No, it is you (and those who modded you up) who are confused.
Right now every inventor is free to either apply for patent protection, or to release their invention into the public domain. Those who have applied for patent protection, by definition, were motivated by profit. (And I shouldn't even have to point this out, but there's nothing wrong with profit, a.k.a. wanting to be able to feed your family as a result of the hard work you've put into your invention.) If there were no prospect of patent protection, those particular inventors would not have poured resources into creating their inventions in the first place. The world would be completely deprived of their inventions (until such time that they were independently invented by entities not motivated by profit -- in many cases, that time would be never).
The modern-day Newton can stand on the shoulders of (1) those who release their art into the public domain; additionally, he can stand on the shoulders of (2) those whose patents are no longer in force; additionally, if he obtains the required permissions and/or licenses, he can stand on the shoulders of (3) those whose patents are still in force.
The important thing to remember is, the inventions of (2) and (3) likely never would have even come into existence if not for the financial incentives provided by the patent system.
So to do away with the patent system would be to completely eliminate many of the shoulders the modern-day Newton could choose to stand on. To do away with the patent system creates no advantages for those who were planning to release their ideas into the public domain anyway. To do away with the patent system really is to kill a goose that lays many golden eggs, and to cut off your nose to spite those who seek to make a living from their inventions.
Elon Musk says he will release his Hyperloop designs into the public domain. More power to him... he doesn't need the money. I'm glad he is free to make that choice. How about you reciprocate, and be glad that those who do need the money are free to apply for patent protection?
You provide no evidence that 3D printing would have been developed in the first place, if not for the additional profitability afforded by patent protection. The original inventors didn't release their IP into the public domain; they filed for patent protection, which is a pretty strong indicator that they were motivated by profit, and without that motivation they wouldn't have done the development work.
So the evidence is that we have the patent system to thank for the very existence of 3D printing. And something has to exist before it can become a craze.
The inventors of PCs (IBM, Xerox, Apple et.al.) received thousands of patents on the new features they developed. They poured billions into R&D, only because they knew they would receive patent protection. The IP system greatly accelerated development of PCs. How would you feel if they hadn't done the R&D, and we were still using 6502 processors and storing data on cassette tapes?
what if all combine harvesters cost 100x as they do today
If all combines cost 100x as much, no one would be able to afford to buy one, and the intellectual property owners would make no profits whatsoever. IP owners would be extremely displeased by that arrangement.
Despite what you've been taught by leftist educators, the price structures that naturally arise out of capitalism tend to be fair to everyone, and work much better than your farfetched example.
Newton wrote, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." When you build upon the work of others who have come before, you effectively start near the finish pole. Thank goodness Newton had that advantage. If he had to start completely from scratch, he may have done nothing notable.
Now back to the topic of IP. If you were forced to donate your IP into the public domain, you would have far less incentive to create that IP in the first place. The fact that people can make money from their IP is responsible for the explosion of IP that makes us all better off in the long run. Don't kill this golden goose.
I see the photo and RTFA and find out its 62 light years away and think "I will NEVER get to see this incredible wonder with my own eyes, never feel its ground under my feet
But you didn't RTFA, which says it's a gas giant, so it has no ground that could be felt under your feet.
If you feel so strongly about lack of faster-than-light travel, stop whining and go study advanced physics, so you can acquire a remote chance of being able to do something about the problem.
For thousands of years whips were used to incentive workers.
To the extent you're implying that I had whipping in mind as a legitimate way to incentivize workers, you are just wrecking your own credibility.
It is practically a useless token, and nobody is fooled
Employee Stock Ownership Plans are indeed practically useless when it comes to those who aren't fooled. But you know there are a few goody-two-shoes employees who are fooled; who reckon "I must do good work because I'm an owner of the company!" and never make the cognitive leap to realizing that the benefit of their hard work is mostly enjoyed by other owners.
This only helps if a company jumps through regulatory hurdles and sells new stock.
Wrong -- to the extent that a company owns shares of its own stock (many companies do, and share buyback programs are common), rising share prices give the company more capital to work with.
But outside investors will almost never give good advice for improving a company's internals. They won't give educated suggestions about what might be researched, They won't know how employees are abusing supplies, wasting thousands of man-hours twiddling their thumbs, or spying on customers.
Every company has a paid management staff, responsible for dealing with those problems. It would be a bad idea to create barriers to ownership by pushing those problems off onto the company's owners (who, in most cases, don't even have any aptitude for management). It's entirely possible to be both an owner and a manager, but this should not be required of anyone.
Since most shareholders are nowhere, nohow involved in the company itself, this has devolved into an ever growing pursuit of cutting costs at the expense of quality, employee pay, and work environment. Now Now Now. This quarter This quarter This quarter... Officers of big corps who try to play 10 years ahead (let alone 20 or 30) get removed by big investment firms who don't intend to invest more than a few months, and could care less about the long term viability of the company.
There's absolutely no correlation between having a narrow short-term outlook and being a publicly-traded company (or between being a producer of shoddy products and being a publicly-traded company). In the auto industry alone, there are examples of publicly-traded companies that have a healthy long-term outlook and produce high-quality products (Toyota, Tesla Motors) and examples of publicly-traded companies that don't (GM, Chrysler).
I think you're totally off the rails here. Rich guys invested in him
Let's try again. Because Nikola Tesla had the backing of George Westinghouse, the technology of alternating current spread rapidly around the world. Now, you can call Westinghouse a "rich guy" -- and it's obvious that you do so pejoratively -- or you can more objectively call him an agent of the financial sector.
I aspire to become a "rich guy" myself -- not because I'm particularly fond of luxury goods, but because I would like to drastically expand the scope of the philanthropy work that I do. The more rich guys there are, the fewer poor guys there are. Poor guys will either directly transition to becoming rich or middle-class guys, or they will benefit indirectly from the activities of the rich guys. A rising tide lifts all boats: it's a cliche, but true.
Effectively, the US Constitution is a negative constitution. Most constitutions enumerate rights with a list, like the UN Declaration of Rights. The US Constitution gives all rights to the people except the ones that it has enumerated to belong to the government.
You are correct, and that is why our current president dislikes the Constitution. In complaining that the Constitution is "a charter of negative liberties," he expresses a goal that's completely at odds with the Founders’ vision.
There are plenty of ways to incentivize workers to perform quality work. Some companies do give shares to workers through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, but that's probably not even the most effective way. (Joe knows that if he slacks off, it could hurt the company's reputation, but the impact to Joe is highly diluted because he only owns 0.00003% of the company.)
"owners" (stock holders) have no feel for their company, being wholly separated from the creation of their products and services. This doesn't lead to a better economy.
Actually, it does. If there's a sudden spike in demand for entwidgets, Entwidgets Inc. has an immediate need to raise capital for expansion. Investors notice this. Their collective insight tends to shift capital to precisely where it's needed most. It doesn't matter if they live 3000 miles away and have never laid eyes on an entwidget factory. It's rather wonderful that a retired bus driver in Vermont can contribute an extra $800 toward his granddaughter's college tuition, because a sharp pension fund manager working on his behalf studied the LED light bulb industry and got a good feel for which players were going to need more capital.
Can you at least admit that the "financial sector" shouldn't be included in GDP?
No, I can't. GDP must measure services as well as goods, and the financial sector's services are invaluable -- much more so than, say, the barbering industry. I can cut my own hair if need be. But imagine that a guy like Edison comes along, and there is no financial sector to get behind him and the rapid application of his inventions. 100 years later, there would still be towns that hadn't been electrified. (And there wouldn't even be as many towns, because the financial sector made possible the construction of the railroads that took settlers en mass into the frontier.)
Wall Street has some social value, but it also has considerable social expense... Stock/commodity/bond markets are not capitalism.
Our markets aren't perfect, but if you started from scratch to devise a way for people to buy and sell fractional ownership of the enterprises that humans naturally create in order to efficiently meet consumer demands, you'd end up with something pretty similar to what we have now.
And free markets have immense social value. They have lifted far more people out of poverty than any wealth-redistribution effort ever has. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if all wealth-redistribution efforts have been counterproductive in the long run. (E.g., if the poor of country X end up having 5% of a $1 trillion GDP coercively redistributed to them, they are much worse off than if they receive 1% of a $10 trillion GDP via voluntary acts of charity. Yes, less economic coercion causes a boost in the rate of economic growth which, if compounded over a few decades, easily means the difference between whether country X has a $1 trillion GDP or a $10 trillion GDP.)
Given the small number of highly exposed workers, it is unlikely that excess cases of thyroid cancer due to radiation exposure would be detectable.
If plant management had any competency at all, the workers were given potassium iodide doses, which proved highly effective at preventing thyroid cancer in people exposed to Chernobyl's radiation.
we should be working on new designs based on molten salt cooling, such as LFTR [wikipedia.org]. Of course we aren't doing that because too many corporations with deep pockets and long tentacles prevent Congress from funding the research.
Nice conspiracy theory, but it's in an electric utility's self-interest to use safer, more efficient designs. I suppose the coal-mining industry would be opposed to safer, more efficient fission. Are those the "deep-pocketed corporations" you're referring to?
The intense white areas in the image are areas of dense flight activity -- and Europe's intense white area is much larger than that of the U.S.
Here's my interpretation: few people are using Europe's vaunted and heavily-subsidized public rail transportation system. Most people are flying instead. It would be a mistake for the U.S. to throw billions into rail transportation as well (i.e., we should have let Amtrak die a long time ago).
"It's a distribution problem", which is to say "It's a capitalism problem".
You're absolutely correct: countries that embrace capitalism have the mans to have food distributed to them -- and even those individuals who don't directly participate in the capitalism benefit from the social safety nets that are paid for by the individuals who do directly participate in the capitalism.
Countries that don't embrace capitalism tend to be abjectly poor, with no means to construct social safety nets. They have a big hunger problem caused by their dire capitalism problem.
this is what the Afghan people deal with all the time.
The Afghan people are dealing with US and UK troops who risk their lives so girls can attend school. You say that these troops senselessly, randomly kill Muslims, but in fact they try to narrowly focus their use of force against Taliban members who throw acid on those schoolgirls, or launch poison attacks against those schoolgirls.
If you live in the United States, you're likely to consume fewer insects than most humans, because to the extent that other countries even have standards for insect contamination, they tend to be more lax than the USDA's standards.
A warm bulb is not what you want in every situation... warm is good in a relaxing environment like the living room or bedroom, but in the kitchen and bathroom I have 5000K (Daylight) LED bulbs.
Why are these bulbs, specifically designed for "Kitchen and Bath" applications, 3000 K?
Why the rudeness? Although I'm not a material scientist, I am an engineer who has done experiments to determine loads that will cause structural failure with various materials. Is that better?
Being free to choose the size of your deductable is great.
Health insurance that covers every little medical expense doesn't make sense. It's like a car insurance policy that pays for oil changes and tire replacements. If I want that, I am free to choose that kind of plan (and the higher premiums that go with it). But those with a little bit of sense choose a higher deductable, and save a lot of money in the long run. I pity people who live in countries that don't allow the freedom to make such choices.
You seem to not understand how pre-Obamacare health plans work in the U.S., because all four of your points are invalid. 1. If I lose my job and have no income, I'll still be covered by Medicaid. 2. It's against the law for my insurer to drop me or raise my premiums if I get sick. 3. Regardless of whether I'm able to present my insurance card (or even whether I'm insured at all) after I've been in an accident, the emergency room will give me the same quality of treatment, and sort it out later. 4. Thanks to my choosing a high-deductable plan, my bank account is much larger than it otherwise would be, and I'm better able to afford visits to a doctor. Some people might blow the money they save on beer, instead of socking it away, but do you really want to design a healthcare system that rewards that kind of irresponsible behavior?
your tax money is used to benefit society; when you don't pay your taxes you are not contributing to society
Your definition of "contributing to society" is much too limited.
I happen to give money to charities that operate a lot more efficiently than government entitlement programs do. To the extent that I am taxed, I am less able to give to those charities. And if I didn't pay taxes, I could and would contribute a lot more to society than I do now.
Maybe you'd blow the money on beer if you weren't taxed, but don't paint everyone else with that broad brush.
They got lucky and the barrel didn't crack, splinter, shatter, or explode. I'm no gun expert, but I imagine that will eventually happen as people experiment with cheaper and cheaper materials.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it is you (and those who modded you up) who are confused.
Right now every inventor is free to either apply for patent protection, or to release their invention into the public domain. Those who have applied for patent protection, by definition, were motivated by profit. (And I shouldn't even have to point this out, but there's nothing wrong with profit, a.k.a. wanting to be able to feed your family as a result of the hard work you've put into your invention.) If there were no prospect of patent protection, those particular inventors would not have poured resources into creating their inventions in the first place. The world would be completely deprived of their inventions (until such time that they were independently invented by entities not motivated by profit -- in many cases, that time would be never).
The modern-day Newton can stand on the shoulders of (1) those who release their art into the public domain; additionally, he can stand on the shoulders of (2) those whose patents are no longer in force; additionally, if he obtains the required permissions and/or licenses, he can stand on the shoulders of (3) those whose patents are still in force.
The important thing to remember is, the inventions of (2) and (3) likely never would have even come into existence if not for the financial incentives provided by the patent system.
So to do away with the patent system would be to completely eliminate many of the shoulders the modern-day Newton could choose to stand on. To do away with the patent system creates no advantages for those who were planning to release their ideas into the public domain anyway. To do away with the patent system really is to kill a goose that lays many golden eggs, and to cut off your nose to spite those who seek to make a living from their inventions.
Elon Musk says he will release his Hyperloop designs into the public domain. More power to him... he doesn't need the money. I'm glad he is free to make that choice. How about you reciprocate, and be glad that those who do need the money are free to apply for patent protection?
You provide no evidence that 3D printing would have been developed in the first place, if not for the additional profitability afforded by patent protection. The original inventors didn't release their IP into the public domain; they filed for patent protection, which is a pretty strong indicator that they were motivated by profit, and without that motivation they wouldn't have done the development work.
So the evidence is that we have the patent system to thank for the very existence of 3D printing. And something has to exist before it can become a craze.
The inventors of PCs (IBM, Xerox, Apple et.al.) received thousands of patents on the new features they developed. They poured billions into R&D, only because they knew they would receive patent protection. The IP system greatly accelerated development of PCs. How would you feel if they hadn't done the R&D, and we were still using 6502 processors and storing data on cassette tapes?
what if all combine harvesters cost 100x as they do today
If all combines cost 100x as much, no one would be able to afford to buy one, and the intellectual property owners would make no profits whatsoever. IP owners would be extremely displeased by that arrangement.
Despite what you've been taught by leftist educators, the price structures that naturally arise out of capitalism tend to be fair to everyone, and work much better than your farfetched example.
Newton wrote, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." When you build upon the work of others who have come before, you effectively start near the finish pole. Thank goodness Newton had that advantage. If he had to start completely from scratch, he may have done nothing notable.
Now back to the topic of IP. If you were forced to donate your IP into the public domain, you would have far less incentive to create that IP in the first place. The fact that people can make money from their IP is responsible for the explosion of IP that makes us all better off in the long run. Don't kill this golden goose.
I see the photo and RTFA and find out its 62 light years away and think "I will NEVER get to see this incredible wonder with my own eyes, never feel its ground under my feet
But you didn't RTFA, which says it's a gas giant, so it has no ground that could be felt under your feet.
If you feel so strongly about lack of faster-than-light travel, stop whining and go study advanced physics, so you can acquire a remote chance of being able to do something about the problem.
Actually, a student receiving GI Bill benefits has less need for a spouse than a student who isn't receiving GI Bill benefits.
Then the child goes into a home, and probably eventually into the military
So you're saying that military service is for messed-up youths who were raised in foster homes?
For thousands of years whips were used to incentive workers.
To the extent you're implying that I had whipping in mind as a legitimate way to incentivize workers, you are just wrecking your own credibility.
It is practically a useless token, and nobody is fooled
Employee Stock Ownership Plans are indeed practically useless when it comes to those who aren't fooled. But you know there are a few goody-two-shoes employees who are fooled; who reckon "I must do good work because I'm an owner of the company!" and never make the cognitive leap to realizing that the benefit of their hard work is mostly enjoyed by other owners.
This only helps if a company jumps through regulatory hurdles and sells new stock.
Wrong -- to the extent that a company owns shares of its own stock (many companies do, and share buyback programs are common), rising share prices give the company more capital to work with.
But outside investors will almost never give good advice for improving a company's internals. They won't give educated suggestions about what might be researched, They won't know how employees are abusing supplies, wasting thousands of man-hours twiddling their thumbs, or spying on customers.
Every company has a paid management staff, responsible for dealing with those problems. It would be a bad idea to create barriers to ownership by pushing those problems off onto the company's owners (who, in most cases, don't even have any aptitude for management). It's entirely possible to be both an owner and a manager, but this should not be required of anyone.
Since most shareholders are nowhere, nohow involved in the company itself, this has devolved into an ever growing pursuit of cutting costs at the expense of quality, employee pay, and work environment. Now Now Now. This quarter This quarter This quarter... Officers of big corps who try to play 10 years ahead (let alone 20 or 30) get removed by big investment firms who don't intend to invest more than a few months, and could care less about the long term viability of the company.
There's absolutely no correlation between having a narrow short-term outlook and being a publicly-traded company (or between being a producer of shoddy products and being a publicly-traded company). In the auto industry alone, there are examples of publicly-traded companies that have a healthy long-term outlook and produce high-quality products (Toyota, Tesla Motors) and examples of publicly-traded companies that don't (GM, Chrysler).
I think you're totally off the rails here. Rich guys invested in him
Let's try again. Because Nikola Tesla had the backing of George Westinghouse, the technology of alternating current spread rapidly around the world. Now, you can call Westinghouse a "rich guy" -- and it's obvious that you do so pejoratively -- or you can more objectively call him an agent of the financial sector.
I aspire to become a "rich guy" myself -- not because I'm particularly fond of luxury goods, but because I would like to drastically expand the scope of the philanthropy work that I do. The more rich guys there are, the fewer poor guys there are. Poor guys will either directly transition to becoming rich or middle-class guys, or they will benefit indirectly from the activities of the rich guys. A rising tide lifts all boats: it's a cliche, but true.
Effectively, the US Constitution is a negative constitution. Most constitutions enumerate rights with a list, like the UN Declaration of Rights. The US Constitution gives all rights to the people except the ones that it has enumerated to belong to the government.
You are correct, and that is why our current president dislikes the Constitution. In complaining that the Constitution is "a charter of negative liberties," he expresses a goal that's completely at odds with the Founders’ vision.
Workers have no ownership of their work
There are plenty of ways to incentivize workers to perform quality work. Some companies do give shares to workers through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, but that's probably not even the most effective way. (Joe knows that if he slacks off, it could hurt the company's reputation, but the impact to Joe is highly diluted because he only owns 0.00003% of the company.)
"owners" (stock holders) have no feel for their company, being wholly separated from the creation of their products and services. This doesn't lead to a better economy.
Actually, it does. If there's a sudden spike in demand for entwidgets, Entwidgets Inc. has an immediate need to raise capital for expansion. Investors notice this. Their collective insight tends to shift capital to precisely where it's needed most. It doesn't matter if they live 3000 miles away and have never laid eyes on an entwidget factory. It's rather wonderful that a retired bus driver in Vermont can contribute an extra $800 toward his granddaughter's college tuition, because a sharp pension fund manager working on his behalf studied the LED light bulb industry and got a good feel for which players were going to need more capital.
Can you at least admit that the "financial sector" shouldn't be included in GDP?
No, I can't. GDP must measure services as well as goods, and the financial sector's services are invaluable -- much more so than, say, the barbering industry. I can cut my own hair if need be. But imagine that a guy like Edison comes along, and there is no financial sector to get behind him and the rapid application of his inventions. 100 years later, there would still be towns that hadn't been electrified. (And there wouldn't even be as many towns, because the financial sector made possible the construction of the railroads that took settlers en mass into the frontier.)
Wall Street has some social value, but it also has considerable social expense... Stock/commodity/bond markets are not capitalism.
Our markets aren't perfect, but if you started from scratch to devise a way for people to buy and sell fractional ownership of the enterprises that humans naturally create in order to efficiently meet consumer demands, you'd end up with something pretty similar to what we have now.
And free markets have immense social value. They have lifted far more people out of poverty than any wealth-redistribution effort ever has. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if all wealth-redistribution efforts have been counterproductive in the long run. (E.g., if the poor of country X end up having 5% of a $1 trillion GDP coercively redistributed to them, they are much worse off than if they receive 1% of a $10 trillion GDP via voluntary acts of charity. Yes, less economic coercion causes a boost in the rate of economic growth which, if compounded over a few decades, easily means the difference between whether country X has a $1 trillion GDP or a $10 trillion GDP.)
Have you heard of a little thing called "The Affordable Care Act"?
I sure have. It is making health insurance less affordable, to an astonishing degree:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/05/30/rate-shock-in-california-obamacare-to-increase-individual-insurance-premiums-by-64-146/
Yes I realize that -- which is why I claimed that potassium iodide prevents thyroid cancer, which is true, and made no other claims for it.
Given the small number of highly exposed workers, it is unlikely that excess cases of thyroid cancer due to radiation exposure would be detectable.
If plant management had any competency at all, the workers were given potassium iodide doses, which proved highly effective at preventing thyroid cancer in people exposed to Chernobyl's radiation.
we should be working on new designs based on molten salt cooling, such as LFTR [wikipedia.org]. Of course we aren't doing that because too many corporations with deep pockets and long tentacles prevent Congress from funding the research.
Nice conspiracy theory, but it's in an electric utility's self-interest to use safer, more efficient designs. I suppose the coal-mining industry would be opposed to safer, more efficient fission. Are those the "deep-pocketed corporations" you're referring to?
The intense white areas in the image are areas of dense flight activity -- and Europe's intense white area is much larger than that of the U.S.
Here's my interpretation: few people are using Europe's vaunted and heavily-subsidized public rail transportation system. Most people are flying instead. It would be a mistake for the U.S. to throw billions into rail transportation as well (i.e., we should have let Amtrak die a long time ago).
"It's a distribution problem", which is to say "It's a capitalism problem".
You're absolutely correct: countries that embrace capitalism have the mans to have food distributed to them -- and even those individuals who don't directly participate in the capitalism benefit from the social safety nets that are paid for by the individuals who do directly participate in the capitalism.
Countries that don't embrace capitalism tend to be abjectly poor, with no means to construct social safety nets. They have a big hunger problem caused by their dire capitalism problem.
this is what the Afghan people deal with all the time.
The Afghan people are dealing with US and UK troops who risk their lives so girls can attend school. You say that these troops senselessly, randomly kill Muslims, but in fact they try to narrowly focus their use of force against Taliban members who throw acid on those schoolgirls, or launch poison attacks against those schoolgirls.
Fear mongering, indeed -- on your part.
If you live in the United States, you're likely to consume fewer insects than most humans, because to the extent that other countries even have standards for insect contamination, they tend to be more lax than the USDA's standards.
A warm bulb is not what you want in every situation... warm is good in a relaxing environment like the living room or bedroom, but in the kitchen and bathroom I have 5000K (Daylight) LED bulbs.
Why are these bulbs, specifically designed for "Kitchen and Bath" applications, 3000 K?
Why the rudeness? Although I'm not a material scientist, I am an engineer who has done experiments to determine loads that will cause structural failure with various materials. Is that better?
Being free to choose the size of your deductable is great.
Health insurance that covers every little medical expense doesn't make sense. It's like a car insurance policy that pays for oil changes and tire replacements. If I want that, I am free to choose that kind of plan (and the higher premiums that go with it). But those with a little bit of sense choose a higher deductable, and save a lot of money in the long run. I pity people who live in countries that don't allow the freedom to make such choices.
You seem to not understand how pre-Obamacare health plans work in the U.S., because all four of your points are invalid.
1. If I lose my job and have no income, I'll still be covered by Medicaid.
2. It's against the law for my insurer to drop me or raise my premiums if I get sick.
3. Regardless of whether I'm able to present my insurance card (or even whether I'm insured at all) after I've been in an accident, the emergency room will give me the same quality of treatment, and sort it out later.
4. Thanks to my choosing a high-deductable plan, my bank account is much larger than it otherwise would be, and I'm better able to afford visits to a doctor. Some people might blow the money they save on beer, instead of socking it away, but do you really want to design a healthcare system that rewards that kind of irresponsible behavior?
your tax money is used to benefit society; when you don't pay your taxes you are not contributing to society
Your definition of "contributing to society" is much too limited.
I happen to give money to charities that operate a lot more efficiently than government entitlement programs do. To the extent that I am taxed, I am less able to give to those charities. And if I didn't pay taxes, I could and would contribute a lot more to society than I do now.
Maybe you'd blow the money on beer if you weren't taxed, but don't paint everyone else with that broad brush.
They got lucky and the barrel didn't crack, splinter, shatter, or explode. I'm no gun expert, but I imagine that will eventually happen as people experiment with cheaper and cheaper materials.
Ketchican -- a quaint drinking village with a phishing problem.
(Apologies to Homer, Alaska, the "quaint drinking village with a fishing problem.")