There's no hypocrisy in his statement: left wing (and right wing) ideologies advocate using the government to force people to do the right thing in order to protect them from themselves and create (what they consider) desirable outcome. You know, laws like outlawing the Big Gulp, forcing people to buy health insurance, redistributing income, etc. One can debate about whether that's the right thing to do (I don't think it is), but there is no question that it tends towards totalitarianism.
You say that as if it's a bad thing. But you can justify ever more egregious violations of privacy and civil liberties with a supposed need to catch crooks and criminals. Places like East Germany had very low crime rates.
If we value our privacy and freedom, we have to accept a certain level of crime, because privacy and freedom make crime easier. In different words, in a free country, you have to trust the citizens by default, even if that trust is sometimes misplaced.
Off topic, but I'll bite. [wikipedia.org] Texas is ranked 9 and California 14 in terms of federal tax dollars contributed versus taken as of 2007. Both are net positive, and within 1 standard deviation. Neither state economy is "borked".
Things have happened since 2007; California was doing really well during the high tech bubble despite its already broken state government, but it is in dire straits now. Nor does that table tell you anything about the quality of a state's government, whether its citizens are doing well, or any of the other things you seem to want to conclude from them. The study you point to itself is questionable; federal tax dollars received can refer to subsidies for businesses just as much as to the creation of a nuclear waste dump . And the simplest explanation for the observed pattern is simply size: small states end up having a negative balance, probably because the federal government has fixed expenditures per state, as well as expenditures proportional to the area of the state. In short, your data is meaningless.
The most important right, the right to life, is apparently eschewed -- Texas murders its own citizens at a rate higher than the rest of the country combined
No, Texas executes them. While one can legitimately discuss the utility and morality of executions, claiming that it is a "murder" or a violation of "individual rights" is wrong. (FWIW, I oppose the death penalty, but I don't demonize people who hold different views as "murderers".)
The only reason you'd need all the information that the US government requires is if you were trying to prevent people from exiting the USD. Its about control, not crime.
Those are annoying to regular users of USD, but if you just want to exit the USD, they do not "prevent" you from doing so: you exchange your USD once, fill out the paperwork, and never have to deal with USD or US banking regulations again.
If you find a currency and country that's actually better, let me know. So far, holding money in USD still seems like the best bet.
That's the way the system works. If you think it should work differently, that's an entirely different conversation
No, it is the conversation we are having, because you accused Ron Paul of acting inconsistent with his principles. Ron Paul's actions are consistent with libertarian views because many libertarians don't view trademarks (and by extension, domain names) as "property", but as an identifying mark intended to ensure that people aren't misled about the identity and source of goods and services.
You and WIPO are free to hold different beliefs and act accordingly, but your and their beliefs don't affect Ron Paul's consistency. .
According to the rules, even if "Ron Paul" was the name of a corporation, the request would have failed because it would only have met one of the three criteria
According to US trademark law, you cannot engage in business using a confusingly similar mark; it doesn't mater what criteria WIPO uses for domain names. WIPO does not get to define US trademark law.
I am merely amused by the spectacle of libertarians jumping through hoops to justify how this one time, it's ok for government to transfer ownership of private property (because it benefits someone they like).
We aren't talking about transfer of ownership here, we are talking about who is the legitimate owner in the first place. If the people holding the registration don't actually have legitimate ownership of the trademark, there is no government taking involved. If you steal something from me and the police recovers it, then the government isn't taking from you, it is restoring my rightful possession.
You seem to assume that first-to-register is the right way of determining trademark ownership, but that's clearly wrong. WIPO doesn't apply that principle to other trademarks, and the only reason it applies it here is because WIPO likes to piss all over non-commercial interests, and they probably hate Ron Paul's guts too.
Well, electronic record keeping is somewhat different. You have failed to show that it's any worse, and I very much doubt you or anybody else complaining about this would actually like to live in the kind of ossified social structure and social control that existed in small villages throughout most of human history. Anyway, you can't do anything about information remaining online, short of destroying democracy and free speech altogether, so you might as well learn to live with it.
"Most of us" here in America have delusions and fantasies about the politics in other nations. In fact, our progressives are about as left wing, and sometimes more so, than social democrats and left wing parties in Europe.
That's like Christians who try to say that anybody who does anything bad isn't "really" a Christian. The countries that failed were what leftist politics leads to, just like Christianity leads to its own set of disasters. Sweden isn't "leftist", it's a constitutional monarchy governed by a center-right party; the progressives and leftist are not in power in Sweden. Sweden does seem to have lavish social benefits and high taxes, but that's not a unique trait of leftist politics.
Fox News just tends to be investigating a lot more now, with a left leaning president, while during W they mostly just pandered. Now MSNBC is in pander mode, having done the "investigating" thing during W.
Yup, that's the way it's supposed to work.
The crime here is our news outlets have such blatant bias,
Heaven forbid that reasonable people can actually reach different conclusions.
and very little dedication to journalism and conveying the facts to the masses.
And whose "the facts" would that be exactly? Yours? Obama's? The Pope's? Do tell!
Do you think the general public has the knowledge and contextual awareness to do anything useful with those minutiae?
Yes.
Do you think it's actually helpful to the people doing the work to know that every little detail will be scrutinized by people who probably have no business scrutinizing their own business, let alone someone else's?
Whether it is "helpful" to those people doesn't matter; what matters is whether it keeps government honest and efficient.
And don't forget to add in a sensationalist media looking for the next scandal, and the opposition party, ready to denounce every little act that the party in power does, good or bad.
Good!
Your proposal will create a massive boondoggle,
No, it will, in fact, get rid of boondoggles; look up where the term came from.
and encourage the government to do almost nothing (which is, perhaps, your goal, but you can at least have the decency to come out and say it),
It will only do those things for which there is a clear need and that it can provide efficiently.
or take no risks at all,
Good! I don't want government to take risks, I want it to provide essential services efficiently.
and provide limited [...] public service.
Good! That's the point. Government should limit itself to the essentials, those that are obviously useful and that it obviously provides efficiently. If a project doesn't pass that test, government shouldn't do it.
I don't see why you keep talking about "reporting"; reporting is when someone condenses information in order to make it more accessible to someone above in the management chain.
Any substantive communications between contractors and government usually should be in writing, inspections should be documented and recorded, etc. Just put all of that online, unfiltered. That's less work than actual "reporting".
Yeah, and the details do matter: when does the construction on my road get finished, exactly how wide is the sidewalk going to be, etc.
Is the public going to be better served by knowing every word that was said between low-level bureaucrats and contractors?
Yes, certainly. Not only does that prevent corruption, it also allows contractors to compare their offers and underbid each other. In different words, pre-bid meetings and discussions should simply be public and open to everybody. Actual bidding for government contracts should be a public reverse auction, with all bids on the table. Where do you think the big cost is in that kind of transparency? Why would you think that the existing system of secret discussions and secret bids yields better results?
I mean, what do you actually want the government to produce for the public?
I'd like to see less corruption and less waste in the way government operates. That's not going to happen if the government just monitors itself, it needs to see where and how the money is spent, and why it is spent that way, down to every cent.
I think this free market argument gets really tired when it comes to telecom.
Look, Verizon is not a regulated monopoly, that's why they can legally choose to terminate their contract with you; that's all I'm saying.
Exactly same problem shows up with medical care providers. Their billing practices are screwed up exactly the same across the board. It's so bad that it doesn't matter whether you go to a non-profit medical system vs. one that is for profit.
That's because there is no free market in health care. Don't blame the market for what is really due to massive failures of government regulation.
I don't really know what sort of advantages you see to this free market economy.
I don't know what you mean by "this free market economy". We have nothing even close to a free market in health care or telecommunications. However, the little bit of market freedom we do have is still better than having a fully regulated system.
That freedom means you can at least choose among three wired providers and a number of wireless providers, but it also means that they can terminate you. It's not ideal, but it's infinitely better than it used to be.
You want more freedom, more choice, and lower prices? Get the government to free up more spectrum for public use and reduce restrictions on antenna placement in your community.
That's a strawman. I suggested open government and absence of secrecy, not "involving people", "expending resources", or special "reporting". There is no special cost to the act of recording meetings or holding them publicly, except to people who are up to no good and are trying to defraud the public.
There's a wide gulf between operating in secret, and not requiring explicit public input on every tiny step of the process.
And I said that the people should get "full real time insight", not "full real time explicit public input". The only explicit input they can give is when they vote. Between votes, politicians are free to ignore whatever real-time feedback they receive from the public if they think it's the right thing to do; secrecy isn't needed for them to ignore voters if they think it's the right thing to do.
You choose secrecy only if (1) you want to keep some of the possibilities raised during the process secret forever, or (2) you don't trust your representatives to ignore public opinion when it is necessary.
You have more and more tech startups challenging the cesspool of corruption that New York City has been historically. I wonder how this turns out in the long run and who will win. For now, New Yorkers still seem to voting for Bloomberg...
When every last detail of a politician's position at every point in a negotiation is publicly verifiable, the incentives for "sticking to principle"* outweigh the incentives for obtaining a pareto optimal solution.
Heaven forbid politicians should actually do what the people want and stick to principle, as opposed to optimizing their and their cronies' political cost/benefit tradeoffs.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no hypocrisy in his statement: left wing (and right wing) ideologies advocate using the government to force people to do the right thing in order to protect them from themselves and create (what they consider) desirable outcome. You know, laws like outlawing the Big Gulp, forcing people to buy health insurance, redistributing income, etc. One can debate about whether that's the right thing to do (I don't think it is), but there is no question that it tends towards totalitarianism.
You say that as if it's a bad thing. But you can justify ever more egregious violations of privacy and civil liberties with a supposed need to catch crooks and criminals. Places like East Germany had very low crime rates.
If we value our privacy and freedom, we have to accept a certain level of crime, because privacy and freedom make crime easier. In different words, in a free country, you have to trust the citizens by default, even if that trust is sometimes misplaced.
Things have happened since 2007; California was doing really well during the high tech bubble despite its already broken state government, but it is in dire straits now. Nor does that table tell you anything about the quality of a state's government, whether its citizens are doing well, or any of the other things you seem to want to conclude from them. The study you point to itself is questionable; federal tax dollars received can refer to subsidies for businesses just as much as to the creation of a nuclear waste dump . And the simplest explanation for the observed pattern is simply size: small states end up having a negative balance, probably because the federal government has fixed expenditures per state, as well as expenditures proportional to the area of the state. In short, your data is meaningless.
No, Texas executes them. While one can legitimately discuss the utility and morality of executions, claiming that it is a "murder" or a violation of "individual rights" is wrong. (FWIW, I oppose the death penalty, but I don't demonize people who hold different views as "murderers".)
You certainly sound and act like her.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/deterrence-states-without-death-peanalty-have-had-consistently-lower-murder-rates
Illiteracy is higher in California and New York State than in Texas.
http://nces.ed.gov/naal/estimates/StateEstimates.aspx
I'll leave it at that. Obviously, your statements are politically motivated fabrications.
Dao doesn't seem to have "optional typing", it seems to have a choice between static and dynamic typing.
Those are annoying to regular users of USD, but if you just want to exit the USD, they do not "prevent" you from doing so: you exchange your USD once, fill out the paperwork, and never have to deal with USD or US banking regulations again.
If you find a currency and country that's actually better, let me know. So far, holding money in USD still seems like the best bet.
And in 1967, the world had about half the population it has today. Funny how that works out.
No, it is the conversation we are having, because you accused Ron Paul of acting inconsistent with his principles. Ron Paul's actions are consistent with libertarian views because many libertarians don't view trademarks (and by extension, domain names) as "property", but as an identifying mark intended to ensure that people aren't misled about the identity and source of goods and services.
You and WIPO are free to hold different beliefs and act accordingly, but your and their beliefs don't affect Ron Paul's consistency.
.
According to US trademark law, you cannot engage in business using a confusingly similar mark; it doesn't mater what criteria WIPO uses for domain names. WIPO does not get to define US trademark law.
We aren't talking about transfer of ownership here, we are talking about who is the legitimate owner in the first place. If the people holding the registration don't actually have legitimate ownership of the trademark, there is no government taking involved. If you steal something from me and the police recovers it, then the government isn't taking from you, it is restoring my rightful possession.
You seem to assume that first-to-register is the right way of determining trademark ownership, but that's clearly wrong. WIPO doesn't apply that principle to other trademarks, and the only reason it applies it here is because WIPO likes to piss all over non-commercial interests, and they probably hate Ron Paul's guts too.
Well, electronic record keeping is somewhat different. You have failed to show that it's any worse, and I very much doubt you or anybody else complaining about this would actually like to live in the kind of ossified social structure and social control that existed in small villages throughout most of human history. Anyway, you can't do anything about information remaining online, short of destroying democracy and free speech altogether, so you might as well learn to live with it.
"Most of us" here in America have delusions and fantasies about the politics in other nations. In fact, our progressives are about as left wing, and sometimes more so, than social democrats and left wing parties in Europe.
That's like Christians who try to say that anybody who does anything bad isn't "really" a Christian. The countries that failed were what leftist politics leads to, just like Christianity leads to its own set of disasters. Sweden isn't "leftist", it's a constitutional monarchy governed by a center-right party; the progressives and leftist are not in power in Sweden. Sweden does seem to have lavish social benefits and high taxes, but that's not a unique trait of leftist politics.
Yup, that's the way it's supposed to work.
Heaven forbid that reasonable people can actually reach different conclusions.
And whose "the facts" would that be exactly? Yours? Obama's? The Pope's? Do tell!
What does money laundering have to do with "exiting the USD"? Anybody can convert USD to anything they like anytime they like.
Yes.
Whether it is "helpful" to those people doesn't matter; what matters is whether it keeps government honest and efficient.
Good!
No, it will, in fact, get rid of boondoggles; look up where the term came from.
It will only do those things for which there is a clear need and that it can provide efficiently.
Good! I don't want government to take risks, I want it to provide essential services efficiently.
Good! That's the point. Government should limit itself to the essentials, those that are obviously useful and that it obviously provides efficiently. If a project doesn't pass that test, government shouldn't do it.
I don't see why you keep talking about "reporting"; reporting is when someone condenses information in order to make it more accessible to someone above in the management chain.
Any substantive communications between contractors and government usually should be in writing, inspections should be documented and recorded, etc. Just put all of that online, unfiltered. That's less work than actual "reporting".
Yeah, and the details do matter: when does the construction on my road get finished, exactly how wide is the sidewalk going to be, etc.
Anonymity and forgetting are relatively new inventions. When people were living in small groups or villages, mistakes did follow you a lifetime.
Paris Brown? A "youth ambassador" paid £25,000/y let go for saying un-PC things? Seems like political correctness eating its own children.
Yes, certainly. Not only does that prevent corruption, it also allows contractors to compare their offers and underbid each other. In different words, pre-bid meetings and discussions should simply be public and open to everybody. Actual bidding for government contracts should be a public reverse auction, with all bids on the table. Where do you think the big cost is in that kind of transparency? Why would you think that the existing system of secret discussions and secret bids yields better results?
I'd like to see less corruption and less waste in the way government operates. That's not going to happen if the government just monitors itself, it needs to see where and how the money is spent, and why it is spent that way, down to every cent.
Look, Verizon is not a regulated monopoly, that's why they can legally choose to terminate their contract with you; that's all I'm saying.
That's because there is no free market in health care. Don't blame the market for what is really due to massive failures of government regulation.
I don't know what you mean by "this free market economy". We have nothing even close to a free market in health care or telecommunications. However, the little bit of market freedom we do have is still better than having a fully regulated system.
That freedom means you can at least choose among three wired providers and a number of wireless providers, but it also means that they can terminate you. It's not ideal, but it's infinitely better than it used to be.
You want more freedom, more choice, and lower prices? Get the government to free up more spectrum for public use and reduce restrictions on antenna placement in your community.
That's a strawman. I suggested open government and absence of secrecy, not "involving people", "expending resources", or special "reporting". There is no special cost to the act of recording meetings or holding them publicly, except to people who are up to no good and are trying to defraud the public.
And I said that the people should get "full real time insight", not "full real time explicit public input". The only explicit input they can give is when they vote. Between votes, politicians are free to ignore whatever real-time feedback they receive from the public if they think it's the right thing to do; secrecy isn't needed for them to ignore voters if they think it's the right thing to do.
You choose secrecy only if (1) you want to keep some of the possibilities raised during the process secret forever, or (2) you don't trust your representatives to ignore public opinion when it is necessary.
What makes you think it doesn't?
You have more and more tech startups challenging the cesspool of corruption that New York City has been historically. I wonder how this turns out in the long run and who will win. For now, New Yorkers still seem to voting for Bloomberg...
Heaven forbid politicians should actually do what the people want and stick to principle, as opposed to optimizing their and their cronies' political cost/benefit tradeoffs.
Just because the people delegate authority to representatives doesn't mean that those representatives should operate in secret.