it is not so easy to acquire a real firearm in many countries
Australia is the country we are speaking of. It is likely that their crazies won't try to get firearms from a country where it is even more difficult to acquire a firearm.
The point is at some stage you are using bitcoins to purchase real things
And how do you lose anonymity with that? Even if you can be identified by that transaction, so what? You can't be associated with previous transactions. Buying a car with bitcoins doesn't prove that you were the same guy who sold marijuana for bitcoins a few transactions back.
I don't know why you got modded insightful. It's not that hard to look at the behavior of actual markets and get that they aren't unicorns and pixie dust. What makes domain names not a free market is WIPO.
Basically, there's a bunch of cybersquatters snarfing any domain names that they can get for cheap and then selling them for many orders of magnitude more than they got them for. Maybe it'd still go on. Scalping goes on in sporting events for much the same reasons. But at least scalpers don't enjoy a government-granted monopoly for pennies on the dollar.
If they were smart, they'd make a lot of noise about these things, but not actually make them illegal. As a police officer, what would you rather be facing? A handgun that is competently made or a fad which barely fires? Or for that matter, a semiautomatic rifle that has been modified to shoot automatic?
You'd want the "Liberator" in the hands of any crazies you happened to face. It's still dangerous, but the odds are better.
I believe rules are rules and you break them, you should be punished, not rewarded.
You need to keep in mind that the rules and the punishments for breaking those rules were designed most likely with the goal of the school district and its administrators evading as much responsibility as possible. A rule which has a punishment appropriate to the infraction requires considerable judgment from the enforcer of the rules. Zero tolerance policies, such as the one that this student ran afoul of, don't.
What's not obvious about transportation helping you survive in the modern world? Generally people need to provide work or similar activities of value in order to be able to obtain the things they need to survive like food, shelter, etc. And the work almost never is where you can live.
And I find it rather frivolous for you to ignore that things can have value beyond their use for mere survival.
That just means people would help each other pursue each others' respective interests out of charity instead of trading through capitalism.
Not if those respective interests conflict. Capitalism is a fair and effective way to resolve such conflicts of interest with respect to things of value. Should a bit of land be better used for a library or an orphanage? Rather than some wasteful if friendly societal debate which might take years or even decades to resolve, people simply buy land for the respective uses.
In the theoretical world where nobody is greedy
In your "theory". In my theory, that isn't sufficient. In practice, there are conflicts even in the frequent cases where greed isn't a contributing factor.
Same difference. So you want to own what beyond "personal" property for yourself. That is greed. You desire to "own" more than just your "personal" property.
Nope. The desire has to be "inordinate". That was in the definition of "greed" which you quoted and promptly ignored. Merely owning something in turn doesn't even indicate desire is present. If I want to build an orphanage, I need land on which to build it. An orphanage is far in excess of my needs for survival, but you are effectively claiming that I have greed for orphanages as a result.
This was the source of my complaint about your semantic abuse of terms (greed, capitalism, and private property).
You confuse your quote with something that is undeniable fact.
Actually, you ignore there that capitalism does have a morality. For example, I can't merely make someone else's property my own. Theft is against the moral code of capitalism. If it weren't, then there wouldn't be a concrete sense of ownership.
So saying that capitalism is amoral is not "undeniable fact" but merely wrong. But my observation remains correct. It's well known that people normally treat their property better than they treat property not owned by them, especially property that isn't owned by anyone at all (eg, public property and goods). But you can get people to treat other peoples' property better, if you give them incentives, say a paying job. ,
So a janitor might treat a business's bathrooms better than their own, but primarily because the incentives are there for them to do so. Sure, it probably is "greed" in your ridiculously stretched definition of the word, but the janitor probably needs more the wages of that job than a cleaner bathroom at home.
Of course my past education have financial value, that's precisely why I said I used to be a net financial beneficiary
Even net financial beneficiaries aren't, if you choose the right time frame in which to take the measurement (for example, in the periods between when they receive the benefits). You said you benefited greatly even if you don't at the present time. And of course, we need to consider that you'll probably transition in the future to net benefit (or is that net drain) when your medical bills and retirement comes around. It's foolish to take you at your word here when you play such games.
My final comment was simply a question as to whether you're really happy having a "I got mine, fuck you" attitude when it's in large part what makes everyone else hate Americans like you.
I think this is what we call "psychological projection". You're spending other peoples' money for your interests, here disguised as being the UK's interests. And if other taxpayers complain, your "fuck you" is a whine about their greed.
As to being "hated", fools hate. How hard should I try to placate fools? I think not at all.
It's worth noting here that neither point need actually move (or they could be moving towards each other a significant portion of the speed of light). It's the space in between which is growing longer.
You're simply see the macro effects of partial photons interacting, and unwilling to give up the idea of the discrete photon.
Where? Doesn't the observation have to support your claim first?
And it's worth noting the current quantum models already have a couple of senses in which photons can be partial. First, you can take energy away from a photon. Second, you can entangle a photon state with a non-photon state (such as the two slit experiment where a photon can entangle with itself while passing through two narrow slits, but not if you try to observe which slot it passed through).
My original comment that I'm not a net beneficiary was that I'm not directly financially a net beneficiary
I see that you get what you pay for. So your past benefits such as education have no financial value? Then how did you get that nice job? And you've already demonstrated that you're willing to spend money for the society thing which means you've given that some sort of financial value as well.
What's it like being barely more liked than China?
Why should I care? Ultimately, my desires are highly disengaged from public opinion in the rest of the world. Sure, the US government might find that being disliked is somewhat inconvenient, but I don't have much of an interest in furthering their wishes.
Or at least, look to the uneducated observer like they might. And I see the order of magnitude drop in scientific productivity when you go from the private world to the public, unaccountable one.
There's also the PETA version where one generates a bogus controversy in order to lure in donations to a non profit which repeats the cycle as often as it can.
You seem to assume that because I'm not a net beneficiary right now that it's not for the benefit of the country and the citizens
That's a fair cop. I do believe that having a class of people getting screwed by the system is usually a good indication that some is very wrong with the system. Especially, when the class of people in question is rather productive.
The rest of your post is boasting about how much you got from government which is in contradiction to your assertion that you got less from government than you put in.
the benefit I get is living in a non-retarded society
But you said you live in the UK. One merely needs to look at their public surveillance system or their laws on slander and libel to see that they're kind of retarded.
Do we really need iPads and computers and cars for "basic survival and comfort"?
The answer is obviously "yes" since these goods provide comfort and to a degree basic survival. They also provide considerable value outside of those stilted considerations.
If nobody is greedy, humanity would be ready to discard capitalism in favor of that communist utopia where everything is just sunshine and rainbows and people are magically motivated to work.
No, we'd still have differing interests. Lack of greed wouldn't make those go away.
"Possess wealth, goods, or objects of abstract value with the intention to keep it for one's self". That's private property.
No, private property is ownership of private goods or assets beyond what is considered to be "personal" property. These goods could have abstract value or as in the case of cars, they can have a quite concrete value.
It's primary virtue is that it reduces the moral hazard that comes from people using something they don't own.
No, its primary virtue is that is has NO virtues Capitalism is amoral (not immoral, look it up if you don't know the difference). It is neutral. Capitalism lets anybody work for anything, including governments that use violence.
My quote already demonstrated you wrong. You even quoted it.
What you have here is just a straw man argument. Greed, capitalism, and private property just aren't what you claim they are.
The irony of your comment is that you seem oblivious to the fact that said tax arrangements are the way they are in large part because nations like the US were instrumental in getting them developed that way both for the benefit of the US and for the benefit of it's citizens like you.
You seem to treat that statement like it were fact.
Oh I see, so you are assuming I'm a net beneficiary of the current [UK] tax system.
So you're saying that the US taxes for the benefit of itself and its citizens while the UK, the country you live in, doesn't?
Nobody should be thankful beyond maybe simple politeness.
The original poster, Joce640k thought Apple should be paying back forever. I thought Joce640k should show some gratitude. You think we should expect nothing beyond what a low level of politeness would require. Nothing of us will be satisfied.
This is the treachery of moral argument. Everyone's morals are different, often on very important issues, and hence, we will not agree. At that point, which morality should triumph? Your approach has the considerable pragmatic advantage of requiring the least of others. But that may not fit with the rest of our moral viewpoints.
This sort of empty tail chasing should remind us of my original argument which is that no one has (and I might add here can't) show that what Apple has done is inherently morally unacceptable. Because it all depends on whether your morals happen to deem that unacceptable. Not all do.
It's just greed, and greed is what makes capitalism work.
No, capitalism would still work even if no one was greedy. It's primary virtue is that it reduces the moral hazard that comes from people using something they don't own.
And the basis for your opinion is? For example, where's the evidence that the IRS peered carefully at organizations with the word "occupy" in their names? Googling around, I see a number of current complaints about the Occupy movement being tracked by Department of Homeland Security, but I see nothing about IRS harassment of Occupy non-profits.
Those with more money have both more ability to pay, and are getting more of out of the society that taxes make possible (think police force as a simple example).
And with a flat tax they pay more. Well, even with the current screwed up tax code, they generally pay more anyway.
Until you need to define what income is so you can take a percentage of that.
Given that the US already has almost a century of experience in taxing income and capital gains, I don't see the point of your observation. It already works.
Soon everyone says their revenue is different and thus not income, etc. And the essential complexity of what will or won't be considered income leads to unfairness.
Whatever. They can do that now.
Just as people think, oh, let's just legalize drugs so there's no enforcement costs or extra crime on top of the underlying drug crime.... and we can even make money on tax revenue. So simple. So easy.
And accurate. Don't forget that. We also already know this works due to the experiences of Prohibition in the US (and its ending) as well as the current results of recreational drug legalization in Europe. But sure, keep calling something that has been demonstrated to work a "fantasy".
Why sell in a legal shop under expensive legal conditions and pay legal taxes when you can conduct illegal business as usual?
Slashdot Mirror
it is not so easy to acquire a real firearm in many countries
Australia is the country we are speaking of. It is likely that their crazies won't try to get firearms from a country where it is even more difficult to acquire a firearm.
The point is at some stage you are using bitcoins to purchase real things
And how do you lose anonymity with that? Even if you can be identified by that transaction, so what? You can't be associated with previous transactions. Buying a car with bitcoins doesn't prove that you were the same guy who sold marijuana for bitcoins a few transactions back.
I don't know why you got modded insightful. It's not that hard to look at the behavior of actual markets and get that they aren't unicorns and pixie dust. What makes domain names not a free market is WIPO.
Basically, there's a bunch of cybersquatters snarfing any domain names that they can get for cheap and then selling them for many orders of magnitude more than they got them for. Maybe it'd still go on. Scalping goes on in sporting events for much the same reasons. But at least scalpers don't enjoy a government-granted monopoly for pennies on the dollar.
If they were smart, they'd make a lot of noise about these things, but not actually make them illegal. As a police officer, what would you rather be facing? A handgun that is competently made or a fad which barely fires? Or for that matter, a semiautomatic rifle that has been modified to shoot automatic?
You'd want the "Liberator" in the hands of any crazies you happened to face. It's still dangerous, but the odds are better.
That's interesting and answers my question. I was about whine "why aren't they selling that store?" You have done a great mercy for mankind.
I believe rules are rules and you break them, you should be punished, not rewarded.
You need to keep in mind that the rules and the punishments for breaking those rules were designed most likely with the goal of the school district and its administrators evading as much responsibility as possible. A rule which has a punishment appropriate to the infraction requires considerable judgment from the enforcer of the rules. Zero tolerance policies, such as the one that this student ran afoul of, don't.
Saying something is "obvious" doesn't make it so.
What's not obvious about transportation helping you survive in the modern world? Generally people need to provide work or similar activities of value in order to be able to obtain the things they need to survive like food, shelter, etc. And the work almost never is where you can live.
And I find it rather frivolous for you to ignore that things can have value beyond their use for mere survival.
That just means people would help each other pursue each others' respective interests out of charity instead of trading through capitalism.
Not if those respective interests conflict. Capitalism is a fair and effective way to resolve such conflicts of interest with respect to things of value. Should a bit of land be better used for a library or an orphanage? Rather than some wasteful if friendly societal debate which might take years or even decades to resolve, people simply buy land for the respective uses.
In the theoretical world where nobody is greedy
In your "theory". In my theory, that isn't sufficient. In practice, there are conflicts even in the frequent cases where greed isn't a contributing factor.
Same difference. So you want to own what beyond "personal" property for yourself. That is greed. You desire to "own" more than just your "personal" property.
Nope. The desire has to be "inordinate". That was in the definition of "greed" which you quoted and promptly ignored. Merely owning something in turn doesn't even indicate desire is present. If I want to build an orphanage, I need land on which to build it. An orphanage is far in excess of my needs for survival, but you are effectively claiming that I have greed for orphanages as a result.
This was the source of my complaint about your semantic abuse of terms (greed, capitalism, and private property).
You confuse your quote with something that is undeniable fact.
Actually, you ignore there that capitalism does have a morality. For example, I can't merely make someone else's property my own. Theft is against the moral code of capitalism. If it weren't, then there wouldn't be a concrete sense of ownership.
So saying that capitalism is amoral is not "undeniable fact" but merely wrong. But my observation remains correct. It's well known that people normally treat their property better than they treat property not owned by them, especially property that isn't owned by anyone at all (eg, public property and goods). But you can get people to treat other peoples' property better, if you give them incentives, say a paying job.
,
So a janitor might treat a business's bathrooms better than their own, but primarily because the incentives are there for them to do so. Sure, it probably is "greed" in your ridiculously stretched definition of the word, but the janitor probably needs more the wages of that job than a cleaner bathroom at home.
Of course my past education have financial value, that's precisely why I said I used to be a net financial beneficiary
Even net financial beneficiaries aren't, if you choose the right time frame in which to take the measurement (for example, in the periods between when they receive the benefits). You said you benefited greatly even if you don't at the present time. And of course, we need to consider that you'll probably transition in the future to net benefit (or is that net drain) when your medical bills and retirement comes around. It's foolish to take you at your word here when you play such games.
My final comment was simply a question as to whether you're really happy having a "I got mine, fuck you" attitude when it's in large part what makes everyone else hate Americans like you.
I think this is what we call "psychological projection". You're spending other peoples' money for your interests, here disguised as being the UK's interests. And if other taxpayers complain, your "fuck you" is a whine about their greed.
As to being "hated", fools hate. How hard should I try to placate fools? I think not at all.
It's worth noting here that neither point need actually move (or they could be moving towards each other a significant portion of the speed of light). It's the space in between which is growing longer.
You're simply see the macro effects of partial photons interacting, and unwilling to give up the idea of the discrete photon.
Where? Doesn't the observation have to support your claim first?
And it's worth noting the current quantum models already have a couple of senses in which photons can be partial. First, you can take energy away from a photon. Second, you can entangle a photon state with a non-photon state (such as the two slit experiment where a photon can entangle with itself while passing through two narrow slits, but not if you try to observe which slot it passed through).
My original comment that I'm not a net beneficiary was that I'm not directly financially a net beneficiary
I see that you get what you pay for. So your past benefits such as education have no financial value? Then how did you get that nice job? And you've already demonstrated that you're willing to spend money for the society thing which means you've given that some sort of financial value as well.
What's it like being barely more liked than China?
Why should I care? Ultimately, my desires are highly disengaged from public opinion in the rest of the world. Sure, the US government might find that being disliked is somewhat inconvenient, but I don't have much of an interest in furthering their wishes.
He turned out to by a crypto conservative plant
What did you expect a leftist politician to look like?
The other 10% form the foundation of our economy.
Or at least, look to the uneducated observer like they might. And I see the order of magnitude drop in scientific productivity when you go from the private world to the public, unaccountable one.
There's also the PETA version where one generates a bogus controversy in order to lure in donations to a non profit which repeats the cycle as often as it can.
You seem to assume that because I'm not a net beneficiary right now that it's not for the benefit of the country and the citizens
That's a fair cop. I do believe that having a class of people getting screwed by the system is usually a good indication that some is very wrong with the system. Especially, when the class of people in question is rather productive.
The rest of your post is boasting about how much you got from government which is in contradiction to your assertion that you got less from government than you put in.
the benefit I get is living in a non-retarded society
But you said you live in the UK. One merely needs to look at their public surveillance system or their laws on slander and libel to see that they're kind of retarded.
Then why did you post if you are satisfied? What did you get by doing that that you haven't already gotten?
Do we really need iPads and computers and cars for "basic survival and comfort"?
The answer is obviously "yes" since these goods provide comfort and to a degree basic survival. They also provide considerable value outside of those stilted considerations.
If nobody is greedy, humanity would be ready to discard capitalism in favor of that communist utopia where everything is just sunshine and rainbows and people are magically motivated to work.
No, we'd still have differing interests. Lack of greed wouldn't make those go away.
"Possess wealth, goods, or objects of abstract value with the intention to keep it for one's self". That's private property.
No, private property is ownership of private goods or assets beyond what is considered to be "personal" property. These goods could have abstract value or as in the case of cars, they can have a quite concrete value.
It's primary virtue is that it reduces the moral hazard that comes from people using something they don't own.
No, its primary virtue is that is has NO virtues Capitalism is amoral (not immoral, look it up if you don't know the difference). It is neutral. Capitalism lets anybody work for anything, including governments that use violence.
My quote already demonstrated you wrong. You even quoted it.
What you have here is just a straw man argument. Greed, capitalism, and private property just aren't what you claim they are.
The irony of your comment is that you seem oblivious to the fact that said tax arrangements are the way they are in large part because nations like the US were instrumental in getting them developed that way both for the benefit of the US and for the benefit of it's citizens like you.
You seem to treat that statement like it were fact.
Oh I see, so you are assuming I'm a net beneficiary of the current [UK] tax system.
So you're saying that the US taxes for the benefit of itself and its citizens while the UK, the country you live in, doesn't?
Nobody should be thankful beyond maybe simple politeness.
The original poster, Joce640k thought Apple should be paying back forever. I thought Joce640k should show some gratitude. You think we should expect nothing beyond what a low level of politeness would require. Nothing of us will be satisfied.
This is the treachery of moral argument. Everyone's morals are different, often on very important issues, and hence, we will not agree. At that point, which morality should triumph? Your approach has the considerable pragmatic advantage of requiring the least of others. But that may not fit with the rest of our moral viewpoints.
This sort of empty tail chasing should remind us of my original argument which is that no one has (and I might add here can't) show that what Apple has done is inherently morally unacceptable. Because it all depends on whether your morals happen to deem that unacceptable. Not all do.
It's just greed, and greed is what makes capitalism work.
No, capitalism would still work even if no one was greedy. It's primary virtue is that it reduces the moral hazard that comes from people using something they don't own.
And the basis for your opinion is? For example, where's the evidence that the IRS peered carefully at organizations with the word "occupy" in their names? Googling around, I see a number of current complaints about the Occupy movement being tracked by Department of Homeland Security, but I see nothing about IRS harassment of Occupy non-profits.
Funny how "natural persons" (i.e. non-corporations) are not allowed that "loophole".
Sure, they are. They can own corporations like any corporation.
If someone is hiding income from taxes
Flat tax greatly reduces the ways in which you can hide income. Apple's trick would still seem to work.
Those with more money have both more ability to pay, and are getting more of out of the society that taxes make possible (think police force as a simple example).
And with a flat tax they pay more. Well, even with the current screwed up tax code, they generally pay more anyway.
Until you need to define what income is so you can take a percentage of that.
Given that the US already has almost a century of experience in taxing income and capital gains, I don't see the point of your observation. It already works.
Soon everyone says their revenue is different and thus not income, etc. And the essential complexity of what will or won't be considered income leads to unfairness.
Whatever. They can do that now.
Just as people think, oh, let's just legalize drugs so there's no enforcement costs or extra crime on top of the underlying drug crime.... and we can even make money on tax revenue. So simple. So easy.
And accurate. Don't forget that. We also already know this works due to the experiences of Prohibition in the US (and its ending) as well as the current results of recreational drug legalization in Europe. But sure, keep calling something that has been demonstrated to work a "fantasy".
Why sell in a legal shop under expensive legal conditions and pay legal taxes when you can conduct illegal business as usual?
Because it is more profitable.