More importantly, why should it matter? If they want to do something dumb like have a competitor on their board, they should be free to make that dumb mistake. How does it become a legal matter, unless fraud or a breach of contract occurred?
to keep it simple for those who don't get global warming, most people don't understand that icecaps melting/receeding like they have been lately is not at all a normal part of our weather patterns.
On the contrary, this is quite normal. Ice caps expand and recede all the time and have been for centuries. As MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen pointed out in WSJ today, you're discarding a well-established understanding of the history of the planet by making that claim.
Except that individual neurons have tens of thousands of possible connections to other neurons, and continually morph and change those connections. That's impossible to do on a rigid piece of hardware.
MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen has long made these claims about global warming researchers, as he discusses in a talk from a few weeks ago: "Cooler Heads". It looks like he's slowly being vindicated in his views of both the researchers and the conclusions.
so, if you have a "right" to free speech, that makes all the media workers slaves?
You misunderstand the right to free speech. It doesn't mean you get to go on anyone's property and say whatever you want, or go onto a TV show and say whatever you want without any threat of being kicked off the property. A speech is made at some location - it doesn't occur in a vacuum (heh). What free speech means is that your speech alone is not an initiation of force, provided of course that the speech is not libelous, fraudulent, or threatening.
if you have the right to a fiat trial, that makes all the lawyers slaves?
Well, the lawyer would be funded by the state, and the lawyer is free to quit. So no.
Well if they are allowed to quit, then broadband isn't a right, so the claim that it is a right is an empty claim or just a lie. My original post stands.
Actually, you can just diet. I tried this myself by cutting off all the exercise I had been doing, and trying simply to cut carbs from my diet - bread, pasta, sugar. I dropped 20 lbs in a few weeks, and another 10 lbs over the next couple months. Of course, getting to the point that I could trust that such a thing was healthy for my body required disintegrating the major misconceptions about diet - that eating fat makes you fat, and that an obese person can sustainably reduce caloric intake without changing the content of their diet.
Are you even paying attention to what we're talking about?
Turning your brain off doesn't make problems go away. We're talking about ISPs with government-granted monopolies supported by the restriction against the creation of competition.
Kant's morality is just as arbitrary and immaterial as a morality grounded in God.
The moment I ask you why I should follow the categorical imperative as my moral system, you will have to resort to either blind faith ("well, because!") or another moral system for justification ("because if you don't, then X Y Z will happen, and that's bad because...").
The only non-arbitrary moral system is one grounded in the nature of man, that answers fundamental questions like "why be moral?", "what is the standard of value?", etc, without resorting to a moral system in order to answer those questions (ie, leading to circular reasoning).
As an example of the disconnect between Kant's morality and the nature of value, which is derived from the fundamental existential alternative faced by living things - life or death - I need only mention his conclusion that if lying to a friend or innocent person is wrong, then lying to a murderer or madman in order to save your life is also wrong. A friend recently wrote a great commentary on this - I'll quote the relevant bits:
When Plato and Kant argue that a principle is "objective" and "absolute," they mean that they know that the principle applies in any and every context, even contexts that are still-unknown to everyone and possibly never-to-be-known-by-anyone. That is a logical contradiction; one cannot know of the applicability of a principle in a context that is unknown and was never known to anyone. In short, the Platonist argues that for a principle to be absolute, its applicability must transcend context. Immanuel Kant said that if it is true that it is ethically wrong to lie to someone who always tries to help you, then it is ethically wrong to lie to a murderer when he asks you for information that he will use in the commission of murder. Many people properly find Kant's "absolutist" argument repugnant, but they do not doubt Kant's insistence that there can be no logical interpretation of "absolute" except Kant's. Again, because they assume that no definition but the Platonic/Kantian one can be valid, most people conclude that "absolute" is useless in real life.
Actually, a principle can be absolute, but its absoluteness is confined to context. That conclusion is consistent with Objectivism. First, we start with reality. The facts that are, are. The facts, as they are, are what we have to work with. They are the starting point in any and every decision. "The context" refers to the facts surrounding the area of discussion, inquiry, or decision to be made. Context means "an accounting of all the facts that are relevant to the current inquiry, discussion, or decision being focused on." These facts include metaphysically-given facts and man-made facts. The facts of reality precede any decision, and any rational decision is made according to a reading of the facts. That reading of facts is the context. That is why a rational decision cannot be made while ignoring the context.
It is the context itself that necessitates that a decision be made, and also determines the extent to which the decision, once made, will have beneficial effects. The context likewise influences the likelihood that the decision will produce the consequences that the decision-maker intended. To the extent that one wants one's decision to be rational, the decision must be adapted to the context. And any and every normative prescription is such a decision that cannot be made except within a context. Hence, a normative principle cannot be rationally applied "in transcendence of context"; it is the context that sets the stage for the normative principle. As the "context" is the sum of the facts pertinent to the decision, the normative principle's applicability is unable to transcend the context for the same reason that the normal principle's applicability is unable to transcend the facts of reality.
A moral principle is a principle that can be repeatedly applied within a certain context, and,
First, the top 5 percent own more than half -- i.e., the majority -- of all wealth.
I am certainly glad to have their services, then. There would not be a need for a person in IT without the creation of all the infrastructure to support it.
Second, most of those stocks in middle-class retirement funds are not owned by those middle-class people, they're owned by the Wall Street financial services corporations, and so are controlled by the boards of those corporations. The account holders are customers, not owners.
And they benefit from the services of those corporations. Wealth is created and transfered to them.
The resources used for economic production -- land, natural resources, factories, money, ideas (copyrights and patents) -- all are privately owned and controlled.
If only that were the case. Unfortunately for us, there are huge tracts of government-owned property, leading to the pollution of lakes and contamination of a valuable food supply. Fishing on Lake Erie, for example, means that I can only safely eat a couple servings of perch a week.
But more than that, as a person of strong ethical character I see few ways to accumulate large amounts of wealth that don't involve unethical behavior.
Strong ethical character, maybe, but little ingenuity. Certainly for many people, theft is the only way to get rich. Other people actually create wealth, rather than take it.
They take some risk of not getting their money back, but so do people at the blackjack table.
They take on the risk that you do not want to take on. Or would you like your everyday transactions to be a gamble?
We don't consider them virtuous.
I do. Now there are certainly people with money who got that money through political corruption - all the more reason to curb the power of politicians. But for the countless folks at the top who actually create wealth, I am glad they do. They make my type of job exist.
The average American worker creates about $93,000 worth of value a year. Do they receive a salary that reflects that? Nope.
How could they? If they did, then they wouldn't create as much wealth. See, in order to create wealth, you have to take less value (money) and turn it into more.
gets a job that pays $hundreds of thousands per year (or millions) because of who they/their parents know
If that's the only reason they got that job, then that company is putting themselves at ridiculous risk. They will likely fail in their dumb decision to hire relatives with no actual experience. Let them fail. Your point?
Capitalism is not the automatic win that the "laissez-faire" crowd presents it as
The "win" is not in the end result being to everyone's liking. The "win" is in the fact that everyone is left free to make his own choices and succeed or fail by them.
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly, why should it matter? If they want to do something dumb like have a competitor on their board, they should be free to make that dumb mistake. How does it become a legal matter, unless fraud or a breach of contract occurred?
Was there an argument in there somewhere?
to keep it simple for those who don't get global warming, most people don't understand that icecaps melting/receeding like they have been lately is not at all a normal part of our weather patterns.
On the contrary, this is quite normal. Ice caps expand and recede all the time and have been for centuries. As MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen pointed out in WSJ today, you're discarding a well-established understanding of the history of the planet by making that claim.
You obviously have not been reading everything about this subject or the related information.
I think you should go back and start from the beginning.
I think you've missed a lot and are quite obviously upset for lack of what was missed.
Your statements are making me sick to my stomach... I think I'll go to the bathroom and use the three seashells.
No more source for handouts => No more handouts => No more incentive to ask for handouts => No more lobbyists.
invoking postsynaptic potentials within a programmable radius.
So basically some of the simulation is still software-side, then.
Except that individual neurons have tens of thousands of possible connections to other neurons, and continually morph and change those connections. That's impossible to do on a rigid piece of hardware.
End the FCC.
Some people try to claim there is a scientific "consensus" that we landed on the moon.
A "scientific" consensus that an event occur 40 years ago??? I don't think that word means what you think it means.
And now to destroy your claim of "consensus", MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen from a few weeks ago.
MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen has long made these claims about global warming researchers, as he discusses in a talk from a few weeks ago: "Cooler Heads". It looks like he's slowly being vindicated in his views of both the researchers and the conclusions.
The stimulus funding shouldn't have occurred.
There, corrected that for ya.
so, if you have a "right" to free speech, that makes all the media workers slaves?
You misunderstand the right to free speech. It doesn't mean you get to go on anyone's property and say whatever you want, or go onto a TV show and say whatever you want without any threat of being kicked off the property. A speech is made at some location - it doesn't occur in a vacuum (heh). What free speech means is that your speech alone is not an initiation of force, provided of course that the speech is not libelous, fraudulent, or threatening.
if you have the right to a fiat trial, that makes all the lawyers slaves?
Well, the lawyer would be funded by the state, and the lawyer is free to quit. So no.
Well if they are allowed to quit, then broadband isn't a right, so the claim that it is a right is an empty claim or just a lie. My original post stands.
...then broadband employees are necessarily slaves.
A bigger threat than terrorists is arbitrary government restriction on competition in the electric grid, which is what led to the rolling blackouts in California.
In any case, this winter could be bad - probably a good time to get a generator.
Actually, you can just diet. I tried this myself by cutting off all the exercise I had been doing, and trying simply to cut carbs from my diet - bread, pasta, sugar. I dropped 20 lbs in a few weeks, and another 10 lbs over the next couple months. Of course, getting to the point that I could trust that such a thing was healthy for my body required disintegrating the major misconceptions about diet - that eating fat makes you fat, and that an obese person can sustainably reduce caloric intake without changing the content of their diet.
Are you even paying attention to what we're talking about?
Turning your brain off doesn't make problems go away. We're talking about ISPs with government-granted monopolies supported by the restriction against the creation of competition.
It means a government-induced monopoly. No competition can exist because it is illegal to build on these public "properties".
The moment I ask you why I should follow the categorical imperative as my moral system, you will have to resort to either blind faith ("well, because!") or another moral system for justification ("because if you don't, then X Y Z will happen, and that's bad because...").
The only non-arbitrary moral system is one grounded in the nature of man, that answers fundamental questions like "why be moral?", "what is the standard of value?", etc, without resorting to a moral system in order to answer those questions (ie, leading to circular reasoning).
As an example of the disconnect between Kant's morality and the nature of value, which is derived from the fundamental existential alternative faced by living things - life or death - I need only mention his conclusion that if lying to a friend or innocent person is wrong, then lying to a murderer or madman in order to save your life is also wrong. A friend recently wrote a great commentary on this - I'll quote the relevant bits:
When Plato and Kant argue that a principle is "objective" and "absolute," they mean that they know that the principle applies in any and every context, even contexts that are still-unknown to everyone and possibly never-to-be-known-by-anyone. That is a logical contradiction; one cannot know of the applicability of a principle in a context that is unknown and was never known to anyone. In short, the Platonist argues that for a principle to be absolute, its applicability must transcend context. Immanuel Kant said that if it is true that it is ethically wrong to lie to someone who always tries to help you, then it is ethically wrong to lie to a murderer when he asks you for information that he will use in the commission of murder. Many people properly find Kant's "absolutist" argument repugnant, but they do not doubt Kant's insistence that there can be no logical interpretation of "absolute" except Kant's. Again, because they assume that no definition but the Platonic/Kantian one can be valid, most people conclude that "absolute" is useless in real life.
Actually, a principle can be absolute, but its absoluteness is confined to context. That conclusion is consistent with Objectivism. First, we start with reality. The facts that are, are. The facts, as they are, are what we have to work with. They are the starting point in any and every decision. "The context" refers to the facts surrounding the area of discussion, inquiry, or decision to be made. Context means "an accounting of all the facts that are relevant to the current inquiry, discussion, or decision being focused on." These facts include metaphysically-given facts and man-made facts. The facts of reality precede any decision, and any rational decision is made according to a reading of the facts. That reading of facts is the context. That is why a rational decision cannot be made while ignoring the context.
It is the context itself that necessitates that a decision be made, and also determines the extent to which the decision, once made, will have beneficial effects. The context likewise influences the likelihood that the decision will produce the consequences that the decision-maker intended. To the extent that one wants one's decision to be rational, the decision must be adapted to the context. And any and every normative prescription is such a decision that cannot be made except within a context. Hence, a normative principle cannot be rationally applied "in transcendence of context"; it is the context that sets the stage for the normative principle. As the "context" is the sum of the facts pertinent to the decision, the normative principle's applicability is unable to transcend the context for the same reason that the normal principle's applicability is unable to transcend the facts of reality.
A moral principle is a principle that can be repeatedly applied within a certain context, and,
First, the top 5 percent own more than half -- i.e., the majority -- of all wealth.
I am certainly glad to have their services, then. There would not be a need for a person in IT without the creation of all the infrastructure to support it.
Second, most of those stocks in middle-class retirement funds are not owned by those middle-class people, they're owned by the Wall Street financial services corporations, and so are controlled by the boards of those corporations. The account holders are customers, not owners.
And they benefit from the services of those corporations. Wealth is created and transfered to them.
The resources used for economic production -- land, natural resources, factories, money, ideas (copyrights and patents) -- all are privately owned and controlled.
If only that were the case. Unfortunately for us, there are huge tracts of government-owned property, leading to the pollution of lakes and contamination of a valuable food supply. Fishing on Lake Erie, for example, means that I can only safely eat a couple servings of perch a week.
But more than that, as a person of strong ethical character I see few ways to accumulate large amounts of wealth that don't involve unethical behavior.
Strong ethical character, maybe, but little ingenuity. Certainly for many people, theft is the only way to get rich. Other people actually create wealth, rather than take it.
They take some risk of not getting their money back, but so do people at the blackjack table.
They take on the risk that you do not want to take on. Or would you like your everyday transactions to be a gamble?
We don't consider them virtuous.
I do. Now there are certainly people with money who got that money through political corruption - all the more reason to curb the power of politicians. But for the countless folks at the top who actually create wealth, I am glad they do. They make my type of job exist.
The average American worker creates about $93,000 worth of value a year. Do they receive a salary that reflects that? Nope.
How could they? If they did, then they wouldn't create as much wealth. See, in order to create wealth, you have to take less value (money) and turn it into more.
gets a job that pays $hundreds of thousands per year (or millions) because of who they/their parents know
If that's the only reason they got that job, then that company is putting themselves at ridiculous risk. They will likely fail in their dumb decision to hire relatives with no actual experience. Let them fail. Your point?
Capitalism is not the automatic win that the "laissez-faire" crowd presents it as
The "win" is not in the end result being to everyone's liking. The "win" is in the fact that everyone is left free to make his own choices and succeed or fail by them.
"They don't understand that if they start to tax me so that I'm paying 60%, 55%, I'll stop."
Who is John Galt?