The experience of un-evaluated perception of reality.
This phrase really jumped out at me as an accurate way of describing the kind of "wow insightful" mindset I'm sometimes (less often nowadays) able to get into, always without drugs. I see that as a very positive thing. It feels like the ability to, metaphorically, move around and manipulate conceptual space, to look at ideas from new perspectives, take them apart, put them back together again, freely and without any constraints. Writing this now kind of reminds me of the stereotypical first stage of a business brainstorming session where everyone is asked to throw out ideas and refrain from telling anyone that their idea is wrong... yet.
In those brainstorming sessions, the "throw out anything" phrase has to be followed by a more critical phase, and likewise I find that the ideas that I reassemble and turn around in that metaphorical conceptual space need to be tested in a different, more critical mindset afterward. (Although the freer mindset is itself also useful in finding flaws in preexisting ideas, ones that never face certain tests in routine real-world usage but easily fall apart when poked and prodded in novel ways in that free-floating conceptual space, revealing vulnerabilities that could one day be exploited in real usage). It reminds me also of an evolutionary algorithm, or real evolution itself: generate lots of variations and possibilities in phases of relative freedom (e.g. a time of plenty that allows a population to spread and mutations to survive and accumulate), then cull everything that you possibly can leaving only the strongest to survive into the next phase.
If some people have trouble reaching that freer state of mind that lets them generate possibilities without using drugs, then I guess more power to them for their drug usage. But that kind of mental freedom can't be the end of the story. Clear thinking requires an open mind but also a critical mind, one willing to entertain any possibility that hasn't been eliminated, but one also willing to discard those that it has to. If the takeaway these drug users have from their experience is all openness all the time and never any criticism then they've just swung from one end of the horseshoe to the other.
Some of the comments in this thread have been kind of offending me. But that offense has made me think.
A bunch of comments above from people who've done LSD talk about the mind-blowing experiences they've had on it, and put down people who don't want to try it, or who poo-poo it, as some kind of beings of lesser consciousness. As someone with no interest in doing LSD, those comments kind of offend me, largely because the mind-blowing kind of stuff they describe sounds like the kind of state I used to operate in almost all the time, full of off-the-wall crazy insights, constantly finding interconnections between seemingly disparate things, and new angles on everything, way back before life beat the fuck out of me and I had to adopt a much more pragmatic and guarded mindset most of the time. But I still get get into those states now and then, and yeah it's this exhilarating thrill that feels like OMFG I suddenly understand the meaning of life the universe and everything. A lot of what I come up with in those states of mind can, later, in a more sober state of mind, be turned into something more productive, and the insights I find and refine that way continue to positively shape my worldview for the rest of my life. A lot of the other stuff is utter crap, and sometimes it may take me years of sober reflection to realize how crap it was, while other times it's obvious the next morning.
All that makes it seem to me like these people, the ones bragging about how LSD opened their mind and how people won't try it are squares or whatever, seem like they are the lesser-minded beings who need drugs to achieve what seems to me like a natural healthy state of being I've never needed drugs to achieve, and have only found difficulty achieving after years and years of trauma. (Trauma which, as a relevant aside, feels like it is gradually making me more and more like "normal people", which has made me long suspect that maybe what we think of as "normalcy" is the effect of pervasive early trauma in most people's childhoods that I was somehow able to avoid or resist for longer).
But then all that makes me think. Switch out the LSD discussion for one about an anti-anxiety medicine, and instead of talking about having these big open-mind higher-consciousness experiences, let's talk about comfortably socializing with large groups. Now imagine naturally sociable people putting down anti-anxiety meds. And people with social anxiety disorder speaking of how the anti-anxiety meds have transformed their lives, how they could just be social and it wasn't scary or challenging and they just got it. And then the naturally social people looking down on them in turn for needing drugs to achieve what seems to them like a natural healthy state of being they've never needed drugs to achieve.
Those people kinda seem like dicks. Some people just aren't naturally able to do those things, and the drugs transform their lives by allowing them to. But at the same time, other people are naturally able to do those things, and the drugs don't unlock any thing special that they're missing out on without them. And the drug-users suggesting they are missing out on that are also kinda dicks. So maybe let's not be dicks to each other and just accept that different people have different brains, that for some people certain drugs will have dramatic transformative effects on their lives, and yet other people have no need for those drugs to achieve the same things.
If his sexual preference was for young children, he's breaking the law.
To nitpick, merely having that preference isn't breaking the law, acting on it is. Child molestation is a crime, pedophilia is just a mental disorder, and it's not illegal to have a mental disorder, even if that mental disorder disposes you to commit certain crimes. Until you actually commit the crime no crime has been committed.
It was a politically contentious issue, there was a reasonable case for the traditional definition of marriage as between a man and a woman, and even many mainstream Democrats at the time had not come out in support of gay marriage (quite the opposite in some cases), and only changed their position when it became political expedient to do so.
As someone who thinks there really never was a reasonable case: it still doesn't matter, firing someone for having the wrong opinions is bad. You can believe in your heart of hearts that 2+2=5 for all it matters, so long as your job doesn't hinge on your arithmetical abilities even being that obviously wrong still shouldn't get you fired.
When a BDSM participant starts hitting me with his whip without my consent, someone starts modifying my genitalia without my consent, etc, then I will hate on those people the way I hate on smokers. On the other hand, keep your filthy drug habit to yourself and out of the public air I need to breath, and I've got no problem with smokers either.
A quick addendum I thought of after writing my other reply:
Go back in time a thousands years and tell anyone, anywhere, that you live in a country where there are no monarchs, no aristocracy, and no slaves; where everyone is both a freeman and a commoner; and where a laundry list of rights are legally guaranteed and the powers of the state are legally curtailed. They wouldn't believe you; such a civilization is impossible, it would collapse immediately, they'd say. But we look back on them now as primitive unenlightened civilizations of a darker age. I hold out hope that a thousand years in the future, people will look back on us the same way, and see our states, capitalists, and working poor the same way we see medieval kings, nobles, and serfs.
People said similar things about democracy never working. People probably said similar things about the ability of a decentralized network of academic peers to explain the origins of life, the universe, and everything better than their favorite religious authority. The point is that it's not "inevitably" or "by definition", we just haven't figured out all the finer details yet, and it's a worthwhile long-term goal, what we should be striving generation over generation to inch ever closer toward.
Big picture, broad strokes, it's super easy to imagine something like it. We can argue all day about ways in which that broad strokes big picture would fall apart, and what we could do to prevent that, but that's the finer details we've yet to work out; the general idea is easy to imagine. A free society of roughly equal people freely trading with each other for the goods and services they need to survive, organized together into cooperative organizations with widely distributed ownership (employee-owned, member-owned, etc), including the service of protection from those who would wrong them, i.e. governance. Where "wrong", matters of law, are not just decreed by any one party but worked out in a reasoned, methodical, collaborative way, much like the way matters of fact are worked out by science, and not for anyone to simply decree. I was starting to write out more of this "rough sketch" but then I realized I'm going into too much detail, and I'm not here to argue the details right now. The point is that it's easy to imagine, broadly, a system of stateless governance. It's also pretty easy to poke holes in any quick statement of what it would be, to find ways that it would fail. But it's not hard to patch up most of those holes, to come up with ways to prevent that failure. It's a little harder to poke further holes, and harder still to patch those up, and you can go back and forth getting into more and more nuance and detail and it becomes harder work for both sides the further into it you go.
But it's hard work that's worth doing, when it's not at all clear that it's going to be impossible from the outset, and the results would be magnificent if you finally got it done. And it's work that we, human civilization, have been doing. Liberalism, democracy, various approaches to socialism, are all trying, with degrees of success that would surprise ancient peoples, to inch us closer and closer to a world where we are all free and equal and not ruled over by anyone. We still have a long, long way to go, but we've already made remarkable progress, and it would be foolish to say "this is as far as is possible" and give up on all further progress.
(Of course, it would also be foolish to risk all that we've achieved so far on a reckless gamble for more that will almost certainly lose everything, but I'm not suggesting we do that).
Not by definition. In concept it is possible to have governance without states; governance where nobody claims a monopoly on the use of force, but there is a stable arrangement of force keeping anyone from the unchecked use of it against anyone else. That is what stable anarchy requires. The difficulty is in coming up with such a distribution of force that stays distributed and does not become a monopoly, a state. One of the primary difficulties is in funding such an organization in a way that guarantees universal access for everyone. Even if a state were to evolve to such a mode where it allowed the maximally compossible liberty, providing the law enforcement necessary for that and not transgressing against that itself, not even claiming a monopoly on the legislation or enforcement of that law, merely providing the universal service of defending people from each other and mediating disputes, and allowing others to provide that service as well if they so chose (only existing so that everyone has universal access to such a service, and not only the rich)... how is it going to fund the provision of that service? States are funded by taxes, which would be reckoned theft if done by one party among equals and not a monopoly that grants itself an exception. So until we can figure out a way to fund a government without taxes, we cannot have stateless governance, and so cannot have stable anarchy. Which is still not an a priori insurmountable problem. It's just a very hard one.
Somalia has a government. Somalia has lots of governments; it's essentially a bunch of tiny countries now. They're the worst kind of governments, because that's usually the kind of government that springs up out of a power vacuum, but they're still governments, not anarchy. Somalia is what you get in the aftermath of an unstable anarchy's collapse; it's not anarchy itself. (That leave the hard question of how to make anarchy stable and keep it from collapsing; or at the least, to keep it from collapsing into that, to make sure that if it fails, it fails safely into a liberal democracy instead of warlords).
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." The international stage is anarchic, because governments (states, technically) are not governed by anything but themselves. There is no world-state mediating international disputes, just various attempts between the individual states to get along with each other, to various degrees of success.
Anarchy means no state; no monopoly on the use of force. Nobody ruling, unchallenged, over everyone else. Preventing states requires some kind of governance. The challenge is just how to have governance that is not backed by a state, and so self-defeating. That is what (stable) anarchy is: stateless governance. You can briefly have ungoverned statelessness, which is technically anarchy, for a moment, but it will almost immediately collapse into the worst kind of states and cease to be anarchy anymore.
"Whoever has the biggest stick wins" is that worst kind of state, which is not anarchy but its opposite, even though unstable anarchy will tend to collapse into it. All other forms of government in between them are various degrees of having states act less state-like, more anarchic, more free and equal and less concentrated power ruling over all with an iron fist, without sacrificing their stability and collapsing into the worst form of state.
Except that the Fair Tax is a sales tax and not an income tax, and the money to pay for the UBI has to come from taxes, and sales taxes do not increase progressively with income, so you'd end up with most people paying about as much in taxes to fund the UBI as they would get from the UBI, completely defeating the point of it.
It only works if the flat tax that's funding the UBI is an income tax.
Anarchy by definition means nobody is ruling over anybody.
The problem is that anarchy is unstable and tends to collapse into states; and new states are usually the worst kind, where whoever has the most power rules.
So if you've got a stable state that's better than that, that's better than switching to an unstable utopia that will immediately collapse into something much worse.
But if you can keep making your stable state better and better, the limit toward which you are perfecting it is anarchy.
Improving states over the "whoever has the most power will rule" kind is a slow march of progress toward anarchy, not away from it.
Anarchy is the peak we're trying to climb up to. "Whoever has the most power will rule" is the ground below. The hard part is climbing further up the mountain without losing your tenuous grip on where you already are, and falling all the way down to the bottom again. Leaping straight from the cliff face you're barely clinging to while stretching your arms upward is not a recommended technique.
How can you admit that most wealthy people come from wealthy families and then go on to claim in the same post that the rich are rich and the poor are poor because of different lifestyle choices they made? People born shit poor to shit poor families spend their entire lives struggling just to get to the point where they don't owe anyone else money (such as to rent housing or pay mortgage interest, never mind likely student loans etc). How do you expect someone born with negative money to invest (because there are huge amounts they're required to spend ahead of them) to live the lifestyle of an investor rather than a consumer?
Also, how in the hell are people born to poor families "suffering from the mania" that everyone has to pull themselves up by their bootstraps? That's their only option because they don't have a rich mommy and daddy to give them the hand up; it's bootstraps or nothing for them. It's the people born into wealthy families telling everyone else "pull yourself up by your bootstraps"; the people trying to actually do that are generally of the opinion that they shouldn't have to, but they don't get a choice besides try anyway or just die.
Taxes are theft, even if you get something in return for them; and not paying for something that was thrust upon you without asking isn't theft.
The problem is, states have no idea how to fund themselves without taxes, and we have no idea how to keep states from spontaneously arising without another state there to fill the space. So if we're going to have a state one way or another, it's better to stick with one that at least nominally represents the interests of the people, instead of letting a bunch of warlord states spring up in its absence. You'll be stuck with someone stealing from you (and calling it "taxes") either way, but in one case you might get roads and schools and such out of the deal, while in the other case you definitely won't.
Until we figure out how to have stateless or at least taxless governance, there is no practical choice to have nobody stealing from you, it's only a question of who is going to steal from whom and what are they going to do with that money. Paying a trifle to the nicer thugs who mostly rob from those who can better afford it and do nice things for the community on the side is definitely worth it for the main service they provide of keeping the meaner thugs who would just crack you over the head and take everything from you at bay.
Don't forget the biggest one of all: rent, or else mortgage interest which amounts to the same. If you're not lucky enough to be born to parents with a spare house for you to live in, you continually have to pay someone, somewhere just for the temporary right to exist in their space, because there is no space that is unowned, and you don't own any space yourself, so no matter what you do you are in someone else's space and they will all demand you pay them for that "privilege"
And good luck saving up to buy a space of your own while you're busy pay them most of your income for that; and also, you know, all of the costs of things you actually consume in life on top of that.
Fun fact: if you add a universal basic income to a flat income tax, the net result is a progressive tax that automatically sets its brackets based on the level of income disparity.
Get rid of deductions, stop treating different types of income differently, tax everyone's everything the same percent, then give everyone the same lump sum as a tax credit, and pay anything they end up getting back in monthly installments (likewise allowing people to pay anything they owe monthly), and you've got a clean, simple system that puts a gentle pressure toward the mean income on everyone's incomes... or less gentle as the greater income disparity becomes.
Of relevance to that matter is the fact that the median income is about HALF of the mean income. So that person at the 50th percentile, that "average American" by one measure, is only making half of the "average American" by the measure most people probably think of (add up how much we all make and divide by number of people, i.e. mean income). It's not surprising that people making not even half of average are paying a very low tax rate. What SHOULD be surprising is that most Americans are making less than half of the "average American".
Rich people want more people to share their tax burden? See to it that more people get more income to be taxed, then. But if you want to hoard all the money, be prepared to pay for everything, because nobody else can.
Not a developer here, and I basically get to use my vacation time whenever I ask for it, but this is the first job that has ever made taking a vacation stress-inducing. See, the company basically cannot function without me -- which is great for my job security but terrible design for the business, and bad for me in an indirect way. There is no shift after me, nobody else who picks up where I leave off. The buck stops with me in my department. Which means that if I take a week off, I'm coming back to a week's worth of backlog. Since I'm already drowning in work on a normal week anyway, that makes my entire vacation time full of dread of the week of hell that's going to greet me when I get back, and halfway makes me wish I just hadn't taken the vacation at all so as to avoid that.
But aside from constant dread and misery and year after year after year of continuing to function even while burnt out, it's still the best job I've ever had. Work from home with super flexible hours, better pay than any previous job, and regularly scheduled no-argument raises every year. And all it takes to keep that is trading in my previous lifelong routine of being so on top of everything that I have to find way to look busy so as not to get in trouble, for a constant unending rush to keep up with the (figurative) assembly line lest the immediate future become even more rushed and backed up than I already am.:(
Sorry, I meant insignificant in a technical sense: the term "nerd" does not signify any concrete set of properties. You can't go down some checklist to determine whether someone is "really" a nerd or not, because there's no objective reality to it. It's just a socially constructed category. (I was trying to avoid that phrase in my previous post because it triggers a lot of alt-right snowflakes -- I'm doing it on purpose now).
You're right that it is just as much a judgement others make about you, and so too is gender. But since there's no underlying objective reality being argued about, it's purely a matter of social acceptance/rejection/etc. By saying someone's not really a nerd (or analogous), you're merely doing a social action with your words, not actually making a truth-apt claim about reality.
Slashdot Mirror
The experience of un-evaluated perception of reality.
This phrase really jumped out at me as an accurate way of describing the kind of "wow insightful" mindset I'm sometimes (less often nowadays) able to get into, always without drugs. I see that as a very positive thing. It feels like the ability to, metaphorically, move around and manipulate conceptual space, to look at ideas from new perspectives, take them apart, put them back together again, freely and without any constraints. Writing this now kind of reminds me of the stereotypical first stage of a business brainstorming session where everyone is asked to throw out ideas and refrain from telling anyone that their idea is wrong... yet.
In those brainstorming sessions, the "throw out anything" phrase has to be followed by a more critical phase, and likewise I find that the ideas that I reassemble and turn around in that metaphorical conceptual space need to be tested in a different, more critical mindset afterward. (Although the freer mindset is itself also useful in finding flaws in preexisting ideas, ones that never face certain tests in routine real-world usage but easily fall apart when poked and prodded in novel ways in that free-floating conceptual space, revealing vulnerabilities that could one day be exploited in real usage). It reminds me also of an evolutionary algorithm, or real evolution itself: generate lots of variations and possibilities in phases of relative freedom (e.g. a time of plenty that allows a population to spread and mutations to survive and accumulate), then cull everything that you possibly can leaving only the strongest to survive into the next phase.
If some people have trouble reaching that freer state of mind that lets them generate possibilities without using drugs, then I guess more power to them for their drug usage. But that kind of mental freedom can't be the end of the story. Clear thinking requires an open mind but also a critical mind, one willing to entertain any possibility that hasn't been eliminated, but one also willing to discard those that it has to. If the takeaway these drug users have from their experience is all openness all the time and never any criticism then they've just swung from one end of the horseshoe to the other.
Some of the comments in this thread have been kind of offending me. But that offense has made me think.
A bunch of comments above from people who've done LSD talk about the mind-blowing experiences they've had on it, and put down people who don't want to try it, or who poo-poo it, as some kind of beings of lesser consciousness. As someone with no interest in doing LSD, those comments kind of offend me, largely because the mind-blowing kind of stuff they describe sounds like the kind of state I used to operate in almost all the time, full of off-the-wall crazy insights, constantly finding interconnections between seemingly disparate things, and new angles on everything, way back before life beat the fuck out of me and I had to adopt a much more pragmatic and guarded mindset most of the time. But I still get get into those states now and then, and yeah it's this exhilarating thrill that feels like OMFG I suddenly understand the meaning of life the universe and everything. A lot of what I come up with in those states of mind can, later, in a more sober state of mind, be turned into something more productive, and the insights I find and refine that way continue to positively shape my worldview for the rest of my life. A lot of the other stuff is utter crap, and sometimes it may take me years of sober reflection to realize how crap it was, while other times it's obvious the next morning.
All that makes it seem to me like these people, the ones bragging about how LSD opened their mind and how people won't try it are squares or whatever, seem like they are the lesser-minded beings who need drugs to achieve what seems to me like a natural healthy state of being I've never needed drugs to achieve, and have only found difficulty achieving after years and years of trauma. (Trauma which, as a relevant aside, feels like it is gradually making me more and more like "normal people", which has made me long suspect that maybe what we think of as "normalcy" is the effect of pervasive early trauma in most people's childhoods that I was somehow able to avoid or resist for longer).
But then all that makes me think. Switch out the LSD discussion for one about an anti-anxiety medicine, and instead of talking about having these big open-mind higher-consciousness experiences, let's talk about comfortably socializing with large groups. Now imagine naturally sociable people putting down anti-anxiety meds. And people with social anxiety disorder speaking of how the anti-anxiety meds have transformed their lives, how they could just be social and it wasn't scary or challenging and they just got it. And then the naturally social people looking down on them in turn for needing drugs to achieve what seems to them like a natural healthy state of being they've never needed drugs to achieve.
Those people kinda seem like dicks. Some people just aren't naturally able to do those things, and the drugs transform their lives by allowing them to. But at the same time, other people are naturally able to do those things, and the drugs don't unlock any thing special that they're missing out on without them. And the drug-users suggesting they are missing out on that are also kinda dicks. So maybe let's not be dicks to each other and just accept that different people have different brains, that for some people certain drugs will have dramatic transformative effects on their lives, and yet other people have no need for those drugs to achieve the same things.
If his sexual preference was for young children, he's breaking the law.
To nitpick, merely having that preference isn't breaking the law, acting on it is. Child molestation is a crime, pedophilia is just a mental disorder, and it's not illegal to have a mental disorder, even if that mental disorder disposes you to commit certain crimes. Until you actually commit the crime no crime has been committed.
It was a politically contentious issue, there was a reasonable case for the traditional definition of marriage as between a man and a woman, and even many mainstream Democrats at the time had not come out in support of gay marriage (quite the opposite in some cases), and only changed their position when it became political expedient to do so.
As someone who thinks there really never was a reasonable case: it still doesn't matter, firing someone for having the wrong opinions is bad. You can believe in your heart of hearts that 2+2=5 for all it matters, so long as your job doesn't hinge on your arithmetical abilities even being that obviously wrong still shouldn't get you fired.
Nah, vapers need to die in a fire just like smokers do.
When a BDSM participant starts hitting me with his whip without my consent, someone starts modifying my genitalia without my consent, etc, then I will hate on those people the way I hate on smokers. On the other hand, keep your filthy drug habit to yourself and out of the public air I need to breath, and I've got no problem with smokers either.
Don't you know, prepositions so 20th century. Nowdays our cars need washed and we experiment tabs experience.
Where was dark energy debunked?
A quick addendum I thought of after writing my other reply:
Go back in time a thousands years and tell anyone, anywhere, that you live in a country where there are no monarchs, no aristocracy, and no slaves; where everyone is both a freeman and a commoner; and where a laundry list of rights are legally guaranteed and the powers of the state are legally curtailed. They wouldn't believe you; such a civilization is impossible, it would collapse immediately, they'd say. But we look back on them now as primitive unenlightened civilizations of a darker age. I hold out hope that a thousand years in the future, people will look back on us the same way, and see our states, capitalists, and working poor the same way we see medieval kings, nobles, and serfs.
People said similar things about democracy never working. People probably said similar things about the ability of a decentralized network of academic peers to explain the origins of life, the universe, and everything better than their favorite religious authority. The point is that it's not "inevitably" or "by definition", we just haven't figured out all the finer details yet, and it's a worthwhile long-term goal, what we should be striving generation over generation to inch ever closer toward.
Big picture, broad strokes, it's super easy to imagine something like it. We can argue all day about ways in which that broad strokes big picture would fall apart, and what we could do to prevent that, but that's the finer details we've yet to work out; the general idea is easy to imagine. A free society of roughly equal people freely trading with each other for the goods and services they need to survive, organized together into cooperative organizations with widely distributed ownership (employee-owned, member-owned, etc), including the service of protection from those who would wrong them, i.e. governance. Where "wrong", matters of law, are not just decreed by any one party but worked out in a reasoned, methodical, collaborative way, much like the way matters of fact are worked out by science, and not for anyone to simply decree. I was starting to write out more of this "rough sketch" but then I realized I'm going into too much detail, and I'm not here to argue the details right now. The point is that it's easy to imagine, broadly, a system of stateless governance. It's also pretty easy to poke holes in any quick statement of what it would be, to find ways that it would fail. But it's not hard to patch up most of those holes, to come up with ways to prevent that failure. It's a little harder to poke further holes, and harder still to patch those up, and you can go back and forth getting into more and more nuance and detail and it becomes harder work for both sides the further into it you go.
But it's hard work that's worth doing, when it's not at all clear that it's going to be impossible from the outset, and the results would be magnificent if you finally got it done. And it's work that we, human civilization, have been doing. Liberalism, democracy, various approaches to socialism, are all trying, with degrees of success that would surprise ancient peoples, to inch us closer and closer to a world where we are all free and equal and not ruled over by anyone. We still have a long, long way to go, but we've already made remarkable progress, and it would be foolish to say "this is as far as is possible" and give up on all further progress.
(Of course, it would also be foolish to risk all that we've achieved so far on a reckless gamble for more that will almost certainly lose everything, but I'm not suggesting we do that).
Not by definition. In concept it is possible to have governance without states; governance where nobody claims a monopoly on the use of force, but there is a stable arrangement of force keeping anyone from the unchecked use of it against anyone else. That is what stable anarchy requires. The difficulty is in coming up with such a distribution of force that stays distributed and does not become a monopoly, a state. One of the primary difficulties is in funding such an organization in a way that guarantees universal access for everyone. Even if a state were to evolve to such a mode where it allowed the maximally compossible liberty, providing the law enforcement necessary for that and not transgressing against that itself, not even claiming a monopoly on the legislation or enforcement of that law, merely providing the universal service of defending people from each other and mediating disputes, and allowing others to provide that service as well if they so chose (only existing so that everyone has universal access to such a service, and not only the rich)... how is it going to fund the provision of that service? States are funded by taxes, which would be reckoned theft if done by one party among equals and not a monopoly that grants itself an exception. So until we can figure out a way to fund a government without taxes, we cannot have stateless governance, and so cannot have stable anarchy. Which is still not an a priori insurmountable problem. It's just a very hard one.
Somalia has a government. Somalia has lots of governments; it's essentially a bunch of tiny countries now. They're the worst kind of governments, because that's usually the kind of government that springs up out of a power vacuum, but they're still governments, not anarchy. Somalia is what you get in the aftermath of an unstable anarchy's collapse; it's not anarchy itself. (That leave the hard question of how to make anarchy stable and keep it from collapsing; or at the least, to keep it from collapsing into that, to make sure that if it fails, it fails safely into a liberal democracy instead of warlords).
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." The international stage is anarchic, because governments (states, technically) are not governed by anything but themselves. There is no world-state mediating international disputes, just various attempts between the individual states to get along with each other, to various degrees of success.
Anarchy means no state; no monopoly on the use of force. Nobody ruling, unchallenged, over everyone else. Preventing states requires some kind of governance. The challenge is just how to have governance that is not backed by a state, and so self-defeating. That is what (stable) anarchy is: stateless governance. You can briefly have ungoverned statelessness, which is technically anarchy, for a moment, but it will almost immediately collapse into the worst kind of states and cease to be anarchy anymore.
"Whoever has the biggest stick wins" is that worst kind of state, which is not anarchy but its opposite, even though unstable anarchy will tend to collapse into it. All other forms of government in between them are various degrees of having states act less state-like, more anarchic, more free and equal and less concentrated power ruling over all with an iron fist, without sacrificing their stability and collapsing into the worst form of state.
Except that the Fair Tax is a sales tax and not an income tax, and the money to pay for the UBI has to come from taxes, and sales taxes do not increase progressively with income, so you'd end up with most people paying about as much in taxes to fund the UBI as they would get from the UBI, completely defeating the point of it.
It only works if the flat tax that's funding the UBI is an income tax.
Anarchy by definition means nobody is ruling over anybody.
The problem is that anarchy is unstable and tends to collapse into states; and new states are usually the worst kind, where whoever has the most power rules.
So if you've got a stable state that's better than that, that's better than switching to an unstable utopia that will immediately collapse into something much worse.
But if you can keep making your stable state better and better, the limit toward which you are perfecting it is anarchy.
Improving states over the "whoever has the most power will rule" kind is a slow march of progress toward anarchy, not away from it.
Anarchy is the peak we're trying to climb up to. "Whoever has the most power will rule" is the ground below. The hard part is climbing further up the mountain without losing your tenuous grip on where you already are, and falling all the way down to the bottom again. Leaping straight from the cliff face you're barely clinging to while stretching your arms upward is not a recommended technique.
Your first line reminds me of one of my favorite arguments to use against people opposed to progressive taxation:
Given the principle of marginal utility, with which they as money-lovers are likely aware;
and given their premise that taxation is evil, with which we shall not argue for now;
and given the inevitability of some taxation or another, because states live off taxes and states spontaneously arise in the absence of states;
it follows that the least-harmful distribution of tax burden would take more dollars from those for whom the loss of each dollar hurts less;
which is to say, thanks to marginal utility, taxing those with more dollars does less harm.
In other words, because taxation is evil, but a necessary evil, progressive taxation is the best available option.
Watch their little minds explode.
How can you admit that most wealthy people come from wealthy families and then go on to claim in the same post that the rich are rich and the poor are poor because of different lifestyle choices they made? People born shit poor to shit poor families spend their entire lives struggling just to get to the point where they don't owe anyone else money (such as to rent housing or pay mortgage interest, never mind likely student loans etc). How do you expect someone born with negative money to invest (because there are huge amounts they're required to spend ahead of them) to live the lifestyle of an investor rather than a consumer?
Also, how in the hell are people born to poor families "suffering from the mania" that everyone has to pull themselves up by their bootstraps? That's their only option because they don't have a rich mommy and daddy to give them the hand up; it's bootstraps or nothing for them. It's the people born into wealthy families telling everyone else "pull yourself up by your bootstraps"; the people trying to actually do that are generally of the opinion that they shouldn't have to, but they don't get a choice besides try anyway or just die.
Taxes are theft, even if you get something in return for them; and not paying for something that was thrust upon you without asking isn't theft.
The problem is, states have no idea how to fund themselves without taxes, and we have no idea how to keep states from spontaneously arising without another state there to fill the space. So if we're going to have a state one way or another, it's better to stick with one that at least nominally represents the interests of the people, instead of letting a bunch of warlord states spring up in its absence. You'll be stuck with someone stealing from you (and calling it "taxes") either way, but in one case you might get roads and schools and such out of the deal, while in the other case you definitely won't.
Until we figure out how to have stateless or at least taxless governance, there is no practical choice to have nobody stealing from you, it's only a question of who is going to steal from whom and what are they going to do with that money. Paying a trifle to the nicer thugs who mostly rob from those who can better afford it and do nice things for the community on the side is definitely worth it for the main service they provide of keeping the meaner thugs who would just crack you over the head and take everything from you at bay.
Don't forget the biggest one of all: rent, or else mortgage interest which amounts to the same. If you're not lucky enough to be born to parents with a spare house for you to live in, you continually have to pay someone, somewhere just for the temporary right to exist in their space, because there is no space that is unowned, and you don't own any space yourself, so no matter what you do you are in someone else's space and they will all demand you pay them for that "privilege"
And good luck saving up to buy a space of your own while you're busy pay them most of your income for that; and also, you know, all of the costs of things you actually consume in life on top of that.
Fun fact: if you add a universal basic income to a flat income tax, the net result is a progressive tax that automatically sets its brackets based on the level of income disparity.
Get rid of deductions, stop treating different types of income differently, tax everyone's everything the same percent, then give everyone the same lump sum as a tax credit, and pay anything they end up getting back in monthly installments (likewise allowing people to pay anything they owe monthly), and you've got a clean, simple system that puts a gentle pressure toward the mean income on everyone's incomes... or less gentle as the greater income disparity becomes.
Of relevance to that matter is the fact that the median income is about HALF of the mean income. So that person at the 50th percentile, that "average American" by one measure, is only making half of the "average American" by the measure most people probably think of (add up how much we all make and divide by number of people, i.e. mean income). It's not surprising that people making not even half of average are paying a very low tax rate. What SHOULD be surprising is that most Americans are making less than half of the "average American".
Rich people want more people to share their tax burden? See to it that more people get more income to be taxed, then. But if you want to hoard all the money, be prepared to pay for everything, because nobody else can.
Not a developer here, and I basically get to use my vacation time whenever I ask for it, but this is the first job that has ever made taking a vacation stress-inducing. See, the company basically cannot function without me -- which is great for my job security but terrible design for the business, and bad for me in an indirect way. There is no shift after me, nobody else who picks up where I leave off. The buck stops with me in my department. Which means that if I take a week off, I'm coming back to a week's worth of backlog. Since I'm already drowning in work on a normal week anyway, that makes my entire vacation time full of dread of the week of hell that's going to greet me when I get back, and halfway makes me wish I just hadn't taken the vacation at all so as to avoid that.
But aside from constant dread and misery and year after year after year of continuing to function even while burnt out, it's still the best job I've ever had. Work from home with super flexible hours, better pay than any previous job, and regularly scheduled no-argument raises every year. And all it takes to keep that is trading in my previous lifelong routine of being so on top of everything that I have to find way to look busy so as not to get in trouble, for a constant unending rush to keep up with the (figurative) assembly line lest the immediate future become even more rushed and backed up than I already am. :(
Because you want the expensive, and everyone else does too, which is why it's more expensive.
And you want it because you perceive it to be better.
Possibly for bad reasons, like race or sex.
Quite possible only subconsciously.
Sorry, I meant insignificant in a technical sense: the term "nerd" does not signify any concrete set of properties. You can't go down some checklist to determine whether someone is "really" a nerd or not, because there's no objective reality to it. It's just a socially constructed category. (I was trying to avoid that phrase in my previous post because it triggers a lot of alt-right snowflakes -- I'm doing it on purpose now).
You're right that it is just as much a judgement others make about you, and so too is gender. But since there's no underlying objective reality being argued about, it's purely a matter of social acceptance/rejection/etc. By saying someone's not really a nerd (or analogous), you're merely doing a social action with your words, not actually making a truth-apt claim about reality.