What's underage? 5, 10, 17? Even so, if the community doesn't like it, everyone can vote with their wallets. If there isn't enough demand, the store will have to close.
This isn't specifically about being "of age to view pornography" (whatever that means anyways). This is about your continued insistence that might makes right.
with their wallets. If there is little demand for what the store is offering, it will have to close down. If there is enough demand to keep it open, then obviously it's providing a valuable service to enough people, and shutting it down because "those other people who don't shop there don't like it" is tantamount to communism. If you don't like the store being there, then *don't go to the store*.
I'm an atheist. I don't much like religion. So let's say I live in a town that's mostly atheist, with a few religious people who open a small church. Just because we all get together and say that we don't like the church doesn't mean we get to close it down. No-one's forcing us or anyone else to go to the church, and you cannot make a reasonable argument that it is violating our rights. Thus, there is no justification to shut it down. Likewise for the pornography case in the main article.
Having such a vague standard as to let it vary from one state to another, or one town to another, and depend on nothing more than the "moral consensus of the community" (or whatever the vague bullshit was that the USSC said) is non-sense, and makes a mockery out of our justice system.
We might as well say that rape is wrong in one state, but if you step accross the border to another, it's ok.
Legal standards cannot be vague bullshit like "I'll know it when I see it", or "accorfding to the moral sensibility of the community". Also, no-one has to go into a store of pornography, or look at any of the magazines inside...they may very well see the words "X-Rated Magazines" on the store, but they also hear about obscenity in those vague terms from all the zealots who oppose it.
Might does not make morally right. Nor does numbers. Just a couple hundred years ago, it could be argued that the majority of the population thought that African Americans didn't deserve rights. That makes it a popular position, not a right one.
Selling pornography doesn't violate anyone's rights. In fact, you can't make a reasonable case for it harming anyone, since no-one has to buy it or look at it. That's a different matter from walking down a public street naked, something that it's unavoidable to look at.
Of course, there's also this silly litle thing called the US Constitution and Amerndment's,which in all cases supercede any other laws, and nullify those laws which are in conflict. It's pretty clear that adult comic books, and other x-rated material, is protected under the First Amendment.
Your populist thinking is disturbing, because it goes against the very principles that we think of when we talk about human rights, one of which is freedom of speech. According to you, if a community felt like it, they would be right in forcing a husband and wife to have sex in a specified way, or in forbidding sex on Sundays, or at a specific time of the day.
It is clear that you have little or no respect for human rights, if you think that we are justified in violating them every time we can convince a majority of the people that that's "ok".
It's also nice to know that the cops are making good use of our tax dollars by prosecuting victimless crimes, such as pornography, prostitution, and drug-use, instead of going after real criminals, like rapists, murderers, and child-molesters.
As if thousands of people didn't think of the same thing before. The next obvious logical step to most people, but it takes MS years to figure it out.
What would really make sense is having the two buttons be button/wheels, where the left button-wheel controls up/down and the right button-wheel controls pgup/pgdn.
The GPL is a license that Richard Stallman created in the 1980s as part of a plan to create a clone of Unix that anyone was free to use and modify. That project, Gnu's Not Unix (GNU), provided the legal and technological framework that Linux built upon. The GPL hasn't yet been tested in court...
Now, the confusiong caused by calling the entire OS "Linux" has been perpetuated even further.
The GNU project laid out much of the groundwork for non-kernel core components of the GNU/Linux OS. The FSF laid out the legal framework upon which the Linux kernel was based, GNU was based, and the rest of the components of the OS were based.
However, the GNU project did not in any way lay out the technical framework upon which the Linux kernel is based. Linus created the initial Linux kernel from the ground up, and did not base it on any GNU software (though he may have used GNU software along-side it).
This is an interesting example of where -- not only does calling the entire OS "Linux" not acknowledge the credit of many others, but it also gives credit to GNU for the Linux kernel, which is simply factually incorrect.
Here is what the FSF has said about the APSL. Unlike what most people here seem to think, I don't think it's overly critical. I think it's just practical and honest.
The Apple Public Source License (APSL) version 2.0 qualifies as a free software license. Apple's lawyers worked with the FSF to produce a license that would qualify. The problems previously described on this page are still potential issues for other possible licenses, but they do not apply to version 2.0 of the APSL. We encourage everyone who uses any version of Apple Software under the APSL to use the terms of version 2.0 rather than that of any earlier license.
In version 2.0 of the APSL, the definition of "Externally Deployed" has been narrowed in a way that is appropriate for the respect of users' freedoms. It has always been the position of FSF that the freedom of Free Software is primarily for the users of that software. Technologies, like web applications, are changing the way that users interact with software. The APSL 2.0, like the Affero GPL, seeks to defend the freedom of those who use software in these novel ways, without unduly hindering the users' privacy nor freedom to use the software.
The FSF now considers the APSL to be a free software license with three major practical problems, reminiscent of the NPL:
It is not a true copyleft, because it allows linking with other files which may be entirely proprietary.
It is unfair, since it requires you to give Apple rights to your changes which Apple will not give you for its code.
It is incompatible with the GPL.
For this reason, we recommend you do not release new software using this license, even though it is ok to use and improve software which other people release under this license.
Aside from this, we must remember that only part of Mac OS X is being released under the APSL. Even though the fatal flaws of the APSL were fixed, and even if the practical problems were addressed, that does no good for the other parts of Mac OS X whose source code is not being released at all. We must not judge all of a company by just part of what they do.
Gentoo's a great distribution, but it is hardly one of the founding distros.
Gentoo has been around for, what, a year? Slackware and Debian have been there almost from the beginning. RedHat's done a lot to popularize GNU/Linux.
Now, Gentoo has contributed something important. Namely, portage. It's not for everyone, though (no distro is), and you shouldn't bother recommending it to anyone who doesn't have the patience and desire to use it. There are many benefits that one can get (smaller code, completely customizeable system, choosing which version of something you use, etc), but they aren't of interest to the majority of people. That's fine.
and we should feel sorry for this guy because??
on
Linking Dangerously
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If he wants to argue against the government, fine. I agree with him there -- our government is pretty fucked up. Stealing from the people under the euphemism of taxes and inflation is wrong. If he wants to link to pages on making bombs, fine, so long as he does not actively encourage people to kill others (it is illegal to try to persuade others to take illegal action, or to incite a riot).
However, this guy did quite a bit more than that. He hacked into people's computers. He hacked into military computers. This constitutes a clear and obvious case of what is analagous to tresspassing -- violating another person's property (in the case of the military computers, violating the property of the US taxpayers).
This guy is clearly a danger to those around him. If he doesn't like some government policy, or the governmnet itself, fine. He can criticize as harshly as he wants. However, unless his rights are directly threatened, he can't take up force. What if this nutcase reads something one of you wrote, and decide that he doesn't like what you believe in, or doesn't like you, so that -- he thinks -- gives him the right to hack into your computer and fuck up your data?
So, why exactly is it that we're supposed to feel sorry for this guy? Maybe the punishment is a little out of line with the crime. 4 months in prison was recommended; the judge gave 1 year. But justice is an inherently subjective, not objective, matter. Trying to nail down the "just" sentence to within a couple of months -- or maybe even years, in the case of more severe crimes -- is a matter of art, not science.
Windows, KDE, GNOME, Apple...all of them are basically brain-dead easy to use. What's left to work on is minor annoyances and glitches, not major design changes.
Rather than wasting time trying to beat MS at the dead-end game of "come up with the next useless 'feature' (e.g., Microsoft Bog) that nobody likes, wants, or uses".
GNU/Linux is going to be competing with MS in a top-down fashion, not a bottom-up grass-roots fashion. The major uses of GNU/Linux will be in the most complicated of things, big, large-scale research, complicated physics, and so-on and so-forth. There will also be huge data-base uses of it. Companies like Google, Amazon, and Walmart are either running completely on it or switching everything over to it, at great $$$ savings to themselves. Slowly, more and more corporate work-stations will be one or another brand of GNU/Linux as well.
Now, being quite honest, the brand is probably going to be RedHat, Lindows, or Mandrake. One of the no-brainers. And, as a Gentoo user, I don't see any reason why this should be bothersome to those of us who like the more do-it-yourself distros, like LFS, Gentoo, Slackware, and Debian. All GNU/Linux distributions basically use the same software anyways, can all use the same drivers, and so-on and so-forth. The differences are in what packages are offered, and the packaging system.
After GNU/Linux starts making significant inroads on corporate and public workstations, it will then start to impress itself upon private desktop users.
One thing that does need to be worked on is standardization accross applications. PicoGUI provides an answer for this by completely divorcing form from content. Programmers should not be deciding how programs look and respond to user-input...they should be deciding what programs actually do in response to a certain input. E.g., they should specify "menu, with these items on it, each of which does xyz" or "toolbar, with these buttons, each of which does abc"...then, depending on the environment the user's in, the menu or toolbar is drawn to fit in and behave consistently with all other apps.
This does not mean that those trying to make GNU/Linux better for the home-user should quit. Many of the supporters are home-users. But, we should understand that GNU/Linux is going to "trickle down" from top to bottom.
Slashdot should post daily stories -- even repeats, or trivial ones -- if at all possible on all of our enemies -- Microsoft, the US government, RIAA, MPAA -- so they can be humbled by the slashdot effect.
Different packages need different optimizations. Packages that have a huge mess of stuff to be loaded probably need -Os, not -O2 or -O3. Not all packages benefit from fomit-frame-pointer. Some packages -- e.g,. computationally intensive scientific packages -- will benefit significantly from CPU-optimizations. Others won't.
To take advantage of Gentoo's optimizations, you need to understand what various optimizations do and what your packages need.
Yes, but GCC 3.3.2 compiles things slower than GCC 3.3.1. Now, you can say, "that's gentoo's fault for using GCC 3.3.2". Wrong. It's the user's fault. Gentoo allows you to choose what version you want.
Irrelevant of such, its one that many Gentoo uses need. Many Gentoo users don't need stack traces to hand to a developer, period. You also ignore a common optimization used in Gentoo -- -Os, which optimizes for size, producing smaller binaries which load quicker, and take up less RAM.
compiling for different architectures generally makes very little difference on any platform other than compiling for i586 on a Pentium
This is an unqualified statement that doesn't hold. It might be true for some very generic functions, like word-processing and internet browing. However, for many scientifically intense functions, like phylogenetics, architecture-specific optimizations do matter.
I will agree with you that the specific optimizations don't make a huge difference in most cases; in some, however, they will. And of course, the other benefit is that software is only compiled with support for stuff you want, and that you have absolute control over what's there and what's not from the start.
I recommend you read some of the articles from Mises.org. US Patent laws are unbelievably biased in favor of patent-owners, and give them a monopoly to charge above what the market would otherwise afford. This is *proven* by the fact that they are willing to sell much much cheaper in foreign countries (and are now trying to ban re-imports).
If people want to create groups where those within are preferential in line for body-part donations, then so be it. And so what if people want to sell their body parts (e.g., kidneys) while alive, or when dead, at market-price? One life is as valuable as another -- there is nothing particularly noble about saving the life of a poor person over a rich one, nor vica versa. The point is that a person's body is his or her own, and only s/he should decide what is done with it and in what manner, while alive and when dead. If, after I die, I want to sell my body parts to the highest bidder (so as to increase the estate that will be passed on to my heirs), then so be it. If I want it to be designated that they must go to a poor person in need of them, then so be it. If I want to designate that they can only go to an Indian, then so be it. I could also designate who they can't go to, and make a long long list (e.g., criminals and those I don't like).
Consider this scenario. If two people are on the verge of drowning, I only have enough time to save one. Now, under the law, I don't have to save either. I'm not required to do anything to help them. Now, obviously I have a choice to make. I may make it based on several criteria, but however I choose is irrelevant -- one person is going to die, another is going to live.
1. I choose to try to save the thinnest person, who I am most likely to be able to drag out of the water.
2. If they are two women, maybe I save the most attractive one.
3. If one of them is my friend/family member, maybe I save him or her.
4. If one of them is my enemy, maybe I save the other person.
5. If I know one of them to be more intelligent than the other, maybe I save that one.
6. If I know one of them to be loved and cared about by more people than the other, then maybe I save that one.
7. If one of them is offering me a million dollars to save him or her, maybe I save that one*. Hell, I could choose by any other material or immaterial thing they were offering me. * Though the person may honor the verbal contract, it is unlikely to be held up in court, as it constitutes contract at gunpoint.
8. Maybe I choose randomly.
and so on and so forth. The point is, there are many criterion by which we judge. I may not even judge consciously. As far as the law and Constitution is concerned, regarding our right to life, we all have equal share in that right, and are all equal as persons to be bestowed rights. However, let's not pretend that we -- as individuals -- don't make judgements everyday about who's life and happiness is more important to us.
I think that Mises' and Rothbard's interpretation of why we have economic cycles are largely correct, but not complete. As Warren Buffet said in an interview, "The economy goes into great excesses of booms and busts, because people get caught up in the rear-view mirror". I a significant amount of the reason we have business cycles is because people overshoot in both directions. Government inflation accounts for some poor decisions, but it most certainly does not account for people just buying whatever stock is going up:
"The one principal that applies to nearly all these so-called "technical approaches" is that one should buy because a stock or the market has gone up and one should sell because it has declined. This is the exact opposite of sound business sense everywhere else, and it is most unlikely that it can lead to lasting success in Wall Street. In our own stock-market experience and observation, extending over 50 years, we have not known a single person who has consistently or lastingly made money by thus "following the market." We do not hesitate to declare that this approach is as fallacious as it is popular.
This is actually an opportunity for wise investors. Of course, similar opportunities would still be there even if the cycles weren't as pronounced, because: (1) there would still be such cycles; (2) There will still be stocks which the market has undervalued and ignored.
May be that subsidizing the education of poor women's children encourages poor women to have children (or rather, removes obstacles in the way of them doing that).
Rothbard says, "we can have exactly as much unemployment as we choose to pay for", and he has a point. In NY, a woman on welfare with two kids gets $32,500 a year in non-taxable money (the equivalent of about $45,000 in taxable income). So there's a huge incentive for women who can't make that much money to do what it takes to get on welfare.
The thing that, so far, is puzzling to unederstand is how -- presuming we eliminate all taxes -- the government can do it's one legitimate job: to protect our rights from both internal and external threats, to trial crimes, and arbitrate civil cases.
1) The free market continually improves due to the feedback of consumers. Do a poor job, and your profits suffer.
I agree with this. It is an obvious point when in reference to cars. There is no subjectivity in cars. Safer, cheaper, more luxerious, and cheaper = better. However, when you start talking about schools, it gets split into two parts: the objective and subjective. Math, science, historical facts, and the English language are objective. It is obvious to anyone if the school is doing a good job. But in regards to values, I think that saying the market will produce the best result is sort of like saying that what is right is what the majority of the people believe (the fallacy ad populum). Of course, there is no reason to think that the belief of a governor -- or whoever it is that decides what values are taught in school -- as to what values should be taught are any better than that of the average person.
The money spent per-pupil in the USA over the last 20 years on education has been going up and up and up and up, and the quality of education has been going down, down, down.
I assume that you mean the cost has been going up, compensating for inflation (and I agree with Rothbard and Mises that government-caused inflation is a bad thing, effectively stealing).
Thanks for the link to Mises.org. Very interesting read. I've read through most of the articles on the front page, and am now looking at Making Economic Sense, by Rothbard. An interesting book (and it's great that it's free online).
Slashdot Mirror
What's underage? 5, 10, 17? Even so, if the community doesn't like it, everyone can vote with their wallets. If there isn't enough demand, the store will have to close.
This isn't specifically about being "of age to view pornography" (whatever that means anyways). This is about your continued insistence that might makes right.
with their wallets. If there is little demand for what the store is offering, it will have to close down. If there is enough demand to keep it open, then obviously it's providing a valuable service to enough people, and shutting it down because "those other people who don't shop there don't like it" is tantamount to communism. If you don't like the store being there, then *don't go to the store*.
I'm an atheist. I don't much like religion. So let's say I live in a town that's mostly atheist, with a few religious people who open a small church. Just because we all get together and say that we don't like the church doesn't mean we get to close it down. No-one's forcing us or anyone else to go to the church, and you cannot make a reasonable argument that it is violating our rights. Thus, there is no justification to shut it down. Likewise for the pornography case in the main article.
obviously morons.
Having such a vague standard as to let it vary from one state to another, or one town to another, and depend on nothing more than the "moral consensus of the community" (or whatever the vague bullshit was that the USSC said) is non-sense, and makes a mockery out of our justice system.
We might as well say that rape is wrong in one state, but if you step accross the border to another, it's ok.
Legal standards cannot be vague bullshit like "I'll know it when I see it", or "accorfding to the moral sensibility of the community". Also, no-one has to go into a store of pornography, or look at any of the magazines inside...they may very well see the words "X-Rated Magazines" on the store, but they also hear about obscenity in those vague terms from all the zealots who oppose it.
Might does not make morally right. Nor does numbers. Just a couple hundred years ago, it could be argued that the majority of the population thought that African Americans didn't deserve rights. That makes it a popular position, not a right one.
,which in all cases supercede any other laws, and nullify those laws which are in conflict. It's pretty clear that adult comic books, and other x-rated material, is protected under the First Amendment.
Selling pornography doesn't violate anyone's rights. In fact, you can't make a reasonable case for it harming anyone, since no-one has to buy it or look at it. That's a different matter from walking down a public street naked, something that it's unavoidable to look at.
Of course, there's also this silly litle thing called the US Constitution and Amerndment's
Your populist thinking is disturbing, because it goes against the very principles that we think of when we talk about human rights, one of which is freedom of speech. According to you, if a community felt like it, they would be right in forcing a husband and wife to have sex in a specified way, or in forbidding sex on Sundays, or at a specific time of the day.
It is clear that you have little or no respect for human rights, if you think that we are justified in violating them every time we can convince a majority of the people that that's "ok".
It's also nice to know that the cops are making good use of our tax dollars by prosecuting victimless crimes, such as pornography, prostitution, and drug-use, instead of going after real criminals, like rapists, murderers, and child-molesters.
As if thousands of people didn't think of the same thing before. The next obvious logical step to most people, but it takes MS years to figure it out.
What would really make sense is having the two buttons be button/wheels, where the left button-wheel controls up/down and the right button-wheel controls pgup/pgdn.
Now, the confusiong caused by calling the entire OS "Linux" has been perpetuated even further.
The GNU project laid out much of the groundwork for non-kernel core components of the GNU/Linux OS. The FSF laid out the legal framework upon which the Linux kernel was based, GNU was based, and the rest of the components of the OS were based.
However, the GNU project did not in any way lay out the technical framework upon which the Linux kernel is based. Linus created the initial Linux kernel from the ground up, and did not base it on any GNU software (though he may have used GNU software along-side it).
This is an interesting example of where -- not only does calling the entire OS "Linux" not acknowledge the credit of many others, but it also gives credit to GNU for the Linux kernel, which is simply factually incorrect.
Intellectual authorship is important.
This goes to show that the efforts of RMS have in fact been fruitful. He's constructive criticism has helped Apple to make a better license.
It's called progress. It's still not compatable with the GPL, but it is now Free Software according to the FSD.
Gentoo's a great distribution, but it is hardly one of the founding distros.
Gentoo has been around for, what, a year? Slackware and Debian have been there almost from the beginning. RedHat's done a lot to popularize GNU/Linux.
Now, Gentoo has contributed something important. Namely, portage. It's not for everyone, though (no distro is), and you shouldn't bother recommending it to anyone who doesn't have the patience and desire to use it. There are many benefits that one can get (smaller code, completely customizeable system, choosing which version of something you use, etc), but they aren't of interest to the majority of people. That's fine.
If he wants to argue against the government, fine. I agree with him there -- our government is pretty fucked up. Stealing from the people under the euphemism of taxes and inflation is wrong. If he wants to link to pages on making bombs, fine, so long as he does not actively encourage people to kill others (it is illegal to try to persuade others to take illegal action, or to incite a riot).
However, this guy did quite a bit more than that. He hacked into people's computers. He hacked into military computers. This constitutes a clear and obvious case of what is analagous to tresspassing -- violating another person's property (in the case of the military computers, violating the property of the US taxpayers).
This guy is clearly a danger to those around him. If he doesn't like some government policy, or the governmnet itself, fine. He can criticize as harshly as he wants. However, unless his rights are directly threatened, he can't take up force. What if this nutcase reads something one of you wrote, and decide that he doesn't like what you believe in, or doesn't like you, so that -- he thinks -- gives him the right to hack into your computer and fuck up your data?
So, why exactly is it that we're supposed to feel sorry for this guy? Maybe the punishment is a little out of line with the crime. 4 months in prison was recommended; the judge gave 1 year. But justice is an inherently subjective, not objective, matter. Trying to nail down the "just" sentence to within a couple of months -- or maybe even years, in the case of more severe crimes -- is a matter of art, not science.
that SCO ought to give all individuals who use the Linux kernel 669 dollars for wasting our time.
Windows, KDE, GNOME, Apple...all of them are basically brain-dead easy to use. What's left to work on is minor annoyances and glitches, not major design changes.
Rather than wasting time trying to beat MS at the dead-end game of "come up with the next useless 'feature' (e.g., Microsoft Bog) that nobody likes, wants, or uses".
GNU/Linux is going to be competing with MS in a top-down fashion, not a bottom-up grass-roots fashion. The major uses of GNU/Linux will be in the most complicated of things, big, large-scale research, complicated physics, and so-on and so-forth. There will also be huge data-base uses of it. Companies like Google, Amazon, and Walmart are either running completely on it or switching everything over to it, at great $$$ savings to themselves. Slowly, more and more corporate work-stations will be one or another brand of GNU/Linux as well.
Now, being quite honest, the brand is probably going to be RedHat, Lindows, or Mandrake. One of the no-brainers. And, as a Gentoo user, I don't see any reason why this should be bothersome to those of us who like the more do-it-yourself distros, like LFS, Gentoo, Slackware, and Debian. All GNU/Linux distributions basically use the same software anyways, can all use the same drivers, and so-on and so-forth. The differences are in what packages are offered, and the packaging system.
After GNU/Linux starts making significant inroads on corporate and public workstations, it will then start to impress itself upon private desktop users.
One thing that does need to be worked on is standardization accross applications. PicoGUI provides an answer for this by completely divorcing form from content. Programmers should not be deciding how programs look and respond to user-input...they should be deciding what programs actually do in response to a certain input. E.g., they should specify "menu, with these items on it, each of which does xyz" or "toolbar, with these buttons, each of which does abc"...then, depending on the environment the user's in, the menu or toolbar is drawn to fit in and behave consistently with all other apps.
This does not mean that those trying to make GNU/Linux better for the home-user should quit. Many of the supporters are home-users. But, we should understand that GNU/Linux is going to "trickle down" from top to bottom.
Slashdot should post daily stories -- even repeats, or trivial ones -- if at all possible on all of our enemies -- Microsoft, the US government, RIAA, MPAA -- so they can be humbled by the slashdot effect.
Different packages need different optimizations. Packages that have a huge mess of stuff to be loaded probably need -Os, not -O2 or -O3. Not all packages benefit from fomit-frame-pointer. Some packages -- e.g,. computationally intensive scientific packages -- will benefit significantly from CPU-optimizations. Others won't.
To take advantage of Gentoo's optimizations, you need to understand what various optimizations do and what your packages need.
Yes, but GCC 3.3.2 compiles things slower than GCC 3.3.1. Now, you can say, "that's gentoo's fault for using GCC 3.3.2". Wrong. It's the user's fault. Gentoo allows you to choose what version you want.
Omit-frame-pointer is not a regular optimization.
Irrelevant of such, its one that many Gentoo uses need. Many Gentoo users don't need stack traces to hand to a developer, period. You also ignore a common optimization used in Gentoo -- -Os, which optimizes for size, producing smaller binaries which load quicker, and take up less RAM.
compiling for different architectures generally makes very little difference on any platform other than compiling for i586 on a Pentium
This is an unqualified statement that doesn't hold. It might be true for some very generic functions, like word-processing and internet browing. However, for many scientifically intense functions, like phylogenetics, architecture-specific optimizations do matter.
I will agree with you that the specific optimizations don't make a huge difference in most cases; in some, however, they will. And of course, the other benefit is that software is only compiled with support for stuff you want, and that you have absolute control over what's there and what's not from the start.
I recommend you read some of the articles from Mises.org. US Patent laws are unbelievably biased in favor of patent-owners, and give them a monopoly to charge above what the market would otherwise afford. This is *proven* by the fact that they are willing to sell much much cheaper in foreign countries (and are now trying to ban re-imports).
Eliminate patents. They are an artificial granting of monopoly by the government, and discourage competition.
If people want to create groups where those within are preferential in line for body-part donations, then so be it. And so what if people want to sell their body parts (e.g., kidneys) while alive, or when dead, at market-price? One life is as valuable as another -- there is nothing particularly noble about saving the life of a poor person over a rich one, nor vica versa. The point is that a person's body is his or her own, and only s/he should decide what is done with it and in what manner, while alive and when dead. If, after I die, I want to sell my body parts to the highest bidder (so as to increase the estate that will be passed on to my heirs), then so be it. If I want it to be designated that they must go to a poor person in need of them, then so be it. If I want to designate that they can only go to an Indian, then so be it. I could also designate who they can't go to, and make a long long list (e.g., criminals and those I don't like).
Consider this scenario. If two people are on the verge of drowning, I only have enough time to save one. Now, under the law, I don't have to save either. I'm not required to do anything to help them. Now, obviously I have a choice to make. I may make it based on several criteria, but however I choose is irrelevant -- one person is going to die, another is going to live.
1. I choose to try to save the thinnest person, who I am most likely to be able to drag out of the water.
2. If they are two women, maybe I save the most attractive one.
3. If one of them is my friend/family member, maybe I save him or her.
4. If one of them is my enemy, maybe I save the other person.
5. If I know one of them to be more intelligent than the other, maybe I save that one.
6. If I know one of them to be loved and cared about by more people than the other, then maybe I save that one.
7. If one of them is offering me a million dollars to save him or her, maybe I save that one*. Hell, I could choose by any other material or immaterial thing they were offering me.
* Though the person may honor the verbal contract, it is unlikely to be held up in court, as it constitutes contract at gunpoint.
8. Maybe I choose randomly.
and so on and so forth. The point is, there are many criterion by which we judge. I may not even judge consciously. As far as the law and Constitution is concerned, regarding our right to life, we all have equal share in that right, and are all equal as persons to be bestowed rights. However, let's not pretend that we -- as individuals -- don't make judgements everyday about who's life and happiness is more important to us.
This is actually an opportunity for wise investors. Of course, similar opportunities would still be there even if the cycles weren't as pronounced, because: (1) there would still be such cycles; (2) There will still be stocks which the market has undervalued and ignored.
May be that subsidizing the education of poor women's children encourages poor women to have children (or rather, removes obstacles in the way of them doing that).
Rothbard says, "we can have exactly as much unemployment as we choose to pay for", and he has a point. In NY, a woman on welfare with two kids gets $32,500 a year in non-taxable money (the equivalent of about $45,000 in taxable income). So there's a huge incentive for women who can't make that much money to do what it takes to get on welfare.
The thing that, so far, is puzzling to unederstand is how -- presuming we eliminate all taxes -- the government can do it's one legitimate job: to protect our rights from both internal and external threats, to trial crimes, and arbitrate civil cases.
Quite frankly, the prospect of changing our current system to a libertarian form of minimal government is so daunting that it would seem easier to build an island on the ocean and start from there.
1) The free market continually improves due to the feedback of consumers. Do a poor job, and your profits suffer.
I agree with this. It is an obvious point when in reference to cars. There is no subjectivity in cars. Safer, cheaper, more luxerious, and cheaper = better. However, when you start talking about schools, it gets split into two parts: the objective and subjective. Math, science, historical facts, and the English language are objective. It is obvious to anyone if the school is doing a good job. But in regards to values, I think that saying the market will produce the best result is sort of like saying that what is right is what the majority of the people believe (the fallacy ad populum). Of course, there is no reason to think that the belief of a governor -- or whoever it is that decides what values are taught in school -- as to what values should be taught are any better than that of the average person.
The money spent per-pupil in the USA over the last 20 years on education has been going up and up and up and up, and the quality of education has been going down, down, down.
I assume that you mean the cost has been going up, compensating for inflation (and I agree with Rothbard and Mises that government-caused inflation is a bad thing, effectively stealing).
You would be much better off referring people to Mises.org instead of that cartoon-presentation.
Thanks for the link to Mises.org. Very interesting read. I've read through most of the articles on the front page, and am now looking at Making Economic Sense, by Rothbard. An interesting book (and it's great that it's free online).