Sure thing it's your choice to dump toxic waste in your yard, but it's my choice to keep your toxic waste out of my yard, and the air and groundwater that's just as much mine as yours and everyone else's. So long as you keep your toxic waste entirely confined to your property and out of anyone else's property or public property, sure thing it's your choice. Good luck meeting that high bar though.
Problem was, Doc was known (from the future) to get shot less than a week later. They didn't have a few years to wait for gas to be available, or even enough time to fix the engine damage from their attempts to manufacture fuel themselves and try that again.
The problem was that they were under time pressure as (knowing the future) Doc was going to be shot (in unknown circumstances) in under a week. They did try making fuel in Doc's lab and blew out the... fuel intake manifold, I think it was, by getting the octane terribly wrong or something. And fixing that would have taken too much time. If it wasn't for the time pressure, yeah, they could have just gotten fuel somewhere somehow and fixed the car and driven back to the future, but there was no time, so they had to take a train.
Now if it had been Bill and Ted instead of Doc and Marty, they could simply have decided to come back with a portable tank of gas once they get the time machine working again, and them bam, future-them would appear with it right there, and they could go back to the future to buy some gas and bring it back to themselves, then get on with their lives.
The flying circuits were also electrically powered by Mr. Fusion, along with the Flux Capacitor, but the engine ran on ordinary gas, and we know that because Doc Brown said so and that was the entire plot obstacle of the third movie: they're stuck in the Old West with no gas (and busted flying circuits), so they can't get up to speed to return Back To The Future.
That is a problem, sure, and I would love to see a greater supply of smaller, less expensive housing so that people get get off the rent treadmill sooner in life.
But the bigger problem I see is the existence of the institute of rent (including interest, which is rent on money) in the first place, leaving generation after generation of those families too poor to escape it paying half their life's earnings with nothing to show for it, nothing to leave to their kids, leaving those kids in the same circumstances generation after generation.
If it weren't possible to rent (which doesn't require banning anything, just render certain contracts unenforceable), so housing had to be sold instead (on terms comparable to rent payments, otherwise nobody would be able to buy it and everyone's real estate investments would become worthless), then the money people are currently paying landlords (and banks, for those wealthy enough to rent money instead) would accumulate as equity in housing that they could leave to their children, even if those children have to continue paying it off, and eventually we'd have a world where the housing people are already living in was owned by the people who live in it.
Who, back on point, could then get by with much lower incomes, and so could accept much lower wages, lowering the greatest cost of business, and consequently the cost of the products of those businesses, in turn further lowering the cost of living for the workers who buy those products, who could then get by with lower incomes, etc. All by just removing the parasitic drain of capital-owners charging usury.
And the biggest cost to labor is capital, mostly land.
If people didn't have to borrow half a career's income just to have a place to even sit and starve to death in peace, they could work for much cheaper. I live quite luxuriously off a budget that a full-time minimum-wage job could fund if it weren't for rent, and savings to eventually escape from rent, and taxes on the money I have to earn to pay for those things, adding up to almost 300% of what I actually need to consume for that comfortable lifestyle.
Fix the problem of rent (and interest) and get us to a world where people actually own the places they live outright and don't have to pay to borrow them (or money to buy them), and then labor costs can plummet, and the cost of business can plummet with it.
The main reason for having free speech is precisely that words are so harmless there is no justification for banning them. No special effort need be made to protect the speech itself, only to protect people from being attacked without justification -- and speaking is never such a justification, because words are harmless.
No, I think "Hold me Ani! Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo!" was way ore cringe-worthy, in that I actually, physically cringed (and someone else in the theater shouted "oh come on!" at the screen) when that happened.
When those mobs brought together on the internet start doing things to affect their target's lives, rather than just saying things to them, then there is grounds to do things back to them. But so long as they're just saying things, the most that's warranted is saying things back to them.
When you imprison someone in your basement, they can't just ignore it and continue on with their lives, or if they feel like it, imprison you in their basement in retaliation.
But when someone says something to you, you can ignore it and continue on with your life, or if you feel like it, say something equally mean back to them.
If by "imprison someone in your basement" you meant "tell someone to go into your basement and stay there", a command that they could ignore or respond to at their whim, then you would have a comparable case. Or if by "silence" you didn't mean "say things that make you not want to speak", but rather "duct-tape your mouth shut", then the cases would be comparable too.
This post of mine isn't a response to this post of yours directly, but a broader question at you more generally.
Throughout this thread I keep seeing you speak of "binary" and "non-binary" in a way that's not familiar to me and not immediately obvious from context.
Can you explain what you mean by those terms, in this context?
Then any charges brought against anyone breaking the "law" should be summarily thrown out of court as soon as the the defendant's lawyer asks what... hell, I was about to end this sentence "what the charges are", but if you're not actually in violation of any law, how are you even being charged with anything? You can't be charged with violation of... nothing. There has to be a law to even press charges.
Money doesn't have a fixed value. Its value is the sum total of all the productivity of your citizens, divided by (roughly speaking) the sum total of how much everyone is paid. Consequently, an increase in real income (amount of stuff you can buy with your income, not the amount of money you're paid) depends entirely on increasing the average productivity of your citizens.
But the amount of stuff that gets bought varied with the distribution of that income. If the sum total of how much everyone is paid is concentrated in few hands, much less of it will get spent than if it was spread out across many hands. The difference between those two figures, how much that money could be buying and how much it does actually buy, is a measure of the inefficiency of the economy due to a few people parasitizing the economy at the expense of the rest of the people.
There is also marginal utility to consider, which is really the same thing in different terms. Your millionth dollar is worth less, to you, than your second dollar was worth, to you. Given the same amount of dollars in circulation, and the same productive activity, you can increase the actual value held throughout society by taking someone's millionth dollar and giving someone else a second dollar; the loss felt by the first person is less than the gain felt by the second.
The only difference between a brown dwarf and a supergiant planet is that the latter orbits another star, while a brown dwarf is the largest thing in its star system. A brown dwarf basically is a supermassive planet, just a rogue one (not orbiting another star), so the question at the end of this summary is dumb.
If only there were ever any alternatives besides a Republican who's even (if only slightly) worse. I've never seen a third party even on the ballot for Senate here. Every election I personally compare the two-and-only-two D and R options hoping against hope that somehow there will be a Republican this year who's at least tiny bit better than the Democrat incumbents... and then sigh and resignedly for for the incumbents again, because as shitty as they are, the alternatives are always slightly worse.
The same guy who was hammering on the importance of free speech in defense of his contributions to the Proposition 8 (anti-gay-marriage law in California) campaign is now proposing a means of automated censorship?
I think the suggestion was not to do one big conclusive scientific study that proves that nobody is "allergic to wifi", but rather to let any given person who thinks they are to "get tested" to determine whether or not they in particular are, without assailing the patient's belief that some people are. Then the patient gets the results back that they, in particular, aren't one of the people who are "allergic to wifi", without getting their defenses up about whether or not there are any such people at all, and they move on to finding something else to blame their symptoms on.
And maybe they tell their friends who are "allergic to wifi" that they thought they were and got tested and actually weren't, and then those friends go get tested too, and pretty soon nobody knows anybody who's "allergic to wifi" and it stops being a thing. Maybe something else pops up to replace it, but at least wifi gets off the hook as the boogeyman of the day.
The reason to save is so that you don't need to borrow in the future. Not all savings are immediately lent out, and it's only because of inflation that anyone feels like they have to, because savings not invested somehow will be diminished by inflation. Inflation forces people to lend and rewards borrowers, encouraging a society of people constantly scrambling to service their debts, terrified of all their "savings" (that aren't actually set aside, but are being used riskily by others) vanishing with a fluctuation of the market, and a tiny fraction of people with absurdly huge and diversified assets (the big lenders and rentiers) reaping the benefits of all that debt-servicing by other people.
Of course deflation has its own problems too, causing those who have more to get more, more quickly, without having to do anything for anyone.
What we really want is a stable currency, with no inflation or deflation, where people can work, actually save when times are good instead of "investing" their earnings in risky ventures, and then "borrow" from themselves (spend from their own savings) in the future when times are lean.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure thing it's your choice to dump toxic waste in your yard, but it's my choice to keep your toxic waste out of my yard, and the air and groundwater that's just as much mine as yours and everyone else's. So long as you keep your toxic waste entirely confined to your property and out of anyone else's property or public property, sure thing it's your choice. Good luck meeting that high bar though.
Or really, just wait a few years
Problem was, Doc was known (from the future) to get shot less than a week later. They didn't have a few years to wait for gas to be available, or even enough time to fix the engine damage from their attempts to manufacture fuel themselves and try that again.
The problem was that they were under time pressure as (knowing the future) Doc was going to be shot (in unknown circumstances) in under a week. They did try making fuel in Doc's lab and blew out the... fuel intake manifold, I think it was, by getting the octane terribly wrong or something. And fixing that would have taken too much time. If it wasn't for the time pressure, yeah, they could have just gotten fuel somewhere somehow and fixed the car and driven back to the future, but there was no time, so they had to take a train.
Now if it had been Bill and Ted instead of Doc and Marty, they could simply have decided to come back with a portable tank of gas once they get the time machine working again, and them bam, future-them would appear with it right there, and they could go back to the future to buy some gas and bring it back to themselves, then get on with their lives.
The flying circuits were also electrically powered by Mr. Fusion, along with the Flux Capacitor, but the engine ran on ordinary gas, and we know that because Doc Brown said so and that was the entire plot obstacle of the third movie: they're stuck in the Old West with no gas (and busted flying circuits), so they can't get up to speed to return Back To The Future.
That is a problem, sure, and I would love to see a greater supply of smaller, less expensive housing so that people get get off the rent treadmill sooner in life.
But the bigger problem I see is the existence of the institute of rent (including interest, which is rent on money) in the first place, leaving generation after generation of those families too poor to escape it paying half their life's earnings with nothing to show for it, nothing to leave to their kids, leaving those kids in the same circumstances generation after generation.
If it weren't possible to rent (which doesn't require banning anything, just render certain contracts unenforceable), so housing had to be sold instead (on terms comparable to rent payments, otherwise nobody would be able to buy it and everyone's real estate investments would become worthless), then the money people are currently paying landlords (and banks, for those wealthy enough to rent money instead) would accumulate as equity in housing that they could leave to their children, even if those children have to continue paying it off, and eventually we'd have a world where the housing people are already living in was owned by the people who live in it.
Who, back on point, could then get by with much lower incomes, and so could accept much lower wages, lowering the greatest cost of business, and consequently the cost of the products of those businesses, in turn further lowering the cost of living for the workers who buy those products, who could then get by with lower incomes, etc. All by just removing the parasitic drain of capital-owners charging usury.
And the biggest cost to labor is capital, mostly land.
If people didn't have to borrow half a career's income just to have a place to even sit and starve to death in peace, they could work for much cheaper. I live quite luxuriously off a budget that a full-time minimum-wage job could fund if it weren't for rent, and savings to eventually escape from rent, and taxes on the money I have to earn to pay for those things, adding up to almost 300% of what I actually need to consume for that comfortable lifestyle.
Fix the problem of rent (and interest) and get us to a world where people actually own the places they live outright and don't have to pay to borrow them (or money to buy them), and then labor costs can plummet, and the cost of business can plummet with it.
Bruce is a long-time, regular Slashdotter, so him participating in an article on Slashdot about him is hardly surprising.
The main reason for having free speech is precisely that words are so harmless there is no justification for banning them. No special effort need be made to protect the speech itself, only to protect people from being attacked without justification -- and speaking is never such a justification, because words are harmless.
No, I think "Hold me Ani! Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo!" was way ore cringe-worthy, in that I actually, physically cringed (and someone else in the theater shouted "oh come on!" at the screen) when that happened.
When those mobs brought together on the internet start doing things to affect their target's lives, rather than just saying things to them, then there is grounds to do things back to them. But so long as they're just saying things, the most that's warranted is saying things back to them.
When you imprison someone in your basement, they can't just ignore it and continue on with their lives, or if they feel like it, imprison you in their basement in retaliation.
But when someone says something to you, you can ignore it and continue on with your life, or if you feel like it, say something equally mean back to them.
If by "imprison someone in your basement" you meant "tell someone to go into your basement and stay there", a command that they could ignore or respond to at their whim, then you would have a comparable case. Or if by "silence" you didn't mean "say things that make you not want to speak", but rather "duct-tape your mouth shut", then the cases would be comparable too.
This post of mine isn't a response to this post of yours directly, but a broader question at you more generally.
Throughout this thread I keep seeing you speak of "binary" and "non-binary" in a way that's not familiar to me and not immediately obvious from context.
Can you explain what you mean by those terms, in this context?
Then any charges brought against anyone breaking the "law" should be summarily thrown out of court as soon as the the defendant's lawyer asks what... hell, I was about to end this sentence "what the charges are", but if you're not actually in violation of any law, how are you even being charged with anything? You can't be charged with violation of... nothing. There has to be a law to even press charges.
Money doesn't have a fixed value. Its value is the sum total of all the productivity of your citizens, divided by (roughly speaking) the sum total of how much everyone is paid. Consequently, an increase in real income (amount of stuff you can buy with your income, not the amount of money you're paid) depends entirely on increasing the average productivity of your citizens.
But the amount of stuff that gets bought varied with the distribution of that income. If the sum total of how much everyone is paid is concentrated in few hands, much less of it will get spent than if it was spread out across many hands. The difference between those two figures, how much that money could be buying and how much it does actually buy, is a measure of the inefficiency of the economy due to a few people parasitizing the economy at the expense of the rest of the people.
There is also marginal utility to consider, which is really the same thing in different terms. Your millionth dollar is worth less, to you, than your second dollar was worth, to you. Given the same amount of dollars in circulation, and the same productive activity, you can increase the actual value held throughout society by taking someone's millionth dollar and giving someone else a second dollar; the loss felt by the first person is less than the gain felt by the second.
Do you mean a CAPTCHA?
That was "Hugh".
The only difference between a brown dwarf and a supergiant planet is that the latter orbits another star, while a brown dwarf is the largest thing in its star system. A brown dwarf basically is a supermassive planet, just a rogue one (not orbiting another star), so the question at the end of this summary is dumb.
If only there were ever any alternatives besides a Republican who's even (if only slightly) worse. I've never seen a third party even on the ballot for Senate here. Every election I personally compare the two-and-only-two D and R options hoping against hope that somehow there will be a Republican this year who's at least tiny bit better than the Democrat incumbents... and then sigh and resignedly for for the incumbents again, because as shitty as they are, the alternatives are always slightly worse.
Thanks, and sorry for the confusion.
The same guy who was hammering on the importance of free speech in defense of his contributions to the Proposition 8 (anti-gay-marriage law in California) campaign is now proposing a means of automated censorship?
Time is not a cube. It's more like a... sort of a ball.... of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff.
I think the suggestion was not to do one big conclusive scientific study that proves that nobody is "allergic to wifi", but rather to let any given person who thinks they are to "get tested" to determine whether or not they in particular are, without assailing the patient's belief that some people are. Then the patient gets the results back that they, in particular, aren't one of the people who are "allergic to wifi", without getting their defenses up about whether or not there are any such people at all, and they move on to finding something else to blame their symptoms on.
And maybe they tell their friends who are "allergic to wifi" that they thought they were and got tested and actually weren't, and then those friends go get tested too, and pretty soon nobody knows anybody who's "allergic to wifi" and it stops being a thing. Maybe something else pops up to replace it, but at least wifi gets off the hook as the boogeyman of the day.
"Something must be done! This is something! Therefore, this must be done!"
To paraphrase Mr. Nye, “You do not like what interests me, so you must be an idiot, a moron or a redneck."
"...but I repeat myself."
The reason to save is so that you don't need to borrow in the future. Not all savings are immediately lent out, and it's only because of inflation that anyone feels like they have to, because savings not invested somehow will be diminished by inflation. Inflation forces people to lend and rewards borrowers, encouraging a society of people constantly scrambling to service their debts, terrified of all their "savings" (that aren't actually set aside, but are being used riskily by others) vanishing with a fluctuation of the market, and a tiny fraction of people with absurdly huge and diversified assets (the big lenders and rentiers) reaping the benefits of all that debt-servicing by other people.
Of course deflation has its own problems too, causing those who have more to get more, more quickly, without having to do anything for anyone.
What we really want is a stable currency, with no inflation or deflation, where people can work, actually save when times are good instead of "investing" their earnings in risky ventures, and then "borrow" from themselves (spend from their own savings) in the future when times are lean.