It's good advice. Except when it isn't. I kept my mouth shut when a cop tried to interrogate me at a sobriety checkpoint and that led to my being beaten, nearly strangled to death, and brought up on enough false charges to put me in jail for 3-5 years.
Angering or annoying the wrong cop can be very dangerous or even fatal and standing up for your so called "rights" pisses most of them off. The honest ones won't do anything about it. The dishonest ones may take matters into their own hands and the consequences can be severe. Standing up for your rights is really a kind of Russian Roulette, at least here in the US.
The problem with that scenario is that you are very likely to be arrested on contempt of cop charges. Depending on the cop you may be beaten as well. A cop is likely to treat silence as disrespect.
Not that I disagree about the best course of action. A simple rule is easiest to follow: never, ever, under any circumstances speak to a member of law enforcement if you have a choice in the matter. If the cop puts his glock in your mouth however you're on your own. Assuming that cops have integrity and will follow the law is a very dangerous assumption to make.
You may not be able to remain silent, but you can at least lie. Perjury is rarely prosecuted and can be difficult to prove. In any case, I'd rather go to jail myself for a short time, rather than risk putting someone I loved in jail for a long time. In this case she also had her daughter to think about, but still. Lying would have been the best course of action in this case.
If asked a question you don't have to refuse to answer. You can always say, "I don't recall." or "I don't know".
The rules: 1. Don't talk to law enforcement, ever, for any reason. 2. When rule 1 is not practical or possible, lie and lie, and lie some more.
I would also prefer solitary. When I was in my temporary cell I at least didn't have to share it, partly because they thought I was violent. So I guess there was some segregation in my case. Aside from the boredom the other problem with captivity is the lack of privacy. Having to deal with violent people in a regular jail/prison is whole other can of worms which luckily I never had to deal with. Being in solitary would seem to make sense, except that you're not usually allowed books (which is huge) and I've heard that people wonder if you are a snitch of some kind or maybe a child molester.
Living in a cage for a short time where I wasn't allowed out at all gives me more sympathy for caged animals. I like to keep parrots, but I would never lock one in a cage again after my experience. Not even for a short time when I'm not home. It really is cruel.
I won't. Thank you for the advice. And, yes, EA is evil. It's companies like EA that don't care at all about their products and only care about their profits that give capitalism a bad name. Perhaps that's the biggest problem with large companies: that they tend to lose sight of their original purpose which is rarely just to make money.
I've never been arrested (lucky me), so I could be wrong, but I imagine he's probably being confined in a less "permanent" location right now, which will probably be moderately more comfortable.
As someone who has been arrested and seen the inside of a temporary holding cell more than once let me assure you that you are wrong. His conditions are likely to improve in a longer term facility. Jails are actually considered more dangerous than prisons precisely because it's considered 'temporary' and dangerous murderers and rapists are mixed in with contempt of cop and file sharer prisoners. In real prisons they are supposed to at least try to segregate people. I would imagine that a military prison might be a bit better than normal prison, but who knows.
One of the worst parts of it for me was the sheer boredom. And you're also let out of your cage occasionally. I spent practically the whole time just pacing my cage like an animal: back and forth, back and forth. There was something about being penned in that drove me half crazy. In longer term facilities they have a tendency to allow things like books.
It's good to know that last mile fiber is not cost effective. Verizon must be losing money on every FIOS customer. These corporations are always so altruistic. Always finding new ways of offering services for less than cost. Also those Japanese, Korean, and Swedish ISPs must be losing truly immense amounts of money. Presumably they'll all be bankrupt soon and the only ones left will be the companies charging $100+/month for 1/0.2 mbit service. Is that about right?
Do you reasonably believe any for-profit company can offer gigabit ISP service for less than $100/month?
Of course, but why should they? The only reason would be a competitor offering faster uncapped speeds at similar prices who is stealing your customers. Like most modern corporations they spend as little as they can, offer as little value as they can, for as much money as they can. And try never to look further forward than about a week. Don't innovate or offer anything new unless you can see a way that it will definitely make you more money than you are making now. If you are already charging as much as most consumers are willing to pay (roughly $100 or so as a maximum) then there is no point in improving your 'infrastructure'. In fact it might make more sense to reduce your speeds instead.
They think that the copyright cartels are their buddies for taking their bribes and fighting their fight, but when this fails just like all the rest of their evil greedy plans of never letting so much as a penny slip through their fingers the ISPs participating in this may find it difficult to testify to a judge with a straight face that they have no control of the infringing content transmitted over their network. This strategy may not bite them in the ass today, or even next week or next month, but someday it will. He who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.
A smarter way is for us to unite in disobedience to clearly unconsitutional laws, and drum up media sympathy.
Yes, because getting run over by tanks and getting shot in the face by automatic weapon wielding 'peace keeping' cops or soldiers is what makes progress. I think shooting cops and congressmen is a hell of a lot better than that. At least it's a start.
But what you'd really want to do is secretly form a rebel army. A guerrilla military force of hundreds of thousands or even millions is what you would need to properly overthrow a first world government.
In the near future it would be a lot more about organizing people who believe things have already gone too far or soon will and then building secret manufacturing facilities and arms caches (wars are all about manufacturing of arms) than it would be about actually spilling blood. Shooting a few cops might be nice. Most are no better than blood thirsty, sadistic animals. But it wouldn't accomplish anything politically. Neither would killing congressman unless you managed to get all of them and even then new ones would just be voted in under the current system. No. You can't fight the system from within the system.
You have to step outside of it and look at the big picture and that is about gathering large groups of people who are willing to fight and die to derail the trajectory of this country toward its destiny: a true, 100% pure fascist democracy where human rights are completely ignored except on paper and the will either of the majority or of whatever rich corporations are most generous with campaign 'contributions' is enforced. With prejudice. That's the dystopia we are fast approaching and I don't think anything will stop it.
You do realize that the founders of this country were 100% Libertarians themselves and that the All Men are Created Equal thing was one of their Libertarian slogans, right? Based to a great degree on the philosophy of John Locke. If you care about rights, human rights, individual rights, natural rights, whatever you want to call it then you are speaking the language of Libertarians. That's what Libertarians are all about: positing that all humans have certain inalienable rights that a government can neither give nor take away. That just exist as a natural consequence of being human.
The whole point of Libertarianism is that people should not be treated as if one is superior to the other. Creating a level playing field without aristocrats was the whole point. That's what human rights are all about. The reason why humans are considered to have rights, equal rights, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was because some people realized that no one has the right to tell anyone else what to do, to force them to act against their will. That no man has the right to make another man his slave no matter how righteous he may think his goals are. Whether the noble goal is to "kill all the jews, gypsies and undesirables and create a pure race" or "soak the rich" or "Only corporations are full citizens."
That all humans must be treated as equals is the whole point of Libertarianism. Not to make everyone equal, but to not favor one man over another. Not ever. If you are under the illusion that Libertarians are close allies with Republicans, either of the new 'compromise is everything' variety or the old fashioned Tea Party ones you couldn't be more wrong. If anything I would say we are more like the old style Democrats, the ones who founded the ACLU in the first place.
When it comes to class warfare we just don't care. It's irrelevant to our way of thinking. A classless society is every bit as much an ideal for Libertarians as it is for Communists or Socialists and Democrats and Republicans don't really even have goals like that. Talking about philosophy at all isn't really speaking their langauge. Pragmatism is the only language they speak.
Well to most of the world it is big money. And, actually, $12,500 really does seem like a lot of money to me as well. You can buy a half decent new car for about that much. And as an annual income it's actually not too bad even in the US. More than minimum wage I think.
Maybe compared to you it does suck to be me, but what can I say? Just that we can't all be rich. Someone has to clean your toilets and follow your barked orders with downcast eyes. Still, I don't envy all rich people. Some have awful jobs that just pay well.
IMO looks are far more important to a happy life than money anyway. Unfortunately I am one ugly son of a bitch as well and it's not because I got old and fat (although I have). I was ugly even as a kid. So yeah I got screwed on all counts. I did once meet a guy in Jakarta who grew up homeless and eating out of trash cans and that does put things in perspective for me. I guess we all have someone to make us feel lucky.
That's more than I make now albeit only slightly. Lots of people make less than that. In fact most of the world makes less than that. Far, far less. And you can live like a king on that much in many places. Nice places too. You just have to leave the womb to do it. Of course if someone wants to spend their whole life as a wage slave corporate lackey company man only to be fired when they get over the hill then that's fine, but when you've got a quarter mil it's a choice not a necessity. Very, very few people have the luxury of such a choice even in the US.
I've been meaning to download some stuff and haven't gotten around to it. Sounds like today would be a good day for it. I'd love to see what Verizon would do when 50% of their customers get first strikes on the first day. It's the first shot across the bow, but whose bow? When they ban me I'm going to make sure I still owe them at least a couple of hundred bucks. Let them pay doubly for their treachery. Let them feel the cold steel of my cutlass. Let's have at them! Let's make 'em walk the plank and see how they like the chilly shark infested waters of bankruptcy.
Unless you are referring to wardriving there are typically only a limited number of suckers using WEP or really obvious WPA/WPA2 passwords nearby. When all of those sources have been banned from all of the local ISPs you are back to square one.
Why would anyone want it? It's not like they can somehow borrow the achievement that earned it by having it on their mantelpiece. Well I guess they could try to change the name to their own and tell anyone who will listen that they received a Nobel prize. What does the prize look like anyway? Maybe the granddaughter can just write in the name of the auction winner with magic marker or something. Maybe for 300,000+ she would be willing to cross out the other names as well so that you don't have to share the prize. I can't picture the kind of person who would want someone else's Nobel prize even for free let alone for 250k. It's sort of like buying someone else's university diploma.
Personally I would rather have grandpa's NOBEL FUCKING PRIZE on my mantel than some bullshit car or boat in the driveway
Another wealthy slashdotter who seems put on this earth for the sole reason of making me feel poor. The only thing you can think of to do with a quarter of a million dollars is buy a boat, or even more improbably, a car? How about a fucking house?! Or how about enough money to live on without working for the rest of your life? I know being rich warps your perspective, but please at least try to realize that most of the rest of the world is thinking more in terms of food and rent and basic survival than buying new yacht or Ferrari. Christ. The grandkids may be spitting on grandad's grave, but let's at least admit that 250k represents quite a generous inheritance and to most of the world far more than most people will ever make in their entire lives. Hell, I'm an American and it would still take me about 20 years to earn that much. The interest alone on that much money is enough for most single people to live on for their entire lives.
As as long as you remember not to think, just regurgitate.
As Americans, this is what we have always believed. It is what we stand for. It is the essence of who we are.
Give a man a thought and you have only annoyed him into beating you to a pulp for being a smartass, but teach him how to achieve a perfectly blank mind without even a hint of a thought and to blindly obey authority and to regurgitate the most popular state-sponsored slogans and you have taught him to be an American for a lifetime. But he already knew how not to think and so beat you to a pulp for being an arrogant, know-it-all, smartass.
From a young age we are all taught that our true mission is to give the rest of the world a wedgie and then make loud armpit farting noises at it to demonstrate our inherent superiority. A superiority that only we will ever fully understand. It shall remain forever a mystery to the rest of the planet who just see a bunch of obese, spoiled, angry, retarded, religious fanatics with too many guns and too much time on our hands.
Or IOW you don't actually believe in anything, not in any ideals, at least not ones you are willing to explicitly mention. Or rather, you only believe in the idea that ideology and principles are useless in politics and that endless compromises on top of compromises based on nothing but infighting between special interest groups and poorly thought out knee jerk responses to complex problems are the solution.
I disagree. I think the now failed US experiment proved centuries ago that a society based on a philosophical ideal can grow and prosper for a time, until the corruption of government aggregates and becomes an unstoppable avalanche burying everything under its weight and crushing everything good and noble out of human life.
Where we, and many other societies, are headed feels inevitable, unstoppable. This is where putting one privileged group of people in charge of everyone else always leads. Power corrupts. This we know well. Government, at least one without any real external limits, is like a snowball rolling downhill. It will never limit itself. It exists only to grow and grow. The only way to stop it is to destroy it and start again.
But by that definition there is no right either. It might be fair to say that there is no left or right in mainstream American politics anymore. The vast majority pretty much agrees that a police state is what we want, need, and deserve.
The only difference is in verbiage. The two sides flap their lips a bit differently either to appeal to CEOs of giant evil corporations or to jealous angry people who want to more or less get rid of anyone who makes more money than they do.
Democrats: blah, blah, blah, soak the rich, blah, blah, blah.
Both want life in America to be indistinguishable from that of a one huge prison. With true bipartisan support these efforts have made great strides in the past decade, fast approaching a total transformation into something resembling East Germany.
I can remember when the Democrats represented personal freedom, when they were usually in agreement with Libertarians on social issues. I can also remember when Republicans represented financial freedom and came close to agreeing with Libertarians on financial issues. Both parties have replaced Libertarian ideology with Fascist ideology for the stuff that really matters to them. Both sides have given up fighting for freedom of any kind and have embraced tyranny with open arms and puckered lips.
I suppose that the old Republicans have become Tea Party Republicans, but what happened to the old ACLU Democrats? They seem to have lost any voice in American politics. I sorely miss them. They were valuable allies in the fight for non-monetary individual rights, for civil liberties and personal freedoms. I never did understand why they believed in freedom in their personal lives but championed slavery in their work. Well so long as it isn't actually called 'slavery'. It would also be nice to know why the Republicans wanted to keep the government out of their bank accounts, but welcomed them into their homes, into their bedrooms, into every aspect of their lives not related to money. In any case both sides have finally come to their senses, seen their inconsistency and fixed it by embracing every aspect of government control in their lives.
You state that it is evil to force anyone to do anything they don't want to do, as though that is some hotly debated principle. It's not.
It's not hotly debated because almost no one believes it. Although they may pretend to believe it. Our whole society is based on the idea of forcing others to behave in a certain way. It certainly isn't based on the principle of voluntarism, of just leaving people alone and letting them be as long as they are not at least physically harming anyone else. I mean, christ, that's what most of the political stories here are about: forcing people to do things.
If you base your society on pragmatic, isolated, immediate issues with no principles to guide you then you get what we have today. That is our status quo. Most people don't believe in utopias or broad political principles anymore. They mostly just believe in themselves. And not just the Republicans. The Democrats too regardless of how much they deny it.
That is why libertarians and socialists have much more in common with each other than either has with the two major parties. We at least believe in right and wrong. That there is such a thing.
And libertarians believe that slavery, and police states, and ubiquitous surveillance, and a life that is at the mercy of any government agent with arbitrary power and having to ask permission or even beg just for the privilege to travel somewhere and all the rest of the tyranny that has been building in this country for decades and has blossomed in the new millenium is wrong. Just wrong.
A just society must be one where every citizen is treated equally. I'm not talking about egalitarianism. I mean that there is not one group that is 'more equal' than the other. What right does anyone have to tell someone else how they must live? What makes them so superior to be able to do that?
You see that is what human rights are really all about. The idea that one person has no right to treat another like a slave, regardless of whether they are more violent and have more guns. Human rights are all about the inalienable right to simply be left alone to live your life. That's where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness came from.
Now of course you may not believe in the idea of rights. You may believe that might makes right and that the government, as the strongest, essentially owns its citizens and can do whatever they like with them, but if you are like most people you don't believe that because you don't really believe in much of anything when it comes to politics. Just the status quo and a few narrow issues here or there, particularly when they have a personal stake in the matter.
As far as building a society that minimizes harm, the founders of this country already did that more or less. They just didn't build that society to last. Perhaps it never can. Governments will always grow out of control unless restrained by violence. There will always be selfish, power-hungry people who will try to seize power and inforce their will on a nation.
The essence of the problem with the two major parties is not what their ideas are, but that they don't actually have any. They mostly just want to nitpick at the status quo. The democrats want to raise taxes and introduce more social programs. The republicans want to micromanage and control anyone who is not a corporation and impose their religious based principles on everyone else. What both parties want is essentially a police state, but of course they don't think about it that way because that would require more than just a moment's thought and they don't like to think too much. It must give them a headache or something. Politics is actually a branch of philosophy. Without any guiding principles to determine what kind of society you think is ideal you really have nothing more than a mob fighting with each other over special interests and who gets to feed at the public trough.
I agree that a little pain can be a useful signal that something is wrong, but once you know that something is wrong it certainly serves no useful purpose. Have you ever had chronic pain? Do you have any idea how tiring and awful it is to be in pain constantly 24 hours a day? And if you don't like your doctor get a new one. Most doctors are not like that. You just happened to pick one of the 0.0000000000000000001% of doctors that does not fear the DEA and gives out pain pills at the drop of a hat. He could easily lose his license to practice medicine and even end up in prison for that. The point is that your doctor is not at all representative of doctors in general.
Also, it's not about getting 'high' as you call it. It's about getting rid of pain. There is nothing virtuous about being in pain. After you have taken an opioid for a week or so there isn't much more than a mild sense of well being anyway and that is if you are lucky. In fact the problem with opioids is that your body builds up a tolerance and downregulates your opioid receptors so that you have to keep taking more and more for them to be fully effective. So most people end up having to live with at least some pain even while on the pain killers.
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It's good advice. Except when it isn't. I kept my mouth shut when a cop tried to interrogate me at a sobriety checkpoint and that led to my being beaten, nearly strangled to death, and brought up on enough false charges to put me in jail for 3-5 years.
Angering or annoying the wrong cop can be very dangerous or even fatal and standing up for your so called "rights" pisses most of them off. The honest ones won't do anything about it. The dishonest ones may take matters into their own hands and the consequences can be severe. Standing up for your rights is really a kind of Russian Roulette, at least here in the US.
The problem with that scenario is that you are very likely to be arrested on contempt of cop charges. Depending on the cop you may be beaten as well. A cop is likely to treat silence as disrespect.
Not that I disagree about the best course of action. A simple rule is easiest to follow: never, ever, under any circumstances speak to a member of law enforcement if you have a choice in the matter. If the cop puts his glock in your mouth however you're on your own. Assuming that cops have integrity and will follow the law is a very dangerous assumption to make.
You may not be able to remain silent, but you can at least lie. Perjury is rarely prosecuted and can be difficult to prove. In any case, I'd rather go to jail myself for a short time, rather than risk putting someone I loved in jail for a long time. In this case she also had her daughter to think about, but still. Lying would have been the best course of action in this case.
If asked a question you don't have to refuse to answer. You can always say, "I don't recall." or "I don't know".
The rules:
1. Don't talk to law enforcement, ever, for any reason.
2. When rule 1 is not practical or possible, lie and lie, and lie some more.
I would also prefer solitary. When I was in my temporary cell I at least didn't have to share it, partly because they thought I was violent. So I guess there was some segregation in my case. Aside from the boredom the other problem with captivity is the lack of privacy. Having to deal with violent people in a regular jail/prison is whole other can of worms which luckily I never had to deal with. Being in solitary would seem to make sense, except that you're not usually allowed books (which is huge) and I've heard that people wonder if you are a snitch of some kind or maybe a child molester.
Living in a cage for a short time where I wasn't allowed out at all gives me more sympathy for caged animals. I like to keep parrots, but I would never lock one in a cage again after my experience. Not even for a short time when I'm not home. It really is cruel.
If you don't like EA, don't buy their games.
I won't. Thank you for the advice. And, yes, EA is evil. It's companies like EA that don't care at all about their products and only care about their profits that give capitalism a bad name. Perhaps that's the biggest problem with large companies: that they tend to lose sight of their original purpose which is rarely just to make money.
You're right Manning should be punished and the fact that he pleaded guilty means he recognizes that he should be punished.
Are you really that naive?
I've never been arrested (lucky me), so I could be wrong, but I imagine he's probably being confined in a less "permanent" location right now, which will probably be moderately more comfortable.
As someone who has been arrested and seen the inside of a temporary holding cell more than once let me assure you that you are wrong. His conditions are likely to improve in a longer term facility. Jails are actually considered more dangerous than prisons precisely because it's considered 'temporary' and dangerous murderers and rapists are mixed in with contempt of cop and file sharer prisoners. In real prisons they are supposed to at least try to segregate people. I would imagine that a military prison might be a bit better than normal prison, but who knows.
One of the worst parts of it for me was the sheer boredom. And you're also let out of your cage occasionally. I spent practically the whole time just pacing my cage like an animal: back and forth, back and forth. There was something about being penned in that drove me half crazy. In longer term facilities they have a tendency to allow things like books.
It's good to know that last mile fiber is not cost effective. Verizon must be losing money on every FIOS customer. These corporations are always so altruistic. Always finding new ways of offering services for less than cost. Also those Japanese, Korean, and Swedish ISPs must be losing truly immense amounts of money. Presumably they'll all be bankrupt soon and the only ones left will be the companies charging $100+/month for 1/0.2 mbit service. Is that about right?
Do you reasonably believe any for-profit company can offer gigabit ISP service for less than $100/month?
Of course, but why should they? The only reason would be a competitor offering faster uncapped speeds at similar prices who is stealing your customers. Like most modern corporations they spend as little as they can, offer as little value as they can, for as much money as they can. And try never to look further forward than about a week. Don't innovate or offer anything new unless you can see a way that it will definitely make you more money than you are making now. If you are already charging as much as most consumers are willing to pay (roughly $100 or so as a maximum) then there is no point in improving your 'infrastructure'. In fact it might make more sense to reduce your speeds instead.
They think that the copyright cartels are their buddies for taking their bribes and fighting their fight, but when this fails just like all the rest of their evil greedy plans of never letting so much as a penny slip through their fingers the ISPs participating in this may find it difficult to testify to a judge with a straight face that they have no control of the infringing content transmitted over their network. This strategy may not bite them in the ass today, or even next week or next month, but someday it will. He who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.
A smarter way is for us to unite in disobedience to clearly unconsitutional laws, and drum up media sympathy.
Yes, because getting run over by tanks and getting shot in the face by automatic weapon wielding 'peace keeping' cops or soldiers is what makes progress. I think shooting cops and congressmen is a hell of a lot better than that. At least it's a start.
But what you'd really want to do is secretly form a rebel army. A guerrilla military force of hundreds of thousands or even millions is what you would need to properly overthrow a first world government.
In the near future it would be a lot more about organizing people who believe things have already gone too far or soon will and then building secret manufacturing facilities and arms caches (wars are all about manufacturing of arms) than it would be about actually spilling blood. Shooting a few cops might be nice. Most are no better than blood thirsty, sadistic animals. But it wouldn't accomplish anything politically. Neither would killing congressman unless you managed to get all of them and even then new ones would just be voted in under the current system. No. You can't fight the system from within the system.
You have to step outside of it and look at the big picture and that is about gathering large groups of people who are willing to fight and die to derail the trajectory of this country toward its destiny: a true, 100% pure fascist democracy where human rights are completely ignored except on paper and the will either of the majority or of whatever rich corporations are most generous with campaign 'contributions' is enforced. With prejudice. That's the dystopia we are fast approaching and I don't think anything will stop it.
You do realize that the founders of this country were 100% Libertarians themselves and that the All Men are Created Equal thing was one of their Libertarian slogans, right? Based to a great degree on the philosophy of John Locke. If you care about rights, human rights, individual rights, natural rights, whatever you want to call it then you are speaking the language of Libertarians. That's what Libertarians are all about: positing that all humans have certain inalienable rights that a government can neither give nor take away. That just exist as a natural consequence of being human.
The whole point of Libertarianism is that people should not be treated as if one is superior to the other. Creating a level playing field without aristocrats was the whole point. That's what human rights are all about. The reason why humans are considered to have rights, equal rights, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was because some people realized that no one has the right to tell anyone else what to do, to force them to act against their will. That no man has the right to make another man his slave no matter how righteous he may think his goals are. Whether the noble goal is to "kill all the jews, gypsies and undesirables and create a pure race" or "soak the rich" or "Only corporations are full citizens."
That all humans must be treated as equals is the whole point of Libertarianism. Not to make everyone equal, but to not favor one man over another. Not ever. If you are under the illusion that Libertarians are close allies with Republicans, either of the new 'compromise is everything' variety or the old fashioned Tea Party ones you couldn't be more wrong. If anything I would say we are more like the old style Democrats, the ones who founded the ACLU in the first place.
When it comes to class warfare we just don't care. It's irrelevant to our way of thinking. A classless society is every bit as much an ideal for Libertarians as it is for Communists or Socialists and Democrats and Republicans don't really even have goals like that. Talking about philosophy at all isn't really speaking their langauge. Pragmatism is the only language they speak.
Well to most of the world it is big money. And, actually, $12,500 really does seem like a lot of money to me as well. You can buy a half decent new car for about that much. And as an annual income it's actually not too bad even in the US. More than minimum wage I think.
Maybe compared to you it does suck to be me, but what can I say? Just that we can't all be rich. Someone has to clean your toilets and follow your barked orders with downcast eyes. Still, I don't envy all rich people. Some have awful jobs that just pay well.
IMO looks are far more important to a happy life than money anyway. Unfortunately I am one ugly son of a bitch as well and it's not because I got old and fat (although I have). I was ugly even as a kid. So yeah I got screwed on all counts. I did once meet a guy in Jakarta who grew up homeless and eating out of trash cans and that does put things in perspective for me. I guess we all have someone to make us feel lucky.
That's more than I make now albeit only slightly. Lots of people make less than that. In fact most of the world makes less than that. Far, far less. And you can live like a king on that much in many places. Nice places too. You just have to leave the womb to do it. Of course if someone wants to spend their whole life as a wage slave corporate lackey company man only to be fired when they get over the hill then that's fine, but when you've got a quarter mil it's a choice not a necessity. Very, very few people have the luxury of such a choice even in the US.
I've been meaning to download some stuff and haven't gotten around to it. Sounds like today would be a good day for it. I'd love to see what Verizon would do when 50% of their customers get first strikes on the first day. It's the first shot across the bow, but whose bow? When they ban me I'm going to make sure I still owe them at least a couple of hundred bucks. Let them pay doubly for their treachery. Let them feel the cold steel of my cutlass. Let's have at them! Let's make 'em walk the plank and see how they like the chilly shark infested waters of bankruptcy.
Unless you are referring to wardriving there are typically only a limited number of suckers using WEP or really obvious WPA/WPA2 passwords nearby. When all of those sources have been banned from all of the local ISPs you are back to square one.
Why would anyone want it? It's not like they can somehow borrow the achievement that earned it by having it on their mantelpiece. Well I guess they could try to change the name to their own and tell anyone who will listen that they received a Nobel prize. What does the prize look like anyway? Maybe the granddaughter can just write in the name of the auction winner with magic marker or something. Maybe for 300,000+ she would be willing to cross out the other names as well so that you don't have to share the prize. I can't picture the kind of person who would want someone else's Nobel prize even for free let alone for 250k. It's sort of like buying someone else's university diploma.
Would you rather have grandpa's Nobel Prize than, oh, a college education? Or an expensive medical treatment?
If you have a quarter of a million USD you don't need a college education. You can just retire right out of high school.
Personally I would rather have grandpa's NOBEL FUCKING PRIZE on my mantel than some bullshit car or boat in the driveway
Another wealthy slashdotter who seems put on this earth for the sole reason of making me feel poor. The only thing you can think of to do with a quarter of a million dollars is buy a boat, or even more improbably, a car? How about a fucking house?! Or how about enough money to live on without working for the rest of your life? I know being rich warps your perspective, but please at least try to realize that most of the rest of the world is thinking more in terms of food and rent and basic survival than buying new yacht or Ferrari. Christ. The grandkids may be spitting on grandad's grave, but let's at least admit that 250k represents quite a generous inheritance and to most of the world far more than most people will ever make in their entire lives. Hell, I'm an American and it would still take me about 20 years to earn that much. The interest alone on that much money is enough for most single people to live on for their entire lives.
As as long as you remember not to think, just regurgitate.
As Americans, this is what we have always believed. It is what we stand for. It is the essence of who we are.
Give a man a thought and you have only annoyed him into beating you to a pulp for being a smartass, but teach him how to achieve a perfectly blank mind without even a hint of a thought and to blindly obey authority and to regurgitate the most popular state-sponsored slogans and you have taught him to be an American for a lifetime. But he already knew how not to think and so beat you to a pulp for being an arrogant, know-it-all, smartass.
From a young age we are all taught that our true mission is to give the rest of the world a wedgie and then make loud armpit farting noises at it to demonstrate our inherent superiority. A superiority that only we will ever fully understand. It shall remain forever a mystery to the rest of the planet who just see a bunch of obese, spoiled, angry, retarded, religious fanatics with too many guns and too much time on our hands.
1. Make all kinds of unwarranted assumptions about the world based on nothing except that it makes it easier to draw the conclusions you want.
2. Draw many conclusions based on all of those ridiculous unproven assumptions.
3. Drop the assumptions and forget they ever existed.
4. Keep the conclusions.
That's my take on modern (macro) economics.
Or IOW you don't actually believe in anything, not in any ideals, at least not ones you are willing to explicitly mention. Or rather, you only believe in the idea that ideology and principles are useless in politics and that endless compromises on top of compromises based on nothing but infighting between special interest groups and poorly thought out knee jerk responses to complex problems are the solution.
I disagree. I think the now failed US experiment proved centuries ago that a society based on a philosophical ideal can grow and prosper for a time, until the corruption of government aggregates and becomes an unstoppable avalanche burying everything under its weight and crushing everything good and noble out of human life.
Where we, and many other societies, are headed feels inevitable, unstoppable. This is where putting one privileged group of people in charge of everyone else always leads. Power corrupts. This we know well. Government, at least one without any real external limits, is like a snowball rolling downhill. It will never limit itself. It exists only to grow and grow. The only way to stop it is to destroy it and start again.
But by that definition there is no right either. It might be fair to say that there is no left or right in mainstream American politics anymore. The vast majority pretty much agrees that a police state is what we want, need, and deserve.
The only difference is in verbiage. The two sides flap their lips a bit differently either to appeal to CEOs of giant evil corporations or to jealous angry people who want to more or less get rid of anyone who makes more money than they do.
Democrats: blah, blah, blah, soak the rich, blah, blah, blah.
Republicans: blah, blah, blah, money talks bullshit walks, blah, blah, blah.
Both want life in America to be indistinguishable from that of a one huge prison. With true bipartisan support these efforts have made great strides in the past decade, fast approaching a total transformation into something resembling East Germany.
I can remember when the Democrats represented personal freedom, when they were usually in agreement with Libertarians on social issues. I can also remember when Republicans represented financial freedom and came close to agreeing with Libertarians on financial issues. Both parties have replaced Libertarian ideology with Fascist ideology for the stuff that really matters to them. Both sides have given up fighting for freedom of any kind and have embraced tyranny with open arms and puckered lips.
I suppose that the old Republicans have become Tea Party Republicans, but what happened to the old ACLU Democrats? They seem to have lost any voice in American politics. I sorely miss them. They were valuable allies in the fight for non-monetary individual rights, for civil liberties and personal freedoms. I never did understand why they believed in freedom in their personal lives but championed slavery in their work. Well so long as it isn't actually called 'slavery'. It would also be nice to know why the Republicans wanted to keep the government out of their bank accounts, but welcomed them into their homes, into their bedrooms, into every aspect of their lives not related to money. In any case both sides have finally come to their senses, seen their inconsistency and fixed it by embracing every aspect of government control in their lives.
You state that it is evil to force anyone to do anything they don't want to do, as though that is some hotly debated principle. It's not.
It's not hotly debated because almost no one believes it. Although they may pretend to believe it. Our whole society is based on the idea of forcing others to behave in a certain way. It certainly isn't based on the principle of voluntarism, of just leaving people alone and letting them be as long as they are not at least physically harming anyone else. I mean, christ, that's what most of the political stories here are about: forcing people to do things.
If you base your society on pragmatic, isolated, immediate issues with no principles to guide you then you get what we have today. That is our status quo. Most people don't believe in utopias or broad political principles anymore. They mostly just believe in themselves. And not just the Republicans. The Democrats too regardless of how much they deny it.
That is why libertarians and socialists have much more in common with each other than either has with the two major parties. We at least believe in right and wrong. That there is such a thing.
And libertarians believe that slavery, and police states, and ubiquitous surveillance, and a life that is at the mercy of any government agent with arbitrary power and having to ask permission or even beg just for the privilege to travel somewhere and all the rest of the tyranny that has been building in this country for decades and has blossomed in the new millenium is wrong. Just wrong.
A just society must be one where every citizen is treated equally. I'm not talking about egalitarianism. I mean that there is not one group that is 'more equal' than the other. What right does anyone have to tell someone else how they must live? What makes them so superior to be able to do that?
You see that is what human rights are really all about. The idea that one person has no right to treat another like a slave, regardless of whether they are more violent and have more guns. Human rights are all about the inalienable right to simply be left alone to live your life. That's where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness came from.
Now of course you may not believe in the idea of rights. You may believe that might makes right and that the government, as the strongest, essentially owns its citizens and can do whatever they like with them, but if you are like most people you don't believe that because you don't really believe in much of anything when it comes to politics. Just the status quo and a few narrow issues here or there, particularly when they have a personal stake in the matter.
As far as building a society that minimizes harm, the founders of this country already did that more or less. They just didn't build that society to last. Perhaps it never can. Governments will always grow out of control unless restrained by violence. There will always be selfish, power-hungry people who will try to seize power and inforce their will on a nation.
The essence of the problem with the two major parties is not what their ideas are, but that they don't actually have any. They mostly just want to nitpick at the status quo. The democrats want to raise taxes and introduce more social programs. The republicans want to micromanage and control anyone who is not a corporation and impose their religious based principles on everyone else. What both parties want is essentially a police state, but of course they don't think about it that way because that would require more than just a moment's thought and they don't like to think too much. It must give them a headache or something. Politics is actually a branch of philosophy. Without any guiding principles to determine what kind of society you think is ideal you really have nothing more than a mob fighting with each other over special interests and who gets to feed at the public trough.
I agree that a little pain can be a useful signal that something is wrong, but once you know that something is wrong it certainly serves no useful purpose. Have you ever had chronic pain? Do you have any idea how tiring and awful it is to be in pain constantly 24 hours a day? And if you don't like your doctor get a new one. Most doctors are not like that. You just happened to pick one of the 0.0000000000000000001% of doctors that does not fear the DEA and gives out pain pills at the drop of a hat. He could easily lose his license to practice medicine and even end up in prison for that. The point is that your doctor is not at all representative of doctors in general.
Also, it's not about getting 'high' as you call it. It's about getting rid of pain. There is nothing virtuous about being in pain. After you have taken an opioid for a week or so there isn't much more than a mild sense of well being anyway and that is if you are lucky. In fact the problem with opioids is that your body builds up a tolerance and downregulates your opioid receptors so that you have to keep taking more and more for them to be fully effective. So most people end up having to live with at least some pain even while on the pain killers.