Please stop selling the notion that all sides have a legitimate claim.
I'm not saying that all sides have a legitimate claim.
"Religionists", conservatives, and company are fucking insane. Full stop. A brief, cursory whif of reality proves they are way off the deep end. The notion that their culture of dangerous ignorance and greed has a place in society is among the most egregious of fallacies we have today.
There is no "Unification" with crazy. We've tried compromising, and they only get more crazy. We can't get anything done because one side is wrong, and it needs to be ended.
If you think you can live without them, then stop taking their money to fund your pet projects and government giveaways.
Since I have 100W fixtures, and since the new bulbs use 23W to get the same brightness as a 100W bulb, why can't I get a 50W bulb that's 60-100% brighter than my old 100W bulbs?
Obviously, finger-pointing is the answer. Just look at nearly every comment on this news story. The consensus solution for NASA's problems is clearly finger-pointing and trying to find someone to blame.
Religion-haters are sure it's the fault of the religionists. Military-haters aren't sure whose fault it is, but did they mention they hate the military? Ditto for the banker-haters and the millionaire-haters. Leftists are sure it's the fault of the right. Rightists are sure it's the fault of the left. The "use Science as a wedge issue" crowd are sure it's because of the War on Science (tm). No one has mentioned the War on Women (tm) yet, so I guess NASA doesn't poll well with women.
Here's an alternate idea -- NASA isn't getting funded for three reasons:
1. NASA doesn't have very many votes to sell 2. There's a lot less uncommitted money in the GDP. The money that is there is already over-committed to retirement spending, health-care spending, and repayment of debt. Investments in the future are hard to justify because ROIs are down. 3. The US no longer has a culture that can unify. On anything. Ever. So all government spending is either for "our side" or "their side", never for the common good. This leads some (including me) to the conclusion that very little money should be spent by government -- until the culture swings back to where we can unify on some things again.
Yeah, I was just hoping for something more specific than "smaller". You're not the most radical libertarian I've discussed this with...
That's the problem with libertarians and with liberals. They think they have some magic, specific answer to problems in human societies. They don't. Human societies will always have problems. Actions by people who think they can solve these problems will always fail.
So, if I were more specific than "smaller", you could point out all the ways that my specific answers will fail to solve all human problems. And you might be right or wrong about the reasons, but not about the failure.
Meddling in others' lives is destructive. Liberals should stop doing it. Libertarians should learn to fight against government power because exercising that power is unjust, not because they have some secret personal understanding of "the Right Way" to fix everything.
Since we've tried "smaller" in the past and the world didn't end, and since we haven't tried "smaller" recently and everything is getting worse, it seems like we should try "smaller" government.
Again, I guess it sucks for you to have been effectively signed on to the U.S. social contract at birth, but do you have an alternative system?
I'm not sure why taxing the population of Norway doesn't qualify as an alternate system. You've made very little distinction between taxes imposed by one group on another inside a border and the exact same taxes imposed by one group on another across a border. Yet one is wrong and immoral, and you're defending the other as the only answer. That's why it's a thought experiment. It's supposed to provoke thought.
Smaller government is also "an alternate system". We should go back to a government that respects individual rights and freedoms ahead of government schemes and controls. Government and the people who work for government should practice humility and respect for the liberty of citizens. Individuals should stop selling their votes for a cut of the treasury loot and stop trying to rule their neighbors' lives and police their neighbors' choices. People should stop thinking there's a courtroom available for every problem that makes them feel bad. And government should make access to those courtrooms risky and expensive for those who would misuse them. Laws should always benefit humans ahead of animals and liberty ahead of process. Bigotry against corporations and religions should be treated exactly as bigotry against races and genders, but such treatment should always respect the freedom to believe and associate as one wishes and to transact business voluntarily. Is that "alternate" enough for you?
Based on what happens. We would try it. If the results weren't catastrophically bad, then we could conclude that the programs weren't a necessary evil.
But my response was to answer your question. I'm in favor of smaller government until it can't be made any smaller. Because taxes and government are a necessary evil. Let's have the least evil we can. You asked. That's the answer.
I suspect you're not aware of how popular things like Social Security and Medicare are.
"Popular" isn't "good". I don't care how popular they are. If people want stolen money, it's because they've allowed themselves to become corrupt. I'm asking people to please be less corrupt. It's a request.
I never voted to join the US either. I was born here.
That's a good point. But I didn't claim democracy was perfect. From a combination of population and technology, there's an increasing trend of us affecting and being affected by our neighbors. We're not able to head off over the horizon and try to make a go of it on our own anymore. Barring some massive depopulation here, the next time that'll be possible is when we start colonizing space.
And was there somewhere you'd rather have been born? Is there somewhere closer to your ideal?
Again, this was in response to "Nowhere in that scenario did I see the Norwegian people voting to join the U.S., so that's immoral." Voting to join either changes the morality of one group levying taxes on another, or it doesn't.
I think I would have been better off being born other places. Lots of other places have a better family tradition and less corrupt politics and better education. I am very capable and healthy and industrious and frugal. I should be able to do relatively well in any society where those traits are valued. But I underperform in the US because the US civil society favors the credentialed and the connected over the capable, the weak over the healthy, and non-workers over the industrious. The US penalizes the frugal to bail out the foolish.
But it's OK for the President and his party to target and seek to loot and oppress "millionaires and billionaires".
Calling a mildly progressive tax scheme looting and oppression is almost as silly as calling it slavery. You're in favor of some taxation, so I don't know why you want to call your own positions looting, oppression and slavery.
It's either OK to target people or it isn't. We can't target Norwegians. But it's OK to target people in the US. Why?
Are you in favor of treating capital gains as normal income? Investment bankers and other investors get preferential treatment compared to wage earners.
Wage earners don't take any monetary risk. You work, you get paid. Investors often lose their entire investment. It's not the same. Why should it be taxed the same?
I'd be in favor of lowering taxes on wage earners to a very low level. Once this level is very low, I'm in favor of taxing capital gains at that level too.
I'm missing your point on the health references.
They were targeted and demonized. You want to protect Norwegians from being targeted for oppression. Why aren't US citizens in the health industries worthy of being protected from such things?
Regarding energy, are you in favor of eliminating the preferential treatment (subsidies) given to oil companies?
You keep stating your ideological aversion to taxation, but I have no idea what you want as a system of government or its funding.
A much, much smaller and less expensive government.
I don't have a utopian endpoint in mind, because there are no perfect human institutions and there can never be. But we can start shutting down government departments to see if we can live without them. When we can, we should. When we can't, we should bring them back in pieces until they are at the absolute minimum size we can live with.
Since taxation and government are probably a necessary evil, we should strive to do only as much taxing and governing as is absolutely necessary.
Nowhere in that scenario did I see the Norwegian people voting to join the U.S., so that's immoral.
I never voted to join the US either. I was born here.
And if they did join voluntarily, I suspect the 70% tax rate for the new state of Norway wouldn't get popular support and wouldn't be upheld as constitutional anyway.
That's not a philosophy. Are you saying if it got 51% of the vote and 5 votes on the Supreme Court that it would be OK? Or is it wrong regardless of the vote?
Our modern democracy resists such targeting of a group based on where they live or their national background. You could just as easily asked why we don't double taxes on Californians, or those of Irish background. We as a country have determined that we shouldn't target people like that.
But it's OK for the President and his party to target and seek to loot and oppress "millionaires and billionaires". And "bankers" (which is only sometimes a code-word for "Jews", other times it isn't). And health insurers and doctors and folks who make drugs and medical devices. And anyone in the energy business (Obama campaign-donors excepted -- subsidies for them). And people who smoke the wrong plants. And tanning salons and their customers. And farmers and ranchers. And miners. And Wal-mart and other non-union businesses. And dozens of other groups.
But the point of mentioning slavery is that slavery is 100% compatible with the philosophy you're advocating. Since slavery is intolerably evil, you should rethink why your philosophy is compatible with it. Intolerable evils don't become acceptable when they get 51% of the vote. Getting 51% of the vote, in fact, doesn't change whether something is right or wrong at all. But you're endorsing the idea that election winners can just decide to loot and oppress the election losers.
Also, the difference between high taxes on a minority and slavery is a matter of degree only. A 100% tax imposed by one group on another group isn't slavery, but it's most of the way there. Smaller percentages are better by degrees, but not categorically different. But until the taxes are imposed on everyone equally (or based on usage of government services, like fuel taxes), they're still oppressive and exploitative -- like slavery, only not as bad. If they're not going to be equally imposed on everyone, then they are evil and they should be as absolutely low as possible so you don't do any more evil than is absolutely necessary. (Unless you want to endorse purposefully being evil because it "works".)
My thought experiment for this is: Why doesn't the US just decide to levy a 70% tax on the citizens of Norway? We have the military might to enforce it. We can take a vote of all US and Norwegian citizens together. Since the Norwegians are vastly outnumbered in this vote, they'll lose. But hey, we held a vote. So the Norwegians can STFU and pay the tax or else. They owe us for [reason to be made up and filled in later -- social contract or something that happened 50 years ago or some other meaningless nonsense]. This seems like a great source of revenue to help the US. So what's wrong with this idea?
Based on what works. Trial and error. Scored by voters and their elected representatives. Democracy is far from perfect, but it's better than the alternatives.
Slavery "works". It works great for slave owners. If we allow only a minority of people to be enslaved, and if the majority share in the benefits, I'm sure you can get voters to agree.
I figured that was coming. But that's not some malicious targeting of you, it's all of us deciding how our society should function.
For you. At my expense.
I agree. It's not malicious. Just like the guy who robs the liquor store doesn't hate the liquor store owner. He just wants the money and doesn't care who he hurts to get it.
Even with all the special interest crap, it's a bargain. Civilization is priceless and I hope we don't go too far with radical libertarian experiments.
Their intentions are none of your business? You're not affected by the economy at large? I am.
You don't get to command your fellow men to obey your whims based on being "affected by the economy at large". And if you try, guess what? More-connected, less-ethical people will command you, based on their whims -- for the good of the economy at large (or whatever other reason, as long as they command and you obey any justification will suffice).
But let's keep it to finance. Do you use any modern finance? I have bank accounts, credit cards and own stock in private and public companies. Even with regulation, the rules regarding those interactions are impenetrably complex without a huge investment of time and testing of their bounds in court. Without regulation, we'd have no protection at all in those dealings. You seem rather naive to think they'd be more trustworthy if they had no referee making sure they played fair.
And you want to make it more complex by adding regulations. With fewer regulations, we would have to rely more on independent non-government auditing to tell us things. I guess I don't see that as some sort of end of the world scenario.
Well, that's just a BS straw man. We should add regulations that help (e.g. Glass Steagall) and reject or remove regulations that hurt (e.g. SOPA, CISPA).
Based of what metrics? Scored by whom? Voters?
Regulations can promote competition from small competitors or concentrate power with big companies.
Usually the later.
Obviously the last part of this is another straw man. But the fear of public or private bad actors is an important one. Honest mistakes will happen at roughly the same rate, I expect. But I find it much more likely that an individual or small group of people (e.g. those running a corporation) will decide to screw me over than my fellow citizens as a whole.
"My fellow citizens as a whole" intentionally screw me over every day when I go to work and earn my paycheck and my fellow citizens demand and seize 40-50% of it, offering me very little in return. And they screw me over again when they support regulations to make everything in life more expensive to "protect" them from bogeymen or to harm whoever they're bigoted against. They screw me over when they give the government more power over my choices. Every single day.
Why are you changing the subject from financial regulations? It's because you don't have a single valid counter-argument that relates to the subject of financial regulations, isn't it?
Please start such posts with "While you're 100% correct about everything you say about financial regulations,...". Or just try to keep your posts on subject. Thanks.
It seems you don't think corporations always have the best of intentions, but it sounds like you don't want restrictions on them, which seems contradictory.
Their intentions are none of my business unless they enlist the government to use force against people. Without government force, the only thing corporations can do to interact with me is by my consent. To get my consent, they have to offer me something good enough for me to want to consenting to. Why should I want those offers to be restricted?
The rest of your post can be summed up as "we should keep adding regulations and laws until we reach a utopia where nothing could ever go wrong for anyone". This ignores history. It ignores the fact that regulations essentially protect big powerful companies with the resources to comply and freeze out smaller competitors -- which leads to more corporate power backed by government. It replaces voluntary private transactions with government force. It's based on fears of private-sector criminality but ignores even the possibility of government-sector criminality -- as if humans somehow become infallible the instant they get hired by government.
Why are you so eager to spend middle class taxpayers' money to try to safeguard millionaires' and billionaires' foreign bond-trading schemes?
Federal laws are by definition centralized power. Surely you're not denying that there are good federal laws. Or are you?
Very, very few. 95+% of the Federal laws are bad.
Corporations spend a lot of money trying to capture that centralized power to do away with regulations. Should we give them what they want without having to go through that trouble?
Corporations spend a lot of money trying to capture that centralized power to get more regulations enacted that are favorable to them. Should we give them what they want? SOPA anyone?
What laws could have affected what happened with MF Global?
Could something like Glass-Steagall have enforced a separation of customer accounts and MF's own investing?
See above where this is already against the law. You understand what that means, right? It means another different law about something more-or-less unrelated else doesn't make it more illegal.
Could tighter leverage ratio requirements have helped (they went too far leading up to the recent financial crisis). Could record-keeping and reporting requirements have made it clearer what exactly happened and where the money went? Could that money be recovered and returned to the customers?
Probably not. No. And No. It wasn't a record-keeping problem. The money isn't "missing", it was lost making bad securities trades. It was apparently transferred from customer accounts to MF Global accounts to cover MF Global losses. Apparently, this was directly authorized by Jon Corzine.
Different margin requirements might have slowed down MF Global's losses on their bad trades, but so what if it takes them a few extra days to loot their customer's accounts?
What was your point here? Don't try to reign in corporate power, because they have taken over the government and won't let you? You can still be pessimistic but support that reigning in of corporate power.
There's no government mechanism for reigning in so-called "corporate power" (actually government power wielded by corporations) that won't result in the further centralization of power. Once power is centralized it can be captured by corporations or a dictator, or anyone.
For example, support the CFPB. If you're a fan of a free market, you know that informed consumers are a key ingredient, and the CFPB enforces the kind of transparency that makes the consumer financial markets work well.
As an example of what happens without regulation, look into MF Global. It had big losses from its own trading and literally stole $1.2 Billion from its customers' accounts. So far it's not looking like those customers will get their money back. If that stands and you have any money at financial firms that's isn't government insured (e.g. by the FDIC), it could be taken at any time. I have some, and it's troubling. I'm very glad the FDIC is there though. The era of runs on banks didn't sound like much fun.
Stealing money from customer accounts was illegal long before the CFPB. But the guy who did it is President Obama's friend and campaign fund raiser, so he has yet to be arrested.
2. Right, so poor people should give up their kids now...
Why shouldn't they? If they were thinking of what's good for their kids rather than themselves, wouldn't they have to consider it?
I guess this is also too much to ask.
3. I guess you never heard of this thing called unemployment? I don't know if you follow the news, but it's pretty damn high, especially for the unskilled.
Yeah, it's too much to ask, again. Just like it was too much to ask when unemployment was at 4%.
So how are you going to get the money for education so that you can get a job? How are you going to survive while going to school? Should education should be a privilege reserved for the well off?
Is it? Not in any place I've heard of. They actually have to try though. Is that also too much to ask?
It's amazing how any kind of responsible behavior is too much to ask these people you're talking about. It's almost like you don't think of them as people at all.
Tell me, how is anyone in a situation where they don't have access to one or more of these ever going to improve their situation? "Buckle down" and go without food for the kids in order to afford the education needed to better their situation?
If only there were a way to avoid having kids... If only there were people willing to adopt kids whose parents can't afford to feed them... If only there were a way to get money (to buy food for kids) in exchange for doing useful work for people...
A really, really good worker is able to produce good work for about 6 hours a day.
Let's pretend this is true. Most people also have several meetings each week, so it's not too hard to get to 50 hours when you start adding the "good work" plus meetings and everything else.
But the exact number of hours isn't the point. The sense of entitlement is. Employers generally don't go around choosing substantially worse workers for the same price. If older programmers can't compete with younger programmers, then employers will hire younger programmers.
When you want to go home early all the time, go ahead and tell your boss he has "a lot of reading and learning to do" and that no one gets more than 6 hours of work done in a day. Maybe he'll listen. Or maybe he'll hire someone else who isn't making excuses.
If you do a lot more "good work" than the guy in the next cube who works 40% more hours, then you probably won't have a problem.
Well first of all, I was replying to a post saying 50-60 hour weeks (not 80) are too much to ask. And 60 is certainly pushing it like you say. But 50 is reasonable.
There's a lot of complaining about employers that seems to stem from an entitlement mentality. People want to do less work and get paid more for it. And then they whine when employers don't want to employ them. I don't sympathize with that.
"Bloomberg is correct. After a few years, programmers are too self-impressed and preoccupied to do a good job and be valuable to their employer."
And you're probably both right for a subset of self-impressed, preoccupied programmers who can't make up for their lack of job-focus with extraordinary programming skill. If you're not a genius, you need to try harder. If you're not going to work hard, you better be a genius. If you're neither a hard worker nor a genius, don't expect much success at work.
My friend's uncle's data was sold. Later that year, he got hurt in a car accident.
That's why we need a government department that keeps all of our data safe in a giant database. But those damn Republicans and their corporate paymasters oppose it. So nothing ever gets done.
A common sentiment. Unfortunately, a majority of Slashdotters will proclaim the answer is to increase government power to finally reign in those nasty corporations. Because, obviously, that's super-duper wise when you don't trust the government because it's been captured by corporate interests.
This is why I personally don't trust any of these institutions and individuals: because the people involved want power to impose their wishes on their neighbors. Corporations and unions and government-check-cashers do it for money. Others do it because they hate religious people. Or they hate anyone with money. Or they hate people who have the wrong skin color. Or they hate people who eat the wrong foods. Or they hate people who smoke the wrong plants. Or they hate people who use the wrong energy. Or they simply believe they know The Right Way for everyone to live their lives. Whatever the motive, seeking power over people is wrong. And actually wielding that power is evil.
Slashdot Mirror
Stop
Please stop selling the notion that all sides have a legitimate claim.
I'm not saying that all sides have a legitimate claim.
"Religionists", conservatives, and company are fucking insane. Full stop. A brief, cursory whif of reality proves they are way off the deep end. The notion that their culture of dangerous ignorance and greed has a place in society is among the most egregious of fallacies we have today.
There is no "Unification" with crazy. We've tried compromising, and they only get more crazy. We can't get anything done because one side is wrong, and it needs to be ended.
If you think you can live without them, then stop taking their money to fund your pet projects and government giveaways.
Since I have 100W fixtures, and since the new bulbs use 23W to get the same brightness as a 100W bulb, why can't I get a 50W bulb that's 60-100% brighter than my old 100W bulbs?
Efficiency is good, but I want brighter lights.
Obviously, finger-pointing is the answer. Just look at nearly every comment on this news story. The consensus solution for NASA's problems is clearly finger-pointing and trying to find someone to blame.
Religion-haters are sure it's the fault of the religionists. Military-haters aren't sure whose fault it is, but did they mention they hate the military? Ditto for the banker-haters and the millionaire-haters. Leftists are sure it's the fault of the right. Rightists are sure it's the fault of the left. The "use Science as a wedge issue" crowd are sure it's because of the War on Science (tm). No one has mentioned the War on Women (tm) yet, so I guess NASA doesn't poll well with women.
Here's an alternate idea -- NASA isn't getting funded for three reasons:
1. NASA doesn't have very many votes to sell
2. There's a lot less uncommitted money in the GDP. The money that is there is already over-committed to retirement spending, health-care spending, and repayment of debt. Investments in the future are hard to justify because ROIs are down.
3. The US no longer has a culture that can unify. On anything. Ever. So all government spending is either for "our side" or "their side", never for the common good. This leads some (including me) to the conclusion that very little money should be spent by government -- until the culture swings back to where we can unify on some things again.
According to these charts, the world ended in 2008.
Yeah, I was just hoping for something more specific than "smaller". You're not the most radical libertarian I've discussed this with...
That's the problem with libertarians and with liberals. They think they have some magic, specific answer to problems in human societies. They don't. Human societies will always have problems. Actions by people who think they can solve these problems will always fail.
So, if I were more specific than "smaller", you could point out all the ways that my specific answers will fail to solve all human problems. And you might be right or wrong about the reasons, but not about the failure.
Meddling in others' lives is destructive. Liberals should stop doing it. Libertarians should learn to fight against government power because exercising that power is unjust, not because they have some secret personal understanding of "the Right Way" to fix everything.
Since we've tried "smaller" in the past and the world didn't end, and since we haven't tried "smaller" recently and everything is getting worse, it seems like we should try "smaller" government.
Again, I guess it sucks for you to have been effectively signed on to the U.S. social contract at birth, but do you have an alternative system?
I'm not sure why taxing the population of Norway doesn't qualify as an alternate system. You've made very little distinction between taxes imposed by one group on another inside a border and the exact same taxes imposed by one group on another across a border. Yet one is wrong and immoral, and you're defending the other as the only answer. That's why it's a thought experiment. It's supposed to provoke thought.
Smaller government is also "an alternate system". We should go back to a government that respects individual rights and freedoms ahead of government schemes and controls. Government and the people who work for government should practice humility and respect for the liberty of citizens. Individuals should stop selling their votes for a cut of the treasury loot and stop trying to rule their neighbors' lives and police their neighbors' choices. People should stop thinking there's a courtroom available for every problem that makes them feel bad. And government should make access to those courtrooms risky and expensive for those who would misuse them. Laws should always benefit humans ahead of animals and liberty ahead of process. Bigotry against corporations and religions should be treated exactly as bigotry against races and genders, but such treatment should always respect the freedom to believe and associate as one wishes and to transact business voluntarily. Is that "alternate" enough for you?
Based of what metrics? Scored by whom? Voters?
Based on what happens. We would try it. If the results weren't catastrophically bad, then we could conclude that the programs weren't a necessary evil.
But my response was to answer your question. I'm in favor of smaller government until it can't be made any smaller. Because taxes and government are a necessary evil. Let's have the least evil we can. You asked. That's the answer.
I suspect you're not aware of how popular things like Social Security and Medicare are.
"Popular" isn't "good". I don't care how popular they are. If people want stolen money, it's because they've allowed themselves to become corrupt. I'm asking people to please be less corrupt. It's a request.
I never voted to join the US either. I was born here.
That's a good point. But I didn't claim democracy was perfect. From a combination of population and technology, there's an increasing trend of us affecting and being affected by our neighbors. We're not able to head off over the horizon and try to make a go of it on our own anymore. Barring some massive depopulation here, the next time that'll be possible is when we start colonizing space.
And was there somewhere you'd rather have been born? Is there somewhere closer to your ideal?
Again, this was in response to "Nowhere in that scenario did I see the Norwegian people voting to join the U.S., so that's immoral." Voting to join either changes the morality of one group levying taxes on another, or it doesn't.
I think I would have been better off being born other places. Lots of other places have a better family tradition and less corrupt politics and better education. I am very capable and healthy and industrious and frugal. I should be able to do relatively well in any society where those traits are valued. But I underperform in the US because the US civil society favors the credentialed and the connected over the capable, the weak over the healthy, and non-workers over the industrious. The US penalizes the frugal to bail out the foolish.
But it's OK for the President and his party to target and seek to loot and oppress "millionaires and billionaires".
Calling a mildly progressive tax scheme looting and oppression is almost as silly as calling it slavery. You're in favor of some taxation, so I don't know why you want to call your own positions looting, oppression and slavery.
It's either OK to target people or it isn't. We can't target Norwegians. But it's OK to target people in the US. Why?
Are you in favor of treating capital gains as normal income? Investment bankers and other investors get preferential treatment compared to wage earners.
Wage earners don't take any monetary risk. You work, you get paid. Investors often lose their entire investment. It's not the same. Why should it be taxed the same?
I'd be in favor of lowering taxes on wage earners to a very low level. Once this level is very low, I'm in favor of taxing capital gains at that level too.
I'm missing your point on the health references.
They were targeted and demonized. You want to protect Norwegians from being targeted for oppression. Why aren't US citizens in the health industries worthy of being protected from such things?
Regarding energy, are you in favor of eliminating the preferential treatment (subsidies) given to oil companies?
You're repeating a false talking point.
Why are we allowing the entire population of Norway to get away with not paying taxes to the US? It's a tax subsidy!
You keep stating your ideological aversion to taxation, but I have no idea what you want as a system of government or its funding.
A much, much smaller and less expensive government.
I don't have a utopian endpoint in mind, because there are no perfect human institutions and there can never be. But we can start shutting down government departments to see if we can live without them. When we can, we should. When we can't, we should bring them back in pieces until they are at the absolute minimum size we can live with.
Since taxation and government are probably a necessary evil, we should strive to do only as much taxing and governing as is absolutely necessary.
Nowhere in that scenario did I see the Norwegian people voting to join the U.S., so that's immoral.
I never voted to join the US either. I was born here.
And if they did join voluntarily, I suspect the 70% tax rate for the new state of Norway wouldn't get popular support and wouldn't be upheld as constitutional anyway.
That's not a philosophy. Are you saying if it got 51% of the vote and 5 votes on the Supreme Court that it would be OK? Or is it wrong regardless of the vote?
Our modern democracy resists such targeting of a group based on where they live or their national background. You could just as easily asked why we don't double taxes on Californians, or those of Irish background. We as a country have determined that we shouldn't target people like that.
But it's OK for the President and his party to target and seek to loot and oppress "millionaires and billionaires". And "bankers" (which is only sometimes a code-word for "Jews", other times it isn't). And health insurers and doctors and folks who make drugs and medical devices. And anyone in the energy business (Obama campaign-donors excepted -- subsidies for them). And people who smoke the wrong plants. And tanning salons and their customers. And farmers and ranchers. And miners. And Wal-mart and other non-union businesses. And dozens of other groups.
Because that's different somehow.
Slavery coexisted for a long time with democracy.
But the point of mentioning slavery is that slavery is 100% compatible with the philosophy you're advocating. Since slavery is intolerably evil, you should rethink why your philosophy is compatible with it. Intolerable evils don't become acceptable when they get 51% of the vote. Getting 51% of the vote, in fact, doesn't change whether something is right or wrong at all. But you're endorsing the idea that election winners can just decide to loot and oppress the election losers.
Also, the difference between high taxes on a minority and slavery is a matter of degree only. A 100% tax imposed by one group on another group isn't slavery, but it's most of the way there. Smaller percentages are better by degrees, but not categorically different. But until the taxes are imposed on everyone equally (or based on usage of government services, like fuel taxes), they're still oppressive and exploitative -- like slavery, only not as bad. If they're not going to be equally imposed on everyone, then they are evil and they should be as absolutely low as possible so you don't do any more evil than is absolutely necessary. (Unless you want to endorse purposefully being evil because it "works".)
My thought experiment for this is: Why doesn't the US just decide to levy a 70% tax on the citizens of Norway? We have the military might to enforce it. We can take a vote of all US and Norwegian citizens together. Since the Norwegians are vastly outnumbered in this vote, they'll lose. But hey, we held a vote. So the Norwegians can STFU and pay the tax or else. They owe us for [reason to be made up and filled in later -- social contract or something that happened 50 years ago or some other meaningless nonsense]. This seems like a great source of revenue to help the US. So what's wrong with this idea?
Based on what works. Trial and error. Scored by voters and their elected representatives. Democracy is far from perfect, but it's better than the alternatives.
Slavery "works". It works great for slave owners. If we allow only a minority of people to be enslaved, and if the majority share in the benefits, I'm sure you can get voters to agree.
I figured that was coming. But that's not some malicious targeting of you, it's all of us deciding how our society should function.
For you. At my expense.
I agree. It's not malicious. Just like the guy who robs the liquor store doesn't hate the liquor store owner. He just wants the money and doesn't care who he hurts to get it.
Even with all the special interest crap, it's a bargain. Civilization is priceless and I hope we don't go too far with radical libertarian experiments.
That's what the slave owners said. I disagree.
Their intentions are none of your business? You're not affected by the economy at large? I am.
You don't get to command your fellow men to obey your whims based on being "affected by the economy at large". And if you try, guess what? More-connected, less-ethical people will command you, based on their whims -- for the good of the economy at large (or whatever other reason, as long as they command and you obey any justification will suffice).
But let's keep it to finance. Do you use any modern finance? I have bank accounts, credit cards and own stock in private and public companies. Even with regulation, the rules regarding those interactions are impenetrably complex without a huge investment of time and testing of their bounds in court. Without regulation, we'd have no protection at all in those dealings. You seem rather naive to think they'd be more trustworthy if they had no referee making sure they played fair.
And you want to make it more complex by adding regulations. With fewer regulations, we would have to rely more on independent non-government auditing to tell us things. I guess I don't see that as some sort of end of the world scenario.
Well, that's just a BS straw man. We should add regulations that help (e.g. Glass Steagall) and reject or remove regulations that hurt (e.g. SOPA, CISPA).
Based of what metrics? Scored by whom? Voters?
Regulations can promote competition from small competitors or concentrate power with big companies.
Usually the later.
Obviously the last part of this is another straw man. But the fear of public or private bad actors is an important one. Honest mistakes will happen at roughly the same rate, I expect. But I find it much more likely that an individual or small group of people (e.g. those running a corporation) will decide to screw me over than my fellow citizens as a whole.
"My fellow citizens as a whole" intentionally screw me over every day when I go to work and earn my paycheck and my fellow citizens demand and seize 40-50% of it, offering me very little in return. And they screw me over again when they support regulations to make everything in life more expensive to "protect" them from bogeymen or to harm whoever they're bigoted against. They screw me over when they give the government more power over my choices. Every single day.
And you still have nothing meaningful to say on the subject of financial regulation.
Why are you changing the subject from financial regulations? It's because you don't have a single valid counter-argument that relates to the subject of financial regulations, isn't it?
Please start such posts with "While you're 100% correct about everything you say about financial regulations, ...". Or just try to keep your posts on subject. Thanks.
It seems you don't think corporations always have the best of intentions, but it sounds like you don't want restrictions on them, which seems contradictory.
Their intentions are none of my business unless they enlist the government to use force against people. Without government force, the only thing corporations can do to interact with me is by my consent. To get my consent, they have to offer me something good enough for me to want to consenting to. Why should I want those offers to be restricted?
The rest of your post can be summed up as "we should keep adding regulations and laws until we reach a utopia where nothing could ever go wrong for anyone". This ignores history. It ignores the fact that regulations essentially protect big powerful companies with the resources to comply and freeze out smaller competitors -- which leads to more corporate power backed by government. It replaces voluntary private transactions with government force. It's based on fears of private-sector criminality but ignores even the possibility of government-sector criminality -- as if humans somehow become infallible the instant they get hired by government.
Why are you so eager to spend middle class taxpayers' money to try to safeguard millionaires' and billionaires' foreign bond-trading schemes?
Federal laws are by definition centralized power. Surely you're not denying that there are good federal laws. Or are you?
Very, very few. 95+% of the Federal laws are bad.
Corporations spend a lot of money trying to capture that centralized power to do away with regulations. Should we give them what they want without having to go through that trouble?
Corporations spend a lot of money trying to capture that centralized power to get more regulations enacted that are favorable to them. Should we give them what they want? SOPA anyone?
What laws could have affected what happened with MF Global?
I am not a lawyer, but I believe the law is:
17 CFR 1.20 - Customer funds to be segregated and separately accounted for.
Could something like Glass-Steagall have enforced a separation of customer accounts and MF's own investing?
See above where this is already against the law. You understand what that means, right? It means another different law about something more-or-less unrelated else doesn't make it more illegal.
Could tighter leverage ratio requirements have helped (they went too far leading up to the recent financial crisis). Could record-keeping and reporting requirements have made it clearer what exactly happened and where the money went? Could that money be recovered and returned to the customers?
Probably not. No. And No. It wasn't a record-keeping problem. The money isn't "missing", it was lost making bad securities trades. It was apparently transferred from customer accounts to MF Global accounts to cover MF Global losses. Apparently, this was directly authorized by Jon Corzine.
Different margin requirements might have slowed down MF Global's losses on their bad trades, but so what if it takes them a few extra days to loot their customer's accounts?
What was your point here? Don't try to reign in corporate power, because they have taken over the government and won't let you? You can still be pessimistic but support that reigning in of corporate power.
There's no government mechanism for reigning in so-called "corporate power" (actually government power wielded by corporations) that won't result in the further centralization of power. Once power is centralized it can be captured by corporations or a dictator, or anyone.
For example, support the CFPB. If you're a fan of a free market, you know that informed consumers are a key ingredient, and the CFPB enforces the kind of transparency that makes the consumer financial markets work well.
As an example of what happens without regulation, look into MF Global. It had big losses from its own trading and literally stole $1.2 Billion from its customers' accounts. So far it's not looking like those customers will get their money back. If that stands and you have any money at financial firms that's isn't government insured (e.g. by the FDIC), it could be taken at any time. I have some, and it's troubling. I'm very glad the FDIC is there though. The era of runs on banks didn't sound like much fun.
Stealing money from customer accounts was illegal long before the CFPB. But the guy who did it is President Obama's friend and campaign fund raiser, so he has yet to be arrested.
1. Um, yeah, good luck with that.
Too much to ask of the benighted poor?
2. Right, so poor people should give up their kids now...
Why shouldn't they? If they were thinking of what's good for their kids rather than themselves, wouldn't they have to consider it?
I guess this is also too much to ask.
3. I guess you never heard of this thing called unemployment? I don't know if you follow the news, but it's pretty damn high, especially for the unskilled.
Yeah, it's too much to ask, again. Just like it was too much to ask when unemployment was at 4%.
So how are you going to get the money for education so that you can get a job? How are you going to survive while going to school? Should education should be a privilege reserved for the well off?
Is it? Not in any place I've heard of. They actually have to try though. Is that also too much to ask?
It's amazing how any kind of responsible behavior is too much to ask these people you're talking about. It's almost like you don't think of them as people at all.
Tell me, how is anyone in a situation where they don't have access to one or more of these ever going to improve their situation? "Buckle down" and go without food for the kids in order to afford the education needed to better their situation?
If only there were a way to avoid having kids...
If only there were people willing to adopt kids whose parents can't afford to feed them...
If only there were a way to get money (to buy food for kids) in exchange for doing useful work for people...
A really, really good worker is able to produce good work for about 6 hours a day.
Let's pretend this is true. Most people also have several meetings each week, so it's not too hard to get to 50 hours when you start adding the "good work" plus meetings and everything else.
But the exact number of hours isn't the point. The sense of entitlement is. Employers generally don't go around choosing substantially worse workers for the same price. If older programmers can't compete with younger programmers, then employers will hire younger programmers.
When you want to go home early all the time, go ahead and tell your boss he has "a lot of reading and learning to do" and that no one gets more than 6 hours of work done in a day. Maybe he'll listen. Or maybe he'll hire someone else who isn't making excuses.
If you do a lot more "good work" than the guy in the next cube who works 40% more hours, then you probably won't have a problem.
[weird pregnancy nonsense deleted]
Well first of all, I was replying to a post saying 50-60 hour weeks (not 80) are too much to ask. And 60 is certainly pushing it like you say. But 50 is reasonable.
There's a lot of complaining about employers that seems to stem from an entitlement mentality. People want to do less work and get paid more for it. And then they whine when employers don't want to employ them. I don't sympathize with that.
I think what you're really saying here is:
"Bloomberg is correct. After a few years, programmers are too self-impressed and preoccupied to do a good job and be valuable to their employer."
And you're probably both right for a subset of self-impressed, preoccupied programmers who can't make up for their lack of job-focus with extraordinary programming skill. If you're not a genius, you need to try harder. If you're not going to work hard, you better be a genius. If you're neither a hard worker nor a genius, don't expect much success at work.
Shut up. He's into whining, not thinking. It's not his fault though. Because nothing is.
My friend's uncle's data was sold. Later that year, he got hurt in a car accident.
That's why we need a government department that keeps all of our data safe in a giant database. But those damn Republicans and their corporate paymasters oppose it. So nothing ever gets done.
How?
A common sentiment. Unfortunately, a majority of Slashdotters will proclaim the answer is to increase government power to finally reign in those nasty corporations. Because, obviously, that's super-duper wise when you don't trust the government because it's been captured by corporate interests.
This is why I personally don't trust any of these institutions and individuals: because the people involved want power to impose their wishes on their neighbors. Corporations and unions and government-check-cashers do it for money. Others do it because they hate religious people. Or they hate anyone with money. Or they hate people who have the wrong skin color. Or they hate people who eat the wrong foods. Or they hate people who smoke the wrong plants. Or they hate people who use the wrong energy. Or they simply believe they know The Right Way for everyone to live their lives. Whatever the motive, seeking power over people is wrong. And actually wielding that power is evil.
How about:
YouTube Ordered By German Court To Remove Videos, Filter Future Uploads
or
German Court Orders YouTube to Remove Videos and Filter Future Uploads