Only if you creatively redefine both of the terms to mean something they don't in a colloquial usage. Which, in turn, would make the great-grandparent's definition of life useless — because it did not contain the necessary (re)definitions of the terms it used.
The "movement", "respiration", and "excretion" requirements would disqualify most plants. On the other hand, a robot can already be made to satisfy all 7...
Generally, the ACLU does in meat-space what the EFF does in cyberspace.
BS. Once, a decade ago, I donated enough to ACLU to warrant sending me a membership card. Still have it somewhere. Guess what? 2 weeks later an invitation to subscribe to a disgusting far-left magazine showed up, sent to the same "tagged" address as what I gave the ACLU. It had a picture of the then-President in shackles on it — showing today's President that way would've been a national scandal.
Do you suppose, the USSR or Cuba, that American Left love some much, were any better on LGBT rights, than the US is today?
Having aligned themselves so solidly with the Left — and outright communistsamong them — indeed, having concentrated on the nonsense like "LGBT rights", they've lost the hearts and minds of the rest of us...
If society thinks I should pay more, then it would be rather hypocritical to disagree.
It is only hypocritical for those, who proclaim their trust in government determining the amount for other people...
But, hypocritical or not, you pay more than you believe is fair because you can not avoid it — on pain of having armed men come in and evict you from your house (though I doubt you have one, if you aren't American).
If you made an offer of $100 to buy an item from me and I said "No! It's only worth $50" are you going to haggle over the price and insist on paying the extra?
People disagreeing about a price are welcome to not commence the transaction. There is no such freedom with taxes — and the taxpayers are forced into paying. All taxes are collected like that world-wide, that's a given. What it means, however, is that these monies can only be spent on things, only government can provide — such as military and law-enforcement — not transport, not health care, not food... It is simply immoral to force Peter to pay for a bus line, which will help Paul get to work... And it is outright outrageous to force Peter to pay for Paul's food and housing.
We have an efficient public transport system throughout the country, affordable health care, a safety net if I lose my job, and mandatory paid vacation
You may have been brainwashed into believing, that's the only way to live — and that those "elected administrators", in their omniwisdom and benevolence are the best at deciding, how to spend other people's money. Better even than the people themselves are. You have the excuse, that those ruling you have a (very) vested interest in perpetuating your belief. But you should've recognized the truth, when it slapped you...
Clearly there's a problem in the US where apparently there's a ruling class that you have no say about
Having visited Europe many times, I can "clearly" see, you live in poverty. Your cars are too small for comfort, as are your showers. Your food is expensive — and so are most other goods and services. And, despite all those taxes upping the every-day prices, you are still too poor to maintain a military, that can credibly discourage Russian... Shrugs...
No. I pay taxes because it's my duty to society. [...] Perhaps you are a sociopath, and we need threats of violence to control people
No, dearest. It is the other way around. If, indeed, the tax-avoidance was only found among sociopaths, the Executive (IRS) wouldn't have needed the investigative apparatus, its own "Tax court" (whose Judges the President is empowered to remove at whim), and the power to confiscate property and bank-accounts (on mere suspicion, neither proof nor even an accusation of wrongdoing is required), and to garnish wages.
If parasitic sociopaths like myself truly were a tiny minority you allege us to be, why have the tax code at all? Have responsible folks like yourself pay what each believes their fair share to be, and shrug at the non-paying sociopaths the way you shrug at a similarly anti-social drunkards.
Indeed, why do you trust the IRS to determine your fair share — why don't you pay more? It is easy — and the Treasury encourages such gifts.
not all of us are that way
If most of us were not that way, then we would've been getting by just fine on voluntary donations — as, indeed, we were throughout the 19th century.
But then the government types decided, the benevolent and omniscient government officials are better at running various things — and the taxes went up... Today I pay at least 50% of my earnings to various tax-authorities (Federal, State, and local) — plus the sales tax. I don't like it one bit — I'm perfectly certain, I would've spent it better than Charlie Rangels in Congress do — and only the threat of violence keeps me in line.
I also don't rob banks, because I consider it an obligation to society not to do so.
No, it is not your obligation to society — it is your obligation to the owner(s) of what you would've misappropriated. Derived, of course, from your inner subliminal unwillingness to see the same sort of thing ever done to yourself.
But I do find your equating obligations to the government with those towards fellow men interesting. Perhaps, you'd be better in a country driven by Confucian or similarly Socialist principles, rather than the Individualist America...
Eliminating some of the taxes was one obvious solution to the crisis. The East India Company initially sought to have the Townshend duty repealed, but the North ministry was unwilling because such an action might be interpreted as a retreat from Parliament's position that it had the right to tax the colonies. More importantly, the tax collected from the Townshend duty was used to pay the salaries of some colonial governors and judges.
Replace "East India Company" with "Amazon" and "Townshend duty" with whatever that Australian tax is named... The Founding Fathers recognized the need for some taxes, so they framed their protest as against "taxation without representation". But the actual rioters back then just didn't want to pay "their fair share".
You are onto something here. Can't say, I got a bona-fide erection imagining Siri in such a situation, but there is that refreshing feeling of solidity, yes...
go look at ALL the worlds largest companies, traders, hedge funds, phone/broadband, space companies, taxi firms, poker sites, tech/IP holding, lotteries, scratchcards, just about every finance based industry, health, they are all doing it
Taxes — by definition — are collected at the point of a weapon. It is perfectly natural to wish to avoid them. And we used to understand that attitude a lot better in this country — if Boston Tea Party has taught anybody anything...
Well, then you do have the same system I proposed only you have to go through the trouble of creating those throw-away accounts before you can use them.
By using the scheme I outlined (or your own domain) you don't need to pre-make the accounts — you+FOO@gmail.com (and/or FOO@yourdomain.com) already exists for an infinite (well, very large) variety of FOOs.
Considering how many people get screwed over by big corporations [...] surprised we don't see more examples of unstable victims attempting serious, premeditated harm [...] these companies have a lot of victims
Well, if your theory conflicts with the available facts, maybe, the theory is wrong? Maybe, the reason we don't see that much violence is that it is actually very few people, who are "screwed over" by big KKKorporations? (That's the proper spelling for a rant like yours, by the way.) I for one can't even imagine, how an "oil company" (your first example) could possibly screw me over... By selling diluted gasoline?
And, though VZW's actions seem rather underhanded, it is nothing worth causing bodily harm to another human being...
"My name is Doofus of Death and you injected tracking cookies into my browser's requests! Prepare to die!" — just does not have the right ring to it, sorry...
This may be good enough for companies, that force registration needlessly. But there are other cases. Say, you buy something online — and want to get order confirmation and tracking number by e-mail? Or want your transit (bus or train) to warn you, they have a problem before you leave the house...
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to give your address to other people and companies alike and using "throw-away" addresses is not a good way to keep in touch. My way all of the message still arrive to your normal account. But, by giving a unique address to each party, I can always block one sender without abandoning the "throw-away" account — and all the other, perfectly decent, correspondents, who also know it.
Connected to the cloud so it's always getting smarter
Suppose, you are disciplining your child, or singing in the shower, or having a tender moment with your spouse... The device listens — and is connected to the cloud "getting smarter".
Will it start offering suggestions? Will it start reminding us to wash hands — if it hears flushing, but not running water in the sink? Will it call police upon detecting "domestic violence" — and wouldn't Amazon some day be sued for not doing so?
The Big Brother we were warned about nearly 100 years ago, does not necessarily need to be entirely for monitoring — the watching interface could also deliver weather reports and other useful information.
I do remember the face of a nice cashier lady in a rural Home Depot — she asked me to "sign up for free" and I refused. It genuinely offended her, though she remained professionally nice... Maybe, now she understands.
And when you have to — or, despite the risks, want to — register with some company, always use an address like yourid+companyname-year@example.com. The nifty feature supported by most mail-servers will still deliver the message into your mbox, but you'll be able to block a particular address, when it gets stolen (or when the party you gave it to in the first place turns to spamming).
GMail supports the feature, Yahoo! Mail might too.
(Of course, owners of their own domains have the infinite supply of even nicer-looking addresses.)
It was deemed too precious to fail by the government.
I though they paid back their government loan ahead of schedule.
That's irrelevant to my argument. Not all companies helped by the government are necessary failures. The point is, there should not be any such companies.
Yet despite all the public celebration, both Solyndra and Tesla stand as warnings of the dangers in deputizing bureaucrats to play bankers and venture capitalists. In both loans, the government walked away laughably undercompensated for the risk it accepted in the startup companies. In fact, the Tesla deal was arguably far more costly for America than the Solyndra fiasco.
Does capitalism depend on people being truthful all the time?
Of course, not. A liar will be caught — and pushed into bankruptcy. The banks will be punished for not being sufficiently careful by losing their monies and their customers (not taxpayers').
The company will, likely, be sold or otherwise placed in control of new management, which might — as Mitt Romney was doing before entering politics — turn it around into making profit again, possibly even repaying the debts.
That is, indeed, how Capitalism works — or ought to, anyway — unless the company's product is something particularly dear to the government (Solindra, cough, Tesla, cough), or the banks involved are at risk of failing over the problem and the Administration decides, it can not be allowed. Then it becomes Crony Capitalism, which to the real thing is like Westboro Baptist Church to Christianity.
Insex site and company was shut down using on the same tactics.
Not the same at all. Insex was targeted directly (rather than forcing their bank to close their accounts) — and not for suspected tax or accounting irregularities, but for the actual content they produced.
You and I may disapprove of the efforts to shut down Insex', but it was a straightforward prosecution of what the prosecutors believed was illegal (and disgusting) activity.
Obama/Holder would've gone after Insex' banker(s) and credit-card processor(s) — threatening them with audits — without touching Insex directly.
Slashdot Mirror
Ad Hominems... A sure sign of an Illiberal losing his argument before even entering it...
Some plants move. Most plants don't. All of them are alive, contrary to the proposed definition. Ergo, the definition "needs work".
My car breathes, excretes, senses, and eats. It neither grows nor reproduces, true, but then it moves — unlike plants...
The proposed definition of life is crap.
Not all plants have stomata ("stomas" would've seem like proper English). Non-vascular ones do not — are moss and algae not alive?
And we still need to deal with the movement requirement...
We may have. But if we haven't, it is only for lack of interest — not because it is not possible.
A lot of human self-replication involves cheating, why rule it out?
Only if you creatively redefine both of the terms to mean something they don't in a colloquial usage. Which, in turn, would make the great-grandparent's definition of life useless — because it did not contain the necessary (re)definitions of the terms it used.
The "movement", "respiration", and "excretion" requirements would disqualify most plants. On the other hand, a robot can already be made to satisfy all 7...
BS. Once, a decade ago, I donated enough to ACLU to warrant sending me a membership card. Still have it somewhere. Guess what? 2 weeks later an invitation to subscribe to a disgusting far-left magazine showed up, sent to the same "tagged" address as what I gave the ACLU. It had a picture of the then-President in shackles on it — showing today's President that way would've been a national scandal.
Do you suppose, the USSR or Cuba, that American Left love some much, were any better on LGBT rights, than the US is today?
Having aligned themselves so solidly with the Left — and outright communists among them — indeed, having concentrated on the nonsense like "LGBT rights", they've lost the hearts and minds of the rest of us...
It is only hypocritical for those, who proclaim their trust in government determining the amount for other people...
But, hypocritical or not, you pay more than you believe is fair because you can not avoid it — on pain of having armed men come in and evict you from your house (though I doubt you have one, if you aren't American).
People disagreeing about a price are welcome to not commence the transaction. There is no such freedom with taxes — and the taxpayers are forced into paying. All taxes are collected like that world-wide, that's a given. What it means, however, is that these monies can only be spent on things, only government can provide — such as military and law-enforcement — not transport, not health care, not food... It is simply immoral to force Peter to pay for a bus line, which will help Paul get to work... And it is outright outrageous to force Peter to pay for Paul's food and housing.
You may have been brainwashed into believing, that's the only way to live — and that those "elected administrators", in their omniwisdom and benevolence are the best at deciding, how to spend other people's money. Better even than the people themselves are. You have the excuse, that those ruling you have a (very) vested interest in perpetuating your belief. But you should've recognized the truth, when it slapped you...
Having visited Europe many times, I can "clearly" see, you live in poverty. Your cars are too small for comfort, as are your showers. Your food is expensive — and so are most other goods and services. And, despite all those taxes upping the every-day prices, you are still too poor to maintain a military, that can credibly discourage Russian... Shrugs...
No, dearest. It is the other way around. If, indeed, the tax-avoidance was only found among sociopaths, the Executive (IRS) wouldn't have needed the investigative apparatus, its own "Tax court" (whose Judges the President is empowered to remove at whim), and the power to confiscate property and bank-accounts (on mere suspicion, neither proof nor even an accusation of wrongdoing is required), and to garnish wages.
If parasitic sociopaths like myself truly were a tiny minority you allege us to be, why have the tax code at all? Have responsible folks like yourself pay what each believes their fair share to be, and shrug at the non-paying sociopaths the way you shrug at a similarly anti-social drunkards.
Indeed, why do you trust the IRS to determine your fair share — why don't you pay more? It is easy — and the Treasury encourages such gifts.
If most of us were not that way, then we would've been getting by just fine on voluntary donations — as, indeed, we were throughout the 19th century.
But then the government types decided, the benevolent and omniscient government officials are better at running various things — and the taxes went up... Today I pay at least 50% of my earnings to various tax-authorities (Federal, State, and local) — plus the sales tax. I don't like it one bit — I'm perfectly certain, I would've spent it better than Charlie Rangels in Congress do — and only the threat of violence keeps me in line.
No, it is not your obligation to society — it is your obligation to the owner(s) of what you would've misappropriated. Derived, of course, from your inner subliminal unwillingness to see the same sort of thing ever done to yourself.
But I do find your equating obligations to the government with those towards fellow men interesting. Perhaps, you'd be better in a country driven by Confucian or similarly Socialist principles, rather than the Individualist America...
Replace "East India Company" with "Amazon" and "Townshend duty" with whatever that Australian tax is named... The Founding Fathers recognized the need for some taxes, so they framed their protest as against "taxation without representation". But the actual rioters back then just didn't want to pay "their fair share".
You are onto something here. Can't say, I got a bona-fide erection imagining Siri in such a situation, but there is that refreshing feeling of solidity, yes...
Taxes — by definition — are collected at the point of a weapon. It is perfectly natural to wish to avoid them. And we used to understand that attitude a lot better in this country — if Boston Tea Party has taught anybody anything...
Paraphrasing John Gilmore:Corporations interpret taxation as damage and route around it.
Well, then you do have the same system I proposed only you have to go through the trouble of creating those throw-away accounts before you can use them.
By using the scheme I outlined (or your own domain) you don't need to pre-make the accounts — you+FOO@gmail.com (and/or FOO@yourdomain.com) already exists for an infinite (well, very large) variety of FOOs.
Well, if your theory conflicts with the available facts, maybe, the theory is wrong? Maybe, the reason we don't see that much violence is that it is actually very few people, who are "screwed over" by big KKKorporations? (That's the proper spelling for a rant like yours, by the way.) I for one can't even imagine, how an "oil company" (your first example) could possibly screw me over... By selling diluted gasoline?
And, though VZW's actions seem rather underhanded, it is nothing worth causing bodily harm to another human being...
"My name is Doofus of Death and you injected tracking cookies into my browser's requests! Prepare to die!" — just does not have the right ring to it, sorry...
Good to see somebody doing, what ACLU used to do...
This may be good enough for companies, that force registration needlessly. But there are other cases. Say, you buy something online — and want to get order confirmation and tracking number by e-mail? Or want your transit (bus or train) to warn you, they have a problem before you leave the house...
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to give your address to other people and companies alike and using "throw-away" addresses is not a good way to keep in touch. My way all of the message still arrive to your normal account. But, by giving a unique address to each party, I can always block one sender without abandoning the "throw-away" account — and all the other, perfectly decent, correspondents, who also know it.
Suppose, you are disciplining your child, or singing in the shower, or having a tender moment with your spouse... The device listens — and is connected to the cloud "getting smarter".
Will it start offering suggestions? Will it start reminding us to wash hands — if it hears flushing, but not running water in the sink? Will it call police upon detecting "domestic violence" — and wouldn't Amazon some day be sued for not doing so?
The Big Brother we were warned about nearly 100 years ago, does not necessarily need to be entirely for monitoring — the watching interface could also deliver weather reports and other useful information.
I do remember the face of a nice cashier lady in a rural Home Depot — she asked me to "sign up for free" and I refused. It genuinely offended her, though she remained professionally nice... Maybe, now she understands.
And when you have to — or, despite the risks, want to — register with some company, always use an address like yourid+companyname-year@example.com. The nifty feature supported by most mail-servers will still deliver the message into your mbox, but you'll be able to block a particular address, when it gets stolen (or when the party you gave it to in the first place turns to spamming).
GMail supports the feature, Yahoo! Mail might too.
(Of course, owners of their own domains have the infinite supply of even nicer-looking addresses.)
It was deemed too precious to fail by the government.
That's irrelevant to my argument. Not all companies helped by the government are necessary failures. The point is, there should not be any such companies.
Not to say, the Administration has failed to mishandle Tesla too:
Evidently, the Anonymous troll has never lived in the USSR...
Of course, not. A liar will be caught — and pushed into bankruptcy. The banks will be punished for not being sufficiently careful by losing their monies and their customers (not taxpayers').
The company will, likely, be sold or otherwise placed in control of new management, which might — as Mitt Romney was doing before entering politics — turn it around into making profit again, possibly even repaying the debts.
That is, indeed, how Capitalism works — or ought to, anyway — unless the company's product is something particularly dear to the government (Solindra, cough, Tesla, cough), or the banks involved are at risk of failing over the problem and the Administration decides, it can not be allowed. Then it becomes Crony Capitalism, which to the real thing is like Westboro Baptist Church to Christianity.
Not the same at all. Insex was targeted directly (rather than forcing their bank to close their accounts) — and not for suspected tax or accounting irregularities, but for the actual content they produced.
You and I may disapprove of the efforts to shut down Insex', but it was a straightforward prosecution of what the prosecutors believed was illegal (and disgusting) activity.
Obama/Holder would've gone after Insex' banker(s) and credit-card processor(s) — threatening them with audits — without touching Insex directly.
Sounds scatological...
"Old" you say? Eeeww....