No, may smart people think greed is a good thing, but it's short term thinkers that screw up the system. Bernie Madoff was greedy, but it didn't work out in the long term now did it?
Yeah, but just for how many people it did work. They got the big payoff out of other people's investments and loans before things collapsed, and often fat bonuses on top of that. And that happens every 5-7 years, things collapse and the greedy walk away with big pile of cash, with no regard to the lives that got (financially) destroyed in the process.
It's the long term thinkers that screw up the system, because they're the ones setting up the system, coming up with the ways of rigging the game and trying to make the cycle as profitable as they can. The short term thinkers that burn themselves are just a useful distraction, a tip of the iceberg.
couldn't get them under control - and if you consider that the Soviets didn't give a rat's ass about PR, I'm sure they didn't pull any punches like we do (read: the didn't give a shit about civilian casualties)
Though it's worth considering, that not giving shit about civilian casualties is probably a recipe for disaster if you plan to really control a country.
Well, unless you nuke them from the orbit, of course, with enough warheads to cover every mountain valley...
"But can you name a place where you will specifically lose your property if you don't pay the taxes? "
Err...every state I've ever lived in?
You've never seen or heard of a tax auction held by the local govt. for unpaid taxes?
Yeah, but that's not directly for not paying the property tax, is it? It's for owing money to the government, and not being able to pay. That the money is owed because of unpaid property taxes is not directly related to property being auctioned. The property is auctioned because at that situation there's usually nothing else of value to sell. It doesn't matter if it's property tax that is unpaid or some other tax.
In other words, unpaid property tax does not directly lead to losing the property. It leads to the process used for any unpaid taxes or other fees owed to the government. Unpaid sales tax would result in exactly the same outcome (if the business owns a property that can be sold).
What might be consider unfair is, that (in most places at least, I think) property tax is tied to the property, ie. if you sell a property with unpaid property taxes, the taxes follow the property. This is of course fraud if buyer doesn't know it, but usually the sale can't be officially registered or legally valid without unpaid taxes becoming known, so this probably is not a problem.
If you don't want the protection, then don't pay, but don't complain either when nobody stops somebody (ie. the police, but that's beside the point) from coming and seizing it.
Ah, so it's a protection racket!
BTW, this argument doesn't quite hold. If you attempt to protect your own property, by shooting at the police who come to seize it when you don't pay your taxes, then (if they take you alive) you'll be charged with murder. If you were really free to choose to opt out of the protection, then you should be free to use force against anyone who comes to take your property, including the police.
But you are free to use force to stop the police! If they still get you, it just means you were not using enough force...
But more realistically, your property is also protected from a criminal gang invading it. Just imagine a property with anything valuable, that is not protected by the society around it? How long do you think it'd take for it to be pillaged, if it were outside the protection of law enforcement system?
Personally, I think property tax is mostly a scam. Police should be paid for from general sales taxes. Everyone has to eat, so restaurants and grocery stores in the area will always be bringing in tax revenue. More revenue can be had by adding extra taxes to bars and restaurants (than for staple foods at grocery stores), and by adding taxes to utilities like power, water, trash, etc. You should never be in danger of losing your property through non-payment of taxes on that property. The only place where a direct tax on the property makes any sense is for fire protection.
Nah, fire protection could be a service bought, and you could just not buy it. The fire department would then just let your property to burn to ground, while only protecting the properties around it if needed. And failing that, you'd be liable for allowing fire to spread from your property, and of course you'd be liable for the cost of having the fire engines there spraying water on your neighbors house.
But can you name a place where you will specifically lose your property if you don't pay the taxes? Otherwise, your property is no more at risk of being seized for unpaid property taxes, that it is in danger of being seized for unpaid sales taxes. So no difference there.
Value of property corresponds quite well on how much protection you need from the society, too, so it's very fair. If your protected properties are worth more, you get more value from the protection, and therefore pay more for it too. Note that property tax is also effectively sales tax, because shops, warehouses etc need to be on some property, and therefore they are taxed, and the cost is of course transferred to the price of the goods being sold.
they are instead smug about hopping on the walled-off Apple bandwagon where customizing a device you own is not allowed unless it's approved by the company that sold it to you.
Uh... Isn't Android largely just the same? To freely customize an average Android device you own, you have to root it using methods very unapproved by the operator that sold it to you? How is this different from iPhone?
But at the same time, people are most likely *not* buying these phones because it's Linux
Well duh, it'd be rather stupid to buy a Linux for it being Linux, when it can't run any Linux software without extensive hacking that essentially amounts to installing a Linux on it.
You don't own property in the USA, you merely rent it from the govt.
Just try not paying your property taxes for a period of time, and see how long you still 'own' said property.
Exceptions of course for states with no property tax...but you get the idea.
I wonder... You'd think they just want the tax money. So, if all else fails, only then will the property be sold to get money, just like with other unpaid debts. Now some places might have different laws, that state that unpaid property taxes specifically lead to losing the property, but I've never heard of such laws, and if they exist then that's pretty unfair and unusual.
Now then, you might argue that property taxes are evil. But property taxes are type of tax that is just common sense and easy to justify. The property is unavoidably protected by the military and the police forces of the country, so it makes sense that the property owner has to pay for the protection. If you don't want the protection, then don't pay, but don't complain either when nobody stops somebody (ie. the police, but that's beside the point) from coming and seizing it.
I don't know about you, but most people I know would not consider 100k as "not super high income". You individually were making roughly double the median household income for the US in 2003.
Be that as it may, the summary specificlally talks about those making over 200k.
If free enterprise is constrained by honesty and morals, then it's not really free
I'm sorry, but that's a ridiculous statement. Free enterprise is nothing more than business run by individuals.
A person is in servitude because they discipline their own behavior? Just how do you end up at that conclusion? It makes no sense. Liberty is all about people being free to make their own decisions, and being moral is personal decision.
They end up in servitude of those who do not constrain themselves with morals or honesty, because the option of cheating gives amoral businesses an advantage (as long as they're not stupid or "evil" too). All it takes is to cheat when it gives and advantage, while being honest when that gives and advantage, evaluating the risk/reward of each course of action. A moral business has to be honest even when it's a disadvantage, and will eventually get cheated by the amoral business, while amoral business is free to choose the best alternative. So if a free market environment works as advertised, then amoral businesses will replace the moral ones slowly but steadily, through the normal process of more efficient businesses taking over less efficient ones (including the cases of actively getting a competing business into trouble by cheating somehow when there's an opportunity to do that).
Capitalism isn't the problem, and the problem cannot be cured by the central planning required by socialism. The problem is greed and a lack of morality and caring about our fellow citizens/neighbors. Free enterprise hurts no one, and denies no freedom if it is engaged in by honest, moral people.
If free enterprise is constrained by honesty and morals, then it's not really free, and will be driven out of business by competitors who don't have such constraints.
Therefore truly Free enterprise will end up hurting others whenever it is profitable.
But people are paid exactly what the value of their effort is perceived to be worth by their employers.
Correction: people are paid at most what the value of their effort is perceived to be worth by their employers.
They won't be paid more, at least not for long, since they won't get a raise as long as they're perceived to already get more than they're worth. If they're unlucky, they're get a choice of pay cut or getting fired.
And usually they're paid less, because they were unable to haggle the salary to the maximum. Also, the pay seldom goes up from the initial salary at the same rate as a workers value increases for the company.
Competition is the only thing that is able to drive prices lower without creating shortages. No competition means higher prices.
That only applies to completely free markets (and sometimes doesn't even work there). It only applies there because with no competition, the companies can and will charge as much as people are willing to spend ("Oh? We are the only company that sells fuel in this area? Fuel that people desperately need. We can charge whatever the fuck we want!") and with competition they are forced to lower their profit margins.
A regulatory body can look at the cost of materials, etc. and say "You really would be able to offer the service for X... You arent allowed to charge more than X+Y at most. If you are too incompetent to offer the service for that price, we will find someone more competent.". Of course, you can call that a form of competition (and yes, competition can and needs to exist even in completely socialistic systems) and you would be correct... But I doubt it is the kind of competition you had in mind there.
But how do you come up with X and Y? With sufficient lobbying/bribing, Y can be increased, since it's just arbitrary profit margin, essentially a cartel imposed by the government. Also in most businesses, X changes all the time, sometimes even rapidly. The regulatory body would need to be constantly re-calculating proper value of X, or there will be trouble one way or the other. And the people doing the re-calculating have no personal interest in getting the real value for X (unless you enter corruption, in which case they actually have interest in getting false value of X). And sometimes there will be somebody higher up that just comes in and says something like "I just heard that over there X+Y is this much, so it must be lower here because we are better than them, so make sure you calculate it so that it is", with no regard to reality.
Also, even though you'd imagine that businesses would still want to optimize to maximize profits, that's far less motivation than optimizing in order to not be driven out of business by more innovative competitor. Also, if any optimization goes to maximize profits, then the business owners benefit, unlike when optimization goes to lower the price (to gain market share from competitor).
In short, that doesn't work terribly well. Only thing that can determine correct value of X and optimal value of Y is the market itself. Your kind of regulation just doesn't work, and the longer the regulation continues, the farther it will drift from the optimum, and the more corruption will sneak into the system.
Only places where free market really doesn't work is markets where the goal is to minimize the business. For example health care, military, security: there the goal should be to minimize the need for that service, while business interest is to maximize need for their service. And another place for heavy regulation is business where there can be no competition for practical reasons, ie. "natural monopolies". But even in those cases, regulation doesn't work well, just better than free market would.
And does that really matter? These people have more important things to do in life than to argue about little things over their internet connections.
Competition is the only thing that is able to drive prices lower without creating shortages. No competition means higher prices. Higher prices means more time spent on working, and/or less money for other activities in life.
In other words, unless you consider doing more work to get money to be able to afford internet connection more important than the internet connection itself, yes it does matter.
Yeah. But in this context, I'd say that you can't have either (space travel or radical biological augmentation) without also getting the other, perhaps barring some sort of religious influence banning research on one, but uncompetitive religious influences like that tend to be quite temporary.
I'd even speculate, that regular interplanetary travel, especially stuff like asteroid mining/outposts/colonization, already requires augmentation. It's needed for repairing radiation damage, for adapting body to low-gravity environment, for allowing "natural" hibernation during long voyages, and for reducing general life support requirements (like add ability to tolerate high level of CO2 and to produce more essential vitamins so nutrition will be easier to handle). So all the things that might be needed for interstellar travel will initially be developed just to make interplanetary travel and colonization feasible.
Oh and of course the vast distances mean that if we started sending the ships tomorrow, they wouldn't get to where they may be for hundreds or thousands or 10s of thousands of years.
So they may have beat us by a day, and just launched their ships today, but there is still no paradox.
Of course, there is likely a wiggle factor in the gestational time of complex life in the universe, but it may be only measured in terms of a few millions or 10s of millions of years, and the vast distance argument, and the difficulty/cost argument could plausibly explain lack of contact, with such a narrow time-window of contenders.
Timescale check: 10s of thousands of years is still less than Homo Sapiens as species has existed. A blink of an eye. 10 million years is less than 0.1% of the age of the universe. I don't think it would have been impossible for Earth-like planet to be born like 10% earlier in the history of universe. Beings on that planet would be one billion years ahead of us (that is twice the time that there has been any kind of complex life on dry land), if life evolved at about the same rate.
So while we could be "the first" just due to evolution of Universe itself not being far enough earlier, it's doesn't sound very likely. More likely we got started a few billion years later than earliest possible time.
Think about what would happen if today the electricity went out forever. We'd be lost. Some might survive but can the survive for long?
Reality check: Something like I think a billion people live without electricity today. They've survived just fine through innumerable plagues, famines and wars since the appearance of human species, and will likely continue to survive.
I don't think it's as grim as you think. We still use so little energy that solar (including hydroelectric and wind) could easily satisfy all our current energy needs, if only our technology was built around that. Coal and then oil only helped us get jump-started, but I don't think it sped up things that much. And as long as any knowledge of todays technology is preserved, getting re-started after a collapse would be much faster, as people would know what electricity is, what can be done with it, and how to easily produce quite enormous amounts of it (hydroelectric) to get industrial revolution going again.
But by the time the civilization collapses it's used up all of the readily available hydrocarbon deposits and metal deposits.
I'll give you the hydrocarbons (although those can be synthesized if you have an energy source) but metals? Come on man, no one is shooting metals out into space, never to return. Eventually it becomes cheaper to recycle, scavenge old garbage heaps, etc to recover "wasted" metals than to refine new ones. The metals aren't going anywhere. The problem is one of distribution - if you have an exponentially growing population, eventually there's less of "metal X" to go round per person so you could get shortages THAT way. Hopefully an "advanced" civilization can eventually control it's population. Most Western countries here on Earth have been having negative population growth rates if you subtract immigration, so it's not impossible to expect.
Reversed population growth in developed nations is just a temporary effect. There are those who still have a lot of children, because they are "resistant" to whatever effect it is that makes people have less babies. In a few generations, most people will have the traits that cause them to have a lot of babies even with a high standard of living.
A civilization can of course control amount of people it has, as long as it has the desire to control it. But it requires that the society decides and stays firm on the principle, that people do not have an inherent right to have children (enter abortions, sterilizations, executions...). Alternatively, if reproducing itself is unrestricted, it requires that the society decides and stays firm on the principle, that if there are too many people, then some must get killed (enter gladiatorial fights, executions for small crimes, replacing safety equipment (like seat belts and air bags in cars) with lethal stuff, "euthanasia" of handicapped/disabled, making duels to the death legal, making everybody go through a to-the-death test when reaching certain age...). It works, as long it's remembered that evolution will weed out any genetic, hereditary traits that prevent having children, no matter why they prevent having children.
Slashdot Mirror
No, may smart people think greed is a good thing, but it's short term thinkers that screw up the system. Bernie Madoff was greedy, but it didn't work out in the long term now did it?
Yeah, but just for how many people it did work. They got the big payoff out of other people's investments and loans before things collapsed, and often fat bonuses on top of that. And that happens every 5-7 years, things collapse and the greedy walk away with big pile of cash, with no regard to the lives that got (financially) destroyed in the process.
It's the long term thinkers that screw up the system, because they're the ones setting up the system, coming up with the ways of rigging the game and trying to make the cycle as profitable as they can. The short term thinkers that burn themselves are just a useful distraction, a tip of the iceberg.
OMG DELETE THE INTERNET!
How many nukes it would take to shut down the Internet permanently?
Answer: Just one. Aim it at Moscow/Washington DC (depending on which red button you have access to). Rest will happen automatically.
No more WikiLeaks!
couldn't get them under control - and if you consider that the Soviets didn't give a rat's ass about PR, I'm sure they didn't pull any punches like we do (read: the didn't give a shit about civilian casualties)
Though it's worth considering, that not giving shit about civilian casualties is probably a recipe for disaster if you plan to really control a country.
Well, unless you nuke them from the orbit, of course, with enough warheads to cover every mountain valley...
What are you hiding, then? Don't try to deny it, you have things to hide! Things you don't want to be public... Bad things...
You must be a terrorist or a pedophile or something!
May Google save us from your kind!
"But can you name a place where you will specifically lose your property if you don't pay the taxes? "
Err...every state I've ever lived in?
You've never seen or heard of a tax auction held by the local govt. for unpaid taxes?
Yeah, but that's not directly for not paying the property tax, is it? It's for owing money to the government, and not being able to pay. That the money is owed because of unpaid property taxes is not directly related to property being auctioned. The property is auctioned because at that situation there's usually nothing else of value to sell. It doesn't matter if it's property tax that is unpaid or some other tax.
In other words, unpaid property tax does not directly lead to losing the property. It leads to the process used for any unpaid taxes or other fees owed to the government. Unpaid sales tax would result in exactly the same outcome (if the business owns a property that can be sold).
What might be consider unfair is, that (in most places at least, I think) property tax is tied to the property, ie. if you sell a property with unpaid property taxes, the taxes follow the property. This is of course fraud if buyer doesn't know it, but usually the sale can't be officially registered or legally valid without unpaid taxes becoming known, so this probably is not a problem.
If you don't want the protection, then don't pay, but don't complain either when nobody stops somebody (ie. the police, but that's beside the point) from coming and seizing it.
Ah, so it's a protection racket!
BTW, this argument doesn't quite hold. If you attempt to protect your own property, by shooting at the police who come to seize it when you don't pay your taxes, then (if they take you alive) you'll be charged with murder. If you were really free to choose to opt out of the protection, then you should be free to use force against anyone who comes to take your property, including the police.
But you are free to use force to stop the police! If they still get you, it just means you were not using enough force...
But more realistically, your property is also protected from a criminal gang invading it. Just imagine a property with anything valuable, that is not protected by the society around it? How long do you think it'd take for it to be pillaged, if it were outside the protection of law enforcement system?
Personally, I think property tax is mostly a scam. Police should be paid for from general sales taxes. Everyone has to eat, so restaurants and grocery stores in the area will always be bringing in tax revenue. More revenue can be had by adding extra taxes to bars and restaurants (than for staple foods at grocery stores), and by adding taxes to utilities like power, water, trash, etc. You should never be in danger of losing your property through non-payment of taxes on that property. The only place where a direct tax on the property makes any sense is for fire protection.
Nah, fire protection could be a service bought, and you could just not buy it. The fire department would then just let your property to burn to ground, while only protecting the properties around it if needed. And failing that, you'd be liable for allowing fire to spread from your property, and of course you'd be liable for the cost of having the fire engines there spraying water on your neighbors house.
But can you name a place where you will specifically lose your property if you don't pay the taxes? Otherwise, your property is no more at risk of being seized for unpaid property taxes, that it is in danger of being seized for unpaid sales taxes. So no difference there.
Value of property corresponds quite well on how much protection you need from the society, too, so it's very fair. If your protected properties are worth more, you get more value from the protection, and therefore pay more for it too. Note that property tax is also effectively sales tax, because shops, warehouses etc need to be on some property, and therefore they are taxed, and the cost is of course transferred to the price of the goods being sold.
they are instead smug about hopping on the walled-off Apple bandwagon where customizing a device you own is not allowed unless it's approved by the company that sold it to you.
Uh... Isn't Android largely just the same? To freely customize an average Android device you own, you have to root it using methods very unapproved by the operator that sold it to you? How is this different from iPhone?
For whom?
For businesses who'd like to release proprietary software for Linux, but don't because it's a mess.
Good or bad, that is of course a matter of opinion...
But at the same time, people are most likely *not* buying these phones because it's Linux
Well duh, it'd be rather stupid to buy a Linux for it being Linux, when it can't run any Linux software without extensive hacking that essentially amounts to installing a Linux on it.
"what ever happened to owning property?"
You don't own property in the USA, you merely rent it from the govt.
Just try not paying your property taxes for a period of time, and see how long you still 'own' said property.
Exceptions of course for states with no property tax...but you get the idea.
I wonder... You'd think they just want the tax money. So, if all else fails, only then will the property be sold to get money, just like with other unpaid debts. Now some places might have different laws, that state that unpaid property taxes specifically lead to losing the property, but I've never heard of such laws, and if they exist then that's pretty unfair and unusual.
Now then, you might argue that property taxes are evil. But property taxes are type of tax that is just common sense and easy to justify. The property is unavoidably protected by the military and the police forces of the country, so it makes sense that the property owner has to pay for the protection. If you don't want the protection, then don't pay, but don't complain either when nobody stops somebody (ie. the police, but that's beside the point) from coming and seizing it.
Well, just remember to not bath naked in your pool when the satellite crosses :-)
Why not?
I don't know about you, but most people I know would not consider 100k as "not super high income". You individually were making roughly double the median household income for the US in 2003.
Be that as it may, the summary specificlally talks about those making over 200k.
Can't think of a better way to go...
R.I.P.
Heart attack while having casual sex with a stranger?
Manually detonating a nuclear device on an asteroid in Earth collision course, thus saving humanity from extinction?
Blasted away by frickin' sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their frickin' heads?
I'm not saying dying while sleeping is bad, but it's certainly not the best way to go.
If free enterprise is constrained by honesty and morals, then it's not really free
I'm sorry, but that's a ridiculous statement. Free enterprise is nothing more than business run by individuals.
A person is in servitude because they discipline their own behavior? Just how do you end up at that conclusion? It makes no sense. Liberty is all about people being free to make their own decisions, and being moral is personal decision.
They end up in servitude of those who do not constrain themselves with morals or honesty, because the option of cheating gives amoral businesses an advantage (as long as they're not stupid or "evil" too). All it takes is to cheat when it gives and advantage, while being honest when that gives and advantage, evaluating the risk/reward of each course of action. A moral business has to be honest even when it's a disadvantage, and will eventually get cheated by the amoral business, while amoral business is free to choose the best alternative. So if a free market environment works as advertised, then amoral businesses will replace the moral ones slowly but steadily, through the normal process of more efficient businesses taking over less efficient ones (including the cases of actively getting a competing business into trouble by cheating somehow when there's an opportunity to do that).
I just assumed he was talking about yet another fight between the Debian and Ubuntu people.
Or the Gnome and KDE people.
Or the Red Hat and the Debian people.
Or the Democrats and the Republicans.
Or the Trekkies and the Jedi.
As long as you use GNU Emacs for all your daily needs, who cares?
Capitalism isn't the problem, and the problem cannot be cured by the central planning required by socialism. The problem is greed and a lack of morality and caring about our fellow citizens/neighbors. Free enterprise hurts no one, and denies no freedom if it is engaged in by honest, moral people.
If free enterprise is constrained by honesty and morals, then it's not really free, and will be driven out of business by competitors who don't have such constraints.
Therefore truly Free enterprise will end up hurting others whenever it is profitable.
But people are paid exactly what the value of their effort is perceived to be worth by their employers.
Correction: people are paid at most what the value of their effort is perceived to be worth by their employers.
They won't be paid more, at least not for long, since they won't get a raise as long as they're perceived to already get more than they're worth. If they're unlucky, they're get a choice of pay cut or getting fired.
And usually they're paid less, because they were unable to haggle the salary to the maximum. Also, the pay seldom goes up from the initial salary at the same rate as a workers value increases for the company.
Competition is the only thing that is able to drive prices lower without creating shortages. No competition means higher prices.
That only applies to completely free markets (and sometimes doesn't even work there). It only applies there because with no competition, the companies can and will charge as much as people are willing to spend ("Oh? We are the only company that sells fuel in this area? Fuel that people desperately need. We can charge whatever the fuck we want!") and with competition they are forced to lower their profit margins.
A regulatory body can look at the cost of materials, etc. and say "You really would be able to offer the service for X... You arent allowed to charge more than X+Y at most. If you are too incompetent to offer the service for that price, we will find someone more competent.". Of course, you can call that a form of competition (and yes, competition can and needs to exist even in completely socialistic systems) and you would be correct... But I doubt it is the kind of competition you had in mind there.
But how do you come up with X and Y? With sufficient lobbying/bribing, Y can be increased, since it's just arbitrary profit margin, essentially a cartel imposed by the government. Also in most businesses, X changes all the time, sometimes even rapidly. The regulatory body would need to be constantly re-calculating proper value of X, or there will be trouble one way or the other. And the people doing the re-calculating have no personal interest in getting the real value for X (unless you enter corruption, in which case they actually have interest in getting false value of X). And sometimes there will be somebody higher up that just comes in and says something like "I just heard that over there X+Y is this much, so it must be lower here because we are better than them, so make sure you calculate it so that it is", with no regard to reality.
Also, even though you'd imagine that businesses would still want to optimize to maximize profits, that's far less motivation than optimizing in order to not be driven out of business by more innovative competitor. Also, if any optimization goes to maximize profits, then the business owners benefit, unlike when optimization goes to lower the price (to gain market share from competitor).
In short, that doesn't work terribly well. Only thing that can determine correct value of X and optimal value of Y is the market itself. Your kind of regulation just doesn't work, and the longer the regulation continues, the farther it will drift from the optimum, and the more corruption will sneak into the system.
Only places where free market really doesn't work is markets where the goal is to minimize the business. For example health care, military, security: there the goal should be to minimize the need for that service, while business interest is to maximize need for their service. And another place for heavy regulation is business where there can be no competition for practical reasons, ie. "natural monopolies". But even in those cases, regulation doesn't work well, just better than free market would.
And does that really matter? These people have more important things to do in life than to argue about little things over their internet connections.
Competition is the only thing that is able to drive prices lower without creating shortages. No competition means higher prices. Higher prices means more time spent on working, and/or less money for other activities in life.
In other words, unless you consider doing more work to get money to be able to afford internet connection more important than the internet connection itself, yes it does matter.
Yeah. But in this context, I'd say that you can't have either (space travel or radical biological augmentation) without also getting the other, perhaps barring some sort of religious influence banning research on one, but uncompetitive religious influences like that tend to be quite temporary.
I'd even speculate, that regular interplanetary travel, especially stuff like asteroid mining/outposts/colonization, already requires augmentation. It's needed for repairing radiation damage, for adapting body to low-gravity environment, for allowing "natural" hibernation during long voyages, and for reducing general life support requirements (like add ability to tolerate high level of CO2 and to produce more essential vitamins so nutrition will be easier to handle). So all the things that might be needed for interstellar travel will initially be developed just to make interplanetary travel and colonization feasible.
Answer that and you'll get a Nobel Prize.
Patent the answer, and soon you can buy the Nobel Foundation.
Oh and of course the vast distances mean that if we started sending the ships tomorrow, they wouldn't get to where they may be for hundreds or thousands or 10s of thousands of years.
So they may have beat us by a day, and just launched their ships today, but there is still no paradox.
Of course, there is likely a wiggle factor in the gestational time of complex life in the universe, but it may be only measured in terms of a few millions or 10s of millions of years, and the vast distance argument, and the difficulty/cost argument could plausibly explain lack of contact, with such a narrow time-window of contenders.
Timescale check: 10s of thousands of years is still less than Homo Sapiens as species has existed. A blink of an eye. 10 million years is less than 0.1% of the age of the universe. I don't think it would have been impossible for Earth-like planet to be born like 10% earlier in the history of universe. Beings on that planet would be one billion years ahead of us (that is twice the time that there has been any kind of complex life on dry land), if life evolved at about the same rate.
So while we could be "the first" just due to evolution of Universe itself not being far enough earlier, it's doesn't sound very likely. More likely we got started a few billion years later than earliest possible time.
Think about what would happen if today the electricity went out forever. We'd be lost. Some might survive but can the survive for long?
Reality check: Something like I think a billion people live without electricity today. They've survived just fine through innumerable plagues, famines and wars since the appearance of human species, and will likely continue to survive.
I don't think it's as grim as you think. We still use so little energy that solar (including hydroelectric and wind) could easily satisfy all our current energy needs, if only our technology was built around that. Coal and then oil only helped us get jump-started, but I don't think it sped up things that much. And as long as any knowledge of todays technology is preserved, getting re-started after a collapse would be much faster, as people would know what electricity is, what can be done with it, and how to easily produce quite enormous amounts of it (hydroelectric) to get industrial revolution going again.
But by the time the civilization collapses it's used up all of the readily available hydrocarbon deposits and metal deposits.
I'll give you the hydrocarbons (although those can be synthesized if you have an energy source) but metals? Come on man, no one is shooting metals out into space, never to return. Eventually it becomes cheaper to recycle, scavenge old garbage heaps, etc to recover "wasted" metals than to refine new ones. The metals aren't going anywhere. The problem is one of distribution - if you have an exponentially growing population, eventually there's less of "metal X" to go round per person so you could get shortages THAT way. Hopefully an "advanced" civilization can eventually control it's population. Most Western countries here on Earth have been having negative population growth rates if you subtract immigration, so it's not impossible to expect.
Reversed population growth in developed nations is just a temporary effect. There are those who still have a lot of children, because they are "resistant" to whatever effect it is that makes people have less babies. In a few generations, most people will have the traits that cause them to have a lot of babies even with a high standard of living.
A civilization can of course control amount of people it has, as long as it has the desire to control it. But it requires that the society decides and stays firm on the principle, that people do not have an inherent right to have children (enter abortions, sterilizations, executions...). Alternatively, if reproducing itself is unrestricted, it requires that the society decides and stays firm on the principle, that if there are too many people, then some must get killed (enter gladiatorial fights, executions for small crimes, replacing safety equipment (like seat belts and air bags in cars) with lethal stuff, "euthanasia" of handicapped/disabled, making duels to the death legal, making everybody go through a to-the-death test when reaching certain age...). It works, as long it's remembered that evolution will weed out any genetic, hereditary traits that prevent having children, no matter why they prevent having children.