If the gov't is prevented from collecting taxes on production, so no more income taxes, no more payroll taxes, no more corporate taxes, then the production is not going to be limited artificially by these impediments.
If simultaneously the gov't is prevented from destroying the value of money, by printing them and by setting fake interest rates, then all of a sudden the gov't bonds become an ATTRACTIVE opportunity for people, who do NOT want to be in the stock market.
Yes, most people shouldn't even be in the stock market, they are forced into the stock market by the gov't regulations and inflation.
But if the bonds paid the real rates of return, then the majority of people could buy gov't bonds and hold on to them for the return, and that would mean that they would be bullish on the economy of their own country.
So the taxes that still would be collected off the transactions (like sales taxes, duties, levies, they are very much Constitutional), these taxes could be used to pay the interest on the gov't bonds.
Now, if the bonds paid the interest, maybe 5-6%, but there was no income taxes, no gov't regulations, then the growth of economy would directly mean more transactions, more taxes from those transactions, more taxes collected FROM CONSUMPTION, because all legal taxes are really consumption taxes, not production taxes.
This would mean that production would keep growing and the consumption would pay for consumption.
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Imagine that, a growing economy, more and more savings (high interest rates), so more and more credit available for various business ventures. The more business activity - the more taxes are collected from transactions.
With high efficiencies in the business due to lack of gov't protections and regulations and thus lack of monopolies and price distortions, the people would be extremely productive, would be working much less than they are now, which, by the way, what the initial industrialization allowed in USA.
People sometimes say: what would happen if ALL jobs were automated, all production would be automated? Well, people would be freed to come up with new things to produce, something that cannot be automated, because the concept doesn't exist yet.
But what about the TRANSITION period? Well that is the point of owning part of the economy via the government bonds (or stock market) - you are invested in the economy with these bonds, stocks, and you are paid DIVIDENDS.
DIVIDENDS that are paid to the investors, and everybody becomes an investor.
--
Here you go, this is how the very much Marxist utopia becomes a reality VIA FREE MARKET CAPITALISM.
All production is owned by the people simply through investments. But the difference between this and all of the forced attempts at Communism and Socialism is that it is NOT FORCED.
This is purely voluntarily, nobody is forced to buy investments, nobody is forced to buy gov't bonds, but if the bonds return a good rate, you'd be stupid not to be invested.
The reason that people are 'not participating' is because there is no capital left to make them participate and there are too many incentives not to participate.
I have another fewcomments of-course, that show the absurdity of the welfare situation:
A single mother on welfare will not take a job that pays under 100K and even then it's not a guarantee at all that she would choose to take the job over staying on welfare.
Welfare for a single mother amounts to about 45K in cash and benefits. Even if she is offered 50K salary this means that she gets a 100% marginal tax, she has to give up 45K of money and benefi
(I continue with my second account, submitted the first comment too early).
... the Green movement, it doesn't matter. It's better to die than to become what she advocates. What is the purpose of living as a slave, there is no reason to allow that.
I would add one more thing though, of-course we do not have to make that choice. We do not have to see the planet cook IF we get rid of the socialist ideology.
The completely nonsensical idea of 'social contract' is what is killing the individual liberty and principles and it is that very idea is what is preventing the solutions from being developed in the free market and without the completely wrong ideology of collectivism.
USSR was not exactly environmentally friendly. Neither was Communist China, neither was Fascist Germany.
Collectivism does not produce good outcomes economically and thus environmentally. If we want to PREVENT the planet from cooking and going to hell, we have to fight against collectivism and allow individual liberties and free market principles to search for solutions.
1. I doubt you can have a study that covers every profession and job and that's what you'd have to do, you can't rely on figures for nurses to be relevant to figures for engineers or for drivers or for shit shovelers, or whatever.
2. It's always an employer's problem since the employer has to figure out what to do when the productivity goes down and productivity goes down with every sick person. Thus it makes sense to punish people for either being sick in the first place or for coming to work while sick and spreading the disease.
3. Giving out compensation for being sick is just a way to promote being sick. People are very good at finding their own efficiencies in life and they will find every way in which they can get more with doing less and they will keep doing exactly that.
I think what employers should do is gradually reduce any compensation for sick leave while prohibiting people from coming to work and spreading communicable disease. Whether employers decide to do this with more compensation or less or whatever the mechanisms are depends on that industry and that particular employer, because it's very doubtful that you can just lump all the various jobs out there into a single pile and say that it is all the same, that a job is a job. A job is not a job, they are different and there are different environments and conditions and requirements, etc. Can't simply compare it in a 'study'. It would be a waste of time and money and wouldn't sway employer's opinions at all. What employers should do is look at different things that are tried in the industry and try and find a balance for their own situation.
"Stay home while you are sick" should be the policy and there should be a sliding scale of pay so that the longer you stay at home the less and less money you are going to get one way or another. Why should people be able not to go to work and get paid while not working?
Sure, they are sick, it's not the employer's problem.
You basically shouldn't be allowed by the employer at your work place while you are sick and your pay should be reduced while you are on sick leave.
Tax levels for the wealthy are at historic highs, not historic lows. Historic lows are 0. That links to my journal entry, where I point at IRS PDF files containing data from 1954 to now and this data actually shows the exact opposite picture than what the current crop of socialists and their favorite politicians and news anchors like to promote.
In 1958 0.178% of all tax filers out of about 45.6Million paid a tax at 35% or higher. That's 8549 people who were in the highest tax brackets. Out of them 236 paid some taxes in 91% bracket even. Their total contribution to the paid taxes was 3.5%.
Compare that to now, when the top rates are 35%. 2.5Million people or 2% of all tax filers pay 35% or more in taxes! They pay 41.5% of all income taxes (and top 5% pays 59% of all income taxes, while bottom 47% pays 3%)
Going back to 1950 levels of taxes is preferable for the top earners who would pay almost no taxes, which was possible because every purchase could be deducted from all earnings. All losses could be deducted dollar for dollar. Investments were relatively stagnant, I explain why in this comment.
Of-course going back to 1950 levels of taxation means that the middle class and the working poor pay most of the taxes.
As to 'productivity gains', more nonsense that comes out of lack of understanding. The workers in USA or Europe are not growing their productivity. Productivity is a function of capital that is applied to workforce (better tools, more equipment, etc.) The workers in USA have less and less capital applied to them, instead the workers in other countries where the goods are actually produced see the capital flow in and make them more productive.
The productivity gains do increase workers' purchasing power but not in USA. Of-course the Chinese have another problem, their gov't steals their productivity with inflation (buying up US dollars and debt, which creates inflation and makes worker's compensation less valuable).
What the owners are getting is gain in the profit due to higher productivity of their new workforce if compared to the Western workforce.
As to corporate profits - as long as the corporations can avoid being taxed in USA and as long as they can keep their assets away from US dollars they will see higher savings. Of-course they can't import their earnings into USA or confiscatory levels of taxes will be applied.
As to companies that get gov't bail out and stimulus money, that's a different story altogether, it's a travesty, never should have happened. But you can't do anything about that as long as you expect gov't to "provide general werlare" in the first place, because that is exactly what gives gov't power to get around all the laws, around the Constitution, do things that are unauthorized. Can't expect to give gov't the green light to be above law on some issues but not sell that power to those who are willing to pay (and who are well connected).
1930s economic collapse was created by gov't, by the Fed and Treasury and gov't spending, and then gov't 'came to the rescue' and the mob gave the gov't the authority to steal individual liberties, as long as gov't promoted the cause of big labour. You reap what you sow.
Precious metals are just as worthless as fiat currencies in most scenarios where a collapse occurs.
- you have no clue. There were so many collapses even over the last 40 years, that there is enough data, plenty of it that shows the exact opposite effect. Where the fiat becomes worthless (or near worthless by losing much of its purchasing power), people move into real assets, including precious metals (at least those people who can). In fact barter comes back, people barter things and bartering in precious metals is very easy. There is a reason that during huge wars people avoid currencies altogether and just barter in things, including gold and silver. If diamonds were easy to split into smaller and smaller (but still valuable) quantities, people would be using diamonds, as things are, they can use diamonds but it's nowhere near as efficient as using gold.
By the way, before FDR's 6102 order of 1933 people just walked with gold coins and used those for trade. You can always buy things with gold except when the gov't makes it illegal (like it was in USA once even the gold contract clause was prohibited and in USSR 1917 to 1921, then a short period of time during 'NEP' (New Economic Policy), where the gov't gave way a bit but then since 1927 the policy became extremely strict and violent towards people who 'undermined the Soviet economy by conducting trade in gold and other currencies', you couldn't do it legally if you weren't the central bank).
You are brought up in a system that came out of the period where it was illegal to use gold, that's your view of the real money, you don't understand it, you don't understand inflation, you don't understand real savings, you don't understand capitalism. It's not completely your fault, maybe only that you are not interested enough in understanding it, but obviously with enough propaganda on all levels, fromgov't to even the films that you watch, it's not surprising.
You are right, but as always in such cases you have to admit that in order to use threading and parallel processing in the applications you have to apply more effort, so it is an issue of managing complexity, it is an issue of cost and time and quality.
Today we can already rely on many tools that do multi-threading (processing of multiple user requests for instance, and a user doesn't have to be defined as a person, it can be another piece of code), that's why we build so much software as servers and servers running services.
Of-course sometimes we have to actively seek parallel execution, not rely on a container or on a compiler. I am going to give an example, and if somebody knows how a compiler would be able to figure this out, please tell me.
Imagine you need to build a report (at the end represented as a graph comparing performance of multiple entities across fairly long time scales). The data comes from a database, let's talk specifics. I have to build a report comparing sales and profitability of multiple items on a graph, for example I can compare sales and profitability of a number of brands and of some suppliers and of some product categories (and all of this goes onto 3 graphs, 1 comparing sales by items, 1 comparing sales by dollar amounts and one comparing by profits).
I am going to build this data across 1 year of time for example across 15 stores and have maybe 6 lines on the charts. So now what? Do it all sequentially once, just build the part of the application that does all of it in a sequence. Of-course it would take some time to have it all done this way, imagine it takes an hour to complete if done in a sequence. You don't want to force anybody to wait that long, so you break the problem into smaller ones, split the data into individual stores and across the stores split the data collection by the different data types (different brands, different suppliers, different categories).
So if there will be 6 chart lines on a graph across 15 stores, this already means you can load it as 90 individual threads all trying to pull data from the database on their own and then storing the results in the server RAM to combine it all once all threads finish. If you do it all right, you can get the data and build the graph in under 2 minutes now, maybe less, it depends on the other things the system is busy doing.
So you have this system, but everybody and their grandma believes that it is the wrong thing to do, to manage threads on your own, that you should delegate it to the container, you should have thread pools, then you should have queues, etc.etc., maybe they are right or maybe it doesn't matter until the system hits a certain load, at which point it will have to be done, because if you don't, you'll just trash the server.
I don't believe that what I just described can be done with a compiler figuring this out, the threading is done on a level that is too high, it's not a single procedure that is being multi-threaded, this spans too much code. The compiler has to understand the purpose of the data collection and figure out a correct manner to parameterize calls to the database, recombine the data after it is collected properly.
This maybe could be done with a compiler if the system was written in a much higher level language but not when it's built with a general purpose language. Although maybe it could be done with a general purpose language if it could be supplemented by some meta-language, that described purpose of what is done to the compiler in architectural sense.
---- By the way, Moore's law also took into account minimum component cost, so he was talking about complexity of components at the minimum cost, which also brings economics into the equation. It's not only that the number of components on an IC is (or was) doubling (and now it's about multiple cores), but it's that in order for this to be accepted, the cost of production cannot expand by the same factor, the cost of production should stay minimal, the increase should be a constant, not a function (which it is, the constant cost is the cost of development of the architecture and the cost of building a fab).
My question is (and I understand if you are hesitant to voice anything on this matter) is your company still in your hands?
Your company represents a valuable asset, have the 'right people' (somebody from VTB and such) approached you and asked you to hand over or even just sell part of the company, so that they can have their hands in it?
A more correct question would be: when have they done it and how much did you have to 'share' (percentage wise)?
The Real Internet has to be created, just like real money, this one will not be under the rule of any nation State or any combination of any nation States. It will not be the best Internet, the fastest with the most whizbang, but it will be what it is supposed to be. It can only be done if businesses participate, but businesses cannot participate as long as the governments can punish businesses, tax them out of existence, regulate them out of existence for any pretence reason without disclosing the real reason - support of the real Internet.
A real Internet has to be self-sustainable, that is why businesses must participate. If businesses do not participate, then this Internet can only exist on donations and it is not clear that there is a model that can be sustained based on donations.
Thus every tax based on productivity, every business regulation and obviously control of money is a way to control the real Internet, either to prevent it from existing or to control what it is by government agenda, and no Internet is real if it is controlled by governments.
---
(oh, and do not listen to those, who will disparage the message because it is brought through any specific messenger. So Julian gives this interview on RT, do not dismiss the Interview because the channel used to be named 'Russia Today', treat with suspicion any messenger and message that disparages the ideas that Julian is presenting here based on the media he used).
- yeah, what you mean by that is that Germany pays for the food while various Southern States live off of other people's charity (credit).
How is Greece doing, by the way? I am in Germany right now, I know people who go there on vacations, apparently on the islands they are not treated as 'nazis' the way that Merkel was greeted back in October this year. You know, a leader of a country that actually gives out cash to the socialists.
--
And as to your assertion that European countries are the 'proper' ones, it's funny. It's funny because of how many Americans ran away from those proper countries for freedom. Not for free education, free social assistance (welfare) or free food.
No, for individual freedom of being able to live and not be harassed by their tyrannical governments.
There are so many different algorithms for hard disk seek, read and write functions that I think it would be a complete waste not to look at them when creating an elevator algorithm. Look it up, I think it's all there.
You are buying this nonsense hook line and sinker. Assange and wikileaks DID NOT COMMIT ANY CRIME.
If they were handed documents that somebody else retrieved by any means, even illegal means, you can say that they may have some moral or ethical obligations (and I personally would disagree with that as well), however you can't claim that they are criminally liable, even under some espionage act.
If this was the case that a journalist could be tried, persecuted, jailed for data that he releases after he got the data that he himself didn't actually steal from anywhere, then how would any journalism be done exactly?
Everything that makes a good journalist report has some data in it that some interested parties do not want to see revealed. Please explain again how is it possible that a journalist that gets his hands on some data can be declared a criminal when in fact he himself never did anything actually to take that information from a secured facility, he never broke any laws to retrieve that information in the first place.
You are buying into the propaganda and you are probably not even noticing it, it's in your wording, so it's subconscious.
Can there be a compromise on core principles? I don't think so.
If the core principle is freedom for the individual, regardless of what type of freedom it is, social or economic, then how can there be a compromise either with those, who promote social tyranny by government or with those who promote economic tyranny by government?
What is the middle ground between these 2 positions? 1. Slavery is a good thing. 2. Slavery is unacceptable.
There is no middle ground, there can be no compromise on that position. You can't be a little pregnant and you can be somewhat for slavery.
People must be free to participate in any gambling they like, it's our fundamental right as individuals to ingest any foods we like, to fuck whoever we like and to gamble against whoever we like.
Now, if YOU do not want to participate in a market that is not regulated by some regulator of your choice, that is again, your freedom.
What probably will happen eventually is a Bitcoin (or similar) based system , where bets are recorded in blocks in the network with money deposited into the blocks and then with payouts being calculated automatically and automatically going to the addresses that must receive the money because they won on those bets. It's very complex, but probably doable.
Also if some Americans want to continue betting on Intrade, at this point they'll have to channel their bets through some proxies, some can use their friends, relatives, whoever they trust.
China doesn't have SS or Medicare and their military budget is tiny compared to USA and China actually is the world's biggest producer of all things people buy, so if the Chinese gov't stops buying US dollars from the Chinese exporter and thus stops printing renminbi to buy US dollars and stops buying US debt, all o a sudden the problem in USA becomes completely obvious: it can't buy anything that it doesn't manufacture, because nobody wants worthless dollars.
As to the Western nations with their health care plans, that's not a good model. Yes, right now USA spends much more and gets doubtful results than the Europeans for example, but Europe is already falling apart even based on its spending, which doesn't even have the type of military spending that USA does. The real solution of-course is to stop government from meddling in health care (and in pensions and in education and in banking and in finance, in money, interest rates, business) and get rid of income taxes and most regulations, licenses, labour and employment laws, price controls, all that nonsense.
It is also well known that entering WWII spent the US out of the Great depression, war keynesianism that is.
- no this is a common misconception, it's based on complete lack of understanding.
WWII didn't get USA out of the depression, it worsened the depression, it only put USA on a ration. Yes, people were brought to work in military factories and given token salaries, but so what? They didn't actually improve the economy with any of that, sure the bullets were needed to defeat the nazis, but economically it was still a waste and nobody wanted to buy bullets. People want cars, radios, shoes, better food, TVs, not bullets (well, unless they like that past time).
It's a myth that gov't can "spend out of recession", gov't can only increase inflation and debt, but it cannot spend out of recession. It's a rare thing, but sometimes even politicians admit it.
What actually ended the Great Depression in 1947 was government cutting its spending by 64% and cutting overall taxes by 32% and allowing the nationalised factories to return to normal. By the keynesian myth the returning soldiers would have 'restarted the depression' (which never ended until 1947), instead the women went back home and the 10,000,000 or so soldiers were cheap enough work force that the economy could restructure with government finally no longer crowding out all of the private businesses away from the credit. Of-course it helped that USA had intact infrastructure while others had to rebuild theirs.
Universal health care is a terrible idea even in principle, even based on morality, economically it's just one way to speed up the inevitable economic slow down and possibly a collapse based on it.
I suppose that the non-partisan in this story is used in the traditional sense, where there are only 2 parties, Ds vs Rs. How about the non-partisan software that supports ideas of Ls? I do mean libertarian ideas and actually even anarchist ones?
I spent a few hours learning about Bitcoin protocol and came up with an idea of using Bitcoins to vote in an elections. Then I typed this into a search engine: "Bitcoin based elections" and voila, as it often happens there were already hundreds or more pages on this topic. Apparently it is too obvious of a step for many people who looked at this currency system, to start thinking about elections being recorded in the same manner.
So what would the Ds and Rs do when confronted with a third party (or non-party) solutions to existing problems? Maybe distributed information systems and software will actually end up solving the 'two party' problem and actually the very problem of the centralized government itself? Why have centralized government of any type in the world where people can handle information dissemination and currency exchange and payments not only without any central planning but actually by directly designing solutions and systems to go around such controls?
TOR, any form of encrypted file exchange (darknets), torrents, Wiki pages and Wiki leaks, mobile platforms, decentralized currencies, banking and investment. Is central government really that important for people who don't see a role for it in currency any longer?
No he is right, the government is illegitimate now (that is the federal court, correct?) Even the electing majority likely is not with the gov't on this, it is doubtful.
The federal governmen exists to protect the law, which is the constitution, and this shows that the law is not protected but violated and this is not the only display of the violation. NDAA, Patriot Act, Kill List - even this are enough to see that the law is violated, now this. The States can nullify the fed, the States ratified the union and they can end it if he federal government no longer behaves in accordance with its ratified role.
Again, multiple failures on your part. You have no idea what rights are and you don't understand the difference between individual rights and a criminal code. Criminal code does not require any government to be set in place. Pretty much any group of people figures out their own criminal code, have done this since there were people on this planet.
As an individual you have all the rights (and the criminal code only describes penalties that you may incur in case you initiate violence against other individuals, nothing else), but as an individual you have all the rights by default against the collective.
The Constitution then describes under what scenarios and what the procedures are for the government to diminish your rights under certain conditions.
Thus the Constitution empowers a government to certain actions and without this document government has no power at all (no consent of the governed). Think of the Constitution as the white list of what government is allowed to do. All other things are prohibited to the government by default.
Individuals on the other hand have all the rights in the face of the collective (the gov't, the society) and if they are limited in what they do by the criminal code, it is not because they violate rights of other individuals. Individuals cannot by definition violate rights of others, but they can initiate violence that may cause penalties brought up against them because of the criminal code and whatever judicial and punitive system that exists (again, totally unnecessary for this to be a government function).
As an individual you cannot violate any rights of any other individuals it is impossible by definition. But you can cause them harm and then it's up to the criminal system to deal with you.
Rights can only be violated by the collective and only individuals have inalienable rights.
So I have a client that I moved to GNU/Linux, to Fedora and OpenBSD servers and switched 3/4 of their user machines to Ubuntu because I provide software that is OS agnostic (well, actually it's Java, whatever).
They just opened another store, they want a similar setup. OK, the 11.04 is no longer supported, let's try 11.10. I work with their admin (it's all remote), he is unexperienced with Linux/Unix in general, but hey, they are saving money on licenses for the OS, antivirus and office software and hopefully this truly means fewer vectors of attack that stupid users can inflict on a machine. However 11.10 has Unity and no Gnome at all, it has to be installed separately. Fine, I tell him to install it, little did I know that he installed Gnome 3 (which installs by default).
Oh fuck, so he can't find 'System' option on the task bar and parts of it are scattered around, (some are in Applications, some are on the user icon, whatever), but some are missing, actually not there. In any case, we are looking at different distros right now, something that will be like Gnome 2 and something that promises STABILITY OF USER INTERFACE.
People have to be trained on a GNU/Linux distro as is at work environment, they don't even know what the fuck it is, what they are looking at. Having the most visible parts of it change doesn't help at all.
The software that I provide OTOH is stupidly simple from POV of a user, I don't do any generic menus, I don't provide any functions or change of settings that end users (non-admins) can modify, but the app looks the same and it's simple, no icons even. It's all text and if it say: 'inventory' it's inventory and it's always in the same place as it was before regardless of the functional update.
No need for any protections for anybody. People do research and invent stuff on their own as long as the economy's sound. What really need to be protected is the economy against the politicians. IBM, Intel, Apple, etc. research and innovate and won't stop without patent protection. Individuals rarely invent without companies but if they do they can make much more profit by selling to producing companies though some try and bring a product to market, which is again more rare. If a large firm wants to steal it will steal even with patent law and most likely will get away with it. The point is not to cover all corner cases, the point is to have a good enough system and this is not it.will
There is no reason to have any government regulations around mobile payment systems at all, the providers are interested in making sure that they have customers and customers are interested in not being scammed, and thus the providers have to figure out how to ensure safety and security and customers and clients have to make sure that they check that the company they are dealing with has good ratings by the public (and today it's a much easier thing to do than ever before in history).
I actually read TFA and nowhere there it mentioned just what exactly the regulators are interested in doing, but it is obvious that their concern is not actual safety of consumers and clients, obviously their main concern is that they may not be able to track transactions that they want to track, and they want to track all transactions.
They'll tell you anything, it's about drugs, it's about pedophiles, it's about terrorists.
You know what it is about? It's about money and your ability not to be scammed by the very government that pretends it has your 'best interests' in mind. Do you know what they say about best intentions? Well, that's what it is when the intentions are 'good', what about the time when the intentions are actually not good at all in the first place?
Slashdot Mirror
An inch? For females, right? Come on!
I have the solution for the question that you raise, of-course it was not liked here.
relevant part:
If the gov't is prevented from collecting taxes on production, so no more income taxes, no more payroll taxes, no more corporate taxes, then the production is not going to be limited artificially by these impediments.
If simultaneously the gov't is prevented from destroying the value of money, by printing them and by setting fake interest rates, then all of a sudden the gov't bonds become an ATTRACTIVE opportunity for people, who do NOT want to be in the stock market.
Yes, most people shouldn't even be in the stock market, they are forced into the stock market by the gov't regulations and inflation.
But if the bonds paid the real rates of return, then the majority of people could buy gov't bonds and hold on to them for the return, and that would mean that they would be bullish on the economy of their own country.
So the taxes that still would be collected off the transactions (like sales taxes, duties, levies, they are very much Constitutional), these taxes could be used to pay the interest on the gov't bonds.
Now, if the bonds paid the interest, maybe 5-6%, but there was no income taxes, no gov't regulations, then the growth of economy would directly mean more transactions, more taxes from those transactions, more taxes collected FROM CONSUMPTION, because all legal taxes are really consumption taxes, not production taxes.
This would mean that production would keep growing and the consumption would pay for consumption.
---
Imagine that, a growing economy, more and more savings (high interest rates), so more and more credit available for various business ventures. The more business activity - the more taxes are collected from transactions.
With high efficiencies in the business due to lack of gov't protections and regulations and thus lack of monopolies and price distortions, the people would be extremely productive, would be working much less than they are now, which, by the way, what the initial industrialization allowed in USA.
People sometimes say: what would happen if ALL jobs were automated, all production would be automated? Well, people would be freed to come up with new things to produce, something that cannot be automated, because the concept doesn't exist yet.
But what about the TRANSITION period? Well that is the point of owning part of the economy via the government bonds (or stock market) - you are invested in the economy with these bonds, stocks, and you are paid DIVIDENDS.
DIVIDENDS that are paid to the investors, and everybody becomes an investor.
--
Here you go, this is how the very much Marxist utopia becomes a reality VIA FREE MARKET CAPITALISM.
All production is owned by the people simply through investments. But the difference between this and all of the forced attempts at Communism and Socialism is that it is NOT FORCED.
This is purely voluntarily, nobody is forced to buy investments, nobody is forced to buy gov't bonds, but if the bonds return a good rate, you'd be stupid not to be invested.
The reason that people are 'not participating' is because there is no capital left to make them participate and there are too many incentives not to participate.
I have another few comments of-course, that show the absurdity of the welfare situation:
A single mother on welfare will not take a job that pays under 100K and even then it's not a guarantee at all that she would choose to take the job over staying on welfare.
Welfare for a single mother amounts to about 45K in cash and benefits. Even if she is offered 50K salary this means that she gets a 100% marginal tax, she has to give up 45K of money and benefi
(I continue with my second account, submitted the first comment too early).
... the Green movement, it doesn't matter. It's better to die than to become what she advocates. What is the purpose of living as a slave, there is no reason to allow that.
I would add one more thing though, of-course we do not have to make that choice. We do not have to see the planet cook IF we get rid of the socialist ideology.
The completely nonsensical idea of 'social contract' is what is killing the individual liberty and principles and it is that very idea is what is preventing the solutions from being developed in the free market and without the completely wrong ideology of collectivism.
USSR was not exactly environmentally friendly. Neither was Communist China, neither was Fascist Germany.
Collectivism does not produce good outcomes economically and thus environmentally. If we want to PREVENT the planet from cooking and going to hell, we have to fight against collectivism and allow individual liberties and free market principles to search for solutions.
1. I doubt you can have a study that covers every profession and job and that's what you'd have to do, you can't rely on figures for nurses to be relevant to figures for engineers or for drivers or for shit shovelers, or whatever.
2. It's always an employer's problem since the employer has to figure out what to do when the productivity goes down and productivity goes down with every sick person. Thus it makes sense to punish people for either being sick in the first place or for coming to work while sick and spreading the disease.
3. Giving out compensation for being sick is just a way to promote being sick. People are very good at finding their own efficiencies in life and they will find every way in which they can get more with doing less and they will keep doing exactly that.
I think what employers should do is gradually reduce any compensation for sick leave while prohibiting people from coming to work and spreading communicable disease. Whether employers decide to do this with more compensation or less or whatever the mechanisms are depends on that industry and that particular employer, because it's very doubtful that you can just lump all the various jobs out there into a single pile and say that it is all the same, that a job is a job. A job is not a job, they are different and there are different environments and conditions and requirements, etc. Can't simply compare it in a 'study'. It would be a waste of time and money and wouldn't sway employer's opinions at all. What employers should do is look at different things that are tried in the industry and try and find a balance for their own situation.
"Stay home while you are sick" should be the policy and there should be a sliding scale of pay so that the longer you stay at home the less and less money you are going to get one way or another. Why should people be able not to go to work and get paid while not working?
Sure, they are sick, it's not the employer's problem.
You basically shouldn't be allowed by the employer at your work place while you are sick and your pay should be reduced while you are on sick leave.
Tax levels for the wealthy are at historic highs, not historic lows. Historic lows are 0. That links to my journal entry, where I point at IRS PDF files containing data from 1954 to now and this data actually shows the exact opposite picture than what the current crop of socialists and their favorite politicians and news anchors like to promote.
In 1958 0.178% of all tax filers out of about 45.6Million paid a tax at 35% or higher. That's 8549 people who were in the highest tax brackets. Out of them 236 paid some taxes in 91% bracket even. Their total contribution to the paid taxes was 3.5%.
Compare that to now, when the top rates are 35%. 2.5Million people or 2% of all tax filers pay 35% or more in taxes! They pay 41.5% of all income taxes (and top 5% pays 59% of all income taxes, while bottom 47% pays 3%)
Going back to 1950 levels of taxes is preferable for the top earners who would pay almost no taxes, which was possible because every purchase could be deducted from all earnings. All losses could be deducted dollar for dollar. Investments were relatively stagnant, I explain why in this comment.
Of-course going back to 1950 levels of taxation means that the middle class and the working poor pay most of the taxes.
As to 'productivity gains', more nonsense that comes out of lack of understanding. The workers in USA or Europe are not growing their productivity. Productivity is a function of capital that is applied to workforce (better tools, more equipment, etc.) The workers in USA have less and less capital applied to them, instead the workers in other countries where the goods are actually produced see the capital flow in and make them more productive.
The productivity gains do increase workers' purchasing power but not in USA. Of-course the Chinese have another problem, their gov't steals their productivity with inflation (buying up US dollars and debt, which creates inflation and makes worker's compensation less valuable).
What the owners are getting is gain in the profit due to higher productivity of their new workforce if compared to the Western workforce.
As to corporate profits - as long as the corporations can avoid being taxed in USA and as long as they can keep their assets away from US dollars they will see higher savings. Of-course they can't import their earnings into USA or confiscatory levels of taxes will be applied.
As to companies that get gov't bail out and stimulus money, that's a different story altogether, it's a travesty, never should have happened. But you can't do anything about that as long as you expect gov't to "provide general werlare" in the first place, because that is exactly what gives gov't power to get around all the laws, around the Constitution, do things that are unauthorized. Can't expect to give gov't the green light to be above law on some issues but not sell that power to those who are willing to pay (and who are well connected).
1930s economic collapse was created by gov't, by the Fed and Treasury and gov't spending, and then gov't 'came to the rescue' and the mob gave the gov't the authority to steal individual liberties, as long as gov't promoted the cause of big labour. You reap what you sow.
Precious metals are just as worthless as fiat currencies in most scenarios where a collapse occurs.
- you have no clue. There were so many collapses even over the last 40 years, that there is enough data, plenty of it that shows the exact opposite effect. Where the fiat becomes worthless (or near worthless by losing much of its purchasing power), people move into real assets, including precious metals (at least those people who can). In fact barter comes back, people barter things and bartering in precious metals is very easy. There is a reason that during huge wars people avoid currencies altogether and just barter in things, including gold and silver. If diamonds were easy to split into smaller and smaller (but still valuable) quantities, people would be using diamonds, as things are, they can use diamonds but it's nowhere near as efficient as using gold.
By the way, before FDR's 6102 order of 1933 people just walked with gold coins and used those for trade. You can always buy things with gold except when the gov't makes it illegal (like it was in USA once even the gold contract clause was prohibited and in USSR 1917 to 1921, then a short period of time during 'NEP' (New Economic Policy), where the gov't gave way a bit but then since 1927 the policy became extremely strict and violent towards people who 'undermined the Soviet economy by conducting trade in gold and other currencies', you couldn't do it legally if you weren't the central bank).
You are brought up in a system that came out of the period where it was illegal to use gold, that's your view of the real money, you don't understand it, you don't understand inflation, you don't understand real savings, you don't understand capitalism. It's not completely your fault, maybe only that you are not interested enough in understanding it, but obviously with enough propaganda on all levels, from gov't to even the films that you watch, it's not surprising.
You are right, but as always in such cases you have to admit that in order to use threading and parallel processing in the applications you have to apply more effort, so it is an issue of managing complexity, it is an issue of cost and time and quality.
Today we can already rely on many tools that do multi-threading (processing of multiple user requests for instance, and a user doesn't have to be defined as a person, it can be another piece of code), that's why we build so much software as servers and servers running services.
Of-course sometimes we have to actively seek parallel execution, not rely on a container or on a compiler. I am going to give an example, and if somebody knows how a compiler would be able to figure this out, please tell me.
Imagine you need to build a report (at the end represented as a graph comparing performance of multiple entities across fairly long time scales). The data comes from a database, let's talk specifics. I have to build a report comparing sales and profitability of multiple items on a graph, for example I can compare sales and profitability of a number of brands and of some suppliers and of some product categories (and all of this goes onto 3 graphs, 1 comparing sales by items, 1 comparing sales by dollar amounts and one comparing by profits).
I am going to build this data across 1 year of time for example across 15 stores and have maybe 6 lines on the charts. So now what? Do it all sequentially once, just build the part of the application that does all of it in a sequence. Of-course it would take some time to have it all done this way, imagine it takes an hour to complete if done in a sequence. You don't want to force anybody to wait that long, so you break the problem into smaller ones, split the data into individual stores and across the stores split the data collection by the different data types (different brands, different suppliers, different categories).
So if there will be 6 chart lines on a graph across 15 stores, this already means you can load it as 90 individual threads all trying to pull data from the database on their own and then storing the results in the server RAM to combine it all once all threads finish. If you do it all right, you can get the data and build the graph in under 2 minutes now, maybe less, it depends on the other things the system is busy doing.
So you have this system, but everybody and their grandma believes that it is the wrong thing to do, to manage threads on your own, that you should delegate it to the container, you should have thread pools, then you should have queues, etc.etc., maybe they are right or maybe it doesn't matter until the system hits a certain load, at which point it will have to be done, because if you don't, you'll just trash the server.
I don't believe that what I just described can be done with a compiler figuring this out, the threading is done on a level that is too high, it's not a single procedure that is being multi-threaded, this spans too much code. The compiler has to understand the purpose of the data collection and figure out a correct manner to parameterize calls to the database, recombine the data after it is collected properly.
This maybe could be done with a compiler if the system was written in a much higher level language but not when it's built with a general purpose language. Although maybe it could be done with a general purpose language if it could be supplemented by some meta-language, that described purpose of what is done to the compiler in architectural sense.
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By the way, Moore's law also took into account minimum component cost, so he was talking about complexity of components at the minimum cost, which also brings economics into the equation. It's not only that the number of components on an IC is (or was) doubling (and now it's about multiple cores), but it's that in order for this to be accepted, the cost of production cannot expand by the same factor, the cost of production should stay minimal, the increase should be a constant, not a function (which it is, the constant cost is the cost of development of the architecture and the cost of building a fab).
My question is (and I understand if you are hesitant to voice anything on this matter) is your company still in your hands?
Your company represents a valuable asset, have the 'right people' (somebody from VTB and such) approached you and asked you to hand over or even just sell part of the company, so that they can have their hands in it?
A more correct question would be: when have they done it and how much did you have to 'share' (percentage wise)?
The Real Internet has to be created, just like real money, this one will not be under the rule of any nation State or any combination of any nation States. It will not be the best Internet, the fastest with the most whizbang, but it will be what it is supposed to be. It can only be done if businesses participate, but businesses cannot participate as long as the governments can punish businesses, tax them out of existence, regulate them out of existence for any pretence reason without disclosing the real reason - support of the real Internet.
A real Internet has to be self-sustainable, that is why businesses must participate. If businesses do not participate, then this Internet can only exist on donations and it is not clear that there is a model that can be sustained based on donations.
Thus every tax based on productivity, every business regulation and obviously control of money is a way to control the real Internet, either to prevent it from existing or to control what it is by government agenda, and no Internet is real if it is controlled by governments.
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(oh, and do not listen to those, who will disparage the message because it is brought through any specific messenger. So Julian gives this interview on RT, do not dismiss the Interview because the channel used to be named 'Russia Today', treat with suspicion any messenger and message that disparages the ideas that Julian is presenting here based on the media he used).
At least the countries stand up for eachother,
- yeah, what you mean by that is that Germany pays for the food while various Southern States live off of other people's charity (credit).
How is Greece doing, by the way? I am in Germany right now, I know people who go there on vacations, apparently on the islands they are not treated as 'nazis' the way that Merkel was greeted back in October this year. You know, a leader of a country that actually gives out cash to the socialists.
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And as to your assertion that European countries are the 'proper' ones, it's funny. It's funny because of how many Americans ran away from those proper countries for freedom. Not for free education, free social assistance (welfare) or free food.
No, for individual freedom of being able to live and not be harassed by their tyrannical governments.
There are so many different algorithms for hard disk seek, read and write functions that I think it would be a complete waste not to look at them when creating an elevator algorithm. Look it up, I think it's all there.
You are buying this nonsense hook line and sinker. Assange and wikileaks DID NOT COMMIT ANY CRIME.
If they were handed documents that somebody else retrieved by any means, even illegal means, you can say that they may have some moral or ethical obligations (and I personally would disagree with that as well), however you can't claim that they are criminally liable, even under some espionage act.
If this was the case that a journalist could be tried, persecuted, jailed for data that he releases after he got the data that he himself didn't actually steal from anywhere, then how would any journalism be done exactly?
Everything that makes a good journalist report has some data in it that some interested parties do not want to see revealed. Please explain again how is it possible that a journalist that gets his hands on some data can be declared a criminal when in fact he himself never did anything actually to take that information from a secured facility, he never broke any laws to retrieve that information in the first place.
You are buying into the propaganda and you are probably not even noticing it, it's in your wording, so it's subconscious.
Can there be a compromise on core principles? I don't think so.
If the core principle is freedom for the individual, regardless of what type of freedom it is, social or economic, then how can there be a compromise either with those, who promote social tyranny by government or with those who promote economic tyranny by government?
What is the middle ground between these 2 positions?
1. Slavery is a good thing.
2. Slavery is unacceptable.
There is no middle ground, there can be no compromise on that position. You can't be a little pregnant and you can be somewhat for slavery.
People must be free to participate in any gambling they like, it's our fundamental right as individuals to ingest any foods we like, to fuck whoever we like and to gamble against whoever we like.
Now, if YOU do not want to participate in a market that is not regulated by some regulator of your choice, that is again, your freedom.
What probably will happen eventually is a Bitcoin (or similar) based system , where bets are recorded in blocks in the network with money deposited into the blocks and then with payouts being calculated automatically and automatically going to the addresses that must receive the money because they won on those bets. It's very complex, but probably doable.
Also if some Americans want to continue betting on Intrade, at this point they'll have to channel their bets through some proxies, some can use their friends, relatives, whoever they trust.
China doesn't have SS or Medicare and their military budget is tiny compared to USA and China actually is the world's biggest producer of all things people buy, so if the Chinese gov't stops buying US dollars from the Chinese exporter and thus stops printing renminbi to buy US dollars and stops buying US debt, all o a sudden the problem in USA becomes completely obvious: it can't buy anything that it doesn't manufacture, because nobody wants worthless dollars.
As to the Western nations with their health care plans, that's not a good model. Yes, right now USA spends much more and gets doubtful results than the Europeans for example, but Europe is already falling apart even based on its spending, which doesn't even have the type of military spending that USA does. The real solution of-course is to stop government from meddling in health care (and in pensions and in education and in banking and in finance, in money, interest rates, business) and get rid of income taxes and most regulations, licenses, labour and employment laws, price controls, all that nonsense.
It is also well known that entering WWII spent the US out of the Great depression, war keynesianism that is.
- no this is a common misconception, it's based on complete lack of understanding.
WWII didn't get USA out of the depression, it worsened the depression, it only put USA on a ration. Yes, people were brought to work in military factories and given token salaries, but so what? They didn't actually improve the economy with any of that, sure the bullets were needed to defeat the nazis, but economically it was still a waste and nobody wanted to buy bullets. People want cars, radios, shoes, better food, TVs, not bullets (well, unless they like that past time).
It's a myth that gov't can "spend out of recession", gov't can only increase inflation and debt, but it cannot spend out of recession. It's a rare thing, but sometimes even politicians admit it.
What actually ended the Great Depression in 1947 was government cutting its spending by 64% and cutting overall taxes by 32% and allowing the nationalised factories to return to normal. By the keynesian myth the returning soldiers would have 'restarted the depression' (which never ended until 1947), instead the women went back home and the 10,000,000 or so soldiers were cheap enough work force that the economy could restructure with government finally no longer crowding out all of the private businesses away from the credit. Of-course it helped that USA had intact infrastructure while others had to rebuild theirs.
Universal health care is a terrible idea even in principle, even based on morality, economically it's just one way to speed up the inevitable economic slow down and possibly a collapse based on it.
how would one contact you?
I suppose that the non-partisan in this story is used in the traditional sense, where there are only 2 parties, Ds vs Rs. How about the non-partisan software that supports ideas of Ls? I do mean libertarian ideas and actually even anarchist ones?
I spent a few hours learning about Bitcoin protocol and came up with an idea of using Bitcoins to vote in an elections. Then I typed this into a search engine: "Bitcoin based elections" and voila, as it often happens there were already hundreds or more pages on this topic. Apparently it is too obvious of a step for many people who looked at this currency system, to start thinking about elections being recorded in the same manner.
So what would the Ds and Rs do when confronted with a third party (or non-party) solutions to existing problems? Maybe distributed information systems and software will actually end up solving the 'two party' problem and actually the very problem of the centralized government itself? Why have centralized government of any type in the world where people can handle information dissemination and currency exchange and payments not only without any central planning but actually by directly designing solutions and systems to go around such controls?
TOR, any form of encrypted file exchange (darknets), torrents, Wiki pages and Wiki leaks, mobile platforms, decentralized currencies, banking and investment. Is central government really that important for people who don't see a role for it in currency any longer?
No he is right, the government is illegitimate now (that is the federal court, correct?) Even the electing majority likely is not with the gov't on this, it is doubtful.
The federal governmen exists to protect the law, which is the constitution, and this shows that the law is not protected but violated and this is not the only display of the violation. NDAA, Patriot Act, Kill List - even this are enough to see that the law is violated, now this. The States can nullify the fed, the States ratified the union and they can end it if he federal government no longer behaves in accordance with its ratified role.
(same person, second account)
Again, multiple failures on your part. You have no idea what rights are and you don't understand the difference between individual rights and a criminal code. Criminal code does not require any government to be set in place. Pretty much any group of people figures out their own criminal code, have done this since there were people on this planet.
As an individual you have all the rights (and the criminal code only describes penalties that you may incur in case you initiate violence against other individuals, nothing else), but as an individual you have all the rights by default against the collective.
The Constitution then describes under what scenarios and what the procedures are for the government to diminish your rights under certain conditions.
Thus the Constitution empowers a government to certain actions and without this document government has no power at all (no consent of the governed). Think of the Constitution as the white list of what government is allowed to do. All other things are prohibited to the government by default.
Individuals on the other hand have all the rights in the face of the collective (the gov't, the society) and if they are limited in what they do by the criminal code, it is not because they violate rights of other individuals. Individuals cannot by definition violate rights of others, but they can initiate violence that may cause penalties brought up against them because of the criminal code and whatever judicial and punitive system that exists (again, totally unnecessary for this to be a government function).
As an individual you cannot violate any rights of any other individuals it is impossible by definition. But you can cause them harm and then it's up to the criminal system to deal with you.
Rights can only be violated by the collective and only individuals have inalienable rights.
So I have a client that I moved to GNU/Linux, to Fedora and OpenBSD servers and switched 3/4 of their user machines to Ubuntu because I provide software that is OS agnostic (well, actually it's Java, whatever).
They just opened another store, they want a similar setup. OK, the 11.04 is no longer supported, let's try 11.10. I work with their admin (it's all remote), he is unexperienced with Linux/Unix in general, but hey, they are saving money on licenses for the OS, antivirus and office software and hopefully this truly means fewer vectors of attack that stupid users can inflict on a machine. However 11.10 has Unity and no Gnome at all, it has to be installed separately. Fine, I tell him to install it, little did I know that he installed Gnome 3 (which installs by default).
Oh fuck, so he can't find 'System' option on the task bar and parts of it are scattered around, (some are in Applications, some are on the user icon, whatever), but some are missing, actually not there. In any case, we are looking at different distros right now, something that will be like Gnome 2 and something that promises STABILITY OF USER INTERFACE.
People have to be trained on a GNU/Linux distro as is at work environment, they don't even know what the fuck it is, what they are looking at. Having the most visible parts of it change doesn't help at all.
The software that I provide OTOH is stupidly simple from POV of a user, I don't do any generic menus, I don't provide any functions or change of settings that end users (non-admins) can modify, but the app looks the same and it's simple, no icons even. It's all text and if it say: 'inventory' it's inventory and it's always in the same place as it was before regardless of the functional update.
No need for any protections for anybody. People do research and invent stuff on their own as long as the economy's sound. What really need to be protected is the economy against the politicians. IBM, Intel, Apple, etc. research and innovate and won't stop without patent protection. Individuals rarely invent without companies but if they do they can make much more profit by selling to producing companies though some try and bring a product to market, which is again more rare. If a large firm wants to steal it will steal even with patent law and most likely will get away with it. The point is not to cover all corner cases, the point is to have a good enough system and this is not it.will
Is anybody still thinking that patents and copyrights promote innovation? How peculiar!
There is no reason to have any government regulations around mobile payment systems at all, the providers are interested in making sure that they have customers and customers are interested in not being scammed, and thus the providers have to figure out how to ensure safety and security and customers and clients have to make sure that they check that the company they are dealing with has good ratings by the public (and today it's a much easier thing to do than ever before in history).
I actually read TFA and nowhere there it mentioned just what exactly the regulators are interested in doing, but it is obvious that their concern is not actual safety of consumers and clients, obviously their main concern is that they may not be able to track transactions that they want to track, and they want to track all transactions.
They'll tell you anything, it's about drugs, it's about pedophiles, it's about terrorists.
You know what it is about? It's about money and your ability not to be scammed by the very government that pretends it has your 'best interests' in mind. Do you know what they say about best intentions? Well, that's what it is when the intentions are 'good', what about the time when the intentions are actually not good at all in the first place?
You know it, I know it, employers know it. /. moderators call it a 'Troll'.