Maybe your separation of powers does work and I am just ignorant of the facts. So feel free to educate me with some RECENT example.
Well, what alternatives do you suggest? Catholic monarchy? Communist central committee? Military dictatorship? Come on, let us all know, we are waiting with bated breath.
Sorry, English is my 3rd language so I may have used the wrong term.
Oh my, his third language! He must be one of those super-sophisticated foreigners who speak multiple languages, unless us redneck hicks here in the US! Give me a break.
If you haven't seen the painting in person, don't make fun of this. Like most people, I saw pictures of Van Gogh's paintings in books for years. Then when I was in my early 20s I visited the Metropolitan, where IIRC at least two Van Goghs were there.
And thanks to the way the van Gogh museum restricts access to the scans and issues only 260 overpriced copies, most people will never get to see these paintings, or replicas, in person either.
It's pretty outrageous that these institutions monopolize cultural treasures that are long out of copyright. These 3D scans should be publicly available so that anybody who wants to can reproduce the artwork in whatever detail they are capable of.
"Legality" only matters when it can be enforced. Pray tell who is enforcing the law on the US government?
Separation of powers.
You don't? In this case, may I have your online banking URL, username and password?
How is that "financial data"? Are you stupid or something?
Exactly my point. The "government" is comprised of individual people, some of whom may be "crooks trying to rip [you] off".
I'm sure they are, and that's why it doesn't matter whether the German government has a policy of spying on me or not; it wouldn't help even if they did.
No. I'm saying that if you do something illegal, you should not be allowed to hide behind your corporation. People make political statements all the time without committing crimes.
You don't even understand what a corporation is: a corporation isn't set up to protect officers from criminal liability, it's set up to protect owners (i.e. shareholders) from personal liability. The owners of the corporation usually never actually do anything, let alone anything illegal.
I will continue to suggest specific steps that can be taken in order to actually accomplish the objective of reforming the government
You aren't suggesting anything; you're simply repeating tired old policies that have been tried over and over again and don't work. You have no evidence and don't even understand the issues. And, no, this isn't a discussion, I'm simply pointing that out.
Why? Why should you be allowed to avoid that risk?
So you're saying if I make political statements, people should be able to sue the pants off me and ruin my life? That's what it comes down to.
Corporate officers should be personally responsible for the actions of the corporation as a whole, and they should make their decisions with that accountability in mind.
This has nothing to do with "corporate officers".
First, the reason that there is little evidence is because of a lack of disclosure, not because there is actually no influence.
It doesn't matter where the money comes from, it matters that it doesn't have a significant effect.
I'm not sure that stripping the federal government of its powers is quite as easy as you think.
It may not be easy, but unlike the stupid ideas you propose, it actually works.
How casoemthing that is often as fast a sa plane and which is far cheaper than a car be considered overprised or inefficient?
Ah, I see, still arguing with hallucinated facts. As I was saying, it usually is neither.
How a democracy can be totalitary is beyond me as well.
Much of the German railway network dates to between 1871 and 1945, you know, when the German government could simply make stuff like this happen by force.
The quote you made now the second time is not from your first poste (or what I considerd the first one) but from an answer to one of my answers...
The quote is from my very first posting in this thread. But keep on hallucinating.
How many of those countries have an NDAA and allow their citizens to be militarily imprisoned without a trial?
Many of them actually.
How many of those countries have a "constitution free" zone [aclu.org] that covers most of their population?
All of them.
How many of those countries have continue to hold innocent prisoners cleared for release a la Gitmo?
Many of them have stateless persons in custody that they don't know what to do with.
How many of those countries have openly assassinated one of their citizens for engaging in protected speech?
Don't be naive; most big nations have almost certainly committed political and military assassinations of citizens and others. The fact that they do it covertly doesn't make it any better.
Visiting a country isn't the same as living there. Many countries don't need to be particularly "invasive" to visitors because visitors neither want nor can stay there.
And even your experiences as a visitor might reflect your own attitudes and background more than anything having to do with the US.
3. The notion of corporations as people needs to be explicitly disallowed. Corporations are not people. If corporations were people then we would call them people instead of corporations. Corporations as a whole are not allowed to donate to any political group. Donations must be made by individuals.
Of course, corporations are people, in the same sense as a soccer teams are people. That's exactly what it means. Corporations are just one form in which a bunch of individuals get together to do something. It seems like if I want to make a movie badmouthing Hillary or Romney, I should be able to to so without risking my entire personal savings or property when we get sued, and that is exactly what the legal form of a corporation is for.
2. The influence of money needs to be removed from government. I propose that all elected officials, political parties, or campaigns are barred from receiving anything of value from any lobbyist organization or any corporation. Individuals are allowed to donate whatever they want, and those donations should be made public so that the public can know who is influencing the elections.
There is little evidence that corporate donations have much influence on election outcomes.
5. Elected representatives should be prohibited from participating in any stock market or speculative trading, with the possible exception of physical assets such as real estate (but not commodity futures).
I think there are already significant restrictions.
Serving the public is a position of sacrifice, not a position of prestige. You're there because you want to make a difference, not stay there until you retire.
No, I think wanting to make a difference is the problem. Neither Obama nor Bush have wreaked havoc because they were corrupt, they have wreaked havoc because they thought they were God and could to fix unfixable problems.
The real solution is much simpler: devolve power (and money) back from the federal level to state and local institutions. Everything becomes much more manageable, cheaper, and more accountable at the state and local level. Furthermore, screwups have much more limited effects and consequences.
Oh, then we can have the southern 20 nations re-implement Jim Crow. Face facts: localized government has done even worse by most measures than the federal government.
That's extremely unlikely at this point. Furthermore, just because the federal government can legitimately intervene in that case doesn't justify the millions of other pages of rules, regulations, and laws it imposes.
Dissolution is the solution. Democracy, like Communism, works best at small to medium sized populations and regions. 50 staes must become 50 nations.
We don't need to dissolve the union. The US was intended to be 50 separate states that happen to allow free trade, free movement, and a common defense. That's less integrated than the EU is today. That's also still the legal framework. Many of the powers that the federal government has these days are questionable at best under the Constitution, and a different Supreme Court could undo them quickly by choosing a more traditional interpretation of "interstate commerce" etc.
Devolution of power from the federal government to the states is possible; it is happening in European nations, and it can happen here. Of course, it won't happen with power-mad leaders like Bush and Obama in charge, but a president friendly to these ideas, a shifting supreme court, and a bunch of aggressively independent-minded states making demands and bringing about lawsuits might make it happen.
If I have not missclicked and aswered to the wrong person(I mean your original posting), you clearly said: a car is faster and cheaper.
I quoted what I said. I did not say without qualification "a car is faster and cheaper". You can't read. But we knew that.
Why someone complains about a train where al seats are taken, while he accepts that a plane might have taken all seats as well, is beyond me.
For the same trip, the time actually spent in the seats in an airplane is much shorter. Furthermore, often planes are simply cheaper than trains, even in Germany, even with subsidies for passenger rail.
And, frankly, I really don't care about Germany's train system either way. If you like it and want to keep paying for it, good for you. I happen to ride it when I'm in Germany because I don't give a f*ck about how overpriced it is, and because I fortunately don't usually have to go anywhere into the sticks.
I just don't want the US to waste its money on expanding passenger rail, because today, we in the US don't have the "benefit" of Germany's totalitarian governments, monopolies, and heavy subsidies to create such a passenger rail system in the first place. Even if the rail system in Germany weren't the inefficient, overpriced, subsidized boondoggle that it actually is, the US would do better just improving roads and building more airports.
Competitive businesses don't close branches that their customers like and want, and they do close branches that their customers don't want. It's monopolies and governments that do the opposite.
1) Governments may share data. What prevents "Merkel or her minions" to give some or all of the information they gathered about you to Obama and his minions?
That's a US matter, not a German matter: obviously, if the US government can't legally spy on US citizens, it should also be legally prohibited to get this data from third parties.
3) Governments are composed of people. What if one of "Merkel's minions" decides to sell your financial data to the highest bidder?
I don't really care if they do; why would I? But if I did, how would that be different from any other crook trying to rip me off?
That's not the Finnish higher education system, it's about Finnish primary and secondary education. Come on, stop being so stupid.
And even there, the BI article is bogus: nobody knows for certain why Finland's schools are good, and some of the factors the BI seems to favor aren't even necessarily positive.
What if wide-spread mass adoption of anonymity actually leads to undermining Society's value of free speech?
Anonymity doesn't undermine free speech, interference with anonymity does. Many people simply cannot afford to say what they think if their jobs or social relations are threatened as a result.
Seems inefficient if everyone wants the privilege but none of the responsibility.
Free speech is not a "privilege". And you bet I don't want "the responsibility" of getting fired from my job for writing about libertarian views on my private time while working at a predominantly liberal company.
Most people need anonymity in order to be able to speak freely about controversial topics. Free speech cannot exist without widespread anonymity.
Your first claim was: car is cheaper AND faster. Both is wrong.
No, what I said was:
Something that allows the well-off to travel in comfort between city centers where ordinary people can't afford to live. For ordinary people, high speed rail requires feeder lines that make the whole trip slower than driving, and the tickets are more expensive than (the already expensive) gas or flying. Why would we possibly want this in the US?
With your pre-purchased EU 29 tickets and times, you are comparing apples and oranges.
Who cares if the train is crowded? You need one seat, reservation is mandatory, so everyone has a seat.
I do, as do lots of other people. I also care about the limited luggage carrying capacity and the general hassle of it all.
Neurons don't communicate in an analogue fashion they send digital pulses of the same magnitude periodically, with more rapid pulses indicating more signal.
FALSE. Neurons communicate in an analog fashion. Whether half that statement is technically true doesn't matter. In addition to frequency modulation, you're also missing the point that the actual signal transmission at the synapse is analog.
Statements 2 and 3:
This is both more robust and more effective at preventing over-adaptation.
When researchers figured out how to mimic the imperfections in the biological digital system, their neural networks got significantly better.
These are plausible speculation, but your statements are false because you misrepresent Hinton's speculation as established fact.
It's really despicable how you harass people and try to drive them away with your abusive comments.
Only people like you, who keep writing scientific nonsense. Unfortunately, nothing seems to stop you.
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Well, what alternatives do you suggest? Catholic monarchy? Communist central committee? Military dictatorship? Come on, let us all know, we are waiting with bated breath.
Oh my, his third language! He must be one of those super-sophisticated foreigners who speak multiple languages, unless us redneck hicks here in the US! Give me a break.
And thanks to the way the van Gogh museum restricts access to the scans and issues only 260 overpriced copies, most people will never get to see these paintings, or replicas, in person either.
It's pretty outrageous that these institutions monopolize cultural treasures that are long out of copyright. These 3D scans should be publicly available so that anybody who wants to can reproduce the artwork in whatever detail they are capable of.
Separation of powers.
How is that "financial data"? Are you stupid or something?
I'm sure they are, and that's why it doesn't matter whether the German government has a policy of spying on me or not; it wouldn't help even if they did.
You don't even understand what a corporation is: a corporation isn't set up to protect officers from criminal liability, it's set up to protect owners (i.e. shareholders) from personal liability. The owners of the corporation usually never actually do anything, let alone anything illegal.
You aren't suggesting anything; you're simply repeating tired old policies that have been tried over and over again and don't work. You have no evidence and don't even understand the issues. And, no, this isn't a discussion, I'm simply pointing that out.
So you're saying if I make political statements, people should be able to sue the pants off me and ruin my life? That's what it comes down to.
This has nothing to do with "corporate officers".
It doesn't matter where the money comes from, it matters that it doesn't have a significant effect.
It may not be easy, but unlike the stupid ideas you propose, it actually works.
Ah, I see, still arguing with hallucinated facts. As I was saying, it usually is neither.
Much of the German railway network dates to between 1871 and 1945, you know, when the German government could simply make stuff like this happen by force.
The quote is from my very first posting in this thread. But keep on hallucinating.
Many of them actually.
All of them.
Many of them have stateless persons in custody that they don't know what to do with.
Don't be naive; most big nations have almost certainly committed political and military assassinations of citizens and others. The fact that they do it covertly doesn't make it any better.
Visiting a country isn't the same as living there. Many countries don't need to be particularly "invasive" to visitors because visitors neither want nor can stay there.
And even your experiences as a visitor might reflect your own attitudes and background more than anything having to do with the US.
Of course, corporations are people, in the same sense as a soccer teams are people. That's exactly what it means. Corporations are just one form in which a bunch of individuals get together to do something. It seems like if I want to make a movie badmouthing Hillary or Romney, I should be able to to so without risking my entire personal savings or property when we get sued, and that is exactly what the legal form of a corporation is for.
There is little evidence that corporate donations have much influence on election outcomes.
I think there are already significant restrictions.
No, I think wanting to make a difference is the problem. Neither Obama nor Bush have wreaked havoc because they were corrupt, they have wreaked havoc because they thought they were God and could to fix unfixable problems.
The real solution is much simpler: devolve power (and money) back from the federal level to state and local institutions. Everything becomes much more manageable, cheaper, and more accountable at the state and local level. Furthermore, screwups have much more limited effects and consequences.
That's extremely unlikely at this point. Furthermore, just because the federal government can legitimately intervene in that case doesn't justify the millions of other pages of rules, regulations, and laws it imposes.
We don't need to dissolve the union. The US was intended to be 50 separate states that happen to allow free trade, free movement, and a common defense. That's less integrated than the EU is today. That's also still the legal framework. Many of the powers that the federal government has these days are questionable at best under the Constitution, and a different Supreme Court could undo them quickly by choosing a more traditional interpretation of "interstate commerce" etc.
Devolution of power from the federal government to the states is possible; it is happening in European nations, and it can happen here. Of course, it won't happen with power-mad leaders like Bush and Obama in charge, but a president friendly to these ideas, a shifting supreme court, and a bunch of aggressively independent-minded states making demands and bringing about lawsuits might make it happen.
Which only goes to show that elsewhere, people manage to be even bigger fools than Americans.
I quoted what I said. I did not say without qualification "a car is faster and cheaper". You can't read. But we knew that.
For the same trip, the time actually spent in the seats in an airplane is much shorter. Furthermore, often planes are simply cheaper than trains, even in Germany, even with subsidies for passenger rail.
And, frankly, I really don't care about Germany's train system either way. If you like it and want to keep paying for it, good for you. I happen to ride it when I'm in Germany because I don't give a f*ck about how overpriced it is, and because I fortunately don't usually have to go anywhere into the sticks.
I just don't want the US to waste its money on expanding passenger rail, because today, we in the US don't have the "benefit" of Germany's totalitarian governments, monopolies, and heavy subsidies to create such a passenger rail system in the first place. Even if the rail system in Germany weren't the inefficient, overpriced, subsidized boondoggle that it actually is, the US would do better just improving roads and building more airports.
Competitive businesses don't close branches that their customers like and want, and they do close branches that their customers don't want. It's monopolies and governments that do the opposite.
It's merely the lies that are becoming more transparent.
They are the good guys! Evil America must have made them do it!
That's a US matter, not a German matter: obviously, if the US government can't legally spy on US citizens, it should also be legally prohibited to get this data from third parties.
I don't really care if they do; why would I? But if I did, how would that be different from any other crook trying to rip me off?
That's not the Finnish higher education system, it's about Finnish primary and secondary education. Come on, stop being so stupid.
And even there, the BI article is bogus: nobody knows for certain why Finland's schools are good, and some of the factors the BI seems to favor aren't even necessarily positive.
Most comments are useless, but some do contain useful ideas, viewpoints, or links to related material.
Anonymity doesn't undermine free speech, interference with anonymity does. Many people simply cannot afford to say what they think if their jobs or social relations are threatened as a result.
Free speech is not a "privilege". And you bet I don't want "the responsibility" of getting fired from my job for writing about libertarian views on my private time while working at a predominantly liberal company.
Most people need anonymity in order to be able to speak freely about controversial topics. Free speech cannot exist without widespread anonymity.
No, what I said was:
With your pre-purchased EU 29 tickets and times, you are comparing apples and oranges.
I do, as do lots of other people. I also care about the limited luggage carrying capacity and the general hassle of it all.
Really? By what measure?
Statement 1:
FALSE. Neurons communicate in an analog fashion. Whether half that statement is technically true doesn't matter. In addition to frequency modulation, you're also missing the point that the actual signal transmission at the synapse is analog.
Statements 2 and 3:
These are plausible speculation, but your statements are false because you misrepresent Hinton's speculation as established fact.
Only people like you, who keep writing scientific nonsense. Unfortunately, nothing seems to stop you.
I was going to write a lengthy response to you, but you're obviously a just a jerk and not interested in debate. Get lost.