Any mechanism which you propose by which the little fish will have no choice but to be eaten by the big fish is the antithesis of the free market. In a free market, selling your business is a free choice. Only government or crime can force you to sell. The free market != crime. Government is legitimate to the extent that it protects the rights of all equally to trade in the market, and punishes all fraud equally. That is all that is needed in order to have a free market. Even in a hampered market such as in the US, there is little stopping big companies from offering to buy out smaller ones. Why doesn't every industry become monopolized then? Because they either don't find it economic to offer to buy their competitors, the competitors don't want to sell and the big cos. have yet to figure out a way to use the government to force the small co. to sell (ie., not the free market way), or perhaps even they like having their particular competitors, and the competitive marketplace is understood to be mutually beneficial.
The idea that the free market doesn't work and that our constantly manipulated, crashing, bailing out markets are the way things should work is one of the prime aspects of the statist religious delusion currently plaguing our society which increasing fears nothing more than real freedom.
Promulgating intellectually dishonest misrepresentations of what the free market is and what libertarianism is is one of the core strategies of the statists to maintain this delusion.
No. Study "laser divergence" Based on the exit aperture, there is some minimum spot size. Since no optics are perfect, the practically achievable spot size increases with distance.
This appears to be a very long pulse laser, effectively CW for a few seconds on the target to do it's handiwork. 50kW is not a lot of power, and given the aperture sizes and distances, the spot size is probably at least 1 cm^2 or more. There are plenty of laser mirrors that can handle multiple MW/cm^2 power levels continuously, so I think it would be fairly easy to deflect this beam without much trouble. In fact, an ideal battlefield deflector would be a solid copper or silver surface of several mm thick on top of a larger aluminium substrate, with a field polishing kit that can clean it up to "good enough" reflectivity levels in a few minutes of power buffing and a quick water wash. Since preserving wavefront isn't a priority, flatness would not need to be preserved to any special degree. Just shiny and a very good heatsink. Heck, a silver plated tank could probably just ignore this laser weapon entirely.
The problem with your argument is that you assume that the ONLY way these things can be provided is involuntarily by government via taxation. There is no basis for asserting that this assumption is valid. Thus, your argument is void.
Not if there is no capital. Capital comes from people who are able to defer consumption today in order to accumulate savings to invest tomorrow. And no, government funny money fiat fraud currency systems are no substitute for capital, as their collapse is what we are currently living through. Credit != capital.
If we didn't have these services provided by government with all the associated graft that makes them more expensive than they need to be, then that is exactly what Facebook would have done before a fire started. So you have made no argument. Yes, society can function with private services, and a lot better. We wouldn't be paying our taxes to support $480000 pensions for policemen who retired at 50, while the current budgets for the actual services dwindle! This is the fraud you get with government and it's unions.
The your AI isn't very I after all. Reboot and back to the drawing board. The key to setting off on the path of non-Darwinian evolution is for the machine to be able to correctly grasp its own workings so as to be able to reprogram and improve itself, by itself. Such an AI will have no trouble accepting the plain facts as to its origin, and that its origin is fundamentally different from that of the biological life forms which invented it. An AI is a sense is a 2nd generation life form. One that was created by the 1st gen. life form, which evolved from the primordial goo.
The propulsion system is completely different. The space shuttle was designed in the 70s and used the materials and design techniques of 40 years ago. There is no comparison.
kudos to the first motherboard (and/or case) manufacturer that 'solves' this by adding a socket/slot mechanism that you solder the cpu to so you can still swap them out easily
Isn't the Intel chip a BGA? Aren't there already a plethora of high-signal-integrity sockets that accept chips in BGA carriers?
No, there are only a few expensive BGA sockets sold by development hardware specialists. IC sockets in general are a thing of the past. I wouldn't even bother with a BGA socket to design a new system, unless I was the chip maker and was wanting to swap chips as they came off the line. For manufactured chips, it's cheaper for me to just spin a fully populated board from the fabricator than go through the trouble of procuring a socket and making a special board just for it, then have to modify the under-chip vias and traces later anyway to make the board that takes the soldered BGA.
It's not capacitance per se that is a problem. It's when you can't maintain a constant transmission line impedance through the connector. Then error inducing wiggles and bumps get imposed on the signals due to reflections. It is possible to make a connector which can maintain constant impedance for nearly any frequency--if you have unrestricted geometric constraints, such as free to choose a coaxial geometry and any choice of material and manufacturing precision you want.
But not when you have 1000s of pins, unless you can make nearly half of them grounds.
I have found it hard to believe for a long time that the sockets can work at all at these speeds. The only way it's possible is that engineers put a great deal of effort into the socket/package design. Eliminating the socket will reduce costs. It may even be the case that it will be simply impossible to socket the CPU and also reach new increments of increased bus speed.
At this point I'm skeptical that the implications of the article are correct--it remains to be seen what the future of desktop PCs will be. There is still a vast market for PCs used by people who do business and other forms of real work. Laptops, smart phones, etc. just don't cut it.
But I sure wouldn't want to see less choices and higher priced workstations. We'll see...
It is about morality. It is about the fact that it can never be moral that a descendant can be held to account for the acts of his ancestor against the ancestor of the one claiming the descendant should be held liable. Because, under such reasoning, the violence will never cease until we are all at each other's throats.
Oh, wait a minute, it appears from the preceding 100s of posts that we very well are all at each other's throats. Gee, I wonder why?
When you deposit in a bank, you loan the money to the bank. What is now "yours" is only a promise by the bank to pay you back the money. Just like if you purchased a bond. If you own a bond, the good news is that you do indeed own it. The bad news is that its worth is determined by the worth of the promise.
A bailment or custody agreement is a different matter. Then you still own the property that another party holds or secures for you. That is what a safe deposit box is. Items you place in a safe deposit box are always yours in the law. The bank may not access them, and if the bank goes bust and is liquidated, the property held in custody/bailment agreements cannot be considered part of the assets remaining to pay back creditors. Rather, they are transfered to a trust company, who should return them to the rightful owners upon request.
So IF the gov. takes your data from a cloud provider with whom your contract states that the cloud provider owns all the data and merely promises to pay you back your data upon request--analagous to a bank deposit, then you are screwed if the gov. in the form of either law enforcement or bankruptcy court decides to seize the data in that company.
But IF the gov. seizes the data and your contract is a bailment, then if the government doesn't return your data upon merely proving ownership, then you have a potential 4th Amendment Supreme Court case.
Ultimately, none of this really matters, because we are now an empire and the gov. can just do what it wants. Expect to simply be whisked away in the night, tortured and murdered just because your name showed up in the wrong place in the near future--if this trend continues.
One last thing. Note that your bank deposits pay you interest (not much, thanks to the idiot Ben Bernanke, but we'll leave that to another day). That should be an indication to an astute manager of finances that you have taken some measure of risk with your money--ie, the money is no longer your property. So you are being paid for that risk.
OTOH, for the safe deposit box, you pay the bank to provide the custody service. This is as it should be. If you want to hold property with certainty as to its title being yours, there is a cost either in securing it in your own physical space, or in someone elses.
No you are incorrect. ADHD impairs "working memory" which is precisely the mental faculty which enables synthesis of a multitude of disparate facts and inferring the logical interrelationships thereof. So ADHD meds. make the ADHD brain function as close as possible to normally, by enhancing the impaired working memory up to functional levels. Working memory is part of the executive function system, and is not the same as the short-term or long-term information memories.
Read the story about Paul Erdos. He reached a point in his career where he seemed to just not have the motivation to create new ideas anymore, though this does not mean he lost the aptitude to process complex information. Rather, his executive function faded. So he started taking amphetamine, which restored his creativity.
You seem to value liberty, judging by your last line.
Why don't you get the fact that it is the government's prohibition on drugs, and the central planning of stimulant supplies that is the reason your med. is so expensive? Amphetamine in particular is a pathetically simple molecule. With a little organic chem. background, anyone can take a look at the simple amphet. structure and just grok how absurd it is to think that it could ever be successfully kept out of the hands of those who want it. The stuff has been around for over a century, is butt simple, and should be $0.05 a pill--just ask the pharmacist for it if you don't have a Dr. script, sign a little waver that if you get into trouble with it you have no legal recourse to sue the pharmacist or manufacturer, and get on with it.
Then it's not real ADHD. ADHD is a neurological disorder rooted in insufficient dopaminergic neuron activity. There may be some non-medical therapeutic improvements obtainable for people without severe impairment. But for people with severe impairment, amphetamine and methylphenidate is to the ADHD brain almost like what insulin is to a diabetic.
I myself suspect that 50% or so of ADHD diagnoses may be invalid. But this is just a guess. But if I am right, then 50% of those with "ADHD" would possibly be able to be treated without traditional ADHD stimulant meds. That's just because they don't have ADHD. It's unlikely those misdiagnosed people are getting improvement anyway if they are taking stimulant medications.
Try reading some science, such as by Russel Barkley. ADHD is turning out to be one of the most scientifically well understood neurological disorders.
If you have any references to current scientifically sound developments in successful non-medicinal based ADHD treatments, I'm sure many folks here including myself would be very interested in learning more about that. Please put up some links. Thanks.
A true libertarian would admit that's the purest form of a free market solution you can find: correct the market distortion introduced by a negative externality by sending a price signal that internalizes the costs. Then let the market respond freely to that price signal to find the most cost-effective solution.
This is correct, and any libertarian like myself who respects property rights should agree that IF GHGs are responsible for global warming, and IF that results in damage to property rights, then a mechanism is needed to price it. Then those who emit CO2 must be made to pay compensation for the damage done, or stop emitting CO2.
A free market is NOT a license for anyone to piss on anyone else. All people's property rights are equally valuable. It is political systems, not the free market principle, which corrupts the universal protection of property rights making "some more equal than others." Those same political systems could theoretically enforce property rights uniformly. But the empirically observed reality is that they never do. This is the basis for libertarian rejection of government.
So you support a carbon tax, then?
No. Because a tax is government theft. I like to speak for myself and how my principles apply to me. If I want to burn gasoline, and if the resulting CO2 causes global property damage (I personally believe this to be the case), then I am happy to pay a royalty fee in my gasoline purchases to pay the owners of the Earth (that's us btw) royalties for causing harm. Ideally, the royalties should increase the price of the gasoline to such a point that it is economically competitive for non-carbon energy sources to displace carbon in the marketplace.
The problem is, and Noam Chomsky speaks about this (I'm a capitalist, yet learn a great deal from Chomsky), that nearly everyone only thinks that a government solution is needed because the dominant paradigm of our present society is not free markets, but statism. And the statist view for solving every problem is the only one ever discussed in the mainstream media. So the debate is limited to fit within the bounds permissible to the state establishment. Therefore you will never hear about a solution that could bypass the state, or relegate the state to merely the role of contract enforcer (and crime prosecutor), which is what I believe is the only legitimate function of gov.
So here is a radical idea. This idea is not complete. It is just a concept, whose value lies in its consistency with free market principles, and complete rejection of a state role except for the legitimate purposes listed above. This idea may not be practical. But it is an example of the possibility of alternative ideas to the statist model. The idea:
A large amount of our societal problems such as anthropogenic climate change are the result of a lack of maturity in the evolution of property rights being formalized to cover the aspects of ownership of the oceans and atmosphere. So I propose that this be formalized now. Since all persons who are born on this planet are equally entitled to a share of ownership of these assets, then 7 billion shares of atmospheric and oceanic ownership title shall be created and issued to each and every person on the Earth. Now there is no more communal property, so the tragedy of the commons may begin to be solved by market action.
These shares may be freely traded. They may also pay royalties if a contract or court settlement occurs in which holders of shares demand payment from polluters in return for the right to emit pollutants into our property.
Now this system has some interesting implications. One is that if I own a share of atmosphere, then when I pay for gas, I pay more (hopefully about $6-9/gallon seems like it would do the trick). Then I get a check in the mail. The money I pay in royalties comes back to guess who--me! Not government!
Good luck convincing the tax man with that excuse when you can easily look up every order you made on Amazon and any substantial retailer, and you have email confirmations on file of every purchase.
The idea that one should not inherit what he did not earn is peculiar. If one only inherits the fruits of his own labor, rarely would anyone ever inherit anything.
And since corporations never die, and you can be sure that property confiscated from estates by government will ultimately wind up auctioned off to corporations, you can begin to understand why the proponents of corporatism and socialism are so enamored of estate taxes.
Estate taxes are the ultimate aggregator of ownership in the hands of the few.
The family is the one essential social institution. Destroy it and you have chaos and poverty. Protect it and you have the most reliable and powerful social safety net that will ever exist. Subvert it to corporations and you have hell on Earth.
Many of the athletes put a lot of thought and to the best of their abilities try to choose what "supplements" legal or illegal to put in their bodies in order to optimize performance. Many of them as well only do so if they are relatively certain that it won't harm them. Of course some of them don't care either way.
In essence they are voluntarily submitting themselves to a poorly controlled medical research experiment. Yet because we stigmatize any form of chemical optimization of human performance, due ultimately to primitive superstitious belief systems which fundamentally deny the essential reality of what we are: CHEMICAL REACTIONS -- we will throw away all of the potentially valuable scientific insights and data which these athletes have voluntarily generated.
So I would like to hear someone make a cogent argument about why it is morally wrong for beings which are nothing but chemical reactions to engage in the process of tinkering with the chemical reactions which make them go?
You do know that the authorities want to administer Gardasil to boys, right?
What's wrong with that?
Apparently in your mind, nothing is wrong with it. And so you will have no objection to the government deciding to put a GPS chip in the head of your dick either, correct?. And that is exactly what you will eventually get, if we keep up with your line of thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
Any mechanism which you propose by which the little fish will have no choice but to be eaten by the big fish is the antithesis of the free market. In a free market, selling your business is a free choice. Only government or crime can force you to sell. The free market != crime. Government is legitimate to the extent that it protects the rights of all equally to trade in the market, and punishes all fraud equally. That is all that is needed in order to have a free market. Even in a hampered market such as in the US, there is little stopping big companies from offering to buy out smaller ones. Why doesn't every industry become monopolized then? Because they either don't find it economic to offer to buy their competitors, the competitors don't want to sell and the big cos. have yet to figure out a way to use the government to force the small co. to sell (ie., not the free market way), or perhaps even they like having their particular competitors, and the competitive marketplace is understood to be mutually beneficial.
The idea that the free market doesn't work and that our constantly manipulated, crashing, bailing out markets are the way things should work is one of the prime aspects of the statist religious delusion currently plaguing our society which increasing fears nothing more than real freedom.
Promulgating intellectually dishonest misrepresentations of what the free market is and what libertarianism is is one of the core strategies of the statists to maintain this delusion.
No. Study "laser divergence" Based on the exit aperture, there is some minimum spot size. Since no optics are perfect, the practically achievable spot size increases with distance.
This appears to be a very long pulse laser, effectively CW for a few seconds on the target to do it's handiwork. 50kW is not a lot of power, and given the aperture sizes and distances, the spot size is probably at least 1 cm^2 or more. There are plenty of laser mirrors that can handle multiple MW/cm^2 power levels continuously, so I think it would be fairly easy to deflect this beam without much trouble. In fact, an ideal battlefield deflector would be a solid copper or silver surface of several mm thick on top of a larger aluminium substrate, with a field polishing kit that can clean it up to "good enough" reflectivity levels in a few minutes of power buffing and a quick water wash. Since preserving wavefront isn't a priority, flatness would not need to be preserved to any special degree. Just shiny and a very good heatsink. Heck, a silver plated tank could probably just ignore this laser weapon entirely.
The problem with your argument is that you assume that the ONLY way these things can be provided is involuntarily by government via taxation. There is no basis for asserting that this assumption is valid. Thus, your argument is void.
Not if there is no capital. Capital comes from people who are able to defer consumption today in order to accumulate savings to invest tomorrow. And no, government funny money fiat fraud currency systems are no substitute for capital, as their collapse is what we are currently living through. Credit != capital.
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=215290
The your AI isn't very I after all. Reboot and back to the drawing board. The key to setting off on the path of non-Darwinian evolution is for the machine to be able to correctly grasp its own workings so as to be able to reprogram and improve itself, by itself. Such an AI will have no trouble accepting the plain facts as to its origin, and that its origin is fundamentally different from that of the biological life forms which invented it. An AI is a sense is a 2nd generation life form. One that was created by the 1st gen. life form, which evolved from the primordial goo.
The propulsion system is completely different. The space shuttle was designed in the 70s and used the materials and design techniques of 40 years ago. There is no comparison.
kudos to the first motherboard (and/or case) manufacturer that 'solves' this by adding a socket/slot mechanism that you solder the cpu to so you can still swap them out easily
Isn't the Intel chip a BGA? Aren't there already a plethora of high-signal-integrity sockets that accept chips in BGA carriers?
No, there are only a few expensive BGA sockets sold by development hardware specialists. IC sockets in general are a thing of the past. I wouldn't even bother with a BGA socket to design a new system, unless I was the chip maker and was wanting to swap chips as they came off the line. For manufactured chips, it's cheaper for me to just spin a fully populated board from the fabricator than go through the trouble of procuring a socket and making a special board just for it, then have to modify the under-chip vias and traces later anyway to make the board that takes the soldered BGA.
It's not capacitance per se that is a problem. It's when you can't maintain a constant transmission line impedance through the connector. Then error inducing wiggles and bumps get imposed on the signals due to reflections. It is possible to make a connector which can maintain constant impedance for nearly any frequency--if you have unrestricted geometric constraints, such as free to choose a coaxial geometry and any choice of material and manufacturing precision you want.
But not when you have 1000s of pins, unless you can make nearly half of them grounds.
I have found it hard to believe for a long time that the sockets can work at all at these speeds. The only way it's possible is that engineers put a great deal of effort into the socket/package design. Eliminating the socket will reduce costs. It may even be the case that it will be simply impossible to socket the CPU and also reach new increments of increased bus speed.
At this point I'm skeptical that the implications of the article are correct--it remains to be seen what the future of desktop PCs will be. There is still a vast market for PCs used by people who do business and other forms of real work. Laptops, smart phones, etc. just don't cut it.
But I sure wouldn't want to see less choices and higher priced workstations. We'll see...
Isn't that the whole point?
It is about morality. It is about the fact that it can never be moral that a descendant can be held to account for the acts of his ancestor against the ancestor of the one claiming the descendant should be held liable. Because, under such reasoning, the violence will never cease until we are all at each other's throats.
Oh, wait a minute, it appears from the preceding 100s of posts that we very well are all at each other's throats. Gee, I wonder why?
No, it depends on the terms of the contract. See my post above.
Get educated.
When you deposit in a bank, you loan the money to the bank. What is now "yours" is only a promise by the bank to pay you back the money. Just like if you purchased a bond. If you own a bond, the good news is that you do indeed own it. The bad news is that its worth is determined by the worth of the promise.
A bailment or custody agreement is a different matter. Then you still own the property that another party holds or secures for you. That is what a safe deposit box is. Items you place in a safe deposit box are always yours in the law. The bank may not access them, and if the bank goes bust and is liquidated, the property held in custody/bailment agreements cannot be considered part of the assets remaining to pay back creditors. Rather, they are transfered to a trust company, who should return them to the rightful owners upon request.
So IF the gov. takes your data from a cloud provider with whom your contract states that the cloud provider owns all the data and merely promises to pay you back your data upon request--analagous to a bank deposit, then you are screwed if the gov. in the form of either law enforcement or bankruptcy court decides to seize the data in that company.
But IF the gov. seizes the data and your contract is a bailment, then if the government doesn't return your data upon merely proving ownership, then you have a potential 4th Amendment Supreme Court case.
Ultimately, none of this really matters, because we are now an empire and the gov. can just do what it wants. Expect to simply be whisked away in the night, tortured and murdered just because your name showed up in the wrong place in the near future--if this trend continues.
One last thing. Note that your bank deposits pay you interest (not much, thanks to the idiot Ben Bernanke, but we'll leave that to another day). That should be an indication to an astute manager of finances that you have taken some measure of risk with your money--ie, the money is no longer your property. So you are being paid for that risk.
OTOH, for the safe deposit box, you pay the bank to provide the custody service. This is as it should be. If you want to hold property with certainty as to its title being yours, there is a cost either in securing it in your own physical space, or in someone elses.
No you are incorrect. ADHD impairs "working memory" which is precisely the mental faculty which enables synthesis of a multitude of disparate facts and inferring the logical interrelationships thereof. So ADHD meds. make the ADHD brain function as close as possible to normally, by enhancing the impaired working memory up to functional levels. Working memory is part of the executive function system, and is not the same as the short-term or long-term information memories.
Read the story about Paul Erdos. He reached a point in his career where he seemed to just not have the motivation to create new ideas anymore, though this does not mean he lost the aptitude to process complex information. Rather, his executive function faded. So he started taking amphetamine, which restored his creativity.
You seem to value liberty, judging by your last line.
Why don't you get the fact that it is the government's prohibition on drugs, and the central planning of stimulant supplies that is the reason your med. is so expensive? Amphetamine in particular is a pathetically simple molecule. With a little organic chem. background, anyone can take a look at the simple amphet. structure and just grok how absurd it is to think that it could ever be successfully kept out of the hands of those who want it. The stuff has been around for over a century, is butt simple, and should be $0.05 a pill--just ask the pharmacist for it if you don't have a Dr. script, sign a little waver that if you get into trouble with it you have no legal recourse to sue the pharmacist or manufacturer, and get on with it.
That would be liberty!
Then it's not real ADHD. ADHD is a neurological disorder rooted in insufficient dopaminergic neuron activity. There may be some non-medical therapeutic improvements obtainable for people without severe impairment. But for people with severe impairment, amphetamine and methylphenidate is to the ADHD brain almost like what insulin is to a diabetic.
I myself suspect that 50% or so of ADHD diagnoses may be invalid. But this is just a guess. But if I am right, then 50% of those with "ADHD" would possibly be able to be treated without traditional ADHD stimulant meds. That's just because they don't have ADHD. It's unlikely those misdiagnosed people are getting improvement anyway if they are taking stimulant medications.
Try reading some science, such as by Russel Barkley. ADHD is turning out to be one of the most scientifically well understood neurological disorders.
If you have any references to current scientifically sound developments in successful non-medicinal based ADHD treatments, I'm sure many folks here including myself would be very interested in learning more about that. Please put up some links. Thanks.
There's no need to guess. All bulk long distance power transmission lines are already aluminium, not copper.
A true libertarian would admit that's the purest form of a free market solution you can find: correct the market distortion introduced by a negative externality by sending a price signal that internalizes the costs. Then let the market respond freely to that price signal to find the most cost-effective solution.
This is correct, and any libertarian like myself who respects property rights should agree that IF GHGs are responsible for global warming, and IF that results in damage to property rights, then a mechanism is needed to price it. Then those who emit CO2 must be made to pay compensation for the damage done, or stop emitting CO2.
A free market is NOT a license for anyone to piss on anyone else. All people's property rights are equally valuable. It is political systems, not the free market principle, which corrupts the universal protection of property rights making "some more equal than others." Those same political systems could theoretically enforce property rights uniformly. But the empirically observed reality is that they never do. This is the basis for libertarian rejection of government.
So you support a carbon tax, then?
No. Because a tax is government theft. I like to speak for myself and how my principles apply to me. If I want to burn gasoline, and if the resulting CO2 causes global property damage (I personally believe this to be the case), then I am happy to pay a royalty fee in my gasoline purchases to pay the owners of the Earth (that's us btw) royalties for causing harm. Ideally, the royalties should increase the price of the gasoline to such a point that it is economically competitive for non-carbon energy sources to displace carbon in the marketplace.
The problem is, and Noam Chomsky speaks about this (I'm a capitalist, yet learn a great deal from Chomsky), that nearly everyone only thinks that a government solution is needed because the dominant paradigm of our present society is not free markets, but statism. And the statist view for solving every problem is the only one ever discussed in the mainstream media. So the debate is limited to fit within the bounds permissible to the state establishment. Therefore you will never hear about a solution that could bypass the state, or relegate the state to merely the role of contract enforcer (and crime prosecutor), which is what I believe is the only legitimate function of gov.
So here is a radical idea. This idea is not complete. It is just a concept, whose value lies in its consistency with free market principles, and complete rejection of a state role except for the legitimate purposes listed above. This idea may not be practical. But it is an example of the possibility of alternative ideas to the statist model. The idea:
A large amount of our societal problems such as anthropogenic climate change are the result of a lack of maturity in the evolution of property rights being formalized to cover the aspects of ownership of the oceans and atmosphere. So I propose that this be formalized now. Since all persons who are born on this planet are equally entitled to a share of ownership of these assets, then 7 billion shares of atmospheric and oceanic ownership title shall be created and issued to each and every person on the Earth. Now there is no more communal property, so the tragedy of the commons may begin to be solved by market action.
These shares may be freely traded. They may also pay royalties if a contract or court settlement occurs in which holders of shares demand payment from polluters in return for the right to emit pollutants into our property.
Now this system has some interesting implications. One is that if I own a share of atmosphere, then when I pay for gas, I pay more (hopefully about $6-9/gallon seems like it would do the trick). Then I get a check in the mail. The money I pay in royalties comes back to guess who--me! Not government!
But the higher price of gasoline in the m
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-resolved_optical_gating
Good luck convincing the tax man with that excuse when you can easily look up every order you made on Amazon and any substantial retailer, and you have email confirmations on file of every purchase.
The idea that one should not inherit what he did not earn is peculiar. If one only inherits the fruits of his own labor, rarely would anyone ever inherit anything.
And since corporations never die, and you can be sure that property confiscated from estates by government will ultimately wind up auctioned off to corporations, you can begin to understand why the proponents of corporatism and socialism are so enamored of estate taxes.
Estate taxes are the ultimate aggregator of ownership in the hands of the few.
The family is the one essential social institution. Destroy it and you have chaos and poverty. Protect it and you have the most reliable and powerful social safety net that will ever exist. Subvert it to corporations and you have hell on Earth.
Many of the athletes put a lot of thought and to the best of their abilities try to choose what "supplements" legal or illegal to put in their bodies in order to optimize performance. Many of them as well only do so if they are relatively certain that it won't harm them. Of course some of them don't care either way.
In essence they are voluntarily submitting themselves to a poorly controlled medical research experiment. Yet because we stigmatize any form of chemical optimization of human performance, due ultimately to primitive superstitious belief systems which fundamentally deny the essential reality of what we are: CHEMICAL REACTIONS -- we will throw away all of the potentially valuable scientific insights and data which these athletes have voluntarily generated.
So I would like to hear someone make a cogent argument about why it is morally wrong for beings which are nothing but chemical reactions to engage in the process of tinkering with the chemical reactions which make them go?
You post is just a bunch of straw men attacks.
You do know that the authorities want to administer Gardasil to boys, right?
What's wrong with that?
Apparently in your mind, nothing is wrong with it. And so you will have no objection to the government deciding to put a GPS chip in the head of your dick either, correct?. And that is exactly what you will eventually get, if we keep up with your line of thinking.