The "most expensive method possible" was not used.
Well, name a more expensive method that still works and would fall within the budget.
An excellent example of spending less money up front, but being forced to spend more later to work around issues on a compromised system that wouldn't have occurred if enough money had been spent on designing it right in the first place.
A vast amount of money was spent up front. Keep in mind that they built a number of orbiters at roughly $2 billion apiece, plus development costs, and Earth-side infrastructure.
The problem wasn't the lack of funds to build the Shuttle, but the design itself was too amibitious. I consider this essay a great explanation of the problem.
What if they had intentionally bitten off a smaller task at first. What if they had retired the Saturn V, and slimmed down the staff for the Saturn IB (or better yet, auctioned it off or allowed the companies involved to commercialize it), and then done a much smaller first generation âoeshuttleâ? This shuttle might have only been capable of putting a couple thousand pounds into orbit, and might not have gone straight to an operation vehicle. This wouldnâ(TM)t have been a program trying to keep as much of the Saturn team together as possible, or an attempt to replace all existing rockets in one fell-swoop. It wouldâ(TM)ve been an X-vehicle in reality.
In other words, keep the Saturn 1B and build a much smaller shuttle capable of carrying 2-4 people or in the unmanned version a ton and a half of payload. I think the US would have much more than a space program these days, if they had gone that route.
Obese individuals don't usually die quickly, they take many years of gradual decline to pass away and tend to use a lot more than average medical care in the process.
Healthy people do too. And when they die, they tend to use a lot more than average as well.
Unless the implication is that you don't need quite the same quality because no lives (in the aircraft) are at risk?
That's true. The real problem is the liability. Looking at your example above, the organization in question doesn't need to train the drone pilot to the same level as the helicopter pilot because less lives and property damage are at risk. That means, if something goes wrong, you're out the cost of the drone plus whatever it hit. With a helicopter, that's at least a pilot and a much larger footprint on the ground.
We need to become like Europe and ban all the junk.
Why? Because we have a bunch of fat people? Because somewhere, there's someone making money off someone's headache? Don't you need to have a reason first? LOL.
When it's about profit, the people get screwed.
And when it's about flimsy pretexts for running other peoples' lives, the people get screwed.
Yeah, I see what you mean, but now we know. We didn't, before. And whatever we do in the future, we'll try to avoid those problems (as new ones are created).
That's a rather empty thing to say.
A lot of Slashdotters like to compare the cost of the Shuttle to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So would it make the wars and the vast sums spent on them ok, if I just observed that "Now we know, we didn't know before"? And of course, "We'll try to avoid those problems."
It's especially empty since we really did know ahead of time that the Shuttle was going to have most of the problems it had. Obviously, not the oblivious NASA managers who were forecasting a bunch of nines (1 in 100,000 prior to the Challenger accident according to Feynman) of reliability for the Shuttle. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at the budget for NASA (even back in 1970 when things were starting to draw down) and see that there wasn't both money for the Shuttle and money for interesting things to do with that Shuttle at the same time.
Nor was there surprises for those who look at actual reliability of rockets. Accidents were bound to occur which for NASA caused at least 4-5 years of cessation of launch activity.
And we can see with the Space Launch System funding, that US Congress and the NASA supply chain aren't interested in learning from their "mistakes". It looks to me like the US is about to repeat all the mistakes of the past half century again.
The attack is only possible due to being able to communicate much faster than a human could. A human can put in a lot of failed bids to find out Alice's lowest price, but in the mean time Bob could have put in a successful bid. A high frequency trader can do that long before Bob can put in a bid.
Well, you just said above that it works better when it's faster, not that it becomes impossible at human speeds. In addition we need to consider the nuts and bolts of what's going on. Basically, in the above scenario. Alice is running a computer program not a limit order and selling to what appears on the market. So no matter how fast the HFT is, it can only respond to Alice's activities as her program makes them.
Now she might have a stop order which is a trade that operates at HFT speeds. Then it becomes to some degree worth poking around to see what triggers when one creates a small "flash crash".
Or she might do a bunch of market orders which are also operating at HFT speeds and very gameable once you know the timing of her activities (say she sees your book order and then 200 ms later sells 500 shares to market). An HFT trader can drop their buy order (in practice they'd be putting up a buy order for short periods of time, long enough for it to register to program traders and short enough that it doesn't have much chance of getting triggered) in that short period of time and pick up those shares for even less than what Alice thought she was selling them for.
But these sort of things are simply bad trading tactics for Alice in a market where HFT traders are known to lurk. That's why it's not a traditional man in the middle attack.
Thus Eve does have special knowledge of Alice or Bob's price thresholds at which they're willing to trade.
This is a typical market maker advantage.
I think your "covert" limit is a completely irrelevant figleaf
The covertness is a standard part of the definition of man in the middle attack. If you know Eve is there, you'll behave differently than if you don't know she's there.
Besides, if Alice is never aware of Bob due to the speed of the trade doesn't that even fit your artificially narrow definition?
Technically, none of the three know of each other aside from the very limited actions they have via the market. But they know there's other people on the market including HFT players doing their thing.
to get away from your ridiculous assertion that 70% of all trade has little impact on the market.
As I stated earlier, it could be 99.9% of the volume on the market and still be as irrelevant as it is now. Market makers have always had a high part of the volume of the stock market. And they don't accumulate stock. So in the long term it's only the people who want to buy and sell long term the stock who actually have the stock. In terms of a communication channel, HFT is noise (and even at high volumes, just not that much noise) and long time scale trade is the signal.
NASA started life as the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in 1915 and predates the US Air Force (which separated from the US Army in 1947) by 32 years.
And frankly, the shuttle just doesn't make sense as a military vehicle. Too expensive, capabilities that the military didn't care about (like putting seven people in space), other capabilities that weren't that good (small payload capacity for the size of the vehicle), and the operator, NASA wasn't under the control of the military (as I noted in my last post).
Alice with the assets wants to sell. Bob the broker wants to buy. Eve wishes to profit by inserting herself into the communication channel and buying at the lowest price Alice will sell at then sell at the highest price Bob will buy at. This works if Eve can communicate to them much faster than they can communicate with each other - hence HFT.
There are numerous problems with calling this a man in the middle attack First, everyone knows that there's a bunch of Eves present. So it's about as covert as a parade, which fails one of the standard non-personal conditions for being a man in the middle attack.
Second, Eve has no special knowledge of Alice or Bob's price thresholds at which they're willing to trade. So Eve has to trade with both Alice and Bob when they show up on the market in order to probe out the price thresholds of each in turn (unless they're slapping down long term limit orders, in which case a trade occurs whether Eve is there or not). Alice and Bob have no reason to care, because that's why they're there in the first place to make trades at the price they want to trade at. They don't care whether they're trading with each other or the many Eves in the markets.
This is also an activity that a human can do. HFT just does it a few orders of magnitude faster.
Finally, in the case where Alice and Bob aren't actually putting up long term limit orders, they don't know about each others' willingness to trade and no trade occurs until Eve closes the sale. So this man in the middle (what we would normally call a market maker) is not "attacking", but an integral part of the sale. This incidentally is an example of how an HFT trader can provide liquidity to a market.
such as your bullshit that it has to be "covert".
That's part of the standard definition of a man in the middle attack. It's just a reasonable point.
Do you want to stay on that old system without trying the new one?
Absolutely. No go on the new system. And I stated why. The primary problem with the old system is its high cost. The new system just pumps steroids into that price problem and has democracy-harming features to boot. I think it's insane that Obamacare has gotten as far as it has.
I'd prefer we dump Obamacare for something we know works - single payer or at least a public option, but I don't think that's what you meant.
My view is that these other systems are in trouble as well. But they'll fail later and perhaps leave smaller impact craters when they do, compared to the US system with or without Obamacare. I think a big tragedy of the US health care debate is that it ignores that few systems really seem to have any long term control over health care costs.
Yes, and I strongly disagreed with your assertion that HFT is just irrelevant fluffy bunnies or whatever bullshit you think it is instead of market manipulation by inserting itself into other peoples trades before they can react.
You've made that very clear. But my point is that your opinion is just going to remain an opinion since there's no evidence to back it up.
Our disagreement came down to your very narrow personal definition of a man in the middle attack.
I quoted Wikipedia in that link. That's a standard definition of man in the middle attack. I've occasionally used words or phrases incorrectly, but that wasn't one of those times.
No need to look further. With that much economic power in one place over one good that the US is heavily dependent on, the US has business in that place.
It's interesting how many NASA "spinoffs" described in those links fall in the category of "would have done anyway". But why research it yourself when you can get NASA to overpay for that research?
As far as money goes, and spending it wisely, over its 30-year run the shuttle program ended up costing us just under $200 billion in 2011 dollars, as well as 14 lives. That sounds like a lot of money. The current estimate of the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is between 3.2 and 4 trillion dollars, with over 4400 Americans killed and over 33,000 wounded in Iraq alone. Afghanistan has cost us another 2100 American lives, and those numbers don't even include non-Americans or civilians. In 2008 alone Bush proposed $190 billion for the wars, just under the total cost of the 30-year shuttle program. I'll leave it up to you to decide which is the better investment.
I see war cost estimates a third of that. And funding a couple of years of a war in a critical region to the US does seem to have a lot of value compared to coming up with the most expensive method possible for launching things into space.
Nonsense. If the Shuttle was meant to be a military vehicle first and foremost, there wouldn't have been a two year gap of Shuttle launches due to the Challenger accident. There's also the fact that Shuttle design predates military involvement (the military became involved only because NASA needed a lot more funding to complete their great white elephant). Finally, after Challenger and the above gap when military payloads weren't launching, the military took great pains and great costs to move as many of its payloads to the Titan IV rocket as it could.
We shouldn't let anyone tell us we're so incompetent we can't have a better, cheaper and universal health care system in this country.
Indeed. Why take my word for it, when the US can show us all how incompetent they are at this? Well, fortunately for you, we'll have an excellent demonstration of that over the next few years, unless by some chance, the law gets overturned in the meantime.
You're just proving my point. Those things aren't moral in the first place, so that means nobody's been paying for morals all along. Ergo, the logical conclusion is that people don't want to pay for morals.
By that logic, it's impossible to act in a moral way since those actions aren't moral (as established by random geek on internet) in the first place so discussing the morality of action is pointless.
Irrelevant. I simply said you can afford morals. I never said you do it through government.
MY earlier example didn't even involve government. My example was the Average Joe picking a cheaper product even if the savings was achieved in amoral ways
Then you're in the wrong thread since we're speaking of publicly funded morality here. I have no trouble with a private entity pursuing moral actions with their resources.
Look at that list. How much clean water can you consume? Light? Food? Sanitation? And education? Those are inherently limited in demand and something you can readily pay for past a certain point.
Demand for health care is not limited in the way that it is for these items. For example, clean water has controlled marginal costs. If you want a little more water, then that's a modest cost. It is too easy to spend tremendous sums in order to get slightly better health consequences or a little more lifespan. There's no clean line where you can say "This is a reasonable standard of health care."
And we can see with Obamacare and subsequent regulation that there really is a slippery slope here. For example, employer insurance is now required to fully cover the cost of birth control. That doesn't make sense to me even from the moral viewpoint of the supporters of the regulation. It's too easy to buy cheap but effective birth control. And there's no reason to not have some sort of copay (a requirement that the insuree pay some non-trivial part of the bill) as well.
Nonsense. All those Americans gladly paid taxes. Instead of paying the British, who people felt didn't represent them, they paid the Founding Fathers and others who would become the leaders of the next empire (the US) who at the time seem to represent them better.
Saudi Arabia has stated that there is a 'crying need for international collaboration to address "freedom of expression" which clearly disregards public order.'
I quite agree. So let's address this "crying need" by determining the best way to remove the Saud family from its undeserved nest in Saudi Arabia. So what sort of groups are looking to replace the Saud family with a democracy (which is the sort of government I favor)? Googling around, I see these guys. Anyone have some insight into this issue?
People who would have paid less for it without the man in the middle attacks of HFT.
We've discussed this before. A man in the middle attack is a covert action that listens in or intercepts communication to which they're not a party. HFT is merely trading very fast.
Further, you have no evidence that current human traders are actually paying any more than they used to. HFT's primary effect has been to figure out what's going on faster than slower traders can do that. So if you're going to sell a zillion shares of some stock, HFT just figures it out in milliseconds rather than seconds or minutes. No real change there except the market is a bit more responsive to really fast changes. If you're trading smaller units over human time scales, the effects of HFT are irrelevant.
Oh, you can afford it. It's just that nobody really wants to pay for morality.
I disagree. My view is that most of the problems of our society are precisely due to morality which both we can't afford and which wasn't moral in the first place.
One merely needs to look in Slashdot at blanket claims for government spending to see that the things that government does which are adequate benefits to society are used rhetorically as cover for the unseemly things that aren't beneficial to society.
For example, see the very post which I replied to earlier in this very thread which rationalizes a huge handout to insurance companies and government (funding and power increases) on the basis that it provides more health care coverage to the poor. We can't afford that kind of morality.
The "no taxation without representation" gag was more about lack of democratic accountability than the taxes themselves.
In that the Americans probably thought that proper representation would mean these taxes wouldn't exist. Given that a large portion of Americans of the time couldn't vote even if their regions had representation (one needed to achieve a particular standard of wealth and property in order to vote), that meant the taxation schemes were more likely to be the trigger than the lack of representation since most of the British empire, including most people in England, had similar lack of representation.
Sure taxation played a part in pushing for independence but it eventually took a war to force the issue.
And what was the motive for the Revolutionary War? It pretty much boils down to onerous taxes and trade monopolies. Those existed pretty much because of the numerous wars that England was involved in. At the rate of growth of the American colonies, they would have revolted successfully sooner or later.
It's worth noting, for example, that what became the US had something like 2.5 million residents compared to 7 million residents in England in 1776. I gather that while England had a tremendous population growth rate at the time, the US was growing much more rapidly due to massive immigration (same link claims 9 million in England and 5 million in the new US in 1800).
England just didn't have infinite amounts of power to contain a rapidly growing colony (with a slight edge in military technology!).
No, what he is saying is that a lot of wealthy people paid little or no tax and became more or less independent of the empire, contributing little and yet exploiting the economic benefits of having a large organised trading empire and powerful military to defend their interests.
In other words, selfish libertarians destroyed empires.
What made them libertarians? They didn't try to reduce the power or extent of the Roman empire. To the contrary, they increased its power and extent in Roman society (because somebody had to pay for that stuff). That's the key violation that means they aren't libertarian, selfish or otherwise.
They also didn't pay for concrete services received. While that's even more a violation for Randian Objectivists (Rand's "going Galt", for example, is basically self-imposed exile from society and the approved means for dealing with a parasitic society), most libertarians don't approve of mooching off the state and their fellow members of society even as a protest.
I believe there is a minority that do believe in excessively using government public goods (a sort of DoS attack, I suppose) in order to end existence of those public goods.
Slashdot Mirror
The "most expensive method possible" was not used.
Well, name a more expensive method that still works and would fall within the budget.
An excellent example of spending less money up front, but being forced to spend more later to work around issues on a compromised system that wouldn't have occurred if enough money had been spent on designing it right in the first place.
A vast amount of money was spent up front. Keep in mind that they built a number of orbiters at roughly $2 billion apiece, plus development costs, and Earth-side infrastructure.
The problem wasn't the lack of funds to build the Shuttle, but the design itself was too amibitious. I consider this essay a great explanation of the problem.
What if they had intentionally bitten off a smaller task at first. What if they had retired the Saturn V, and slimmed down the staff for the Saturn IB (or better yet, auctioned it off or allowed the companies involved to commercialize it), and then done a much smaller first generation âoeshuttleâ? This shuttle might have only been capable of putting a couple thousand pounds into orbit, and might not have gone straight to an operation vehicle. This wouldnâ(TM)t have been a program trying to keep as much of the Saturn team together as possible, or an attempt to replace all existing rockets in one fell-swoop. It wouldâ(TM)ve been an X-vehicle in reality.
In other words, keep the Saturn 1B and build a much smaller shuttle capable of carrying 2-4 people or in the unmanned version a ton and a half of payload. I think the US would have much more than a space program these days, if they had gone that route.
Obese individuals don't usually die quickly, they take many years of gradual decline to pass away and tend to use a lot more than average medical care in the process.
Healthy people do too. And when they die, they tend to use a lot more than average as well.
Unless the implication is that you don't need quite the same quality because no lives (in the aircraft) are at risk?
That's true. The real problem is the liability. Looking at your example above, the organization in question doesn't need to train the drone pilot to the same level as the helicopter pilot because less lives and property damage are at risk. That means, if something goes wrong, you're out the cost of the drone plus whatever it hit. With a helicopter, that's at least a pilot and a much larger footprint on the ground.
We need to become like Europe and ban all the junk.
Why? Because we have a bunch of fat people? Because somewhere, there's someone making money off someone's headache? Don't you need to have a reason first? LOL.
When it's about profit, the people get screwed.
And when it's about flimsy pretexts for running other peoples' lives, the people get screwed.
Yeah, I see what you mean, but now we know. We didn't, before. And whatever we do in the future, we'll try to avoid those problems (as new ones are created).
That's a rather empty thing to say.
A lot of Slashdotters like to compare the cost of the Shuttle to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So would it make the wars and the vast sums spent on them ok, if I just observed that "Now we know, we didn't know before"? And of course, "We'll try to avoid those problems."
It's especially empty since we really did know ahead of time that the Shuttle was going to have most of the problems it had. Obviously, not the oblivious NASA managers who were forecasting a bunch of nines (1 in 100,000 prior to the Challenger accident according to Feynman) of reliability for the Shuttle. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at the budget for NASA (even back in 1970 when things were starting to draw down) and see that there wasn't both money for the Shuttle and money for interesting things to do with that Shuttle at the same time.
Nor was there surprises for those who look at actual reliability of rockets. Accidents were bound to occur which for NASA caused at least 4-5 years of cessation of launch activity.
And we can see with the Space Launch System funding, that US Congress and the NASA supply chain aren't interested in learning from their "mistakes". It looks to me like the US is about to repeat all the mistakes of the past half century again.
The attack is only possible due to being able to communicate much faster than a human could. A human can put in a lot of failed bids to find out Alice's lowest price, but in the mean time Bob could have put in a successful bid. A high frequency trader can do that long before Bob can put in a bid.
Well, you just said above that it works better when it's faster, not that it becomes impossible at human speeds. In addition we need to consider the nuts and bolts of what's going on. Basically, in the above scenario. Alice is running a computer program not a limit order and selling to what appears on the market. So no matter how fast the HFT is, it can only respond to Alice's activities as her program makes them.
Now she might have a stop order which is a trade that operates at HFT speeds. Then it becomes to some degree worth poking around to see what triggers when one creates a small "flash crash".
Or she might do a bunch of market orders which are also operating at HFT speeds and very gameable once you know the timing of her activities (say she sees your book order and then 200 ms later sells 500 shares to market). An HFT trader can drop their buy order (in practice they'd be putting up a buy order for short periods of time, long enough for it to register to program traders and short enough that it doesn't have much chance of getting triggered) in that short period of time and pick up those shares for even less than what Alice thought she was selling them for.
But these sort of things are simply bad trading tactics for Alice in a market where HFT traders are known to lurk. That's why it's not a traditional man in the middle attack.
Thus Eve does have special knowledge of Alice or Bob's price thresholds at which they're willing to trade.
This is a typical market maker advantage.
I think your "covert" limit is a completely irrelevant figleaf
The covertness is a standard part of the definition of man in the middle attack. If you know Eve is there, you'll behave differently than if you don't know she's there.
Besides, if Alice is never aware of Bob due to the speed of the trade doesn't that even fit your artificially narrow definition?
Technically, none of the three know of each other aside from the very limited actions they have via the market. But they know there's other people on the market including HFT players doing their thing.
to get away from your ridiculous assertion that 70% of all trade has little impact on the market.
As I stated earlier, it could be 99.9% of the volume on the market and still be as irrelevant as it is now. Market makers have always had a high part of the volume of the stock market. And they don't accumulate stock. So in the long term it's only the people who want to buy and sell long term the stock who actually have the stock. In terms of a communication channel, HFT is noise (and even at high volumes, just not that much noise) and long time scale trade is the signal.
NASA started life as the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) in 1915 and predates the US Air Force (which separated from the US Army in 1947) by 32 years.
And frankly, the shuttle just doesn't make sense as a military vehicle. Too expensive, capabilities that the military didn't care about (like putting seven people in space), other capabilities that weren't that good (small payload capacity for the size of the vehicle), and the operator, NASA wasn't under the control of the military (as I noted in my last post).
Alice with the assets wants to sell. Bob the broker wants to buy. Eve wishes to profit by inserting herself into the communication channel and buying at the lowest price Alice will sell at then sell at the highest price Bob will buy at. This works if Eve can communicate to them much faster than they can communicate with each other - hence HFT.
There are numerous problems with calling this a man in the middle attack First, everyone knows that there's a bunch of Eves present. So it's about as covert as a parade, which fails one of the standard non-personal conditions for being a man in the middle attack.
Second, Eve has no special knowledge of Alice or Bob's price thresholds at which they're willing to trade. So Eve has to trade with both Alice and Bob when they show up on the market in order to probe out the price thresholds of each in turn (unless they're slapping down long term limit orders, in which case a trade occurs whether Eve is there or not). Alice and Bob have no reason to care, because that's why they're there in the first place to make trades at the price they want to trade at. They don't care whether they're trading with each other or the many Eves in the markets.
This is also an activity that a human can do. HFT just does it a few orders of magnitude faster.
Finally, in the case where Alice and Bob aren't actually putting up long term limit orders, they don't know about each others' willingness to trade and no trade occurs until Eve closes the sale. So this man in the middle (what we would normally call a market maker) is not "attacking", but an integral part of the sale. This incidentally is an example of how an HFT trader can provide liquidity to a market.
such as your bullshit that it has to be "covert".
That's part of the standard definition of a man in the middle attack. It's just a reasonable point.
Do you want to stay on that old system without trying the new one?
Absolutely. No go on the new system. And I stated why. The primary problem with the old system is its high cost. The new system just pumps steroids into that price problem and has democracy-harming features to boot. I think it's insane that Obamacare has gotten as far as it has.
I'd prefer we dump Obamacare for something we know works - single payer or at least a public option, but I don't think that's what you meant.
My view is that these other systems are in trouble as well. But they'll fail later and perhaps leave smaller impact craters when they do, compared to the US system with or without Obamacare. I think a big tragedy of the US health care debate is that it ignores that few systems really seem to have any long term control over health care costs.
Yes, and I strongly disagreed with your assertion that HFT is just irrelevant fluffy bunnies or whatever bullshit you think it is instead of market manipulation by inserting itself into other peoples trades before they can react.
You've made that very clear. But my point is that your opinion is just going to remain an opinion since there's no evidence to back it up.
Our disagreement came down to your very narrow personal definition of a man in the middle attack.
I quoted Wikipedia in that link. That's a standard definition of man in the middle attack. I've occasionally used words or phrases incorrectly, but that wasn't one of those times.
other than buying oil
No need to look further. With that much economic power in one place over one good that the US is heavily dependent on, the US has business in that place.
It's interesting how many NASA "spinoffs" described in those links fall in the category of "would have done anyway". But why research it yourself when you can get NASA to overpay for that research?
As far as money goes, and spending it wisely, over its 30-year run the shuttle program ended up costing us just under $200 billion in 2011 dollars, as well as 14 lives. That sounds like a lot of money. The current estimate of the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is between 3.2 and 4 trillion dollars, with over 4400 Americans killed and over 33,000 wounded in Iraq alone. Afghanistan has cost us another 2100 American lives, and those numbers don't even include non-Americans or civilians. In 2008 alone Bush proposed $190 billion for the wars, just under the total cost of the 30-year shuttle program. I'll leave it up to you to decide which is the better investment.
I see war cost estimates a third of that. And funding a couple of years of a war in a critical region to the US does seem to have a lot of value compared to coming up with the most expensive method possible for launching things into space.
It was more military than anything
Nonsense. If the Shuttle was meant to be a military vehicle first and foremost, there wouldn't have been a two year gap of Shuttle launches due to the Challenger accident. There's also the fact that Shuttle design predates military involvement (the military became involved only because NASA needed a lot more funding to complete their great white elephant). Finally, after Challenger and the above gap when military payloads weren't launching, the military took great pains and great costs to move as many of its payloads to the Titan IV rocket as it could.
Huh. I'd have to disagree. For 190 billion USD, I bet we could have gotten a lot better extinction insurance than that.
We shouldn't let anyone tell us we're so incompetent we can't have a better, cheaper and universal health care system in this country.
Indeed. Why take my word for it, when the US can show us all how incompetent they are at this? Well, fortunately for you, we'll have an excellent demonstration of that over the next few years, unless by some chance, the law gets overturned in the meantime.
The farmers and westerners didn't feel the government was representing them through this tax, so they rebelled.
So this is what your argument sounds like to me. If my government does something I don't like or want, then it's not representing me.
You're just proving my point. Those things aren't moral in the first place, so that means nobody's been paying for morals all along. Ergo, the logical conclusion is that people don't want to pay for morals.
By that logic, it's impossible to act in a moral way since those actions aren't moral (as established by random geek on internet) in the first place so discussing the morality of action is pointless.
Irrelevant. I simply said you can afford morals. I never said you do it through government.
MY earlier example didn't even involve government. My example was the Average Joe picking a cheaper product even if the savings was achieved in amoral ways
Then you're in the wrong thread since we're speaking of publicly funded morality here. I have no trouble with a private entity pursuing moral actions with their resources.
Considering that the developed world was able to solve much of the problems of the third world a couple hundred years ago, and the developed world has advanced greatly since then, it is simply defeatist to think we can't afford morals... especially when you think those things aren't even moral in the first place (since if they were actually moral, they'd most likely cost even more)
Look at that list. How much clean water can you consume? Light? Food? Sanitation? And education? Those are inherently limited in demand and something you can readily pay for past a certain point.
Demand for health care is not limited in the way that it is for these items. For example, clean water has controlled marginal costs. If you want a little more water, then that's a modest cost. It is too easy to spend tremendous sums in order to get slightly better health consequences or a little more lifespan. There's no clean line where you can say "This is a reasonable standard of health care."
And we can see with Obamacare and subsequent regulation that there really is a slippery slope here. For example, employer insurance is now required to fully cover the cost of birth control. That doesn't make sense to me even from the moral viewpoint of the supporters of the regulation. It's too easy to buy cheap but effective birth control. And there's no reason to not have some sort of copay (a requirement that the insuree pay some non-trivial part of the bill) as well.
Nonsense. All those Americans gladly paid taxes. Instead of paying the British, who people felt didn't represent them, they paid the Founding Fathers and others who would become the leaders of the next empire (the US) who at the time seem to represent them better.
Rebuttal: the Whiskey rebellion.
Saudi Arabia has stated that there is a 'crying need for international collaboration to address "freedom of expression" which clearly disregards public order.'
I quite agree. So let's address this "crying need" by determining the best way to remove the Saud family from its undeserved nest in Saudi Arabia. So what sort of groups are looking to replace the Saud family with a democracy (which is the sort of government I favor)? Googling around, I see these guys. Anyone have some insight into this issue?
People who would have paid less for it without the man in the middle attacks of HFT.
We've discussed this before. A man in the middle attack is a covert action that listens in or intercepts communication to which they're not a party. HFT is merely trading very fast.
Further, you have no evidence that current human traders are actually paying any more than they used to. HFT's primary effect has been to figure out what's going on faster than slower traders can do that. So if you're going to sell a zillion shares of some stock, HFT just figures it out in milliseconds rather than seconds or minutes. No real change there except the market is a bit more responsive to really fast changes. If you're trading smaller units over human time scales, the effects of HFT are irrelevant.
Oh, you can afford it. It's just that nobody really wants to pay for morality.
I disagree. My view is that most of the problems of our society are precisely due to morality which both we can't afford and which wasn't moral in the first place.
One merely needs to look in Slashdot at blanket claims for government spending to see that the things that government does which are adequate benefits to society are used rhetorically as cover for the unseemly things that aren't beneficial to society.
For example, see the very post which I replied to earlier in this very thread which rationalizes a huge handout to insurance companies and government (funding and power increases) on the basis that it provides more health care coverage to the poor. We can't afford that kind of morality.
The "no taxation without representation" gag was more about lack of democratic accountability than the taxes themselves.
In that the Americans probably thought that proper representation would mean these taxes wouldn't exist. Given that a large portion of Americans of the time couldn't vote even if their regions had representation (one needed to achieve a particular standard of wealth and property in order to vote), that meant the taxation schemes were more likely to be the trigger than the lack of representation since most of the British empire, including most people in England, had similar lack of representation.
Sure taxation played a part in pushing for independence but it eventually took a war to force the issue.
And what was the motive for the Revolutionary War? It pretty much boils down to onerous taxes and trade monopolies. Those existed pretty much because of the numerous wars that England was involved in. At the rate of growth of the American colonies, they would have revolted successfully sooner or later.
It's worth noting, for example, that what became the US had something like 2.5 million residents compared to 7 million residents in England in 1776. I gather that while England had a tremendous population growth rate at the time, the US was growing much more rapidly due to massive immigration (same link claims 9 million in England and 5 million in the new US in 1800).
England just didn't have infinite amounts of power to contain a rapidly growing colony (with a slight edge in military technology!).
No, what he is saying is that a lot of wealthy people paid little or no tax and became more or less independent of the empire, contributing little and yet exploiting the economic benefits of having a large organised trading empire and powerful military to defend their interests.
In other words, selfish libertarians destroyed empires.
What made them libertarians? They didn't try to reduce the power or extent of the Roman empire. To the contrary, they increased its power and extent in Roman society (because somebody had to pay for that stuff). That's the key violation that means they aren't libertarian, selfish or otherwise.
They also didn't pay for concrete services received. While that's even more a violation for Randian Objectivists (Rand's "going Galt", for example, is basically self-imposed exile from society and the approved means for dealing with a parasitic society), most libertarians don't approve of mooching off the state and their fellow members of society even as a protest.
I believe there is a minority that do believe in excessively using government public goods (a sort of DoS attack, I suppose) in order to end existence of those public goods.