And I am committed to ensuring "No Disconnect" in countries that struggle for democracy.
Note the qualification the politician used. In a democracy, it's perfectly okay to censor people apparently. After all, the government "represents the people," right? So anything they do, however despotic, is acceptable.
I'm amazed that it's taken this long for someone to do the right thing... and that the paper didn't end up on Wikileaks or similar a couple days after this controversy started.
Now imagine that they have been trying that tack, and they're still broke.
They might be going broke, but private space development and exploration companies certainly aren't. NASA is failing because it's an enormous, lethargic bureaucracy staffed by the same caliber of people who work at the DMV or the welfare office, and people know this. I certainly wouldn't give money voluntarily to NASA.
Going into space benefits us all. It has already paid dividends. It can pay more.
And this justifies forcing everyone to pay for it how?
And, true or not, this misses my point. If you're going to force everyone to pay for it, everyone (either directly, or through their congressman, or whatever) gets to have a say in whether or not space exploration gets paid for. So, if 50%+1 say no, it doesn't get paid for. On the other hand, with private funding, only the people who want it pay for it. People who don't want to pay for it have no input, and no ability to prevent space exploration from happening.
With this in mind, if you support space exploration, how can you possibly think public funding is the better method? Or is it more important to you, on some sort of "principle," to make everyone pay for it because it "benefits us all," even if this makes it harder to raise money?
It makes more sense than blowing the money on highways when we could be building rail, which can carry ten times as many passengers per dollar spent in the best case, and achieves parity in the worst case.
Yes, it does. What's your point, other than trying to make a false dichotomy? I would vote against these things too, and would support defunding them just as quickly as I support defunding space programs that are coercively paid for.
Now imagine if these people instead went out and spent their time trying to raise the money they need from private benefactors, rather than this silly attempt at shaming the government into giving them more stolen money. It wouldn't matter how many people don't want to fund them; if they find enough money, even if it comes from just one benefactor, they could go forward with their research.
Or, they can keep begging the government to fund them out of money stolen from the public, in which case they constantly have to worry about opponents outnumbering proponents and cutting their funding.
The issue is how the government is trying to use these facts to control and steal from people. I'm not an environmental scientist; I'm not interested in even trying to argue whether or not the theories are true or not. What I'm interested in is ensuring the government doesn't use these theories as an excuse to control people.
That people implicitly go from "something bad is going to happen" to "the government has to do something!" not only without realizing they're doing it, but aggressively resisting acknowledging the fact that they're doing it only shows how much is wrong with society today.
Yes. I am quite proud that freedom of choice is winning out against people trying to use scientific theories to justify crushing regulation, confiscatory taxation, and more and more intrusions into our economic and private lives.
It's not about the facts. It's about how you're trying to use them as a weapon against liberty.
The two sides are whether the government should implement a given policy, or shouldn't. Just because thermodynamics leads to such-and-such a conclusion doesn't force the government to act. People, with free will, need to choose to act. Or not to act. That is a political decision.
What people are upset about is those policies: New taxes, new regulations, more government control. People who will be victimized by these policies naturally push back, and---just as how you seem to think that a scientific theory mandates a policy---some people think that the way to discredit that policy is to discredit the theory.
Sounds to me some bureaucrat is just upset his taxpayer-funded job might not be as secure as it once was.
Maybe climate change is real; maybe it isn't. Maybe if governments didn't spend billions of our own dollars trying to convince us that it is, in an effort to justify policies giving them more control over our lives, growing their bureaucracies, taking our money, regulating our businesses and private lives, and so on, there wouldn't be so much political push-back trying to "deny" global warming. Maybe if the government didn't use climate change to victimize people, those victims wouldn't be trying to defend themselves.
If you politicize something, you can always expect the truth to fall by the wayside. The progressives, technocrats, and other assorted socialists in government started this. Now they're upset the other side of the political battle they started is winning.
So you go right ahead and create your tax-free "ferengi" society, where absolutely everything you do (using the road, using the library, educating your kids, going to the park, talking to a politician) will cost at least some amount of cash,...
Because in our current society these things don't cost anything... they're "free," right?
Thanks for posting about this. I hope they pass this. You know why?
I'm from New Hampshire and part of the large and ever-growing liberty movement here. People sick of the nonstop attacks on their freedoms and liberties are moving here from all over the country. For some people, it's a single issue that made them move---exorbitant and ever-increases taxes, the never-ending Drug War, erosion of private property rights, lack of education freedom, attacks on parental rights, infringements upon the Second Amendment, you name it---and for some people it's a bit of everything. (I left Massachusetts over "Romneycare." The government forcing me to buy health insurance was the last straw for me.)
The anti-vaccination movement has become, over the past couple years, one of the liberty movement's most active single-issue allies. The current chair of the biggest pro-liberty lobby organization in the state (probably in the whole country) came into the liberty movement through one of the anti-vax groups here, as did another woman and her son, both of whom got elected to the State House in 2010. They're Republicans; a few years years ago, a Democrat state representative was the one to sponsor a bill expanding New Hampshire's existing philosophical exemption to vaccination.
If the state right next door passes this attack on people's right of conscience, that would only serve to help the movement here as people move to escape Vermont's tyranny.
And thus we have a perfect example of how network neutrality is nothing more than government interference in (natural) free markets, and going to cost consumers more in the long run.
I can move gigabytes of data across my LAN at no cost other than the electricity it takes to run it and the nominal equipment costs. But to pull data in from an upstream network, I need to pay the upstream network provider for access at whatever rate they charge, most likely based on the bandwidth I use. Service A costs me next to nothing, service B costs me money directly, so naturally I might want to charge more for B than I do for A. Perhaps I can even give A away for free or offer a very substantial discount since it costs me little to nothing.
But now the government is going to tell me this pricing scheme is "discriminatory." How dare I charge customers more for services that cost me more money!?
So now I either have to figure out some scheme to distribute the cost of the B across A equally, to make it appear "fair," and hope that I get the subsidization formula right so it doesn't end up costing me money to provide B and A together... or I just charge people as much for A as I do for B in order to ensure it doesn't cost me.
Congratulations, consumers, your idiotic laws just cost you money. But at least it's "fair"!
Are you aware of how careful businesses are nowadays to not even go near something that might result in a lawsuit? (Obviously not.) If they're big enough to have an "HR department," they probably have lawyers and a liability policy that has told them in no uncertain terms what questions they can't ask for fear of a lawsuit. My point is that if Facebook started making noise about these employers violating their ToS, and threatening to take some sort of action therefor, the lawyers and insurers would very quickly bar their clients from asking these sorts of questions if they wanted to continue to be their clients.
Problem solved, without any overreaching new laws or congressional inquiries needed.
As usual, the government has to interfere where a simple private contractual provision would suffice to end this nonsense.
All Facebook has to do is add something to their terms of service that says that no user shall allow another person to log in using their credentials, and that doing so is grounds for account termination.* Then all a prospective employee has to tell their employer when they make this request is, "are you trying to make me violate a contract I have with a third party in order to get this job?" Any employer who isn't a complete idiot will know what the employee is getting at, and if they don't, all they have to do is ask their legal department or liability insurance provider what will happen next if they continue.
Making the employee "agree" to the login by the employer isn't enough: The Facebook ToS is a contract with two parties, and they would need Facebook's permission, too.
To add extra teeth to the ToS, perhaps Facebook could additionally say they'll terminate the account of the unauthorized user, too, if such person has an account and Facebook can determine what it is. Then the PHB who tries to do this to his employee runs the risk of losing his own Facebook account, and maybe even his business' entire presence on Facebook if he happens to be the admin for their FB group.
* I'd actually be amazed if they don't already have this provision in there. Not being a Facebook user, I don't know what their ToS says.
The State is by definition coercive. Governments can be voluntarily constituted, however. People enter into voluntary contracts by which they waive a certain amount of control over themselves every day, and that's really all a "government" is. Homeowners associations and condominium agreements, virtually all private companies, partnerships, trusts, and other voluntary associations, and the first generation of people to colonize an area of terra nullius are all examples of voluntary governance. The State is not. The State exerts its force against people who never agreed to be subject to it, and since States cover every square mile of land on the Earth nowadays, one can't simply leave it to escape as they could in the past.
The view tax is just an example of the many attempts by money-hungry politicians to find ways of raising revenue since they know an income/sales tax would be a career-killer. The State here also has a multitude of silly business licenses (e.g., manicurists) and a rather high "room and meals" tax. All of these are things we're working on getting rid of.
In fairness, though, the "view tax" isn't really a tax, directly speaking: What they're doing now is including the pleasant view that a property may have in its property value assessment. A mountain-top property where you can see mountain ridges miles away would certainly sell for more than a piece of land with no view, wouldn't it? So naturally it's going to be assessed at a higher value.
The problem isn't so much as the view tax as the whole concept of taxing people based on their property's "value." There's probably no stronger disincentive you could possibly come up with for someone to build or otherwise improve their property than to permanently extract more money from them based on the improvements. Pay $10,000 to renovate your house or build a new barn or shed or something, and you'll be paying the State $150-300/year in perpetuity as a result. In many of the rural towns around New Hampshire one can find people living in intentionally crappy-looking or unfinished houses (e.g., exposed Tyvek with no siding ever put up), all to minimize their property value assessment. I've never seen as many people living in RVs as I have since I moved to Grafton.
The State-owned liquor stores are also something some of the liberty activists are trying to get rid of here. However, whereas this may be idiotic, it is nothing unique to New Hampshire. There are 19 "ABC" states.
You're right on one point: The word theft appears to be more of a legal term than a layman's word, which I was unaware of. So let's use another word that has a common definition and hasn't been polluted by self-serving redefinition by the State:
stealing: to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice.
"Wrongfully." Yes, the State has once again re-defined this word in a self-serving manner, to exempt themselves from its coverage, but I am using the term in its moral, not legal sense. It is wrong to take something from someone without their consent. Very few philosophies or religions accept exceptions to this concept, except for some theistic belief systems which contain a god who can do no wrong by definition. So, is the State a god to you?
And if we had large-scale private roads, they would be built much better than they are now. As it is, there's a perverse incentive to actually build roads with substandard materials: Constant construction and road work means "more jobs." For a private business, more work is always a bad thing: It means more expense, and less profits. But for the government, it's a good thing: It makes politicians' careers, creates job security for State workers, and to many people, it justifies the very existence of the State. The more they do, the more necessary their existence appears to be.
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Note the qualification the politician used. In a democracy, it's perfectly okay to censor people apparently. After all, the government "represents the people," right? So anything they do, however despotic, is acceptable.
I'm amazed that it's taken this long for someone to do the right thing... and that the paper didn't end up on Wikileaks or similar a couple days after this controversy started.
They might be going broke, but private space development and exploration companies certainly aren't. NASA is failing because it's an enormous, lethargic bureaucracy staffed by the same caliber of people who work at the DMV or the welfare office, and people know this. I certainly wouldn't give money voluntarily to NASA.
And this justifies forcing everyone to pay for it how?
And, true or not, this misses my point. If you're going to force everyone to pay for it, everyone (either directly, or through their congressman, or whatever) gets to have a say in whether or not space exploration gets paid for. So, if 50%+1 say no, it doesn't get paid for. On the other hand, with private funding, only the people who want it pay for it. People who don't want to pay for it have no input, and no ability to prevent space exploration from happening.
With this in mind, if you support space exploration, how can you possibly think public funding is the better method? Or is it more important to you, on some sort of "principle," to make everyone pay for it because it "benefits us all," even if this makes it harder to raise money?
Yes, it does. What's your point, other than trying to make a false dichotomy? I would vote against these things too, and would support defunding them just as quickly as I support defunding space programs that are coercively paid for.
Now imagine if these people instead went out and spent their time trying to raise the money they need from private benefactors, rather than this silly attempt at shaming the government into giving them more stolen money. It wouldn't matter how many people don't want to fund them; if they find enough money, even if it comes from just one benefactor, they could go forward with their research.
Or, they can keep begging the government to fund them out of money stolen from the public, in which case they constantly have to worry about opponents outnumbering proponents and cutting their funding.
Wrong.
Did you read what I said?
The issue is how the government is trying to use these facts to control and steal from people. I'm not an environmental scientist; I'm not interested in even trying to argue whether or not the theories are true or not. What I'm interested in is ensuring the government doesn't use these theories as an excuse to control people.
That people implicitly go from "something bad is going to happen" to "the government has to do something!" not only without realizing they're doing it, but aggressively resisting acknowledging the fact that they're doing it only shows how much is wrong with society today.
Yes. I am quite proud that freedom of choice is winning out against people trying to use scientific theories to justify crushing regulation, confiscatory taxation, and more and more intrusions into our economic and private lives.
It's not about the facts. It's about how you're trying to use them as a weapon against liberty.
P.S.: I not a right-winger.
The two sides are whether the government should implement a given policy, or shouldn't. Just because thermodynamics leads to such-and-such a conclusion doesn't force the government to act. People, with free will, need to choose to act. Or not to act. That is a political decision.
What people are upset about is those policies: New taxes, new regulations, more government control. People who will be victimized by these policies naturally push back, and---just as how you seem to think that a scientific theory mandates a policy---some people think that the way to discredit that policy is to discredit the theory.
Good news for personal and economic freedom.
Sounds to me some bureaucrat is just upset his taxpayer-funded job might not be as secure as it once was.
Maybe climate change is real; maybe it isn't. Maybe if governments didn't spend billions of our own dollars trying to convince us that it is, in an effort to justify policies giving them more control over our lives, growing their bureaucracies, taking our money, regulating our businesses and private lives, and so on, there wouldn't be so much political push-back trying to "deny" global warming. Maybe if the government didn't use climate change to victimize people, those victims wouldn't be trying to defend themselves.
If you politicize something, you can always expect the truth to fall by the wayside. The progressives, technocrats, and other assorted socialists in government started this. Now they're upset the other side of the political battle they started is winning.
Good.
So I guess we can expect to see a booming black market in hard drives pretty soon.
Leaving? I already live in New Hampshire.
Because in our current society these things don't cost anything... they're "free," right?
Thanks for posting about this. I hope they pass this. You know why?
I'm from New Hampshire and part of the large and ever-growing liberty movement here. People sick of the nonstop attacks on their freedoms and liberties are moving here from all over the country. For some people, it's a single issue that made them move---exorbitant and ever-increases taxes, the never-ending Drug War, erosion of private property rights, lack of education freedom, attacks on parental rights, infringements upon the Second Amendment, you name it---and for some people it's a bit of everything. (I left Massachusetts over "Romneycare." The government forcing me to buy health insurance was the last straw for me.)
The anti-vaccination movement has become, over the past couple years, one of the liberty movement's most active single-issue allies. The current chair of the biggest pro-liberty lobby organization in the state (probably in the whole country) came into the liberty movement through one of the anti-vax groups here, as did another woman and her son, both of whom got elected to the State House in 2010. They're Republicans; a few years years ago, a Democrat state representative was the one to sponsor a bill expanding New Hampshire's existing philosophical exemption to vaccination.
If the state right next door passes this attack on people's right of conscience, that would only serve to help the movement here as people move to escape Vermont's tyranny.
"Hitting on" someone and looking for "sexual favors" makes one a sexual predator nowadays?
Nice. I was just about to post that myself.
And thus we have a perfect example of how network neutrality is nothing more than government interference in (natural) free markets, and going to cost consumers more in the long run.
I can move gigabytes of data across my LAN at no cost other than the electricity it takes to run it and the nominal equipment costs. But to pull data in from an upstream network, I need to pay the upstream network provider for access at whatever rate they charge, most likely based on the bandwidth I use. Service A costs me next to nothing, service B costs me money directly, so naturally I might want to charge more for B than I do for A. Perhaps I can even give A away for free or offer a very substantial discount since it costs me little to nothing.
But now the government is going to tell me this pricing scheme is "discriminatory." How dare I charge customers more for services that cost me more money!?
So now I either have to figure out some scheme to distribute the cost of the B across A equally, to make it appear "fair," and hope that I get the subsidization formula right so it doesn't end up costing me money to provide B and A together... or I just charge people as much for A as I do for B in order to ensure it doesn't cost me.
Congratulations, consumers, your idiotic laws just cost you money. But at least it's "fair"!
Are you aware of how careful businesses are nowadays to not even go near something that might result in a lawsuit? (Obviously not.) If they're big enough to have an "HR department," they probably have lawyers and a liability policy that has told them in no uncertain terms what questions they can't ask for fear of a lawsuit. My point is that if Facebook started making noise about these employers violating their ToS, and threatening to take some sort of action therefor, the lawyers and insurers would very quickly bar their clients from asking these sorts of questions if they wanted to continue to be their clients.
Problem solved, without any overreaching new laws or congressional inquiries needed.
As usual, the government has to interfere where a simple private contractual provision would suffice to end this nonsense.
All Facebook has to do is add something to their terms of service that says that no user shall allow another person to log in using their credentials, and that doing so is grounds for account termination.* Then all a prospective employee has to tell their employer when they make this request is, "are you trying to make me violate a contract I have with a third party in order to get this job?" Any employer who isn't a complete idiot will know what the employee is getting at, and if they don't, all they have to do is ask their legal department or liability insurance provider what will happen next if they continue.
Making the employee "agree" to the login by the employer isn't enough: The Facebook ToS is a contract with two parties, and they would need Facebook's permission, too.
To add extra teeth to the ToS, perhaps Facebook could additionally say they'll terminate the account of the unauthorized user, too, if such person has an account and Facebook can determine what it is. Then the PHB who tries to do this to his employee runs the risk of losing his own Facebook account, and maybe even his business' entire presence on Facebook if he happens to be the admin for their FB group.
* I'd actually be amazed if they don't already have this provision in there. Not being a Facebook user, I don't know what their ToS says.
That's cute.
So the FAA should be regulating people's idea of entertainment now?
The government should ban something because some guy on the Internet thinks "our entertainment must come from within, not without."
If you're going to resort to an ad hominem, you could at least make it a bit more creative.
You confuse the term government and the State.
The State is by definition coercive. Governments can be voluntarily constituted, however. People enter into voluntary contracts by which they waive a certain amount of control over themselves every day, and that's really all a "government" is. Homeowners associations and condominium agreements, virtually all private companies, partnerships, trusts, and other voluntary associations, and the first generation of people to colonize an area of terra nullius are all examples of voluntary governance. The State is not. The State exerts its force against people who never agreed to be subject to it, and since States cover every square mile of land on the Earth nowadays, one can't simply leave it to escape as they could in the past.
The view tax is just an example of the many attempts by money-hungry politicians to find ways of raising revenue since they know an income/sales tax would be a career-killer. The State here also has a multitude of silly business licenses (e.g., manicurists) and a rather high "room and meals" tax. All of these are things we're working on getting rid of.
In fairness, though, the "view tax" isn't really a tax, directly speaking: What they're doing now is including the pleasant view that a property may have in its property value assessment. A mountain-top property where you can see mountain ridges miles away would certainly sell for more than a piece of land with no view, wouldn't it? So naturally it's going to be assessed at a higher value.
The problem isn't so much as the view tax as the whole concept of taxing people based on their property's "value." There's probably no stronger disincentive you could possibly come up with for someone to build or otherwise improve their property than to permanently extract more money from them based on the improvements. Pay $10,000 to renovate your house or build a new barn or shed or something, and you'll be paying the State $150-300/year in perpetuity as a result. In many of the rural towns around New Hampshire one can find people living in intentionally crappy-looking or unfinished houses (e.g., exposed Tyvek with no siding ever put up), all to minimize their property value assessment. I've never seen as many people living in RVs as I have since I moved to Grafton.
The State-owned liquor stores are also something some of the liberty activists are trying to get rid of here. However, whereas this may be idiotic, it is nothing unique to New Hampshire. There are 19 "ABC" states.
You're right on one point: The word theft appears to be more of a legal term than a layman's word, which I was unaware of. So let's use another word that has a common definition and hasn't been polluted by self-serving redefinition by the State:
"Wrongfully." Yes, the State has once again re-defined this word in a self-serving manner, to exempt themselves from its coverage, but I am using the term in its moral, not legal sense. It is wrong to take something from someone without their consent. Very few philosophies or religions accept exceptions to this concept, except for some theistic belief systems which contain a god who can do no wrong by definition. So, is the State a god to you?
And if we had large-scale private roads, they would be built much better than they are now. As it is, there's a perverse incentive to actually build roads with substandard materials: Constant construction and road work means "more jobs." For a private business, more work is always a bad thing: It means more expense, and less profits. But for the government, it's a good thing: It makes politicians' careers, creates job security for State workers, and to many people, it justifies the very existence of the State. The more they do, the more necessary their existence appears to be.