Musk's business models are largely based on government subsidies, government regulation, government-created barriers to entry, Naturally, he wants most of the population to become dependent on government.
Then again: A90, did you read the last paragraph? As long as the President is not going to court, there is no case.
And that affects the truth of my statement... how?
And then again: you claimed "any politician". It is obviously clear now it is only concerns "head of states".
Sorry, wrong again. Defamation of the German head of state is covered under Art 90. Defamation of foreign heads of states and symbols is covered under Art 103/104. Defamation of other politicians is covered under Art 188 (prison sentences run between 6 months and five years).
And ofc I'm completely ok with them.
So? What do I care what an ignorant proto-Nazi like you "is OK with"?
last year De Beers helped launch a trade association with other producers to market the attraction of natural diamonds
And "the attraction" would be the blood of Africans that is spilled in obtaining them? The horrible working conditions that they are mined under? The environmental destruction that is wreaked by digging them up? Please help me out here, there are so many "attractions" to choose from.
Germany has criminal laws against insults, defamation, and slander.
No, we have not. That are civil laws just like in the USA
Criminal libel is defined in Art 185-189 of the German criminal code, as well as Art 90 (defamation of the state), and Art. 166 (defamation of religions). Art 130 criminalizes "defaming segments of the population".
Seriously, you need to get a clue about what's going on in your own country.
What? sorry but the Blackberry and Palm Treo was the defacto standard in the smartphone world before apple.
No, not really. Worldwide, in 2007, "Symbian" had the largest market share, followed by Microsoft, RIM, and Palm. But Microsoft and Palm were really the only ones that had anything like a modern smartphone and app experience. Microsoft was also widely used for PDAs, tablets, and verticals.
You can quibble about whether "dominant" is the right term for that market situation; the point is, however, that Microsoft was a big and important player with a lot developers when iPhone just got started. Microsoft, like Symbian, RIM, and Palm, lost because Android and iOS were just better systems.
At the same time, try to work towards the normalization of good security practices.
For example, it used to be suspicious for people to use encrypted connections. These days, that has been normalized, resulting in a double benefit: not only can you use encryption without sticking out, it also greatly increases the difficulty of widespread surveillance in general because crooks and spies now have to decrypt lots of cat videos.
That's why pushing for widespread adoption of onion routers, alternative currencies, Linux, and many other things is good for security and privacy in general: for most people that level of privacy and security is overkill most of the time, but widespread usage means that when people need it, they can use it and they can use it without arousing suspicion.
The problem with Microsoft's phone effort wasn't that Microsoft didn't invest in it soon enough or early enough; in fact, Microsoft was the dominant smartphone player prior to iPhone. The reason Microsoft lost in the smartphone market was because their product sucked.
I had this idea many years ago: Once a month(ish), all citizens would have the ability to veto any bill (via on-line) at the federal level, overriding even the president.
You don't seriously believe that any politician worth their salt would allow their power to be diminished in this way.
There are a lot of simple ways of fixing what's wrong with US democracy. None of those will get enacted because it isn't in the interest of the people who actually write the laws.
Tbh these kinds of laws are starting to take it on the chin in the courts anyway as it steps on the right of the people to criticise their government, the most sacred part of free speech.
How does an ability to record public meetings "step on the right of the people to criticize the government"?
Why not? What is the hurry to pass new laws and regulations?
The only thing that remotely keeps the Democratic-dominated California legislature in check is public outrage, because even Democrats fear that when running against other Democrats. By suppressing public debate prior to votes, they can largely vote as they like, unencumbered by public opinion or outrage, since after the vote has happened, people usually don't bother with deep analysis or debate, since it's pointless. Being able to rush bills through is particularly important to legislators for crony-capitalist spending bills. Both parties love to wallow in lengthy debates on symbolic but divisive social issues.
Note that should Republicans ever regain power in California, Republican legislators love the ability to rush through bills as well. This isn't a Democratic/Republican issue, it's a citizen vs a corrupt legislature issue.
First of all, your explanation of control instabilities is nonsense, since you describe a control system that doesn't take into account the delay while controlling a system with delay. You're also mixing up control systems with delayed sensing and control systems with delayed control response.
Second, you ignore the massive "control system" delays already built into the current legislative system: signature by the government, legal challenges, etc. Those delays exist for good reasons. The US system of government is set up so that the executive branch can deal with short term concerns, and the legislative branch is supposed to take the long term view and engage in careful deliberation.
Third, we already know what happens if you give governments and ruling parties the power to pass laws quickly and without impediments; history is full of examples.
Your arguments don't make much rational sense; they are simply a reflection of your proto-fascist mindset. Pretty much the same arguments were made in order to short-circuit political debate and legislative deliberation in European democracies heading for fascism. Hitler usually argued that the "burning needs of the nation demands the ability of the party put in power by voters to act quickly and decisively".
But tell you what, just for amusement's sake, why don't you give some examples from the past where it was necessary for the California state legislature to pass a law in less than 72h. Please, go ahead.
From a cybernetics point of view, the operational problem from introducing an unconditional 72 hour time delay into the feedback loop of the legislature guiding the operation of the state is the time delay will create a potential instability in the feedback loop.
There is already a huge delay built into the system: the governor needs to sign the law, and then it takes even longer to implement it. In different words, your argument is utter bullshit, and you are obfuscating your authoritarian, partisan agenda with pseudo-scientific nonsense.
From a practical and cybernetics standpoint, proposition 54 aims to cripple the legislature and prevent it from acting promptly. Proposition 54 has an embedded assumption that the legislature will do something bad if it is allowed to pass bills without a 72 hour freeze.
That's not an "embedded assumption", that's quite an explicit statement, one that happens to correspond to reality. The only problem is that publishing the bills ahead of time won't really make any difference: California's political corruption and dysfunction goes so deep that publishing bills will make no difference.
According to Steven Maviglio, the director of Californians for an Effective Legislature, a campaign committee formed to oppose Proposition 54. It all comes down to who is behind the initiative, and why. "The first thing you need to do is follow the money," he told Ars, pointing us to Munger, Jr. "He's been the top contributor to the California Republican Party. His goal is to disrupt the power of a legislature that's getting things done."
"Give power to the progressives and remove democratic safeguards in order to fight off the political influence of rich people" seems to sum up Steven Maviglio's argument. Those were pretty much also Hitler's arguments for the Enabling Act.
We have the same free speech laws in Europe (not only Germany) as you in the USA, with one minimal restriction: holocoust denial and hate speech are prohibited. Display of Nazi symbols are prohibited.
You don't know what you are talking about. German restrictions on free speech are extensive, and different from much of Western Europe, and radically different from the US. Germany has criminal laws against insults, defamation, and slander. Germany has special criminal laws against defaming politicians, expressing contempt towards Germany, its constitution, or its symbols. Defaming the deceased is illegal. Blasphemy is illegal. No such criminal laws exist in the US.
And, JFYI: those laws were more or less forced on us by the occupying parties at the end resp. after WWII.
No, they werent. Post-WWII law was worked out in cooperation between the Allies and Germany; it was not dictated to Germany like post-WWI restrictions. And the restrictions allies were concerned with were restrictions on the glorification of Nazism and restrictions on antisemitism, for the simple reason that large parts of the German government, police, educational institutions, and business leadership were former Nazis (they are now mostly dead).
The German obsession with criminalizing speech in general has nothing to do with the Allies or WWII and goes back to long before the 20th century. Furthermore, since the early 1990's, Germany is pretty much free to do whatever it wants to.
Note that I didn't lament that Germans still have these restrictions per se, what I lamented is that Germans haven't learned from their Nazi past. In particular, even though these restrictions are still in place, they seem to be ineffective in dealing with Germany's massive and growing neo-Nazi problem. The fact that Germany still has these laws on the book is merely a symptom of deep-running problems with German democracy and society.
Discussing Nazism is NOT forbidden. Forbidden is glorifying the Nazis and the Third Reich or denying facts like the existence of concentration camps or that the Holocaust happened.
What is forbidden is whatever the people in power want to forbid, and what they usually forbid is things that threaten their power.
In Germany, it's generally illegal to insult the head of state, as well as to refer to politicians, police, and other government officials as "Nazis" or "fascists".
Laws regulating hate speech in Germany are extremely tight, with most Nazi symbolism and racist propaganda strictly forbidden, a legacy of Germany's role in World War II.
One of the primary characteristics of the Nazi regime was its suppression of free speech and control of the media by the German government. It is depressing that, rather than defend free speech, Germans have learned nothing from their history.
Europe generally outlaws speech that upsets people and might provoke violence. So, you can get prosecuted for praising a radical organization, but you can also get prosecuted for insulting a radical organization, on the theory that you might be provoking violence.
f we start at the same level and I wind up increasing my wealth by a factor of two thousand and you increase yours by a factor of two, you can certainly buy more than you could before.
I certainly hope so.
We also no longer have the same power to run things
That is the whole point of a free market: people who make good decisions have more influence in the economy, while people who make bad decisions lose influence in the economy.
, and you have to adapt to the world the way I want it.
Not at all. The fact that Larry Ellison bought himself a Hawaiian island or Bill Gates owns a private jet doesn't affect my ability to spend my money at all.
And, yes, people value positive rights and will give up important things for them. I don't see why you claim this is not so
Of course, people value positive rights and will give up important things for them. The error is in how you used that observation in your chain of reasoning.
Good old von Bismarck was not a guy to give handouts out of the goodness of his heart
Correct. He was an authoritarian who held on to power by paying off special interests groups. Hence, Bismarck is not an example of how people gave up liberties for positive rights. That doesn't mean people never give up liberties for positive rights, it means that your example didn't show what you said it showed.
I'm also unclear why you advocate small weak governments, given that you say they tend to get absorbed by large strong governments.
I didn't say that they "tend to get absorbed"; what I said is that they get invaded and destroyed by vast armies raised by their authoritarian neighbors. But that's not inevitable and the world has changed, because...
I'd want a system that could last in the real world, and I'd accept a lot of other problems for that. Remember, a government large enough to defend you and your stuff is large enough to kill you and take your stuff.
See, what has changed is that in the 21st century, it's not so much about "stuff" anymore. It's largely pointless to invade wealthy countries because wealth these days comes primarily from what the citizens of a country accomplish. When countries get invaded, or governments become too intrusive, people simply vote with their feet, and if you force them to stay, they simply stop producing. You can take stuff by force, you can't take high productivity and creativity by force. That's what has changed in the 21st century. And while productive people are tolerant of a certain amount of positive rights (aka rent seeking, lobbyism, and corruption), when that gets out of hand, they also either leave or stop producing.
640k ought to be enough for everybody, right? And there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home, right?
You customers want certain features. Either you listen or you can go the way of other companies that thought they could tell their customers what they want.
In the first place, there is a role for zero sum in economics. If I want to pay you to do something, the impact on my finances is roughly the same whether our incomes double or not. If, on the other hand, mine doubles and yours doesn't, the impact on me goes down.
No, that's not how it works. First of all, when comparing wealth over time, we use constant dollars. So, when someone who is wealthy earns a return on their investment, that is actual overall growth of the economy. If you double your wealth by investing your money, and I don't, I can still buy exactly what I could buy before (and, if anything, prices will go down). Nor is doubling your money through investments anything particularly unusual: anybody with a retirement plan does that about 4 times during their lifetime.
People value positive rights so much they'll give up fundamental liberties for them.
No, that's not the pattern and that's not what your example illustrates. The people who Bismarck bribed with handouts didn't have and "fundamental liberties to give up"; they were already living in an authoritarian state. Also, he didn't bribe them with positive rights (that came later under Hitler), he simply gave them handouts.
People are what they are, and a political system that doesn't work is of only speculative interest.
What kind of political system a nation has depends on, among other things, its culture. The US used to have a more libertarian culture, but that culture is threatened by the authoritarian European political culture.
Similarly, if you're saying that Libertarianism is the right political system for humans, but you wind up complaining that it doesn't work for actual humans for some reason or other, you're contradicting yourself.
I didn't say it was "the right system for humans" and I didn't "complain" either. Humans are obviously capable of existing in totalitarian and murderous regimes for centuries at a time. There are multiple factors at work: education, culture, economic context, and external threats. Authoritarian government was inevitable throughout much of European and some of US history, though the repeated massive wars and genocides were a choice Europeans made. At the beginning of the 21st century, we do have a choice: we can go back to the broken culture and ideologies of 20th century Europe, or we can choose to become classically liberal societies.
A political system that never seems to happen for a large country is questionable at best.
Large nations, largely created by authoritarian governments and wars, are not an immutable fixture. Power in Britain is devolving, and regions in continental Europe are also demanding and receiving more political independence. US states used to be quite independent from each other, and we can return to that. Again, we face choices that determine the future of the US, Europe, and the world for a long time to come.
Communism has worked wonderfully in small towns with charismatic leaders for a generation or so.
Communism never works; it always infringes on people's rights by its very nature. Communal living, with voluntary membership, does work. But that's not communism, that is a personal choice, a choice that libertarians not only tolerate, but many of us actually encourage.
I consider size to matter here. Almost anything would work for a small or limited enough group.
Yes, which is why government should be mostly local. Americans understood this when this nation was founded. That's why the Constitution originally demanded one representative for every 30000 citizens, and why the power of the federal government was so sharply limited. We can return to that ideal. And others around the world are waking up to the desirability of more local government and the rejection of the large, centralized nation state as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Musk's business models are largely based on government subsidies, government regulation, government-created barriers to entry, Naturally, he wants most of the population to become dependent on government.
It's generally considered a blasphemy law.
And that affects the truth of my statement... how?
Sorry, wrong again. Defamation of the German head of state is covered under Art 90. Defamation of foreign heads of states and symbols is covered under Art 103/104. Defamation of other politicians is covered under Art 188 (prison sentences run between 6 months and five years).
So? What do I care what an ignorant proto-Nazi like you "is OK with"?
And "the attraction" would be the blood of Africans that is spilled in obtaining them? The horrible working conditions that they are mined under? The environmental destruction that is wreaked by digging them up? Please help me out here, there are so many "attractions" to choose from.
Criminal libel is defined in Art 185-189 of the German criminal code, as well as Art 90 (defamation of the state), and Art. 166 (defamation of religions). Art 130 criminalizes "defaming segments of the population".
Seriously, you need to get a clue about what's going on in your own country.
No, not really. Worldwide, in 2007, "Symbian" had the largest market share, followed by Microsoft, RIM, and Palm. But Microsoft and Palm were really the only ones that had anything like a modern smartphone and app experience. Microsoft was also widely used for PDAs, tablets, and verticals.
You can quibble about whether "dominant" is the right term for that market situation; the point is, however, that Microsoft was a big and important player with a lot developers when iPhone just got started. Microsoft, like Symbian, RIM, and Palm, lost because Android and iOS were just better systems.
At the same time, try to work towards the normalization of good security practices.
For example, it used to be suspicious for people to use encrypted connections. These days, that has been normalized, resulting in a double benefit: not only can you use encryption without sticking out, it also greatly increases the difficulty of widespread surveillance in general because crooks and spies now have to decrypt lots of cat videos.
That's why pushing for widespread adoption of onion routers, alternative currencies, Linux, and many other things is good for security and privacy in general: for most people that level of privacy and security is overkill most of the time, but widespread usage means that when people need it, they can use it and they can use it without arousing suspicion.
The problem with Microsoft's phone effort wasn't that Microsoft didn't invest in it soon enough or early enough; in fact, Microsoft was the dominant smartphone player prior to iPhone. The reason Microsoft lost in the smartphone market was because their product sucked.
You don't seriously believe that any politician worth their salt would allow their power to be diminished in this way.
There are a lot of simple ways of fixing what's wrong with US democracy. None of those will get enacted because it isn't in the interest of the people who actually write the laws.
How does an ability to record public meetings "step on the right of the people to criticize the government"?
Even California hasn't fallen so low that its laws come down to "business negotiations".
The only thing that remotely keeps the Democratic-dominated California legislature in check is public outrage, because even Democrats fear that when running against other Democrats. By suppressing public debate prior to votes, they can largely vote as they like, unencumbered by public opinion or outrage, since after the vote has happened, people usually don't bother with deep analysis or debate, since it's pointless. Being able to rush bills through is particularly important to legislators for crony-capitalist spending bills. Both parties love to wallow in lengthy debates on symbolic but divisive social issues.
Note that should Republicans ever regain power in California, Republican legislators love the ability to rush through bills as well. This isn't a Democratic/Republican issue, it's a citizen vs a corrupt legislature issue.
First of all, your explanation of control instabilities is nonsense, since you describe a control system that doesn't take into account the delay while controlling a system with delay. You're also mixing up control systems with delayed sensing and control systems with delayed control response.
Second, you ignore the massive "control system" delays already built into the current legislative system: signature by the government, legal challenges, etc. Those delays exist for good reasons. The US system of government is set up so that the executive branch can deal with short term concerns, and the legislative branch is supposed to take the long term view and engage in careful deliberation.
Third, we already know what happens if you give governments and ruling parties the power to pass laws quickly and without impediments; history is full of examples.
Your arguments don't make much rational sense; they are simply a reflection of your proto-fascist mindset. Pretty much the same arguments were made in order to short-circuit political debate and legislative deliberation in European democracies heading for fascism. Hitler usually argued that the "burning needs of the nation demands the ability of the party put in power by voters to act quickly and decisively".
But tell you what, just for amusement's sake, why don't you give some examples from the past where it was necessary for the California state legislature to pass a law in less than 72h. Please, go ahead.
There is already a huge delay built into the system: the governor needs to sign the law, and then it takes even longer to implement it. In different words, your argument is utter bullshit, and you are obfuscating your authoritarian, partisan agenda with pseudo-scientific nonsense.
That's not an "embedded assumption", that's quite an explicit statement, one that happens to correspond to reality. The only problem is that publishing the bills ahead of time won't really make any difference: California's political corruption and dysfunction goes so deep that publishing bills will make no difference.
"Give power to the progressives and remove democratic safeguards in order to fight off the political influence of rich people" seems to sum up Steven Maviglio's argument. Those were pretty much also Hitler's arguments for the Enabling Act.
You don't know what you are talking about. German restrictions on free speech are extensive, and different from much of Western Europe, and radically different from the US. Germany has criminal laws against insults, defamation, and slander. Germany has special criminal laws against defaming politicians, expressing contempt towards Germany, its constitution, or its symbols. Defaming the deceased is illegal. Blasphemy is illegal. No such criminal laws exist in the US.
No, they werent. Post-WWII law was worked out in cooperation between the Allies and Germany; it was not dictated to Germany like post-WWI restrictions. And the restrictions allies were concerned with were restrictions on the glorification of Nazism and restrictions on antisemitism, for the simple reason that large parts of the German government, police, educational institutions, and business leadership were former Nazis (they are now mostly dead).
The German obsession with criminalizing speech in general has nothing to do with the Allies or WWII and goes back to long before the 20th century. Furthermore, since the early 1990's, Germany is pretty much free to do whatever it wants to.
Note that I didn't lament that Germans still have these restrictions per se, what I lamented is that Germans haven't learned from their Nazi past. In particular, even though these restrictions are still in place, they seem to be ineffective in dealing with Germany's massive and growing neo-Nazi problem. The fact that Germany still has these laws on the book is merely a symptom of deep-running problems with German democracy and society.
What is forbidden is whatever the people in power want to forbid, and what they usually forbid is things that threaten their power.
In Germany, it's generally illegal to insult the head of state, as well as to refer to politicians, police, and other government officials as "Nazis" or "fascists".
Yes, and for about 20 years, Germans have had the option to repeal such laws.
When the reality distortion field starts affecting basic mathematics, you know you're in real trouble.
One of the primary characteristics of the Nazi regime was its suppression of free speech and control of the media by the German government. It is depressing that, rather than defend free speech, Germans have learned nothing from their history.
Europe generally outlaws speech that upsets people and might provoke violence. So, you can get prosecuted for praising a radical organization, but you can also get prosecuted for insulting a radical organization, on the theory that you might be provoking violence.
I trust it's still OK to refer to present day France as "Vichy 2.0" and to refer to its current leader by the honorary title of "Marshal Putain"?
I certainly hope so.
That is the whole point of a free market: people who make good decisions have more influence in the economy, while people who make bad decisions lose influence in the economy.
Not at all. The fact that Larry Ellison bought himself a Hawaiian island or Bill Gates owns a private jet doesn't affect my ability to spend my money at all.
Of course, people value positive rights and will give up important things for them. The error is in how you used that observation in your chain of reasoning.
Correct. He was an authoritarian who held on to power by paying off special interests groups. Hence, Bismarck is not an example of how people gave up liberties for positive rights. That doesn't mean people never give up liberties for positive rights, it means that your example didn't show what you said it showed.
I didn't say that they "tend to get absorbed"; what I said is that they get invaded and destroyed by vast armies raised by their authoritarian neighbors. But that's not inevitable and the world has changed, because...
See, what has changed is that in the 21st century, it's not so much about "stuff" anymore. It's largely pointless to invade wealthy countries because wealth these days comes primarily from what the citizens of a country accomplish. When countries get invaded, or governments become too intrusive, people simply vote with their feet, and if you force them to stay, they simply stop producing. You can take stuff by force, you can't take high productivity and creativity by force. That's what has changed in the 21st century. And while productive people are tolerant of a certain amount of positive rights (aka rent seeking, lobbyism, and corruption), when that gets out of hand, they also either leave or stop producing.
Jobs's cancer wasn't "extremely aggressive" and it was detected early. He would probably be alive if he had followed his doctor's advice.
640k ought to be enough for everybody, right? And there is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home, right?
You customers want certain features. Either you listen or you can go the way of other companies that thought they could tell their customers what they want.
No, that's not how it works. First of all, when comparing wealth over time, we use constant dollars. So, when someone who is wealthy earns a return on their investment, that is actual overall growth of the economy. If you double your wealth by investing your money, and I don't, I can still buy exactly what I could buy before (and, if anything, prices will go down). Nor is doubling your money through investments anything particularly unusual: anybody with a retirement plan does that about 4 times during their lifetime.
No, that's not the pattern and that's not what your example illustrates. The people who Bismarck bribed with handouts didn't have and "fundamental liberties to give up"; they were already living in an authoritarian state. Also, he didn't bribe them with positive rights (that came later under Hitler), he simply gave them handouts.
What kind of political system a nation has depends on, among other things, its culture. The US used to have a more libertarian culture, but that culture is threatened by the authoritarian European political culture.
I didn't say it was "the right system for humans" and I didn't "complain" either. Humans are obviously capable of existing in totalitarian and murderous regimes for centuries at a time. There are multiple factors at work: education, culture, economic context, and external threats. Authoritarian government was inevitable throughout much of European and some of US history, though the repeated massive wars and genocides were a choice Europeans made. At the beginning of the 21st century, we do have a choice: we can go back to the broken culture and ideologies of 20th century Europe, or we can choose to become classically liberal societies.
Large nations, largely created by authoritarian governments and wars, are not an immutable fixture. Power in Britain is devolving, and regions in continental Europe are also demanding and receiving more political independence. US states used to be quite independent from each other, and we can return to that. Again, we face choices that determine the future of the US, Europe, and the world for a long time to come.
Communism never works; it always infringes on people's rights by its very nature. Communal living, with voluntary membership, does work. But that's not communism, that is a personal choice, a choice that libertarians not only tolerate, but many of us actually encourage.
Yes, which is why government should be mostly local. Americans understood this when this nation was founded. That's why the Constitution originally demanded one representative for every 30000 citizens, and why the power of the federal government was so sharply limited. We can return to that ideal. And others around the world are waking up to the desirability of more local government and the rejection of the large, centralized nation state as well.