No it would not because you are not taking into the account modification of behaviour.
If you do that, you'll simply end most of the financial transactions that can be taxed, some will find new homes and some will just disappear. Most of the smaller traders in the markets will disappear, for who 0.5% is definitely the game killer, they can't make a profit on average if that type of confiscatory tax is applied, and it is confiscatory in case of most traders.
--- (all of this sets aside the obvious issue of lack of morality of such behavior - confiscation of private property via income taxes)
The market doesn't prevent things like dumping toxic chemicals in communal drinking sources
- correct, that's what property rights are for. Property owners do not want their water polluted, they don't want water that flows through their property polluted by their neighbors.
it doesn't prevent the squandering of easily accessible but non-renewable resources
- that's a meaningless statement because again, this is about property rights. If you own your property and you have some mineral on it that you are mining and some people regard it as valuable, they can bid on it in the market.
It's the market that decides what the correct price levels are for any given resource, renewable or not, same with the definition of what 'squandering' is. Actually if you own your property where you have a reserve of natural gas or oil or whatever, it's your property. You can do with it as you wish. You can mine it, sell it or burn it or shoot it into the Moon. It's your property and that's all there is to it.
Every government purchase comes with quotas, likely per time period. So a department would have so much money allocated per time period and then the money would be allocated again for the next time period.
For a commodity like Helium, which is expensive to store in large quantities it means that once the government fulfills its quota, it would no longer buy in that month or year for example, but the natural gas production does not stop. So the rest of the Helium for that time period can be sold at free market prices.
The gov't was buying at the highest prices, which would divert almost all supply to the government rather than to private sector.
I suppose government had quotas on how much it would buy per month or whatever though, and the rest could be then sold at actual market prices in the normal market.
ORLY? Scientist cannot produce helium (he can produce hot gas, but not of that type), while a commercial operation that extracts natural gas can produce (extract) Helium from their gas and sell it in the market.
For decades gov't has been overpaying for Helium using tax payer dollars to build up this 'strategic reserve' for war, what else? So the market produces a good and gov't steals it from the market by stealing money from tax payers and overpaying for that good, thus denying the market that produced that good from access to that very good.
A humanitarian would not say: do more of that, take more of tax payer money to buy up the product that people apparently want for some uses at inflated prices, thus denying those very people access to that very product.
If the gov't simply sets a floor price on Helium without buying it from the natural gas producers, then they will simply be dumping the gas into the space, because they are not going to store something they can't sell, and they won't be able to sell almost any of it at prices that this Richardson 'academic' wants. (he wants the prices to be 20 times what they are today at least).
A humanitarian? A humanitarian is not somebody who denies people access to things they want by using threat of government violence (that is what all laws are based upon).
A humanitarian? The same type of humanitarian that says that health care should be only provided by government, because it's "not a market good"? Well, let's put it this way, before market provided people with Helium, nobody provided people with Helium. Before market provided people with health care, nobody did. Then various governments came and took away those goods from people by using tax payer money to create artificial demand and raise the prices. This is as true for Helium as it is for health care, people used to be able to buy health care out of pocket and it was cheap. Once government got involved, it became almost impossible to buy for most people out of pocket. Same with insurance.
Actually same with the houses right now, same with credit right now, same with anything that government gets into.
A true humanitarian would be speaking up for free markets with all his passion, he wouldn't be trying to dictate to people.
I mean how Orwellian is it, that the markets, that provided the actual goods to the people in the first place, are called 'immoral' and 'evil', while governments, that actually stole the goods from the people are considered 'moral' somehow? Stealing from the people, to buy up a resource so that people cannot afford to buy it on their own (both, because their money is taken away from them in taxes and because gov't can pay much more for a resource and thus it buys up the entire supply). This is moral? This is schizophrenia, people who believe such things need help.
Hydrogen filled balloons are impossible in a over-regulated, lawsuit happy society, it's just not going to fly (pardon the pun). It can't work, one single liability claim will wipe out the entire "Hydrogen in a kid's balloon" industry.
Helium, just like health care, didn't exist until the market started providing it. The market provided people with Helium. The market provided people with health care.
In both cases governments intervened and increased prices for Helium and increased prices for health care. In both cases producer and tax payer has money removed from him by government and then the government uses that money to buy the supply of either Helium or health care at prices above the market level because the government can throw much more money at things, in any case the gov't can throw more money at anything than the market would.
This artificial demand reduces supply at normal prices, actually drives it to 0 at normal market prices, at this point only gov't can afford such things as Helium or health care.
In case of Helium the gov't was doing it because Helium probably was thought of as something useful for war. In case of health care it's just about taking more money out of people's pockets and as a side effect promising something for nothing, while increasing the prices, the costs, destroying the competition, creating more controls, growing the government and eventually turning a large portion of population into dependents, who will vote for the politicians promising more of the same. ----
Helium was STOLEN from people by using their own money! The tax payer had money removed from him by gov't, so that gov't could overpay for Helium, creating a large gov't controlled deposit of it, while simultaneously preventing the people, who are part of the market that provided this resource, from being able to access this resource. And it's done with their own money (*like all other things that gov'ts do*).
So the gov't has a large resource of Helium that it WAY overpaid for and that eventually the gov't couldn't subsidize storage of anymore, so it decided to get rid of the reserve, but almost nobody would buy at those elevated, monopoly prices. So gov't had to allow the market to set the price to get rid of this reserve of stolen commodity.
Helium is just another commodity. Health care is just another service. All of it is delivered for profit in a much more efficient manner than any government could. This has to be obvious to anybody - the gov't overpaid for Helium by at least a factor of 20 (never mind storage fees and various government positions created around it), so it's obviously not an efficient way to store or deliver this commodity and it's theft.
What is funny is how much dependency the government was able to breed in the population that the people now believe that the very government that is stealing from the economy is going to be a better steward of the scarce resources and provider of services. What's extremely funny is how screwed up the thinking is to believe that government is a 'moral agent' as opposed to free market. There is no more moral agent than free market, definitely not gov't, nothing that uses threat of violence in order to steal can be considered moral, this is a huge win for the Orwellian ideology - redefining meanings not only of words but of concepts.
----
Helium is a byproduct of natural gas extraction and people who are participating in the market today are much more relevant to this market, they should be in a position to access the resources (given the price that market sets based on voluntary transactions) than anybody in either government or in a supposed future economy.
The belief here is that the future economy will be able to use Helium with a more, shall we say, moral authority! That is pure insanity - to deny the people who are participating in the market today, who are part of the market that creates the resource, from using the resource, while using the very productivity of the people that create the resource (their own taxes) to set monopoly prices and thus steal the resource from them. This is height of hypocrisy, this is complete lack of integrity.
There is nothing about it, everything about it stinks and screams: corruption of the mind.
What's a more common desktop, Debian or Ubuntu? People use Ubuntu, who never used GNU/Linux before, they, Ubuntu should have charged them something from the very start, even a trivial 30 bucks per disk would be better than living on promise of non-existing future profits from non-existing revenues. No company can live with a perpetual loss, they will go out of business (same as with governments, who can't live on perpetual deficits and debts, they will go out of business as well).
Canonical is trying to figure out how to stay in business while not making ppl actually put out the cash, well, it's an experiment. Time and market will tell whether it will succeed or fail, not you.
Well, if you are going to use thermodynamics you have to be more general than that, eventually all people will lose, we are all going to be destroyed by entropy eventually. However even in this Universe there are clumps of matter with stars and planets appearing out of gas and then even sometimes people (like us here). So eventually yes, everything will end, but as long as people exist and the have access to some form of external energy, the market will continue winning.
Combined voluntary will of the people is a force of nature, it's quite physical as well. It's why you have more leisure time, why you, personally, don't have to fish or hunt or farm to eat today, you can call it the force of self-interest.
The ignorant comment that the AC made is moderated to +2 Insightful by people who also don't understand economics and don't know that US gov't was keeping prices for He artificially high for decades by buying up He from natural gas producers.
The reason people could even start using He in balloons or whatever is because finaly in 1996 US gov't stopped artificially inflating (no pun intended) prices on Helium, because it stopped buying it from natural gas companies and even put it up for sale on the market.
The market brought prices down to where they should be, which again, is an example of how normal market works vs gov't.
My argument (second account,/. limits my comments on the first account) is that market forces are unstoppable, they are forces of nature, no amount of regulations can prevent the inevitable. But regulations can delay the inevitable and change it into something worse.
(/. comment limitation strikes again, thus my second account) --
They can try and dictate it, but the market always wins at the end, it's a law of nature, like gravity. You can fight it for a while, but you can't stop it.
Any price manipulations will be met by higher prices but also by black markets, where the price will be set by the market given the conditions it has to operate within.
In case of He production, it just may cease to exist altogether, after all, it's mostly extracted during natural gas mining process, so if the prices are set at a level where nobody buys the gas, then why should anybody produce it? It's ridiculous to believe that a company must collect a worthless resources like that (worthless, because it's unsellable and thus unusable). What, a company would build bigger and bigger, more and more expensive facilities to store Helium for the future use? 50 years into the future? It's not a metal, it's a very light gas, it's very expensive to keep around.
Here, look at the natural gas prices, set the time line to "Max". The prices are falling even in this manipulated inflationary economy, so this means the supply is plentiful given the consumption level (and it can't be stored and transported easily, like oil can).
The end result of artificial floor at 20 times the current rate (which is what Richardson wants) would be near disappearance of the gas from the market, THEN the prices would go up much higher, not 20 times, maybe 1000 times or more, nobody knows, but here is what this will mean for people: MRI scans will become much more expensive and no more party balloons for kids, all while most of He will be just let out into the space. Congrats.
- that's how we know that your comment is a troll. You are one of the Marxists populating the world, which simply means you are one of the thieves populating the world.
Maybe you should leave the people alone, and that will be enough for them to have their free market. And you can have your 'socialized' health care in that free market if there are enough people that believe in your idea and together, voluntarily, you will establish your 'socialized medicare system'.
No, what you actually want to do is to force everybody into a government system, which has nothing to do with free markets, capitalism, and it certainly takes away individual freedoms from people. But you like that idea, you want to take away individual freedoms.
Medicare in USA is bankrupt, same with Social Security. Those are welfare programs, they have no assets behind them, USA T bills and bonds are NOT assets.
First the taxes were collected under the guise of 'SS' or 'Medicare' fund, that money was spent as all general income taxes are spent on whatever the politicians want to spend it on.
The money was replaced with IOUs, and those are bonds (or bills), they have to be sold in the market to raise money to pay benefits. This means that eventually that debt has to be bought back by USA and this means the taxes have to be raised SECOND TIME to pay for the same 'benefit'. This means that SS and Medicare benefits are not paid by specific SS and Medicare taxes, they are paid by general taxes and redistributed like all welfare.
--
SS and Medicare (and basically USD and bond) are the biggest ponzi scams in the world today and American people are forced to participate in them. People can opt out of private ponzi scams, but they can't opt out of gov't ran ponzi scams, they are forced into them. You want more people to be forced into another, bigger ponzi scam, that's all there is to it. You are a thief, not a capitalist, not a free market anything, you are simply a thief, like all pro-government types.
Assuming everyone puts in according to their ability, those on the left think you should receive according to your need, whereas those on the right think you should receive according to your might. It is that simple.
- having been born and grown in the former USSR helps to dispell such ridiculous notions by example.
The example is very simple: in a system like that (where a country is operated this way, not a small voluntary community, like a kibbutz, everybody's needs grow exponentially and everybody's abilities fall exponentially. Nobody produces and everybody wants to consume. That's it', it all falls apart, it's that simple and you can't do anything about it, it's the most obvious, the most human, the most rational behavior.
If you are a sucker and you do follow this idea by putting in all you can, you just end up being the scape goat for everything, because once you show any ability at all, you become responsible for everything that happens. Normally you are then responsible for all the bad things, while the good things that happen are 'shared' by everybody, that's the system that you think is viable, you only think it because you can't actually think worth a damn.
Saying that 'right' by definition is pure evil and the 'left' is by definition pure good is just another confirmation of complete lack of any independent and intelligent thought.
Canonical doesn't owe you anything, it owes itself to run a profitable operation, otherwise the subsidy will end and the business will shut down, full stop.
If they can't be profitable with the service model based on corporate clients, it means they can't be profitable and they will shut down the doors.
WTF does "right" have to do with claiming that adverts are "for your benefit"?
Do you consider FB, Zynga works of the "left" or the "right"? How about Google? How about Microsoft? How about Red Hat?
You are pushing political agenda into the world of software, so you have to define then what it means for software to be 'right' or 'left', these monikers don't have much meaning outside of software, but in software they are completely nonsensical.
Or is the meaning of "left leaning software" to be software designed and developed by the hungry?
---
I am not for or against ads by Canonical, it's their business, you can still download the source if you want to disable the ads I am sure, otherwise it's GPL violation.
You are wrong, it's because you are not actually a human, you are a bunch of letters on my computer screen. We, humans, can survive without any water for months at a time. In fact we don't really even need water at all, it's just a habit from the old times, we live mostly on solid coffee beans and salt. Lots and lots of salt. That's how we fight off the land pyranha as well, they hate salt.
IRS wants a cut of income, if you grow a hog and then use the bacon for trading, IRS will want you to give it their cut of income (pun intended I suppose).
FDA and other agencies will want their cut as well. Going State to State with bacon? Must be in violation of a couple of hundred laws on both federal and State levels.
Sure, sure, growing hogs or chickens to exchange for other things may become problematic if everybody was doing it. But printing paper is much easier, and today they don't even have to print it, it's a transaction on a computer, add some 0s to that account and you are done.
All fiat currencies blow up, and the only real money for thousands of years that people really choose is gold (and silver).
Slashdot Mirror
No it would not because you are not taking into the account modification of behaviour.
If you do that, you'll simply end most of the financial transactions that can be taxed, some will find new homes and some will just disappear. Most of the smaller traders in the markets will disappear, for who 0.5% is definitely the game killer, they can't make a profit on average if that type of confiscatory tax is applied, and it is confiscatory in case of most traders.
---
(all of this sets aside the obvious issue of lack of morality of such behavior - confiscation of private property via income taxes)
The market doesn't prevent things like dumping toxic chemicals in communal drinking sources
- correct, that's what property rights are for. Property owners do not want their water polluted, they don't want water that flows through their property polluted by their neighbors.
it doesn't prevent the squandering of easily accessible but non-renewable resources
- that's a meaningless statement because again, this is about property rights. If you own your property and you have some mineral on it that you are mining and some people regard it as valuable, they can bid on it in the market.
It's the market that decides what the correct price levels are for any given resource, renewable or not, same with the definition of what 'squandering' is. Actually if you own your property where you have a reserve of natural gas or oil or whatever, it's your property. You can do with it as you wish. You can mine it, sell it or burn it or shoot it into the Moon. It's your property and that's all there is to it.
I did not miss anything.
Every government purchase comes with quotas, likely per time period. So a department would have so much money allocated per time period and then the money would be allocated again for the next time period.
For a commodity like Helium, which is expensive to store in large quantities it means that once the government fulfills its quota, it would no longer buy in that month or year for example, but the natural gas production does not stop. So the rest of the Helium for that time period can be sold at free market prices.
The gov't was buying at the highest prices, which would divert almost all supply to the government rather than to private sector.
I suppose government had quotas on how much it would buy per month or whatever though, and the rest could be then sold at actual market prices in the normal market.
I have detailed enough responses that touch upon your questions.
ORLY? Scientist cannot produce helium (he can produce hot gas, but not of that type), while a commercial operation that extracts natural gas can produce (extract) Helium from their gas and sell it in the market.
For decades gov't has been overpaying for Helium using tax payer dollars to build up this 'strategic reserve' for war, what else? So the market produces a good and gov't steals it from the market by stealing money from tax payers and overpaying for that good, thus denying the market that produced that good from access to that very good.
A humanitarian would not say: do more of that, take more of tax payer money to buy up the product that people apparently want for some uses at inflated prices, thus denying those very people access to that very product.
If the gov't simply sets a floor price on Helium without buying it from the natural gas producers, then they will simply be dumping the gas into the space, because they are not going to store something they can't sell, and they won't be able to sell almost any of it at prices that this Richardson 'academic' wants. (he wants the prices to be 20 times what they are today at least).
A humanitarian? A humanitarian is not somebody who denies people access to things they want by using threat of government violence (that is what all laws are based upon).
A humanitarian? The same type of humanitarian that says that health care should be only provided by government, because it's "not a market good"? Well, let's put it this way, before market provided people with Helium, nobody provided people with Helium. Before market provided people with health care, nobody did. Then various governments came and took away those goods from people by using tax payer money to create artificial demand and raise the prices. This is as true for Helium as it is for health care, people used to be able to buy health care out of pocket and it was cheap. Once government got involved, it became almost impossible to buy for most people out of pocket. Same with insurance.
Actually same with the houses right now, same with credit right now, same with anything that government gets into.
A true humanitarian would be speaking up for free markets with all his passion, he wouldn't be trying to dictate to people.
I mean how Orwellian is it, that the markets, that provided the actual goods to the people in the first place, are called 'immoral' and 'evil', while governments, that actually stole the goods from the people are considered 'moral' somehow? Stealing from the people, to buy up a resource so that people cannot afford to buy it on their own (both, because their money is taken away from them in taxes and because gov't can pay much more for a resource and thus it buys up the entire supply). This is moral? This is schizophrenia, people who believe such things need help.
Hydrogen filled balloons are impossible in a over-regulated, lawsuit happy society, it's just not going to fly (pardon the pun). It can't work, one single liability claim will wipe out the entire "Hydrogen in a kid's balloon" industry.
Helium, just like health care, didn't exist until the market started providing it. The market provided people with Helium. The market provided people with health care.
In both cases governments intervened and increased prices for Helium and increased prices for health care. In both cases producer and tax payer has money removed from him by government and then the government uses that money to buy the supply of either Helium or health care at prices above the market level because the government can throw much more money at things, in any case the gov't can throw more money at anything than the market would.
This artificial demand reduces supply at normal prices, actually drives it to 0 at normal market prices, at this point only gov't can afford such things as Helium or health care.
In case of Helium the gov't was doing it because Helium probably was thought of as something useful for war. In case of health care it's just about taking more money out of people's pockets and as a side effect promising something for nothing, while increasing the prices, the costs, destroying the competition, creating more controls, growing the government and eventually turning a large portion of population into dependents, who will vote for the politicians promising more of the same.
----
Helium was STOLEN from people by using their own money! The tax payer had money removed from him by gov't, so that gov't could overpay for Helium, creating a large gov't controlled deposit of it, while simultaneously preventing the people, who are part of the market that provided this resource, from being able to access this resource. And it's done with their own money (*like all other things that gov'ts do*).
So the gov't has a large resource of Helium that it WAY overpaid for and that eventually the gov't couldn't subsidize storage of anymore, so it decided to get rid of the reserve, but almost nobody would buy at those elevated, monopoly prices. So gov't had to allow the market to set the price to get rid of this reserve of stolen commodity.
Helium is just another commodity. Health care is just another service. All of it is delivered for profit in a much more efficient manner than any government could. This has to be obvious to anybody - the gov't overpaid for Helium by at least a factor of 20 (never mind storage fees and various government positions created around it), so it's obviously not an efficient way to store or deliver this commodity and it's theft.
What is funny is how much dependency the government was able to breed in the population that the people now believe that the very government that is stealing from the economy is going to be a better steward of the scarce resources and provider of services. What's extremely funny is how screwed up the thinking is to believe that government is a 'moral agent' as opposed to free market. There is no more moral agent than free market, definitely not gov't, nothing that uses threat of violence in order to steal can be considered moral, this is a huge win for the Orwellian ideology - redefining meanings not only of words but of concepts.
----
Helium is a byproduct of natural gas extraction and people who are participating in the market today are much more relevant to this market, they should be in a position to access the resources (given the price that market sets based on voluntary transactions) than anybody in either government or in a supposed future economy.
The belief here is that the future economy will be able to use Helium with a more, shall we say, moral authority! That is pure insanity - to deny the people who are participating in the market today, who are part of the market that creates the resource, from using the resource, while using the very productivity of the people that create the resource (their own taxes) to set monopoly prices and thus steal the resource from them. This is height of hypocrisy, this is complete lack of integrity.
There is nothing about it, everything about it stinks and screams: corruption of the mind.
What's a more common desktop, Debian or Ubuntu? People use Ubuntu, who never used GNU/Linux before, they, Ubuntu should have charged them something from the very start, even a trivial 30 bucks per disk would be better than living on promise of non-existing future profits from non-existing revenues. No company can live with a perpetual loss, they will go out of business (same as with governments, who can't live on perpetual deficits and debts, they will go out of business as well).
Canonical is trying to figure out how to stay in business while not making ppl actually put out the cash, well, it's an experiment. Time and market will tell whether it will succeed or fail, not you.
Well, if you are going to use thermodynamics you have to be more general than that, eventually all people will lose, we are all going to be destroyed by entropy eventually. However even in this Universe there are clumps of matter with stars and planets appearing out of gas and then even sometimes people (like us here). So eventually yes, everything will end, but as long as people exist and the have access to some form of external energy, the market will continue winning.
Combined voluntary will of the people is a force of nature, it's quite physical as well. It's why you have more leisure time, why you, personally, don't have to fish or hunt or farm to eat today, you can call it the force of self-interest.
The ignorant comment that the AC made is moderated to +2 Insightful by people who also don't understand economics and don't know that US gov't was keeping prices for He artificially high for decades by buying up He from natural gas producers.
The reason people could even start using He in balloons or whatever is because finaly in 1996 US gov't stopped artificially inflating (no pun intended) prices on Helium, because it stopped buying it from natural gas companies and even put it up for sale on the market.
The market brought prices down to where they should be, which again, is an example of how normal market works vs gov't.
My argument (second account, /. limits my comments on the first account) is that market forces are unstoppable, they are forces of nature, no amount of regulations can prevent the inevitable. But regulations can delay the inevitable and change it into something worse.
---
My actual arguments about He are here.
(/. comment limitation strikes again, thus my second account)
--
They can try and dictate it, but the market always wins at the end, it's a law of nature, like gravity. You can fight it for a while, but you can't stop it.
Any price manipulations will be met by higher prices but also by black markets, where the price will be set by the market given the conditions it has to operate within.
In case of He production, it just may cease to exist altogether, after all, it's mostly extracted during natural gas mining process, so if the prices are set at a level where nobody buys the gas, then why should anybody produce it? It's ridiculous to believe that a company must collect a worthless resources like that (worthless, because it's unsellable and thus unusable). What, a company would build bigger and bigger, more and more expensive facilities to store Helium for the future use? 50 years into the future? It's not a metal, it's a very light gas, it's very expensive to keep around.
Here, look at the natural gas prices, set the time line to "Max". The prices are falling even in this manipulated inflationary economy, so this means the supply is plentiful given the consumption level (and it can't be stored and transported easily, like oil can).
The end result of artificial floor at 20 times the current rate (which is what Richardson wants) would be near disappearance of the gas from the market, THEN the prices would go up much higher, not 20 times, maybe 1000 times or more, nobody knows, but here is what this will mean for people: MRI scans will become much more expensive and no more party balloons for kids, all while most of He will be just let out into the space. Congrats.
i say this as a committed capitalist
- that's how we know that your comment is a troll. You are one of the Marxists populating the world, which simply means you are one of the thieves populating the world.
Maybe you should leave the people alone, and that will be enough for them to have their free market. And you can have your 'socialized' health care in that free market if there are enough people that believe in your idea and together, voluntarily, you will establish your 'socialized medicare system'.
No, what you actually want to do is to force everybody into a government system, which has nothing to do with free markets, capitalism, and it certainly takes away individual freedoms from people. But you like that idea, you want to take away individual freedoms.
Medicare in USA is bankrupt, same with Social Security. Those are welfare programs, they have no assets behind them, USA T bills and bonds are NOT assets.
First the taxes were collected under the guise of 'SS' or 'Medicare' fund, that money was spent as all general income taxes are spent on whatever the politicians want to spend it on.
The money was replaced with IOUs, and those are bonds (or bills), they have to be sold in the market to raise money to pay benefits. This means that eventually that debt has to be bought back by USA and this means the taxes have to be raised SECOND TIME to pay for the same 'benefit'. This means that SS and Medicare benefits are not paid by specific SS and Medicare taxes, they are paid by general taxes and redistributed like all welfare.
--
SS and Medicare (and basically USD and bond) are the biggest ponzi scams in the world today and American people are forced to participate in them. People can opt out of private ponzi scams, but they can't opt out of gov't ran ponzi scams, they are forced into them. You want more people to be forced into another, bigger ponzi scam, that's all there is to it. You are a thief, not a capitalist, not a free market anything, you are simply a thief, like all pro-government types.
Assuming everyone puts in according to their ability, those on the left think you should receive according to your need, whereas those on the right think you should receive according to your might. It is that simple.
- having been born and grown in the former USSR helps to dispell such ridiculous notions by example.
The example is very simple: in a system like that (where a country is operated this way, not a small voluntary community, like a kibbutz, everybody's needs grow exponentially and everybody's abilities fall exponentially. Nobody produces and everybody wants to consume. That's it', it all falls apart, it's that simple and you can't do anything about it, it's the most obvious, the most human, the most rational behavior.
If you are a sucker and you do follow this idea by putting in all you can, you just end up being the scape goat for everything, because once you show any ability at all, you become responsible for everything that happens. Normally you are then responsible for all the bad things, while the good things that happen are 'shared' by everybody, that's the system that you think is viable, you only think it because you can't actually think worth a damn.
Saying that 'right' by definition is pure evil and the 'left' is by definition pure good is just another confirmation of complete lack of any independent and intelligent thought.
Canonical doesn't owe you anything, it owes itself to run a profitable operation, otherwise the subsidy will end and the business will shut down, full stop.
If they can't be profitable with the service model based on corporate clients, it means they can't be profitable and they will shut down the doors.
WTF does "right" have to do with claiming that adverts are "for your benefit"?
Do you consider FB, Zynga works of the "left" or the "right"? How about Google? How about Microsoft? How about Red Hat?
You are pushing political agenda into the world of software, so you have to define then what it means for software to be 'right' or 'left', these monikers don't have much meaning outside of software, but in software they are completely nonsensical.
Or is the meaning of "left leaning software" to be software designed and developed by the hungry?
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I am not for or against ads by Canonical, it's their business, you can still download the source if you want to disable the ads I am sure, otherwise it's GPL violation.
How RIDICULOUS is it that /. doesn't support proper unicode even in URLs today? Here it is again, this time with a URL proxy.
Maybe you should stop 'looking' and starting listening.
You are wrong, it's because you are not actually a human, you are a bunch of letters on my computer screen. We, humans, can survive without any water for months at a time. In fact we don't really even need water at all, it's just a habit from the old times, we live mostly on solid coffee beans and salt. Lots and lots of salt. That's how we fight off the land pyranha as well, they hate salt.
IRS wants a cut of income, if you grow a hog and then use the bacon for trading, IRS will want you to give it their cut of income (pun intended I suppose).
FDA and other agencies will want their cut as well. Going State to State with bacon? Must be in violation of a couple of hundred laws on both federal and State levels.
Enough with all the beaver jokes already!
BTW if the market decides to use livestock or food items as currency, it is also an inflationary situation. The market would become saturated with hogs or chickens or whatever, that's why we can't use such things as money. But this puts a very fine point on the failure of using the fiat currency that is made of paper.
Sure, sure, growing hogs or chickens to exchange for other things may become problematic if everybody was doing it. But printing paper is much easier, and today they don't even have to print it, it's a transaction on a computer, add some 0s to that account and you are done.
All fiat currencies blow up, and the only real money for thousands of years that people really choose is gold (and silver).