The threat of serious financial crime is constantly evolving, as new technologies emerge and criminals seek to nefariously exploit them.
Translation: "OMG, people are transacting business in unregulated free markets without the heavy hand of government being able to scoop out its pound of flesh or pay off its cronies."
The Australian government proposed a set of reforms on Thursday which will close a gap in regulation and bring digital currency exchange providers under the remit of the Australian Transactions and Reporting Analysis Centre.
Well, good luck with that. I'm sure it's going to be just as effective as trying to repeal the laws of mathematics.
Mr. Keenan: you're an ignorant, totalitarian prick, and you'll be the laughing stock of future generations, provided that you are lucky enough that they'll remember you at all.
In the NHS you get care for as long as you need it, free of charge if you're a UK citizen*.
Correct. But "as long as you need it" is not sufficient for US voters: US voters want treatment "as long as they want it and as they want it". There is a big difference. US patients often want heroic end-of-life treatments and the latest technology and gadgets, none of which is actually needed. Furthermore, the UK has a significant private healthcare sector, which provide higher quality services to those who want them and can pay for them.
It almost certainly will cost a lot less than in the US largely because the NHS is more efficient than a million doctors, hospitals, insurers and drug companies all spending on advertising and sending bills to each other and all extracting profits from the patients.
Well, yes: the NHS is a nationalized system with public providers and strict cost controls (the Beveridge model). An NHS-like model is a political non-starter even among the most progressive and left wing voters and politicians in the US.
People pushing for single payer in the US aren't talking about such a model. The model they are talking about is one in which drug companies, hospitals, and doctors continue to operate privately, make massive private profits, and use advertising, while tax payers are coerced to pay for it pretty much without limit. And that is really the worst of all possible "single payer" systems.
C. auris is "deadly" in the same way doctors in a hospital are "deadly": if you are sick and in a hospital, there is a significant chance that they will kill you.
But calling it "deadly" without qualification makes it sound like it's a significant threat to the population at large, and it is not.
Candida infections are often a sign of some underlying problem. For example, Candida infections are strongly associated with both obesity and diabetes, through multiple mechanisms; there are other common causes. Treating people for Candida without diagnosing and addressing the underlying problem or behavioral issue is irresponsible.
For the rest of us, it's so bad that we have shorter adult lifespans and higher infant mortality rates.
The idea that differences in life expectancy are mostly due to large differences in the quality of medical are are not supported by data. In fact, they are largely determined by public health issues and lifestyle choices: obesity, tobacco, alcohol, sedentary lifestyle, lack of exercise, drug addiction, communicable diseases, national origin, STDs, single parenthood, stressful jobs, driving, guns, etc.
Furthermore, the bottom 98% also receive vastly more sophisticated and costly medical care than people in countries with much cheaper health care systems and longer life expectancies.
US fear of socialised medicine makes them believe paying more than twice as much for the same outcomes with millions of people denied access is actually "superior".
Nice theory, but utterly wrong. The US has a huge public healthcare system (socialized medicine) that spends more per American citizen than many European countries or New Zealand. So, if your theory was true, the US government could simply extend that public healthcare system to the entire population, just like in Europe, without changing anything about the existing private health insurance system. The private system would just go away if everybody got everything covered through taxes they already pay.
The problem with US healthcare is precisely that the US system of socialized medicine lacks sufficient cost controls, and forcing more people into such an inefficient system would make things work.
And the reasons the US system is so costly are also fairly straightforward: the US has powerful medical, healthcare, and pharma lobbies that get their way; and the US has powerful lobbies for the elderly who also get their way. And their way is that they want everything to be done to "save people's lives", as opposed to saying things like "cancer treatment doesn't make sense for you", or "it's probably nothing, you don't need an MRI", or "a 20 year old generic drug will do, you don't need the latest patented drug".
I think it's hilarious that all the self-styled "libertarians" here are freaking out about private businesses choosing not to host material they see as potentially harmful to their bottom line.
Except, of course, that the domain name system is anything but a libertarian construct.
But don't worry, it will be augmented by a system that is not controllable by either governments or big corporations.
And that fact, as far as the company is concerned, exempts it from judgment over who its clients are -- even if those clients are literally Nazis
Why do socialists and communists get a free pass in these discussions? If you are going to talk about kicking totalitarians off the net, do it for all of them: Nazis, communists, and socialists.
Mankind does not learn from past mistakes in this regard. In the mid 1940s, the US released huge volumes of DDT into the environment. The chemical caused the shells of (wild) bird eggs to be super-thin and especially brittle and was responsible for the near-extinction of the Bald Eagle.
And the political reaction was hysterical: rather than a measured approach towards DDT use, we ended up effectively banning it, costing the lives of millions of people.
In the 1950s, the drug thalidomide became widely available - resulting in literally thousands of individuals being born with mal-formed limbs, unable to care for themselves.
The drug was not approved in the US. But the political reaction, and outright ban for several decades, instead of a limited approval caused enormous suffering to people.
Bottom line: the moment we put profit ahead of public safety, scandals follow.
Neither DDT nor thalidomide were particularly important for profits, in the sense the companies that made them could easily make profits with producing many other chemicals/drugs. The reason these chemicals were popular and big sellers was because they were very effective at something. The knee jerk reaction to them when their problems were discovered caused unnecessary and preventable human suffering on a massive scale.
As a sophisticated society, with a well-developed and functioning scientific community, there should be no excuses for the situation we see described in this article.
What you describe is not a "sophisticated society with a well-developed and functioning scientific community", it's a society of irrational Luddites that cowers in fear in their cold caves. A society with a well-developed and functioning scientific community recognizes that excessive risk reduction is not rational and ends up causing more harm than good.
The FDA and EPA are lousy mechanisms for making the necessary tradeoffs between safety and social benefits, because they are politically driven entities whose policy making is dominated by nincompoops like you. Regulations aren't the only way, or the best way, of preventing injury from new products. What we need is far stronger legal liability for harm caused by new products, and weaker regulations to make it easier to introduce new products.
Yes, that's what I keep telling you: before any further discussion is possible, you need to do your homework. Right now, you speak from a position of complete ignorance. I'm glad you realize it.
Please re-read my post and respond on the main point
I already responded to it: your coercion argument is unsound in ways that have nothing to do with libertarianism.
More importantly, though, you cannot cherry-pick libertarian principles and policy positions and then apply them out of context. As a libertarian, I want legalized physician assisted suicide only if the health care system is fully privatized and largely unregulated; as long as Medicare/Medicaid exist, I want physician assisted suicide to remain illegal.
Honestly, your position is as absurd to me as mine is to you
Your position isn't absurd to me at all. I know pretty much what you believe and why you believe it because I used to believe it myself. That's also how I know that it is wrong.
We are going to have to work backward to find which of us has a flawed axiom.
I have stated my axioms: they are those of classical liberalism, aka libertarianism in the US. You obviously don't understand them since you keep making assertions that aren't true. The only thing that needs "debugging" here is your understanding of what classical liberalism is, and you will have to do that by reading some books about it instead of fabricating statements out of thin air. Boaz "The Libertarian Mind" is a good introduction. You can find more reading here and here.
I thought Google was all about the diversity. Are you telling me they don't believe older workers can accomplish the same as younger workers?
Google is basically a company run by and for aging college kids, except that they are now millionaires and can get away with even more shit than they could in college. That's why everything is provided for them on campus: food, laundry, etc. It's also why employees at Google are treated as immature kids. Age discrimination is part of Google's corporate DNA.
I'm going to continue this discussion, but I'm saying up front: there's a strong tendency among libertarians online to declare that anyone who disagrees with them just doesn't understand libertarianism. I'm continuing this on the assumption that you're open to critique.
The question isn't whether you "understand" libertarianism but whether you are talking about it at all. There are different forms of libertarianism, stated clearly in a number of books and publications (Boaz and Kibbe might work for you). Pick whichever suits your argument best and then start arguing from it. Then take the definition of "crony capitalism" (I gave it). Then try to connect the two with a logical argument.
Where you most lack understanding, however, is not in libertarianism, but in economics, history, and political science. That's much harder to correct.
Would you agree that opposition to mortgage regulations is a libertarian position?
Yes, but it's also a position of many conservatives and socialists if you look around the world. So I don't see what this has to do with libertarianism.
Furthermore, mortgage regulations, like many regulations, are also an example of crony capitalism and a source of financial instability and harm to consumers.
Your example is irrelevant to the thesis "Libertarians ARE the crony capitalism gang."
And otherwise, I don't see what your example has to do with libertarians. Libertarians aren't opposed to unions. Beyond that, your comment doesn't get libertarianism wrong, it gets history and economics wrong.
And what does the legality of doctor assisted suicide have to do with the thesis we are discussing, namely that "Libertarians are the crony capitalist gang"?
In the past, libertarians tell me that it ought to be legal for a doctor to help someone who wants to die kill themselves,
Yes, and so do many socialists, conservatives, liberals, and people of all stripes. You yourself seem to agree, because nowhere do you make any argument against doctor assisted suicide per se; you simply voice concerns that it might be abused as a cover for murder. Your example has nothing to do with libertarianism. Beyond that, I'm not going to discuss the legality of legalizing assisted suicide with you, except to say that your argument against it needs a lot of work because it is an incoherent mess.
"That's because Libertarians ARE the crony capitalism gang."
Defending that statement requires linking the actual positions of libertarians to the actual meaning of "crony capitalism".
What you have done is fabricated all sorts of incorrect statements about libertarianism, falsely equating it with anarchy or kratocracy, and using an incorrect definition of "crony capitalism".
Your experience is irrelevant: stick to the facts and stop confabulating, fabricating, or inventing things.
The particular usage of the land by the previous owners really does not matter. "Oh, we ran a business so we ignored the guy with the surfboard under his arm walking through our parking lot" is not a counterargument,
The guy with the surfboard under his arm walking through the parking lot has permission because it is a business that's open to the public. Customers to private businesses do not acquire easements.
If one single person can testify they crossed that land for years to get to the public beach without asking permission, that is sufficient grounds for a judge recognizing an easement
Even if an easement had come into existence that way, it would only apply to that person.
In my experience, liberty for individuals is not something that most individuals can defend on their own. It takes a systemic defense of liberty to maximize individual liberty. We give that systemic defense the name "representative government." It's not a perfect system, but I've seen no evidence that anything else works anywhere near as well. And Libertarians who advocate against it
Libertarians aren't anarchists; libertarians don't advocate against representative government. Libertarians advocate against government intervention in the economy. That is, libertarians advocate against crony capitalism.
They want to instead empower the "economic might makes right" that is the root of crony capitalism.
"Economic might makes right" is not a libertarian principle or concept.
Libertarian ideology and philosophy has been clearly stated by a number of authors. Pick any one of them and then link it to the actual definition of "crony capitalism" by a coherent argument. We can take this up again when you have done that.
Right now, you obviously don't understand neither what "libertarianism" means nor what "crony capitalism" means.
I stand by my statement that the primary source of crony capitalism is an unintentional but inevitable byproduct of progressive of fascist policies.
Libertarianism is free market capitalism and government only by contract. Libertarianism doesn't believe in any sort of collectivist rights
There are different forms of libertarianism, but that is one of them..
there is no "public good," only what the individuals decide to do.
Not quite. You make the incorrect assumption that the public good is best advanced through government action; history shows that to be false. Libertarians say that the public good is best advanced when individuals can act freely.
How is that *not* the definition of crony capitalism?
Well, it just isn't.
"crony capitalism
noun derogatory
an economic system characterized by close, mutually advantageous relationships between business leaders and government officials."
In democracies, crony capitalism can only happen when people like you convince more and more voters to place economic power in the hands of government officials, usually justifying it as being "for the public good"; that economic power is then used for collusion between business leaders and said government officials.
Libertarianism is the antidote to crony capitalism because libertarianism demands stripping government officials of economic power, and hence stripping them of the ability to hand out favors to business leaders.
You'd think that someone with a net worth of $1.5b wouldn't be so petty and stupid to cause himself such bad press.
Heck, the smart thing for him would be to turn the whole property into "Khosla beach", add some nice private facilities, and close it off temporarily for "private functions" on the couple of days that he actually might have time to spend there. Instant good press.
But as far as I can tell, Sun Microsystems attracted jerks like rotten meat attracts flies.
The previous owners ran a business. You don't acquire an easement when you enter a private business. That's because you acquire an easement only if you haven't been given explicit permission to enter a property, but you do so anyway and repeatedly.
Slashdot Mirror
Translation: "OMG, people are transacting business in unregulated free markets without the heavy hand of government being able to scoop out its pound of flesh or pay off its cronies."
Well, good luck with that. I'm sure it's going to be just as effective as trying to repeal the laws of mathematics.
Mr. Keenan: you're an ignorant, totalitarian prick, and you'll be the laughing stock of future generations, provided that you are lucky enough that they'll remember you at all.
Spoken like the totalitarian prick that you are.
Correct. But "as long as you need it" is not sufficient for US voters: US voters want treatment "as long as they want it and as they want it". There is a big difference. US patients often want heroic end-of-life treatments and the latest technology and gadgets, none of which is actually needed. Furthermore, the UK has a significant private healthcare sector, which provide higher quality services to those who want them and can pay for them.
Well, yes: the NHS is a nationalized system with public providers and strict cost controls (the Beveridge model). An NHS-like model is a political non-starter even among the most progressive and left wing voters and politicians in the US.
People pushing for single payer in the US aren't talking about such a model. The model they are talking about is one in which drug companies, hospitals, and doctors continue to operate privately, make massive private profits, and use advertising, while tax payers are coerced to pay for it pretty much without limit. And that is really the worst of all possible "single payer" systems.
C. auris is "deadly" in the same way doctors in a hospital are "deadly": if you are sick and in a hospital, there is a significant chance that they will kill you.
But calling it "deadly" without qualification makes it sound like it's a significant threat to the population at large, and it is not.
Stay out of hospitals and you won't get C. auris.
Candida infections are often a sign of some underlying problem. For example, Candida infections are strongly associated with both obesity and diabetes, through multiple mechanisms; there are other common causes. Treating people for Candida without diagnosing and addressing the underlying problem or behavioral issue is irresponsible.
The idea that differences in life expectancy are mostly due to large differences in the quality of medical are are not supported by data. In fact, they are largely determined by public health issues and lifestyle choices: obesity, tobacco, alcohol, sedentary lifestyle, lack of exercise, drug addiction, communicable diseases, national origin, STDs, single parenthood, stressful jobs, driving, guns, etc.
Furthermore, the bottom 98% also receive vastly more sophisticated and costly medical care than people in countries with much cheaper health care systems and longer life expectancies.
Nice theory, but utterly wrong. The US has a huge public healthcare system (socialized medicine) that spends more per American citizen than many European countries or New Zealand. So, if your theory was true, the US government could simply extend that public healthcare system to the entire population, just like in Europe, without changing anything about the existing private health insurance system. The private system would just go away if everybody got everything covered through taxes they already pay.
The problem with US healthcare is precisely that the US system of socialized medicine lacks sufficient cost controls, and forcing more people into such an inefficient system would make things work.
And the reasons the US system is so costly are also fairly straightforward: the US has powerful medical, healthcare, and pharma lobbies that get their way; and the US has powerful lobbies for the elderly who also get their way. And their way is that they want everything to be done to "save people's lives", as opposed to saying things like "cancer treatment doesn't make sense for you", or "it's probably nothing, you don't need an MRI", or "a 20 year old generic drug will do, you don't need the latest patented drug".
Except, of course, that the domain name system is anything but a libertarian construct.
But don't worry, it will be augmented by a system that is not controllable by either governments or big corporations.
Why do socialists and communists get a free pass in these discussions? If you are going to talk about kicking totalitarians off the net, do it for all of them: Nazis, communists, and socialists.
And the political reaction was hysterical: rather than a measured approach towards DDT use, we ended up effectively banning it, costing the lives of millions of people.
The drug was not approved in the US. But the political reaction, and outright ban for several decades, instead of a limited approval caused enormous suffering to people.
Neither DDT nor thalidomide were particularly important for profits, in the sense the companies that made them could easily make profits with producing many other chemicals/drugs. The reason these chemicals were popular and big sellers was because they were very effective at something. The knee jerk reaction to them when their problems were discovered caused unnecessary and preventable human suffering on a massive scale.
What you describe is not a "sophisticated society with a well-developed and functioning scientific community", it's a society of irrational Luddites that cowers in fear in their cold caves. A society with a well-developed and functioning scientific community recognizes that excessive risk reduction is not rational and ends up causing more harm than good.
The FDA and EPA are lousy mechanisms for making the necessary tradeoffs between safety and social benefits, because they are politically driven entities whose policy making is dominated by nincompoops like you. Regulations aren't the only way, or the best way, of preventing injury from new products. What we need is far stronger legal liability for harm caused by new products, and weaker regulations to make it easier to introduce new products.
Yes, that's what I keep telling you: before any further discussion is possible, you need to do your homework. Right now, you speak from a position of complete ignorance. I'm glad you realize it.
I already responded to it: your coercion argument is unsound in ways that have nothing to do with libertarianism.
More importantly, though, you cannot cherry-pick libertarian principles and policy positions and then apply them out of context. As a libertarian, I want legalized physician assisted suicide only if the health care system is fully privatized and largely unregulated; as long as Medicare/Medicaid exist, I want physician assisted suicide to remain illegal.
Your position isn't absurd to me at all. I know pretty much what you believe and why you believe it because I used to believe it myself. That's also how I know that it is wrong.
I have stated my axioms: they are those of classical liberalism, aka libertarianism in the US. You obviously don't understand them since you keep making assertions that aren't true. The only thing that needs "debugging" here is your understanding of what classical liberalism is, and you will have to do that by reading some books about it instead of fabricating statements out of thin air. Boaz "The Libertarian Mind" is a good introduction. You can find more reading here and here.
Google is basically a company run by and for aging college kids, except that they are now millionaires and can get away with even more shit than they could in college. That's why everything is provided for them on campus: food, laundry, etc. It's also why employees at Google are treated as immature kids. Age discrimination is part of Google's corporate DNA.
The question isn't whether you "understand" libertarianism but whether you are talking about it at all. There are different forms of libertarianism, stated clearly in a number of books and publications (Boaz and Kibbe might work for you). Pick whichever suits your argument best and then start arguing from it. Then take the definition of "crony capitalism" (I gave it). Then try to connect the two with a logical argument.
Where you most lack understanding, however, is not in libertarianism, but in economics, history, and political science. That's much harder to correct.
Yes, but it's also a position of many conservatives and socialists if you look around the world. So I don't see what this has to do with libertarianism.
Furthermore, mortgage regulations, like many regulations, are also an example of crony capitalism and a source of financial instability and harm to consumers.
Your example is irrelevant to the thesis "Libertarians ARE the crony capitalism gang."
And otherwise, I don't see what your example has to do with libertarians. Libertarians aren't opposed to unions. Beyond that, your comment doesn't get libertarianism wrong, it gets history and economics wrong.
And what does the legality of doctor assisted suicide have to do with the thesis we are discussing, namely that "Libertarians are the crony capitalist gang"?
Yes, and so do many socialists, conservatives, liberals, and people of all stripes. You yourself seem to agree, because nowhere do you make any argument against doctor assisted suicide per se; you simply voice concerns that it might be abused as a cover for murder. Your example has nothing to do with libertarianism. Beyond that, I'm not going to discuss the legality of legalizing assisted suicide with you, except to say that your argument against it needs a lot of work because it is an incoherent mess.
"That's because Libertarians ARE the crony capitalism gang."
Defending that statement requires linking the actual positions of libertarians to the actual meaning of "crony capitalism".
What you have done is fabricated all sorts of incorrect statements about libertarianism, falsely equating it with anarchy or kratocracy, and using an incorrect definition of "crony capitalism".
Your experience is irrelevant: stick to the facts and stop confabulating, fabricating, or inventing things.
Well, you have conclusively proved one thing: you are both utterly ignorant and incapable of engaging in a rational argument.
The guy with the surfboard under his arm walking through the parking lot has permission because it is a business that's open to the public. Customers to private businesses do not acquire easements.
Even if an easement had come into existence that way, it would only apply to that person.
Libertarians aren't anarchists; libertarians don't advocate against representative government. Libertarians advocate against government intervention in the economy. That is, libertarians advocate against crony capitalism.
"Economic might makes right" is not a libertarian principle or concept.
Libertarian ideology and philosophy has been clearly stated by a number of authors. Pick any one of them and then link it to the actual definition of "crony capitalism" by a coherent argument. We can take this up again when you have done that.
Right now, you obviously don't understand neither what "libertarianism" means nor what "crony capitalism" means.
I stand by my statement that the primary source of crony capitalism is an unintentional but inevitable byproduct of progressive of fascist policies.
There are different forms of libertarianism, but that is one of them..
Not quite. You make the incorrect assumption that the public good is best advanced through government action; history shows that to be false. Libertarians say that the public good is best advanced when individuals can act freely.
Well, it just isn't.
"crony capitalism noun derogatory an economic system characterized by close, mutually advantageous relationships between business leaders and government officials."
In democracies, crony capitalism can only happen when people like you convince more and more voters to place economic power in the hands of government officials, usually justifying it as being "for the public good"; that economic power is then used for collusion between business leaders and said government officials.
Libertarianism is the antidote to crony capitalism because libertarianism demands stripping government officials of economic power, and hence stripping them of the ability to hand out favors to business leaders.
So? I was suggesting he accept that and do something good for his fellow citizens.
Take your own advice.
Heck, the smart thing for him would be to turn the whole property into "Khosla beach", add some nice private facilities, and close it off temporarily for "private functions" on the couple of days that he actually might have time to spend there. Instant good press.
But as far as I can tell, Sun Microsystems attracted jerks like rotten meat attracts flies.
The previous owners ran a business. You don't acquire an easement when you enter a private business. That's because you acquire an easement only if you haven't been given explicit permission to enter a property, but you do so anyway and repeatedly.