These regulation would also prevent you from putting whatever you want into other people's bodies, with or without their consent.
No anti-regulation person that I have ever heard of would count consider a prohibition on drugging others against their will a mere "regulation". I understand that the term can be used more generally, but in this context "regulation" specifically means prohibitions or requirements other than, and thus contrary to, the Non-Aggression Principle. There is no opposition to just laws, e.g. those against murder, assault, extortion, theft, fraud, etc., where the prohibited action would be an involuntary intrusion into another's person or property.
The Linux kernel has been GPLv2 for a long time. If Sun wanted ZFS support in Linux they could have made it work easily. The license they chose, and the patents they hold, allow them to call it "open source" while avoiding the possibility of native support in the most popular open-source alternative to their own Solaris operating system. I don't think that's a coincidence.
A much more detailed debate on the LKML is summarized on KernelTrap in support of my position. About a third of the way down the page you'll find this quote: "there are senior Sun programmers who have on record stated that one of the reasons why Sun picked the CDDL was precisely because it was incompatible with GPL and Sun fears Linux."
All of the features I mentioned are in ZFS. The GP wanted a filesystem with the functionality of ZFS, so those are the points I emphasized. BtrFS has other features which can be found on its homepage.
Perhaps I wasn't completely clear. I am fully aware that ZFS supports all these features; I meant only that these ZFS features are also in BtrFS. BtrFS has some additional features not in ZFS, and visa-versa; there is a more extensive list on the BtrFS Wiki.
Among all the features of BtrFS the most significant is native Linux compatibility, which ZFS does not have and is not likely to acquire.
With that said, linux REALLY needs ZFS , and not in userspace.
Due to deliberate licensing issues we won't have native ZFS in Linux any time soon. However, BtrFS should be merging into the mainline kernel soon enough (~2.6.29), and it includes most of ZFS's features plus a few of its own: storage pools, checksumming, mutable snapshots, built-in extent-level striping and mirroring, etc. It even supports in-place, reversible conversion from ext3 via a copy-on-write snapshot.
You don't actually have to use those features, of course -- they're just shorthand. The 'symbol pattern, for example, is just translated by reader macros into (quote symbol), and `(macro,@quoting) becomes (append (list (quote macro)) quoting).
The actual syntax of Lisp is defined in terms of data structures, not characters, and at that level there are really only two atomic forms, literals and symbols, and three list forms: special operators, macros, and function calls.
The government should not stop me from doing anything! (Unless it is someone else doing it to me)
A better way to word that would be "all actions which harm others (against their will) should be illegal; nothing else should be." Also known as the Non-Aggression Principle. (*Some definitions apply.)
Let's get over this idea that there are "no victims" in the crime of prostitution.
(Emphasis mine.)
What you say is true, but what the GP says is also true. The act of prostitution itself harms no one but the one choosing to commit it, and thus fits the definition of a victimless crime perfectly. The prostitute may in fact be a victim of other crimes, and there may exist victims of separate crimes associated with (but not caused by) prostitution, but it is nonetheless a crime for which there are no victims.
Your best bet is Wildblue with 750-1500ms latency and 256kbps upload speed.... you also face rate-limiting from WildBlue once you pass a bandwidth threshold. Let us not forget wiping the snow off the dish, throwing a trash bag over the lnb when it rains, and wiggling the dish when you lose signal.
My parents use HughesNet, a competing satellite Internet provider. The high ping times are inherent in the design, but the bandwidth is more like 1Mbps. They do have to remove snow occasionally in the winter, but so far as I know haven't had any other signal issues and they don't take any special measures when it rains.
The real issues, other than the latency, are the daily 350MB transfer cap and the price: ~$70/mo. including the amortized installation and hardware costs. Compared to DSL or cable Internet that is a lot of money for a very limited service. However, DSL and cable aren't available in their area, and 350MB is more than they could transfer in a day at dial-up speeds; in practice they rarely come close to exceeding the limit. In return they get an always-on connection with 25x the bandwidth and eliminate the need for a dedicated phone line.
I understand why native-PostScript printers are scarce, but how difficult could it be to include a simple ROM with self-contained, platform-agnostic (Java?) translator software? It'd be cheap to implement, with all the CPU-intensive work being done on the PC, and there would be no need to supply separate drivers for each OS.
Probably an Intel HDA chipset. They're notorious for never being implemented the same way twice; knowing that it's an HDA chip doesn't actually tell you much about how the channels, volume controls, etc. are arranged. That has to be coded in differently for every case where the chip is used.
I have an Eee PC with an Intel HDA audio device, and had similar problems getting it to function properly; it would act like the volume was muted, but none of the volume controls had any effect on the output. Eventually I stumbled on a configuration that worked. You might have some luck using the "model" module option to override the kernel's autodetection.
Those aren't release names, they're code names. The release names are "Ubuntu 8.04", "Ubuntu 8.10", etc., which are perfectly professional. Proprietary software often has code names which are just as "childish" (your word, not mine); you just don't see them because the development is done behind closed doors.
I think the GP was referring to networks where the user profiles are stored on a remote file server. It more likely has something to do with locking, which tends to be haphazardly implemented among network filesystems. (That's not a criticism of the developers; it's a more difficult problem than local file locking.)
First, I did mention a "state of emergency" exception, which would fully address your concerns.
Second, World War II is what got us out of the Great Depression, by diverting resources away from the massively wasteful government programs that created the Great Depression in the first place.
The economic conditions leading up to the GD weren't any worse than we'd experienced previously, but the GD was the first time the government got seriously involved in trying to put off the correction process (made necessary by significant inflationary policies from 1921-1929). As a result, instead of the painful-but-quick corrections of the past we spent a number of long, miserable years attempting to avoid the inevitable effects of prior interventions.
Lack of consumer spending doesn't cause depressions, and stubbornly continuing to waste resources can't get us out of one.
I don't entirely disagree, but your point #4 isn't all that different in effect from my point #3. A hard limit on federal tax rates would make it much more difficult to divert limited federal revenues toward wealth redistribution and away from items of common interest, like nation defense. As a bonus, the less the feds can take in taxes the less opportunity they have to bribe states with their own citizens' money.
Strictly speaking, if no state could ever receive more than its share of services relative to the taxes paid by its citizens there would be no point at all in even having the tax; the state could just implement the services itself. I'm not opposed to that at all, but it's a much harder position to gather support for. People in general seem hard-wired (or perhaps just indoctrinated?) to see government as necessary, even though it doesn't do anything that couldn't be done privately -- anything, for that matter, that hasn't been done privately in the past.
Certainly any of our states could easily operate as an independent, sovereign nation; numerous smaller ones exist elsewhere in the world without any difficulty.
I don't think you understand the law of diminishing returns. You're still trying to apply it to different individuals' utility, which doesn't make any sense.
All that the law of diminishing returns says is that if you currently have 20 units of something, the use of each of which is independent of the others, then the value of the 21st unit is less than the individual values of the 1st through 20th units. The first unit you get goes toward the most urgent use, the second unit goes to the next most urgent use, etc. From the opposite point of view, the value of the marginal unit goes up as units are expended; going from five units to four costs you more than going from twenty to nineteen, because that fifth unit would have fulfilled a more urgent want than the 20th. Whether or not there are "tipping points" when units are interdependent is a matter of perspective -- I prefer to consider such cases as alternate, simultaneous orderings rather than a single unordered sequence -- but either way I don't think there are many such points relevant to this argument. Feel free to bring up a specific example if you disagree.
In the context of a job, then, going from 40 hours per week to 45 (giving up five hours of leisure) is not as costly as going from 60 to 65. You're giving up the same amount of leisure, but in the second case you have fewer leisure hours left, and the ones you give up would have gone to (subjectively) more valuable uses. Regarding income, an extra $100 to someone making $20k is a much bigger deal than the same $100 to someone making $60k. All else being equal, at some point the value of the additional money is less than the value of the leisure time sacrificed to get it, and no further hours will be traded away. The point where this occurs is specific to the individual, and can change over time.
As to why haven't *I* moved to a higher paying job? Still building the requisites. It has little or nothing to do with my ability or willingness to spend more time or effort in what I do - some things you can't rush (like, say, licensing requiring X years experience) and that's all there is to it.
You're focusing on one specific job. That's not uncommon, but it isn't the only option. You could trade leisure time for a second job, for example. There are plenty available which do not require significant prior experience. You could probably increase your prospective income by moving to another area. You could cut unnecessary expenditures, sell your possessions, and lend the resulting money out at interest, or trade in the market, or invest in human capital: higher education, networking, anything which would help you get ahead. As I said, there are many paths to higher income for those above subsistence standards of living. Even under a seniority system there are fewer managers at each tier as you progress up the ladder, and they aren't chosen at random. Those who make the most trade-offs in favor of their career stand the best chance of being picked for advancement.
Note that I'm not saying that you should do these things, only that they are available. You questioned why people who could make more would choose to stay in lower-paying job(s) as a result of taxes; I gave you the answer. Simply put, taxes decrease the payoff of moving to the higher-paying job(s), without making the job(s) any easier to get or to keep. Same effort + less reward = fewer people making the trade.
The law of diminishing returns is a well-accepted economic principle. It's the basis for the law of supply and demand. If you think there's something wrong with it "in the general case" you have more than just me to argue with.
By your argument, anyone earning a living wage would be awash in leisure time while the executives earning 7 digits a year would be toiling 24/7 with only federal holidays off.
That does not follow from my argument. For one thing, I never said that ratio of cost to pay was constant across different individuals. Obviously there are many things, including natural abilities, learned skills, experience, luck, status, family connections, etc., which can lead to one person earning more than another for the same task. Most people have less chance of ever becoming the CEO of a large company than of winning the lottery, but that doesn't have anything to do with marginal utility, which is a strictly intrapersonal concept.
If you think that you, personally, could move from a $50k job to a $100k job without giving anything up, why haven't you done so? Unless one is already at a bare subsistence standard of living -- no leisure time, no hedges against risk, no resources of any kind allocated to anything but production -- there is always a path available to higher income for those willing to make the necessary trade-offs. The fact that people choose not to make those trade-offs proves that there is a balance between income and other factors, which is all I need to make my point. If you tax away even part of that marginal income then those other factors are going to look more valuable by comparison, and fewer people will choose to give them up for increasingly limited returns.
I never understood how people can honestly present the argument that taxing the rich would make people not want to be rich.
No, people would still want to be rich. What you're missing, however, is that you'll never move from less than $50k to over $100k (2008 dollars) while continuing to perform the same work. Each increment of time and effort, and other resources, devoted to earning that extra income costs you more than the last. At the same time the marginal value of the extra income decreases as your most urgent needs and wants are met. (see also: law of diminishing returns)
In the end there is a balance, which varies per individual, between the degree of effort expended and the resulting level of income. Income taxes don't inhibit people's desire for greater income, which is naturally unlimited, but do affect the balance point by decreasing the reward for any given amount of additional effort.
Exactly. It's not enough to just look at taxes; to really fix things would require at least three separate initiatives:
A Constitutional mandate to maintain a balanced budget, to end deficit spending.
The establishment of a commodity currency, to end inflation.
Constitutional caps on overall tax rates as a percentage of an individual's income.
By "commodity currency" I mean that the Treasury actually holds a specific commodity -- probably gold, though there are other options -- and is required to offer and accept it in exchange for paper, coins, and electronic currency at a fixed rate and in the smallest practical increments. I do not refer to bimetallism, or to the more recent scam where exchange is only open to foreign governments at unrealistic rates.
The tax cap, and the ban on deficit spending, could be lifted during times of emergency. However, such states of emergency -- indicated by separate supermajorities in the House and the Senate -- must lapse after a short time unless renewed. I would suggest no more than 10 or 15% for the normal peacetime limit.
Adam Smith didn't invent Capitalism (which has been around pretty much since the dawn of time); he merely observed and documented it in action. In some areas his observations were incomplete and/or flawed, and have since been replaced with more accurate models. Smith's writings are not the definition of Capitalism, but rather merely a starting point for the modern study of the same. Also, just because he documented the workings of Capitalism doesn't mean that he was himself a Capitalist; his attempts to control the outcome, via progressive taxation and other measures, prove otherwise.
Anyway, this thread was discussing Marxism, not Socialism. You can pick and choose whichever definition of Socialism serves your argument, but -- as the GP correctly pointed out -- Obama's policies, including progressive taxation, are right in line with Marxist philosophy.
Personally I don't see how anyone can justify supporting McCain at this point, but the alternative is only marginally better. I'm far from optimistic about the next four years, no matter who wins.
If you give people that are not shrewd with their money some extra money, they will spend it freely, injecting that money into the economy, thus stimulating it.
Thus driving up prices and wasting resources, you mean. The "stimulation" is entirely on paper, and fails to take into consideration the unintended consequences of this "free" spending. Economic progress results from foregoing present consumption to fund investments in future production; no long-term economic improvement can result from seizing savings to fund consumption. Your proposal runs contrary to the most basic of economic principles.
Cases like these are what the courts are for. Water rights have a long and successful history under the Common Law, and pollution was properly treated as a property-rights violation up until some misguided judges decided to elevate "social progress" over the rights of property owners during the Industrial Revolution.
If there's one thing we don't need it's more legislation. New laws can only serve to further bury and distort the fundamental principles of any free, just, and civilized society: property rights.
Personally I favor a mandatory sunset clause, with each law requiring the support of an explicit supermajority every few years to remain active. If it can't maintain 85% approval -- abstentions and absences counting as votes against renewal -- then it shouldn't be a matter of law. (The higher the percentage the better; as it approaches 100% we move toward pure Unanimous Consent.)
The problem with DRM isn't the strength of the encryption, it's the fact that some component of the user's (presumably hostile) hardware must possess both the key and the data in order to display the DRMed content. There's no need to break any encryption when you already have the key.
A closed-source system at least has the option of obscuring the key and decrypted content inside a binary program with a draconian anti-reverse-engineering EULA (and even that doesn't work in practice). Truly open-source DRM software could be trivially modified to just dump the decrypted data to a file.
Ultimately, DRM can't possibly work unless the content provider has full control over the data path, from decryption all the way through the viewer's senses. Such control is plainly incompatible with the open-source mindset. In order to remain effective, some part of any DRM system much always remain closed to inspection and modification by the owner of the device it's running on.
The the reality is, if I were to become homeless, I would want food, shelter, treatment until I got back on my feet. If I were unemployed, I would want food, shelter, medical treatment until I found a job. If I got some disease and couldn't afford it, I would want treatment.
Congratulation, you've just discovered the reason to buy insurance before such things happen. You have not, however, established why you should be granted the privilege of forcing others to provide you with these things involuntarily.
I am perfectly happy to agree that people ought to consider the Golden Rule and voluntarily donate to those who are truly in need, but the moment you bring government and taxes into it you are advocating theft, not charity. As I see it, theft carries more negative "karma" than any degree of passive selfishness.
Slashdot Mirror
These regulation would also prevent you from putting whatever you want into other people's bodies, with or without their consent.
No anti-regulation person that I have ever heard of would count consider a prohibition on drugging others against their will a mere "regulation". I understand that the term can be used more generally, but in this context "regulation" specifically means prohibitions or requirements other than, and thus contrary to, the Non-Aggression Principle. There is no opposition to just laws, e.g. those against murder, assault, extortion, theft, fraud, etc., where the prohibited action would be an involuntary intrusion into another's person or property.
The Linux kernel has been GPLv2 for a long time. If Sun wanted ZFS support in Linux they could have made it work easily. The license they chose, and the patents they hold, allow them to call it "open source" while avoiding the possibility of native support in the most popular open-source alternative to their own Solaris operating system. I don't think that's a coincidence.
A much more detailed debate on the LKML is summarized on KernelTrap in support of my position. About a third of the way down the page you'll find this quote: "there are senior Sun programmers who have on record stated that one of the reasons why Sun picked the CDDL was precisely because it was incompatible with GPL and Sun fears Linux."
All of the features I mentioned are in ZFS. The GP wanted a filesystem with the functionality of ZFS, so those are the points I emphasized. BtrFS has other features which can be found on its homepage.
Perhaps I wasn't completely clear. I am fully aware that ZFS supports all these features; I meant only that these ZFS features are also in BtrFS. BtrFS has some additional features not in ZFS, and visa-versa; there is a more extensive list on the BtrFS Wiki.
Among all the features of BtrFS the most significant is native Linux compatibility, which ZFS does not have and is not likely to acquire.
With that said, linux REALLY needs ZFS , and not in userspace.
Due to deliberate licensing issues we won't have native ZFS in Linux any time soon. However, BtrFS should be merging into the mainline kernel soon enough (~2.6.29), and it includes most of ZFS's features plus a few of its own: storage pools, checksumming, mutable snapshots, built-in extent-level striping and mirroring, etc. It even supports in-place, reversible conversion from ext3 via a copy-on-write snapshot.
You don't actually have to use those features, of course -- they're just shorthand. The 'symbol pattern, for example, is just translated by reader macros into (quote symbol), and `(macro ,@quoting) becomes (append (list (quote macro)) quoting).
The actual syntax of Lisp is defined in terms of data structures, not characters, and at that level there are really only two atomic forms, literals and symbols, and three list forms: special operators, macros, and function calls.
The government should not stop me from doing anything! (Unless it is someone else doing it to me)
A better way to word that would be "all actions which harm others (against their will) should be illegal; nothing else should be." Also known as the Non-Aggression Principle. (*Some definitions apply.)
there are no victims for this crime
Let's get over this idea that there are "no victims" in the crime of prostitution.
(Emphasis mine.)
What you say is true, but what the GP says is also true. The act of prostitution itself harms no one but the one choosing to commit it, and thus fits the definition of a victimless crime perfectly. The prostitute may in fact be a victim of other crimes, and there may exist victims of separate crimes associated with (but not caused by) prostitution, but it is nonetheless a crime for which there are no victims.
Your best bet is Wildblue with 750-1500ms latency and 256kbps upload speed. ... you also face rate-limiting from WildBlue once you pass a bandwidth threshold. Let us not forget wiping the snow off the dish, throwing a trash bag over the lnb when it rains, and wiggling the dish when you lose signal.
My parents use HughesNet, a competing satellite Internet provider. The high ping times are inherent in the design, but the bandwidth is more like 1Mbps. They do have to remove snow occasionally in the winter, but so far as I know haven't had any other signal issues and they don't take any special measures when it rains.
The real issues, other than the latency, are the daily 350MB transfer cap and the price: ~$70/mo. including the amortized installation and hardware costs. Compared to DSL or cable Internet that is a lot of money for a very limited service. However, DSL and cable aren't available in their area, and 350MB is more than they could transfer in a day at dial-up speeds; in practice they rarely come close to exceeding the limit. In return they get an always-on connection with 25x the bandwidth and eliminate the need for a dedicated phone line.
I understand why native-PostScript printers are scarce, but how difficult could it be to include a simple ROM with self-contained, platform-agnostic (Java?) translator software? It'd be cheap to implement, with all the CPU-intensive work being done on the PC, and there would be no need to supply separate drivers for each OS.
Probably an Intel HDA chipset. They're notorious for never being implemented the same way twice; knowing that it's an HDA chip doesn't actually tell you much about how the channels, volume controls, etc. are arranged. That has to be coded in differently for every case where the chip is used.
I have an Eee PC with an Intel HDA audio device, and had similar problems getting it to function properly; it would act like the volume was muted, but none of the volume controls had any effect on the output. Eventually I stumbled on a configuration that worked. You might have some luck using the "model" module option to override the kernel's autodetection.
Those aren't release names, they're code names. The release names are "Ubuntu 8.04", "Ubuntu 8.10", etc., which are perfectly professional. Proprietary software often has code names which are just as "childish" (your word, not mine); you just don't see them because the development is done behind closed doors.
I think the GP was referring to networks where the user profiles are stored on a remote file server. It more likely has something to do with locking, which tends to be haphazardly implemented among network filesystems. (That's not a criticism of the developers; it's a more difficult problem than local file locking.)
First, I did mention a "state of emergency" exception, which would fully address your concerns.
Second, World War II is what got us out of the Great Depression, by diverting resources away from the massively wasteful government programs that created the Great Depression in the first place.
The economic conditions leading up to the GD weren't any worse than we'd experienced previously, but the GD was the first time the government got seriously involved in trying to put off the correction process (made necessary by significant inflationary policies from 1921-1929). As a result, instead of the painful-but-quick corrections of the past we spent a number of long, miserable years attempting to avoid the inevitable effects of prior interventions.
Lack of consumer spending doesn't cause depressions, and stubbornly continuing to waste resources can't get us out of one.
See also: America's Great Depression.
I don't entirely disagree, but your point #4 isn't all that different in effect from my point #3. A hard limit on federal tax rates would make it much more difficult to divert limited federal revenues toward wealth redistribution and away from items of common interest, like nation defense. As a bonus, the less the feds can take in taxes the less opportunity they have to bribe states with their own citizens' money.
Strictly speaking, if no state could ever receive more than its share of services relative to the taxes paid by its citizens there would be no point at all in even having the tax; the state could just implement the services itself. I'm not opposed to that at all, but it's a much harder position to gather support for. People in general seem hard-wired (or perhaps just indoctrinated?) to see government as necessary, even though it doesn't do anything that couldn't be done privately -- anything, for that matter, that hasn't been done privately in the past.
Certainly any of our states could easily operate as an independent, sovereign nation; numerous smaller ones exist elsewhere in the world without any difficulty.
I don't think you understand the law of diminishing returns. You're still trying to apply it to different individuals' utility, which doesn't make any sense.
All that the law of diminishing returns says is that if you currently have 20 units of something, the use of each of which is independent of the others, then the value of the 21st unit is less than the individual values of the 1st through 20th units. The first unit you get goes toward the most urgent use, the second unit goes to the next most urgent use, etc. From the opposite point of view, the value of the marginal unit goes up as units are expended; going from five units to four costs you more than going from twenty to nineteen, because that fifth unit would have fulfilled a more urgent want than the 20th. Whether or not there are "tipping points" when units are interdependent is a matter of perspective -- I prefer to consider such cases as alternate, simultaneous orderings rather than a single unordered sequence -- but either way I don't think there are many such points relevant to this argument. Feel free to bring up a specific example if you disagree.
In the context of a job, then, going from 40 hours per week to 45 (giving up five hours of leisure) is not as costly as going from 60 to 65. You're giving up the same amount of leisure, but in the second case you have fewer leisure hours left, and the ones you give up would have gone to (subjectively) more valuable uses. Regarding income, an extra $100 to someone making $20k is a much bigger deal than the same $100 to someone making $60k. All else being equal, at some point the value of the additional money is less than the value of the leisure time sacrificed to get it, and no further hours will be traded away. The point where this occurs is specific to the individual, and can change over time.
As to why haven't *I* moved to a higher paying job? Still building the requisites. It has little or nothing to do with my ability or willingness to spend more time or effort in what I do - some things you can't rush (like, say, licensing requiring X years experience) and that's all there is to it.
You're focusing on one specific job. That's not uncommon, but it isn't the only option. You could trade leisure time for a second job, for example. There are plenty available which do not require significant prior experience. You could probably increase your prospective income by moving to another area. You could cut unnecessary expenditures, sell your possessions, and lend the resulting money out at interest, or trade in the market, or invest in human capital: higher education, networking, anything which would help you get ahead. As I said, there are many paths to higher income for those above subsistence standards of living. Even under a seniority system there are fewer managers at each tier as you progress up the ladder, and they aren't chosen at random. Those who make the most trade-offs in favor of their career stand the best chance of being picked for advancement.
Note that I'm not saying that you should do these things, only that they are available. You questioned why people who could make more would choose to stay in lower-paying job(s) as a result of taxes; I gave you the answer. Simply put, taxes decrease the payoff of moving to the higher-paying job(s), without making the job(s) any easier to get or to keep. Same effort + less reward = fewer people making the trade.
The law of diminishing returns is a well-accepted economic principle. It's the basis for the law of supply and demand. If you think there's something wrong with it "in the general case" you have more than just me to argue with.
By your argument, anyone earning a living wage would be awash in leisure time while the executives earning 7 digits a year would be toiling 24/7 with only federal holidays off.
That does not follow from my argument. For one thing, I never said that ratio of cost to pay was constant across different individuals. Obviously there are many things, including natural abilities, learned skills, experience, luck, status, family connections, etc., which can lead to one person earning more than another for the same task. Most people have less chance of ever becoming the CEO of a large company than of winning the lottery, but that doesn't have anything to do with marginal utility, which is a strictly intrapersonal concept.
If you think that you, personally, could move from a $50k job to a $100k job without giving anything up, why haven't you done so? Unless one is already at a bare subsistence standard of living -- no leisure time, no hedges against risk, no resources of any kind allocated to anything but production -- there is always a path available to higher income for those willing to make the necessary trade-offs. The fact that people choose not to make those trade-offs proves that there is a balance between income and other factors, which is all I need to make my point. If you tax away even part of that marginal income then those other factors are going to look more valuable by comparison, and fewer people will choose to give them up for increasingly limited returns.
I never understood how people can honestly present the argument that taxing the rich would make people not want to be rich.
No, people would still want to be rich. What you're missing, however, is that you'll never move from less than $50k to over $100k (2008 dollars) while continuing to perform the same work. Each increment of time and effort, and other resources, devoted to earning that extra income costs you more than the last. At the same time the marginal value of the extra income decreases as your most urgent needs and wants are met. (see also: law of diminishing returns)
In the end there is a balance, which varies per individual, between the degree of effort expended and the resulting level of income. Income taxes don't inhibit people's desire for greater income, which is naturally unlimited, but do affect the balance point by decreasing the reward for any given amount of additional effort.
Exactly. It's not enough to just look at taxes; to really fix things would require at least three separate initiatives:
By "commodity currency" I mean that the Treasury actually holds a specific commodity -- probably gold, though there are other options -- and is required to offer and accept it in exchange for paper, coins, and electronic currency at a fixed rate and in the smallest practical increments. I do not refer to bimetallism, or to the more recent scam where exchange is only open to foreign governments at unrealistic rates.
The tax cap, and the ban on deficit spending, could be lifted during times of emergency. However, such states of emergency -- indicated by separate supermajorities in the House and the Senate -- must lapse after a short time unless renewed. I would suggest no more than 10 or 15% for the normal peacetime limit.
That section specifically applies to distributing unmodified source code; this thread was about distributing binaries.
You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, ...
Obviously you don't need to offer the original source code to those to whom you're distributing unmodified source code; they already have it.
Adam Smith didn't invent Capitalism (which has been around pretty much since the dawn of time); he merely observed and documented it in action. In some areas his observations were incomplete and/or flawed, and have since been replaced with more accurate models. Smith's writings are not the definition of Capitalism, but rather merely a starting point for the modern study of the same. Also, just because he documented the workings of Capitalism doesn't mean that he was himself a Capitalist; his attempts to control the outcome, via progressive taxation and other measures, prove otherwise.
Anyway, this thread was discussing Marxism, not Socialism. You can pick and choose whichever definition of Socialism serves your argument, but -- as the GP correctly pointed out -- Obama's policies, including progressive taxation, are right in line with Marxist philosophy.
Personally I don't see how anyone can justify supporting McCain at this point, but the alternative is only marginally better. I'm far from optimistic about the next four years, no matter who wins.
If you give people that are not shrewd with their money some extra money, they will spend it freely, injecting that money into the economy, thus stimulating it.
Thus driving up prices and wasting resources, you mean. The "stimulation" is entirely on paper, and fails to take into consideration the unintended consequences of this "free" spending. Economic progress results from foregoing present consumption to fund investments in future production; no long-term economic improvement can result from seizing savings to fund consumption. Your proposal runs contrary to the most basic of economic principles.
Cases like these are what the courts are for. Water rights have a long and successful history under the Common Law, and pollution was properly treated as a property-rights violation up until some misguided judges decided to elevate "social progress" over the rights of property owners during the Industrial Revolution.
If there's one thing we don't need it's more legislation. New laws can only serve to further bury and distort the fundamental principles of any free, just, and civilized society: property rights.
Personally I favor a mandatory sunset clause, with each law requiring the support of an explicit supermajority every few years to remain active. If it can't maintain 85% approval -- abstentions and absences counting as votes against renewal -- then it shouldn't be a matter of law. (The higher the percentage the better; as it approaches 100% we move toward pure Unanimous Consent.)
The problem with DRM isn't the strength of the encryption, it's the fact that some component of the user's (presumably hostile) hardware must possess both the key and the data in order to display the DRMed content. There's no need to break any encryption when you already have the key.
A closed-source system at least has the option of obscuring the key and decrypted content inside a binary program with a draconian anti-reverse-engineering EULA (and even that doesn't work in practice). Truly open-source DRM software could be trivially modified to just dump the decrypted data to a file.
Ultimately, DRM can't possibly work unless the content provider has full control over the data path, from decryption all the way through the viewer's senses. Such control is plainly incompatible with the open-source mindset. In order to remain effective, some part of any DRM system much always remain closed to inspection and modification by the owner of the device it's running on.
The the reality is, if I were to become homeless, I would want food, shelter, treatment until I got back on my feet. If I were unemployed, I would want food, shelter, medical treatment until I found a job. If I got some disease and couldn't afford it, I would want treatment.
Congratulation, you've just discovered the reason to buy insurance before such things happen. You have not, however, established why you should be granted the privilege of forcing others to provide you with these things involuntarily.
I am perfectly happy to agree that people ought to consider the Golden Rule and voluntarily donate to those who are truly in need, but the moment you bring government and taxes into it you are advocating theft, not charity. As I see it, theft carries more negative "karma" than any degree of passive selfishness.