Why are you assuming that taxes should correlate with income? Sure, the tax is collected based on income, but it goes to pay for infrastructure and services whose cost is essentially a flat rate per citizen. In fact, most public services are inversely related to wealth for the simple reason that those who can afford it pay for personalized private services elsewhere.
If you're trying to be fair, ensuring that each individual pays for the services they receive, no more and no less, then it makes perfect sense to consider what percentage of the population pays (or receives) a given percentage of the taxes. If 5% of the population receives 5% or less of the tax-funded public services, why should they pay 22% of the cost, regardless of their income?
I'm sure it will be. There are a number of "populated" areas of Alaska which can only be reached by plane, after all.
Yes, the same argument applies to roads, and every other kind of "infrastructure" you can imagine. There is no value to be had in building infrastructure (or anything else) which people don't demand enough to pay for voluntarily.
The thing is, the reason no company is going to run fiber out to rural areas (assuming your predictions to be correct) is that those in the rural areas don't value high-speed Internet access enough to make it cost-effective. It doesn't matter who actually runs the fiber, government or some private company -- either way it's a waste of resources. The difference is that only governments are capable of wasting other people's resources in this way.
Private companies are fundamentally incapable of providing services people aren't willing to pay for over the long term, which ensures that the outcome is as close to optimal as anyone knows how to get: no resource is wasted producing a less-demanded good when some other good is known to be in higher demand. The only thing governments can do that private companies can't is force people to accept less-than-optimum solutions in support of some arbitrary political goal.
Do you know why people want marriage rights? Because they bring with them other rights, like insurance, social security benefits, health care powers, etc.
The powers you list are the cause of the problem here, not the attributes of those being married:
Legally, shared insurance shouldn't have anything to do with marriage. This is a private matter between the insurance agency and whoever is paying for the insurance.
Social security "benefits" obviously shouldn't exist to begin with, so there's no point in addressing them.
Power-of-attorney, inheritance, etc. are separate civil matters only applicable to those legally recognized as "persons", and again have nothing to do with marriage despite frequent association.
If a human wanted to grant a goat the hospital visitation rights normally accorded to family members, that should be entirely up to the hospital and the patient; the same applies to visiting humans of either gender.
Once you concede that, what principle prevents any old arrangement - marrying your sister, marrying a goat, marrying a group of people, whatever?
Exactly so -- there is no reasonable, religion-neutral objection to such arrangements.
This wouldn't be "separate but equal". Couples from more restrictive religious backgrounds would also have to file for a civil union to get the same benefits. Essentially, the law would be neutral regarding the concept of "marriage"; that term would become merely a label or certification bestowed by any number of private organizations, with no legal consequences whatsoever.
So you're saying that you, as an individual, are a customer of Google? What kind of advertising do you buy from them?
If you're one of their commercial customers, it would be hypocritical to boycott them for getting involved in the "culture wars" based on your own personal feelings regarding the same. If you think they shouldn't get involved, then your decisions should likewise be neutral.
Also, failing to act in accordance with the beliefs of others is not a form of discrimination. E.g. those who eat meat are not discriminating against vegetarians. Those who argue/vote against Prop 8 are not discriminating against those whose philosophical and/or religious beliefs require them to support it. Tolerance goes both ways.
If they're going to be truly religion-neutral, civil unions shouldn't be limited to "a couple" -- all numbers and combinations of individuals should be eligible.
Personally I'd rather that the implications of a civil union be limited to just the tax aspects. Shared insurance is a matter between the insurer and the one(s) paying for the insurance; whether hospital visits are permitted should be up to the hospital, with input from the person receiving care. (The latter could be arranged in advance; e.g. a card or letter of introduction provided to family members.) Neither requires any official recognition from the government.
Why do you say "and potentially worse"? I consider it a good thing that people are learning not to assume that lawmakers, and others in authority, always know best. Not having one's own criteria by which to measure such things is, to me, clear evidence of an absence of moral development.
Sorry, but who do you think grew/processed/delivered the food you just ate, and do you think, given the choice, they wouldn't rather be doing a nice creative/management job than sorting potatoes?
All true, but they weren't coerced into doing it, which is what made your original statement false.
As for the rest of your comments: you are missing the point of a virtual world: all such worlds rely on a certain suspension of disbelief by the participants.
In that case it would probably work just as well as any small community gifted with local superabundance, right up until the resulting growth forces the actual limitations of the virtual environment to the foreground.
To me, it seems as though a shared environment with no limitations or consequences, as you describe, would essentially be the 3D equivalent of Wikipedia, except without the admins, page locks, IP bans, etc. which punish disruptive behavior and make Wikipedia usable. It would be interesting to see the results of such an experiment, though.
...but any other person or group can take a copy of the code and start their own version of the project.
Which is exactly why I said that software itself isn't property, but also that private property rights govern things like access to the repository. The repository is the result of applying specific private property to a task (hosting). Anyone can set up their own copy of the repository, using their own property, but rights are still respected where they make sense -- where something can't simultaneously be put to multiple arbitrary uses. Effective collaboration depends on this; repositories can only be in one state at a time, and thus very few projects accept arbitrary contributions from outsiders directly into the official repository. The consequence of doing so would be an immediate "tragedy of the commons" and non-working code.
Many people argue against capitalism when what they really object to is an irrational refusal to work together for mutual benefit. However, when put to the test, such choices often turn out not to be quite so irrational as originally thought. To assume that unrestricted collaboration is always better than private competition goes against human nature in any world.
It's easier to convert voltages with AC power, but DC doesn't suffer from the skin effect, which amplifies the effective resistance of lines carrying AC current by decreasing the cross-sectional area through which the current travels. For the same voltage, current and transmission lines, DC has lower resistive losses.
As described by rabtech in this comment, now that we have high-efficiency solid-state DC transformers, AC is losing ground for long-distance power transmission.
Even in a virtual world there is always at least one scarce commodity: labor.
No: because the only labour necessary in a virtual world takes place for the direct benefit of the labourer and is usually of a creative/intellectual nature. Nobody has to be coerced into digging coal or grow food in order to support the lifestyle of the slighty-more-equal comrades at the top of the heap.
First, that latter statement isn't even true in the real world. Second, labor is scarce even when you only consider the individual. There's only so much time in a day, and the person acting in the virtual world (as opposed to their avatar) has other things to be doing with that time, many of which may be easier or more rewarding than spending additional time in the virtual world.
But anything destroyed in a virtual world can be re-created by fiat.
If the world has a fine-grained "undo" capability, sure, that would generally work -- unless the thief was unusually persistent. The full history of the world would have to be kept on file, however, which isn't usually done for reasons of storage space. Things still tend to run more smoothly if players can rely on certain elements (like their avatar) remaining protected from unwanted modification by other players, rather than constantly being forced to restore them to an earlier state. Such protection is trivial to implement, so it's not surprising that most virtual worlds include such rules.
Secondly, those resources are used in the real world there is no reason why every citizen can't pay a fixed monthly subscription or make donations to cover that - as long as those do not translate into personal property or status within the virtual world.
The monthly subscriptions would only serve to determine just how *much* capacity you have to share amongst all the players. At that point you have to decide whether any given player will be permitted to use up all the resources, or whether each player will be allocated a specific amount, or some other arrangement. If you divide all resources equally you force yourself to turn away both those who would use less (but only at a lower rate) and those who would use more, and pay their own way. Real-world scarcity thus intrudes upon the virtual world.
Even making the choice at all presumes that access to the virtual world is a commodity (simultaneously real and virtual) that can be treated as private property.
However, back in the real world, we do have one example: the Free (as in GPL) Software movement.
The software itself isn't property -- and I would argue that treating it as such isn't logically consistent with the purpose or nature of property -- but the development of free software depends very much on the existence of private property. To begin with, each developer is choosing whether or not to contribute, exercising their rights in their own body and mind, not to mention their food, shelter, computer, etc. To work as a group, someone has to apply their own property to the purpose of hosting the shared aspects of the project. Generally there is a limited group with write access to the repository, whose members can be said to "own" the code in the limited fashion I've been using above with regard to modifications, etc., etc. The effort is cooperative, yes, but everything for which the concept of property applies is privately owned by one or more individuals, not collectively by everyone.
So all you have to do to "prove" it wasn't you is change the embedded timestamp?
Somehow I don't think they plan to make things quite that easy.
Anyway, removing the information should be trivial, provided it's limited to actual strings embedded in the headers and not steganography. Since the files are lossless you can extract the raw audio and move it to another container (e.g. FLAC) without worrying about quality degradation or an increase in size.
What I find depressing is that these "virtual worlds" are all taking the form of capitalist economies. Communism/Socialism may or may not work in the real world, but if I'm going to move to a virtual world which is supposedly limited only by the imagination of its inhabitants, I'm holding out for a post-scarcity utopia like The Culture or even the freakin' United Federation of Planets!
Even in a virtual world there is always at least one scarce commodity: labor. Users tend to prefer worlds where the (virtual) product of their labor is protected from destruction by some anonymous "troll", which amounts to a form of private property rights. Also, virtual "building blocks" may be superabundant in the abstract, but they all require a measure of storage/bandwidth/CPU time/etc., which means they, too, are subject to the constraints of scarcity.
Given that you claim to be young and in good health, the obvious answer would be to take out a loan. Under any reasonable circumstances the terms on a personal loan are bound to be better than the expected return on your monthly insurance premiums.
Insurance has its place, but only in the context of pooling risks. If everyone is expected to endure a $10k hospital stay at some point it isn't really a risk, but rather a known cost, and the tools to deal with known costs are savings and loans.
As for the other common objection, "pre-existing conditions", the solution is to take out insurance before they become "pre-existing". Essentially, you're stuck with making one wager -- that you (or your dependent) might end up with some unforeseen disease or disability -- so you balance it out with a bet on the opposing side, trading risk for cost.
The entrenched cable and telco companies wouldn't argue in favor of reducing regulatory barriers. On the contrary, they willingly accept such minor restrictions as they can't work around in exchange for effective protection from competition. An invasive regulatory environment best serves the incumbent providers.
That's an old argument that we proved was little more than rhetoric long ago.
That's an old argument that we proved was little more than rhetoric long ago.
Seriously, where is this "proof" you speak of? All you've done is dismiss others' legitimate concerns out-of-hand.
... you will always have an unfair system which is set up to benefit the providers, not the recipients.
The providers don't benefit unless (a) the recipients believe themselves reasonably compensated by provided services; or (b) someone like you forces them to pay the provider despite not believing they are receiving adequate service. Such beliefs may be wrong, temporarily, but who are you to make that decision for everyone?
How exactly do you expect the IPv4-only hosts behind the router to indicate which IPv6 addresses their packets are to be sent to? It's relatively easy to go the other way around, since all IPv4 addresses map to IPv6 addresses --/48 subnets, actually -- but having an IPv4-only local network would limit you to accessing the IPv6 web via a proxy server.
Anyway, you can already access both IPv4 and IPv6 local hosts by mDNS names (hostname.local) rather than IPs provided they're running Avahai (on Linux) or Bonjour (on Mac OS X or Windows). The former two are standard, and Bonjour for Windows is available as a free download. You're not expected to memorize IPv6 addresses, or type them in by hand.
P.S. The IPv6 localhost address is just::1, which is actually somewhat easier to remember and type than 127.0.0.1.
Philosophy, religious or political, is used as a justification or a method to gain the support of the people being sent to war.... We are all wise enough to realize that this truly was in name only, and that their true motivations were to acquire and hold power.
This, as it happens, is very near to the point that I intended to make myself. When placing blame, it doesn't really matter whether the leader was genuinely religious/atheistic or just using such rhetoric to incite the masses. What matters is whether religious or anti-religious rhetoric has historically been more successful at inciting violence. Obviously there is some blame on both sides, but I think you'll find that far more people have been killed because they didn't follow the "right" religion than have been killed because they weren't atheist, from the perspective of those actually doing the killing. It appears to me that shared beliefs, particularly subjective or irrational ones, are much more effective at inspiring the masses toward war than any shared lack of belief could ever be.
(I'm ignoring violence in the names of political ideologies for now, since it can't be directly blamed on either religion or atheism -- although it can often be traced to the same sort of exaggerated, shared beliefs typical of religions, and rarely to anything resembling the typical atheistic absence of belief.)
Experience is obviously a factor when it comes to employment. No one goes straight school into the sort of upper-level managerial positions I was addressing. Changes in the job market over time are also a factor; it's generally harder to start a career than it is to maintain one, and conditions are a lot tighter recently than they were in the past, so I'm not surprised that someone just getting started ended up in a more stressful and lower-paying job than someone employed earlier.
Note, however, that I wasn't addressing correlations of stress and pay between unrelated lines of work, or between different individuals. This is specifically about whether you would accept an advancement within your own field, trading off an increase in pay against greater responsibility.
Assume for a moment that an opportunity for advancement is available to you, accompanied by an increase in pay. They've already decided that you qualify. Wouldn't you agree that the new position is likely to be more difficult than what you're doing now? If it were just a matter of finding an opening, wouldn't you happily take the job at your current pay grade? Why would they offer a raise as well, if not to give you an incentive to switch -- to compensate you for the opportunity cost of taking the job?
If a tax is imposed, then that incentive is decreased by the full amount of the tax. The decrease in opportunity cost would be somewhere between 0% and 100% (corresponding to another job with the same tax). At best the tax has no effect; in the far more likely case of a relative decrease in incentive vs. cost, some will choose not to advance.
Government programs always look good when you want exactly what they're offering and don't consider the cost. For those who believe they would be better served by a different provider, or who end up being coerced into paying more than their share to subsidize the services you enjoy on the cheap, it's not such an obvious choice.
Presumably they'd get the funding from the same place they're already getting $2.5 trillion (about $7.1 billion(!) per citizen) for their current "recovery" programs: inflation and debt.
Since you seem to have strong opinions about economics and tax policy, would you mind telling us what economic training, if any, you have?
I'm normally on your side, but this is nothing more than a blatant attempt at ad hominem -- or possibly an appeal to authority, which is just as much of a logical fallacy. Debate the subject, not your opponent.
The GP's statements of fact are largely correct; the primary issue lies with the unstated assumption that the situation described is somehow wrong -- other than the point about individuals being more heavily penalized via taxes. You pointed out one such instance with respect to savings, but there are others. The GP implicitly asserts that it is wrong to import goods, wrong to take steps to minimize losses to taxation[1], wrong for the those "in the top income brackets" to rent out property for profit... these concepts underly the GP's entire post, but no logical support is provided for any of it.
--------------------
[1] Even at least one federal judge I know of disagreed with this one, stating that people have no obligation whatsoever to increase their tax burden beyond the minimum the law demands.
If you assume one can take home either $250k or $55k for exactly the same work, sure, anyone would choose the $250k job, no questions asked. In general, however, that isn't the case. Higher-paying jobs tend to require more effort and longer hours, produce more stress, depend on specialized skills and connections which must be maintained, etc. The trade-offs a person may be willing to make to earn $1M likely wouldn't remain justified after 75% is cut away by taxes.
Everyone would like to make more money, but few are willing to pay the price. That price doesn't decrease any just because you tax away most of the incentive. Those on the margin, who would be willing to take on the additional responsibility at the higher salary but not the reduced one, will choose not to advance as a direct result of the tax.
If you're being paid interest then it's an investment, not simple savings. You don't get interest from money sitting in a bank vault; it has to be loaned out. They try to pretend that these sorts of investments are "risk-free", but they're really just insured -- and as with any insurance scheme, the accounts are only protected from isolated failures. In a way it's not unlike the recent debacle regarding repackaged mortgages; both schemes rely on the questionable assumption that risks are mutually independent.
In the event of a widespread collapse the FDIC would only have two options: default on the insurance, leaving people without their pseudo-"savings", or dramatically increase the amount of currency in circulation. Either way the overall effect on purchasing-power is the same.
All life is a gamble, really, and the fact that currency plays a special part in the economy doesn't prevent it from gaining and losing relative value just like any other good. Some gambles are more rational than others, however, and for those who desire actual savings, holding on to dollars -- at the bank or in a mattress -- would not be a rational choice based on their history (95+% devaluation over the past century or so). A better plan would be to maintain a mix of durable commodities, with an eye toward easy of storage and marketability. You'd still be gambling, of course, but at least you wouldn't be placing all your eggs in one (leaky) basket.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are you assuming that taxes should correlate with income? Sure, the tax is collected based on income, but it goes to pay for infrastructure and services whose cost is essentially a flat rate per citizen. In fact, most public services are inversely related to wealth for the simple reason that those who can afford it pay for personalized private services elsewhere.
If you're trying to be fair, ensuring that each individual pays for the services they receive, no more and no less, then it makes perfect sense to consider what percentage of the population pays (or receives) a given percentage of the taxes. If 5% of the population receives 5% or less of the tax-funded public services, why should they pay 22% of the cost, regardless of their income?
I'm sure it will be. There are a number of "populated" areas of Alaska which can only be reached by plane, after all.
Yes, the same argument applies to roads, and every other kind of "infrastructure" you can imagine. There is no value to be had in building infrastructure (or anything else) which people don't demand enough to pay for voluntarily.
The thing is, the reason no company is going to run fiber out to rural areas (assuming your predictions to be correct) is that those in the rural areas don't value high-speed Internet access enough to make it cost-effective. It doesn't matter who actually runs the fiber, government or some private company -- either way it's a waste of resources. The difference is that only governments are capable of wasting other people's resources in this way.
Private companies are fundamentally incapable of providing services people aren't willing to pay for over the long term, which ensures that the outcome is as close to optimal as anyone knows how to get: no resource is wasted producing a less-demanded good when some other good is known to be in higher demand. The only thing governments can do that private companies can't is force people to accept less-than-optimum solutions in support of some arbitrary political goal.
Recognize all pairings between two people as civil unions...
should be:
Recognize all groupings between two or more people as civil unions...
Do you know why people want marriage rights? Because they bring with them other rights, like insurance, social security benefits, health care powers, etc.
The powers you list are the cause of the problem here, not the attributes of those being married:
Legally, shared insurance shouldn't have anything to do with marriage. This is a private matter between the insurance agency and whoever is paying for the insurance.
Social security "benefits" obviously shouldn't exist to begin with, so there's no point in addressing them.
Power-of-attorney, inheritance, etc. are separate civil matters only applicable to those legally recognized as "persons", and again have nothing to do with marriage despite frequent association.
If a human wanted to grant a goat the hospital visitation rights normally accorded to family members, that should be entirely up to the hospital and the patient; the same applies to visiting humans of either gender.
Once you concede that, what principle prevents any old arrangement - marrying your sister, marrying a goat, marrying a group of people, whatever?
Exactly so -- there is no reasonable, religion-neutral objection to such arrangements.
This wouldn't be "separate but equal". Couples from more restrictive religious backgrounds would also have to file for a civil union to get the same benefits. Essentially, the law would be neutral regarding the concept of "marriage"; that term would become merely a label or certification bestowed by any number of private organizations, with no legal consequences whatsoever.
So you're saying that you, as an individual, are a customer of Google? What kind of advertising do you buy from them?
If you're one of their commercial customers, it would be hypocritical to boycott them for getting involved in the "culture wars" based on your own personal feelings regarding the same. If you think they shouldn't get involved, then your decisions should likewise be neutral.
Also, failing to act in accordance with the beliefs of others is not a form of discrimination. E.g. those who eat meat are not discriminating against vegetarians. Those who argue/vote against Prop 8 are not discriminating against those whose philosophical and/or religious beliefs require them to support it. Tolerance goes both ways.
If they're going to be truly religion-neutral, civil unions shouldn't be limited to "a couple" -- all numbers and combinations of individuals should be eligible.
Personally I'd rather that the implications of a civil union be limited to just the tax aspects. Shared insurance is a matter between the insurer and the one(s) paying for the insurance; whether hospital visits are permitted should be up to the hospital, with input from the person receiving care. (The latter could be arranged in advance; e.g. a card or letter of introduction provided to family members.) Neither requires any official recognition from the government.
Why do you say "and potentially worse"? I consider it a good thing that people are learning not to assume that lawmakers, and others in authority, always know best. Not having one's own criteria by which to measure such things is, to me, clear evidence of an absence of moral development.
Sorry, but who do you think grew/processed/delivered the food you just ate, and do you think, given the choice, they wouldn't rather be doing a nice creative/management job than sorting potatoes?
All true, but they weren't coerced into doing it, which is what made your original statement false.
As for the rest of your comments: you are missing the point of a virtual world: all such worlds rely on a certain suspension of disbelief by the participants.
In that case it would probably work just as well as any small community gifted with local superabundance, right up until the resulting growth forces the actual limitations of the virtual environment to the foreground.
To me, it seems as though a shared environment with no limitations or consequences, as you describe, would essentially be the 3D equivalent of Wikipedia, except without the admins, page locks, IP bans, etc. which punish disruptive behavior and make Wikipedia usable. It would be interesting to see the results of such an experiment, though.
...but any other person or group can take a copy of the code and start their own version of the project.
Which is exactly why I said that software itself isn't property, but also that private property rights govern things like access to the repository. The repository is the result of applying specific private property to a task (hosting). Anyone can set up their own copy of the repository, using their own property, but rights are still respected where they make sense -- where something can't simultaneously be put to multiple arbitrary uses. Effective collaboration depends on this; repositories can only be in one state at a time, and thus very few projects accept arbitrary contributions from outsiders directly into the official repository. The consequence of doing so would be an immediate "tragedy of the commons" and non-working code.
Many people argue against capitalism when what they really object to is an irrational refusal to work together for mutual benefit. However, when put to the test, such choices often turn out not to be quite so irrational as originally thought. To assume that unrestricted collaboration is always better than private competition goes against human nature in any world.
It's easier to convert voltages with AC power, but DC doesn't suffer from the skin effect, which amplifies the effective resistance of lines carrying AC current by decreasing the cross-sectional area through which the current travels. For the same voltage, current and transmission lines, DC has lower resistive losses.
As described by rabtech in this comment, now that we have high-efficiency solid-state DC transformers, AC is losing ground for long-distance power transmission.
Even in a virtual world there is always at least one scarce commodity: labor.
No: because the only labour necessary in a virtual world takes place for the direct benefit of the labourer and is usually of a creative/intellectual nature. Nobody has to be coerced into digging coal or grow food in order to support the lifestyle of the slighty-more-equal comrades at the top of the heap.
First, that latter statement isn't even true in the real world. Second, labor is scarce even when you only consider the individual. There's only so much time in a day, and the person acting in the virtual world (as opposed to their avatar) has other things to be doing with that time, many of which may be easier or more rewarding than spending additional time in the virtual world.
But anything destroyed in a virtual world can be re-created by fiat.
If the world has a fine-grained "undo" capability, sure, that would generally work -- unless the thief was unusually persistent. The full history of the world would have to be kept on file, however, which isn't usually done for reasons of storage space. Things still tend to run more smoothly if players can rely on certain elements (like their avatar) remaining protected from unwanted modification by other players, rather than constantly being forced to restore them to an earlier state. Such protection is trivial to implement, so it's not surprising that most virtual worlds include such rules.
Secondly, those resources are used in the real world there is no reason why every citizen can't pay a fixed monthly subscription or make donations to cover that - as long as those do not translate into personal property or status within the virtual world.
The monthly subscriptions would only serve to determine just how *much* capacity you have to share amongst all the players. At that point you have to decide whether any given player will be permitted to use up all the resources, or whether each player will be allocated a specific amount, or some other arrangement. If you divide all resources equally you force yourself to turn away both those who would use less (but only at a lower rate) and those who would use more, and pay their own way. Real-world scarcity thus intrudes upon the virtual world.
Even making the choice at all presumes that access to the virtual world is a commodity (simultaneously real and virtual) that can be treated as private property.
However, back in the real world, we do have one example: the Free (as in GPL) Software movement.
The software itself isn't property -- and I would argue that treating it as such isn't logically consistent with the purpose or nature of property -- but the development of free software depends very much on the existence of private property. To begin with, each developer is choosing whether or not to contribute, exercising their rights in their own body and mind, not to mention their food, shelter, computer, etc. To work as a group, someone has to apply their own property to the purpose of hosting the shared aspects of the project. Generally there is a limited group with write access to the repository, whose members can be said to "own" the code in the limited fashion I've been using above with regard to modifications, etc., etc. The effort is cooperative, yes, but everything for which the concept of property applies is privately owned by one or more individuals, not collectively by everyone.
So all you have to do to "prove" it wasn't you is change the embedded timestamp?
Somehow I don't think they plan to make things quite that easy.
Anyway, removing the information should be trivial, provided it's limited to actual strings embedded in the headers and not steganography. Since the files are lossless you can extract the raw audio and move it to another container (e.g. FLAC) without worrying about quality degradation or an increase in size.
What I find depressing is that these "virtual worlds" are all taking the form of capitalist economies. Communism/Socialism may or may not work in the real world, but if I'm going to move to a virtual world which is supposedly limited only by the imagination of its inhabitants, I'm holding out for a post-scarcity utopia like The Culture or even the freakin' United Federation of Planets!
Even in a virtual world there is always at least one scarce commodity: labor. Users tend to prefer worlds where the (virtual) product of their labor is protected from destruction by some anonymous "troll", which amounts to a form of private property rights. Also, virtual "building blocks" may be superabundant in the abstract, but they all require a measure of storage/bandwidth/CPU time/etc., which means they, too, are subject to the constraints of scarcity.
Given that you claim to be young and in good health, the obvious answer would be to take out a loan. Under any reasonable circumstances the terms on a personal loan are bound to be better than the expected return on your monthly insurance premiums.
Insurance has its place, but only in the context of pooling risks. If everyone is expected to endure a $10k hospital stay at some point it isn't really a risk, but rather a known cost, and the tools to deal with known costs are savings and loans.
As for the other common objection, "pre-existing conditions", the solution is to take out insurance before they become "pre-existing". Essentially, you're stuck with making one wager -- that you (or your dependent) might end up with some unforeseen disease or disability -- so you balance it out with a bet on the opposing side, trading risk for cost.
The entrenched cable and telco companies wouldn't argue in favor of reducing regulatory barriers. On the contrary, they willingly accept such minor restrictions as they can't work around in exchange for effective protection from competition. An invasive regulatory environment best serves the incumbent providers.
That's an old argument that we proved was little more than rhetoric long ago.
That's an old argument that we proved was little more than rhetoric long ago.
Seriously, where is this "proof" you speak of? All you've done is dismiss others' legitimate concerns out-of-hand.
... you will always have an unfair system which is set up to benefit the providers, not the recipients.
The providers don't benefit unless (a) the recipients believe themselves reasonably compensated by provided services; or (b) someone like you forces them to pay the provider despite not believing they are receiving adequate service. Such beliefs may be wrong, temporarily, but who are you to make that decision for everyone?
How exactly do you expect the IPv4-only hosts behind the router to indicate which IPv6 addresses their packets are to be sent to? It's relatively easy to go the other way around, since all IPv4 addresses map to IPv6 addresses -- /48 subnets, actually -- but having an IPv4-only local network would limit you to accessing the IPv6 web via a proxy server.
Anyway, you can already access both IPv4 and IPv6 local hosts by mDNS names (hostname.local) rather than IPs provided they're running Avahai (on Linux) or Bonjour (on Mac OS X or Windows). The former two are standard, and Bonjour for Windows is available as a free download. You're not expected to memorize IPv6 addresses, or type them in by hand.
P.S. The IPv6 localhost address is just ::1, which is actually somewhat easier to remember and type than 127.0.0.1.
Philosophy, religious or political, is used as a justification or a method to gain the support of the people being sent to war. ... We are all wise enough to realize that this truly was in name only, and that their true motivations were to acquire and hold power.
This, as it happens, is very near to the point that I intended to make myself. When placing blame, it doesn't really matter whether the leader was genuinely religious/atheistic or just using such rhetoric to incite the masses. What matters is whether religious or anti-religious rhetoric has historically been more successful at inciting violence. Obviously there is some blame on both sides, but I think you'll find that far more people have been killed because they didn't follow the "right" religion than have been killed because they weren't atheist, from the perspective of those actually doing the killing. It appears to me that shared beliefs, particularly subjective or irrational ones, are much more effective at inspiring the masses toward war than any shared lack of belief could ever be.
(I'm ignoring violence in the names of political ideologies for now, since it can't be directly blamed on either religion or atheism -- although it can often be traced to the same sort of exaggerated, shared beliefs typical of religions, and rarely to anything resembling the typical atheistic absence of belief.)
Experience is obviously a factor when it comes to employment. No one goes straight school into the sort of upper-level managerial positions I was addressing. Changes in the job market over time are also a factor; it's generally harder to start a career than it is to maintain one, and conditions are a lot tighter recently than they were in the past, so I'm not surprised that someone just getting started ended up in a more stressful and lower-paying job than someone employed earlier.
Note, however, that I wasn't addressing correlations of stress and pay between unrelated lines of work, or between different individuals. This is specifically about whether you would accept an advancement within your own field, trading off an increase in pay against greater responsibility.
Assume for a moment that an opportunity for advancement is available to you, accompanied by an increase in pay. They've already decided that you qualify. Wouldn't you agree that the new position is likely to be more difficult than what you're doing now? If it were just a matter of finding an opening, wouldn't you happily take the job at your current pay grade? Why would they offer a raise as well, if not to give you an incentive to switch -- to compensate you for the opportunity cost of taking the job?
If a tax is imposed, then that incentive is decreased by the full amount of the tax. The decrease in opportunity cost would be somewhere between 0% and 100% (corresponding to another job with the same tax). At best the tax has no effect; in the far more likely case of a relative decrease in incentive vs. cost, some will choose not to advance.
Government programs always look good when you want exactly what they're offering and don't consider the cost. For those who believe they would be better served by a different provider, or who end up being coerced into paying more than their share to subsidize the services you enjoy on the cheap, it's not such an obvious choice.
Presumably they'd get the funding from the same place they're already getting $2.5 trillion (about $7.1 billion(!) per citizen) for their current "recovery" programs: inflation and debt.
Since you seem to have strong opinions about economics and tax policy, would you mind telling us what economic training, if any, you have?
I'm normally on your side, but this is nothing more than a blatant attempt at ad hominem -- or possibly an appeal to authority, which is just as much of a logical fallacy. Debate the subject, not your opponent.
The GP's statements of fact are largely correct; the primary issue lies with the unstated assumption that the situation described is somehow wrong -- other than the point about individuals being more heavily penalized via taxes. You pointed out one such instance with respect to savings, but there are others. The GP implicitly asserts that it is wrong to import goods, wrong to take steps to minimize losses to taxation[1], wrong for the those "in the top income brackets" to rent out property for profit... these concepts underly the GP's entire post, but no logical support is provided for any of it.
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[1] Even at least one federal judge I know of disagreed with this one, stating that people have no obligation whatsoever to increase their tax burden beyond the minimum the law demands.
If you assume one can take home either $250k or $55k for exactly the same work, sure, anyone would choose the $250k job, no questions asked. In general, however, that isn't the case. Higher-paying jobs tend to require more effort and longer hours, produce more stress, depend on specialized skills and connections which must be maintained, etc. The trade-offs a person may be willing to make to earn $1M likely wouldn't remain justified after 75% is cut away by taxes.
Everyone would like to make more money, but few are willing to pay the price. That price doesn't decrease any just because you tax away most of the incentive. Those on the margin, who would be willing to take on the additional responsibility at the higher salary but not the reduced one, will choose not to advance as a direct result of the tax.
If you're being paid interest then it's an investment, not simple savings. You don't get interest from money sitting in a bank vault; it has to be loaned out. They try to pretend that these sorts of investments are "risk-free", but they're really just insured -- and as with any insurance scheme, the accounts are only protected from isolated failures. In a way it's not unlike the recent debacle regarding repackaged mortgages; both schemes rely on the questionable assumption that risks are mutually independent.
In the event of a widespread collapse the FDIC would only have two options: default on the insurance, leaving people without their pseudo-"savings", or dramatically increase the amount of currency in circulation. Either way the overall effect on purchasing-power is the same.
All life is a gamble, really, and the fact that currency plays a special part in the economy doesn't prevent it from gaining and losing relative value just like any other good. Some gambles are more rational than others, however, and for those who desire actual savings, holding on to dollars -- at the bank or in a mattress -- would not be a rational choice based on their history (95+% devaluation over the past century or so). A better plan would be to maintain a mix of durable commodities, with an eye toward easy of storage and marketability. You'd still be gambling, of course, but at least you wouldn't be placing all your eggs in one (leaky) basket.