Adam Smith himself insisted that for a market to be free it must be well-regulated. Freedom is not the absence of regulation but the presence of the right kind of regulation.
They are comparing themselves to their competition. "Not just the sum of its parts", and then showing the parts of an iPhone. The message I get from that is "not just an iPhone"; implicitly, "...but something better". How is this a gaffe at all?
The important rights in a free market are the claim rights that limit others' liberty to act upon ourselves and our property, and the immunity rights that limit others' power to change who has what rights and liberties. My complaint is specifically that we are not adequately immune from certain powers of contract that enable the creation of new claims obliging the payment of rents (including interest), without which what are currently rendered as such rental contracts would instead have to be refactored as sales contracts.
That is not a truly free market because the important freedom in a free market is a “freedom from”, not a “freedom to”. My complaint is that what we have is too much like that, not too little.
Just like AirBnB drives up the cost of longer-term rentals, the existence of rent in the first place drives up the cost of homeownership.
Rent (including interest, which is just rent on money) is the core mechanism that perpetuates and amplifies the divide between rich and poor, turning what would otherwise be a truly free market into exploitative capitalism.
For long-term job security, either get into AI / machine learning / anything to do with automation, or else something as immune to automation as possible, because those will be the last jobs to go.
I can imagine two reasons they might have done that.
One, it's more like Tinder which is their main competition these days.
Two, the biggest complaint I've heard about online dating has mostly been that women are absolutely inundated with messages and consequently barely respond to any of them so men never get any responses so they just spam every woman so women get inundated with messages and so on in a vicious cycle. If you can only see messages from people you also "like" (without first knowing that they like you enough to message you), then women won't be so inundated with messages that they stop responding, so men will actually get some responses, and men will have less incentive to spam every woman with "sup", breaking the vicious cycle.
Of course the obvious way to game that is to just "like" everybody, so you can receive messages from anybody. Which again gets back to copying Tinder, where many guys just swipe right(? I've never used it, but up and down would be way more intuitive) over every. single. profile. and hope that any of them at all will swipe right on them too.
It's not your phone, it's Slashdot, which doesn't support Unicode and so turns two-byte characters like that vowel in the scientist's name into different two-byte characters in a different encoding.
How's this for you: tax everyone at the same rate, but also give everyone a fixed tax credit (equal to that rate times the mean income). It's morally fair, but mathematically has the result of a progressive tax rate that goes negative below the mean, providing cash welfare for the poor.
Nobody (in management) cared about Damore's politics, they cared that a big ugly work-disrupting (i.e. money-costing) stink happened centered around him (that he didn't cause, those who distributed his memo outside its intended audience did), and fired him to try to make that stop (not that that worked).
You can be robbed "off grid" by whoever is more powerful than you, just like you can be robbed "on grid" by the more-powerful state. For almost everyone, anywhere they go there will be someone more powerful than them, and people who hold power over others almost always use that to steal from others, unless another power stops them, but then that power will be doing the stealing. It's virtually impossible to get away from theft, or violence in general, but some violent thieving overlords will be gentler than others, and if they're also keeping the more vicious ones away by their presence, they're the best option for most people.
People spend too much and carry too much debt. The entire system is built to encourage this behavior.
Plus, you know, those who own all the land demand most of what most people can make for the right to continue living on it, so if you suddenly aren't making any money, someone else who you've been bribing into allowing you to continue existing on their land will force you off of it, and nobody else is going to take you in unless you can bribe them too...
Don't act like irresponsible spending is at fault here. Mandatory, unavoidable expenses like housing are just barely within most people's reach these days.
It's not "voluntary" when some people make decisions for other people. The People collectively are not a person who can makes unitary decisions about only himself that can rightly be called voluntary.
As for moving somewhere else to not pay taxes, you seem to have missed the whole point of my post, which was that you can't. States tend to spring up wherever there are no states, and those states tend to tax. Even somewhere you might say has "no government" like Somalia, has a lot of small governments: every warlord was established his own little state, because warlords are the primitive form of states, and you bet your ass they tax their subjects, because that's what warlords do. The only choice anyone has is whether to live under that kind of state and accept the taxes they impose in exchange for nothing, or to live under this kind of state and accept the taxes that they at least use to buy gifts for their subjects (and even ask them what they want, how nice!) to appease them. The latter is clearly better than the former, but a choice between a brutal thief and a gentle thief still leaves no option but to get robbed.
Stephen Pinker points out that a good correlate of the violent death rate in a country is the willingness of the populace to trust an authority to resolve their conflicts.
So the more reliance on authority, the more violent deaths? Wouldn't that suggest that it's wise not to rely on authorities and look out for yourself instead?
People don't go live off-grid because they're even more likely to get robbed there and even less likely to get anything in return for what's taken from them.
Giving someone something they didn't ask for after forcibly taking their money doesn't make it not theft. Even if it's something that they would have given money for voluntarily. The lack of choice is what makes it theft. By that standard, taxes are theft, because you don't get to decide that you would rather not have the services, and then get out of paying for them.
But that doesn't mean that we should immediately abolish all taxes and the government that depends on them, because in the absence of a government, another government would immediately spring up out of the power vacuum, and those are the worse kinds of governments: the kind made up of whoever is most powerful, who don't ask the governed for their opinion on anything and doesn't think they need to do anything to appease those governed.
But governments that want to stick around for a long time eventually figure out that giving the governed some say in things, and giving them some things in return, will help that government stay in power longer. It's still ultimately a group of people exercising violence to control other people. It's still not in and of itself good. But if that moderate evil is the only thing keeping a much worse evil from springing up out of the power vacuum, then far better to play along with the moderate evil.
And if that moderate evil can slowly be made less and less evil while still keeping the greater evils at bay, eventually you get a stable anarchy. Anarchy is the limit (in the mathematical sense) of good governance: what better and better governance converges toward. Part of figuring out how to achieve that will involve figuring out how to fund it without demanding the funds from people on threat of violence, i.e. without taxes. But until we can figure that out, paying taxes to support a somewhat decent government is a better compromise than going out where the figurative wolves will figuratively eat you alive.
It sounds like the motive for this "cashless" system is to keep the increasingly-widespread use of electronic payments from being completely controlled by private parties like banks. What doesn't make any sense to me is why the government can't just roll out a public electronic payment system, to compete with the private ones (with the advantage of not having to turn a profit doing so), which it can leave just as they are without shutting them down... and also continue having the public cash system as well. The problem they're concerned about doesn't require the solution they're naming. By all means, make a public electronic payment system to protect the public from private ones. Doesn't mean you have to shut down cash at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
Adam Smith himself insisted that for a market to be free it must be well-regulated. Freedom is not the absence of regulation but the presence of the right kind of regulation.
They are comparing themselves to their competition. "Not just the sum of its parts", and then showing the parts of an iPhone. The message I get from that is "not just an iPhone"; implicitly, "...but something better". How is this a gaffe at all?
To elaborate on the post I made a minute ago:
The important rights in a free market are the claim rights that limit others' liberty to act upon ourselves and our property, and the immunity rights that limit others' power to change who has what rights and liberties. My complaint is specifically that we are not adequately immune from certain powers of contract that enable the creation of new claims obliging the payment of rents (including interest), without which what are currently rendered as such rental contracts would instead have to be refactored as sales contracts.
That is not a truly free market because the important freedom in a free market is a “freedom from”, not a “freedom to”. My complaint is that what we have is too much like that, not too little.
I wish I could upmod you but I've already posted upthread. It's heartening to finally see someone else who gets it.
Just like AirBnB drives up the cost of longer-term rentals, the existence of rent in the first place drives up the cost of homeownership.
Rent (including interest, which is just rent on money) is the core mechanism that perpetuates and amplifies the divide between rich and poor, turning what would otherwise be a truly free market into exploitative capitalism.
For long-term job security, either get into AI / machine learning / anything to do with automation, or else something as immune to automation as possible, because those will be the last jobs to go.
I can imagine two reasons they might have done that.
One, it's more like Tinder which is their main competition these days.
Two, the biggest complaint I've heard about online dating has mostly been that women are absolutely inundated with messages and consequently barely respond to any of them so men never get any responses so they just spam every woman so women get inundated with messages and so on in a vicious cycle. If you can only see messages from people you also "like" (without first knowing that they like you enough to message you), then women won't be so inundated with messages that they stop responding, so men will actually get some responses, and men will have less incentive to spam every woman with "sup", breaking the vicious cycle.
Of course the obvious way to game that is to just "like" everybody, so you can receive messages from anybody. Which again gets back to copying Tinder, where many guys just swipe right(? I've never used it, but up and down would be way more intuitive) over every. single. profile. and hope that any of them at all will swipe right on them too.
It's not your phone, it's Slashdot, which doesn't support Unicode and so turns two-byte characters like that vowel in the scientist's name into different two-byte characters in a different encoding.
Education needs de-funded.
Your education "needs improved" if you write like that.
Download it with what, the refurbished computer they just bought that has no usable OS installed on it yet?
Libertarian socialism is a thing you know. And exactly the thing we need more of.
Read it again, that’s not what I said.
How's this for you: tax everyone at the same rate, but also give everyone a fixed tax credit (equal to that rate times the mean income). It's morally fair, but mathematically has the result of a progressive tax rate that goes negative below the mean, providing cash welfare for the poor.
...and that's FINL!
Nobody (in management) cared about Damore's politics, they cared that a big ugly work-disrupting (i.e. money-costing) stink happened centered around him (that he didn't cause, those who distributed his memo outside its intended audience did), and fired him to try to make that stop (not that that worked).
You can be robbed "off grid" by whoever is more powerful than you, just like you can be robbed "on grid" by the more-powerful state. For almost everyone, anywhere they go there will be someone more powerful than them, and people who hold power over others almost always use that to steal from others, unless another power stops them, but then that power will be doing the stealing. It's virtually impossible to get away from theft, or violence in general, but some violent thieving overlords will be gentler than others, and if they're also keeping the more vicious ones away by their presence, they're the best option for most people.
You really expect this more from Democrats than the party that wants big government in your bedroom (and basically anywhere but the boardroom)?
People spend too much and carry too much debt. The entire system is built to encourage this behavior.
Plus, you know, those who own all the land demand most of what most people can make for the right to continue living on it, so if you suddenly aren't making any money, someone else who you've been bribing into allowing you to continue existing on their land will force you off of it, and nobody else is going to take you in unless you can bribe them too...
Don't act like irresponsible spending is at fault here. Mandatory, unavoidable expenses like housing are just barely within most people's reach these days.
It's not "voluntary" when some people make decisions for other people. The People collectively are not a person who can makes unitary decisions about only himself that can rightly be called voluntary.
As for moving somewhere else to not pay taxes, you seem to have missed the whole point of my post, which was that you can't. States tend to spring up wherever there are no states, and those states tend to tax. Even somewhere you might say has "no government" like Somalia, has a lot of small governments: every warlord was established his own little state, because warlords are the primitive form of states, and you bet your ass they tax their subjects, because that's what warlords do. The only choice anyone has is whether to live under that kind of state and accept the taxes they impose in exchange for nothing, or to live under this kind of state and accept the taxes that they at least use to buy gifts for their subjects (and even ask them what they want, how nice!) to appease them. The latter is clearly better than the former, but a choice between a brutal thief and a gentle thief still leaves no option but to get robbed.
Stephen Pinker points out that a good correlate of the violent death rate in a country is the willingness of the populace to trust an authority to resolve their conflicts.
So the more reliance on authority, the more violent deaths? Wouldn't that suggest that it's wise not to rely on authorities and look out for yourself instead?
People don't go live off-grid because they're even more likely to get robbed there and even less likely to get anything in return for what's taken from them.
Giving someone something they didn't ask for after forcibly taking their money doesn't make it not theft. Even if it's something that they would have given money for voluntarily. The lack of choice is what makes it theft. By that standard, taxes are theft, because you don't get to decide that you would rather not have the services, and then get out of paying for them.
But that doesn't mean that we should immediately abolish all taxes and the government that depends on them, because in the absence of a government, another government would immediately spring up out of the power vacuum, and those are the worse kinds of governments: the kind made up of whoever is most powerful, who don't ask the governed for their opinion on anything and doesn't think they need to do anything to appease those governed.
But governments that want to stick around for a long time eventually figure out that giving the governed some say in things, and giving them some things in return, will help that government stay in power longer. It's still ultimately a group of people exercising violence to control other people. It's still not in and of itself good. But if that moderate evil is the only thing keeping a much worse evil from springing up out of the power vacuum, then far better to play along with the moderate evil.
And if that moderate evil can slowly be made less and less evil while still keeping the greater evils at bay, eventually you get a stable anarchy. Anarchy is the limit (in the mathematical sense) of good governance: what better and better governance converges toward. Part of figuring out how to achieve that will involve figuring out how to fund it without demanding the funds from people on threat of violence, i.e. without taxes. But until we can figure that out, paying taxes to support a somewhat decent government is a better compromise than going out where the figurative wolves will figuratively eat you alive.
It sounds like the motive for this "cashless" system is to keep the increasingly-widespread use of electronic payments from being completely controlled by private parties like banks. What doesn't make any sense to me is why the government can't just roll out a public electronic payment system, to compete with the private ones (with the advantage of not having to turn a profit doing so), which it can leave just as they are without shutting them down... and also continue having the public cash system as well. The problem they're concerned about doesn't require the solution they're naming. By all means, make a public electronic payment system to protect the public from private ones. Doesn't mean you have to shut down cash at the same time.
Better enslaved for 15-30 years and then free, than enslaved for life renting.
I wish I could mod +1 Funny in a thread I've already posted in.