That's right you printed those dollar yourself, built the whole internet yourself, and invented the quantum chromo dynamics just to build your own DRAM.
The rationalizations are as pathetic as ever. But I see something we can fix right away. I'll just start printing my own dollars to ease that particular burden on the rest of society. I'm sure it'll turn out well.
Then you're liable to blow up at any moment. In the "explosion of an unnatural abomination" sense not the "rage" sense. It is a wonder that you've managed to blindly find your way to a keyboard before the inevitable. I hope the keyboard has one of those plastic coverings so that it'll be protected from the giblets of heresy that will soon be set free.
As the other replier noted, Google is not a monopoly because it has strong, credible competition. It doesn't matter that it has a relatively high market share. If it charges too much (or in some cases, anything at all), then it loses that market share.
How could a bookstore sell the book for less than they paid the publishing company and remain profitable?
Two ways. Let a popular book be a loss leader in order to bring customers in the door. Or to sell off excess inventory, such as selling at a discount a book that hasn't sold well. Both actions might be legal in France as well. I don't know about that.
Or we could learn that now. It strikes me that people won't be impressed by that argument in a few centuries (when the actual capability to begin some sort of mass terraforming of Mars might be around) no matter how things turn out, unless someone looks for and finds something worth preserving by then.
That's not what I noted. I noted how it's attempts at freedom and individuality (where nobody is required to significant sacrifice or commitment) that have failed.
And interestingly enough, the US despite your observations is a great counterexample. It wasn't in the end a tremendous sacrifice to free black slaves, to deal squarely with native Americans, or to treat Asians fairly. And the US did this.
Or how about how the general public supporting the government sending troops to deal with people who didn't want to pay tax? You think those farmers and whiskey drinkers' mutual interests were met when 15000 troops came down on them?
I bet that those farmers and whiskey drinkers probably didn't pay full taxes until fairly recently. Whiskey smuggling was a common sport for that region through to the 60s or so.
So... your parents? Grandparents maybe? Whichever ancestor who was around the days of Jim Crow laws, or the Chinese Exclusion Act? Or are you perhaps an immigrant? But then... who pointed a gun at your head to move to the US?
No, it's a much more recent phenomenon. Demand for creation and maintenance of public goods and complex bureaucracies at the expense of the society itself, such as my example of universal health care, public pensions, corporate welfare, etc.
When I said living in debt, I meant the kind of debt that you can't reasonably afford or pay off. The debt other people use as a "common tool" doesn't "accumulate". It gets paid off over time.
I didn't interpret it any other way though I can understand how that didn't come across. People and entities which acquire debt cautiously and sparingly aren't the problem.
The US was and is, like all the other empires, a good example of what I noted before: the select few ruling over the rest, with *some* people being sacrificed so others don't have to, with *some* people's self interests met at the expense of others.
And appeal to emotion being a standard tool for maintaining this "empire" today. I see it in this thread today. I protested my sacrifice for other peoples' unjust benefit. For that I was accused of being "callous" and actually supporting this aspect of "empire" which I was opposing.
Two, if you don't study Mars before you terraform it, you lose any chance to learn about its past
Which also doesn't work, because that hasn't been true of Earth either which is far more terraformed than Mars will be for a long time. We still learn a lot about the past, both our pasts and the geological past of the planet itself.
I suppose you'd say that the free market should fund astronomical research. Well good luck making that happen.
It's worth noting that most demand for astronomical research in the US was determined by free market prior to the Second World War. That resulted in construction of a lot of telescopes and discoveries such as galaxies are made of stars, the universal red shift of the distant universe (and that red shift is roughly proportional to the object's distance from Earth), and the first Kuiper belt object (Pluto).
Probably you should read Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars and see what the character Ann has to say about it before your next comment along these lines.
Having actually read Red Mars, Ann was a flake and Robinson gave too much credence to the belief system in question. Having said that, if he didn't take that belief system so seriously, he would have lost some sales. So it was a financially sound decision on his part.
It just might. I find that I need more sleep when I enter a new situation or environment (for example, starting work at a new location or school, moving to a new place to live).
But if you expect us to be poorer and less productive in the future, and still for some reason trust that your claims to wealth will be recognized, it makes sense to hoard rather than invest.
In other words, a standard variation of a deflationary expectation.
Their belief that there will be less real wealth in their future may or may not be correct, but the belief that their claims will be recognized is pretty foolish.
They didn't get screwed so far. I'm sure most of them are aware of the US's history with gold seizures under FDR.
No, the cause and effect is simply your attitude. You don't let other people's emotions and needs rule over you. Other people don't let your needs and emotions rule over them. Eventually, you two groups will fight, and the winner takes it all, and the republic dies.
Here's my take on that. If your wonderful plan for society requires a significant sacrifice or positive commitment from everyone, a near unanimity, then it's not going to work ever. We don't even need to waste our time to try it. As you note, we have many centuries, if not millennia, of experience with failure in the matter.
Self-interest is an integral part of being human. Why attempt to push a system that can't handle that? Don't say that no system can. We have, again, the US system which worked quite well to manage our mutual self-interests for a time, before a number of people decided to rationalize their self-interests over those of others and create the current conflicts of wealth redistribution.
If you mean people who aren't fucking up their own system, who aren't living in debt, then I'll take that as a compliment.
Of course not. Instead when I speak of those who are fucking up their societies, I mean tautologically those who are fucking up their societies, taking from others mostly through government machination to further their own interests (though that could be subordinated to ideological goals). Accumulation of debt, which I find odd that you mention since your society and perhaps you as well has probably done a lot of it, is a common tool simply because they usually can't cover the wants of the moment without borrowing from the future.
I hope you understand what's good for the goose is good for the gander
I invite you to call my bluff on this one.
Other people don't let your wants and emotions rule them either. So they'll take your money regardless, and dump the suffering, problems, and costs onto you.
We call it "taxes". And yes, I've noticed.
I wager most people think just like you, and that's why most experiments in government systems of the last few hundred years have failed. The norm of humanity is for the elite few to rule over the rest. The USA experiment merely lasted a bit longer than most socialist/communist systems (but one could argue the USA as the Founding Fathers wanted it was long gone after the first 100 years or so, when US had to fight a civil war to end slavery)
And the non sequiturs come out. The obvious counter is that you are among the ones actually fucking these systems up. The "USA experiment" didn't have health care for at least 150 years and it worked just fine turning a large but backwards colony into a superpower that led in many different fields. And now that we do have this wonderful but oh so very expensive health fluff and related things, we see the experiment failing.
It's like cause and effect. Create a bunch of pointless, actively harmful wealth transfers (ignorant of basic human nature and economics, no less), divide the society's members against each other (since there are winners and losers in this wealth transfer game), and the society starts fraying at the seams. Who would have thought it? Well, someone who was actually thinking.
When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.
When someone more than two centuries ago can predict today's problems with a simple observation, it does make you wonder what's wrong with people like you. I guess you are incapable of learning from other peoples' mistakes, perhaps not even from your own.
I find it odd how many people care about the health care system and not about the outcome.
That doesn't make any sense. People care about the outcome, especially when that outcome is "you're alive" and not "you're dead".
Then what's all the yapping over health care instead of how much it costs or what it does? My concern is with the effectiveness of the money I spend on health care. If I'm not getting good value for the money spent, then I spend that money on other things. My health is not the only thing of value to me. The same goes with other peoples' money.
I don't risk my life for money, and neither does a large portion of the country.
You've never chosen to pick something up at increased risk to yourself rather than have it delivered? You've never chosen a somewhat higher paying job with a little more risk or stress? You've never done a "do it yourself" job which was even a bit risky rather than hire someone to do it for you?
I don't know about you, but Blue Cross gets paid $1200 a month to provide my family with health coverage. If the government gets that instead of BC, I have lost nothing.
What was the purpose of that $1200 a month? To provide your family with health coverage. If the government does a worse job of it, and it's not hard for the government to do so, then you've lost something even though you claim otherwise.
It will never be anything like the computer example.
Except that we've already pointed out how it is related. Being alike is not the same as being identical. There can still be significant differences and yet the analogy still be useful.
This is far, far more than you can do with BitCoins right now, and, as the deflationary spiral continues, in six months.
Well, if you're correct, then there will come a point when it is worthwhile to spend bitcoins. Then it will become exactly like the computer example. I think the real problem is simply that the bitcoins aren't being used even as a hording of value. Someone probably generated them and forgot about them.
You can rest assured anything NASA and/or groups working with NASA develop that the military/DHS/TLAs think might be useful they'll use.
The same holds for anything made by anyone with possible military application. The real question is whether this research was done with at least partial intent that it be used by the military?
I think it would be detrimental to society to have people specialize at such an early age.
As opposed to having a large number of people who are in their mid-20s with little to no job experience and they still don't know what they want to do when they grow up? I'm not seeing the problem with early specialization.
You're basically saying that it is impossible to store countably infinite information in our universe. But that is only true in a universe of finite extent. We don't observe the entire universe and can't so we don't know whether our universe has finite extent or not.
Slashdot Mirror
That's right you printed those dollar yourself, built the whole internet yourself, and invented the quantum chromo dynamics just to build your own DRAM.
The rationalizations are as pathetic as ever. But I see something we can fix right away. I'll just start printing my own dollars to ease that particular burden on the rest of society. I'm sure it'll turn out well.
Then you're liable to blow up at any moment. In the "explosion of an unnatural abomination" sense not the "rage" sense. It is a wonder that you've managed to blindly find your way to a keyboard before the inevitable. I hope the keyboard has one of those plastic coverings so that it'll be protected from the giblets of heresy that will soon be set free.
As the other replier noted, Google is not a monopoly because it has strong, credible competition. It doesn't matter that it has a relatively high market share. If it charges too much (or in some cases, anything at all), then it loses that market share.
How could a bookstore sell the book for less than they paid the publishing company and remain profitable?
Two ways. Let a popular book be a loss leader in order to bring customers in the door. Or to sell off excess inventory, such as selling at a discount a book that hasn't sold well. Both actions might be legal in France as well. I don't know about that.
Or we could learn that now. It strikes me that people won't be impressed by that argument in a few centuries (when the actual capability to begin some sort of mass terraforming of Mars might be around) no matter how things turn out, unless someone looks for and finds something worth preserving by then.
That's not what I noted. I noted how it's attempts at freedom and individuality (where nobody is required to significant sacrifice or commitment) that have failed.
And interestingly enough, the US despite your observations is a great counterexample. It wasn't in the end a tremendous sacrifice to free black slaves, to deal squarely with native Americans, or to treat Asians fairly. And the US did this.
Or how about how the general public supporting the government sending troops to deal with people who didn't want to pay tax? You think those farmers and whiskey drinkers' mutual interests were met when 15000 troops came down on them?
I bet that those farmers and whiskey drinkers probably didn't pay full taxes until fairly recently. Whiskey smuggling was a common sport for that region through to the 60s or so.
So... your parents? Grandparents maybe? Whichever ancestor who was around the days of Jim Crow laws, or the Chinese Exclusion Act? Or are you perhaps an immigrant? But then... who pointed a gun at your head to move to the US?
No, it's a much more recent phenomenon. Demand for creation and maintenance of public goods and complex bureaucracies at the expense of the society itself, such as my example of universal health care, public pensions, corporate welfare, etc.
When I said living in debt, I meant the kind of debt that you can't reasonably afford or pay off. The debt other people use as a "common tool" doesn't "accumulate". It gets paid off over time.
I didn't interpret it any other way though I can understand how that didn't come across. People and entities which acquire debt cautiously and sparingly aren't the problem.
The US was and is, like all the other empires, a good example of what I noted before: the select few ruling over the rest, with *some* people being sacrificed so others don't have to, with *some* people's self interests met at the expense of others.
And appeal to emotion being a standard tool for maintaining this "empire" today. I see it in this thread today. I protested my sacrifice for other peoples' unjust benefit. For that I was accused of being "callous" and actually supporting this aspect of "empire" which I was opposing.
Two, if you don't study Mars before you terraform it, you lose any chance to learn about its past
Which also doesn't work, because that hasn't been true of Earth either which is far more terraformed than Mars will be for a long time. We still learn a lot about the past, both our pasts and the geological past of the planet itself.
I suppose you'd say that the free market should fund astronomical research. Well good luck making that happen.
It's worth noting that most demand for astronomical research in the US was determined by free market prior to the Second World War. That resulted in construction of a lot of telescopes and discoveries such as galaxies are made of stars, the universal red shift of the distant universe (and that red shift is roughly proportional to the object's distance from Earth), and the first Kuiper belt object (Pluto).
Probably you should read Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars and see what the character Ann has to say about it before your next comment along these lines.
Having actually read Red Mars, Ann was a flake and Robinson gave too much credence to the belief system in question. Having said that, if he didn't take that belief system so seriously, he would have lost some sales. So it was a financially sound decision on his part.
Sleep has no effect on "ability to adapt" at all.
It just might. I find that I need more sleep when I enter a new situation or environment (for example, starting work at a new location or school, moving to a new place to live).
Their belief that there will be less real wealth in their future may or may not be correct, but the belief that their claims will be recognized is pretty foolish.
They didn't get screwed so far. I'm sure most of them are aware of the US's history with gold seizures under FDR.
No, the cause and effect is simply your attitude. You don't let other people's emotions and needs rule over you. Other people don't let your needs and emotions rule over them. Eventually, you two groups will fight, and the winner takes it all, and the republic dies.
Here's my take on that. If your wonderful plan for society requires a significant sacrifice or positive commitment from everyone, a near unanimity, then it's not going to work ever. We don't even need to waste our time to try it. As you note, we have many centuries, if not millennia, of experience with failure in the matter.
Self-interest is an integral part of being human. Why attempt to push a system that can't handle that? Don't say that no system can. We have, again, the US system which worked quite well to manage our mutual self-interests for a time, before a number of people decided to rationalize their self-interests over those of others and create the current conflicts of wealth redistribution.
If you mean people who aren't fucking up their own system, who aren't living in debt, then I'll take that as a compliment.
Of course not. Instead when I speak of those who are fucking up their societies, I mean tautologically those who are fucking up their societies, taking from others mostly through government machination to further their own interests (though that could be subordinated to ideological goals). Accumulation of debt, which I find odd that you mention since your society and perhaps you as well has probably done a lot of it, is a common tool simply because they usually can't cover the wants of the moment without borrowing from the future.
If there's deflation, then there isn't intense future discounting. Someone has an expectation of getting more tomorrow than today.
I hope you understand what's good for the goose is good for the gander
I invite you to call my bluff on this one.
Other people don't let your wants and emotions rule them either. So they'll take your money regardless, and dump the suffering, problems, and costs onto you.
We call it "taxes". And yes, I've noticed.
I wager most people think just like you, and that's why most experiments in government systems of the last few hundred years have failed. The norm of humanity is for the elite few to rule over the rest. The USA experiment merely lasted a bit longer than most socialist/communist systems (but one could argue the USA as the Founding Fathers wanted it was long gone after the first 100 years or so, when US had to fight a civil war to end slavery)
And the non sequiturs come out. The obvious counter is that you are among the ones actually fucking these systems up. The "USA experiment" didn't have health care for at least 150 years and it worked just fine turning a large but backwards colony into a superpower that led in many different fields. And now that we do have this wonderful but oh so very expensive health fluff and related things, we see the experiment failing.
It's like cause and effect. Create a bunch of pointless, actively harmful wealth transfers (ignorant of basic human nature and economics, no less), divide the society's members against each other (since there are winners and losers in this wealth transfer game), and the society starts fraying at the seams. Who would have thought it? Well, someone who was actually thinking.
When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.
When someone more than two centuries ago can predict today's problems with a simple observation, it does make you wonder what's wrong with people like you. I guess you are incapable of learning from other peoples' mistakes, perhaps not even from your own.
Then the problem is lack of utility not deflation. Deflation implies the currency is gaining in value, presumably to buy these things in some way.
I find it odd how many people care about the health care system and not about the outcome.
That doesn't make any sense. People care about the outcome, especially when that outcome is "you're alive" and not "you're dead".
Then what's all the yapping over health care instead of how much it costs or what it does? My concern is with the effectiveness of the money I spend on health care. If I'm not getting good value for the money spent, then I spend that money on other things. My health is not the only thing of value to me. The same goes with other peoples' money.
I don't risk my life for money, and neither does a large portion of the country.
You've never chosen to pick something up at increased risk to yourself rather than have it delivered? You've never chosen a somewhat higher paying job with a little more risk or stress? You've never done a "do it yourself" job which was even a bit risky rather than hire someone to do it for you?
I don't know about you, but Blue Cross gets paid $1200 a month to provide my family with health coverage. If the government gets that instead of BC, I have lost nothing.
What was the purpose of that $1200 a month? To provide your family with health coverage. If the government does a worse job of it, and it's not hard for the government to do so, then you've lost something even though you claim otherwise.
and there is intense future discounting.
Well, then someone expects to buy something with them tomorrow.
It will never be anything like the computer example.
Except that we've already pointed out how it is related. Being alike is not the same as being identical. There can still be significant differences and yet the analogy still be useful.
This is far, far more than you can do with BitCoins right now, and, as the deflationary spiral continues, in six months.
Well, if you're correct, then there will come a point when it is worthwhile to spend bitcoins. Then it will become exactly like the computer example. I think the real problem is simply that the bitcoins aren't being used even as a hording of value. Someone probably generated them and forgot about them.
Could someone explain how they would escape that spiral?
Eventually you'll want to do something with your bitcoins. Then you spend them.
You can rest assured anything NASA and/or groups working with NASA develop that the military/DHS/TLAs think might be useful they'll use.
The same holds for anything made by anyone with possible military application. The real question is whether this research was done with at least partial intent that it be used by the military?
I think it would be detrimental to society to have people specialize at such an early age.
As opposed to having a large number of people who are in their mid-20s with little to no job experience and they still don't know what they want to do when they grow up? I'm not seeing the problem with early specialization.
Many people want high school to be retooled as technical schools
No retooling should be needed in the first place. This has long been a purpose of high schools.
You're basically saying that it is impossible to store countably infinite information in our universe. But that is only true in a universe of finite extent. We don't observe the entire universe and can't so we don't know whether our universe has finite extent or not.
So we should expect new invasions of vast hordes of horse archers from Mongolia? New employment options in the pillage and loot industry?