From my very limited background as an amateur, part-time Bible student in the past:
The oldest texts (Alexandrian family mainly) differ substantially from the later "Textus Receptus" family. These differences dwarf any subtle differences between translations based on the same textual family.
Most widely used English translations are actually pretty good. In particular, the KJV does a fairly good job of translating the TR (though the English is of course out of date) and the NIV does a decent job on the Alexandrian family.
People who prefer the KJV in spite of its dated English, including myself, often do so because they are not fully persuaded that a handful of older texts outweigh the evidence of numerous newer ones. But even in this group there are many (again including me) who would like an updated version of the KJV, keeping the same textual basis but updating the language to be more understandable to 21st century English speakers.
Even the substantial differences between Alexandrian and non-Alexandrian manuscript families are somewhat irrelevant to doctrine.
For the Old Testament we have a completely different problem. The text can be reconstructed fairly well. The meaning of the text sometimes cannot, because of our less than perfect knowledge of ancient Hebrew and Aramaic. The best evidence often comes from versions (translations) and while some of these are much later than the texts in question, they do provide valuable insight into the meaning.
The Greek LXX (Septuagint) version is enigmatic at best . . . it is not of particularly good quality, yet Jesus and the apostles quoted from it extensively, even in places where it appears to differ in meaning from the Hebrew text. To me this is an unsolved problem. It suggests a need for further research and questioning of many of the assumptions Bible scholars tend to make.
When a vast number of scientists say it's true, "I don't think it's right" is not a valid answer unless you've got a PhD.
An interesting, but still logically fallacious, amalgamation of "appeal to authority" and "truth by majority vote." As other posters have already replied, science is a method for learning about the universe through experimentation, NOT a fixed and unquestionable body of conclusions.
I would not say they will get "screwed over" except possibly in the sense that other kinds of thieves are "screwed over" by laws against theft. In reality, the most that might happen is that THEIR ability to screw over other people will be reduced, probably marginally and temporarily at best.
The first and most startling thing I noticed when I traveled outside the U.S. (to Canada and Europe) was that the constant fear I always had, but had grown accustomed to (such that I really don't notice it most of the time), was suddenly gone. No one in those places felt any reason to fear anything, so long as they behaved with common sense and in a reasonably intelligent and courteous fashion. No one felt like they might be arrested for being the wrong color or wrong religion or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. No one felt fear that they might be harrassed or killed by street thugs financed and empowered by the government. Thus, neither did I. It was refreshing. In the U.S. we've lived with these things for so long that we don't really pay much attention. But we do modify our behavior accordingly. To add to the examples already given in the comments above, we allow "government" thugs to take vast sums of money from us in exchange for nothing. We allow them to disarm us while simultaneously ignoring inner-city street thugs. We allow them to imprison people at will by calling them "terrorists" or "drug dealers." We avoid public rallies or demonstrations that are commonplace, and mostly safe, everywhere else in the world. We allow people to be raped in prison for the most trivial of crimes. We basically satisfy ourselves with the bread and circuses our "masters" have prepared for us - reality TV and fast food. We allow ourselves to be kept fat and stupid. We do not even think of rebelling, as we ought, much less do we actually rebel. We literally do not lift a finger to improve the circumstances our children and grandchildren will grow up in, never mind our own. We are slaves, and we are happy to be slaves, just so long as we don't realize that we are slaves. I do not sense this anyplace else I've travelled. Not that any country or any place is perfect, but most of the rest seem to be able to manage to deal with occasional terrorists and criminals without resorting to the constant, low-level, implicit threats of violence and death that our "masters" (who are supposed to be our SERVANTS) feel compelled to vomit upon us on a continuous basis. If I did not have family here I would be gone in an instant. Not because I don't want to see things improve here, and even help them improve in the limited ways I can. But because I do not want my children, or their children, to have to live in fear, or to live as slaves.
Some excellent points. But recently I have come to understand that the concept of a state which claims total sovereignty is really no different than a priest or mullah claiming total sovereignty. In either case the individual and his or her conscience is unfree. In either case we lack capacity to act with the dignity in which God created us. In either case we are unfree to obey what I understand to be the highest law of God, both according to Christianity, and to many other faiths (love God with all your being, and your neighbor as yourself - which implies not robbing, enslaving, imprisoning, or killing him, either directly, or indirectly via said State). So I tend to reject any authority, religious or secular, which claims sovereignty over me or my conscience, or that of any other, without my willing consent.
The falling dollar is part of the problem for sure, especially for Americans, but not all of it. We've entered the perfect economic shitstorm, and the shit will be flying for a while.
Until very recently, demand was the highest ever, and production probably has peaked at least in the short term. Refinery capacity is maxed out, political problems in Nigeria and Venezuela threaten a lot of production, Iraq is producing much less than pre-war levels, and the imperial power constantly threatens war with Iran which would not only decimate production throughout the Middle East, but also close off the Straits of Hormuz, threaten two nuclear powers (Pakistan and Israel), and create the first serious risk of a third world war since the end of the Cold War. Many of these factors are temporary or at least reversible, which is why no one smart (Big Oil, the Saudis, OPEC in general) will bet on real prices remaining this high forever. But they will be with us for a while.
My recommended solutions: Understand how and why we got here, and learn from it. Privatize, don't subsidize. Allow new refinery construction (though following sane environmental standards). Extract ourselves from the Middle East where our presence is unwanted and counterproductive. Build modern (and therefore safer and more environmentally friendly) nuke plants. Gasify otherwise unusable high-sulfur coal. Avoid subsidizing suburban sprawl (I don't advocate legislation attempting to prohibit it, but let's face it, it would not have happened to the extent it did without government involvement, and I do advocate bringing that involvement to an end). DO NOT subsidize corn-to-ethanol . . . this is wasteful and counterproductive . . . but end punitive tariffs on imported sugar. Decriminalize hemp at least for industrial use (and for all uses if possible . . . a joint never hurt anyone except possibly the person smoking it). Seek out and eliminate legislation that attempts to distort energy and housing markets in any direction. For that matter, seek out and eliminate all legislation period that is not necessary for the protection of life, liberty, or property. Most of it is there to protect one special interest or another, at the expense of all of the rest of us, and it creates huge, cascading economic problems which, even if not directly related to energy, certainly work together to make it much more difficult to deal with it.
I'm in the Cleveland area and contemplating a similar move myself (from suburb just past city limits, to inner city). The problem is that, just as in Detroit, the inner city is not particularly safe. The people I know there, and I know quite a few, don't necessarily live in fear, but they do accept that they have a greater chance of being burglarized, robbed, beat up, raped, etc., and all those things have happened to people I know. I can't afford to stay out in the 'burbs but I don't know if I want to expose my family to unnecessary danger either.
DNA can be viewed as software or as data. This has chilling implications. It is only a matter of time, and not much time at that, before sequenced DNA data can be used to create people (or plants, animals, microbes, etc.). It's already been done for smaller/simpler organisms.
But this "ordinary rock" contains all of the people I care about. That makes it special to me. It's also the only one, among all those we might conceivably reach during any of our lifetimes, that at least arguably contains intelligent life. Yes, there may be dozens, hundreds, or billions of others somewhere that are objectively indistinguishable from our own, but we almost certainly will never learn of them, and thus they are of interest, to me at least, in a theoretical/speculative sense only.
The choice of asbestos as a comparison is more than an appeal to emotion; it's actually fairly valid. Both substances appear much the same way to a mammalian tissue, both affect the immune systems in a similar way, and both tend to be very long-lived once inside the lungs. True, this does mean we will have to be VERY careful with this stuff. But better to know that now, rather than decades later, after it is too late.
Admittedly you can't actually move anywhere for 30-40 mins afterwards
This means your body can't regulate blood sugar levels adequately, and that, therefore, you may be at risk for Type 2 diabetes. Get yourself checked. Frequently Type 2 can be avoided with minor lifestyle changes and resulting modest, but sustained, reductions in weight (that's what I'm fighting to do right now myself, and mainly for that same reason).
I'm sorry, but it does not work that way. Prosperity does not come at the expense of others. It comes from offering products and/or services that other people are willing to VOLUNTARILY pay for. It comes from exercising whatever your competitive advantage may be - from doing whatever it is that you do best, and trading the outputs from whatever that my be for other things that other people produce when they do what they do best.
I am sorry that both the U.S. and third-world governments have been screwing over Third World people for so many generations. But the U.S. government is about to come to an end, at least in its present form. You might consider ways to encourage your own governments to do the same. A government can be compatible with basic human dignity ONLY if it is willing to respect the freedom of their people to work, earn, save, invest, and prosper. Most today do not, and therefore do not deserve to exist, and all people, especially the poorest, will have a far better chance to survive, grow, and prosper if they are replaced with others more friendly to economic growth and therefore to something at least strongly resembling free enterprise (not socialism, but not corporatism either, which at least arguably is worse).
I tend to agree, although I do think as an intermediate step, sufficiently cheap electricity, nuclear or otherwise, also can be used to gasify some of our huge and otherwise very ecologically unfriendly reserves of coal, so that existing ICE and fuel-cell vehicles can continue to run in a cost-effective manner during the transition period.
One thing to keep in mind is that China, Japan, and France already have significant nuclear infrastructure. If we do not begin now to catch up, we will be left behind, and our greatest potential competitive advantages, namely, agriculture, manufacturing and technology, will be lost, possibly forever.
Sorry to nitpick but it is two quarters of negative real (inflation-adjusted) growth. And that is an important distinction because the fedgov tends to understate the true rate of inflation. If it did not . . . if it attempted to take into account the rise in energy and food prices, and the fall of the dollar versus gold, oil, and other commodities . . . then it would be more clear that we have been in recession for 2 or 3 quarters already. It doesn't yet feel like a traditional recession because instead of high unemployment, we are seeing declining real wages and salaries instead. When people begin to realize this, and when living costs increase beyond what most people can afford, at that point we will see rising unemployment as well.
I do see this as a great opening for selling Free Software and related services to smaller and medium sized companies. An increasingly competitive environment for many businesses, particularly those that face competition from overseas, demands that businesses do everything possible to reduce or eliminate unnecessary costs, and Free Software offers many companies an excellent, well-established and proven means for doing so.
1. We trust users until they give us a reason not to. But we also arrange things so individual users or machines are unable to do significant damage to others or to the network.
2. We can't afford to support a separate custom configuration for each employee, yet we realize no two will have exactly the same needs. We accommodate this dilemma by installing critical apps, even if used by only a small number of people, on company-maintained servers rather than users' desktops/laptops. Access is via Remote Desktop, Citrix, VNC, X, or a Web browser. Local machines have as little software as possible - preferably none except what is necessary to access the servers. This makes desktops more or less interchangeable, and also greatly reduces dependence upon Microsoft.
3. We have a strong bias toward Open Source and open standards/protocols, unless there is a solid and sustainable business case for doing otherwise (which is very seldom, except for industry-specific niche products). Thus, most users have OpenOffice, Firefox, Eclipse, etc.; if they have a business need for MS tools, these exist, but usually not on local desktops; they get to them via remote access of some type. Laptops users may get their own copies if there's a real need, e.g., if they must frequently work disconnected from the Internet and therefore the VPN.
4. Network traffic is not routinely monitored, but it is logged. Should spam, viruses, trojans, etc., or just plain old excessive use of Internet resources, become an issue, we can look at the logs to get a good idea of what's going on.
5. We try to filter Web traffic intelligently. Sites known to be malicious are blocked as are those very unlikely to have any business-related purpose (e.g., goatse...). Most others are allowed until they give us a reason not to be. We do not for example filter blogs, or Slashdot; these can be useful and work-related tools especially for developers. But if an employee is found to be abusing them, to the detriment of his or her job and/or our company's resources or reputation, then of course we will discuss it. Since our setup is very flexible, so are our options for dealing with the problem. We can adjust filtering rules on a per-employee basis; we can throttle traffic by employee or by port; we can of course punish the employee but we'd really rather not have to do that unless they've seriously and willfully breached our trust.
6. In this environment, we don't really have to know or care what is on users' desktops or laptops - but we also don't have to support it. We can remove admin rights if necessary without seriously compromising their ability to work.
7. One potential weakness: we presently do not have automatic monitoring of license compliance; we could potentially be held liable if a user installed something on a work machine without being properly licensed. Several of the above strategies help mitigate this risk, but they do not eliminate it completely. Naturally we are looking at ways to do so. We're pretty sure it can be done without draconian changes to existing policy, which really does seem to work well for everyone.
Wow...I'd hardly call that 'common'. Who works 12 hours a day (not talking the occasional crunch time)? Who commutes 3 freakin' hours a day? That sounds like lunacy.
Obviously you are not from Boston, San Jose, or NYC. It may be lunacy, but in many major job markets there simply is no affordable housing within any shorter of a commute than that.
As for continuous 12 hour days, I'll agree with you that it is lunacy, especially for knowledge workers. Neither I nor anyone I know can produce as much in 12 hours as we could in 8, or even zero. (Tired people make mistakes that are VERY expensive to fix.) But there are roughly 25,000 unemployed software developers in my metro area who would love to be working 12 hours a day, instead of not at all. Management knows this, and milks it for every penny.
Slashdot Mirror
When a vast number of scientists say it's true, "I don't think it's right" is not a valid answer unless you've got a PhD.
An interesting, but still logically fallacious, amalgamation of "appeal to authority" and "truth by majority vote." As other posters have already replied, science is a method for learning about the universe through experimentation, NOT a fixed and unquestionable body of conclusions.
Trust me, you do not want to be someone's "wife" in FPMITA Prison.
I would not say they will get "screwed over" except possibly in the sense that other kinds of thieves are "screwed over" by laws against theft. In reality, the most that might happen is that THEIR ability to screw over other people will be reduced, probably marginally and temporarily at best.
The first and most startling thing I noticed when I traveled outside the U.S. (to Canada and Europe) was that the constant fear I always had, but had grown accustomed to (such that I really don't notice it most of the time), was suddenly gone. No one in those places felt any reason to fear anything, so long as they behaved with common sense and in a reasonably intelligent and courteous fashion. No one felt like they might be arrested for being the wrong color or wrong religion or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. No one felt fear that they might be harrassed or killed by street thugs financed and empowered by the government. Thus, neither did I. It was refreshing. In the U.S. we've lived with these things for so long that we don't really pay much attention. But we do modify our behavior accordingly. To add to the examples already given in the comments above, we allow "government" thugs to take vast sums of money from us in exchange for nothing. We allow them to disarm us while simultaneously ignoring inner-city street thugs. We allow them to imprison people at will by calling them "terrorists" or "drug dealers." We avoid public rallies or demonstrations that are commonplace, and mostly safe, everywhere else in the world. We allow people to be raped in prison for the most trivial of crimes. We basically satisfy ourselves with the bread and circuses our "masters" have prepared for us - reality TV and fast food. We allow ourselves to be kept fat and stupid. We do not even think of rebelling, as we ought, much less do we actually rebel. We literally do not lift a finger to improve the circumstances our children and grandchildren will grow up in, never mind our own. We are slaves, and we are happy to be slaves, just so long as we don't realize that we are slaves. I do not sense this anyplace else I've travelled. Not that any country or any place is perfect, but most of the rest seem to be able to manage to deal with occasional terrorists and criminals without resorting to the constant, low-level, implicit threats of violence and death that our "masters" (who are supposed to be our SERVANTS) feel compelled to vomit upon us on a continuous basis. If I did not have family here I would be gone in an instant. Not because I don't want to see things improve here, and even help them improve in the limited ways I can. But because I do not want my children, or their children, to have to live in fear, or to live as slaves.
Some excellent points. But recently I have come to understand that the concept of a state which claims total sovereignty is really no different than a priest or mullah claiming total sovereignty. In either case the individual and his or her conscience is unfree. In either case we lack capacity to act with the dignity in which God created us. In either case we are unfree to obey what I understand to be the highest law of God, both according to Christianity, and to many other faiths (love God with all your being, and your neighbor as yourself - which implies not robbing, enslaving, imprisoning, or killing him, either directly, or indirectly via said State). So I tend to reject any authority, religious or secular, which claims sovereignty over me or my conscience, or that of any other, without my willing consent.
The falling dollar is part of the problem for sure, especially for Americans, but not all of it. We've entered the perfect economic shitstorm, and the shit will be flying for a while.
Until very recently, demand was the highest ever, and production probably has peaked at least in the short term. Refinery capacity is maxed out, political problems in Nigeria and Venezuela threaten a lot of production, Iraq is producing much less than pre-war levels, and the imperial power constantly threatens war with Iran which would not only decimate production throughout the Middle East, but also close off the Straits of Hormuz, threaten two nuclear powers (Pakistan and Israel), and create the first serious risk of a third world war since the end of the Cold War. Many of these factors are temporary or at least reversible, which is why no one smart (Big Oil, the Saudis, OPEC in general) will bet on real prices remaining this high forever. But they will be with us for a while.
My recommended solutions: Understand how and why we got here, and learn from it. Privatize, don't subsidize. Allow new refinery construction (though following sane environmental standards). Extract ourselves from the Middle East where our presence is unwanted and counterproductive. Build modern (and therefore safer and more environmentally friendly) nuke plants. Gasify otherwise unusable high-sulfur coal. Avoid subsidizing suburban sprawl (I don't advocate legislation attempting to prohibit it, but let's face it, it would not have happened to the extent it did without government involvement, and I do advocate bringing that involvement to an end). DO NOT subsidize corn-to-ethanol . . . this is wasteful and counterproductive . . . but end punitive tariffs on imported sugar. Decriminalize hemp at least for industrial use (and for all uses if possible . . . a joint never hurt anyone except possibly the person smoking it). Seek out and eliminate legislation that attempts to distort energy and housing markets in any direction. For that matter, seek out and eliminate all legislation period that is not necessary for the protection of life, liberty, or property. Most of it is there to protect one special interest or another, at the expense of all of the rest of us, and it creates huge, cascading economic problems which, even if not directly related to energy, certainly work together to make it much more difficult to deal with it.
I'm in the Cleveland area and contemplating a similar move myself (from suburb just past city limits, to inner city). The problem is that, just as in Detroit, the inner city is not particularly safe. The people I know there, and I know quite a few, don't necessarily live in fear, but they do accept that they have a greater chance of being burglarized, robbed, beat up, raped, etc., and all those things have happened to people I know. I can't afford to stay out in the 'burbs but I don't know if I want to expose my family to unnecessary danger either.
DNA can be viewed as software or as data. This has chilling implications. It is only a matter of time, and not much time at that, before sequenced DNA data can be used to create people (or plants, animals, microbes, etc.). It's already been done for smaller/simpler organisms.
But this "ordinary rock" contains all of the people I care about. That makes it special to me. It's also the only one, among all those we might conceivably reach during any of our lifetimes, that at least arguably contains intelligent life. Yes, there may be dozens, hundreds, or billions of others somewhere that are objectively indistinguishable from our own, but we almost certainly will never learn of them, and thus they are of interest, to me at least, in a theoretical/speculative sense only.
It [took] 37 minutes [to] walk back to my car
In a row?
The choice of asbestos as a comparison is more than an appeal to emotion; it's actually fairly valid. Both substances appear much the same way to a mammalian tissue, both affect the immune systems in a similar way, and both tend to be very long-lived once inside the lungs. True, this does mean we will have to be VERY careful with this stuff. But better to know that now, rather than decades later, after it is too late.
Admittedly you can't actually move anywhere for 30-40 mins afterwards
This means your body can't regulate blood sugar levels adequately, and that, therefore, you may be at risk for Type 2 diabetes. Get yourself checked. Frequently Type 2 can be avoided with minor lifestyle changes and resulting modest, but sustained, reductions in weight (that's what I'm fighting to do right now myself, and mainly for that same reason).
I'm sorry, but it does not work that way. Prosperity does not come at the expense of others. It comes from offering products and/or services that other people are willing to VOLUNTARILY pay for. It comes from exercising whatever your competitive advantage may be - from doing whatever it is that you do best, and trading the outputs from whatever that my be for other things that other people produce when they do what they do best.
I am sorry that both the U.S. and third-world governments have been screwing over Third World people for so many generations. But the U.S. government is about to come to an end, at least in its present form. You might consider ways to encourage your own governments to do the same. A government can be compatible with basic human dignity ONLY if it is willing to respect the freedom of their people to work, earn, save, invest, and prosper. Most today do not, and therefore do not deserve to exist, and all people, especially the poorest, will have a far better chance to survive, grow, and prosper if they are replaced with others more friendly to economic growth and therefore to something at least strongly resembling free enterprise (not socialism, but not corporatism either, which at least arguably is worse).
Congratulations. You've just reinvented Freshmeat!
I tend to agree, although I do think as an intermediate step, sufficiently cheap electricity, nuclear or otherwise, also can be used to gasify some of our huge and otherwise very ecologically unfriendly reserves of coal, so that existing ICE and fuel-cell vehicles can continue to run in a cost-effective manner during the transition period.
One thing to keep in mind is that China, Japan, and France already have significant nuclear infrastructure. If we do not begin now to catch up, we will be left behind, and our greatest potential competitive advantages, namely, agriculture, manufacturing and technology, will be lost, possibly forever.
That explains how we got the federal government . . . they must all have been manufactured in that same Antarctic lab.
A recession is two quarters of negative growth.
Sorry to nitpick but it is two quarters of negative real (inflation-adjusted) growth. And that is an important distinction because the fedgov tends to understate the true rate of inflation. If it did not . . . if it attempted to take into account the rise in energy and food prices, and the fall of the dollar versus gold, oil, and other commodities . . . then it would be more clear that we have been in recession for 2 or 3 quarters already. It doesn't yet feel like a traditional recession because instead of high unemployment, we are seeing declining real wages and salaries instead. When people begin to realize this, and when living costs increase beyond what most people can afford, at that point we will see rising unemployment as well.
I do see this as a great opening for selling Free Software and related services to smaller and medium sized companies. An increasingly competitive environment for many businesses, particularly those that face competition from overseas, demands that businesses do everything possible to reduce or eliminate unnecessary costs, and Free Software offers many companies an excellent, well-established and proven means for doing so.
1. We trust users until they give us a reason not to. But we also arrange things so individual users or machines are unable to do significant damage to others or to the network.
2. We can't afford to support a separate custom configuration for each employee, yet we realize no two will have exactly the same needs. We accommodate this dilemma by installing critical apps, even if used by only a small number of people, on company-maintained servers rather than users' desktops/laptops. Access is via Remote Desktop, Citrix, VNC, X, or a Web browser. Local machines have as little software as possible - preferably none except what is necessary to access the servers. This makes desktops more or less interchangeable, and also greatly reduces dependence upon Microsoft.
3. We have a strong bias toward Open Source and open standards/protocols, unless there is a solid and sustainable business case for doing otherwise (which is very seldom, except for industry-specific niche products). Thus, most users have OpenOffice, Firefox, Eclipse, etc.; if they have a business need for MS tools, these exist, but usually not on local desktops; they get to them via remote access of some type. Laptops users may get their own copies if there's a real need, e.g., if they must frequently work disconnected from the Internet and therefore the VPN.
4. Network traffic is not routinely monitored, but it is logged. Should spam, viruses, trojans, etc., or just plain old excessive use of Internet resources, become an issue, we can look at the logs to get a good idea of what's going on.
5. We try to filter Web traffic intelligently. Sites known to be malicious are blocked as are those very unlikely to have any business-related purpose (e.g., goatse...). Most others are allowed until they give us a reason not to be. We do not for example filter blogs, or Slashdot; these can be useful and work-related tools especially for developers. But if an employee is found to be abusing them, to the detriment of his or her job and/or our company's resources or reputation, then of course we will discuss it. Since our setup is very flexible, so are our options for dealing with the problem. We can adjust filtering rules on a per-employee basis; we can throttle traffic by employee or by port; we can of course punish the employee but we'd really rather not have to do that unless they've seriously and willfully breached our trust.
6. In this environment, we don't really have to know or care what is on users' desktops or laptops - but we also don't have to support it. We can remove admin rights if necessary without seriously compromising their ability to work.
7. One potential weakness: we presently do not have automatic monitoring of license compliance; we could potentially be held liable if a user installed something on a work machine without being properly licensed. Several of the above strategies help mitigate this risk, but they do not eliminate it completely. Naturally we are looking at ways to do so. We're pretty sure it can be done without draconian changes to existing policy, which really does seem to work well for everyone.
Or me. Except I only kneecap people who done something wrong.
As a low-ranking mobster I very much resent the comparison.
What a crappy thing to say . . . about the Soviets!
Wow...I'd hardly call that 'common'. Who works 12 hours a day (not talking the occasional crunch time)? Who commutes 3 freakin' hours a day? That sounds like lunacy.
Obviously you are not from Boston, San Jose, or NYC. It may be lunacy, but in many major job markets there simply is no affordable housing within any shorter of a commute than that.
As for continuous 12 hour days, I'll agree with you that it is lunacy, especially for knowledge workers. Neither I nor anyone I know can produce as much in 12 hours as we could in 8, or even zero. (Tired people make mistakes that are VERY expensive to fix.) But there are roughly 25,000 unemployed software developers in my metro area who would love to be working 12 hours a day, instead of not at all. Management knows this, and milks it for every penny.
I think you will find if you dig deeply enough that taxes are a means of enforcing and increasing income inequality in the first place.
Not just GPL. Free and open source software, as defined by the FSF and OSI respectively, BY DEFINITION cannot have this restriction.