I wonder if this is such a concern (and the court hasn't thrown it out already) because this person's "place of business" happens to be his home. I mean, would there be an issue here if all the spam, junk mail and boxes were being received at an office somewhere else?
Disregarding that question, I definitely have a hard time sympathizing with his case, least of all because he's a spammer. There's a lot of noise about "right to privacy" in many circles, the most notable being celebrity status and what constitutes "public information" about private citizens on the net. But what right to privacy of your home information do you expect if you're listing it in TLD registration information? If I allow my phone number to be published in a phone book (and nowadays, that I don't put it in a "do not call" registry), do I have a reasonable expectation that I will never receive calls selling vacuum cleaners and low low interest rates on home equity loans?
Someone else brought up the issue of the Nuremberg files, specifically how courts have found that simply listing this information incites people to commit actions against them. And while people who make threats and perform other illegal actions should definitely be prosecuted, I don't see how someone can be compelled to not display public information that is available elsewhere.
Spammers often use the defense that people who don't want their "offers" shouldn't put their addresses in the public domain (where the public domain means almost anywhere in public that spammers can conceivably connect to and harvest), and certainly that's the common wisdom today, not just among spammers but anyone looking to control their inbox. But if spammers are going to play by these rules, they must also be prepared to live by them, and if someone can get their contact information off a publicly connectable system, they must be ready to deal with the results. They certainly need no warning that making a living as a spammer is one of the more unpopular positions one can make for oneself.
Frankly, this whole thing reeks of someone exercising their right to free speech and then complaining when they find their views to be wildly unpopular with their audience. One has the right to spam, but one does not have the right to be free of, and immune from, the reaction of the spammed.
1) Why hasn't an organization arisen to challenge the RIAA? I mean, it's my understanding that being a member of the RIAA is *not* legally required of a record label. When one considers the tons of indie labels out there that, thanks to free downloading off websites and through p2p networks, it makes me wonder why large groups of independents that have good talent and catalogs, like Caroline, Epitaph, Six Degrees, all the way down to little labels like ESL, tru thoughts, fork in hand and others haven't forged an alliance simply to combat this insanity. This seems like a golden opportunity to seize the thunder of the big six and woo bands to the "free music" side of the aisle. But then, when one considers how often bands tend to jump around labels, maybe the problem is more endemic to record labels than just the big six...
2) Speaking of bands, where are "the talent" in all this? why don't we hear from the bands beyond the occasional (apparent) nutcase voicing his opinion then going back to the label lounge? We keep hearing about how the big nasty RIAA is pimping their work and buying out their right to their creative work (if I have to hear Tom Petty's sob story one more time I'm going to puke), but why aren't so many top label bands coming out in favor for/against the RIAA behavior? Many of the A-list acts can certainly get along just fine no matter what label they're on, so if they can extricate themselves from the labels, why don't they? If Fred Durst really thinks mp3's should be free, why doesn't he just jump ship and release his band's own stuff on his own terms? Oh wait, he's VP of Interscope. Nevermind....
evil ./ers succeed when good /. readers do nothing
on
Updates on War in Iraq
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· Score: 2
I will add my voice to the growing chorus to please, for f***s sake, stop covering the war in Iraq. Yes it's news, but I don't think slashdotters are SO cloistered that they don't check other world news sites. Please keep slashdot's appeal, namely good stories (-Jonkatz) that won't really be headlines in those other news sites. The only thing more depressing than the war are the idiotic responses to it, both pro- and anti-war. Please, stop with the war coverage. Thankyew.
Oh, the law is well enforced, believe you me. My dad ran a tech consulting company for years and he was constantly hounded by state employment administrations and the INS. If they were willing and able to chase down little tech companies, I don't see why they couldn't keep an eye on the Fortune 500 crowd.
This doesn't make much sense. Why would Sun lay off people here and try to import H1-Bs when they could just expand staffing at their India Engineering Center and ship development over there, as they have already done for their HPC ClusterTools software? Oh wait, they're already doing that.
And also why did my submission of this very same story get rejected three days ago?
...I'll call you right. I like to drive my car, and I hate treehuggers, because like you, they do not deal in facts, they deal in accusations and opinion. They deal in shame, shaming people for having the audacity to try and live their lives the way they want. How dare they! Meanwhile they smoke their camel lights, releasing dangerous chemicals into the air and into the lungs of near bystande, wear baha shirts made from petrochemical dyes, throw the empty containers of Ben & Jerry's "phish food" into evergrowing landfills and cut down countless trees to make hundreds more flyers to hand out at the next Burning Man festival.
As P.J. O'Rourke once said, "environmentalists seem to be willing to do anything for the biosphere except take a class and learn something about it." Let me guess: Every study confirming the suspicions of global warming is a scientifically sound, rigorous study, but every study discrediting the trend is either reactionary or written by paid stooges of "big business interests", yes? It's amazing how clear cut the good guys and the bad guys are. I imagine in your world the bad guys have handlebar mustaches too, and they twirl them as they concoct ever more cruel ways of slaughtering cattle for human consumption.
let me just add my voice to the growing chorus...
on
The End of Cyber BS
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· Score: 1
...and say that if it were truly the end of Cyber BS, maybe we wouldn't have to read Jon Katz at Slashdot anymore.
That's the same definition I'm using. The point of the post is this: no one is forced to consume the services of the government.
Untrue. Take, for example, many government regulatory agencies: the FAA, FCC, NRC, etc. These fellows charge "user fees" for people using their services (certification that their equipment is safe, legal, etc.). At a fundamental level, this is fine: the TLA stamps its seal of authority on something, demands payment for services rendered. Except businesses are required by law to use these services if they wish to enter into business. This is NOT voluntary, any more than a businessman pays off a mobster make sure nothing "happens" to his business (like, say, a molotov cocktail through the front window).
Closer to home, you are forced to pay into Social Security, which (so they say) is for YOUR retirement (actually it goes to pay old people right now). But I for one don't want any part of social security. I want to save for retirement in a way that provide more of a return than simply depositing into a lockbox for fifty years. Your analogy of "not paying your electric bill" is correct, but you need to preface it with the fact that "the electric company forces you to buy electricity from them, whether you want it or not" to be fully accurate.
THIS is the problem. If government were simply charging people for services rendered as they are requested, that's fine; this is because people have the option to opt out of dealing with government altogether. But people DON'T have that option. People are forced to either go through a government group or are not allowed to do something.
To take it further: imagine the government held a monopoly on housing and house building. Sure, you wouldn't have to deal with them if you didn't want to. But that would mean that you live in a cave or something.
Now, if you want to argue that "no one forces you to do business with people", you're right. But then, no one forces you to live. You can wither away and die and no one will (legally) care, necessarily. But bother are choices that are yours to make. Simply because one choice requires you to do things like get housing, food, clothing, et cetera, doesn't give government the right to force you to use its services.
True enough, taxes are up to public debate. So is the legality of murder. If the people legalize the act of murder (as in, someone can just walk up to you and kill you), does this make it right? No. Similarly, simply because the people decide to levy taxes does not make it right.
A number of people here have made decent arguments for why an inheritance tax is wrong: any way you slice it, unless someone is keeping their billions in hard cash stashed under their bed, the money will be circulating through the economy via goods and services, or loans and mortgages. Hard to argue with that.
In fact, I'll argue that its impossible to avoid; so much so that Brin and many people who make the argument about "frozen capital" are aware of it, yet they continue to argue this position, hoping the less-thoughtful suckers will believe them.
In which case, this is not about "what's good for people in general" (which would be to LET the rich folks have their millions in retirement funds), but about envy, pure and simple. Envy that some people have a LOT of money and some people don't.
Of course, such people will argue (vehemently) that this is not the case, and that, if they had that money, they'd feel the same. Of course its easy to make that hypothetical statement, as they would never have such money. (Yes, I know about George Soros -- but he made his money on investing, and besides, you'll notice he never gives away close to even 25% of his fortune.) This is worse than greed; greed is the desire to be something better, bigger and/or more than one is currently. Envy is the desire to have no one any better than oneself. Its not levelling the playing field, its reducing its best and brightest to that of the lowest common denominator.
And this sort of envy is the most virulent. It induces people to meddle in the affairs of others, when they have no right to do so (and they know it).
And the worst part is, they don't even have the goddamn honesty to admit that their ideals are nothing more than this.
What you say is correct. For all of you who have become complacent in your wealth and success, think of Schindler in "Schindler's List", looking at his car, saying "thirty more people" as he weeps. Think about that!!!!!
I do, and my first thought is "ham-hand acting designed to get an Oscar".
If you live in a country, every day you receive services from its government, whether it's roads or police departments or schools. At the end of every year, the governments requests that you reimburse it for the cost of these services. If you refuse, the force of the government will be against you, same as if you refused to pay any other business for services of its that you had consumed.
This is just another purely voluntary exchange in our capitalist society. It puzzles me that people object so strongly to it. Sure, it would be nice if I could pick and choose which services I wanted to receive, and it'd also be nice if I had some anti-gravity boots.
OK, let's take this idea to its logical conclusion. Since your idea of "voluntary exchange" ignores any usage of coercion, use of force or threat of force, then consider the following situation:
A man jumps from the shadows, brandishes a weapon, says "your money or your life". You hand over your wallet, he disappears, you're out $50 plus everything you have in your wallet: credit cards, pictures of loved ones, important documents. According to you, this is just a "voluntary exchange in our capitalist society", hence this is not a crime. as you argue, that robber is offering you a service, namely, letting you walk away from this encounter. And you are free to refuse his services, just as he is free to refuse to let you live.
The definition of "voluntary" is "something done freely, without duress". That means that you made the decision without coercion, duress, threat of violence, whatever. The government does not give you the "option" to pay. They don't "request" it. They may use such terms, but they are usually prefixed with "under threat of incarceration, asset seizure and forfeiture". In civil society, even if someone puts a gun in your face and "requests" your money, that's still robbery. Its still illegal. My question is, if its illegal for individuals and private groups to do it, why is it legal for governments to do it?
1)Emigrate. Sure, go to a country that is even more oppressive. That makes sense. This country is the freest on earth. Its no accident it is also the most prosperous.
2)Vote for people who will eliminate services. Now we're getting somewhere. If you'll notice, libertarians are all for that. Which one comes first (elimination of services or reduced taxation) is simply a matter of methodology for them.
I don't like a lot of libertarians, but at least they are honest and respectful of other people's rights and properties. Seems they care more about other people than the most caring social security advocate. Go figure.
In response to the two previous replies (US is a republic and Be Careful): voter idiocy is the impetus for a Bill of Rights - to protect the individual's rights in the face of blinding lunacy by those wielding political power. Unfortunately, the government got good at circumventing the Bill of Rights....
Whether rule by majority or by elected representative, power resides with the people, regardless of democracy or republic. And its a strong bill of rights that prevents our freedoms from being voted away. Ours just isn't strong enough.
In any case, I couldn't read the article (broken link!) so I don't know what's involved, but I'm curious as to what safeguards the bill specifies against abuse of digital signatures? How does one verify that signatures are legit?
Do I: A) Step out and try some untested technology that will improve the lives of my customers? B) Keep quiet with my head down and wait for the next boss with his 'different' way?
How about: C) Get a real job in the private sector. Do something valuable that people will pay money for (sorry, taxes taken at the threat of asset seizure don't count).
"You don't know what its like out there. I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."
---Dr. Ray Stantz
B "I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
Yeah, that's it. Give the government means to collect money from people faster. Great. Give the thieves the keys to the vault while you're at it.
One of the most effective lines of defense the common person has against government is precisely its massive, bloated, bureaucratic paperwork system. People were able to save themselves hassles and money by exploiting tricks and loopholes in that system. Sure, developing e-government has no directly negative effects on people, but its a sort of aiding and abetting. One generally doesn't try to make things easier for a known thief; why should we optimize work for the worst thief in the world?
While I think she might be overdramatizing the "piracy" of the major labels and RIAA, many of her other muddled, unfocused rantings ring very true. The necessity of a major label to bring your music to the masses is gone now. Oh sure, you still need promotion, recording, packaging and whatnot, and for that the major labels are a great one-stop shop, but if the contract and money issues are anywhere near as bad as Love makes them out to be, any musician interested in owning their work or getting adequate compensation is best advised to do otherwise.
For a change, its nice to see someone who's actually doing something about a situation they're unhappy with, and not just sitting on their ass saying "there ought to be a law", or worse yet, lobbying for that law.
So now we can wait for NASA to save up enough money to build one, then spend ten years "researching" the project, or some hotshot venture capitalist who wants to be a space cowboy build one and launch it from a mobile platform in the middle of the Pacific sometime late next week. Outstanding!
There's nothing more entertaining than a guy who knows a few buzzwords in economics and thinks this qualifies his opinion as well-informed. Let's start again, sophomore:
Your insulting rambling makes perfect sense, but only if the price of that apple stays constant. As the society creates more wealth, markets make adjustments to benifit from that wealth (increase prices).
Then why do prices go down as markets expand? Consider the railroad industry. At its heyday, it cost 5 cents per ton/mile on major roads like UP and Northern Pacific to haul freight. That translates into less than a buck by today's standards.
Fifty years ago only rich people could afford TVs. Now everyone owns one.
Remember the original VW beetle? Touted as an "economy" car, it retailed for what would be about $15,000 today. I can find a new econo-car for about a third of that.
Prices go up only if supply decreases, demand increases or both. And that's price-per-capita, the only relevant metric in this case. Prices can go up, but if ppc remains constant, there's no recognizable increase in cost.
That is the why those nice little minimum wage increases you enjoy getting every once in a while eventually mean nothing!
I earn enough so that I've never seen the "benefit" of minimum wage increases, only the slap of IRS agents taking more than a quarter of what I make in a year (and bound to get worse).
Remember the 80's! Plenty of money to go around, but the poor just couldn't keep up with inflation... that's a big word, huh?
Inflation, of course, would never happen if our money was based on a gold standard, which it is not. But leaving a gold standard was necessary for Roosevelt to implement his New Deal policies. Because our money isn't backed by real wealth, the gov't can print all the funny money it wants and "pay" people - and that's were you get your problem of "the more there is, the less value it has". Keynesian economics cannot work where a gold standard is in place. Keynes knew this, so did Wilson, and so did Roosevelt.
It's worth noting that inflating the currency was one of Lenin's preferred ways of instituting communist policies in noncommunist countries. Talk about knowing economics all too well.
The movement of wealth depends upon what you can earn, which depends on your value based on your skills. Yet, if you earn $200,000 per year, and the price of an apple is $20,000, you don't really make a lot, do you?
Covered in my response about price-per-capita, above. Better yet, see any half-decent microeconomics text for the explosion of this fallacy.
A) For the past 100 years, they've been giving our "petrol reservers" another 10 years before they ran out. Every ten years they made this prediction. They're still doing it now.
Most of the people who made these claims also made Malthusian claims of exponential population growth, which we have yet to see.
B) There's no problem in doing fusion, hot or "cold"; the problem is the radiation. To do fusion on a commercial grade level (i.e., several hundred MWatts from one plant) would send so much gamma isotopes into the surrounding area that a plant built of concrete and rebar would crumble within six months. How do you justify rebuilding a multibillion dollar plant twice a year?
C) Wishing for "cold" fusion to work is like wishing for people to carry thermonuclear weapons in their briefcases (not an unlikely scenario if cold fusion worked). Cold fusion would make building a high yield device very cheap and convenient. When you consider that a 200 megaton hydrogen bomb (average sized citybuster) uses about the amount of hydrogen in a wastebasket (at atmospheric pressure and temperature), this would put a sobering amount of destructive force in the hands of anyone determined enough to put one together.
In short, be careful what you wish for. Or at least do more research on it.
So, when does english class stop its unit on Karl Marx?
For the benefit of the other high schoolers in your class that may be apt to post the same drivel, let me pick this apart one piece at a time:
"The very nature of capitalism relies on the distribution of wealth to those who can get it. You can have all that you can grab. This means for one to be wealth, many must be poor."
The concept of a "fixed pie" of wealth is as stupid and unrealistic as it is archaic. The fixed pie concept rates right up there with Malthusian growth economics for sheer ignorance of reality; If either were true, the capitalist machinery would've collapsed long after every piece of dry land was occupied by a human and no food existed anywhere.
Wealth is created, it is not simply taken and appropriated to and fro. Your apple analogy underlines your embarrassing misunderstanding of the principles involved. Wealth is not simply that which exists on earth for human survival; wealth is what a person has when they accumulate things a large portion of others are willing to pay for. Some would say that wealth is factories, consumer goods, cars, gadgets, whatnot, but for all these, you need A) someone to invent the damn things and B) someone to buy them. If I invent a lefthanded smokeshifter and nobody buys it, its not worth much more than what its worth to me. Likewise, people want a lot of neat things that don't yet exist. these things need to be created. And if wealth is a static quantity, that balance is thrown all out of wack the moment the first new idea steps on the scene that people are willing to shell out money for. Again, you are a moron if you think that all wealth comes from some mystical pie that never grows, shrinks or changes.
Like your "fixed pie" stupidity, your statement about the "distribution of wealth" exposes your sheer lack of understanding when it comes to economics. Maybe your wealth really is distributed to you in the form of government checks, but where I come from, wealth has to be earned. I go to work to get my paycheck.
The historical origins of the word "distribution" lay in statistics: namely, when plotting income levels in a given geographic area, statisticians used the term "distribution" in the mathematical sense: a very ascetic term that in no way relates to someone actually handing out money. Yet this term has been co-opted to serve precisely that end.
And then of course, is the relative nature of wealth; in this country, someone making $12k/year, who has indoor plumbing and more than one room in his home, eats fresh, clean food from abundant sources and is not dying of dysentery is a wealthy man compared with a number of vacation spots around the world. "Rich" people in those countries kill for the luxuries that American middle classers take for granted.
Try reading some realistic economics texts. Think for yourself. Otherwise, you're only as smart as that $35k/year nitwit who's feeding you this tripe.
WARNING: mention of famous persons for the intent of improving author's notoriety currently in progress. Stand clear of affected message and use caution in attributing respect to author in near future.
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I wonder if this is such a concern (and the court hasn't thrown it out already) because this person's "place of business" happens to be his home. I mean, would there be an issue here if all the spam, junk mail and boxes were being received at an office somewhere else?
Disregarding that question, I definitely have a hard time sympathizing with his case, least of all because he's a spammer. There's a lot of noise about "right to privacy" in many circles, the most notable being celebrity status and what constitutes "public information" about private citizens on the net. But what right to privacy of your home information do you expect if you're listing it in TLD registration information? If I allow my phone number to be published in a phone book (and nowadays, that I don't put it in a "do not call" registry), do I have a reasonable expectation that I will never receive calls selling vacuum cleaners and low low interest rates on home equity loans?
Someone else brought up the issue of the Nuremberg files, specifically how courts have found that simply listing this information incites people to commit actions against them. And while people who make threats and perform other illegal actions should definitely be prosecuted, I don't see how someone can be compelled to not display public information that is available elsewhere.
Spammers often use the defense that people who don't want their "offers" shouldn't put their addresses in the public domain (where the public domain means almost anywhere in public that spammers can conceivably connect to and harvest), and certainly that's the common wisdom today, not just among spammers but anyone looking to control their inbox. But if spammers are going to play by these rules, they must also be prepared to live by them, and if someone can get their contact information off a publicly connectable system, they must be ready to deal with the results. They certainly need no warning that making a living as a spammer is one of the more unpopular positions one can make for oneself.
Frankly, this whole thing reeks of someone exercising their right to free speech and then complaining when they find their views to be wildly unpopular with their audience. One has the right to spam, but one does not have the right to be free of, and immune from, the reaction of the spammed.
1) Why hasn't an organization arisen to challenge the RIAA? I mean, it's my understanding that being a member of the RIAA is *not* legally required of a record label. When one considers the tons of indie labels out there that, thanks to free downloading off websites and through p2p networks, it makes me wonder why large groups of independents that have good talent and catalogs, like Caroline, Epitaph, Six Degrees, all the way down to little labels like ESL, tru thoughts, fork in hand and others haven't forged an alliance simply to combat this insanity. This seems like a golden opportunity to seize the thunder of the big six and woo bands to the "free music" side of the aisle. But then, when one considers how often bands tend to jump around labels, maybe the problem is more endemic to record labels than just the big six...
2) Speaking of bands, where are "the talent" in all this? why don't we hear from the bands beyond the occasional (apparent) nutcase voicing his opinion then going back to the label lounge? We keep hearing about how the big nasty RIAA is pimping their work and buying out their right to their creative work (if I have to hear Tom Petty's sob story one more time I'm going to puke), but why aren't so many top label bands coming out in favor for/against the RIAA behavior? Many of the A-list acts can certainly get along just fine no matter what label they're on, so if they can extricate themselves from the labels, why don't they? If Fred Durst really thinks mp3's should be free, why doesn't he just jump ship and release his band's own stuff on his own terms? Oh wait, he's VP of Interscope. Nevermind....
I will add my voice to the growing chorus to please, for f***s sake, stop covering the war in Iraq. Yes it's news, but I don't think slashdotters are SO cloistered that they don't check other world news sites. Please keep slashdot's appeal, namely good stories (-Jonkatz) that won't really be headlines in those other news sites. The only thing more depressing than the war are the idiotic responses to it, both pro- and anti-war. Please, stop with the war coverage. Thankyew.
It's "Operation Iraqi Freedom", not "Operation Iraqi Liberation". But I would've thought it was funny.
Oh, the law is well enforced, believe you me. My dad ran a tech consulting company for years and he was constantly hounded by state employment administrations and the INS. If they were willing and able to chase down little tech companies, I don't see why they couldn't keep an eye on the Fortune 500 crowd.
This doesn't make much sense. Why would Sun lay off people here and try to import H1-Bs when they could just expand staffing at their India Engineering Center and ship development over there, as they have already done for their HPC ClusterTools software? Oh wait, they're already doing that. And also why did my submission of this very same story get rejected three days ago?
Wasn't Norway banning Herman Miller books and jailing booksellers a few years back?
Oh, you meant freedom for what the reporters could say.
You've come along way baby...
"For the average American freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more."
- Gore Vidal
...I'll call you right. I like to drive my car, and I hate treehuggers, because like you, they do not deal in facts, they deal in accusations and opinion. They deal in shame, shaming people for having the audacity to try and live their lives the way they want. How dare they! Meanwhile they smoke their camel lights, releasing dangerous chemicals into the air and into the lungs of near bystande, wear baha shirts made from petrochemical dyes, throw the empty containers of Ben & Jerry's "phish food" into evergrowing landfills and cut down countless trees to make hundreds more flyers to hand out at the next Burning Man festival.
As P.J. O'Rourke once said, "environmentalists seem to be willing to do anything for the biosphere except take a class and learn something about it." Let me guess: Every study confirming the suspicions of global warming is a scientifically sound, rigorous study, but every study discrediting the trend is either reactionary or written by paid stooges of "big business interests", yes? It's amazing how clear cut the good guys and the bad guys are. I imagine in your world the bad guys have handlebar mustaches too, and they twirl them as they concoct ever more cruel ways of slaughtering cattle for human consumption.
...and say that if it were truly the end of Cyber BS, maybe we wouldn't have to read Jon Katz at Slashdot anymore.
Untrue. Take, for example, many government regulatory agencies: the FAA, FCC, NRC, etc. These fellows charge "user fees" for people using their services (certification that their equipment is safe, legal, etc.). At a fundamental level, this is fine: the TLA stamps its seal of authority on something, demands payment for services rendered. Except businesses are required by law to use these services if they wish to enter into business. This is NOT voluntary, any more than a businessman pays off a mobster make sure nothing "happens" to his business (like, say, a molotov cocktail through the front window).
Closer to home, you are forced to pay into Social Security, which (so they say) is for YOUR retirement (actually it goes to pay old people right now). But I for one don't want any part of social security. I want to save for retirement in a way that provide more of a return than simply depositing into a lockbox for fifty years. Your analogy of "not paying your electric bill" is correct, but you need to preface it with the fact that "the electric company forces you to buy electricity from them, whether you want it or not" to be fully accurate.
THIS is the problem. If government were simply charging people for services rendered as they are requested, that's fine; this is because people have the option to opt out of dealing with government altogether. But people DON'T have that option. People are forced to either go through a government group or are not allowed to do something.
To take it further: imagine the government held a monopoly on housing and house building. Sure, you wouldn't have to deal with them if you didn't want to. But that would mean that you live in a cave or something.
Now, if you want to argue that "no one forces you to do business with people", you're right. But then, no one forces you to live. You can wither away and die and no one will (legally) care, necessarily. But bother are choices that are yours to make. Simply because one choice requires you to do things like get housing, food, clothing, et cetera, doesn't give government the right to force you to use its services.
True enough, taxes are up to public debate. So is the legality of murder. If the people legalize the act of murder (as in, someone can just walk up to you and kill you), does this make it right? No. Similarly, simply because the people decide to levy taxes does not make it right.
In fact, I'll argue that its impossible to avoid; so much so that Brin and many people who make the argument about "frozen capital" are aware of it, yet they continue to argue this position, hoping the less-thoughtful suckers will believe them.
In which case, this is not about "what's good for people in general" (which would be to LET the rich folks have their millions in retirement funds), but about envy, pure and simple. Envy that some people have a LOT of money and some people don't.
Of course, such people will argue (vehemently) that this is not the case, and that, if they had that money, they'd feel the same. Of course its easy to make that hypothetical statement, as they would never have such money. (Yes, I know about George Soros -- but he made his money on investing, and besides, you'll notice he never gives away close to even 25% of his fortune.) This is worse than greed; greed is the desire to be something better, bigger and/or more than one is currently. Envy is the desire to have no one any better than oneself. Its not levelling the playing field, its reducing its best and brightest to that of the lowest common denominator.
And this sort of envy is the most virulent. It induces people to meddle in the affairs of others, when they have no right to do so (and they know it).
And the worst part is, they don't even have the goddamn honesty to admit that their ideals are nothing more than this.
Nice grab, but the (possible) passage of this bill only makes official what the government has been doing for decades.
One of the few people in government actually working to protect your privacy is Ron Paul. His site is a good resource for this sort of gestapo crap.
I do, and my first thought is "ham-hand acting designed to get an Oscar".
OK, let's take this idea to its logical conclusion. Since your idea of "voluntary exchange" ignores any usage of coercion, use of force or threat of force, then consider the following situation:
The definition of "voluntary" is "something done freely, without duress". That means that you made the decision without coercion, duress, threat of violence, whatever. The government does not give you the "option" to pay. They don't "request" it. They may use such terms, but they are usually prefixed with "under threat of incarceration, asset seizure and forfeiture". In civil society, even if someone puts a gun in your face and "requests" your money, that's still robbery. Its still illegal. My question is, if its illegal for individuals and private groups to do it, why is it legal for governments to do it?
1)Emigrate. Sure, go to a country that is even more oppressive. That makes sense. This country is the freest on earth. Its no accident it is also the most prosperous.
2)Vote for people who will eliminate services. Now we're getting somewhere. If you'll notice, libertarians are all for that. Which one comes first (elimination of services or reduced taxation) is simply a matter of methodology for them.
I don't like a lot of libertarians, but at least they are honest and respectful of other people's rights and properties. Seems they care more about other people than the most caring social security advocate. Go figure.
testify! :)
Whether rule by majority or by elected representative, power resides with the people, regardless of democracy or republic. And its a strong bill of rights that prevents our freedoms from being voted away. Ours just isn't strong enough.
In any case, I couldn't read the article (broken link!) so I don't know what's involved, but I'm curious as to what safeguards the bill specifies against abuse of digital signatures? How does one verify that signatures are legit?
How about:
C) Get a real job in the private sector. Do something valuable that people will pay money for (sorry, taxes taken at the threat of asset seizure don't count).
B
"I'm payin' taxes, but what am I buyin'?" -- James Brown
Yeah, that's it. Give the government means to collect money from people faster. Great. Give the thieves the keys to the vault while you're at it.
One of the most effective lines of defense the common person has against government is precisely its massive, bloated, bureaucratic paperwork system. People were able to save themselves hassles and money by exploiting tricks and loopholes in that system. Sure, developing e-government has no directly negative effects on people, but its a sort of aiding and abetting. One generally doesn't try to make things easier for a known thief; why should we optimize work for the worst thief in the world?
B
While I think she might be overdramatizing the "piracy" of the major labels and RIAA, many of her other muddled, unfocused rantings ring very true. The necessity of a major label to bring your music to the masses is gone now. Oh sure, you still need promotion, recording, packaging and whatnot, and for that the major labels are a great one-stop shop, but if the contract and money issues are anywhere near as bad as Love makes them out to be, any musician interested in owning their work or getting adequate compensation is best advised to do otherwise.
For a change, its nice to see someone who's actually doing something about a situation they're unhappy with, and not just sitting on their ass saying "there ought to be a law", or worse yet, lobbying for that law.
B
So now we can wait for NASA to save up enough money to build one, then spend ten years "researching" the project, or some hotshot venture capitalist who wants to be a space cowboy build one and launch it from a mobile platform in the middle of the Pacific sometime late next week. Outstanding!
Well, that does explain a lot. You're a lot saner than I thought. My apologies.
Your insulting rambling makes perfect sense, but only if the price of that apple stays constant. As the society creates more wealth, markets make adjustments to benifit from that wealth (increase prices).
Then why do prices go down as markets expand? Consider the railroad industry. At its heyday, it cost 5 cents per ton/mile on major roads like UP and Northern Pacific to haul freight. That translates into less than a buck by today's standards.
Fifty years ago only rich people could afford TVs. Now everyone owns one.
Remember the original VW beetle? Touted as an "economy" car, it retailed for what would be about $15,000 today. I can find a new econo-car for about a third of that.
Prices go up only if supply decreases, demand increases or both. And that's price-per-capita, the only relevant metric in this case. Prices can go up, but if ppc remains constant, there's no recognizable increase in cost.
That is the why those nice little minimum wage increases you enjoy getting every once in a while eventually mean nothing!
I earn enough so that I've never seen the "benefit" of minimum wage increases, only the slap of IRS agents taking more than a quarter of what I make in a year (and bound to get worse).
Remember the 80's! Plenty of money to go around, but the poor just couldn't keep up with inflation... that's a big word, huh?
Inflation, of course, would never happen if our money was based on a gold standard, which it is not. But leaving a gold standard was necessary for Roosevelt to implement his New Deal policies. Because our money isn't backed by real wealth, the gov't can print all the funny money it wants and "pay" people - and that's were you get your problem of "the more there is, the less value it has". Keynesian economics cannot work where a gold standard is in place. Keynes knew this, so did Wilson, and so did Roosevelt.
It's worth noting that inflating the currency was one of Lenin's preferred ways of instituting communist policies in noncommunist countries. Talk about knowing economics all too well.
The movement of wealth depends upon what you can earn, which depends on your value based on your skills. Yet, if you earn $200,000 per year, and the price of an apple is $20,000, you don't really make a lot, do you?
Covered in my response about price-per-capita, above. Better yet, see any half-decent microeconomics text for the explosion of this fallacy.
Most of the people who made these claims also made Malthusian claims of exponential population growth, which we have yet to see.
B) There's no problem in doing fusion, hot or "cold"; the problem is the radiation. To do fusion on a commercial grade level (i.e., several hundred MWatts from one plant) would send so much gamma isotopes into the surrounding area that a plant built of concrete and rebar would crumble within six months. How do you justify rebuilding a multibillion dollar plant twice a year?
C) Wishing for "cold" fusion to work is like wishing for people to carry thermonuclear weapons in their briefcases (not an unlikely scenario if cold fusion worked). Cold fusion would make building a high yield device very cheap and convenient. When you consider that a 200 megaton hydrogen bomb (average sized citybuster) uses about the amount of hydrogen in a wastebasket (at atmospheric pressure and temperature), this would put a sobering amount of destructive force in the hands of anyone determined enough to put one together.
In short, be careful what you wish for. Or at least do more research on it.
For the benefit of the other high schoolers in your class that may be apt to post the same drivel, let me pick this apart one piece at a time:
"The very nature of capitalism relies on the distribution of wealth to those who can get it. You can have all that you can grab. This means for one to be wealth, many must be poor."
The concept of a "fixed pie" of wealth is as stupid and unrealistic as it is archaic. The fixed pie concept rates right up there with Malthusian growth economics for sheer ignorance of reality; If either were true, the capitalist machinery would've collapsed long after every piece of dry land was occupied by a human and no food existed anywhere.
Wealth is created, it is not simply taken and appropriated to and fro. Your apple analogy underlines your embarrassing misunderstanding of the principles involved. Wealth is not simply that which exists on earth for human survival; wealth is what a person has when they accumulate things a large portion of others are willing to pay for. Some would say that wealth is factories, consumer goods, cars, gadgets, whatnot, but for all these, you need A) someone to invent the damn things and B) someone to buy them. If I invent a lefthanded smokeshifter and nobody buys it, its not worth much more than what its worth to me. Likewise, people want a lot of neat things that don't yet exist. these things need to be created. And if wealth is a static quantity, that balance is thrown all out of wack the moment the first new idea steps on the scene that people are willing to shell out money for. Again, you are a moron if you think that all wealth comes from some mystical pie that never grows, shrinks or changes.
Like your "fixed pie" stupidity, your statement about the "distribution of wealth" exposes your sheer lack of understanding when it comes to economics. Maybe your wealth really is distributed to you in the form of government checks, but where I come from, wealth has to be earned. I go to work to get my paycheck.
The historical origins of the word "distribution" lay in statistics: namely, when plotting income levels in a given geographic area, statisticians used the term "distribution" in the mathematical sense: a very ascetic term that in no way relates to someone actually handing out money. Yet this term has been co-opted to serve precisely that end.
And then of course, is the relative nature of wealth; in this country, someone making $12k/year, who has indoor plumbing and more than one room in his home, eats fresh, clean food from abundant sources and is not dying of dysentery is a wealthy man compared with a number of vacation spots around the world. "Rich" people in those countries kill for the luxuries that American middle classers take for granted.
Try reading some realistic economics texts. Think for yourself. Otherwise, you're only as smart as that $35k/year nitwit who's feeding you this tripe.
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