Oh, I am sorry, I was wrong on one thing. Not on the correctness of definition of what a right is, I was wrong on something else.
I was wrong to assume that you are a person who can be informed about something, so I spent a few minutes of my life unnecessarily trying to teach you why thinking for yourself is more important than following whatever it is that is written down by some form of an 'authority' (a dictionary at this point). An 'authority' that repeatedly redefined words to fit a new political agenda.
An 'authority' who demonstrably follows the course set in front of it by a changing political scenery. Words like *inflation* (in the context of money), which that same dictionary only in 1864 used to define as *undue expansion or increase, from over-issue; â" said of currency.* and nothing more, in 1909 the definition changed to "Undue expansion or increase, as in paper currency, prices, etc.", and by 1934 the definition swelled all the way to this:
"Disproportionate and relatively sharp and sudden increase in the quantity of money or credit, or both, relative to the amount of exchange business. Such increase may come as a result of unexpected additions to the supply of precious metals, as in the period following the Spanish conquests in Central and South America or the period following the opening up of large new gold deposits; or it may come in times of business activity by expansion of credit through the banks; or it may come in times of financial difficulty by governmental issues of paper money without adequate metallic reserve and without provisions for conversion into standard metallic money on demand. In accordance with the law of the quantity theory of money, inflation always produces a rise in the price level. "
Inflation was defined by that dictionary as expansion of the money supply. Now of-course the definition is redefined into something irrelevant:
"a continuous rise of price levels"
(though they still couldn't embarrass themselves completely, so they followed that by
"usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money"
).
That is your authority. OK, so I completely admit that I was wrong and you are not a thinking person (even ever so slightly) as I assumed you might be (which was the only reason for me replying to you in the first place). My bad, won't happen again. Cheers.
Again, a right is a word, words actually have meaning, denying a meaning of a word and redefining it to fit your political agenda does not actually change the meaning of the word.
The perception of people can change, the people are very often uneducated about issues, they are ignorant, some are actually incapable of understanding even mildly complex subjects.
There cannot be a 'basic law' that is a 'right' that puts an obligation on a person A to provide an entitlement to a person B. That's not a 'basic law' and that's certainly not a right. It is a pair of things: an entitlement and an obligation, and as all entitlements+obligation pairs it demands destruction of rights of the person who is forced to provide this entitlement. When an obligation is placed on one person (or on any group of people) to give away their product or time or money to somebody because that somebody (anybody) is entitled to it because a government decreed so, the actual right of that person or a group of people who are forced to provide the entitlement are destroyed, while an extra surplus of unearned product/service is provided to the entitled individual (or a group).
Clearly you are unable to think for yourself, let us try this:
1. A right is not something that a government should be able to take away from you, do you agree or disagree?
2. A right is something that should be protected by the system (be it the law or the court system).
3. A right cannot be upheld if in order to provide it rights of others must be violated. - this is where I suppose you disagree with me, however, you call it 'politically slanted'.
You see, the reason why an entitlement cannot be considered a right is because an entitlement assumes 2 sides to this argument: person A entitled to something and person B who is obligated to provide it. That's the basics of it. If a person B is forced by a government to provide you with something then that thing is not a right, it's an entitlement. I am talking about rights here, not about entitlements.
A right is protection against government oppression. A right only exists as a concept because in order for a right to be protected the system must be prohibited from violating it.
If a generic person or a generic company (I consider businesses to be people, by the way, people that own companies) murders you then they are not actually violating your right. They are committing an act, which can be considered a criminal act but not because they 'violated your right to life'. No, they did not violate your right, because there is a criminal system that declares the act of murder to be a crime in the first place. There is a way to enact punishment against a *specific person* who murders you.
A government cannot be punished by punishing any specific person.
A government is a system and it is much more powerful than any specific person.
A government can only be stopped from oppressing you by ensuring that the government has no legal power to oppress you in certain ways.
So a right as a protection against government oppression makes sense. A right as an entitlement to the product or service provided by somebody who is then obligated to provide it does not make sense because it is not something that you need to be protected against the government for. A government does not need to be prohibited against anything in this case, a separate entity ( a person) or a group of people (the tax payers) can be forced and criminally obligated to provide something, that's an entitlement.
Merriam Webster is as wrong on this as the general population is confused about it.
Who do you think we are here, n00bs, to RTFS? Jizless Kraist, if something is worth knowing it should be clear from the title itself, otherwise that's what the comment section is for - to complain about the title not providing ALL of the information necessary to have a complete and thorough understanding of the issues surrounding the topic and concepts at hand.
You are wrong obviously, a right is a protection against government oppression, it is not a product or a service or a resource. Government must not be able to prevent a person from drinking, it is not the same thing as declaring that clean water must be made available for a person just because that person is born, whether he does or does not pay for the privilege of *somebody cleaning* the water.
Rail tracks are insanely easy to repair and even to build new ones, it costs money and takes time of-course but the technology for this is absolutely clear and there will be nothing that will have to be done to the entire length of the track. Of-course tracks are completely different from a vacuum pipe going from point A to point B, rail tracks can split and reconnect, replacing tracks is a very quick procedure and the technology is so mature that it is extremely unlikely that a local failure would provide some new information that would have to be used to retrofit the entire length of the remaining tracks. Multiple track lanes run in parallel and it is possible to reroute trains and use one track to go in either direction for some distance, none of this is possible with Hyperloop.
Really excellent news, given that as of last week i have s8+ that I got as a gift and typing on right now. I turned off and disabled so many 'features' on it already but this bixby thing has serious staying power, like a zombie, cannot be put to death once and for all. I want to use the physical button, i want more physical buttons on the phone, not fewer of them, so this new button is excellent.... iff (if and only if) it can be used for anything else that i get to choose and not for bixby, which i guarantee never to use.
I am not iron man to build one for myself and i dont trust any company out there to build one for me that i could trust not to spy on me. In case of Samsung - i dont trust them even to get it working right, i had to disable the auto replace 'feature' (it is a bug, not a feature) because it is so completely wrong in what it does for me so often...
You mean instead of bringing a small number of bills to test they brought in a barrel of the stuff and tested each one, they cut each one into pieces and flushed down the toilet right at the bank? OK. That took a lot of time!
My point is that banks don't have the facilities to print money, especially Swiss banks wouldn't have facilities to print Euro. Printing process would be centralized and done by the central banks.
UBS is not SNB, so UBS wouldn't have equipment to print any currency (why would they have currency printing facilities at a random bank in Geneva?) SNB on the other hand is not named in this story.
Beyond that SNB wouldn't (or shouldn't at least) have the equipment to print Euros, they do print Francs though.
But that's why I found it unbelievable but at least it would make some sense if that's what happened (again, why would Switzerland implement phasing out of Euros, it would be similar to USA implementing phasing out of old Canadian dollars, it makes no sense).
No, not in the same way at all. One bus or one plane blowing up has little effect on the rest of the infrastructure, on the rest of the traffic, on the rest of the buses and airplanes. Hyperloop exploding shuts down all Hyperloop traffic at least until everything is fixed, possibly until the entire system is upgraded/rebuilt and very likely forever because the cost is prohibitive.
No, that's not what he said. It will not be a delay, it will be a shutdown and an unknown amount of time will pass before the system can be put online and used again (if ever, in case the flaw is systemic and the entire system needs an upgrade all over the place).
There is a huge difference between a delay and a long (or a permanent) shut down when talking about serious infrastructure.
By the way, a long delay for thousands of people can be compared to lives lost, after all if you multiply the amount of time per person by the number of people that are delayed, you can easily come up with numbers that are on the order of magnitude of individual lives. 80 * 365 * 24 * 60 = 42048000 minutes, that's 42 million minutes in 80 years. If you have 10000 people delayed by 3 days that's the same number of minutes.
So you think that they print counterfeit money in a bank and when it fails they cut up the bad batch and flush it down the toilet at the bank?
More likely it is a modern art installation...
Or maybe the banks are implementing the new European idea of phasing out 500Euro bills, I just don't know why Switzerland would do this and why any particular bank would do it this way, but at least that makes some sense.
The only way you would encounter 15PSI is if the ENTIRE tube was full of air and pressure had equalized
- are you willing to bet your life on it? I would say that if your capsule is moving towards a rupture in the pipe, you are going to be hit not only with a static 'wall' of air that is not moving but is simply at 15PSI, you will be hit with a shockwave.
So this would be a pipe on the ground (or is it underground) in a precisely known location. Never mind terrorists, people will shoot it on purpose and for fun, heavy equipment will run into it by mistake, things will fall on it from the top by random chance. It will get damaged often and hard at many points over its hundreds of miles of pipe.
Ha ha ha ha, you are so wrong it's super funny! The difference is not between 0PSI and 15PSI, the difference is between moving through 0PSI at 1200KM/hour and moving through 0PSI at 1200KM/hour and all of a sudden hitting a *wall* of 15PSI.
Not everybody in Russia, but a gigantic number of people are exactly as you say - expecting somebody to fix their lives for them, to cuddle them from cradle to grave, I am not joking, that is precisely the sentiment of an enormous number of people there.
Not everybody of-course, there are a few percentage points that want actual freedom and they really have so few choices that at this point they just want to see the current regime change and then hope that the next guy will be somehow on the side of more freedoms, not less. Alexey Navalny seems to be the only real option (though with very few chances of success), however personally I don't see him as a person who is seeking to increase individual freedoms. To me he is just more of a socialist type, who wants to end the current form of corruption to install his own ideology of what it means to live in the country.
His ideas are that of a modern welfare statist and I cannot support that though I do generally support removing the current government from power. I do however support removing any current government from power in pretty much any country, I see them all as oppressive regimes.
- I admit about not reading TFA or even the summary, but I can imagine a thing or two that can be done with an old cable; not sure it qualifies for a nerd site...
Well, you just mentioned somebody named Rick Astley without explaining who that is either. I don't know who that is and I don't care enough to google and I don't care to hear from anybody either, but you just did exactly the thing you complained about....
Not really, it follows directly from classical microeconomics, as the diminishing value of money is empirically well-confirmed, under the assumption of utilitarianism
- it is perfectly nonsensical to declare that somebody's savings are of a reduced utility because they save it rather than spending it on consumption. Savings are used as investments, they are also used as rainy day funds. Spending everything you are making is the wrong strategy if you are running a business or a family. Saving is what allows allocation of capital to investments into new businesses, which is what creates new capital. Spending on consumption dissipates capital.
It may be less useful than he thinks - others can do the very same thing, but they will get more utility from the same amount of discretionary income or an even lower one
- I don't understand this ideology of having 'others' spend money of people who actually made it.
Clearly people who made money are a better judge of how that money should be saved or spent, they are running businesses and businesses need access to cash for various reasons and businesses are reinvesting money to grow/expand or just to stay in business when things get tough. To say that somebody else is a better judge of how to spend the money that you are making is to declare that:
1. You are not the owner of your property, of things that you produce.
2. The money you are making is somehow of lesser value in your hands than in the hands of somebody who didn't actually make any money. Thus the money should be taken from somebody who is successful at making it and handed over to somebody who is clearly not as successful at making money (otherwise he wouldn't need the transfer in the first place).
I disagree with both of those statements, they are morally bankrupt and they are economically retarded.
generally speaking very rich people are as replaceable and useful as anyone else
- I disagree completely. Generally speaking I will not speak generally, however people who made their money are not as replaceable as people who didn't. Rockefeller is not a replaceable person, after his property was taken away from him the prices for kerosene that his business supplied never went lower again in history.
implausible to assume that very rich people, as a tendency, work because they want to earn more money "
- wrong. That's what investments are - capital supplied by a wealthy individual is not supplied for the giggles, except for charity it is all supplied to grow a business, thus it is investment and investment is for making a profit.
they work because they like their work
- ha, they work for the results, not for the process. The results have to be tangible.
Bill Gates has no problems with giving away much of his money.
- I don't think you actually understand his motivations enough to speak for him, I will not.
, but he couldn't care less about personal gains.
- hmmm, fame and political power are also personal gains.
becoming that rich is based on substantially more than (mostly) coincidence, based on being at the right place at the right time knowing the right people and other stochastic variables.
- yes, plus working hard, doing what it takes to organize all of these 'stochastic variables' into a system that generates revenue.
People have some sort of a problem with others becoming wealthy by a combination of working and lucking out, I think it is a misplaced sense of so called 'unfairness' (it could have been anybody they think). I could not have been anybody, only a subset of people become wealthy even under the most favourable conditions.
I don't trust any of those "My secret to financial success" books
- you don't need to trust them, however they have have a good advice or two in them. If you haven't gone through a tough situation of some kind once it hits you it is better to be armed with knowledge of others about it rather than finding out from scratch on your own skin.
Many rich people like to pretend that they 'made it' by their own intellect and skills, and I don't blame them because it would be kind of embarrassing to have all this money without any real achievement except for being an outlier of some probability distribution.
- there are people simply born to wealth, I don't understand why they should be embarrassed to have won that lottery.
some intelligence or smartness is certainly required to keep being wealthy
- especially in the world that is dead set on taking everything from you once you have something the majority does not...
As for the claim that nobody should have that much money, it's true that from a utilitarian point of view according to standard economic theory transferring money from the very rich to the poor always increases overall utility in a society, because money has diminishing marginal value.
- it is idiotic at best, it is oppressive at worst.
Everybody should have as much money as they can possibly make, that's what increases overall utility, not stealing from those who have more to give away to those who have less. That does not increase utility, it dissipates scarce resources (savings). It's not that easy to put together a sum of money, dissipating it is always much easier.
It's easy to steal and redistribute, it's hard to accumulate wealth. Accumulation of wealth allows for contingencies, it allows for new business formation and for expansion of existing business. Wealth dissipation only allows a momentary consumption binge with nothing left to boast after that's done.
So yes, according to standard economic theory it makes sense to limit the personal accumulation of wealth.
- that is absolute lunacy.
If a guy runs a successful company and then uses his money to start a second successful company it means he will increase his money by providing the society with the products and services (and investment opportunities and even with such ridiculous things as jobs and tax collections unfortunately).
To limit somebody's ability to earn another dollar means to limit their desire to make that dollar, means to limit their desire to WORK.
Putting a cap on the maximum amount of money one can make (what, per year? per life?) means that once you earned that you stop thinking about it, take off for a vacation.
Nobody benefits when a rich guy goes to a vacation (except for some restaurants and a tour company maybe). The utility of a wealthy person is in WORKING.
By limiting what they can EARN you limit how much they will WORK.
In case of a wealthy person working actually means using his money and connections and all of his capabilities to produce more, so by limiting the amount of money he can earn you are limiting the usefulness of what he does.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no way a pistol with a "silencer" would not be heard very distinctly in a large and crowded venue
- maybe not a 'pistol with a silencer' but a silenced pistol is actually extremely quiet.
America's incidence is very high
- actually I disagree, I think the incidence of having a mass shooting or two a day in a country of over 300 million people is extremely low.
Joined the dark side Yoda has.
Oh, I am sorry, I was wrong on one thing. Not on the correctness of definition of what a right is, I was wrong on something else.
I was wrong to assume that you are a person who can be informed about something, so I spent a few minutes of my life unnecessarily trying to teach you why thinking for yourself is more important than following whatever it is that is written down by some form of an 'authority' (a dictionary at this point). An 'authority' that repeatedly redefined words to fit a new political agenda.
An 'authority' who demonstrably follows the course set in front of it by a changing political scenery. Words like *inflation* (in the context of money), which that same dictionary only in 1864 used to define as *undue expansion or increase, from over-issue; â" said of currency.* and nothing more, in 1909 the definition changed to "Undue expansion or increase, as in paper currency, prices, etc.", and by 1934 the definition swelled all the way to this:
"Disproportionate and relatively sharp and sudden increase in the quantity of money or credit, or both, relative to the amount of exchange business. Such increase may come as a result of unexpected additions to the supply of precious metals, as in the period following the Spanish conquests in Central and South America or the period following the opening up of large new gold deposits; or it may come in times of business activity by expansion of credit through the banks; or it may come in times of financial difficulty by governmental issues of paper money without adequate metallic reserve and without provisions for conversion into standard metallic money on demand. In accordance with the law of the quantity theory of money, inflation always produces a rise in the price level. "
Inflation was defined by that dictionary as expansion of the money supply. Now of-course the definition is redefined into something irrelevant:
"a continuous rise of price levels"
(though they still couldn't embarrass themselves completely, so they followed that by
"usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money"
).
That is your authority. OK, so I completely admit that I was wrong and you are not a thinking person (even ever so slightly) as I assumed you might be (which was the only reason for me replying to you in the first place). My bad, won't happen again. Cheers.
Again, a right is a word, words actually have meaning, denying a meaning of a word and redefining it to fit your political agenda does not actually change the meaning of the word.
The perception of people can change, the people are very often uneducated about issues, they are ignorant, some are actually incapable of understanding even mildly complex subjects.
There cannot be a 'basic law' that is a 'right' that puts an obligation on a person A to provide an entitlement to a person B. That's not a 'basic law' and that's certainly not a right. It is a pair of things: an entitlement and an obligation, and as all entitlements+obligation pairs it demands destruction of rights of the person who is forced to provide this entitlement. When an obligation is placed on one person (or on any group of people) to give away their product or time or money to somebody because that somebody (anybody) is entitled to it because a government decreed so, the actual right of that person or a group of people who are forced to provide the entitlement are destroyed, while an extra surplus of unearned product/service is provided to the entitled individual (or a group).
Clearly you are unable to think for yourself, let us try this:
1. A right is not something that a government should be able to take away from you, do you agree or disagree?
2. A right is something that should be protected by the system (be it the law or the court system).
3. A right cannot be upheld if in order to provide it rights of others must be violated. - this is where I suppose you disagree with me, however, you call it 'politically slanted'.
You see, the reason why an entitlement cannot be considered a right is because an entitlement assumes 2 sides to this argument: person A entitled to something and person B who is obligated to provide it. That's the basics of it. If a person B is forced by a government to provide you with something then that thing is not a right, it's an entitlement. I am talking about rights here, not about entitlements.
A right is protection against government oppression. A right only exists as a concept because in order for a right to be protected the system must be prohibited from violating it.
If a generic person or a generic company (I consider businesses to be people, by the way, people that own companies) murders you then they are not actually violating your right. They are committing an act, which can be considered a criminal act but not because they 'violated your right to life'. No, they did not violate your right, because there is a criminal system that declares the act of murder to be a crime in the first place. There is a way to enact punishment against a *specific person* who murders you.
A government cannot be punished by punishing any specific person.
A government is a system and it is much more powerful than any specific person.
A government can only be stopped from oppressing you by ensuring that the government has no legal power to oppress you in certain ways.
So a right as a protection against government oppression makes sense. A right as an entitlement to the product or service provided by somebody who is then obligated to provide it does not make sense because it is not something that you need to be protected against the government for. A government does not need to be prohibited against anything in this case, a separate entity ( a person) or a group of people (the tax payers) can be forced and criminally obligated to provide something, that's an entitlement.
Merriam Webster is as wrong on this as the general population is confused about it.
Who do you think we are here, n00bs, to RTFS? Jizless Kraist, if something is worth knowing it should be clear from the title itself, otherwise that's what the comment section is for - to complain about the title not providing ALL of the information necessary to have a complete and thorough understanding of the issues surrounding the topic and concepts at hand.
You are wrong obviously, a right is a protection against government oppression, it is not a product or a service or a resource. Government must not be able to prevent a person from drinking, it is not the same thing as declaring that clean water must be made available for a person just because that person is born, whether he does or does not pay for the privilege of *somebody cleaning* the water.
Did you take into account student sebt?
Rail tracks are insanely easy to repair and even to build new ones, it costs money and takes time of-course but the technology for this is absolutely clear and there will be nothing that will have to be done to the entire length of the track. Of-course tracks are completely different from a vacuum pipe going from point A to point B, rail tracks can split and reconnect, replacing tracks is a very quick procedure and the technology is so mature that it is extremely unlikely that a local failure would provide some new information that would have to be used to retrofit the entire length of the remaining tracks. Multiple track lanes run in parallel and it is possible to reroute trains and use one track to go in either direction for some distance, none of this is possible with Hyperloop.
Do we need a new way to talk about design that isn't necessarily friendly, but respectful?
- so here it is. The next UI design paradigm doesn't have to solve any specific issue, but it has to be 'respectful'.
WSJ FTW.
Really excellent news, given that as of last week i have s8+ that I got as a gift and typing on right now. I turned off and disabled so many 'features' on it already but this bixby thing has serious staying power, like a zombie, cannot be put to death once and for all. I want to use the physical button, i want more physical buttons on the phone, not fewer of them, so this new button is excellent.... iff (if and only if) it can be used for anything else that i get to choose and not for bixby, which i guarantee never to use.
I am not iron man to build one for myself and i dont trust any company out there to build one for me that i could trust not to spy on me. In case of Samsung - i dont trust them even to get it working right, i had to disable the auto replace 'feature' (it is a bug, not a feature) because it is so completely wrong in what it does for me so often...
So these are good news indeed.
You mean instead of bringing a small number of bills to test they brought in a barrel of the stuff and tested each one, they cut each one into pieces and flushed down the toilet right at the bank? OK. That took a lot of time!
My point is that banks don't have the facilities to print money, especially Swiss banks wouldn't have facilities to print Euro. Printing process would be centralized and done by the central banks.
UBS is not SNB, so UBS wouldn't have equipment to print any currency (why would they have currency printing facilities at a random bank in Geneva?) SNB on the other hand is not named in this story.
Beyond that SNB wouldn't (or shouldn't at least) have the equipment to print Euros, they do print Francs though.
But that's why I found it unbelievable but at least it would make some sense if that's what happened (again, why would Switzerland implement phasing out of Euros, it would be similar to USA implementing phasing out of old Canadian dollars, it makes no sense).
I think it's art.
No, not in the same way at all. One bus or one plane blowing up has little effect on the rest of the infrastructure, on the rest of the traffic, on the rest of the buses and airplanes. Hyperloop exploding shuts down all Hyperloop traffic at least until everything is fixed, possibly until the entire system is upgraded/rebuilt and very likely forever because the cost is prohibitive.
No, that's not what he said. It will not be a delay, it will be a shutdown and an unknown amount of time will pass before the system can be put online and used again (if ever, in case the flaw is systemic and the entire system needs an upgrade all over the place).
There is a huge difference between a delay and a long (or a permanent) shut down when talking about serious infrastructure.
By the way, a long delay for thousands of people can be compared to lives lost, after all if you multiply the amount of time per person by the number of people that are delayed, you can easily come up with numbers that are on the order of magnitude of individual lives.
80 * 365 * 24 * 60 = 42048000 minutes, that's 42 million minutes in 80 years. If you have 10000 people delayed by 3 days that's the same number of minutes.
So you think that they print counterfeit money in a bank and when it fails they cut up the bad batch and flush it down the toilet at the bank?
More likely it is a modern art installation...
Or maybe the banks are implementing the new European idea of phasing out 500Euro bills, I just don't know why Switzerland would do this and why any particular bank would do it this way, but at least that makes some sense.
The only way you would encounter 15PSI is if the ENTIRE tube was full of air and pressure had equalized
- are you willing to bet your life on it? I would say that if your capsule is moving towards a rupture in the pipe, you are going to be hit not only with a static 'wall' of air that is not moving but is simply at 15PSI, you will be hit with a shockwave.
So this would be a pipe on the ground (or is it underground) in a precisely known location. Never mind terrorists, people will shoot it on purpose and for fun, heavy equipment will run into it by mistake, things will fall on it from the top by random chance. It will get damaged often and hard at many points over its hundreds of miles of pipe.
Ha ha ha ha, you are so wrong it's super funny! The difference is not between 0PSI and 15PSI, the difference is between moving through 0PSI at 1200KM/hour and moving through 0PSI at 1200KM/hour and all of a sudden hitting a *wall* of 15PSI.
Not everybody in Russia, but a gigantic number of people are exactly as you say - expecting somebody to fix their lives for them, to cuddle them from cradle to grave, I am not joking, that is precisely the sentiment of an enormous number of people there.
Not everybody of-course, there are a few percentage points that want actual freedom and they really have so few choices that at this point they just want to see the current regime change and then hope that the next guy will be somehow on the side of more freedoms, not less. Alexey Navalny seems to be the only real option (though with very few chances of success), however personally I don't see him as a person who is seeking to increase individual freedoms. To me he is just more of a socialist type, who wants to end the current form of corruption to install his own ideology of what it means to live in the country.
His ideas are that of a modern welfare statist and I cannot support that though I do generally support removing the current government from power. I do however support removing any current government from power in pretty much any country, I see them all as oppressive regimes.
What Can You Do With Old Coaxial Cable?
- I admit about not reading TFA or even the summary, but I can imagine a thing or two that can be done with an old cable; not sure it qualifies for a nerd site...
Well, you just mentioned somebody named Rick Astley without explaining who that is either. I don't know who that is and I don't care enough to google and I don't care to hear from anybody either, but you just did exactly the thing you complained about....
Not really, it follows directly from classical microeconomics, as the diminishing value of money is empirically well-confirmed, under the assumption of utilitarianism
- it is perfectly nonsensical to declare that somebody's savings are of a reduced utility because they save it rather than spending it on consumption. Savings are used as investments, they are also used as rainy day funds. Spending everything you are making is the wrong strategy if you are running a business or a family. Saving is what allows allocation of capital to investments into new businesses, which is what creates new capital. Spending on consumption dissipates capital.
It may be less useful than he thinks - others can do the very same thing, but they will get more utility from the same amount of discretionary income or an even lower one
- I don't understand this ideology of having 'others' spend money of people who actually made it.
Clearly people who made money are a better judge of how that money should be saved or spent, they are running businesses and businesses need access to cash for various reasons and businesses are reinvesting money to grow/expand or just to stay in business when things get tough. To say that somebody else is a better judge of how to spend the money that you are making is to declare that:
1. You are not the owner of your property, of things that you produce.
2. The money you are making is somehow of lesser value in your hands than in the hands of somebody who didn't actually make any money. Thus the money should be taken from somebody who is successful at making it and handed over to somebody who is clearly not as successful at making money (otherwise he wouldn't need the transfer in the first place).
I disagree with both of those statements, they are morally bankrupt and they are economically retarded.
generally speaking very rich people are as replaceable and useful as anyone else
- I disagree completely. Generally speaking I will not speak generally, however people who made their money are not as replaceable as people who didn't. Rockefeller is not a replaceable person, after his property was taken away from him the prices for kerosene that his business supplied never went lower again in history.
implausible to assume that very rich people, as a tendency, work because they want to earn more money "
- wrong. That's what investments are - capital supplied by a wealthy individual is not supplied for the giggles, except for charity it is all supplied to grow a business, thus it is investment and investment is for making a profit.
they work because they like their work
- ha, they work for the results, not for the process. The results have to be tangible.
Bill Gates has no problems with giving away much of his money.
- I don't think you actually understand his motivations enough to speak for him, I will not.
, but he couldn't care less about personal gains.
- hmmm, fame and political power are also personal gains.
becoming that rich is based on substantially more than (mostly) coincidence, based on being at the right place at the right time knowing the right people and other stochastic variables.
- yes, plus working hard, doing what it takes to organize all of these 'stochastic variables' into a system that generates revenue.
People have some sort of a problem with others becoming wealthy by a combination of working and lucking out, I think it is a misplaced sense of so called 'unfairness' (it could have been anybody they think). I could not have been anybody, only a subset of people become wealthy even under the most favourable conditions.
I don't trust any of those "My secret to financial success" books
- you don't need to trust them, however they have have a good advice or two in them. If you haven't gone through a tough situation of some kind once it hits you it is better to be armed with knowledge of others about it rather than finding out from scratch on your own skin.
Many rich people like to pretend that they 'made it' by their own intellect and skills, and I don't blame them because it would be kind of embarrassing to have all this money without any real achievement except for being an outlier of some probability distribution.
- there are people simply born to wealth, I don't understand why they should be embarrassed to have won that lottery.
some intelligence or smartness is certainly required to keep being wealthy
- especially in the world that is dead set on taking everything from you once you have something the majority does not...
As for the claim that nobody should have that much money, it's true that from a utilitarian point of view according to standard economic theory transferring money from the very rich to the poor always increases overall utility in a society, because money has diminishing marginal value.
- it is idiotic at best, it is oppressive at worst.
Everybody should have as much money as they can possibly make, that's what increases overall utility, not stealing from those who have more to give away to those who have less. That does not increase utility, it dissipates scarce resources (savings). It's not that easy to put together a sum of money, dissipating it is always much easier.
It's easy to steal and redistribute, it's hard to accumulate wealth. Accumulation of wealth allows for contingencies, it allows for new business formation and for expansion of existing business. Wealth dissipation only allows a momentary consumption binge with nothing left to boast after that's done.
So yes, according to standard economic theory it makes sense to limit the personal accumulation of wealth.
- that is absolute lunacy.
If a guy runs a successful company and then uses his money to start a second successful company it means he will increase his money by providing the society with the products and services (and investment opportunities and even with such ridiculous things as jobs and tax collections unfortunately).
To limit somebody's ability to earn another dollar means to limit their desire to make that dollar, means to limit their desire to WORK.
Putting a cap on the maximum amount of money one can make (what, per year? per life?) means that once you earned that you stop thinking about it, take off for a vacation.
Nobody benefits when a rich guy goes to a vacation (except for some restaurants and a tour company maybe). The utility of a wealthy person is in WORKING.
By limiting what they can EARN you limit how much they will WORK.
In case of a wealthy person working actually means using his money and connections and all of his capabilities to produce more, so by limiting the amount of money he can earn you are limiting the usefulness of what he does.