If you live anywhere but the few swing states, a vote for anyone BUT a third party is throwing away your vote. You won't make any difference in the outcome of the election (because you're not in a swing state), AND you won't make any difference in either party's policies (which they adapt to court voters who defect to third parties). All you're doing is voting for the status quo, in which case you may as well have not voted.
The Supreme Court isn't responsible for anything but the proper enforcement of incorporation, which is plainly spelled out in codified law in the Fourteenth Amendment:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States
If anything, they have interpreted against the literal meaning of that, which has the implication that states have only the same claims and powers (the inverse of privileges and immunities) as Congress, and thus conversely (when combined with the ninth and tenth amendments) people have privileges and immunities against the vast majority of laws that state governments pass.
In other words, go down the list of enumerated powers for Congress. The ninth and tenth amendments spell out that those are the only kinds of things Congress can pass laws about, and all other action or inaction on the part of the people or the states is permitted. Then the fourteenth amendment says the states are as limited as Congress, which makes virtually everything on the part of the people permitted. Not actually everything, but a lot more than is actually permitted in practice.
The point of the 'stick it in an index fund' comparison is that that kind of investment reflects the average kind of return that other players in the market manage to make on average, and if your own investing activity doesn't even beat that, then you're hardly some kind of genius business paragon, because you're not even doing as well as the average business, as if you had let average businesses use your money instead they would have done more with it than you managed.
Unions don't have the power to prohibit you from having a job per se. They only have the power to negotiate exclusive contracts with employers; just like you could negotiate an exclusive contract with an employer to be their sole [whatever], if you had the leverage to get them to agree to that (like if, say, you were the sole proprietor of a prestigious subcontracting company, and they wanted your services badly enough to give you all their jobs if you demanded it). Employers are free to not employ unions, if they're willing to forego the labor pool in that union and only use non-union labor. Or, you know, they could negotiate with another union instead, just like anyone in the non-union labor pool can join together into another union and try to outcompete the first union for contracts.
The mirror image of this exists on the employer's side too. A local orange grower is free to go it solo and just sell his oranges at the farmer's market or something, and try to compete against big names like Sunkist; or, he could join with Sunkist (which is nothing but a cooperative of individual growers), and sell his oranges through them. Many sellers of commodities work that way, many individual sellers joining together into a unified brand to sell their product together, because that gives them a huge advantage over any one individual seller. (And for each individual seller participating too, it comes with disadvantages similar to those that union workers face, namely just being one interchangeable piece of a larger whole and not being able to fight for any special treatment). The only place where that kind of thing doesn't make sense is when artificial monopolies due to intellectual property make it absurd to even speak of; it's not like someone else could try (however vainly) to compete with Apple in the market for iPhones, so of course anyone who wants to sell iPhones has to join up with Apple to do so. But if that weren't so -- if anyone could just build and sell identical iPhones -- you would still expect to see individual iPhone makers eventually banding together for the competitive advantage, just like commodity sellers do, and just like laborers do in unions.
Well geez, how does anybody miss the solution if it's that obvious. Just have money in the bank! Man, how stupid are people if they couldn't even think of that? Just have money and that solves most of your problems! Why doesn't everybody just have money?
I was very close to calling this insightful, thinking that of course it would be trivially easy to get yourself fired for cause (by not showing up, after you found another job that you're showing up to instead, of course), but then it struck me that the converse would be equally true... they wouldn't have to fire you, they could just indefinitely delay delivery of your paychecks until you... "quit for cause" I guess would be the converse? After hiring someone else to "help" you, of course; someone whose paychecks were not getting delayed, who's perfectly capable of picking up the slack after you quit for their breach of contract.
In reality either of those -- accepting pay without returning any work, or accepting work without returning any pay -- would be considered a breach of the contract and actionable in court. If they weren't, it would be no different from at-will employment; you could effectively (though nominally not) quit, or they could effectively (though nominally not) let you go, whenever you or they felt like, without repercussion.
"At home" (parents home) isn't an option for many people, and I've known people, student back in college who had no cars and so couldn't live as far from campus as I could, who paid $500/mo EACH to split a fucking bedroom with two other people. Or people like my disabled mother who for the past year until this month was paying $700/mo out of her $900/mo income to split a room with two other strangers each paying the same as her because that is the only kind of place that someone without the savings to put a deposit down can get.
There is a thing here called the Firehose, where the users of the site -- mostly computer nerds, ostensibly, including you! -- can provide input on TFA selection process.
he's successful, in large part, because he knows what to sell, how to sell, and how to get it done.
He's "successful" because he started out with an enormous pile of money and hasn't burned through it all yet. If he had stuck it in an index fund and done nothing at all creative with it, he'd have seen better returns than any of his actual endeavors.
'The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a politically conservative non-profit association founded in 1943 to "fight socialized medicine and to fight the government takeover of medicine."' Wikipedia.
Glad to see someone else properly distinguishing between the two.
Of course, they're not mutually exclusive either, and it's possible that this situation in question is actually capitalism in action, not just the free market.
The food industry does ask the highest price the market will bear. They can't gouge like education or health because there are lots of suppliers of food, unlike suppliers of education or health, who each undercut each other slightly to gain a slightly larger marketshare (and thus more profit overall than the alternative), which in aggregate drives the price that the market will bear down toward the cost of producing the food.
To make education or health care more like food, we'd need to increase the number of education and health care suppliers, or rather somehow make it easier for someone to go into business supplying education or health care and let the search for profit do the rest.
Of course, with education at least, a significant chunk of demand is not for the education per se -- it's easier than ever to actually learn things from many different sources. It's the status conferred by the organization that declares you to be educated. Increasing the supply of such status requires more than just increasing the supply of educators, but somehow increasing the pool of institutes that employers et al consider sufficiently status-conferring. That is a harder problem.
The Ferengi explicitly rejected the very concept of material egalitarianism (which underlies the Federation using their replicated plenty to eliminate scarcity), and for entirely social reasons (status) strove to acquire something that specifically could not be replicated (Latinum). They basically worship capitalism (literally) and actively fight against the natural progress of technology eliminating it.
Mudd likely wanted money for similar reasons. Some people -- lots of people -- don't just want all of the material things they could possibly need, they want social power, they don't want everything to be free and equal because then there's no hierarchy for them to be on top of. In Mudd's case, and probably the Ferengi as well, I imagine he sought out this kind of power over people in places outside the Federation, as it's hard to have power over someone who can get anything they want for free on a whim like most Federation citizens.
As for your signed picture of Majel -- is it OK if I send that via transporter? You don't mind if its constituent atoms are converted into entirely fungible energy and then reassembled into the same pattern they started in on your end? What if there happens to be a transporter accident along the way, and a transporter duplicate gets sent back to me? Or is it that the original got sent back to me and you got the duplicate? How can we tell? What does it matter?
Also, a Bronze Age with starships and replicators sounds pretty sweet to me.
In most countries besides the United States, "liberal" means roughly what Americans call "libertarian". (And "libertarian" there, in turn, means "anarchist", implicitly anarcho-socialist, as anarcho-capitalism is seen to be a contradiction in terms).
I'm not one to advocate the abolition of taxes any time in the near future (and while we have taxes at all, I'm a very strong proponent of very progressive taxes), but they are in fact formally identical to theft. Something is demanded from you under threat of force, and what if anything you get back in return is not up to you to decide.
If you had a choice to pay or not and didn't demand anything in return to give your consent to that, that would be a donation or gift, not a tax.
If you had a choice to pay or not and demanded something specific in return, that would be a purchase, not a tax.
If you have no choice to pay or not, and what if anything you get back in return is up to the party demanding payment, that's theft. Even if they do give you something for it -- if someone mugs me and for some bizarre reason leaves something with me afterward, that's still theft. Even if it's something you would have voluntarily paid for if given the chance -- If I'm thinking of buying a product and, before I agree to the transaction, the seller takes my money by force and gives me the product, that's still theft, even if I would have decided to buy it in the end. The lack of choice is what makes it theft.
If the government does that last thing -- demands money from you on threat of force, and gives back what if anything it decides to give you -- we call it "taxes". Ergo taxes are theft committed by government. You can't decline what it gives you and keep your money. You can't negotiate what you're willing to pay money for. (You can voice a preference in a complex process that highly dilutes your voice, but if you don't get to back out of the deal if you don't like it, that's not negotiation). You just have to pay it, and they don't have to give anything back, even if they in fact do, even if it's something you like. You don't get a choice, and that makes it theft.
Now that said, taxes are the only way we currently know of to keep a state afloat, and in the absence of one state other states tend to spring into existence -- usually of the worst kind possible, warlords and the like. So taxes, being theft, may be an evil, but they are, at least at present (until we can figure out some other way of keeping even-worse states from arising), a necessary evil. And given that they are a necessary evil, it follows that we ought to do them in the least-evil way possible, which thanks to marginal utility means putting the burden more on those more able to afford it (progressive taxation), and using it in ways that help those most in need of it (social programs). Because it is an evil that we unfortunately must endure.
We don't have to kid ourselves about thieving nature of it to accept that pragmatic conclusion.
This is why the tax bill should be passed directly to the shareholders, and taxed exactly like any other income, progressively. The little guys barely starting their retirement fund, who own a share or two of Apple, won't pay much on the returns from those shares. The multibillionaire investors with absurdly huge stock portfolios generating enormous returns would make up the difference. The corporation itself pays nothing.
Unless you live in a swing state, voting for Clinton or Trump IS throwing your vote away. The only way most voters can make any difference is by voting third party. It won't affect who wins this election, but then neither would voting a major party. It will, however, influence party policy the the choice of candidates next election.
"My pitch" is entirely "this other lawyer says I have a case, but he personally can't file it for me. Will you look at what he has prepared and consider filing it for me on contingency?" and the answer to that is "no". I personally don't know a fucking thing about the matter other than that someone else who's supposed to know better says I've probably been wronged and that he personally is barred from righting it for technical reasons I don't understand, and all I want is for someone to look at his pitch, and they won't even do that.
Slashdot Mirror
If you live anywhere but the few swing states, a vote for anyone BUT a third party is throwing away your vote. You won't make any difference in the outcome of the election (because you're not in a swing state), AND you won't make any difference in either party's policies (which they adapt to court voters who defect to third parties). All you're doing is voting for the status quo, in which case you may as well have not voted.
The Supreme Court isn't responsible for anything but the proper enforcement of incorporation, which is plainly spelled out in codified law in the Fourteenth Amendment:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States
If anything, they have interpreted against the literal meaning of that, which has the implication that states have only the same claims and powers (the inverse of privileges and immunities) as Congress, and thus conversely (when combined with the ninth and tenth amendments) people have privileges and immunities against the vast majority of laws that state governments pass.
In other words, go down the list of enumerated powers for Congress. The ninth and tenth amendments spell out that those are the only kinds of things Congress can pass laws about, and all other action or inaction on the part of the people or the states is permitted. Then the fourteenth amendment says the states are as limited as Congress, which makes virtually everything on the part of the people permitted. Not actually everything, but a lot more than is actually permitted in practice.
Ask the US Census and Moors, along with other North Africans and Middle Easterners, are "white".
Which honestly makes just as much sense as lumping Pakistanis and Japanese together as "Asians".
The point of the 'stick it in an index fund' comparison is that that kind of investment reflects the average kind of return that other players in the market manage to make on average, and if your own investing activity doesn't even beat that, then you're hardly some kind of genius business paragon, because you're not even doing as well as the average business, as if you had let average businesses use your money instead they would have done more with it than you managed.
AAPS are apparently trying to imitate the Tenth Doctor when he got pissed at Harriet Jones, Prime Minister (yes, we know who you are).
Not as successfully, of course.
Unions don't have the power to prohibit you from having a job per se. They only have the power to negotiate exclusive contracts with employers; just like you could negotiate an exclusive contract with an employer to be their sole [whatever], if you had the leverage to get them to agree to that (like if, say, you were the sole proprietor of a prestigious subcontracting company, and they wanted your services badly enough to give you all their jobs if you demanded it). Employers are free to not employ unions, if they're willing to forego the labor pool in that union and only use non-union labor. Or, you know, they could negotiate with another union instead, just like anyone in the non-union labor pool can join together into another union and try to outcompete the first union for contracts.
The mirror image of this exists on the employer's side too. A local orange grower is free to go it solo and just sell his oranges at the farmer's market or something, and try to compete against big names like Sunkist; or, he could join with Sunkist (which is nothing but a cooperative of individual growers), and sell his oranges through them. Many sellers of commodities work that way, many individual sellers joining together into a unified brand to sell their product together, because that gives them a huge advantage over any one individual seller. (And for each individual seller participating too, it comes with disadvantages similar to those that union workers face, namely just being one interchangeable piece of a larger whole and not being able to fight for any special treatment). The only place where that kind of thing doesn't make sense is when artificial monopolies due to intellectual property make it absurd to even speak of; it's not like someone else could try (however vainly) to compete with Apple in the market for iPhones, so of course anyone who wants to sell iPhones has to join up with Apple to do so. But if that weren't so -- if anyone could just build and sell identical iPhones -- you would still expect to see individual iPhone makers eventually banding together for the competitive advantage, just like commodity sellers do, and just like laborers do in unions.
Well geez, how does anybody miss the solution if it's that obvious. Just have money in the bank! Man, how stupid are people if they couldn't even think of that? Just have money and that solves most of your problems! Why doesn't everybody just have money?
I was very close to calling this insightful, thinking that of course it would be trivially easy to get yourself fired for cause (by not showing up, after you found another job that you're showing up to instead, of course), but then it struck me that the converse would be equally true... they wouldn't have to fire you, they could just indefinitely delay delivery of your paychecks until you... "quit for cause" I guess would be the converse? After hiring someone else to "help" you, of course; someone whose paychecks were not getting delayed, who's perfectly capable of picking up the slack after you quit for their breach of contract.
In reality either of those -- accepting pay without returning any work, or accepting work without returning any pay -- would be considered a breach of the contract and actionable in court. If they weren't, it would be no different from at-will employment; you could effectively (though nominally not) quit, or they could effectively (though nominally not) let you go, whenever you or they felt like, without repercussion.
"At home" (parents home) isn't an option for many people, and I've known people, student back in college who had no cars and so couldn't live as far from campus as I could, who paid $500/mo EACH to split a fucking bedroom with two other people. Or people like my disabled mother who for the past year until this month was paying $700/mo out of her $900/mo income to split a room with two other strangers each paying the same as her because that is the only kind of place that someone without the savings to put a deposit down can get.
Being poor is stupidly fucking expensive.
There is a thing here called the Firehose, where the users of the site -- mostly computer nerds, ostensibly, including you! -- can provide input on TFA selection process.
he's successful, in large part, because he knows what to sell, how to sell, and how to get it done.
He's "successful" because he started out with an enormous pile of money and hasn't burned through it all yet. If he had stuck it in an index fund and done nothing at all creative with it, he'd have seen better returns than any of his actual endeavors.
'The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a politically conservative non-profit association founded in 1943 to "fight socialized medicine and to fight the government takeover of medicine."' Wikipedia.
That's kinda beside the point at the UC in question here is UCSF.
Also, with the possible exceptions of Irvine and Davis, all UC campuses are coastal.
Glad to see someone else properly distinguishing between the two.
Of course, they're not mutually exclusive either, and it's possible that this situation in question is actually capitalism in action, not just the free market.
The food industry does ask the highest price the market will bear. They can't gouge like education or health because there are lots of suppliers of food, unlike suppliers of education or health, who each undercut each other slightly to gain a slightly larger marketshare (and thus more profit overall than the alternative), which in aggregate drives the price that the market will bear down toward the cost of producing the food.
To make education or health care more like food, we'd need to increase the number of education and health care suppliers, or rather somehow make it easier for someone to go into business supplying education or health care and let the search for profit do the rest.
Of course, with education at least, a significant chunk of demand is not for the education per se -- it's easier than ever to actually learn things from many different sources. It's the status conferred by the organization that declares you to be educated. Increasing the supply of such status requires more than just increasing the supply of educators, but somehow increasing the pool of institutes that employers et al consider sufficiently status-conferring. That is a harder problem.
The Ferengi explicitly rejected the very concept of material egalitarianism (which underlies the Federation using their replicated plenty to eliminate scarcity), and for entirely social reasons (status) strove to acquire something that specifically could not be replicated (Latinum). They basically worship capitalism (literally) and actively fight against the natural progress of technology eliminating it.
Mudd likely wanted money for similar reasons. Some people -- lots of people -- don't just want all of the material things they could possibly need, they want social power, they don't want everything to be free and equal because then there's no hierarchy for them to be on top of. In Mudd's case, and probably the Ferengi as well, I imagine he sought out this kind of power over people in places outside the Federation, as it's hard to have power over someone who can get anything they want for free on a whim like most Federation citizens.
As for your signed picture of Majel -- is it OK if I send that via transporter? You don't mind if its constituent atoms are converted into entirely fungible energy and then reassembled into the same pattern they started in on your end? What if there happens to be a transporter accident along the way, and a transporter duplicate gets sent back to me? Or is it that the original got sent back to me and you got the duplicate? How can we tell? What does it matter?
Also, a Bronze Age with starships and replicators sounds pretty sweet to me.
In most countries besides the United States, "liberal" means roughly what Americans call "libertarian". (And "libertarian" there, in turn, means "anarchist", implicitly anarcho-socialist, as anarcho-capitalism is seen to be a contradiction in terms).
I'm not one to advocate the abolition of taxes any time in the near future (and while we have taxes at all, I'm a very strong proponent of very progressive taxes), but they are in fact formally identical to theft. Something is demanded from you under threat of force, and what if anything you get back in return is not up to you to decide.
If you had a choice to pay or not and didn't demand anything in return to give your consent to that, that would be a donation or gift, not a tax.
If you had a choice to pay or not and demanded something specific in return, that would be a purchase, not a tax.
If you have no choice to pay or not, and what if anything you get back in return is up to the party demanding payment, that's theft. Even if they do give you something for it -- if someone mugs me and for some bizarre reason leaves something with me afterward, that's still theft. Even if it's something you would have voluntarily paid for if given the chance -- If I'm thinking of buying a product and, before I agree to the transaction, the seller takes my money by force and gives me the product, that's still theft, even if I would have decided to buy it in the end. The lack of choice is what makes it theft.
If the government does that last thing -- demands money from you on threat of force, and gives back what if anything it decides to give you -- we call it "taxes". Ergo taxes are theft committed by government. You can't decline what it gives you and keep your money. You can't negotiate what you're willing to pay money for. (You can voice a preference in a complex process that highly dilutes your voice, but if you don't get to back out of the deal if you don't like it, that's not negotiation). You just have to pay it, and they don't have to give anything back, even if they in fact do, even if it's something you like. You don't get a choice, and that makes it theft.
Now that said, taxes are the only way we currently know of to keep a state afloat, and in the absence of one state other states tend to spring into existence -- usually of the worst kind possible, warlords and the like. So taxes, being theft, may be an evil, but they are, at least at present (until we can figure out some other way of keeping even-worse states from arising), a necessary evil. And given that they are a necessary evil, it follows that we ought to do them in the least-evil way possible, which thanks to marginal utility means putting the burden more on those more able to afford it (progressive taxation), and using it in ways that help those most in need of it (social programs). Because it is an evil that we unfortunately must endure.
We don't have to kid ourselves about thieving nature of it to accept that pragmatic conclusion.
This is why the tax bill should be passed directly to the shareholders, and taxed exactly like any other income, progressively. The little guys barely starting their retirement fund, who own a share or two of Apple, won't pay much on the returns from those shares. The multibillionaire investors with absurdly huge stock portfolios generating enormous returns would make up the difference. The corporation itself pays nothing.
It really should be just people who pay the taxes.
The tiny fraction of a percent of people who own most of the corporations (and other capital) and profit off of them should pay the most of them.
Some are even dumb enough to think that "average" only means "mean", and that a median isn't a kind of average...
Wanting to get paid for your labor isn't capitalism. Wanting to get paid just for already owning something is.
Unless you live in a swing state, voting for Clinton or Trump IS throwing your vote away. The only way most voters can make any difference is by voting third party. It won't affect who wins this election, but then neither would voting a major party. It will, however, influence party policy the the choice of candidates next election.
"My pitch" is entirely "this other lawyer says I have a case, but he personally can't file it for me. Will you look at what he has prepared and consider filing it for me on contingency?" and the answer to that is "no". I personally don't know a fucking thing about the matter other than that someone else who's supposed to know better says I've probably been wronged and that he personally is barred from righting it for technical reasons I don't understand, and all I want is for someone to look at his pitch, and they won't even do that.
Apparently you didn't even read the post I was replying to.