My concern is that if you redistribute the 'wealth' that they'll never need, it will have zero real impact on the actual problems indicated by them managing to have so much in the first place. Like you say it can't be solved 'only' with money, but then say doing just the money would do something. I think it would border on utterly meaningless. After all, how many of these folks have gone bankrupt and never missed out on a second of living like a rich guy before the transient 'bankruptcy' state went away?
Sure but I'm not saying that poor people need to live like rich people. I'm saying that if we took that wealth and used it to provide social services for the poor (and not just in our own rich countries but everywhere) that it could make a difference.
Of course it's a pipe dream that has about as much chance of coming to fruition as the proverbial snowball.
I'm not saying the top 1% is not privileged beyond reason. I'm not saying there is no real problem.. I'm saying the situation is not so extreme that they could unilaterally meaningfully elevate the rest of the world's quality of life to the degree the numbers suggest. People who think we could just Robin Hood them and the world's quality of life problems would go away are too optimistically faithful in the numbers.
Economy is as much about psychology as anything else. The value of a 'dollar' is a matter of perception and context (in both time and what sort of good or whatever it is being used on, or the value being different for a dollar being spent versus a dollar hoarded into some account for some indefinite period of time). It's all a confusing mess.
Of course it can't be solved 'only' with money but it can't be solved without money either - and these people have so much that they'll never need that should be redistributed to bring society as a whole forward.
This would first require ending of right to free movement (otherwise whole Eastern Europe would move to countries with ubs) and then really dealing with immigration to prevent whole Africa from moving to Europe. In other words: no way.
Universal presumably means all of the European countries that are part of the EU so no, it wouldn't require an end to the right of free movement. If anything it would be the reverse with people in high cost countries moving to Eastern Europe where the same basic allowance would yield greater results.
As for your second point, this is already the situation and it has nothing to do with UBS.
While I sympathize with the sentiment, the fantasy of being able to just redistribute the 'wealth' of the top 100 doubling the standard of living of everybody else is rooted in the mathematical fiction of 'wealth' (as we model it today).
Wealth is an assessed value of their assets and their money. Assets including cars, land, bulidings, stocks, etc. If Steve Balmer one day said 'I want to trade in my 15 billion dollars of microsoft stock for some cash', he wouldn't get 15 billion dollars of cash because the share price would tank. If you took the resources that go into building a 400,000 exotic car, you could not take those same and just build 20 family sedans, though the 'math' says you could.
On the flip side, a lot of homeless folk are technically more 'wealthy' than some pretty comfortable folks. In the early part of his vice presidency, Joe Biden had negative net worth. By the same standards that establish the top 100 as being able to elevate the rest of the world, Joe Biden was a more pitiable man than people in cardboard boxes (he had plenty of assets, but more debt than assets). Incidentally this scenario applies to most young families with a house and a car or two, but they wouldn't trade that in for a cardboard box to get wealthier.
In general don't look too hard at the ostensible numbers of wealth, because in aggregate it's a situation with many hacks to workaround this nonsense. A lot of the high-dollar things are more like 'high scores' than some indicator of meaningful value that is accurate relative to the experience of most. One would hope there's a better way than just increasingly playing make believe with numbers, but we haven't really come up with something that works in the way modern life goes (no, a return to gold standard or something in the same spirit wouldn't help, it would just limit the ability to do the 'workarounds' to fix things when the behavior of the participants in the economy goes nuts).
When you convince the wealthiest 1% with this then I'll buy into it.
In the meantime I'd rather be part of that 1% and suffer the indignities associated with being super rich.
Look, nobody (except some seriously sick perverts) wants kids to be raped. But the problem is that there are way too many things that don't involve rape or even any harm to a child which have ruined people's lives.
Then you argue for the definition of child porn to be changed, if you disagree with it - not for child porn to be legal (or ignored).
Technical limitations. If someone invented a reliable and affordable brain scanner that could detect any sexual thoughts, it would only be a matter of time before the mind probe becomes mandatory for anyone who works near children.
That's science fiction and has no bearing at all on today's reality.
Maybe for the same reason why they wouldn't want to report evidence of witchcraft if they encountered that?
Personally, I'd only report it if the owner was a right-wing politician, a judge in bed with shady building contractors, or a forensic expert bragging on facebook about his fondness for the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit.
Or if you found pictures of your own kids or very young relatives being raped perhaps.
The fine for a bank failing should be the bank failing. The "bailout" should be given to depositors (there was even an existing mechanism for that, the FDIC), not to the institution that lost the funds. But no, apparently we live in an age where mediocrity and incompetence is rewarded and excellence is restricted. Cos you'll just make the rest of us look bad, ya know?
Or at least be nationalized when bailed out but hey, that would be 'un-American'.
If the taxpayers bail out a company, that company should then belong to the taxpayers.
Some of this is cat and mouse... whatever system is used to identify them is circumvented, when that circumvention no longer works a new one is devised. If a company gets nailed badly enough, they declare bankruptcy and continue on in another corporation using slightly improved evasion methods.
Like calling from out of the country maybe - where such laws don't apply or cannot be easily enforced.
I put a corporate death penalty up on the whitehouse.gov petitions a couple years ago. Got something like 3 signatures. It was even less popular than the one where I suggested that members of Congress should be required to use VA hospitals until the problems with VA hospitals are solved. A couple veterans I know were pretty gung-ho for that one.
Did you get the word out? Certainly this is the first I've heard of either one.
Figure out how to get it to go viral on FB and you'll get the signatures.
It is clear from your answers then, that you'd be OK with minors being able to send child pornography to your inbox, with no consequences to themselves? That minors could be paid by adults to produce child pornography, and only the adults (should they get caught) ought to be punished? After all, can't hold children responsible for making mistakes, right? The trouble, of course, with making something legal for some but not others, is that it makes for a nightmare for enforcement.
No, I wouldn't be okay with it. What you describe should be, and probably is, handled like drug dealers using runners where the adults involved are tried as adults and the children as children, with probable results including the children being taken from their families and being placed in other situations.
With regard to 'some' and 'others' as you postulate, there is a vast difference between an adult who understands the way of the world and a child, who does not and who is often very easily manipulated by the adult in question. The solution is to remove the child from the adult / environment and get them somewhere else where they can grow up in a more positive situation.
This isn't any more of a nightmare than any other aspect of law enforcement, and much less than most. Even if it were, that alone would not dictate the right way to proceed here. One does not make murder illegal because it's a nightmare for law enforcement to find the murderer.
So, a taxi driver is supposed to drive around for about four or five hours, and then sit around for a few hours to recharge? Yeah, there goes his income. Or, we could have TWICE as many of them so that the driver can swap out cars after four hours. That is economical!
Modular battery packs that could be swapped out in a charging garage?
I can see how censoring sexual pictures of children can be good, and CP is against the law. I don't want anybody censored for advocating breaking the law, but I can see an argument for censoring sites that are doing illegal things on the web. However, there's a lot of nonsense in some of the laws, which I'd like to see changed.
Doing a unilateral US action will not cut ISIS communications, unless we can bomb all of their communications gear, which seems unlikely.
I think that the US is quite capable of disrupting all publicly visible ISIS communication via hacking/cracking/DOS/DDOS should they choose to do so.
I have to think that at this point they do not because it serves the purpose of 'BE AFRAID GIVE US MORE POWER'.
Taking the extreme and obvious counter, do you support no censorship of child pornography?
Do you support jailing minors who take pictures of themselves (ie, jailing producers of child pornography)? Do you support jailing minors who send pictures of themselves (ie, jailing distributors of child pornography)? Do you support jailing minors who own pictures of themselves (ie, jailing owners of child pornography)? How about their parents, if they own eg baby pictures? Do you have any evidence that an adult looking at naughty pictures of minors is likely to result in said adult abusing minors, as opposed to serving as a (mostly) victimless outlet for their urges? As a comparison, if you eliminate a normal person's access to porn, are they more or less likely to have sex? Do you support the government using child pornography as an excuse to violate people's rights to privacy? We must spy on all your attachments, because the children. Do you support the government deciding which ones and zeros people aren't allowed to produce, own, or share?
So evidently the answer to my question is yes, you support no censorship of child pornography.
To answer your questions, more or less:
I think that social acceptance of something results in an increase of that something, with whatever comes with it including abuse and so no, there should not be social acceptance of child pornography. Children will make mistakes and so no, they can not be held responsible for being children. I believe that society should teach children not to make such mistakes the same as we try and education children about any other danger to them. Adults should be able to control their animal urges as that is what makes us better than animals. I believe also that society must contrive to constrain adults who are not able to control their animal urges and are thus not able to live in society. As the government should be representing the people of the society, it is their responsibility to exercise such control over those who do not control themselves. Society must enable such control, within reasonable limits - for which there are already laws as well as checks and balances to keep those in power from abusing those laws.
"One of the chief concerns is the various sabotages committed against fibre cables in the area. As the fibre optic cable networks function as back up communication systems in emergency situations, these are a possible target for the attackers. By destroying these cables, response times could be slowed down."
The fucked up thing is that this might actually have more of an impact on many Americans than actual civilian deaths 'elsewhere' do.
But if we build in censorship as a fundamental part of the web to stop ISIS, that doesn't sound so bad. What's the worst that could happen? I'll bet the politicians are even willing to swear that they'll never abuse it.
Taking the extreme and obvious counter, do you support no censorship of child pornography?
In war, stopping recruitment for the enemy military by eliminating their communications is desirable. That in this case the enemy's communications happen to be on the Internet does not change the fact that eliminating enemy communication remains desirable.
It seems quite stupid to me to keep anyone off the "open web" (whatever that is), because you gain a lot more from operational slips as to what they are up to, than you lose from recruiting value the group in question gains from running a website.
Not if you can monitor them on the 'dark' web anyway. Let spies be spies and infiltrate as they're supposed to do.
Part of any war is propaganda and stopping the propaganda of the enemy is desirable.
"Youth younger than 16 years of age working in nonagricultural employment in a business solely owned by their parents or by persons standing in place of their parents, may work any time of day and for any number of hours. However, parents are prohibited from employing their child in manufacturing or mining or in any of the occupations declared hazardous by the Secretary of Labor.
In addition, the child labor rules do not apply to:
Youth employed as actors or performers in motion pictures, theatrical, radio, or television productions;
Youth engaged in the delivery of newspapers to consumers; and
Youth working at home in the making of wreaths composed of natural holly, pine, cedar, or other evergreens (including the harvesting of the evergreens)."
You are talking about laws of a developed country that has social welfare, free education, free medicine for the poor, free housing for the poor.
I am talking about countries that have none of that. Where the children will starve to death if they do not work.
More like the US hasn't quite learned the lesson, or has begun to forget it.
For somewhere between 30 and 60 years (depending on district), the education and entertainment providers in the USA have been actively trying to manipulate the populace toward embracing certain totalitarian police state options. The populace is being taught helplessness and dependence, and to be violently afraid of anyone who does not embrace a lifestyle of helplessness. Thus the loud opposition to the second amendment and cold apathy over the fourth, fifth and tenth. People are now voting who have been trained to defer self-preservation to people who they personally fear and believe will murder them if given a chance, yet few of them realize this inconsistency because they have also been taught that logical thinking is the way of a closed and bigoted mind.
Those in the bureaucracies and other unelected segments of government watch the trends carefully, taking authority with every crisis and never returning any. Many in congress start to think like the staffers they inherited within 3 years, and some presidents act like no one will ever come along capable of revoking their actions (and history has shown, few do directly correct prior presidential action).
People get what they ask for. The people have generally asked for mind-numbing entertainment and to ignore the world at large and that's what they got.
Those in power are filling the vacuum created by the general population, who, not fighting to keep their place, are content to sleep while their rights are degraded until eventually nothing will be left and the cycle hits bottom at which time perhaps the children of those people will want more and will rise up again, starting the cycle anew.
I kind of agree with you, but receiving stolen property is a crime. Why not receiving child-abuse property?
In countries where there is no free education or free medicine, no welfare or food stamps; where a child may very well starve if they don't work - is giving them work really child abuse ?
While unthinkable to us in our comfortable protected societies, there are those who have little choice.
Slashdot Mirror
My concern is that if you redistribute the 'wealth' that they'll never need, it will have zero real impact on the actual problems indicated by them managing to have so much in the first place. Like you say it can't be solved 'only' with money, but then say doing just the money would do something. I think it would border on utterly meaningless. After all, how many of these folks have gone bankrupt and never missed out on a second of living like a rich guy before the transient 'bankruptcy' state went away?
Sure but I'm not saying that poor people need to live like rich people. I'm saying that if we took that wealth and used it to provide social services for the poor (and not just in our own rich countries but everywhere) that it could make a difference.
Of course it's a pipe dream that has about as much chance of coming to fruition as the proverbial snowball.
I'm not saying the top 1% is not privileged beyond reason. I'm not saying there is no real problem.. I'm saying the situation is not so extreme that they could unilaterally meaningfully elevate the rest of the world's quality of life to the degree the numbers suggest. People who think we could just Robin Hood them and the world's quality of life problems would go away are too optimistically faithful in the numbers.
Economy is as much about psychology as anything else. The value of a 'dollar' is a matter of perception and context (in both time and what sort of good or whatever it is being used on, or the value being different for a dollar being spent versus a dollar hoarded into some account for some indefinite period of time). It's all a confusing mess.
Of course it can't be solved 'only' with money but it can't be solved without money either - and these people have so much that they'll never need that should be redistributed to bring society as a whole forward.
This would first require ending of right to free movement (otherwise whole Eastern Europe would move to countries with ubs) and then really dealing with immigration to prevent whole Africa from moving to Europe.
In other words: no way.
Universal presumably means all of the European countries that are part of the EU so no, it wouldn't require an end to the right of free movement. If anything it would be the reverse with people in high cost countries moving to Eastern Europe where the same basic allowance would yield greater results.
As for your second point, this is already the situation and it has nothing to do with UBS.
While I sympathize with the sentiment, the fantasy of being able to just redistribute the 'wealth' of the top 100 doubling the standard of living of everybody else is rooted in the mathematical fiction of 'wealth' (as we model it today).
Wealth is an assessed value of their assets and their money. Assets including cars, land, bulidings, stocks, etc. If Steve Balmer one day said 'I want to trade in my 15 billion dollars of microsoft stock for some cash', he wouldn't get 15 billion dollars of cash because the share price would tank. If you took the resources that go into building a 400,000 exotic car, you could not take those same and just build 20 family sedans, though the 'math' says you could.
On the flip side, a lot of homeless folk are technically more 'wealthy' than some pretty comfortable folks. In the early part of his vice presidency, Joe Biden had negative net worth. By the same standards that establish the top 100 as being able to elevate the rest of the world, Joe Biden was a more pitiable man than people in cardboard boxes (he had plenty of assets, but more debt than assets). Incidentally this scenario applies to most young families with a house and a car or two, but they wouldn't trade that in for a cardboard box to get wealthier.
In general don't look too hard at the ostensible numbers of wealth, because in aggregate it's a situation with many hacks to workaround this nonsense. A lot of the high-dollar things are more like 'high scores' than some indicator of meaningful value that is accurate relative to the experience of most. One would hope there's a better way than just increasingly playing make believe with numbers, but we haven't really come up with something that works in the way modern life goes (no, a return to gold standard or something in the same spirit wouldn't help, it would just limit the ability to do the 'workarounds' to fix things when the behavior of the participants in the economy goes nuts).
When you convince the wealthiest 1% with this then I'll buy into it.
In the meantime I'd rather be part of that 1% and suffer the indignities associated with being super rich.
"...in which I would simply remind the person that child porn is felony"
At which time you become an accessory.
Or drawings, apparently.
Look, nobody (except some seriously sick perverts) wants kids to be raped. But the problem is that there are way too many things that don't involve rape or even any harm to a child which have ruined people's lives.
Then you argue for the definition of child porn to be changed, if you disagree with it - not for child porn to be legal (or ignored).
Technical limitations. If someone invented a reliable and affordable brain scanner that could detect any sexual thoughts, it would only be a matter of time before the mind probe becomes mandatory for anyone who works near children.
That's science fiction and has no bearing at all on today's reality.
Maybe they don't like the concept of thoughtcrime.
'Thoughtcrime' vs. invasion of privacy, or worse, of those who should be protected by those who can protect them.
Where there are consumers of child porn, there are those willing to take whatever means necessary to create the porn to sell.
This is not a victimless crime.
why would anyone NOT want to report it?
Maybe for the same reason why they wouldn't want to report evidence of witchcraft if they encountered that?
Personally, I'd only report it if the owner was a right-wing politician, a judge in bed with shady building contractors, or a forensic expert bragging on facebook about his fondness for the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit.
Or if you found pictures of your own kids or very young relatives being raped perhaps.
Child porn is not witchcraft.
Yeah, the guy said...I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my Granddad, not screaming like his passengers...
The fine for a bank failing should be the bank failing. The "bailout" should be given to depositors (there was even an existing mechanism for that, the FDIC), not to the institution that lost the funds. But no, apparently we live in an age where mediocrity and incompetence is rewarded and excellence is restricted. Cos you'll just make the rest of us look bad, ya know?
Or at least be nationalized when bailed out but hey, that would be 'un-American'.
If the taxpayers bail out a company, that company should then belong to the taxpayers.
Some of this is cat and mouse... whatever system is used to identify them is circumvented, when that circumvention no longer works a new one is devised. If a company gets nailed badly enough, they declare bankruptcy and continue on in another corporation using slightly improved evasion methods.
Like calling from out of the country maybe - where such laws don't apply or cannot be easily enforced.
I put a corporate death penalty up on the whitehouse.gov petitions a couple years ago. Got something like 3 signatures. It was even less popular than the one where I suggested that members of Congress should be required to use VA hospitals until the problems with VA hospitals are solved. A couple veterans I know were pretty gung-ho for that one.
Did you get the word out? Certainly this is the first I've heard of either one.
Figure out how to get it to go viral on FB and you'll get the signatures.
Brilliant :-)
I'd say it was the flush toilet.
The flush toilet is not an 'IT invention'...
It is clear from your answers then, that you'd be OK with minors being able to send child pornography to your inbox, with no consequences to themselves? That minors could be paid by adults to produce child pornography, and only the adults (should they get caught) ought to be punished? After all, can't hold children responsible for making mistakes, right? The trouble, of course, with making something legal for some but not others, is that it makes for a nightmare for enforcement.
No, I wouldn't be okay with it. What you describe should be, and probably is, handled like drug dealers using runners where the adults involved are tried as adults and the children as children, with probable results including the children being taken from their families and being placed in other situations.
With regard to 'some' and 'others' as you postulate, there is a vast difference between an adult who understands the way of the world and a child, who does not and who is often very easily manipulated by the adult in question. The solution is to remove the child from the adult / environment and get them somewhere else where they can grow up in a more positive situation.
This isn't any more of a nightmare than any other aspect of law enforcement, and much less than most. Even if it were, that alone would not dictate the right way to proceed here. One does not make murder illegal because it's a nightmare for law enforcement to find the murderer.
So, a taxi driver is supposed to drive around for about four or five hours, and then sit around for a few hours to recharge? Yeah, there goes his income. Or, we could have TWICE as many of them so that the driver can swap out cars after four hours. That is economical!
Modular battery packs that could be swapped out in a charging garage?
I can see how censoring sexual pictures of children can be good, and CP is against the law. I don't want anybody censored for advocating breaking the law, but I can see an argument for censoring sites that are doing illegal things on the web. However, there's a lot of nonsense in some of the laws, which I'd like to see changed.
Doing a unilateral US action will not cut ISIS communications, unless we can bomb all of their communications gear, which seems unlikely.
I think that the US is quite capable of disrupting all publicly visible ISIS communication via hacking/cracking/DOS/DDOS should they choose to do so.
I have to think that at this point they do not because it serves the purpose of 'BE AFRAID GIVE US MORE POWER'.
Taking the extreme and obvious counter, do you support no censorship of child pornography?
Do you support jailing minors who take pictures of themselves (ie, jailing producers of child pornography)?
Do you support jailing minors who send pictures of themselves (ie, jailing distributors of child pornography)?
Do you support jailing minors who own pictures of themselves (ie, jailing owners of child pornography)? How about their parents, if they own eg baby pictures?
Do you have any evidence that an adult looking at naughty pictures of minors is likely to result in said adult abusing minors, as opposed to serving as a (mostly) victimless outlet for their urges? As a comparison, if you eliminate a normal person's access to porn, are they more or less likely to have sex?
Do you support the government using child pornography as an excuse to violate people's rights to privacy? We must spy on all your attachments, because the children.
Do you support the government deciding which ones and zeros people aren't allowed to produce, own, or share?
So evidently the answer to my question is yes, you support no censorship of child pornography.
To answer your questions, more or less:
I think that social acceptance of something results in an increase of that something, with whatever comes with it including abuse and so no, there should not be social acceptance of child pornography.
Children will make mistakes and so no, they can not be held responsible for being children.
I believe that society should teach children not to make such mistakes the same as we try and education children about any other danger to them.
Adults should be able to control their animal urges as that is what makes us better than animals.
I believe also that society must contrive to constrain adults who are not able to control their animal urges and are thus not able to live in society.
As the government should be representing the people of the society, it is their responsibility to exercise such control over those who do not control themselves.
Society must enable such control, within reasonable limits - for which there are already laws as well as checks and balances to keep those in power from abusing those laws.
"One of the chief concerns is the various sabotages committed against fibre cables in the area. As the fibre optic cable networks function as back up communication systems in emergency situations, these are a possible target for the attackers. By destroying these cables, response times could be slowed down."
The fucked up thing is that this might actually have more of an impact on many Americans than actual civilian deaths 'elsewhere' do.
But if we build in censorship as a fundamental part of the web to stop ISIS, that doesn't sound so bad. What's the worst that could happen? I'll bet the politicians are even willing to swear that they'll never abuse it.
Taking the extreme and obvious counter, do you support no censorship of child pornography?
In war, stopping recruitment for the enemy military by eliminating their communications is desirable. That in this case the enemy's communications happen to be on the Internet does not change the fact that eliminating enemy communication remains desirable.
It seems quite stupid to me to keep anyone off the "open web" (whatever that is), because you gain a lot more from operational slips as to what they are up to, than you lose from recruiting value the group in question gains from running a website.
Not if you can monitor them on the 'dark' web anyway. Let spies be spies and infiltrate as they're supposed to do.
Part of any war is propaganda and stopping the propaganda of the enemy is desirable.
There are well known exceptions:
http://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/w...
"Youth younger than 16 years of age working in nonagricultural employment in a business solely owned by their parents or by persons standing in place of their parents, may work any time of day and for any number of hours. However, parents are prohibited from employing their child in manufacturing or mining or in any of the occupations declared hazardous by the Secretary of Labor.
In addition, the child labor rules do not apply to:
Youth employed as actors or performers in motion pictures, theatrical, radio, or television productions;
Youth engaged in the delivery of newspapers to consumers; and
Youth working at home in the making of wreaths composed of natural holly, pine, cedar, or other evergreens (including the harvesting of the evergreens)."
You are talking about laws of a developed country that has social welfare, free education, free medicine for the poor, free housing for the poor.
I am talking about countries that have none of that. Where the children will starve to death if they do not work.
Have you been to India?
More like the US hasn't quite learned the lesson, or has begun to forget it.
For somewhere between 30 and 60 years (depending on district), the education and entertainment providers in the USA have been actively trying to manipulate the populace toward embracing certain totalitarian police state options. The populace is being taught helplessness and dependence, and to be violently afraid of anyone who does not embrace a lifestyle of helplessness. Thus the loud opposition to the second amendment and cold apathy over the fourth, fifth and tenth. People are now voting who have been trained to defer self-preservation to people who they personally fear and believe will murder them if given a chance, yet few of them realize this inconsistency because they have also been taught that logical thinking is the way of a closed and bigoted mind.
Those in the bureaucracies and other unelected segments of government watch the trends carefully, taking authority with every crisis and never returning any. Many in congress start to think like the staffers they inherited within 3 years, and some presidents act like no one will ever come along capable of revoking their actions (and history has shown, few do directly correct prior presidential action).
People get what they ask for. The people have generally asked for mind-numbing entertainment and to ignore the world at large and that's what they got.
Those in power are filling the vacuum created by the general population, who, not fighting to keep their place, are content to sleep while their rights are degraded until eventually nothing will be left and the cycle hits bottom at which time perhaps the children of those people will want more and will rise up again, starting the cycle anew.
I kind of agree with you, but receiving stolen property is a crime. Why not receiving child-abuse property?
In countries where there is no free education or free medicine, no welfare or food stamps; where a child may very well starve if they don't work - is giving them work really child abuse ?
While unthinkable to us in our comfortable protected societies, there are those who have little choice.