers should be the ones who pay for government, through heavy punitive fines, since those are the ones whose actions necessitate a government in the first place.
A government that collects taxes is nothing more than a protection racket writ large.
They wouldn't exist. It's not government's place to be involved in health care or brainwashing.
If they can't afford insurance, or can't afford to pay for it directly out of their own pocket, well, tough shit for them. As the eminent 20th-century Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand proved, their need does not give them a claim on the property of others. The individual is an end in himself, and properly exists solely for his own sake--he has no obligation to provide for others or "the collective" or "the common good".
I never consented.
"Society" or "the majority" does not own my bank account. I do. So I am the only one who has any moral right to decide what to do with it.
That it is supported by the majority of the populace does not make theft any less wrong.
Just because you might not be able to get away with it does not make it right.
Neither Google nor any other corporation or individual has any moral obligation to pay taxes. The only proper role of government is to enforce contracts and punish violent criminals--and those violent criminals and contract breakers should be the ones who pay for government, through heavy punitive fines, since those are the ones whose actions necessitate a government in the first place.
A government that collects taxes is nothing more than a protection racket writ large.
All it takes is a few drives whose reliability is sky-high to compensate for the many clustered around the bottom of the barrel. There's nothing fraudulent or corrupt about this. You can, certainly, question whether MTBF is a useful metric for measuring reliability, but it takes someone ignorant of high-school statistics to claim that just because the vast majority of drives fail BEFORE the "mean time to failure" means the numbers released are dishonest or fraudulent somehow. Geez...and y'all wonder how the American public gets whipped into such a frenzy about "terrorism" and whatnot. Y'all are the same way, just for different topics.
The reason for poor education is the NEA and their emphasis on bs "Education degrees".
The writings of the Founders of the principles behind the Revolution and the Constitution bear me out on this point. It's not a mere assertion, though it is fashionable to say as much.
Properly understood, there is no distinction or conflict between the two.
But not opinion. Nothing is EVER a matter of opinion--everything, no matter how mundane or trivial, is a matter of objective fact. Any statement, whether normative or descriptive, is either objectively correct or objectively incorrect.
No, you don't.
Philosophy isn't just a botique of unconnected assertions and platitudes where you pick the one that conforms to your preexisting biases. Philosophy is the rigorous study of the fundamental nature of reality, and as such makes statements that are either correct or incorrect. One must be willing to reject his preconceived notions if he finds better arguments for another set.
But that's what philosophy is--using logic to prove true or false any of a number of statements about the Universe.
Wrong.
There is a contract between you and your provider. Either side may legitimately require whatever terms it wishes of the other, because the other party is always free to refuse the deal if he does not like it.
Grow up.
I mean, hey, great - I'm really glad this guy got the compensation very much due him. What worries me more is that the article didn't read "Corporation ignores serious national security concerns because there was no obvious profit."
That's their decision to make. You see, as the eminent 20th-century Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand proved, the individual properly has no obligation to "society" or the state or the "collective" but only to his own rational self-interest. If they deem their actions to be in their own rational self-interest, not only do they have every right to pursue them, but they are morally obligated to do so.
The selfish pursuit of private profit is the most moral act there is.
The United States isn't a government; it's a principle--that principle being individualism. When our government acts against that principle, the patriotic thing to do is oppose it.
I would suggest that it doesn't even need to do that.
Remember how public-domain land was allocated during the westward expansion?
Government simply made the initial sale and then got out of the way.
This is what they should be doing with RF allocation. Simply sell someone the rights to a given frequency range over a defined area, and be done with it. After that, anyone can buy, sell, or trade at his pleasure. You can subdivide (either frequency ranges or areas) or combine "lots" into larger ones. Just like real estate.
If someone's signals exceed the bandwidth or area he owns, he's trespassing--so you'll probably want to make sure you keep your power to a reasonable level.
Then you are pure evil.
Intellectual property is not simply a legal construct, it is an objective moral principle.
Those who reject it are not just of a different opinion--they are outright WRONG.
Reject the legitimacy of intellectual property and you reject your humanity.
...but the degree of damage the alleged activity caused to the victim is irrelevant.
If Posonov is indeed guilty, he should be punished, period, end of story. If not, he should go free.
The size and wealth of his alleged victim is completely irrelevant to his degree of guilt (or lack thereof).
American higher education is turning more and more into nothing more than a series of vocational schools with fancy buildings.
People are going there just to learn skills to get jobs rather than to learn for the sake of learning--which is what it's supposed to be all about.
I blame the G.I. Bill. It wasn't until after WWII that this started to be a problem.
When government does it, yes!
That is none of government's business.
If I own a business and want to refuse to deal with you, that is my prerogative--it is a logical consequence of my freedom of association and rights of property. But for government to come in and pre-empt any such decision is slavery.
The end does not justify the means.
That's precisely what the NRA does, which is why I support GOA.
If you let the state know you'll compromise once, it gives it incentive to do it again. If we followed your advice--which is the same as the NRA's--then pretty soon we'll all be disarmed and have no means of carrying out a revolt.
"Reasonable adults" do NOT compromise on matters of principle. To do so is despicable and absurd. I am not willing to accept ANY infringement on my fundamental individual rights, whose source is not some invisible man in the sky or some government fiat, but simply the mere fact of my existence.
Help stop socialism: vote Libertarian!
So what?
That doesn't change the fact that music distributors have the right to use it.
It's their product, to produce and distribute as they like.
Don't like it? Don't buy it.
Being a foolish business strategy is no reason for government to intervene to stop it.
Yay!
Wikipedia will fail, yes, but its content model has nothing to do with it.
It is the organization of the project itself that cannot last.
Wikipedia is fraught with pretentiousness, which attracts uptight anal-retentives who simply like to power trip and enforce every last minute consequence of every obscure policy rather than, and sometimes to the detriment of, creating good content--and even if the situation to which they were responding wasn't actually hurting anything.
I believe in the idea of Wikipedia, but the idea of Wikipedia needs to be saved from Wikipedia. To that end, I have created an alternative encyclopedia, Opencycle, that I believe will fix those problems.
Yup.
Not the answer you were expecting to get, is it?
I submit that you already do believe me. You would not have said "The world has plenty of food (even if it were grown organically)" unless you accept that total organic food production would result in less food being produced.
Certainly, more food is produced at present than is needed to feed the entire world population at current levels. So, yes, food production could be diminished somewhat and still suffice.
But, obviously, there's a limit to that. If food production is lowered enough, it will fall below that level. Without modern agricultural technology, and without increasing the land devoted to agriculture, the amount of food produced if all food was grown organically would be WAY below that level.
You can cut down the rainforest, or you can use modern technology. It's a trade-off. It's reality. You can choose to accept it or not, but reality has a way of biting you in the ass if you choose to reject it.
I should elaborate on DDT.
DDT breaks down chemically and leaves the food chain after a few days.
The other concerns have been simply shown to be not true, or based on flawed methodology (yeah, studies have statistically correlated DDT and thinner eggshells, but only when the mothers have been deprived of calcium).
In the end, it's another trade-off. No, it's not perfectly safe. It's not totally risk-free. But that's life--get used to it. The lives it will save vastly outnumber the lives it will take. And there's no solution that will save the same or more lives while taking fewer.
Simply not true.
Not if you're willing to settle for less rainforest or wilderness--and more crowding in the cities--to compensate for reduced crop yields, no. Not to mention higher land prices and more labor required for agriculture, taking it away from other endeavors.
And the United States is only one country. It is those same chemicals you decry that enable the US to export foodstuffs worldwide, by keeping food fresh and allowing it to be grown in large enough quantities to make export worthwhile. Without the US's massive agricultural output, prices would go up even higher than they are now that they are propped up by the subsidies (which I oppose on moral grounds anyway, but that's beside the point).
But that's how to solve it--free markets, technology, and strong IP protections.
You fail.
There can't be any reasonable objection that it's happening, no--that's a matter of simple observation.
e k/), "Over the millennia, the planet has warmed and cooled for reasons that are unclear but clearly were unrelated to SUVs."
But the collectivists go further, saying that (a) man is causing it, (b) we can stop or reverse it, and (c) if we don't we're all going to die.
That's where it becomes ridiculous.
The common argument is "global temperatures have been rising since the Industrial Revolution". What that doesn't tell you is that the systems and technology to record and collate the data necessary to be able to legitimately make such a claim has also only been around since the Industrial Revolution--so for all we know, it's been going on for much longer than that.
As George Will pointed out in a recent column (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16960409/site/newswe
No, Will's not a climatologist. But no special education is required to figure out that if X happened before Y ever existed, you can't blame X on Y.
What it comes down to, is a trade-off. In this particular instance, it's a trade of a known value (economic development and knowledge that has produced so much wealth) for an unknown value (trying to fix something that may be impossible to fix that might not have been caused by us, even though fixing it may be unnecessary or even harmful). What sane, moral individual would make such a trade-off?