"Win98" and "a long time ago" have no business being remotely close to each other -- when we're talking programming language lineages, many of the developments still interesting today happened between the 60s and the 80s, and some (LISP) date back to the 50s.
You're right about the schools -- of my friends with kids, a good many live up north, and the rest largely have their children in charter schools. It's a self-perpetuating problem, to a substantial degree -- if parents who care avoid an area's schools, that's not going to do them any good -- but... yes, a problem to be sure.
Braise is the next block over from me (I'm on the other side of the adjoining block with the Lance Armstrong Foundation), and I have a few friends in that complex -- both of them artists with tech careers and no kids. (One is a web developer in her day job, currently stage managing Medea[1] playing over at City Theater for the rest of this month -- if y'all are looking for something to do some evening, I strongly recommend it. The other was a medical artist on my team several startups ago, who today is acting in a position very much like dev manager for what remains of that company's Austin offices... a long story for a different day).
In any event -- do be well!
[1] The Greek tragedy, not the Tyler Perry tragedy.
I live in Austin, which is only in infancy when it comes to ridiculous urban planning and management and housing inflation. I make 6 figures as does my wife, yet we can't justify (we can afford, but can't justify) living anywhere within a 10 mile radius of downtown.
Might I suggest you haven't looked very hard?
(Posting from the Pedernales condos on East 6th; constructed in 2005, bought in at $125K; HOA fee @ $175/mo including water, gas, trash, Internet; huge shared lawn big enough for the dogs to run in, active sense of community with the neighbors, close enough to downtown to get around by bicycle and generally a great place to live).
I use it everyday, what glorious features is it missing that older IDE's had.
To start with? paredit mode.
And to end with, for that matter -- when I'm writing LISP, anything without that one feature is completely and utterly unusable. And a REPL, and a good alternative to SLIME (for very tight integration between the IDE and that REPL)... though really, those features don't even make much sense when you aren't in a functional-programming world -- it's harder to swap stateful objects in a live instance than it is to hotload new versions of stateless functions (or just experiment with them interactively, leaving old versions bound to your namespaces until you're ready -- immutability makes all kinds of things feasible which would be unthinkable in an OO world where one has to think about state).
There are plenty of features which existed in system-image-centric language/runtime tools (a la Smalltalk) back in the day that don't exist any longer today, too -- look at the kind of integration Smalltalk tools used to have between the dev environment and the application instance under development. They went away for fairly good reasons IMHO -- but still: features, used to be commonplace, gone now.
Visual Studio may well be "the best IDE" for your own purposes -- but to be that without qualification, it has to be best for everyone. The world is full of people who aren't you.
Let me give you an example: I can tie into a running QA system remotely over a socket, interactively ask it "what would *this* call do if *this function* were replaced with *this other implementation*?", get a result (thus far without impacting behavior for any other users), tweak and retest that code without any compilation phases involved anywhere in the loop, and then decide to bind the new version to be exposed to other users once I've got it right. There's limited live patching support available in Visual Studio, yes, but it pales before what can be done with a good LISP.
At 30+ tabs it is unmanageable as you spend more time tab cycling trying to figure out which one is where etc.
That's a matter of using the right interface -- I use Vimperator, and (with its keyboardable, search-centric interface) don't have trouble juggling 150+ tabs. The "where" of them -- in terms of ordering the list -- is completely irrelevant; if I want a page about foo, I type bFoo<tab> and get a compact list of which pages regarding Foo I have open, and can select them by typing the number for the appropriate one, further narrowing my search terms and pressing tab again (as with shell filename completion), etc.
And I'm pointing out that the same is true in the existing "ERs may not turn anybody away" model -- it's all just shades of grey, and drawing the line at "any paying for others' bad choices is unacceptable" means that the current system isn't acceptable either.
Incidentally -- the same thing is also true of private medical insurance as well; you're paying for the bad choices of people you share the risk pool with.
A major reason prices are skyrocketing is because almost nobody actually pays directly for healthcare. When somebody else picks up the tab, very few people bother to notice the price.
The "somebody else" surely notices -- and it's not as if insurance companies have no lobbying ability or market power.
Then perhaps healthcare shouldn't be a public burden. Why should anyone pay for anyone else's life choices?
Just to be sure we're clear -- are you saying you want to live somewhere the emergency rooms turn people away?
The options are two: remove public healthcare or remove the choices.
I'm not really sure that it's fair to characterize "ensuring that the costs of the choices have would-be externalities incorporated rather than passed on to others" as "removing the choices". Does make a better sound bite, though.
Interesting. I'm not sure what is cool about this then.
I can only think that you haven't looked at the demo videos - any of them.
Giving you the results of code execution, live, as you work?
Determining the codepaths traversed to fill out a template, and putting the specific models, controllers, views, and other related methods right in front of you -- no bouncing between files?
Giving you tools to render your live display into an IDE pane, so you can actually play your game, show your web interface, &c. as you edit the code that builds those things?
There's lots that's cool about Light Table, and none of it has anything to do with autocompletion.
What does it take to get that liquid hydrogen in the first place. I bet this is as environmentally friendly as the process to make all the batteries in hybrid vehicles.
Funny thing -- the higher-end batteries (NiCd, LiPO) aren't all that environmentally unfriendly. It's the cheap lead-acid ones (which happen to be widely used in Chinese electric scooters) that are pretty nasty.
And what it takes... really depends on the approach taken. I mean, splitting hydrogen out from water is something I'd expect every child who graduated primary school to have done in science class, though there's been plenty of work on more efficient approaches. (Not that it doesn't require plenty of energy... but again, that's a matter of where folks choose to get that energy from; if it's solar, hydro, responsible nuclear, &c...)
Apparently you haven't tried to ride a train in the US recently. I've recently priced a trip from the east to west coast and the train was both more expensive and took longer than going by car. Granted we were taking 5+ people, so YMMV if you're travelling alone.
Also varies by what kind of train and where you are -- here in austin.tx.us, if you're lucky enough to live and work in places where our single little commuter rail line is convenient, it's not only cheaper than gas for a typical (22mpg) passenger vehicle (and that's before repair/insurance/etc factors in), it's cheaper than the bus as well.
The fine would be $150,000, because statutory damages don't care how trivial the infringement is. Still dwarfed by the legal fees for getting to that point, of course.
$150K is the maximum statutory damages, and that maximum can be reached only with willful infringement. The typical range is $750-$30K, with the ability to reduce to a bare minimum of $200 if the defendant was unaware of the infringement.
Huh? No decompilation needed -- it's an API, not an implementation -- and Google's implementation of those specific APIs is certainly compatible (any parts which aren't compatible... also aren't part of the legal case!).
Certainly this makes a huge difference to the rest of the world -- just to choose one particular corner, look at how many products are API-compatible with Amazon S3 or EC2.
It needn't be a cure for HIV; if people believe a prospective partner is clean they're more likely to go bare.
Because that's the only STD in circulation?
Incidents of AIDS may go down (and hurrah for that), but I don't really want HSV, HPV, and all the rest to become more common in turn. My significant other and I may be extremely cautious when sleeping with anyone else (heck, we're extremely cautious with each other, despite having current, clean across-the-board results), but a higher-risk environment is just that, precautions or no.
Maybe you're coming from somewhere with good mass transit, or you're so accustomed to having your own motor vehicle that you assume everyone else has one too... but having done the car-free living bit in a city without decent transit (Texas), nothing that requires getting to a government office within business hours is easy, and I'm lucky enough to have flexible work hours (which not everyone does). Heck, getting to my bank is a royal pain, and I can see it from my office -- but there are two major highways between here and there, and the places where they can be safely crossed add miles to the trip.
Much of this bloat is in the kernel, which even if built fully modular now has so many hooks and semi-optionals that you can't run a normal distro on minimal hardware.
Pardon? There are still a lot of companies centered around using the Linux kernel in embedded space (albeit, in the smaller cases, with a very different userland -- ucLibc, busybox, etc). If it runs your $60 router and your $100 phone, last-decade's desktop is going to be fine... at least as far as the kernel is concerned.
Now, if you were telling me that the basic userland was getting bloated, I might believe you there -- there are fewer people with a vested financial interest and a lot of kernel developers on staff actively working on keeping it tiny.
If that was the case then the judge would say assume the whole API is not copyrightable. The fact that the judge wanted to assume this shows he does believe the api is copyrightable probably after receiving a dinner in a luxury hotel for a private education tutorial from Oracle.
I would hazard you haven't been following this closely.
The judge has been asking the parties for additional briefings on the issue, and asking some very hard questions of Oracle -- questions which make it clear that he groks the subject matter.
Doing it in this order will reduce the surface open for appeal -- if there's a jury finding that Google didn't infringe even in a world where APIs were copyrightable, then the question of law is moot and not open for challenge. If there's a jury finding that Google did infringe, then the question of law is the single, clear point on which the case -- and any appeals -- will rest. Doing things differently would have led to far more ambiguity; what the judge is doing in this case is smart.
I dare you to tell me a single religion that has not used to made money from the stup... believers.
The less-organized ones might be a place to start on that. Some of my good friends identify as Dischordians -- if you believe Dischordianism literally you're explicitly Doing It Wrong, but there is a gestalt to be from the same, making it able to be reasonably interpreted as something more than the joke it appears on its face. (Also, having a religion which can only be adhered to if one is able to grok non-literal subtext filters out a certain element in the populace... one which I think you may be taking to be the entire set of religious adherents).
I have another close friend who closely adheres to a niche religion the original form of which predates Christianity substantially. Inasmuch as there are physical objects involved in its practice (garb, totems), money may change hands from those with the skill to create them themselves and those that can't (and she's just as often a member of the former set)... but frankly, I'm not sure that that's evidence of a scam: There's no promise of salvation or threat of hellfire; in short, no coercion that isn't present in someone spending their money on saltwater aquariums or homebrewing. What makes a freely-chosen, noncoercive religion a "scam" when a freely-chosen, noncoercive hobby isn't?
Notably, both of these religions generally don't require or support prostelyzation, which doesn't quite fit to your thesis, either -- a good money-making scam encourages people to rope in their friends and children, too, right?
Oracle went total asshole, but I don't believe they can pull off that API copyrighting stuff.
There's a good chance they can -- the jury's instructions were to assume that structure and organization are copyrightable elements, with the judge to decide later whether this is actually true. So -- it'll be down to Judge Willium Alsup to make this determination (and then, of course, the various appeals courts to decide if they agree).
Indeed, Europe doesn't allow this... and good for them. Sadly, I'm on the side of the pond where it's still an open question.
If you make a Java ripoff and not be very diligent in your chinese wall cloning efforts, then you probably do have something to worry about.
Have you actually followed Oracle v. Google?
The amount of "Chinese wall" breakage is minuscule -- the rangeCheck function and a bunch of *Impl files which were only ever used in the test suite and which never made it into any shipping phone. The jury is likely to decide that this copying is de minimis, and thus excusable, and even if they don't, good luck showing substantial damages from it.
The place where Oracle is placing their stand isn't on claims that Google got their clean-room development procedures wrong, but on a claim that the APIs themselves are copyrighted, and thereby that anything built to be compatible with them necessarily infringes. That's a very different ballgame, and a much more dangerous claim.
You make a well-reasoned point -- if we accept as a principal that no person can morally advocate a position which may require more sacrifice of others than they are willing to make themselves, the proposed consequent clearly follows.
This principal has merit, and I decline to accept it into my own moral calculus only because if this were the rule, nothing would get done. Consider the case of California, where bills which require spending have only the typical level of political difficulty attached but taxation bills are exceedingly difficult; the result of this well-intentioned effort to require a higher bar of public participation is real harm to real people.
At a federal level, similarly -- we have a tax-and-spend party and a borrow-and-spend party; making it harder to tax means more borrowing, and maintaining ideals which would in practice cause harm to others down the road is something I decline to do (having a great deal of experience at it in the past, but that's a separate discussion).
I acknowledge that there's an argument to be made that ideals should be constructed in a vacuum without acknowledgement of their real-world effects, and I understand if you think I'm allowing my moral calculus to be influenced by factors which should play no part -- but I've made peace with my reasoning as it is, and gave up my reasoning as it was only after a great deal of time and introspection; a seemingly fair and reasonable position is less so if its indirect effects cause people harm.
So -- I think I understand your position better (as something better-founded than mere political posturing), and hope that you have at least a bit more understanding of mine, even if we aren't moving much. Good discussion?:)
Not really. Dubious justification doesn't make people less angry at the taxes.
Sadly, it does. Not people who are paying attention, maybe, but there are few enough of those that they don't matter quite so much.
(Yes, "sadly" -- the US has a severe revenue problem compared to its peers, but I'd very much prefer that discussion was open and rational about how much things cost. See the perception that roads are paid for by use taxes -- it's quite untrue (barely 51% of highways, and often 0% of city streets, are funded by gas taxes, vehicle registrations and the like), but it also leads to effective subsidization, as it's easier to get the public to accept spending on something when they think it's being paid by users thereof).
The state and attitude of the taxing body is shiftiness. It is political sleight of hand.
When did a taxing entity have an attitude at all? I fully agree that what we're discussing here is slight-of-hand, but it's slight-of-hand perpetrated by voters and the politicians they elect... not, in the large, the public employees hired to implement the policies said voters and politicians put into place.
For a guy who has harped on the value of recognizing equivalency, you sure are keen on equating topics undeservedly.
I'll be honest -- I don't see the boundaries you're talking about here; in my worldview, they simply don't exist, and I'm having a lot of trouble trying to figure out where you're coming from.
I'll grant that this does make me a bit hypocritical myself... but I really am trying.
There is no way to evenly redistribute the wealth. Not in the real world in which we live, but apparently we only live there when it suits you.
Would only perfectly fair redistribution satisfy you? I'll certainly grant that such perfection isn't possible (heck, even a perfectly fair voting system is provably impossible when given a sufficient set of common-sense criteria for fairness), but policy that isn't utterly corrupt (ie. narrowly written to favor specific individuals) can often get into a state that's moderately close.
Making an argument about the good of society, but acting in one's own self-interest is certainly rational. That means nothing about the hypocrisy about the presenter of the argument. The act is not compatible with the argument.
I don't argue with anything you say in the above-quoted section, only as to its applicability.
You're talking about emotional states of the taxed but then carry on about practices that demonstrate the emotional states of the taxing body.
To the contrary, practices by the taxing body intended to cater to the emotional state of the taxed.
Then about marketing, as if that were equivalent to taxation.
In the Real World, in which we live, being able to market public policy is absolutely critical to its implementation. An idea with no chance whatsoever of being passed into law is useless.
You arguing that everybody should sacrifice absolute wealth, as long as you don't sacrifice relative social standing is hypocritical. Redistribution of wealth will affect somebody's relative social standing.
Uneven redistribution I would grant you. That said, do you remember the point I made early on, about how people compare themselves to others within their peer group? Keeping the ratio roughly even within given social circles thus minimizes this impact. Asking a lone individual to sacrifice without other members of their peer group doing the same does not.
If you would allow social standing in, you would need for fairness sake to also allow other subjects like emotional state.
Oooh, a slippery slope argument!
That said -- if you think tax policy isn't, in practice, calibrated towards minimizing the impact on emotional state of those being taxed (providing perceived justification by claiming status as usage fees even when dubious; reducing visibility via withholding mechanism as opposed to explicit outflows; etc), I have a bridge to sell you. While I don't altogether agree with the FairTax, for instance, the number of people who object to eliminating the tax-free status of unprepared food items (despite the proposal's cost-of-living rebate providing a compelling alternative) demonstrate the importance of emotional responses in crafting policy for public acceptance.
We live in the real world, here. If a proposed change to tax policy is going to actually take place, gut-feel to those considering the proposal is important. Likewise, if someone feels like their standing relative to their peer group will be changed by a policy proposal, this is more than a little relevant to their level of likely support.
Second, once any one person has come to the conclusion that everybody/some segment of the population should pay more, the strongest argument that person can make is to put up and pay more. End of story. Anything less than that hurts the argument that everybody should pay more. There are no morals involved. It is short, clear evidence that the person does not believe enough in their argument to live it, right now. Why their belief falters may or may not mitigate the injury to the argument. But it will never eliminate the injury to the argument.
The "injury" is only there in the eyes of those unwilling to appreciate nuance. I can argue that I'm willing to sacrifice Thing A but not Thing B -- and if the only option immediately available to me is to sacrifice both things A and B together, I can choose not to do that in complete consistency with my stated views.
Claims of "Thing B doesn't exist!" or "Thing B has no place in this discussion!" are frankly unhelpful at persuading those not already in your camp unless coupled with arguments designed to appeal to people whose prior views acknowledge Thing B as pertinent.
Social standing has zero place in a discussion about taxation.
You make that big, black-and-white dismissive stance -- but can you really defend it?
Taxation, after all, is about what people give up to benefit society as a whole. You make a sweeping claim that giving up buying power and giving up social standing are utterly unrelated -- but both are relevant to a discussion of human willingness to sacrifice for the greater good.
If you want to make a moral argument... well, frankly, I don't have the time or inclination to care what your morals are. I care what my morals are, and those of the people I deal with, but trying to synchronize moral stances with random strangers is an effort which could easily consume a lifetime... and if I wanted to spend mine that way, I'd have chosen an entirely different calling. So, let's have the argument we can have without synchronizing on morals -- one based on practical matters of what is and isn't politically or socially feasible.
If we're talking about feasibility, then we care about what people are actually willing to accept in practice. If we're talking about what people are actually willing to accept in practice, then psychological experiments and game theory are tremendously relevant. If you want a discussion centered on your personal ethics, by contrast, you'll do better to start by finding someone who them -- and give up on being able to convince those that don't.
Slashdot Mirror
"Win98" and "a long time ago" have no business being remotely close to each other -- when we're talking programming language lineages, many of the developments still interesting today happened between the 60s and the 80s, and some (LISP) date back to the 50s.
Now get off my lawn!
You're right about the schools -- of my friends with kids, a good many live up north, and the rest largely have their children in charter schools. It's a self-perpetuating problem, to a substantial degree -- if parents who care avoid an area's schools, that's not going to do them any good -- but... yes, a problem to be sure.
Braise is the next block over from me (I'm on the other side of the adjoining block with the Lance Armstrong Foundation), and I have a few friends in that complex -- both of them artists with tech careers and no kids. (One is a web developer in her day job, currently stage managing Medea[1] playing over at City Theater for the rest of this month -- if y'all are looking for something to do some evening, I strongly recommend it. The other was a medical artist on my team several startups ago, who today is acting in a position very much like dev manager for what remains of that company's Austin offices... a long story for a different day).
In any event -- do be well!
[1] The Greek tragedy, not the Tyler Perry tragedy.
Might I suggest you haven't looked very hard?
(Posting from the Pedernales condos on East 6th; constructed in 2005, bought in at $125K; HOA fee @ $175/mo including water, gas, trash, Internet; huge shared lawn big enough for the dogs to run in, active sense of community with the neighbors, close enough to downtown to get around by bicycle and generally a great place to live).
To start with? paredit mode.
And to end with, for that matter -- when I'm writing LISP, anything without that one feature is completely and utterly unusable. And a REPL, and a good alternative to SLIME (for very tight integration between the IDE and that REPL)... though really, those features don't even make much sense when you aren't in a functional-programming world -- it's harder to swap stateful objects in a live instance than it is to hotload new versions of stateless functions (or just experiment with them interactively, leaving old versions bound to your namespaces until you're ready -- immutability makes all kinds of things feasible which would be unthinkable in an OO world where one has to think about state).
There are plenty of features which existed in system-image-centric language/runtime tools (a la Smalltalk) back in the day that don't exist any longer today, too -- look at the kind of integration Smalltalk tools used to have between the dev environment and the application instance under development. They went away for fairly good reasons IMHO -- but still: features, used to be commonplace, gone now.
Visual Studio may well be "the best IDE" for your own purposes -- but to be that without qualification, it has to be best for everyone. The world is full of people who aren't you.
Let me give you an example: I can tie into a running QA system remotely over a socket, interactively ask it "what would *this* call do if *this function* were replaced with *this other implementation*?", get a result (thus far without impacting behavior for any other users), tweak and retest that code without any compilation phases involved anywhere in the loop, and then decide to bind the new version to be exposed to other users once I've got it right. There's limited live patching support available in Visual Studio, yes, but it pales before what can be done with a good LISP.
That's a matter of using the right interface -- I use Vimperator, and (with its keyboardable, search-centric interface) don't have trouble juggling 150+ tabs. The "where" of them -- in terms of ordering the list -- is completely irrelevant; if I want a page about foo, I type bFoo<tab> and get a compact list of which pages regarding Foo I have open, and can select them by typing the number for the appropriate one, further narrowing my search terms and pressing tab again (as with shell filename completion), etc.
And I'm pointing out that the same is true in the existing "ERs may not turn anybody away" model -- it's all just shades of grey, and drawing the line at "any paying for others' bad choices is unacceptable" means that the current system isn't acceptable either.
Incidentally -- the same thing is also true of private medical insurance as well; you're paying for the bad choices of people you share the risk pool with.
The "somebody else" surely notices -- and it's not as if insurance companies have no lobbying ability or market power.
Just to be sure we're clear -- are you saying you want to live somewhere the emergency rooms turn people away?
I'm not really sure that it's fair to characterize "ensuring that the costs of the choices have would-be externalities incorporated rather than passed on to others" as "removing the choices". Does make a better sound bite, though.
I can only think that you haven't looked at the demo videos - any of them.
Giving you the results of code execution, live, as you work?
Determining the codepaths traversed to fill out a template, and putting the specific models, controllers, views, and other related methods right in front of you -- no bouncing between files?
Giving you tools to render your live display into an IDE pane, so you can actually play your game, show your web interface, &c. as you edit the code that builds those things?
There's lots that's cool about Light Table, and none of it has anything to do with autocompletion.
Funny thing -- the higher-end batteries (NiCd, LiPO) aren't all that environmentally unfriendly. It's the cheap lead-acid ones (which happen to be widely used in Chinese electric scooters) that are pretty nasty.
And what it takes... really depends on the approach taken. I mean, splitting hydrogen out from water is something I'd expect every child who graduated primary school to have done in science class, though there's been plenty of work on more efficient approaches. (Not that it doesn't require plenty of energy... but again, that's a matter of where folks choose to get that energy from; if it's solar, hydro, responsible nuclear, &c...)
Also varies by what kind of train and where you are -- here in austin.tx.us, if you're lucky enough to live and work in places where our single little commuter rail line is convenient, it's not only cheaper than gas for a typical (22mpg) passenger vehicle (and that's before repair/insurance/etc factors in), it's cheaper than the bus as well.
Actually, there's a fair bit of discretion.
$150K is the maximum statutory damages, and that maximum can be reached only with willful infringement. The typical range is $750-$30K, with the ability to reduce to a bare minimum of $200 if the defendant was unaware of the infringement.
Huh? No decompilation needed -- it's an API, not an implementation -- and Google's implementation of those specific APIs is certainly compatible (any parts which aren't compatible... also aren't part of the legal case!).
Certainly this makes a huge difference to the rest of the world -- just to choose one particular corner, look at how many products are API-compatible with Amazon S3 or EC2.
Because that's the only STD in circulation?
Incidents of AIDS may go down (and hurrah for that), but I don't really want HSV, HPV, and all the rest to become more common in turn. My significant other and I may be extremely cautious when sleeping with anyone else (heck, we're extremely cautious with each other, despite having current, clean across-the-board results), but a higher-risk environment is just that, precautions or no.
Maybe you're coming from somewhere with good mass transit, or you're so accustomed to having your own motor vehicle that you assume everyone else has one too... but having done the car-free living bit in a city without decent transit (Texas), nothing that requires getting to a government office within business hours is easy, and I'm lucky enough to have flexible work hours (which not everyone does). Heck, getting to my bank is a royal pain, and I can see it from my office -- but there are two major highways between here and there, and the places where they can be safely crossed add miles to the trip.
Pardon? There are still a lot of companies centered around using the Linux kernel in embedded space (albeit, in the smaller cases, with a very different userland -- ucLibc, busybox, etc). If it runs your $60 router and your $100 phone, last-decade's desktop is going to be fine... at least as far as the kernel is concerned.
Now, if you were telling me that the basic userland was getting bloated, I might believe you there -- there are fewer people with a vested financial interest and a lot of kernel developers on staff actively working on keeping it tiny.
I would hazard you haven't been following this closely.
The judge has been asking the parties for additional briefings on the issue, and asking some very hard questions of Oracle -- questions which make it clear that he groks the subject matter.
Doing it in this order will reduce the surface open for appeal -- if there's a jury finding that Google didn't infringe even in a world where APIs were copyrightable, then the question of law is moot and not open for challenge. If there's a jury finding that Google did infringe, then the question of law is the single, clear point on which the case -- and any appeals -- will rest. Doing things differently would have led to far more ambiguity; what the judge is doing in this case is smart.
The less-organized ones might be a place to start on that. Some of my good friends identify as Dischordians -- if you believe Dischordianism literally you're explicitly Doing It Wrong, but there is a gestalt to be from the same, making it able to be reasonably interpreted as something more than the joke it appears on its face. (Also, having a religion which can only be adhered to if one is able to grok non-literal subtext filters out a certain element in the populace... one which I think you may be taking to be the entire set of religious adherents).
I have another close friend who closely adheres to a niche religion the original form of which predates Christianity substantially. Inasmuch as there are physical objects involved in its practice (garb, totems), money may change hands from those with the skill to create them themselves and those that can't (and she's just as often a member of the former set)... but frankly, I'm not sure that that's evidence of a scam: There's no promise of salvation or threat of hellfire; in short, no coercion that isn't present in someone spending their money on saltwater aquariums or homebrewing. What makes a freely-chosen, noncoercive religion a "scam" when a freely-chosen, noncoercive hobby isn't?
Notably, both of these religions generally don't require or support prostelyzation, which doesn't quite fit to your thesis, either -- a good money-making scam encourages people to rope in their friends and children, too, right?
There's more in heaven and earth, Horatio...
There's a good chance they can -- the jury's instructions were to assume that structure and organization are copyrightable elements, with the judge to decide later whether this is actually true. So -- it'll be down to Judge Willium Alsup to make this determination (and then, of course, the various appeals courts to decide if they agree).
Indeed, Europe doesn't allow this... and good for them. Sadly, I'm on the side of the pond where it's still an open question.
Have you actually followed Oracle v. Google?
The amount of "Chinese wall" breakage is minuscule -- the rangeCheck function and a bunch of *Impl files which were only ever used in the test suite and which never made it into any shipping phone. The jury is likely to decide that this copying is de minimis, and thus excusable, and even if they don't, good luck showing substantial damages from it.
The place where Oracle is placing their stand isn't on claims that Google got their clean-room development procedures wrong, but on a claim that the APIs themselves are copyrighted, and thereby that anything built to be compatible with them necessarily infringes. That's a very different ballgame, and a much more dangerous claim.
You make a well-reasoned point -- if we accept as a principal that no person can morally advocate a position which may require more sacrifice of others than they are willing to make themselves, the proposed consequent clearly follows.
This principal has merit, and I decline to accept it into my own moral calculus only because if this were the rule, nothing would get done. Consider the case of California, where bills which require spending have only the typical level of political difficulty attached but taxation bills are exceedingly difficult; the result of this well-intentioned effort to require a higher bar of public participation is real harm to real people.
At a federal level, similarly -- we have a tax-and-spend party and a borrow-and-spend party; making it harder to tax means more borrowing, and maintaining ideals which would in practice cause harm to others down the road is something I decline to do (having a great deal of experience at it in the past, but that's a separate discussion).
I acknowledge that there's an argument to be made that ideals should be constructed in a vacuum without acknowledgement of their real-world effects, and I understand if you think I'm allowing my moral calculus to be influenced by factors which should play no part -- but I've made peace with my reasoning as it is, and gave up my reasoning as it was only after a great deal of time and introspection; a seemingly fair and reasonable position is less so if its indirect effects cause people harm.
So -- I think I understand your position better (as something better-founded than mere political posturing), and hope that you have at least a bit more understanding of mine, even if we aren't moving much. Good discussion? :)
Sadly, it does. Not people who are paying attention, maybe, but there are few enough of those that they don't matter quite so much.
(Yes, "sadly" -- the US has a severe revenue problem compared to its peers, but I'd very much prefer that discussion was open and rational about how much things cost. See the perception that roads are paid for by use taxes -- it's quite untrue (barely 51% of highways, and often 0% of city streets, are funded by gas taxes, vehicle registrations and the like), but it also leads to effective subsidization, as it's easier to get the public to accept spending on something when they think it's being paid by users thereof).
When did a taxing entity have an attitude at all? I fully agree that what we're discussing here is slight-of-hand, but it's slight-of-hand perpetrated by voters and the politicians they elect... not, in the large, the public employees hired to implement the policies said voters and politicians put into place.
I'll be honest -- I don't see the boundaries you're talking about here; in my worldview, they simply don't exist, and I'm having a lot of trouble trying to figure out where you're coming from.
I'll grant that this does make me a bit hypocritical myself... but I really am trying.
Would only perfectly fair redistribution satisfy you? I'll certainly grant that such perfection isn't possible (heck, even a perfectly fair voting system is provably impossible when given a sufficient set of common-sense criteria for fairness), but policy that isn't utterly corrupt (ie. narrowly written to favor specific individuals) can often get into a state that's moderately close.
I don't argue with anything you say in the above-quoted section, only as to its applicability.
Finally I feel like we're getting somewhere.
To the contrary, practices by the taxing body intended to cater to the emotional state of the taxed.
In the Real World, in which we live, being able to market public policy is absolutely critical to its implementation. An idea with no chance whatsoever of being passed into law is useless.
Uneven redistribution I would grant you. That said, do you remember the point I made early on, about how people compare themselves to others within their peer group? Keeping the ratio roughly even within given social circles thus minimizes this impact. Asking a lone individual to sacrifice without other members of their peer group doing the same does not.
Oooh, a slippery slope argument!
That said -- if you think tax policy isn't, in practice, calibrated towards minimizing the impact on emotional state of those being taxed (providing perceived justification by claiming status as usage fees even when dubious; reducing visibility via withholding mechanism as opposed to explicit outflows; etc), I have a bridge to sell you. While I don't altogether agree with the FairTax, for instance, the number of people who object to eliminating the tax-free status of unprepared food items (despite the proposal's cost-of-living rebate providing a compelling alternative) demonstrate the importance of emotional responses in crafting policy for public acceptance.
We live in the real world, here. If a proposed change to tax policy is going to actually take place, gut-feel to those considering the proposal is important. Likewise, if someone feels like their standing relative to their peer group will be changed by a policy proposal, this is more than a little relevant to their level of likely support.
The "injury" is only there in the eyes of those unwilling to appreciate nuance. I can argue that I'm willing to sacrifice Thing A but not Thing B -- and if the only option immediately available to me is to sacrifice both things A and B together, I can choose not to do that in complete consistency with my stated views.
Claims of "Thing B doesn't exist!" or "Thing B has no place in this discussion!" are frankly unhelpful at persuading those not already in your camp unless coupled with arguments designed to appeal to people whose prior views acknowledge Thing B as pertinent.
You make that big, black-and-white dismissive stance -- but can you really defend it?
Taxation, after all, is about what people give up to benefit society as a whole. You make a sweeping claim that giving up buying power and giving up social standing are utterly unrelated -- but both are relevant to a discussion of human willingness to sacrifice for the greater good.
If you want to make a moral argument... well, frankly, I don't have the time or inclination to care what your morals are. I care what my morals are, and those of the people I deal with, but trying to synchronize moral stances with random strangers is an effort which could easily consume a lifetime... and if I wanted to spend mine that way, I'd have chosen an entirely different calling. So, let's have the argument we can have without synchronizing on morals -- one based on practical matters of what is and isn't politically or socially feasible.
If we're talking about feasibility, then we care about what people are actually willing to accept in practice. If we're talking about what people are actually willing to accept in practice, then psychological experiments and game theory are tremendously relevant. If you want a discussion centered on your personal ethics, by contrast, you'll do better to start by finding someone who them -- and give up on being able to convince those that don't.