Socialism is a system in which the government has complete ownership of all property. (That socialists will not admit it is another issue.) Capitalism is a system in which a person owns himself and his labor, has the right to trade his labor and property for other things. In other words, he has the right and responsibility to support his own life, which he does not have under socialism.
There's nothing essential about any of telephone, garbage collection, or internet service for the individual. I've gone 2 years without telephone service (1977-1979). I currently drive my garbage 5 miles to the dump once a month. Internet service as a need for people not using it as a base for their business is a joke.
You missed the other issues in your post just as badly, through ignorance and bias.
gmail is already used by TDS Telecom (and I assume others) as the backbone of their email service, so TDS doesn't have to do the work itself. I presume this arrangement is by contract, for fee. It won't disappear without notice (barring Force Majeure). It might, however, become non-free.
The anti-drug zealots tend to attack things that cause people to act in a socially-unacceptable manner (slurred speech, giggling without obvious cause, paranoia, excessive reduction of inhibitions, etc.). Something like hydergine tends to produce no obvious results in a normal healthy person, nor does he feel much different. The symptoms of an overdose are headache or upset stomach. It's hard to attack something so benign when there are so many obvious targets available.
When on Adderall knowledge retention becomes increased ten fold...
The effect on a person who normally has retention above 10% must be startling.
Someone who can recite any line from a book is more likely to be an idiot savant than a genius.
The Wired reference is garbage. Mayan predictions? Million kilovolt transformers? That's a billion volts, into fantasy and beyond. And of course, this is a kdawson story.
I've used a welder's face shield that changes to dark in the presence of UV from welding faster than I can perceive. It changes back to clear when welding stops. Am I missing something that makes this new?
It doesn't take a whole lot of pain -- a good toothache will do it -- to realize that living in continuous pain for the rest of your life (whether that's a month or twenty years) is simply not worth it. A person in severe pain is no good to himself or anyone else; severe pain prevents productivity. Severe pain makes happiness difficult or impossible.
Railing about the legal properties of corporations is attacking a straw man. The problem is that illegal activities caused by an individual in a large organization can be deflected from both the organization and the guilty individual. It is this defect in the law and the judges who misunderstand the law that need to be fixed, not the shorthand that in some respects a corporation is like a person.
It is a fallacy to estimate risk in lending and then charge interest based on this risk. All borrowers that pay on time should get the best rate and those who don't just should be denied the loan.
Banks can look at the data available to them and from that estimate the likelihood that they will make a reasonable return on their money. Within some range, a poorer likelihood that they will get their money back can be compensated by raising the interest rate. You apparently consider it OK that a person be prevented from getting a loan if he exceeds some risk threshold, rather than paying more for that loan. (Or on the other side, you consider it not OK to assign someone a lower interest rate if the likelihood of timely payments is near certainty.)
If your desires were made law, 2 things would happen
The loan industry would become less efficient and cause economic dislocations.
Some firms would skirt the law by such means as charging up-front fees to less credit-worthy borrowers
The nasty irony is that when less credit-worthy borrowers are charged higher interest rates, it increses the likelihood that they will fail. Sigh...
When the market is going up, it keeps going up regularly. When the market confidence is broken thend the market is in crash mode, and the markets go down regularly
This was true until about 2002. Before then you could make nice money buying at the close if the close is up, shorting if it is down. Since then the opposite has been true, but less strongly (based on raw NASDAQ COMPOSITE data ^IXIC from yahoo finance).
My guess is that the increased use of computers by day traders and others has fundamentally changed the way the market operates in the short term.
Having recently read Black Swan, I can say with confidence that his main thesis is that the Gaussian distribution (bell curve) does not match much of reality, including the markets. Late in the book he says (without much clarity or any details) that his technique is to bet on changes being larger than most people think they will be, rather than betting that changes will be in any particular direction.
Taleb undercuts his arguments by disparaging those he disagrees with and using ten paragraphs when one would suffice.
Governments stole the property the roads were built on in the first place. Roads can be privately owned and operated, and in some places they are. I live on one such road. Government taxes to maintain and build roads are generally paid for by fuel taxes (proper to a certain extent), but large portions of this tax are stolen to fund unrelated projects. Roads are but a small portion of government expenses, local, state, and federal. I don't know about my state's expenses, but locally 2/3 goes to schools, which is theft from those who don't use public schools to indoctrinate children generally. Also the federal level, about 2/3 is (unconstitutional) transfers of money from one group to another. I.e. theft.
Alas, McCain, like most Democrats, is either a liar or willfully ignorant of the Laffer Curve. Within reasonable limits, lower taxes increase government income (especially long term), and lower taxes greatly increase private income.
The $35 price you cite for gold was the government-imposed price. When it became legal to own (thanks, pres. Ford) the price rose to about $70. At that time, cheap bread sold for about $0.20 a loaf. It's now about $1.50. Other dollar prices for things not strongly affected by advancing technology are similar. This corresponds to gold at $525, so gold might be almost 2X a reasonable market value, but not the 28X that your post implies.
US gold coins were minted in coins as low as $2.50, 1/8 oz. That's about $125 now, so it's not out of possible investment range. Whether it's wise is a question I'm not competent to judge.
It is an issue. For one thing, propagation velocity in SiO2 is only about half that in vacuum. For another, conductors in an IC are seldom straight.
I've read that the P4 actually had pipeline stages that consisted mostly of the propagation delay from one side of the chip to the other.
A shade tree big enough to provide significant shade will become big enough to cause thousands of dollars of damage when a dead limb (or the whole tree) crashes through the house. Getting a tree surgeon to cut down or trim a damaged tree before it ruins your house also costs thousands of dollars. TANSTAAFL.
The Constitution, for example, prohibits the federal government from abridging the freedom of speech. It says nothing about what individuals may do. There may be laws addressing what individuals may or may not do with regard to abridging freedom of speech, but IT'S NOT IN THE CONSTITUTION.
The words are right there, you should read them before posting ignorantly.
The interstates and government-controlled airports have been and remain massive places of theft and corruption. Can you say "eminent domain"? The true cost analysis of privately funded projects involves acquiring the necessary property honestly. If it can't be done without threatening to use a gun, it shouldn't be done.
Slashdot Mirror
I just read the Bill of Rights. Socialism violates 8 of the 10 amendments in theory, and all 10 in practice.
Socialism is a system in which the government has complete ownership of all property. (That socialists will not admit it is another issue.) Capitalism is a system in which a person owns himself and his labor, has the right to trade his labor and property for other things. In other words, he has the right and responsibility to support his own life, which he does not have under socialism.
General Welfare is written as an explanation of purpose, not as an excuse to be used for whatever you want. See the Federalist Papers.
There's nothing essential about any of telephone, garbage collection, or internet service for the individual. I've gone 2 years without telephone service (1977-1979). I currently drive my garbage 5 miles to the dump once a month. Internet service as a need for people not using it as a base for their business is a joke.
You missed the other issues in your post just as badly, through ignorance and bias.
Kevin Phillips ceased being an honest source about 40 years ago.
Nope, no paranoia here, none whatsoever.
gmail is already used by TDS Telecom (and I assume others) as the backbone of their email service, so TDS doesn't have to do the work itself. I presume this arrangement is by contract, for fee. It won't disappear without notice (barring Force Majeure). It might, however, become non-free.
The anti-drug zealots tend to attack things that cause people to act in a socially-unacceptable manner (slurred speech, giggling without obvious cause, paranoia, excessive reduction of inhibitions, etc.). Something like hydergine tends to produce no obvious results in a normal healthy person, nor does he feel much different. The symptoms of an overdose are headache or upset stomach. It's hard to attack something so benign when there are so many obvious targets available.
The effect on a person who normally has retention above 10% must be startling.
Someone who can recite any line from a book is more likely to be an idiot savant than a genius.
The Wired reference is garbage. Mayan predictions? Million kilovolt transformers? That's a billion volts, into fantasy and beyond. And of course, this is a kdawson story.
I've used a welder's face shield that changes to dark in the presence of UV from welding faster than I can perceive. It changes back to clear when welding stops. Am I missing something that makes this new?
It doesn't take a whole lot of pain -- a good toothache will do it -- to realize that living in continuous pain for the rest of your life (whether that's a month or twenty years) is simply not worth it. A person in severe pain is no good to himself or anyone else; severe pain prevents productivity. Severe pain makes happiness difficult or impossible.
Railing about the legal properties of corporations is attacking a straw man. The problem is that illegal activities caused by an individual in a large organization can be deflected from both the organization and the guilty individual. It is this defect in the law and the judges who misunderstand the law that need to be fixed, not the shorthand that in some respects a corporation is like a person.
Banks can look at the data available to them and from that estimate the likelihood that they will make a reasonable return on their money. Within some range, a poorer likelihood that they will get their money back can be compensated by raising the interest rate. You apparently consider it OK that a person be prevented from getting a loan if he exceeds some risk threshold, rather than paying more for that loan. (Or on the other side, you consider it not OK to assign someone a lower interest rate if the likelihood of timely payments is near certainty.)
If your desires were made law, 2 things would happen
The nasty irony is that when less credit-worthy borrowers are charged higher interest rates, it increses the likelihood that they will fail. Sigh...
This was true until about 2002. Before then you could make nice money buying at the close if the close is up, shorting if it is down. Since then the opposite has been true, but less strongly (based on raw NASDAQ COMPOSITE data ^IXIC from yahoo finance).
My guess is that the increased use of computers by day traders and others has fundamentally changed the way the market operates in the short term.
Having recently read Black Swan, I can say with confidence that his main thesis is that the Gaussian distribution (bell curve) does not match much of reality, including the markets. Late in the book he says (without much clarity or any details) that his technique is to bet on changes being larger than most people think they will be, rather than betting that changes will be in any particular direction.
Taleb undercuts his arguments by disparaging those he disagrees with and using ten paragraphs when one would suffice.
Governments stole the property the roads were built on in the first place. Roads can be privately owned and operated, and in some places they are. I live on one such road. Government taxes to maintain and build roads are generally paid for by fuel taxes (proper to a certain extent), but large portions of this tax are stolen to fund unrelated projects. Roads are but a small portion of government expenses, local, state, and federal. I don't know about my state's expenses, but locally 2/3 goes to schools, which is theft from those who don't use public schools to indoctrinate children generally. Also the federal level, about 2/3 is (unconstitutional) transfers of money from one group to another. I.e. theft.
Alas, McCain, like most Democrats, is either a liar or willfully ignorant of the Laffer Curve. Within reasonable limits, lower taxes increase government income (especially long term), and lower taxes greatly increase private income.
Alas, the Pound is Pound Sterling, i.e. silver. Not gold.
The $35 price you cite for gold was the government-imposed price. When it became legal to own (thanks, pres. Ford) the price rose to about $70. At that time, cheap bread sold for about $0.20 a loaf. It's now about $1.50. Other dollar prices for things not strongly affected by advancing technology are similar. This corresponds to gold at $525, so gold might be almost 2X a reasonable market value, but not the 28X that your post implies.
US gold coins were minted in coins as low as $2.50, 1/8 oz. That's about $125 now, so it's not out of possible investment range. Whether it's wise is a question I'm not competent to judge.
It is an issue. For one thing, propagation velocity in SiO2 is only about half that in vacuum. For another, conductors in an IC are seldom straight.
I've read that the P4 actually had pipeline stages that consisted mostly of the propagation delay from one side of the chip to the other.
A shade tree big enough to provide significant shade will become big enough to cause thousands of dollars of damage when a dead limb (or the whole tree) crashes through the house. Getting a tree surgeon to cut down or trim a damaged tree before it ruins your house also costs thousands of dollars. TANSTAAFL.
The Constitution, for example, prohibits the federal government from abridging the freedom of speech. It says nothing about what individuals may do. There may be laws addressing what individuals may or may not do with regard to abridging freedom of speech, but IT'S NOT IN THE CONSTITUTION. The words are right there, you should read them before posting ignorantly.
Pointy sticks to spear the space trash.
The interstates and government-controlled airports have been and remain massive places of theft and corruption. Can you say "eminent domain"? The true cost analysis of privately funded projects involves acquiring the necessary property honestly. If it can't be done without threatening to use a gun, it shouldn't be done.