I refuse to believe that change is bad. Change is the one thing in life that we can depend on. Our constant companion. I embrace change of any kind. Besides I prefer Mormon Tea to coffee. As long as Ma Huang is not affected I will continue to bask in the warmth of the ever changing climate.
Yes. As usual the law of diminishing returns applies, but I don't think that is the only reason we have seen such slow gains in performance. Somehow it has become accepted that going above 100 - 150 or so TDP is just unacceptable. For some applications it certainly is and I am curerntly running my CPU at the lowest speed and voltage it is capable of to save money on my electric bill. I only go above 1.2 Ghz when I have a reason, like playing a computer game or video compression etc.
Compared to what we used to expect out of a single generation Intel's slow, steady gains are just not very impressive. This is not the future that science fiction was expecting. I find it kind of depressing.
It used to be that one of the reasons I wanted to continue living was to see the amazing improvements in computer power that I assumed I might live to see. Now it seems like we cannot expect much improvement, at least not without some kind of fundamental breakthrough that may not happen at all this century.
One thing is certain. If things continue like this traditional artificial intelligence will always remain out of reach. Only wetware, connectionist, biology inspired processing has any chance.
Only embarrassingly parallel algorithms may show any significant gains although we haven't seen any major jumps in the number of processing cores either.
I suggest that it is about time programmers started getting used to coding in assembly once again. Order of magnitude improvements in processing power are over. Cue the nearly imperceptible gains where it takes decades before a difference in processing speed is actually noticable.
This is the first I've heard of RSFQ computers. I'll have to look into them. It certainly sounds interesting. It's starting to look like only a fundamental paradigm shift like that will allow us to continue into the sort of future that many of us like to read about in science fiction.
The founding fathers weren't libertarians and did include rules about things like taxation that modern-day-US-style-libertarians condemn as stuff straight out of hell.
The founding fathers were Libertarians or they were as near as makes no difference. Remember, you are talking about a group of people who were willing to fight and die and fill the streets with blood over a tax dispute. And not any sort of tax like we have now where half the year you are working solely for the sake of the government. More the equivalent if a miniscule VAT. Just imagine how such extremists would be viewed today?
The majority of Libertarians are limited government Libertarians and the majority of limited government Libertarians would be pretty content with the US political system in the late 18th century. I certainly would be. I think what most of us want is simply to reboot and go back to the system we had then, with the exception of the "right" to own slaves of course. Most of us are fans of John Locke just as the founders were.
Of course with the benefit of hindsight we see that their system of preventing the slide into tyranny was ineffectual. We'd probably want to try a slightly different system to avoid an ultra-minimalist government eventually snowballing into the quasi-fascist proto police state we have now. Although such a slide may be inevitable. I believe this is one of the arguments for anarcho-libertarianism: that once you have a government at all it will eventually become a dystopian police state. Just a matter of time.
Unlike terms such as "liberal", "conservative", "republican", and "democrat" which are open to many interpretations and may mean different things in different parts of the world, "libertarian" has a very specific meaning. Basically it means that you support a system pretty much like 18th century America with the possible exception of substituting voluntary contributions for forced taxation. You are not a Libertarian if you don't support the principle of voluntarism, of non-aggression. You are not a Libertarian if you believe that you or anyone have the right to another human being's labor or time without their agreement and or compensation. IOW, You cannot believe in slavery, not even on a part time basis. That's not to say that Libertarians wouldn't settle on a compromise that involves a very small amount of coerced taxation if a society will except nothing else, but if they don't believe that such coercion is wrong they are not really Libertarians.
Power consumption scales with the *cube* of the clock speed, so you pretty quickly run into a power/heat wall.
Bullshit. There is no wall. I don't care all that much about heat/power/noise. I have a water cooling setup and I'm prepared to move to phase change if necessary. What I want is for Moore's Law to mean something again. Giving up on clock speed was a bad move on Intel's part. It's just sad that we still haven't made it to 5 Ghz. This whole shift from raw performance at any price to performance per watt or even wattage walls that cannot be exceeded just sucks.
I haven't bought a new CPU since my Wolfdale Core 2 Duo that I run overclocked at 4 Ghz when I need performance or at 1.2 Ghz, 0.9 volts when I don't. It was nice to get off the upgrade treadmill for a while, but it has gotten old. I want a 10 Ghz processor (without reducing performance per cycle), and I want it now.
Does anyone have one of those old Intel roadmaps that promised something like 12 Ghz by now? Staying under 4 Ghz for all of eternity is not what we were promised. I haven't owned an AMD CPU since they were king of the hill, but I applaud this performance at any price philosophy. Efficiency is great. I love efficiency. If/when VW ever imports their XL1 to America I'll be first in line to buy one, but I wouldn't want it to be the only car available. I like to save money on petrol, but I also might want to actually enjoy driving every once in a while.
I do realize that Intel's CPUs are just as fast while using a lot less power and that this new AMD processor is the equivalent of a car that drives like a Prius with the fuel economy of a Lambo, but it's a start in the right direction. If you can't beat Intel at their own game then change the game. I like the idea that someone has the balls to say, "Power be damned, we're going to make the fastest processor we know how to make. Full stop."
You seem to have forgotten aboout Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana. NH is Libertarian only for the East Coast. I could never live there due to the suspicionless roadblocks and stop and identify laws. There is a small but active community opposing the roadblocks, which is nice, but they still have them. Live Free or Die my ass.
Would you consider it theft if a single person, presumably poor, entered your house and stole most of your possessions? What about 100 thieves? 10,000 thieves? What if everyone in town got a cut of the proceeds from seizing most of what you thought you owned? Would it still be theft or would it be a way for the community to provide for itself? Would you willing to be poor, genuinely poor, in order to improve the standard of living for those who might have been even poorer?
I'm still only going to give you a small portion of my income. 0.1% should suffice. And my 1000 friends here will too, so you'll be fully funded instantly - such is the power of collectivism. And once you don't need it anymore you'll work with net gain by yourself again, because we're living in a capitalistic economy. And society won't have a valuable contributor starved, plus one of your 7 might be the next Einstein, so it'd be a shame if he/she missed out on a complete high quality education because it wasn't free or very cheap.
What you are describing could be done with charities. There is no need for the government to get involved in such things. The problem is when you start forcing people to be generous it becomes indistinguishable from slavery and slavery is wrong.
I only wish that we had advanced enough as a species to finally give up on the temptation of slave labor. Slave labor may be very practical. A lot of impressive things can be done with it. But it is so very wrong. It can only be justified by presuming that some of us are naturally masters and others slaves. I resent being a slave, no matter what the alleged benefits are supposed to be for myself and for all of society. If slavery is the price of an ideal society then it's one that is too high IMO. I have no right to demand that others serve me without compensation or voluntary agreement and neither does anyone else. The right to enslave others is not a right that anyone has IMO.
That is the limited government Libertarians, which I believe represents the majority, but there are also anarcho-libertarians which are basically anarchists who have faith in the market to solve many of the problems that would have traditionally been solved by a government of some kind. I've always found it to be a bit of a tough sell even to myself. It would be nice if it worked, but I have my doubts and, unlike limited government libertarianism, it has never been tried AFAIK, at least in modern times.
The only problem I have with the limited government thing is how do you prevent the seemingly inevitable slide into tyranny, into all powerful police states which basically own its citizens in every way that matters. Pieces of paper like a "constitution" will always be reinterpreted and/or ignored as is convenient for those in power. A piece of paper cannot stop the natural process of the growth of government like a rolling snowball. Human nature makes such growth inevitable.
We libertarians tend to believe that the initial US system, minus the slavery and prejudices, is close enough to ideal to make a good target. In that sense we are the ultimate conservatives. We want to do a complete reboot and go back to the very start of our republic as it was in the late 18th to early 19th century. Things were far from perfect. Life is never that. But it was based on most of the same ideas, inspired by the writings of John Locke about natural rights and represents the sort of society we ourselves would like to live in.
I have no interest in an echo chamber, but one person arguing against 500-1000 or something like that is not practical. 50 strawman arguments per hour cannot be refuted by one or two on the other side. It is no longer an exchange of ideas when one side so outnumbers the other.
I don't think most libertarians are particularly shy about defending our arguments. The problem is that the other side is now so numerous that they clearly feel they don't have to even make arguments. All they have to do is agree that the other side can be dismissed as a bunch of rich, elitist, nutjobs or whatever without actually tackling the arguments they disagree with by using logical argument.
There used to be enough libertarians here as a percentage that political arguments could get interesting. Now there are so many mainstream Democrats and Republicans that any form of real discussion gets buried in partisan bickering and any Libertarians can simply be dismissed and ignored as a bit of stray noise.
It should be pointed out that most libertarians aren't completely against taxation, they're against the amount of taxation that's currently ongoing.
Citation needed. What are you basing this on? One of the core Libertarian ideas is that of Voluntarism. Taxation, as a form of protection money, goes against that principle. Ultimately a citizen who doesn't pay taxes gets locked up in a cage, possibly for the rest of his life (assuming he refuses to pay taxes after he's released). Locking up an innocent person because they don't give you money is most certainly not freedom or liberty.
If you are locked up when you don't surrender part of your labor to the government then you are no more than a slave.
Does this mean that I would oppose reducing the size of the government such that a 5% flat tax would be enough to fund everything? No. That's an issue of pragmatism. Any improvement on the current system would be welcome, but that doesn't mean that I do not oppose the very principle of taxation. I consider it as wrong as an sort of theft or thuggery.
It can be justified as a means to an end, but what is wrong for an individual is still wrong when a group does it. When you live in a society where theft is legal as long as it is committed by a large enough group, by what principle can you argue that theft by an individual is wrong? If a thief enters your home and robs you at gunpoint how can you criticize that person? They are just doing the same as the government does to everyone every year.
Of course one could argue that the government owns everything already. That we and all of our labors and possessions are already government property. If the government owns everything then taxes are just their way of taking a bit of what is theirs. We can only be thankful that they let us keep any of it at all and that we are allowed to even exist.
First of all most of your criticisms are more toward anarcho-libertarianism than limited government libertarianism. In a limited government form there can be laws against pollution, maybe ones with bigger teeth than we have in our existing quasi-fascist playground.
Part of the GP's point is that Libertarianism doesn't handle failure well.
And our system does? Thank goodness for that or we would have things like superfund sites and rampant pollution on land and in water. Our current system is not noticeably better at handling "failures".
Pollution of other people's property as a harm - ok so first you'd have to prove there is pollution, prove there is a harm, go to court, sue for damages, and wait.
In our current system Corporations enjoy complete immunity from prosecution for doing things like dumping dangerous chemicals. The executives are IMMUNE. In any sort of Libertarian society there would be no such immunity, no "limited liability", no corporate personhood. Those responsible can be fined and/or imprisoned in a limited government libertarian society and they can be fined in class action lawsuits (or whatever) in anarcho-libertarianism.
In our current system and in any other system I can think of proof, some kind of evidence would be deemed necessary. Are you suggesting that anyone accused should automatically be assumed guilty? Any just system would require some kind of trial before punishing someone dumping mercury.
Of course in our current system the government has a nice cozy relationship with our super-citizens, the corporations, who might decide to donate to your next campaign or give you a highly lucrative job after you step down from public office.
Basically, a full blown libertarian society would be a complete clusterfuck legal system. It introduces a positive feedback loop where the unscrupulous are rewarded, like today's Wall Street.
Or IOW like our current system where the unscrupulous are rewarded? Do you have in mind a system where they are not rewarded?
You'd have to get attorneys to write contracts for everything you do, attorneys to review contracts for every obligation you enter into, and then wind up suing everybody all the time because of perceived differences in whether each party lived up to their end of the contract.
This sounds an awful lot like our current system.
corporations can and will lie, cheat, fake their numbers, withhold information and outright swindle the public all the time.
Just like they do now? The only difference being that the executives responsible would have no immunity without limited liability and can lose everything they own if they get caught.
Modern corporations are only concerned about quarterly results, barely even annual, and without any regulations at all the stock market would collapse to pre-limited-liability corporations, sometime back in the 17th century.
Corporations as they currently exist have been compared to sociopaths. A very apt comparison IMO. They act without regard to anything but profit. But even a sociopath has to deal with the consequences of their evil actions. Not so for corporations. They can do whatever they want without much in the way of consequences for the individuals involved. Limited liability was never a good idea. It should be eliminated immediately. Luckily sociopath corporations would not be encouraged in a libertarian society. No one would be around to protect them from themselves.
That would be the eventual result of an fully unregulated stock market, the days when owner's bore 100% of the risk and could be wiped out at any time due to forces beyond their control.
If you are afraid of risk then don't gamble. That owners bear 100% of the risk is how it should be. You complain about evil corporations and then want to give them more power and shield them from any risk?
As far as I can tell Tea Partiers are just a subset of Republicans whose ideas tend a bit more towards the Libertarian direction. They are not Libertarians. This article is specifically about Libertarians. No argument you make against Tea Party people has any relevance here. If you think we Libertarians care even slightly about the so called Tea Party you are mistaken. If you think we identify in even the slightest way with Republicans you are mistaken.
This is precisely the reason that I am a Libertarian. I don't believe that anyone else has more right to my own labor than I do. I don't believe that anyone else has the right to tell me what I must do or not do. I already have parents. I don't need a parental government to direct my every action to make sure that the majority of voters agree with it. I don't need a busybody government watching my every action to make sure it is consistent with the beliefs of the majority. Unless my actions directly involve other people it is no one's business but my own.
And libertarians by and large are fine with taxes.
Huh?! At best, a very tiny flat tax might be tolerated grudgingly for pragmatic reasons, but if you are someone who is fine with taxes as long as the programs they support aren't wasteful you sound more like a Republican than a Libertarian.
I am not a Libertarian for any sort of practical reason however. I am a Libertarian because I believe in the principle voluntarism and the wrongness of any sort of slavery and the rightness of just leaving people alone to live their lives. My political views are just a logical consequence of not believing that one human being has the inherent right to control another human being. Everything else follows from those principles.
As long as I am not hurting/attacking others I want the right to live my life how I want without having to obey some master telling me what I must do and how I must do it. I might voluntarily contribute to a kind of voluntary social safety net insurance program if I have enough extra money and I'm not struggling to barely survive myself, but I don't want to be forced to give to a particular charity. Forced charity kind of ruins the point of being generous and kind in the first place. I don't want to be forced to do anything unless I am causing some kind of problem in the society.
What about my right to live my life without interference from you? I have no wish to be your slave or anyone elses whether or not the cause is good and just or evil and cruel.
In the US I cannot do very much without permission from the government. If I am not the property of the government then I am something that is nearly indistinguishable from something that the government owns and controls in every way.
I believe that all men are equal and that we all have the same right to be left alone and not persecuted by the majority for just trying to live our lives in the manner of our choosing. I don't see some group of people as "more equal" than I am who can be my master and order me to do as they wish. What right do they have to order me around in that way? What makes them superior to me? The Divine Right of Kings? The fact that they have a large number of armed servants who would happily murder me or put me in a cage if ordered to do so? Does might make right?
Well yeah, by and large the libertarian movement is made up of people who historically wielded more power over others
Last time I checked something like half or at least some massive percentage of Libertarian Party members were computer programmers / software engineers. Do software engineers wield power over others? Over their computers perhaps. I've never, ever, met a rich or powerful Libertarian. Most rich people seem to be Republicans, although quite a few are Democrats as well.
Ron Paul isn't the hero of my revolution. Unfortunately the party has rarely had good candidates. Most Libertarians are just not the kind of people who want to be politicians. Some of us view most practical political action within the current system as 100% useless. It is quite clear that the majority of Americans and, frankly, Earthlings, prefer tyranny to freedom.
The Free State project OTOH hints at a different kind of fight. Going outside the system. What we need is a Libertarian equivalent of the Socialist commune. If we want a free society the US is NOT the place to start one. Fascism rules here while the two major parties bicker about where to move the deck chairs as the ship sinks to the bottom.
The majority of people don't want freedom. They never have and they never will. Only a very, very tiny minority of people truly want to live in a free society. This is why the Great American Experiment has failed so spectacularly. It always lacked popular support.
I think the only way for such a society to exist is as a small community of like minded people. This is why the Free State Project is basically a good idea. The whole NH thing didn't work of course because there aren't enough Libertarians to form a majority against the pro-government people in NH or anywhere else. Most of the bad laws are federal anyway. The state would have to literally secede and be able to fight the army successfully in order to do so.
If there is ever to be another Libertarians society, something like 18th century US system, we would have to basically seize our own piece of land and be prepared to fight and die to defend it. Because we are such a small minority on this planet the only way to do that would be to choose a place that no large state is really willing to fight to keep.
That means some remote uninhabited island, probably in the Southern Ocean or a piece of Antarctica itself. I just can't picture a large nation going to war to defend either the Antarctic Treaty or a claim to such remote and desolate land.
Unfortunately, in addition to building a permanent settlement in some of the harshest conditions on the planet we would have to start manufacturing weapons almost immediately to anticipate the inevitable war.
If interplanetary space travel ever becomes practical and affordable we would have the option of starting a free society off world, but those conditions would be even more harsh than Antarctica.
I'm reading these comments and all I can say is "wow". Libertarians used to make up a much larger percentage of slashdot than it does now. Once a political view reaches a certain low percentage within a group it is almost impossible to have rational, productive discussion. I didn't realize that taxes = freedom or that government = freedom or that wanting to be left alone when you are not bothering anyone means you must be a racist or that you are rich or powerful or selfish and uncaring or insane.
As a Libertarian I never realized any of this. I especially like the part about how rich I am. Every time there is a discussion about how much most of you make I am astounded to see how many of you make about 10 times more than I do. But I'm a Libertarian so I must be rich without realizing it. I'd rather be poor and free than a rich slave.
This is what I don't get about US-style libertarians
You seem to be implying that the US has a different sort of Libertarian from other countries. Libertarianism is based on certain core principles. If you believe in those principles then you are a Libertarian.
Government is usually the group that enslaves people. Churches can too but only when they essentially are part of the government. Interest groups don't typically have large armies and hundreds of thousands of henchman (the police) to do their bidding. So they are not a danger to freedom.
Governments are typically the ones responsible for doing bad things. That is why the founders of the U.S. felt the need to make a list of things that the government was allowed to do we call a constitution. In order to try to prevent it from growing into something that controls every aspect of peoples' lives.
What happens to me if I don't pay the government in power? If I don't want any of the services they are offering and really want nothing to do with them? They won't do anything to me right? Because they are here to protect individual liberty, not to violate it. They would never dream of putting me in a cramped cage for the rest of my life because I am not willing to work for them? Not all of us are happy about being forced to be a slave.
Making money has never been an attractive proposition to me because it isn't really my money. I would not really own it. Any money I make is really owned by the government. As am I. Ultimately we, all of us, are their property. To be used, abused, and disposed of at their whim. Just because most people don't mind being enslaved as long as the government leaves them with enough to live on doesn't mean it is not slavery.
The idea behind the Free State Project is to give people who actually want to be free a place to live. The majority of people in the world are content to live as slaves as long as they are allowed at least a little freedom, but what about the rest of us? Should we not have a place we can call home? It's not like we are forcing any of you to be free.
There should be place for people of all political beliefs to live. A socialist society, a communist society, a fascist society, a green society, many varieties of pragmatic mixed states where there is some unique mixture of freedom and tyranny, and finally a place for people who value freedom above all else. A place where you are left alone and allowed to do anything you want as long as you don't harm others or interfere with their right to be left alone.
The dirty secret of libertarianism has always been that it's about protecting the rights of the rich over the rights of the poor.
Citation needed. Badly. If anything Libertarianism is based on the idea that all men were created equal and therefore one man cannot claim power over another and enslave them in any way.
If someone is hurting another person, violating their basic human rights in some way, then using force against them to stop them is of course justified. But if you truly believe that all people should be treated as equals in a just society then you have no justification for forcing others to behave in a particular way. Who are you to make such demands? What makes you so special? Equality is at the very core of Libertarian principles.
It goes without saying that government loves armed revolt
They may love it but it doesn't love them. Most (successful) coup d'etats end with the leader's head in a noose and everyone else in the power structure looking for jobs.
You cant set a precedent that "if you THINK what youre doing is right then you can ignore 'top secret'".
Why not? Is the sky going to fall? Also what if what you are doing really is right? Objectively I mean. It doesn't get much more clear cut than in this case. A tyranny violating the rights of its citizens.
How would the prosecutor determine this? By raising the subject of jury nullification or by spooky action-at-a-distance psychic powers? People who know about jury nullification would generally also know it is not a subject to raise during voire dire. Even if asked directly the person planning to vote their conscience may lie about it in voire dire as a means to the end of the greater good.
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I refuse to believe that change is bad. Change is the one thing in life that we can depend on. Our constant companion. I embrace change of any kind. Besides I prefer Mormon Tea to coffee. As long as Ma Huang is not affected I will continue to bask in the warmth of the ever changing climate.
Yes. As usual the law of diminishing returns applies, but I don't think that is the only reason we have seen such slow gains in performance. Somehow it has become accepted that going above 100 - 150 or so TDP is just unacceptable. For some applications it certainly is and I am curerntly running my CPU at the lowest speed and voltage it is capable of to save money on my electric bill. I only go above 1.2 Ghz when I have a reason, like playing a computer game or video compression etc.
Compared to what we used to expect out of a single generation Intel's slow, steady gains are just not very impressive. This is not the future that science fiction was expecting. I find it kind of depressing.
It used to be that one of the reasons I wanted to continue living was to see the amazing improvements in computer power that I assumed I might live to see. Now it seems like we cannot expect much improvement, at least not without some kind of fundamental breakthrough that may not happen at all this century.
One thing is certain. If things continue like this traditional artificial intelligence will always remain out of reach. Only wetware, connectionist, biology inspired processing has any chance.
Only embarrassingly parallel algorithms may show any significant gains although we haven't seen any major jumps in the number of processing cores either.
I suggest that it is about time programmers started getting used to coding in assembly once again. Order of magnitude improvements in processing power are over. Cue the nearly imperceptible gains where it takes decades before a difference in processing speed is actually noticable.
This is the first I've heard of RSFQ computers. I'll have to look into them. It certainly sounds interesting. It's starting to look like only a fundamental paradigm shift like that will allow us to continue into the sort of future that many of us like to read about in science fiction.
The founding fathers weren't libertarians and did include rules about things like taxation that modern-day-US-style-libertarians condemn as stuff straight out of hell.
The founding fathers were Libertarians or they were as near as makes no difference. Remember, you are talking about a group of people who were willing to fight and die and fill the streets with blood over a tax dispute. And not any sort of tax like we have now where half the year you are working solely for the sake of the government. More the equivalent if a miniscule VAT. Just imagine how such extremists would be viewed today?
The majority of Libertarians are limited government Libertarians and the majority of limited government Libertarians would be pretty content with the US political system in the late 18th century. I certainly would be. I think what most of us want is simply to reboot and go back to the system we had then, with the exception of the "right" to own slaves of course. Most of us are fans of John Locke just as the founders were.
Of course with the benefit of hindsight we see that their system of preventing the slide into tyranny was ineffectual. We'd probably want to try a slightly different system to avoid an ultra-minimalist government eventually snowballing into the quasi-fascist proto police state we have now. Although such a slide may be inevitable. I believe this is one of the arguments for anarcho-libertarianism: that once you have a government at all it will eventually become a dystopian police state. Just a matter of time.
Unlike terms such as "liberal", "conservative", "republican", and "democrat" which are open to many interpretations and may mean different things in different parts of the world, "libertarian" has a very specific meaning. Basically it means that you support a system pretty much like 18th century America with the possible exception of substituting voluntary contributions for forced taxation. You are not a Libertarian if you don't support the principle of voluntarism, of non-aggression. You are not a Libertarian if you believe that you or anyone have the right to another human being's labor or time without their agreement and or compensation. IOW, You cannot believe in slavery, not even on a part time basis. That's not to say that Libertarians wouldn't settle on a compromise that involves a very small amount of coerced taxation if a society will except nothing else, but if they don't believe that such coercion is wrong they are not really Libertarians.
Power consumption scales with the *cube* of the clock speed, so you pretty quickly run into a power/heat wall.
Bullshit. There is no wall. I don't care all that much about heat/power/noise. I have a water cooling setup and I'm prepared to move to phase change if necessary. What I want is for Moore's Law to mean something again. Giving up on clock speed was a bad move on Intel's part. It's just sad that we still haven't made it to 5 Ghz. This whole shift from raw performance at any price to performance per watt or even wattage walls that cannot be exceeded just sucks.
I haven't bought a new CPU since my Wolfdale Core 2 Duo that I run overclocked at 4 Ghz when I need performance or at 1.2 Ghz, 0.9 volts when I don't. It was nice to get off the upgrade treadmill for a while, but it has gotten old. I want a 10 Ghz processor (without reducing performance per cycle), and I want it now.
Does anyone have one of those old Intel roadmaps that promised something like 12 Ghz by now? Staying under 4 Ghz for all of eternity is not what we were promised. I haven't owned an AMD CPU since they were king of the hill, but I applaud this performance at any price philosophy. Efficiency is great. I love efficiency. If/when VW ever imports their XL1 to America I'll be first in line to buy one, but I wouldn't want it to be the only car available. I like to save money on petrol, but I also might want to actually enjoy driving every once in a while.
I do realize that Intel's CPUs are just as fast while using a lot less power and that this new AMD processor is the equivalent of a car that drives like a Prius with the fuel economy of a Lambo, but it's a start in the right direction. If you can't beat Intel at their own game then change the game. I like the idea that someone has the balls to say, "Power be damned, we're going to make the fastest processor we know how to make. Full stop."
You seem to have forgotten aboout Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana. NH is Libertarian only for the East Coast. I could never live there due to the suspicionless roadblocks and stop and identify laws. There is a small but active community opposing the roadblocks, which is nice, but they still have them. Live Free or Die my ass.
Would you consider it theft if a single person, presumably poor, entered your house and stole most of your possessions? What about 100 thieves? 10,000 thieves? What if everyone in town got a cut of the proceeds from seizing most of what you thought you owned? Would it still be theft or would it be a way for the community to provide for itself? Would you willing to be poor, genuinely poor, in order to improve the standard of living for those who might have been even poorer?
I'm still only going to give you a small portion of my income. 0.1% should suffice. And my 1000 friends here will too, so you'll be fully funded instantly - such is the power of collectivism. And once you don't need it anymore you'll work with net gain by yourself again, because we're living in a capitalistic economy. And society won't have a valuable contributor starved, plus one of your 7 might be the next Einstein, so it'd be a shame if he/she missed out on a complete high quality education because it wasn't free or very cheap.
What you are describing could be done with charities. There is no need for the government to get involved in such things. The problem is when you start forcing people to be generous it becomes indistinguishable from slavery and slavery is wrong.
I only wish that we had advanced enough as a species to finally give up on the temptation of slave labor. Slave labor may be very practical. A lot of impressive things can be done with it. But it is so very wrong. It can only be justified by presuming that some of us are naturally masters and others slaves. I resent being a slave, no matter what the alleged benefits are supposed to be for myself and for all of society. If slavery is the price of an ideal society then it's one that is too high IMO. I have no right to demand that others serve me without compensation or voluntary agreement and neither does anyone else. The right to enslave others is not a right that anyone has IMO.
That is the limited government Libertarians, which I believe represents the majority, but there are also anarcho-libertarians which are basically anarchists who have faith in the market to solve many of the problems that would have traditionally been solved by a government of some kind. I've always found it to be a bit of a tough sell even to myself. It would be nice if it worked, but I have my doubts and, unlike limited government libertarianism, it has never been tried AFAIK, at least in modern times.
The only problem I have with the limited government thing is how do you prevent the seemingly inevitable slide into tyranny, into all powerful police states which basically own its citizens in every way that matters. Pieces of paper like a "constitution" will always be reinterpreted and/or ignored as is convenient for those in power. A piece of paper cannot stop the natural process of the growth of government like a rolling snowball. Human nature makes such growth inevitable.
We libertarians tend to believe that the initial US system, minus the slavery and prejudices, is close enough to ideal to make a good target. In that sense we are the ultimate conservatives. We want to do a complete reboot and go back to the very start of our republic as it was in the late 18th to early 19th century. Things were far from perfect. Life is never that. But it was based on most of the same ideas, inspired by the writings of John Locke about natural rights and represents the sort of society we ourselves would like to live in.
I have no interest in an echo chamber, but one person arguing against 500-1000 or something like that is not practical. 50 strawman arguments per hour cannot be refuted by one or two on the other side. It is no longer an exchange of ideas when one side so outnumbers the other.
I don't think most libertarians are particularly shy about defending our arguments. The problem is that the other side is now so numerous that they clearly feel they don't have to even make arguments. All they have to do is agree that the other side can be dismissed as a bunch of rich, elitist, nutjobs or whatever without actually tackling the arguments they disagree with by using logical argument.
There used to be enough libertarians here as a percentage that political arguments could get interesting. Now there are so many mainstream Democrats and Republicans that any form of real discussion gets buried in partisan bickering and any Libertarians can simply be dismissed and ignored as a bit of stray noise.
It should be pointed out that most libertarians aren't completely against taxation, they're against the amount of taxation that's currently ongoing.
Citation needed. What are you basing this on? One of the core Libertarian ideas is that of Voluntarism. Taxation, as a form of protection money, goes against that principle. Ultimately a citizen who doesn't pay taxes gets locked up in a cage, possibly for the rest of his life (assuming he refuses to pay taxes after he's released). Locking up an innocent person because they don't give you money is most certainly not freedom or liberty.
If you are locked up when you don't surrender part of your labor to the government then you are no more than a slave.
Does this mean that I would oppose reducing the size of the government such that a 5% flat tax would be enough to fund everything? No. That's an issue of pragmatism. Any improvement on the current system would be welcome, but that doesn't mean that I do not oppose the very principle of taxation. I consider it as wrong as an sort of theft or thuggery.
It can be justified as a means to an end, but what is wrong for an individual is still wrong when a group does it. When you live in a society where theft is legal as long as it is committed by a large enough group, by what principle can you argue that theft by an individual is wrong? If a thief enters your home and robs you at gunpoint how can you criticize that person? They are just doing the same as the government does to everyone every year.
Of course one could argue that the government owns everything already. That we and all of our labors and possessions are already government property. If the government owns everything then taxes are just their way of taking a bit of what is theirs. We can only be thankful that they let us keep any of it at all and that we are allowed to even exist.
First of all most of your criticisms are more toward anarcho-libertarianism than limited government libertarianism. In a limited government form there can be laws against pollution, maybe ones with bigger teeth than we have in our existing quasi-fascist playground.
Part of the GP's point is that Libertarianism doesn't handle failure well.
And our system does? Thank goodness for that or we would have things like superfund sites and rampant pollution on land and in water. Our current system is not noticeably better at handling "failures".
Pollution of other people's property as a harm - ok so first you'd have to prove there is pollution, prove there is a harm, go to court, sue for damages, and wait.
In our current system Corporations enjoy complete immunity from prosecution for doing things like dumping dangerous chemicals. The executives are IMMUNE. In any sort of Libertarian society there would be no such immunity, no "limited liability", no corporate personhood. Those responsible can be fined and/or imprisoned in a limited government libertarian society and they can be fined in class action lawsuits (or whatever) in anarcho-libertarianism.
In our current system and in any other system I can think of proof, some kind of evidence would be deemed necessary. Are you suggesting that anyone accused should automatically be assumed guilty? Any just system would require some kind of trial before punishing someone dumping mercury.
Of course in our current system the government has a nice cozy relationship with our super-citizens, the corporations, who might decide to donate to your next campaign or give you a highly lucrative job after you step down from public office.
Basically, a full blown libertarian society would be a complete clusterfuck legal system. It introduces a positive feedback loop where the unscrupulous are rewarded, like today's Wall Street.
Or IOW like our current system where the unscrupulous are rewarded? Do you have in mind a system where they are not rewarded?
You'd have to get attorneys to write contracts for everything you do, attorneys to review contracts for every obligation you enter into, and then wind up suing everybody all the time because of perceived differences in whether each party lived up to their end of the contract.
This sounds an awful lot like our current system.
corporations can and will lie, cheat, fake their numbers, withhold information and outright swindle the public all the time.
Just like they do now? The only difference being that the executives responsible would have no immunity without limited liability and can lose everything they own if they get caught.
Modern corporations are only concerned about quarterly results, barely even annual, and without any regulations at all the stock market would collapse to pre-limited-liability corporations, sometime back in the 17th century.
Corporations as they currently exist have been compared to sociopaths. A very apt comparison IMO. They act without regard to anything but profit. But even a sociopath has to deal with the consequences of their evil actions. Not so for corporations. They can do whatever they want without much in the way of consequences for the individuals involved. Limited liability was never a good idea. It should be eliminated immediately. Luckily sociopath corporations would not be encouraged in a libertarian society. No one would be around to protect them from themselves.
That would be the eventual result of an fully unregulated stock market, the days when owner's bore 100% of the risk and could be wiped out at any time due to forces beyond their control.
If you are afraid of risk then don't gamble. That owners bear 100% of the risk is how it should be. You complain about evil corporations and then want to give them more power and shield them from any risk?
As far as I can tell Tea Partiers are just a subset of Republicans whose ideas tend a bit more towards the Libertarian direction. They are not Libertarians. This article is specifically about Libertarians. No argument you make against Tea Party people has any relevance here. If you think we Libertarians care even slightly about the so called Tea Party you are mistaken. If you think we identify in even the slightest way with Republicans you are mistaken.
No man should have more rights than any other.
This is precisely the reason that I am a Libertarian. I don't believe that anyone else has more right to my own labor than I do. I don't believe that anyone else has the right to tell me what I must do or not do. I already have parents. I don't need a parental government to direct my every action to make sure that the majority of voters agree with it. I don't need a busybody government watching my every action to make sure it is consistent with the beliefs of the majority. Unless my actions directly involve other people it is no one's business but my own.
And libertarians by and large are fine with taxes.
Huh?! At best, a very tiny flat tax might be tolerated grudgingly for pragmatic reasons, but if you are someone who is fine with taxes as long as the programs they support aren't wasteful you sound more like a Republican than a Libertarian.
I am not a Libertarian for any sort of practical reason however. I am a Libertarian because I believe in the principle voluntarism and the wrongness of any sort of slavery and the rightness of just leaving people alone to live their lives. My political views are just a logical consequence of not believing that one human being has the inherent right to control another human being. Everything else follows from those principles.
As long as I am not hurting/attacking others I want the right to live my life how I want without having to obey some master telling me what I must do and how I must do it. I might voluntarily contribute to a kind of voluntary social safety net insurance program if I have enough extra money and I'm not struggling to barely survive myself, but I don't want to be forced to give to a particular charity. Forced charity kind of ruins the point of being generous and kind in the first place. I don't want to be forced to do anything unless I am causing some kind of problem in the society.
What about my right to live my life without interference from you? I have no wish to be your slave or anyone elses whether or not the cause is good and just or evil and cruel.
In the US I cannot do very much without permission from the government. If I am not the property of the government then I am something that is nearly indistinguishable from something that the government owns and controls in every way.
I believe that all men are equal and that we all have the same right to be left alone and not persecuted by the majority for just trying to live our lives in the manner of our choosing. I don't see some group of people as "more equal" than I am who can be my master and order me to do as they wish. What right do they have to order me around in that way? What makes them superior to me? The Divine Right of Kings? The fact that they have a large number of armed servants who would happily murder me or put me in a cage if ordered to do so? Does might make right?
Well yeah, by and large the libertarian movement is made up of people who historically wielded more power over others
Last time I checked something like half or at least some massive percentage of Libertarian Party members were computer programmers / software engineers. Do software engineers wield power over others? Over their computers perhaps. I've never, ever, met a rich or powerful Libertarian. Most rich people seem to be Republicans, although quite a few are Democrats as well.
Ron Paul isn't the hero of my revolution. Unfortunately the party has rarely had good candidates. Most Libertarians are just not the kind of people who want to be politicians. Some of us view most practical political action within the current system as 100% useless. It is quite clear that the majority of Americans and, frankly, Earthlings, prefer tyranny to freedom.
The Free State project OTOH hints at a different kind of fight. Going outside the system. What we need is a Libertarian equivalent of the Socialist commune. If we want a free society the US is NOT the place to start one. Fascism rules here while the two major parties bicker about where to move the deck chairs as the ship sinks to the bottom.
The majority of people don't want freedom. They never have and they never will. Only a very, very tiny minority of people truly want to live in a free society. This is why the Great American Experiment has failed so spectacularly. It always lacked popular support.
I think the only way for such a society to exist is as a small community of like minded people. This is why the Free State Project is basically a good idea. The whole NH thing didn't work of course because there aren't enough Libertarians to form a majority against the pro-government people in NH or anywhere else. Most of the bad laws are federal anyway. The state would have to literally secede and be able to fight the army successfully in order to do so.
If there is ever to be another Libertarians society, something like 18th century US system, we would have to basically seize our own piece of land and be prepared to fight and die to defend it. Because we are such a small minority on this planet the only way to do that would be to choose a place that no large state is really willing to fight to keep.
That means some remote uninhabited island, probably in the Southern Ocean or a piece of Antarctica itself. I just can't picture a large nation going to war to defend either the Antarctic Treaty or a claim to such remote and desolate land.
Unfortunately, in addition to building a permanent settlement in some of the harshest conditions on the planet we would have to start manufacturing weapons almost immediately to anticipate the inevitable war.
If interplanetary space travel ever becomes practical and affordable we would have the option of starting a free society off world, but those conditions would be even more harsh than Antarctica.
BTW, Wyoming is a freer state than New Hampshire.
I'm reading these comments and all I can say is "wow". Libertarians used to make up a much larger percentage of slashdot than it does now. Once a political view reaches a certain low percentage within a group it is almost impossible to have rational, productive discussion. I didn't realize that taxes = freedom or that government = freedom or that wanting to be left alone when you are not bothering anyone means you must be a racist or that you are rich or powerful or selfish and uncaring or insane.
As a Libertarian I never realized any of this. I especially like the part about how rich I am. Every time there is a discussion about how much most of you make I am astounded to see how many of you make about 10 times more than I do. But I'm a Libertarian so I must be rich without realizing it. I'd rather be poor and free than a rich slave.
This is what I don't get about US-style libertarians
You seem to be implying that the US has a different sort of Libertarian from other countries. Libertarianism is based on certain core principles. If you believe in those principles then you are a Libertarian.
Government is usually the group that enslaves people. Churches can too but only when they essentially are part of the government. Interest groups don't typically have large armies and hundreds of thousands of henchman (the police) to do their bidding. So they are not a danger to freedom.
Governments are typically the ones responsible for doing bad things. That is why the founders of the U.S. felt the need to make a list of things that the government was allowed to do we call a constitution. In order to try to prevent it from growing into something that controls every aspect of peoples' lives.
What happens to me if I don't pay the government in power? If I don't want any of the services they are offering and really want nothing to do with them? They won't do anything to me right? Because they are here to protect individual liberty, not to violate it. They would never dream of putting me in a cramped cage for the rest of my life because I am not willing to work for them? Not all of us are happy about being forced to be a slave.
Making money has never been an attractive proposition to me because it isn't really my money. I would not really own it. Any money I make is really owned by the government. As am I. Ultimately we, all of us, are their property. To be used, abused, and disposed of at their whim. Just because most people don't mind being enslaved as long as the government leaves them with enough to live on doesn't mean it is not slavery.
The idea behind the Free State Project is to give people who actually want to be free a place to live. The majority of people in the world are content to live as slaves as long as they are allowed at least a little freedom, but what about the rest of us? Should we not have a place we can call home? It's not like we are forcing any of you to be free.
There should be place for people of all political beliefs to live. A socialist society, a communist society, a fascist society, a green society, many varieties of pragmatic mixed states where there is some unique mixture of freedom and tyranny, and finally a place for people who value freedom above all else. A place where you are left alone and allowed to do anything you want as long as you don't harm others or interfere with their right to be left alone.
The dirty secret of libertarianism has always been that it's about protecting the rights of the rich over the rights of the poor.
Citation needed. Badly. If anything Libertarianism is based on the idea that all men were created equal and therefore one man cannot claim power over another and enslave them in any way.
If someone is hurting another person, violating their basic human rights in some way, then using force against them to stop them is of course justified. But if you truly believe that all people should be treated as equals in a just society then you have no justification for forcing others to behave in a particular way. Who are you to make such demands? What makes you so special? Equality is at the very core of Libertarian principles.
It goes without saying that government loves armed revolt
They may love it but it doesn't love them. Most (successful) coup d'etats end with the leader's head in a noose and everyone else in the power structure looking for jobs.
You cant set a precedent that "if you THINK what youre doing is right then you can ignore 'top secret'".
Why not? Is the sky going to fall? Also what if what you are doing really is right? Objectively I mean. It doesn't get much more clear cut than in this case. A tyranny violating the rights of its citizens.
How would the prosecutor determine this? By raising the subject of jury nullification or by spooky action-at-a-distance psychic powers? People who know about jury nullification would generally also know it is not a subject to raise during voire dire. Even if asked directly the person planning to vote their conscience may lie about it in voire dire as a means to the end of the greater good.