You have a point about minority voices being drowned out by majority ones, but that's just as much a problem, if not more of a problem, with voting on laws than it is voting with your dollars. If so few people have the same objections to aspartame and sucralose as you, why are the odds of getting enough people to pass a law about it any better than getting enough people to stop buying it?
And if you could get barely a majority of people to pass a law against it, what then about the now-minority who want it and now can't have it? Whereas if you had the exact same barely-majority voting with their dollars, they would get the products they want, but the now-minority who want different products would also continue to get what they want.
Odd are good that somewhere out there is an aspartame- and sucralose-free chewing gum for you. Here, first Google result for it. You can get what you want right now. So can others who want different things. That wouldn't be true if the government stepped in and said one side or the other was right and the other wasn't allowed to have what they wanted anymore.
Re:Say Good By to the Rainforests ....
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FWIW, there is a word for what you took "theism" to mean: "fideism", which is literally "faith-ism". Given the existence of non-theistic religions and non-religious ethics, my preferred way to define religion is just as a synonym for fideism.
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Atheism does not mean "without faith (in anything)". "Theism" does not mean "faith", it means "belief in god(s)". Atheism, being the negation of that, is lack of belief in god(s). A subset of lack of belief in gods is belief that there are no gods; that subset is "strong" atheism, and the rest outside that subset is "weak" atheism, which I covered already.
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If godhood is only a question of power, then godhood is relative; we are gods to ants, and the question "is there a god (relative to us)?" is reduced to effectively "are there sufficiently advanced aliens?"
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Atheism in no way necessarily depends on faith. Sure, one can believe there are no gods on faith, but one can also believe there are no gods as the conclusion of an argument from logic or evidence (which argument could be argued against perhaps, but it doesn't have to be a good argument to make it not an appeal to faith). And all of those possibilities still only cover "strong", "hard", or "positive" atheism, that actively asserts the non-existence of gods; there's also the broader sense of "weak", "soft", or "negative" atheism which simply does not accept others' assertions that there is a god.
It's quite easy to witness the lack of "the divine": look at all the evil in the world. That is immediate proof that any beings that exist either can't fix it, don't know it needs fixing, or don't care to fix it, (because if they knew it needed fixing, wanted to fix it, and could fix it, it would be fixed); and any being that falls into any of those categories can hardly count as a god.
(Cue the "blah blah free will theodicy plantinga blah blah blah"...)
You know we can each individually avoid the problem of corporations cutting corners on the things they sell us just to make a few bucks for themselves, by not cutting corners on buying cheap crap from them just to save a few bucks for ourselves. If you don't like cheap crap, don't but cheap crap, and if enough people agree with you, corporations will stop selling cheap crap. How's that for democracy?
Of course there's a whole separate problem that a lot of people can't afford to buy anything but cheap crap, but there are better, less-micromanaging ways of addressing that problem than having the government pick and choose who can sell what to whom.
Don't outlaw it's production, sale, and possession. Just heavily fine it when it spills over into the public sphere and actually affects other people. I'm not sure what the exact analogy with alcohol would be, but with smoking: if a random member of the public (e.g. a cop on patrol) can tell you're smoking, bam, fine. Otherwise, you're totally fine.
We shouldn't care if people are hurting themselves, only if they're hurting other people.
Just ban public smoking, punishable by a heavy fine, and have cops sit around looking for smokers to make a quick buck for their municipality the same way they do speed traps now.
Let people smoke in private all they want (and sell the stuff to do so, tax-free), but if anyone in public can tell you're doing it, bam, fines commensurate to the previous taxes.
Solves two problems (a morality tax and wanton public air pollution) at once, with the side-effects of each counterbalancing anything lost from the other.
I'm not talking about the software, just about language, which you're still misusing. If it is 40% faster as you say, then it's not 1.4x faster, it's 1.4x as fast, which is the same thing as 0.4x faster. 0.4x is the same thing as 40%.
Maybe whoever originally wrote "1.4x faster" is the one who got it wrong, and they should have wrote "1.4x as fast" instead, but my only point is that "1.4x faster" means the same thing as 240% as fast.
"x% more than" means "(1+x)% as much as", whatever metric you're comparing.
So "1.4x faster than" means "2.4x as fast as".
If it helps make intuitive sense, turn it around instead: if it had been "1.4x as fast as", that would have meant "0.4x faster than" the original 1x speed, because 0.4x faster than 1x is 1.4x. Likewise 2.4x is 1.4x faster than 1x. So since it's 1.4x faster (than the original, which is by definition the 1x being compared to), that makes it 1x + 1.4x = 2.4x as fast.
Unobservable things are fine so long as they are part of the explanatory framework required to account for all the observations.
Time is my favorite example of this. We can only ever observe the present. We have a strong natural intuition that there is also a past and a future, but strictly speaking we can't observe either of them. What we can observe are facts about the present that are best explained by a hypothesized past, and which in turn imply things about a hypothesized future.
Mostly I think of this in analogy to the many worlds interpretation. Other possible worlds are exactly as real as other times. In one sense, only the actual world is real, just like in that sense only the present is real; but in a broader sense, the best explanation of the actual world involves a framework invoking other worlds, just like the best explanation of the present involves a framework invoking other times.
In a really strict sense, even space is a theoretical framework like this. We only directly interact with things locally. We posit that there are other things over there in another place because, for one, we're evolutionarily programmed to jump to that conclusion, but even if not, because the best explanation for why there are a certain configuration of e.g. photons here where I exist seeing something is that they travelled, in various patterns according to various laws, from other places elsewhere.
If you accept that taxation is a necessary evil -- that is, both an "evil", as in a bad thing to be avoided if possible, but also necessary, as in we can't avoid it completely -- then progressive taxes to be spent primarily on social welfare is the obvious conclusion, because of the principle of marginal utility:
If you have to do this bad thing to achieve a good thing, do the bad thing more to the people with the means to bear it than those without (a CEO will miss each dollar less than a fry cook would), because then you're doing less bad overall; and do the good thing more to the people with the need for it than those without (a fry cook will appreciate food stamps much more than a CEO will).
As far as basic income goes, I like the idea of what is effectively a basic income via a progressive income tax that can go into the negative. If everyone paid in taxes half the difference between their income and the mean income, plus the actual intended per-capita tax rate, then you would have essentially a flat tax plus a redistributive factor that lessens the tax burden on the poor and provides supplemental income for the extremely poor, at the expense of only the extremely rich. If pre-tax incomes were distributed evenly, it would be exactly a flat tax. The more unevenly the pre-tax incomes became, the more and more progressive the taxation would become, pulling all incomes toward the mean with a force proportional to how far from the mean they are. There is still always an incentive to work, and because it's based on the mean we can never be spending money we're not actually making, so the "all we have is all we make" issue isn't a problem.
And you get all the simplifying benefits of a basic income. Don't have to have a bunch of government-controlled services. Leave everything to the free market to provide the services and just make sure that everybody has enough to afford the basics. Nobody would ever make less than half the mean income (before the actual flat tax part comes out), and that should always be enough to at least scrape by.
My apologies for misunderstanding. (I was puzzled trying to figure out what the motive would be for making such an obviously-falsified claim as you seemed to be... makes much more sense now).
It kind of makes me wonder how effective this kind of shilling actually is.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone change their mind because of an argument, on the internet or otherwise. Ok, not anyone every, but the rare occasions I've ever seen of anyone ever having their mind changed about anything involved people who were already very open-minded critical thinkers, being presented with well-reasoned and nuanced arguments, and even those are rare.
Can the kind of mindless name-calling that passes for "argument" in most forums actually change anyone's mind, much less the kind of closed minds that tend to engage in that sort of conflict in the first place? What's the payoff for a big organization to engage in that sort of thing at all?
(Then again, I also frequently get spam that does not mention any products or contain any links or attachments or even complete sentences sometimes, which seems to completely defeat the point of spamming, yet it's been going on for years and years anyway at someone's expense...)
Unless they've been deleted somehow (Slashdot wouldn't do that, would they?), none of the posts prior to yours in this thread appears to be pro-Russian propaganda-trolls. There's a Stalin/Putin comparison (with a OT subthread ranting about Dice), a OT rant about Dice, an "In Soviet Russia" joke, a post distinguishing internet trolling from plain old propaganda (with an OT subthread ranting about Dice), and an AC calling trolling an artform. What's pro-Russian in there?
Other people have already said this, but they're buried in replies to replies so I'll say this up here where it's more noticeable:
The practical upshot that a human can get to anywhere in the universe within their lifetime given enough fuel to keep up acceleration is correct, but from no frame of reference will you appear to have travelled faster than a beam of light.
In your traveling frame of reference, it will appear that the distance you travelled got smaller. That's why you can reach places that seemed too distant to reach in your lifetime before: because they don't seem so distant once you're on your way there.
In the rest of the universe's frame of reference, it will appear that you aged more slowly. That's why you can reach places that seemed too distant to reach in your lifetime before: because your lifetime got prolonged once you were on your way there.
In either frame of reference, when you get where you're going, you will still find that a beam of light sent at the same moment you departed will have arrived at your destination before you, and thus in neither frame of reference did you outrun the light. You just either aged more slowly or travelled less distance, depending on whose frame of reference we're talking about.
In a photon's frame of reference, there is no distance between anything and no at all time elapses to travel it. Given enough fuel you can get arbitrarily close to that and so travel to arbitrary locations with arbitrarily little aging along the way, and so get anywhere in your lifetime. But light can always do that better than you still.
Just a pedantic nitpick: the Republican party was never part of the Democratic-Republican party. The Democratic-Republicans split into Democrats and Whigs. The Whigs later folded, and the Republicans rose up as the opposition to the Democrats.
We are a representative democracy, and also a republic, and those are not the same thing.
The US is both a democracy and a republic. The UK is a democracy but not a republic. North Korea is not a democracy but is a republic. Saudi Arabia is neither a democracy nor a republic.
Being a democracy or not is about how and by whom the power of the state is exercised. Being a republic or not is about in whose name the power of the state is exercised.
A republic is a state that officially belongs to the people, in whose name its power is exercised. The degree to which the people themselves direct the use of that power can vary from complete (in a direct democracy) to partial (in a representative democracy) to none at all (in an autocracy).
A democracy is a state that is directed and controlled (to at least some extent) by the people, whether the power of that state is in their name (as in a republic) or not (as in a monarchy).
The US is a republic, because the power of the state is officially that of the people (which is why court cases are titled things like "The People vs..."). But the US is also a democracy, because that power is exercised, indirectly through representatives, by the people themselves, and not held by an autocrat who wields it in their name and ostensibly for their good but without any input from them.
My mom is unfortunately on my phone plan because she can't manage her own finances well enough to pay for a phone herself.
Last November she lost her closest-thing-to-a-dumb-phone-I-could-get-her. It would still do web stuff, but... in a very dumb way, like "smart" phones before the modern (iPhone/Android/etc) smart phone era did. I simply could not get her a phone that only make phone calls, but that was close enough for those purposes.
And then she lost it, and I had to replace it. I wanted the cheapest goddamn dumbest simplest most basic phone possible. All she wants or needs to do is make phone calls. She doesn't give a flying fuck about texting or internet or anything! (Or she didn't at the time, and I wish it had stayed that way). All. She. Needs. Is. A Phone. But to get her a "dumb" (not even, like before) phone would have actually cost me more than their cheapest generation-or-two-old smart phone, a Galaxy Mini S3. Now she's fucking addicted to it and sucking up all the data (that I barely even use) on my plan.
What the fucking fuck has happened where it is simply impossible to get just basic phone service without paying more for it!?!?
I've never used any of the three languages in discussion here, and would barely count myself as a programmer at all, and upon initial reading of each of these routines this was my interpretation:
Java (I assume yours is): For every integer (call it "i") in the set "items", if "i" is less than ten, do whatever the 'add' function of the 'results' object does to it. (No idea what that function is, but my first guess would be to do the math of "results" + "i". Upon reflection after seeing the other languages' versions of this routine, I get now that it means "put 'i' as a member into the set 'results', or more loosely, "add 'i' to the set 'results'".)
Haskell: The set "items" contains members 1, 15, 27, 3, and 54. The set "results" contains every member of that set ("items") that passes the filter of being less than 10. (This is the clearest to me, and the one that shed light on the purpose of the other two).
Python: The set "items" contains members 1, 15, 27, 3, and 54. The set "results"... uhh.... assuming this does the same thing as the Haskell function, I'd guess it means that "results" contains every "item", where "item" is any item in the set of items, but only if "item" is less than ten; a roundabout way of saying, in a more Java-like fashion, "for every item (call it 'item') in the set 'items', if 'item' is less than ten [then that is part of what the set 'results' equals]".
The company is valuable because it makes high profits.
It makes high profits in large part by paying low wages to its employees.
Thus the wealth of the owners of the company is directly due to the poverty induced in its employees.
Nobody needs to sell anything to reverse this. Just paying the employees more would accomplish that, but that would come at the cost of the profits of the company, and thus the stock value, and thus the wealth of the owners, who aren't willing to make that sacrifice.
Slashdot Mirror
You have a point about minority voices being drowned out by majority ones, but that's just as much a problem, if not more of a problem, with voting on laws than it is voting with your dollars. If so few people have the same objections to aspartame and sucralose as you, why are the odds of getting enough people to pass a law about it any better than getting enough people to stop buying it?
And if you could get barely a majority of people to pass a law against it, what then about the now-minority who want it and now can't have it? Whereas if you had the exact same barely-majority voting with their dollars, they would get the products they want, but the now-minority who want different products would also continue to get what they want.
Odd are good that somewhere out there is an aspartame- and sucralose-free chewing gum for you. Here, first Google result for it. You can get what you want right now. So can others who want different things. That wouldn't be true if the government stepped in and said one side or the other was right and the other wasn't allowed to have what they wanted anymore.
FWIW, there is a word for what you took "theism" to mean: "fideism", which is literally "faith-ism". Given the existence of non-theistic religions and non-religious ethics, my preferred way to define religion is just as a synonym for fideism.
Atheism does not mean "without faith (in anything)". "Theism" does not mean "faith", it means "belief in god(s)". Atheism, being the negation of that, is lack of belief in god(s). A subset of lack of belief in gods is belief that there are no gods; that subset is "strong" atheism, and the rest outside that subset is "weak" atheism, which I covered already.
If godhood is only a question of power, then godhood is relative; we are gods to ants, and the question "is there a god (relative to us)?" is reduced to effectively "are there sufficiently advanced aliens?"
Atheism in no way necessarily depends on faith. Sure, one can believe there are no gods on faith, but one can also believe there are no gods as the conclusion of an argument from logic or evidence (which argument could be argued against perhaps, but it doesn't have to be a good argument to make it not an appeal to faith). And all of those possibilities still only cover "strong", "hard", or "positive" atheism, that actively asserts the non-existence of gods; there's also the broader sense of "weak", "soft", or "negative" atheism which simply does not accept others' assertions that there is a god.
It's quite easy to witness the lack of "the divine": look at all the evil in the world. That is immediate proof that any beings that exist either can't fix it, don't know it needs fixing, or don't care to fix it, (because if they knew it needed fixing, wanted to fix it, and could fix it, it would be fixed); and any being that falls into any of those categories can hardly count as a god.
(Cue the "blah blah free will theodicy plantinga blah blah blah"...)
You know we can each individually avoid the problem of corporations cutting corners on the things they sell us just to make a few bucks for themselves, by not cutting corners on buying cheap crap from them just to save a few bucks for ourselves. If you don't like cheap crap, don't but cheap crap, and if enough people agree with you, corporations will stop selling cheap crap. How's that for democracy?
Of course there's a whole separate problem that a lot of people can't afford to buy anything but cheap crap, but there are better, less-micromanaging ways of addressing that problem than having the government pick and choose who can sell what to whom.
Don't outlaw it's production, sale, and possession. Just heavily fine it when it spills over into the public sphere and actually affects other people. I'm not sure what the exact analogy with alcohol would be, but with smoking: if a random member of the public (e.g. a cop on patrol) can tell you're smoking, bam, fine. Otherwise, you're totally fine.
We shouldn't care if people are hurting themselves, only if they're hurting other people.
Just ban public smoking, punishable by a heavy fine, and have cops sit around looking for smokers to make a quick buck for their municipality the same way they do speed traps now.
Let people smoke in private all they want (and sell the stuff to do so, tax-free), but if anyone in public can tell you're doing it, bam, fines commensurate to the previous taxes.
Solves two problems (a morality tax and wanton public air pollution) at once, with the side-effects of each counterbalancing anything lost from the other.
I'm not talking about the software, just about language, which you're still misusing. If it is 40% faster as you say, then it's not 1.4x faster, it's 1.4x as fast, which is the same thing as 0.4x faster. 0.4x is the same thing as 40%.
Maybe whoever originally wrote "1.4x faster" is the one who got it wrong, and they should have wrote "1.4x as fast" instead, but my only point is that "1.4x faster" means the same thing as 240% as fast.
Or to clarify another way: something that's 100% faster than something else is twice as fast, or 200% as fast, because 100% + 100% = 200%.
On the other hand something that's 100% as fast as something else is 0% faster, because it's not faster at all, it's exactly 100% as fast as.
"x% more than" means "(1+x)% as much as", whatever metric you're comparing.
So "1.4x faster than" means "2.4x as fast as".
If it helps make intuitive sense, turn it around instead: if it had been "1.4x as fast as", that would have meant "0.4x faster than" the original 1x speed, because 0.4x faster than 1x is 1.4x. Likewise 2.4x is 1.4x faster than 1x. So since it's 1.4x faster (than the original, which is by definition the 1x being compared to), that makes it 1x + 1.4x = 2.4x as fast.
Unobservable things are fine so long as they are part of the explanatory framework required to account for all the observations.
Time is my favorite example of this. We can only ever observe the present. We have a strong natural intuition that there is also a past and a future, but strictly speaking we can't observe either of them. What we can observe are facts about the present that are best explained by a hypothesized past, and which in turn imply things about a hypothesized future.
Mostly I think of this in analogy to the many worlds interpretation. Other possible worlds are exactly as real as other times. In one sense, only the actual world is real, just like in that sense only the present is real; but in a broader sense, the best explanation of the actual world involves a framework invoking other worlds, just like the best explanation of the present involves a framework invoking other times.
In a really strict sense, even space is a theoretical framework like this. We only directly interact with things locally. We posit that there are other things over there in another place because, for one, we're evolutionarily programmed to jump to that conclusion, but even if not, because the best explanation for why there are a certain configuration of e.g. photons here where I exist seeing something is that they travelled, in various patterns according to various laws, from other places elsewhere.
No worries, looks like it's still doing OK. Thanks for explaining anyway!
If you accept that taxation is a necessary evil -- that is, both an "evil", as in a bad thing to be avoided if possible, but also necessary, as in we can't avoid it completely -- then progressive taxes to be spent primarily on social welfare is the obvious conclusion, because of the principle of marginal utility:
If you have to do this bad thing to achieve a good thing, do the bad thing more to the people with the means to bear it than those without (a CEO will miss each dollar less than a fry cook would), because then you're doing less bad overall; and do the good thing more to the people with the need for it than those without (a fry cook will appreciate food stamps much more than a CEO will).
As far as basic income goes, I like the idea of what is effectively a basic income via a progressive income tax that can go into the negative. If everyone paid in taxes half the difference between their income and the mean income, plus the actual intended per-capita tax rate, then you would have essentially a flat tax plus a redistributive factor that lessens the tax burden on the poor and provides supplemental income for the extremely poor, at the expense of only the extremely rich. If pre-tax incomes were distributed evenly, it would be exactly a flat tax. The more unevenly the pre-tax incomes became, the more and more progressive the taxation would become, pulling all incomes toward the mean with a force proportional to how far from the mean they are. There is still always an incentive to work, and because it's based on the mean we can never be spending money we're not actually making, so the "all we have is all we make" issue isn't a problem.
And you get all the simplifying benefits of a basic income. Don't have to have a bunch of government-controlled services. Leave everything to the free market to provide the services and just make sure that everybody has enough to afford the basics. Nobody would ever make less than half the mean income (before the actual flat tax part comes out), and that should always be enough to at least scrape by.
My apologies for misunderstanding. (I was puzzled trying to figure out what the motive would be for making such an obviously-falsified claim as you seemed to be... makes much more sense now).
Is it because of your mother that you feel about the internet is trolls?
In Capitalist America, internet trolls you too.
It's like my favorite Soviet Russia gag: "In Capitalist America, man oppresses man, but in Soviet Russia it's the other way around!"
It kind of makes me wonder how effective this kind of shilling actually is.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone change their mind because of an argument, on the internet or otherwise. Ok, not anyone every, but the rare occasions I've ever seen of anyone ever having their mind changed about anything involved people who were already very open-minded critical thinkers, being presented with well-reasoned and nuanced arguments, and even those are rare.
Can the kind of mindless name-calling that passes for "argument" in most forums actually change anyone's mind, much less the kind of closed minds that tend to engage in that sort of conflict in the first place? What's the payoff for a big organization to engage in that sort of thing at all?
(Then again, I also frequently get spam that does not mention any products or contain any links or attachments or even complete sentences sometimes, which seems to completely defeat the point of spamming, yet it's been going on for years and years anyway at someone's expense...)
Unless they've been deleted somehow (Slashdot wouldn't do that, would they?), none of the posts prior to yours in this thread appears to be pro-Russian propaganda-trolls. There's a Stalin/Putin comparison (with a OT subthread ranting about Dice), a OT rant about Dice, an "In Soviet Russia" joke, a post distinguishing internet trolling from plain old propaganda (with an OT subthread ranting about Dice), and an AC calling trolling an artform. What's pro-Russian in there?
Other people have already said this, but they're buried in replies to replies so I'll say this up here where it's more noticeable:
The practical upshot that a human can get to anywhere in the universe within their lifetime given enough fuel to keep up acceleration is correct, but from no frame of reference will you appear to have travelled faster than a beam of light.
In your traveling frame of reference, it will appear that the distance you travelled got smaller. That's why you can reach places that seemed too distant to reach in your lifetime before: because they don't seem so distant once you're on your way there.
In the rest of the universe's frame of reference, it will appear that you aged more slowly. That's why you can reach places that seemed too distant to reach in your lifetime before: because your lifetime got prolonged once you were on your way there.
In either frame of reference, when you get where you're going, you will still find that a beam of light sent at the same moment you departed will have arrived at your destination before you, and thus in neither frame of reference did you outrun the light. You just either aged more slowly or travelled less distance, depending on whose frame of reference we're talking about.
In a photon's frame of reference, there is no distance between anything and no at all time elapses to travel it. Given enough fuel you can get arbitrarily close to that and so travel to arbitrary locations with arbitrarily little aging along the way, and so get anywhere in your lifetime. But light can always do that better than you still.
Just a pedantic nitpick: the Republican party was never part of the Democratic-Republican party. The Democratic-Republicans split into Democrats and Whigs. The Whigs later folded, and the Republicans rose up as the opposition to the Democrats.
We are a representative democracy, and also a republic, and those are not the same thing.
The US is both a democracy and a republic.
The UK is a democracy but not a republic.
North Korea is not a democracy but is a republic.
Saudi Arabia is neither a democracy nor a republic.
Being a democracy or not is about how and by whom the power of the state is exercised. Being a republic or not is about in whose name the power of the state is exercised.
A republic is a state that officially belongs to the people, in whose name its power is exercised. The degree to which the people themselves direct the use of that power can vary from complete (in a direct democracy) to partial (in a representative democracy) to none at all (in an autocracy).
A democracy is a state that is directed and controlled (to at least some extent) by the people, whether the power of that state is in their name (as in a republic) or not (as in a monarchy).
The US is a republic, because the power of the state is officially that of the people (which is why court cases are titled things like "The People vs ..."). But the US is also a democracy, because that power is exercised, indirectly through representatives, by the people themselves, and not held by an autocrat who wields it in their name and ostensibly for their good but without any input from them.
My mom is unfortunately on my phone plan because she can't manage her own finances well enough to pay for a phone herself.
Last November she lost her closest-thing-to-a-dumb-phone-I-could-get-her. It would still do web stuff, but... in a very dumb way, like "smart" phones before the modern (iPhone/Android/etc) smart phone era did. I simply could not get her a phone that only make phone calls, but that was close enough for those purposes.
And then she lost it, and I had to replace it. I wanted the cheapest goddamn dumbest simplest most basic phone possible. All she wants or needs to do is make phone calls. She doesn't give a flying fuck about texting or internet or anything! (Or she didn't at the time, and I wish it had stayed that way). All. She. Needs. Is. A Phone. But to get her a "dumb" (not even, like before) phone would have actually cost me more than their cheapest generation-or-two-old smart phone, a Galaxy Mini S3. Now she's fucking addicted to it and sucking up all the data (that I barely even use) on my plan.
What the fucking fuck has happened where it is simply impossible to get just basic phone service without paying more for it!?!?
I've never used any of the three languages in discussion here, and would barely count myself as a programmer at all, and upon initial reading of each of these routines this was my interpretation:
Java (I assume yours is): For every integer (call it "i") in the set "items", if "i" is less than ten, do whatever the 'add' function of the 'results' object does to it. (No idea what that function is, but my first guess would be to do the math of "results" + "i". Upon reflection after seeing the other languages' versions of this routine, I get now that it means "put 'i' as a member into the set 'results', or more loosely, "add 'i' to the set 'results'".)
Haskell: The set "items" contains members 1, 15, 27, 3, and 54. The set "results" contains every member of that set ("items") that passes the filter of being less than 10. (This is the clearest to me, and the one that shed light on the purpose of the other two).
Python: The set "items" contains members 1, 15, 27, 3, and 54. The set "results"... uhh.... assuming this does the same thing as the Haskell function, I'd guess it means that "results" contains every "item", where "item" is any item in the set of items, but only if "item" is less than ten; a roundabout way of saying, in a more Java-like fashion, "for every item (call it 'item') in the set 'items', if 'item' is less than ten [then that is part of what the set 'results' equals]".
The company is valuable because it makes high profits.
It makes high profits in large part by paying low wages to its employees.
Thus the wealth of the owners of the company is directly due to the poverty induced in its employees.
Nobody needs to sell anything to reverse this. Just paying the employees more would accomplish that, but that would come at the cost of the profits of the company, and thus the stock value, and thus the wealth of the owners, who aren't willing to make that sacrifice.