The "so what" is that NAP without defined heirarchy of rights is *no different* from any other system, where the rights under NAP could be prioritized to mimic the other system.
You're making the very sketchy assumption that you can model any political system with just the right collection of rights sorted in the right way. I don't buy it.
Further, NAP doesn't appear in a vacuum. Libertarians do have some ideas about orderings of these rights.
Why would Carmack's wholly owned company get funding due to successes at an unrelated company selling unrelated products he is an employee (and perhaps partner) at?
Because Carmack is both the link between these two companies and a ready conduit for the appropriate transfer of funds. In other words, he makes money at the new business and transfers some of it to Armadillo. You would do something similar, if say you bought a laptop with money you made while working at a completely unrelated business to laptops.
Obamacare doesn't encourage massive cost increases in health care.
Right. It increases the scope and extent of what health insurance covers and forces insurance companies to insure pre-existing conditions. It also attempts to force everyone into buying health insurance.
And with the incentives to lower costs and improve outcomes
Incentives which don't actually exist, let us note.
We haven't yet seen the increases in efficiency that come from the preventative care mandates. Those can easily take 10 years or more to fully materialize, depending upon the condition.
Or never. There are a few examples of useful preventative care such as immunizations and prenatal care. But IMHO its primary outcome is to expend some money to find expensive medical problems. I think that's why insurance companies haven't bothered with it.
Stuart says that Heritage's version of the individual mandate contained "three critical features" that distinguish it from Obamacareâ(TM)s mandate: (1) it required people to buy catastrophic coverage, rather than more expensive comprehensive coverage; (2) it was primarily financed "through the carrot of a generous health credit or voucherâ¦rather than by a stick"; (3) Heritageâ(TM)s mandate "was actually the loss of certain tax breaksâ¦not a legal requirement."
So the most notable difference is that the individual mandate wasn't actually a mandate in the conservative proposals. Among other things, that doesn't create the constitutional conflict of the individual mandate.
The bit about catastrophic versus comprehensive health insurance is also important because paying for the latter just means that you're paying at least one middleman, the insurance company, in order to obtain routine health care.
Second, there's the insurance exchanges.
Feulner went on to argue that "the president knows full well â" or he ought to learn before he speaks â" that the exchanges we and most others support are very different from those in his package. True exchanges are simply a market mechanism to enable families to choose their health insurance. President Obamaâ(TM)s exchanges, by contrast, are a vehicle to introduce sweeping regulation and federal standardization on health insurance."
And of course, there's the other non-conservative features like expansion of basic coverage and elimination of pre-existing coverage which aren't conservative ideas.
And we ignore the glaring fact that Obamacare was passed by a 2000 page bill with a lot more junk in it than some conservative ideas. Is requiring restaurant chains of a certain size to publish nutritional information a conservative idea?
Maybe you thought it fun that many folks could not get coverage at all or not at a price lower than their income?
That's a strong indication that they shouldn't be getting health insurance, but rather health care.
Reducing what is covered by minimal health insurance?
I realize this might be hard for you to grasp. But the more you insure, the more expensive health care becomes. I have found that a lot of the insurance I can get has features that I simply am not interested in or use. So I'm paying for stuff I don't use.
How would you like to hit a ceiling on lifetime costs when you get cancer?
Sucks to be me then. I still see that time as being better than Obamacare.
Another thing, what about the unconstitutional nature of Obamacare? There are at least a couple of ways it breaks the US Constitution. But apparently, it's more important to have slightly better health insurance coverage than a country of laws.
I find it unfathomable how you think taking down democratic societies helps fight tyranny. A lot of the strength of tyranny comes from the creation of artificial scarcity and threats, such as is being done here.
And yet I have to say, so what? Your argument is not the "initial point". In a society of conflicting interests, there will never be enough agreement on rights to completely eliminate these sorts of problems, but we can come to broad agreement on a lot of that and greatly reduce the conflict.
And that leaves us with a core principle of libertarianism which is counter to the assertion that libertarians would be as much regulatory meddlers as anyone else.
If you decide that your clique has a monopoly on the public opinion and should use weapons to enforce your view, then what stops other groups from doing it?
So disrespect for public opinion means I want to use weapons to enforce my view? I didn't know that. I better stock up then.
Here's the thing I don't get. What's supposed to be good about Obamacare?
You are saying that healthcare reform is such a complex hard to tackle that we need to get it right from the start. We won't settle for anything better than the current situation if it's less than perfect.
Keep in mind that the earlier pre-Obamacare state worked better. So we have a known state that we can revert to rather than more unknown states starting from a mess. My take is that if the President and Congress had been serious about health care reform, they could have tackled it in incremental bits. For example, dropping tax incentives for health care benefits doesn't need to be done in conjunction with anything else. Reducing what's covered by minimal health insurance or increasing maximum deductibles (something which they haven't even been inclined to do) doesn't require anything else. Lowering the obstructions to new hospital and medical center construction and encouraging increased competition doesn't require anything else (and again, it's something they haven't been inclined to do).
As I see it, they made a huge gift to the insurance industry in the name of universal health care coverage while ignoring the real problem, the increasing cost of health care coverage. Thus, they made the worst of the health care problems worse.
Please explain what is so different about the USA that Obamacare-like systems work in pretty much the entire civilized world except the USA.
The only thing wrong here is your assumption that there are other Obamacare-like systems elsewhere in the world.
is the USA so incredibly retarded
This. Due to the massive cost increases in health care that Obamacare encourages, I'm not even sure it'll succeed in its alleged primary goal, improving health care coverage.
And the law is so bad that allies of the people who passed the law are trying hard to get out from being covered by the law. There's been a series of waivers of various provisions of Obamacare that went to allies of the President and certain congresspeople. I'm sure we all appreciate the passage of laws which are supposed to be for our own good and for which the allies of the people who advocated the laws are at least partially exempt.
People developing these weapons have hands as bloody as the people who skirted automatic-fire regulations with easily modified guns like the mak 10.
In other words, their hands aren't at all bloody. But then I measure "blood" by actual harm caused to people, not by whether or not I get a blowhard upset on the internet.
Another core of libertarians. "I'm right, even when I'm wrong. I don't discuss, I lecture. You may listen, but questions and contradictions will be ignored."
Or it may be that the original posters' disagreement is genuinely somewhat irrelevant. I note that this is just a disagreement about semantics of the term, "non-aggression". Since a meaning was given and not just the word, we can just use the meaning rather than the word, even if the word usually has some other connotation.
We don't get in a tizzy, if say someone uses the mathematical or physics versions of the word, "field" (for a particularly notorious example), rather than the normal English usage as an area of open land. So why do so when libertarians use "non-aggression" in a particular sense? You aren't required to accept that definition outside of the scope of the discussion.
Going back to Joining Yet Again's assertion that libertarianism is "no different" in outlawing whatever isn't popular enough, there is the principle of so-called "non-aggression". From the previously mentioned Wikipedia link:
The non-aggression principle is a moral stance which asserts that aggression is inherently illegitimate. [...] Aggression, for the purposes of NAP, is defined as the initiation or threatening of violence against a person or legitimately-owned property of another. Specifically, any unsolicited actions of others that physically affect an individualâ(TM)s property or person, no matter if the result of those actions is damaging, beneficial, or neutral to the owner, are considered violent or aggressive when they are against the owner's free will and interfere with his right to self-determination and the principle of self-ownership.
So outlawing an unpopular activity (which isn't itself aggression) is initiating aggression by the above definition and hence, counter to libertarian tenets, contrary to the original assertion.
Another core of libertarians. "I'm right, even when I'm wrong. I don't discuss, I lecture. You may listen, but questions and contradictions will be ignored."
I don't hear a big THANK YOU for providing this completely novel and entertaining rhetorical technique to the world. Now, nobody has to ever be wrong again.
It required conditions that are pretty much unique in the history.
In other words, a valid counterexample to the claims you've been making. Any other such example will also have conditions that are pretty much "unique in the history" by whatever criteria you happen to be using.
I'd really like if every decision had consequences.
My take is that if we had some sort of enforced karma, you'd be getting a lot of consequences. Wishing death or grievous injury on someone merely because they build something. What's a fitting "consequence" for that sort of pathology?
Tritium is bad in that it is readily accepted into any cellular process involving water. It is good in that there's no natural concentrating mechanism. A fish's liver or the human body isn't going to concentrate tritium, like it would mercury. I'd be a bit more worried about the radioactive iodine and strontium isotopes.
Given how diluted the tritium leak is (being dumped into the ocean), I'm not concerned.
And there are far bigger challenges. A newspaper requires deep, detailed understanding of the world around us. Jeff Bezos does not have sufficient social sophistication.
So why is so-called "social sophistication" an asset rather than a liability?
He has never managed anything as complicated as a communication company producing stories throughout the world.
Amazon is the obvious counterexample.
Jeff Bezos had an idea of selling books on the internet. He hired some people to write the software. He was excellent at believing fully in the idea and doing whatever it took to make it a success. He got enormous benefits from being first. But, that is basically all.
And the Washington Post is just a business that writes entertaining stories. "That's all." You can belittle any business. But they are more complex than they appear to a superficial, outside observer.
I don't know the regulations, but I think there's a few hurdles there to deploying the National Guard in other states than their home state. There's also the problem that they usually are considerably worse quality than regular military. Plus, you still have that relatives and friends of the National Guard troops would be in whatever region they're set to.
Looking at things, I'd have to say that dividing the military along ethnic grounds might be more effective.
For a guess, I'd look to the Gaddafi model of holding power in Libya.There, Gaddafi had a core group of well equipped foreign mercenaries with the various ethnic groups played against each other. Such methods also worked for Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Josip Tito in Yugoslavia. The US is similarly ethnically diverse (with Caucasians set to be another minority ethnic group in a decade or two). I'd say that's more likely than using regional differences.
You bring troops from region A to fight in region B, those from B to C, and those from C to A.
That would mean a radical restructuring of both the military and society in the US. Currently, due to high mobility, a person can have relatives all over the country. You would have to change that first so that regional people stay regional. Second, US soldiers are similarly mixed. They're generally US citizens and there's no troops from a single region any more. As it stands, any body of troops would have people from the local region and relatives of soldiers in the local region.
Having said that, the building of substantial military forces that are segregated on such grounds would be a good sign that tyranny was on its way.
But it seems you still may not grasp that the places where biodiversity needs to survive and flourish are those where our food is grown and our fish are caught
I don't "grasp" it because such a claim doesn't make sense. A monoculture farm field is where we need "biodiversity"? The whole point of wild areas is to hold that biodiversity that won't ever be found on the farm. As I see it, 10-15% sounds adequate to me though it probably needs to be connected better.
A whole 1/3rd of the extra CO2 in the air is released by tilling
And stored by the resulting crops that grows afterward (including when the land is left fallow, a standard practice). There is a lot of seasonal variation in CO2 which doesn't contribute to cumulative CO2 growth. This is some of it.
Think of it a different way, if tilling released so much carbon from the soil permanently each time it was done, then you'd only be able to farm land for a few years before it became too infertile to do so, even with fertilizer (which doesn't contribute carbon to the soil).
Instead, the more serious problem for farmland fertility is nitrogen depletion. Which is why so much effort is expended on various ways to put nitrogen into the soil.
So while I applaud that you work in Yellowstone and understand forest successions from the invasive plants through which nature starts to repair our destruction all the way to mature forests, unless you propose that all farmland be turned into ecological reservations and simultaneously farmed sustainably then you're missing the big picture. In the big picture outside of our protected habitats, it's all a completely hopeless descent towards biosphere collapse, and the areas that are protected from it won't help because those are not where the food is grown.
And what is the mechanism by which this collapse is going to happen? I just see some vague talk of releasing CO2 from the soil and a little fertilizer getting into the oceans. At some point, you'll need to demonstrate that there's substantial stress on biospheres that aren't subject directly to heavy pollution. I don't think it is there.
Slashdot Mirror
The "so what" is that NAP without defined heirarchy of rights is *no different* from any other system, where the rights under NAP could be prioritized to mimic the other system.
You're making the very sketchy assumption that you can model any political system with just the right collection of rights sorted in the right way. I don't buy it.
Further, NAP doesn't appear in a vacuum. Libertarians do have some ideas about orderings of these rights.
No, you're the one saying that. I'm not the confused one here.
Why would Carmack's wholly owned company get funding due to successes at an unrelated company selling unrelated products he is an employee (and perhaps partner) at?
Because Carmack is both the link between these two companies and a ready conduit for the appropriate transfer of funds. In other words, he makes money at the new business and transfers some of it to Armadillo. You would do something similar, if say you bought a laptop with money you made while working at a completely unrelated business to laptops.
Obamacare doesn't encourage massive cost increases in health care.
Right. It increases the scope and extent of what health insurance covers and forces insurance companies to insure pre-existing conditions. It also attempts to force everyone into buying health insurance.
And with the incentives to lower costs and improve outcomes
Incentives which don't actually exist, let us note.
We haven't yet seen the increases in efficiency that come from the preventative care mandates. Those can easily take 10 years or more to fully materialize, depending upon the condition.
Or never. There are a few examples of useful preventative care such as immunizations and prenatal care. But IMHO its primary outcome is to expend some money to find expensive medical problems. I think that's why insurance companies haven't bothered with it.
It was a conservative proposal from the start.
Let's start by looking at the differences:
Stuart says that Heritage's version of the individual mandate contained "three critical features" that distinguish it from Obamacareâ(TM)s mandate: (1) it required people to buy catastrophic coverage, rather than more expensive comprehensive coverage; (2) it was primarily financed "through the carrot of a generous health credit or voucherâ¦rather than by a stick"; (3) Heritageâ(TM)s mandate "was actually the loss of certain tax breaksâ¦not a legal requirement."
So the most notable difference is that the individual mandate wasn't actually a mandate in the conservative proposals. Among other things, that doesn't create the constitutional conflict of the individual mandate.
The bit about catastrophic versus comprehensive health insurance is also important because paying for the latter just means that you're paying at least one middleman, the insurance company, in order to obtain routine health care.
Second, there's the insurance exchanges.
Feulner went on to argue that "the president knows full well â" or he ought to learn before he speaks â" that the exchanges we and most others support are very different from those in his package. True exchanges are simply a market mechanism to enable families to choose their health insurance. President Obamaâ(TM)s exchanges, by contrast, are a vehicle to introduce sweeping regulation and federal standardization on health insurance."
And of course, there's the other non-conservative features like expansion of basic coverage and elimination of pre-existing coverage which aren't conservative ideas.
And we ignore the glaring fact that Obamacare was passed by a 2000 page bill with a lot more junk in it than some conservative ideas. Is requiring restaurant chains of a certain size to publish nutritional information a conservative idea?
You liked them retroactively canceling coverage?
Something which was illegal at the time.
Maybe you thought it fun that many folks could not get coverage at all or not at a price lower than their income?
That's a strong indication that they shouldn't be getting health insurance, but rather health care.
Reducing what is covered by minimal health insurance?
I realize this might be hard for you to grasp. But the more you insure, the more expensive health care becomes. I have found that a lot of the insurance I can get has features that I simply am not interested in or use. So I'm paying for stuff I don't use.
How would you like to hit a ceiling on lifetime costs when you get cancer?
Sucks to be me then. I still see that time as being better than Obamacare.
Another thing, what about the unconstitutional nature of Obamacare? There are at least a couple of ways it breaks the US Constitution. But apparently, it's more important to have slightly better health insurance coverage than a country of laws.
I find it unfathomable how you think taking down democratic societies helps fight tyranny. A lot of the strength of tyranny comes from the creation of artificial scarcity and threats, such as is being done here.
And yet I have to say, so what? Your argument is not the "initial point". In a society of conflicting interests, there will never be enough agreement on rights to completely eliminate these sorts of problems, but we can come to broad agreement on a lot of that and greatly reduce the conflict.
And that leaves us with a core principle of libertarianism which is counter to the assertion that libertarians would be as much regulatory meddlers as anyone else.
If you decide that your clique has a monopoly on the public opinion and should use weapons to enforce your view, then what stops other groups from doing it?
So disrespect for public opinion means I want to use weapons to enforce my view? I didn't know that. I better stock up then.
keep the good and correct the bad ?
Here's the thing I don't get. What's supposed to be good about Obamacare?
You are saying that healthcare reform is such a complex hard to tackle that we need to get it right from the start. We won't settle for anything better than the current situation if it's less than perfect.
Keep in mind that the earlier pre-Obamacare state worked better. So we have a known state that we can revert to rather than more unknown states starting from a mess. My take is that if the President and Congress had been serious about health care reform, they could have tackled it in incremental bits. For example, dropping tax incentives for health care benefits doesn't need to be done in conjunction with anything else. Reducing what's covered by minimal health insurance or increasing maximum deductibles (something which they haven't even been inclined to do) doesn't require anything else. Lowering the obstructions to new hospital and medical center construction and encouraging increased competition doesn't require anything else (and again, it's something they haven't been inclined to do).
As I see it, they made a huge gift to the insurance industry in the name of universal health care coverage while ignoring the real problem, the increasing cost of health care coverage. Thus, they made the worst of the health care problems worse.
So what? How's that worse than the ongoing crippling of the US health care system and economy?
Please explain what is so different about the USA that Obamacare-like systems work in pretty much the entire civilized world except the USA.
The only thing wrong here is your assumption that there are other Obamacare-like systems elsewhere in the world.
is the USA so incredibly retarded
This. Due to the massive cost increases in health care that Obamacare encourages, I'm not even sure it'll succeed in its alleged primary goal, improving health care coverage.
And the law is so bad that allies of the people who passed the law are trying hard to get out from being covered by the law. There's been a series of waivers of various provisions of Obamacare that went to allies of the President and certain congresspeople. I'm sure we all appreciate the passage of laws which are supposed to be for our own good and for which the allies of the people who advocated the laws are at least partially exempt.
People developing these weapons have hands as bloody as the people who skirted automatic-fire regulations with easily modified guns like the mak 10.
In other words, their hands aren't at all bloody. But then I measure "blood" by actual harm caused to people, not by whether or not I get a blowhard upset on the internet.
Another core of libertarians. "I'm right, even when I'm wrong. I don't discuss, I lecture. You may listen, but questions and contradictions will be ignored."
Or it may be that the original posters' disagreement is genuinely somewhat irrelevant. I note that this is just a disagreement about semantics of the term, "non-aggression". Since a meaning was given and not just the word, we can just use the meaning rather than the word, even if the word usually has some other connotation.
We don't get in a tizzy, if say someone uses the mathematical or physics versions of the word, "field" (for a particularly notorious example), rather than the normal English usage as an area of open land. So why do so when libertarians use "non-aggression" in a particular sense? You aren't required to accept that definition outside of the scope of the discussion.
Going back to Joining Yet Again's assertion that libertarianism is "no different" in outlawing whatever isn't popular enough, there is the principle of so-called "non-aggression". From the previously mentioned Wikipedia link:
The non-aggression principle is a moral stance which asserts that aggression is inherently illegitimate. [...] Aggression, for the purposes of NAP, is defined as the initiation or threatening of violence against a person or legitimately-owned property of another. Specifically, any unsolicited actions of others that physically affect an individualâ(TM)s property or person, no matter if the result of those actions is damaging, beneficial, or neutral to the owner, are considered violent or aggressive when they are against the owner's free will and interfere with his right to self-determination and the principle of self-ownership.
So outlawing an unpopular activity (which isn't itself aggression) is initiating aggression by the above definition and hence, counter to libertarian tenets, contrary to the original assertion.
We killed 3 million Vietnamese
Who is "we" here? The killers include Communists who, let us say, weren't so concerned about South Vietnam falling to Communism.
This shows a disdain for the will of people.
Is there a problem with that?
Another core of libertarians. "I'm right, even when I'm wrong. I don't discuss, I lecture. You may listen, but questions and contradictions will be ignored."
I don't hear a big THANK YOU for providing this completely novel and entertaining rhetorical technique to the world. Now, nobody has to ever be wrong again.
It required conditions that are pretty much unique in the history.
In other words, a valid counterexample to the claims you've been making. Any other such example will also have conditions that are pretty much "unique in the history" by whatever criteria you happen to be using.
. There is no safe level of lead exposure
Depends what you consider "safe" and your life expectancy.
and most of it will get sacked away in your bones to be slowly released over years.
So if you accumulate lead at a slower rate than you release it from your bones, then that sounds an awful lot like a safe zone for lead exposure.
I'd just discovered a way to make a plague lethal in 80% cases
Ah, yes, another Slashdotter who flips out when anyone disagrees with him. Well, carry on.
I'd really like if every decision had consequences.
My take is that if we had some sort of enforced karma, you'd be getting a lot of consequences. Wishing death or grievous injury on someone merely because they build something. What's a fitting "consequence" for that sort of pathology?
Tritium is bad in that it is readily accepted into any cellular process involving water. It is good in that there's no natural concentrating mechanism. A fish's liver or the human body isn't going to concentrate tritium, like it would mercury. I'd be a bit more worried about the radioactive iodine and strontium isotopes.
Given how diluted the tritium leak is (being dumped into the ocean), I'm not concerned.
And there are far bigger challenges. A newspaper requires deep, detailed understanding of the world around us. Jeff Bezos does not have sufficient social sophistication.
So why is so-called "social sophistication" an asset rather than a liability?
He has never managed anything as complicated as a communication company producing stories throughout the world.
Amazon is the obvious counterexample.
Jeff Bezos had an idea of selling books on the internet. He hired some people to write the software. He was excellent at believing fully in the idea and doing whatever it took to make it a success. He got enormous benefits from being first. But, that is basically all.
And the Washington Post is just a business that writes entertaining stories. "That's all." You can belittle any business. But they are more complex than they appear to a superficial, outside observer.
I don't know the regulations, but I think there's a few hurdles there to deploying the National Guard in other states than their home state. There's also the problem that they usually are considerably worse quality than regular military. Plus, you still have that relatives and friends of the National Guard troops would be in whatever region they're set to.
Looking at things, I'd have to say that dividing the military along ethnic grounds might be more effective.
For a guess, I'd look to the Gaddafi model of holding power in Libya.There, Gaddafi had a core group of well equipped foreign mercenaries with the various ethnic groups played against each other. Such methods also worked for Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Josip Tito in Yugoslavia. The US is similarly ethnically diverse (with Caucasians set to be another minority ethnic group in a decade or two). I'd say that's more likely than using regional differences.
You bring troops from region A to fight in region B, those from B to C, and those from C to A.
That would mean a radical restructuring of both the military and society in the US. Currently, due to high mobility, a person can have relatives all over the country. You would have to change that first so that regional people stay regional. Second, US soldiers are similarly mixed. They're generally US citizens and there's no troops from a single region any more. As it stands, any body of troops would have people from the local region and relatives of soldiers in the local region.
Having said that, the building of substantial military forces that are segregated on such grounds would be a good sign that tyranny was on its way.
But it seems you still may not grasp that the places where biodiversity needs to survive and flourish are those where our food is grown and our fish are caught
I don't "grasp" it because such a claim doesn't make sense. A monoculture farm field is where we need "biodiversity"? The whole point of wild areas is to hold that biodiversity that won't ever be found on the farm. As I see it, 10-15% sounds adequate to me though it probably needs to be connected better.
A whole 1/3rd of the extra CO2 in the air is released by tilling
And stored by the resulting crops that grows afterward (including when the land is left fallow, a standard practice). There is a lot of seasonal variation in CO2 which doesn't contribute to cumulative CO2 growth. This is some of it.
Think of it a different way, if tilling released so much carbon from the soil permanently each time it was done, then you'd only be able to farm land for a few years before it became too infertile to do so, even with fertilizer (which doesn't contribute carbon to the soil).
Instead, the more serious problem for farmland fertility is nitrogen depletion. Which is why so much effort is expended on various ways to put nitrogen into the soil.
So while I applaud that you work in Yellowstone and understand forest successions from the invasive plants through which nature starts to repair our destruction all the way to mature forests, unless you propose that all farmland be turned into ecological reservations and simultaneously farmed sustainably then you're missing the big picture. In the big picture outside of our protected habitats, it's all a completely hopeless descent towards biosphere collapse, and the areas that are protected from it won't help because those are not where the food is grown.
And what is the mechanism by which this collapse is going to happen? I just see some vague talk of releasing CO2 from the soil and a little fertilizer getting into the oceans. At some point, you'll need to demonstrate that there's substantial stress on biospheres that aren't subject directly to heavy pollution. I don't think it is there.