It would be pretty starling if you weren't allowed to exercise these rights in concert, for example by assembling into a corporation and lobbying or contributing to a campaign. Capping any individual's contribution to, say, $10/yr would not infringe those rights, it just attempts to ensure the person with a billion dollars to spare doesn't get any more attention than the person with ten.
The hard part is deciding what 'appropriate levels' might be for any given political election [...] Better to attack it from the sourcing side and let the people decide. Campaign contributions should be limited to natural persons, and to a maximum of two weeks worth of full-time minimum wage labour. That way good ideas can still attract large amounts of funding, but bad ideas that appeal to a minority of very wealthy individuals cannot.
So let me get this straight. You want to have a third party threaten everyone with violence in order to get everyone to turn over a percentage of their property so that the third party can keep most of it for themselves and then redistribute a small portion of it with the net result being that almost everyone is poorer than they would have been. This is what you want? People who wonder what a Straw Man argument is, should read the above quote. And where did you get that this is the only way that serfdom can be prevented? History. The greedy and powerful are incapable of self-regulating. In the early part of the past century the trajectory of the American working class was moving up - and fast. Then the third party decided to fix it. The single most prosperous period of human history was post-WW2 America. Right up until the early '70s when the neo-liberals took over and started implementing policy to concentrate wealth, eliminate the burgeoning middle class, and slam the brakes on social mobility. Since then, as the GP noted, the vast majority of productivity and wealth increases have gone to an increasingly small section of society.
I escaped from poverty on my own, without someone else paying my way. So no public schooling ? Never taken a dime of welfare ? Parents never on welfare ? Never taken public transport ? Never called the police ? I really can't stand when some prick like you acts like its impossible for someone to pull themselves out of the slums in America. This isn't fucking Kenya. In America, contrary to what all you Occupy Wallstreet douchebags with your North Face backpacks and tents think, you make your own way in this place. America is one of the least socially mobile societies in the civilised world.
Getting online and telling people that civil rights will suddenly go away because of this film is an attempt at censorship and it is the reason why we have the Freedom of Speech in the first place. By your logic, "getting online" and telling people they shouldn't shop at $STORE because it sucks, would be theft.
Some are even so strict as to try to "mask" the tax rate by not allowing sellers to show with-tax prices before the sale transaction begins. This is why we don't have more stores that say "this item is $5.00, tax included". This is an asinine bureaucratic requirement that needs to be removed and the people who invented it, continued to enforce it, and who support it idealogically dragged out into the street and publicly humiliated and executed. Meanwhile, one of the most frequent complaints from visitors to the US is that advertised prices don't include the tax component, to them representing a form of false advertising.
I don't think they can force sellers outside of the USA to charge US state sales tax to their customers so I guess I will be buying some stuff 'offshore' Maybe at that point the reality of America being one of the cheapest, lowest-taxing countries in the western world might sink in.
I trust in the good of individuals to do the right thing. No, you don't. If you did, you wouldn't be so paranoid about how they vote to use taxation revenue.
The statement made was "I bet you're in a lower gear when you're going 60 than when you're going 75". The point is that most (probably all) modern autos will be in top gear well before 60mph - ie: same gear regardless of cruising speed. Whether they're designed to be optimal at that speed is an entirely separate issue.
I bet you're in a lower gear when you're going 60 than when you're going 75. I doubt it. Every remotely modern (under ten years old) auto car I've ever driven has reached top gear by 60km/h or so (=40ish mph). Unless you put it into "sport" mode, or whatever the equivalent in your vehicle is.
I've got a better idea that's actually relevant. You tell us what jobs you expect to exist when nearly all manufacturing and services labour is automated.
For example, under a policy originally introduced during the Franco era, a company must pay a laid-off long-term worker 1.5 months of salary for every year he's been employed at the company. (If he's been there for 8 years, the company must pay him a full year's salary as severance pay.) Especially during the downturn, that policy has made companies loath to hire employees on anything other than temp contracts, contributing to Spain's massive 50% unemployment rate for workers under 26. Your reasoning is completely arse about face. A policy like that should discourage companies from firing people, not hiring them (unless, of course, they are planning to fire them in the future). In any event, this is not a policy that impacts "flexibility", it's just an operating expense (ie: you tack another 1.5 months worth of salary onto your costs for hiring an employee).
Windows NT did not exist when OS/2 was being developed. Yes it did. Windows NT development started in 1988, and was being worked on alongside OS/2 1.x. Microsoft started it because they did not like working on OS/2 yet losing full control over it. No, Microsoft and IBM agreed to work on OS/2 NT _together_ as a replacement (long term) for OS/2. But it wasn't. At the time of release OS/2 was only adopted on small servers (as an alternative to Netware, but also for purposes that otherwise required Unix or mainframe) and semi-embedded devices (as an alternative to DOS). On desktops, Windows 3.1 - 3.11 was so entrenched, nothing was capable of displacing it. OS/2 was primarily for clients, not servers, especially in the 1.x and 2.x days. NT was going to be the server. I remember all this fairly well because I watched it unfold. Even the wiki pages cover most of the high level stuff, however.
OS/2 was promoted for very large enterprises and competed with Unix, mainframes (from the same IBM), etc. on the server side, and in "thick embedded" devices.
Rubbish. Originally (ie: pre-IBM/Microsoft breakup):
Windows NT (OS/2 NT at the time) was designed and built to compete with UNIX and Netware.
OS/2 was going to be the high-end (ie: "business") user desktop.
DOS+Windows was going to be the low-end (ie: "home") user desktop.
If I get stuck in a traffic jam that I could have found out about on the radio (had I been manually driving), I'd be pretty pissed off.
1. Not driving does not prevent you from listening to the radio and telling the car to avoid a specific area. 2. Even cheap GPSes these days will receive and account for automated traffic reports.
And we all know all forms of central planning always fail at everything. That's why centrally planned, hierarchical organisations like religions, corporations and military forces have never been successful at anything.
I don't have a Windows 7 machine in front of me to check, but I can't recall any ambiguity about whether or not a program is running. The icon changes to indicate the status. Of course, I haven't really cared about whether or not programs are running for 15+ years, even since I've had OSes with (varying levels of) competent process scheduling and virtual memory management. Nor should anyone else today, when 2/4 HT-core machines with 2-4GB of RAM and SSDs mundane.
Because that one corner case, trivially dealt with simply by moving the gearshift or hitting the flappy paddle a few times, invalidates the other 99% of usage.
There's a reason clutch pedals are disappearing from race cars. The only reason they've stayed around this long is because of artificial rules. Computers have been able to shift gears better than humans for a decade or more.
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It would be pretty starling if you weren't allowed to exercise these rights in concert, for example by assembling into a corporation and lobbying or contributing to a campaign.
Capping any individual's contribution to, say, $10/yr would not infringe those rights, it just attempts to ensure the person with a billion dollars to spare doesn't get any more attention than the person with ten.
The hard part is deciding what 'appropriate levels' might be for any given political election [...]
Better to attack it from the sourcing side and let the people decide.
Campaign contributions should be limited to natural persons, and to a maximum of two weeks worth of full-time minimum wage labour.
That way good ideas can still attract large amounts of funding, but bad ideas that appeal to a minority of very wealthy individuals cannot.
So let me get this straight. You want to have a third party threaten everyone with violence in order to get everyone to turn over a percentage of their property so that the third party can keep most of it for themselves and then redistribute a small portion of it with the net result being that almost everyone is poorer than they would have been. This is what you want?
People who wonder what a Straw Man argument is, should read the above quote.
And where did you get that this is the only way that serfdom can be prevented?
History. The greedy and powerful are incapable of self-regulating.
In the early part of the past century the trajectory of the American working class was moving up - and fast. Then the third party decided to fix it.
The single most prosperous period of human history was post-WW2 America. Right up until the early '70s when the neo-liberals took over and started implementing policy to concentrate wealth, eliminate the burgeoning middle class, and slam the brakes on social mobility. Since then, as the GP noted, the vast majority of productivity and wealth increases have gone to an increasingly small section of society.
I escaped from poverty on my own, without someone else paying my way.
So no public schooling ? Never taken a dime of welfare ? Parents never on welfare ? Never taken public transport ? Never called the police ?
I really can't stand when some prick like you acts like its impossible for someone to pull themselves out of the slums in America. This isn't fucking Kenya. In America, contrary to what all you Occupy Wallstreet douchebags with your North Face backpacks and tents think, you make your own way in this place.
America is one of the least socially mobile societies in the civilised world.
Getting online and telling people that civil rights will suddenly go away because of this film is an attempt at censorship and it is the reason why we have the Freedom of Speech in the first place.
By your logic, "getting online" and telling people they shouldn't shop at $STORE because it sucks, would be theft.
Some are even so strict as to try to "mask" the tax rate by not allowing sellers to show with-tax prices before the sale transaction begins. This is why we don't have more stores that say "this item is $5.00, tax included". This is an asinine bureaucratic requirement that needs to be removed and the people who invented it, continued to enforce it, and who support it idealogically dragged out into the street and publicly humiliated and executed.
Meanwhile, one of the most frequent complaints from visitors to the US is that advertised prices don't include the tax component, to them representing a form of false advertising.
I don't think they can force sellers outside of the USA to charge US state sales tax to their customers so I guess I will be buying some stuff 'offshore'
Maybe at that point the reality of America being one of the cheapest, lowest-taxing countries in the western world might sink in.
What do so many Americans have such fear/hatred of Socialism?
Because they don't understand what a false dichotomy is.
I trust in the good of individuals to do the right thing.
No, you don't. If you did, you wouldn't be so paranoid about how they vote to use taxation revenue.
The statement made was "I bet you're in a lower gear when you're going 60 than when you're going 75".
The point is that most (probably all) modern autos will be in top gear well before 60mph - ie: same gear regardless of cruising speed.
Whether they're designed to be optimal at that speed is an entirely separate issue.
I bet you're in a lower gear when you're going 60 than when you're going 75.
I doubt it. Every remotely modern (under ten years old) auto car I've ever driven has reached top gear by 60km/h or so (=40ish mph). Unless you put it into "sport" mode, or whatever the equivalent in your vehicle is.
Is Mach 5 just an arbitrary number, or does something interesting happen at that speed from an aerodynamic perspective ?
I've got a better idea that's actually relevant. You tell us what jobs you expect to exist when nearly all manufacturing and services labour is automated.
Maybe you missed the part about there being no jobs ?
Yeah. And how has that worked out again ?
For example, under a policy originally introduced during the Franco era, a company must pay a laid-off long-term worker 1.5 months of salary for every year he's been employed at the company. (If he's been there for 8 years, the company must pay him a full year's salary as severance pay.) Especially during the downturn, that policy has made companies loath to hire employees on anything other than temp contracts, contributing to Spain's massive 50% unemployment rate for workers under 26.
Your reasoning is completely arse about face. A policy like that should discourage companies from firing people, not hiring them (unless, of course, they are planning to fire them in the future).
In any event, this is not a policy that impacts "flexibility", it's just an operating expense (ie: you tack another 1.5 months worth of salary onto your costs for hiring an employee).
And when there is no work to be done, what do you propose all those people should do ?
Very, very few people are unemployed because they want to be.
Windows NT did not exist when OS/2 was being developed.
Yes it did. Windows NT development started in 1988, and was being worked on alongside OS/2 1.x.
Microsoft started it because they did not like working on OS/2 yet losing full control over it.
No, Microsoft and IBM agreed to work on OS/2 NT _together_ as a replacement (long term) for OS/2.
But it wasn't. At the time of release OS/2 was only adopted on small servers (as an alternative to Netware, but also for purposes that otherwise required Unix or mainframe) and semi-embedded devices (as an alternative to DOS). On desktops, Windows 3.1 - 3.11 was so entrenched, nothing was capable of displacing it.
OS/2 was primarily for clients, not servers, especially in the 1.x and 2.x days. NT was going to be the server.
I remember all this fairly well because I watched it unfold. Even the wiki pages cover most of the high level stuff, however.
Rubbish. Originally (ie: pre-IBM/Microsoft breakup):
Windows NT (OS/2 NT at the time) was designed and built to compete with UNIX and Netware.
OS/2 was going to be the high-end (ie: "business") user desktop.
DOS+Windows was going to be the low-end (ie: "home") user desktop.
1. Not driving does not prevent you from listening to the radio and telling the car to avoid a specific area.
2. Even cheap GPSes these days will receive and account for automated traffic reports.
I'd lay down a hundred bucks in a second that "the system" will respond to "the unexpected" far more successfully than the majority of human drivers.
And we all know all forms of central planning always fail at everything. That's why centrally planned, hierarchical organisations like religions, corporations and military forces have never been successful at anything.
I don't have a Windows 7 machine in front of me to check, but I can't recall any ambiguity about whether or not a program is running. The icon changes to indicate the status.
Of course, I haven't really cared about whether or not programs are running for 15+ years, even since I've had OSes with (varying levels of) competent process scheduling and virtual memory management. Nor should anyone else today, when 2/4 HT-core machines with 2-4GB of RAM and SSDs mundane.
Because that one corner case, trivially dealt with simply by moving the gearshift or hitting the flappy paddle a few times, invalidates the other 99% of usage.
There's a reason clutch pedals are disappearing from race cars.
The only reason they've stayed around this long is because of artificial rules.
Computers have been able to shift gears better than humans for a decade or more.