They already tax you based on the value of your property in most states. Do people not buy houses?
Not as many as would otherwise, I can tell you that. Plus, if you look at the gigantic tax burden of the federal government, if you transitioned that to a tax on assets, it would be of such a degree that the disincentive would only be worse.
I think everyone will want to have wealth just as much as they did before
You have absolutely no understanding of economics. If you tax something you create a disincentive. If you tax wealth there will be a disincentive to maintain wealth, especially if you could live completely tax free by not having any. Lots of Americans already do (they rent instead of own, spend their entire paycheck each term, etc.)
... and you won't just be able to sit on your wealth, you'll have to take risks to keep it growing ahead of the tax.
Yes, forcing people to put their savings into high-risk investments is a good idea, and could never force people into poverty.
It won't mean everyone is poor, but hopefully it won't mean that we have billionaires building mega yachts while others don't have enough money to eat or get educated.
What about the people who were laid off from the mega-yacht company?
I wasn't disagreeing with his points at all, just his mode of argument. Don't accuse me of being illiterate when you can't correctly parse a two-line Slashdot comment. No wonder you're ashamed to publicly put your name to your remarks.
While I believe in forgiveness, I don't believe in the glorification of suffering. Viewpoints like yours only confirm my suspicion that Catholicism is really quite masochistic as far as religions go. I prefer the life-affirming.
I'm not horrified at all. A three year old child is about as clever as a chimpanzee, and I'm comfortable killing chimps--it's interesting that you're the one to revise the estimate downward when we all know that six month old babies are pretty fucking dumb.
What makes you think we had it in the first place? The entire Apollo program was just an attempt to fulfill the propaganda speeches of a dead president and poke the Soviets in the eye, and after the first landing no one cared anymore and the program was cut back. Two things Americans have always had is a desire to honor our dead and the urge to poke our enemies in the eye. Sense of wonder? From the generation that grew up fighting the most destructive war in world history? That's a rose-tinted view of history.
Once the concept of innate human dignity is gone, you end up with societies where human beings are nothing more than raw material for the State machine.
Awesome! I've always wanted to be part of a finite state machine!
I guarantee you an adult pig can outthink a six month old fetus. And we kill pigs all the time, without needing a good reason to. As a scientist and agnostic, wouldn't it make more sense to be able to kill them until they're about 3 years old? An especially bright 3 year old child can outwit an adult chimpanzee, after all. Don't let your tender human feelings for babies get in the way--clearly there's an evolutionary advantage to not wanting to kill our babies, so that intuition has no bearing. (I'm not trolling or being facetious, either--I honestly think infanticide might not be so bad, although I'm not certain or dogmatic about any of this.)
See, I could listen to your theological speculations on the issue, or I could listen to those of a professional theologian like the Pope. While theology doesn't accomplish much either way and neither of you are saying anything meaningful, at least the Pope is more convincing at pretending to be an authority on the matter.
My point was that people shouldn't bitch about soldiers being placed in harm's way; it's what they do. It is what they are trained to do.
And as a civil society, our duty is to make sure they aren't placed into harm's way until it's undoubtedly necessary.
Now I'm not saying that soldiers long to kill people, but when something breaks out, soldiers are chomping at the bit to be part of it.
And when something doesn't break out, we should start shit just in case?
Now, of course, when you said They don't sit around as some sort of resource or plaything that you can just send into harm's way for the fuck of it. were you speaking of Iraq?
I was speaking in general principles.
I would find it odd that you would speak of "repressive Burma" and not realize that Iraq was just as bad or worse than Burma. In Burma, monks were placed under house arrest. In Iraq, Kurdish men women and children were gassed.
The Kurds were gassed for collaborating with the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War, 20 years before the war in question, and while the United States was openly on Iraq's side. The war in Iraq wasn't going to save any of those Kurds from being gassed. Going into Iraq based on that isn't responding to an emergency situation, it's using 20-year-old history as an excuse for going after oil and the guy who tried to kill your daddy. Between the UN sanctions and the US invasion and occupation, we've killed more Iraqi civilians than Saddam would have.
I can condemn one atrocity without wanting to commit a counteratrocity. If more people felt this way just about every cycle of violence would be stopped.
I wonder, how do you free Tibet peacefully? I don't think you can.
South Africa and India were freed peacefully. The black population of America was ostensibly freed as a side effect of war, but they only gained civil rights a century later--peacefully. Again, I think some emergency situations warrant military action, and this includes human rights crises. But given everything you expend in order to commit to serious military action, we have to be very reserved and not get involved unnecessarily.
That sounds an awful lot like Nietzsche's Will to Power, which is what caused the Holocaust.
No, you idiot. I've studied Nietzsche and I've studied the Holocaust and I would know. While Nietzsche's philosophy is not for the weak, it is life-affirming, and not as needlessly cruel as the Holocaust. (Also, the Holocaust was motivated by racial hatred, not the will to power, although the Nazis twisted Nietzsche's words almost as much as they twisted Christ's words, both times for political benefit.)
When a very close friend of mine committed suicide in High School, and his death was in part the result of his father giving him a medication he *really* didn't need, I spent a great deal of time with his mother and step-father, and I urged exactly that.
Aha! So, through your religiosity and your desire to do right, you are more of a bastard and an asshole than even the most committed Nietzschean.
That's called an "incentive", and a good strategy for well-run companies is to grant stock to its employees in order to hammer this point home. If you're going to own and run a company, you put a lot of time and effort and money into that company so you have an incentive not to make it fail. If your employees are in the same situation as you are, it can be more of a positive team effort to keep the company succeeding.
Usually in cases like Enron, the problem arises when the management isn't as vested in the company as they should, and stand to profit more from raiding it than from helping the company itself to succeed. I definitely think that management needs to be extremely vested in the company, moreso than the employees--but if the CEO is "all in" in terms of having his wealth invested in the company's long term success, he certainly has the right and the standing to ask his employees to have a greater vested interest as well.
The real solution is to tax wealth rather than income, so that investment becomes the best strategy for tax avoidance.
Wait, what? If they tax wealth rather than income, you're going to piss away all of your income so you don't have any wealth left to tax. You're not going to buy a house because then you'll have to pay tax on it. You're not going to invest because then you have wealth that can be taxed. At best you'll bury it in your back yard.
It also just happens to be fairer: you get taxed in proportion to what the government is keeping the poor people from taking away.
Sounds like a pretty high tax to me. If you tax wealth no one is going to want to build and keep wealth. Thus everybody is going to be poor.
That's like saying you should yank the fire alarm just because it's there. Militaries exist just in case you really, seriously, undoubtedly need to go to war. They don't sit around as some sort of resource or plaything that you can just send into harm's way for the fuck of it.
You pretend to refute an argument based on sound economic theory with...your own arguments by assertion and appeals to pity? Why not just jump up and down screaming "NO YOU'RE WRONG!"? It would be more honest and contribute just as much to the conversation.
Apple (who really does have decades of *NIX experience. Think A/UX)
I don't know if the A/UX folks are still at Apple or if their experience is relevant. I do know that Apple have decades of *NIX experience from NeXT, which has been working with *NIX since 1985, and which took over Apple when Apple bought them out in 1997.
It's hard to believe what people pay for houses elsewhere, now that I've moved to another state.
2500 square foot house: $170,000. Getting to live somewhere better than Indianapolis: $400,000. The market places a lot of value in being in the right place, although post-bubble, not quite as much value as it used to.
The "correct" way to handle an incomplete ballot is to reject it.
So if I don't support any of the candidates for Position A, I'm disenfranchised when I do want to vote for Position B?
And I don't think anyone has been thrown in jail for not voting. It's a small fine, $20 or so. I think that getting 95% of the population to participate in democratic elections is well worth the imposition.
I certainly don't think getting 95% of the population to participate in democratic elections is desirable, either as a means or as an end, and I find the use of force to do so repugnant.
To the extent that they cannot 'really' be proven or known, which is to say the extent to which reality itself may be an illusion - a Matrix-style simulation, a dream, etc - is irrelevant because reality itself is the only context within which anything is meaningful.
No, experience is the context you're looking for. In the Matrix, dream, and brain-in-vat counterexamples, reality is nothing like experience and no empirical study would tell the difference.
It's real simple: reason only gets you so far. It's a process of reaching conclusions from premises. It's not an oracle.
Then please explain to me, exactly, how the requirement to wear uniforms and meet the enemy in open battle instead of using stealth and infiltration serves that purpose. The answer is: it doesn't, it simply gives governments an unfair advantage over insurgents, which is why governments pass these laws and refer to anyone who dares to practice warfare without being a government as a terrorist. There's no morally significant difference between planting a bomb on a military target and dropping a bomb on a military target, all other things held equal.
Now, there is such a thing as terrorism, but it's more often than not carried out by governments. The term "terrorist" was originally coined to refer to the Jacobins, after all, and what was the Blitz if not a series of terror bombings? But the powers that be have changed the rules so that when they use terror as a weapon it's called "shock and awe" and when their enemies use terror as a weapon it's called "terrorism". And you've swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker.
When I first started reading Fake Steve Jobs, it was funny because I could tell it was an impression of him, and the parts that didn't seem realistic to me I could shrug off somewhat. When I found out it was a journalist, Daniel Lyons in particular, the errors seemed more glaring to me because I could think, "oh, he's a tech journalist, no wonder he didn't get that right". And when I found out he had a well-documented axe to grind against open source, it only made it worse--while I could imagine Steve Jobs acting dismissive towards Stallman, it was considerably less funny when I found out it was some guy from Forbes of all places projecting his opinions onto Steve Jobs.
It's also possible that the quality went down after the secret was revealed, but I think it's more likely that reading it, knowing who was writing it, made me more aware of flaws that were there the whole time. Add in a bit of disappointment (why did it have to be a professional tech journalist instead of some unknown satirist?) and it's no surprise I ended up removing Fake Steve Jobs from my RSS listing.
Slashdot Mirror
Not as many as would otherwise, I can tell you that. Plus, if you look at the gigantic tax burden of the federal government, if you transitioned that to a tax on assets, it would be of such a degree that the disincentive would only be worse.
I think everyone will want to have wealth just as much as they did beforeYou have absolutely no understanding of economics. If you tax something you create a disincentive. If you tax wealth there will be a disincentive to maintain wealth, especially if you could live completely tax free by not having any. Lots of Americans already do (they rent instead of own, spend their entire paycheck each term, etc.)
... and you won't just be able to sit on your wealth, you'll have to take risks to keep it growing ahead of the tax.Yes, forcing people to put their savings into high-risk investments is a good idea, and could never force people into poverty.
It won't mean everyone is poor, but hopefully it won't mean that we have billionaires building mega yachts while others don't have enough money to eat or get educated.What about the people who were laid off from the mega-yacht company?
If they wanted to make it subtle, they could call it "Microsoft!".
No, the microprocessor was. But the moon is perhaps the most enduring.
Have we ever slashdotted an entire country before?
I wasn't disagreeing with his points at all, just his mode of argument. Don't accuse me of being illiterate when you can't correctly parse a two-line Slashdot comment. No wonder you're ashamed to publicly put your name to your remarks.
While I believe in forgiveness, I don't believe in the glorification of suffering. Viewpoints like yours only confirm my suspicion that Catholicism is really quite masochistic as far as religions go. I prefer the life-affirming.
I'm not horrified at all. A three year old child is about as clever as a chimpanzee, and I'm comfortable killing chimps--it's interesting that you're the one to revise the estimate downward when we all know that six month old babies are pretty fucking dumb.
What makes you think we had it in the first place? The entire Apollo program was just an attempt to fulfill the propaganda speeches of a dead president and poke the Soviets in the eye, and after the first landing no one cared anymore and the program was cut back. Two things Americans have always had is a desire to honor our dead and the urge to poke our enemies in the eye. Sense of wonder? From the generation that grew up fighting the most destructive war in world history? That's a rose-tinted view of history.
Awesome! I've always wanted to be part of a finite state machine!
Three years old?
I guarantee you an adult pig can outthink a six month old fetus. And we kill pigs all the time, without needing a good reason to. As a scientist and agnostic, wouldn't it make more sense to be able to kill them until they're about 3 years old? An especially bright 3 year old child can outwit an adult chimpanzee, after all. Don't let your tender human feelings for babies get in the way--clearly there's an evolutionary advantage to not wanting to kill our babies, so that intuition has no bearing. (I'm not trolling or being facetious, either--I honestly think infanticide might not be so bad, although I'm not certain or dogmatic about any of this.)
See, I could listen to your theological speculations on the issue, or I could listen to those of a professional theologian like the Pope. While theology doesn't accomplish much either way and neither of you are saying anything meaningful, at least the Pope is more convincing at pretending to be an authority on the matter.
And as a civil society, our duty is to make sure they aren't placed into harm's way until it's undoubtedly necessary.
Now I'm not saying that soldiers long to kill people, but when something breaks out, soldiers are chomping at the bit to be part of it.And when something doesn't break out, we should start shit just in case?
Now, of course, when you said They don't sit around as some sort of resource or plaything that you can just send into harm's way for the fuck of it. were you speaking of Iraq?I was speaking in general principles.
I would find it odd that you would speak of "repressive Burma" and not realize that Iraq was just as bad or worse than Burma. In Burma, monks were placed under house arrest. In Iraq, Kurdish men women and children were gassed.The Kurds were gassed for collaborating with the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq War, 20 years before the war in question, and while the United States was openly on Iraq's side. The war in Iraq wasn't going to save any of those Kurds from being gassed. Going into Iraq based on that isn't responding to an emergency situation, it's using 20-year-old history as an excuse for going after oil and the guy who tried to kill your daddy. Between the UN sanctions and the US invasion and occupation, we've killed more Iraqi civilians than Saddam would have.
I can condemn one atrocity without wanting to commit a counteratrocity. If more people felt this way just about every cycle of violence would be stopped.
I wonder, how do you free Tibet peacefully? I don't think you can.South Africa and India were freed peacefully. The black population of America was ostensibly freed as a side effect of war, but they only gained civil rights a century later--peacefully. Again, I think some emergency situations warrant military action, and this includes human rights crises. But given everything you expend in order to commit to serious military action, we have to be very reserved and not get involved unnecessarily.
No, you idiot. I've studied Nietzsche and I've studied the Holocaust and I would know. While Nietzsche's philosophy is not for the weak, it is life-affirming, and not as needlessly cruel as the Holocaust. (Also, the Holocaust was motivated by racial hatred, not the will to power, although the Nazis twisted Nietzsche's words almost as much as they twisted Christ's words, both times for political benefit.)
When a very close friend of mine committed suicide in High School, and his death was in part the result of his father giving him a medication he *really* didn't need, I spent a great deal of time with his mother and step-father, and I urged exactly that.Aha! So, through your religiosity and your desire to do right, you are more of a bastard and an asshole than even the most committed Nietzschean.
That's called an "incentive", and a good strategy for well-run companies is to grant stock to its employees in order to hammer this point home. If you're going to own and run a company, you put a lot of time and effort and money into that company so you have an incentive not to make it fail. If your employees are in the same situation as you are, it can be more of a positive team effort to keep the company succeeding.
Usually in cases like Enron, the problem arises when the management isn't as vested in the company as they should, and stand to profit more from raiding it than from helping the company itself to succeed. I definitely think that management needs to be extremely vested in the company, moreso than the employees--but if the CEO is "all in" in terms of having his wealth invested in the company's long term success, he certainly has the right and the standing to ask his employees to have a greater vested interest as well.
Wait, what? If they tax wealth rather than income, you're going to piss away all of your income so you don't have any wealth left to tax. You're not going to buy a house because then you'll have to pay tax on it. You're not going to invest because then you have wealth that can be taxed. At best you'll bury it in your back yard.
It also just happens to be fairer: you get taxed in proportion to what the government is keeping the poor people from taking away.Sounds like a pretty high tax to me. If you tax wealth no one is going to want to build and keep wealth. Thus everybody is going to be poor.
That's like saying you should yank the fire alarm just because it's there. Militaries exist just in case you really, seriously, undoubtedly need to go to war. They don't sit around as some sort of resource or plaything that you can just send into harm's way for the fuck of it.
You pretend to refute an argument based on sound economic theory with...your own arguments by assertion and appeals to pity? Why not just jump up and down screaming "NO YOU'RE WRONG!"? It would be more honest and contribute just as much to the conversation.
I tried that once. It was an overrated experience.
I don't know if the A/UX folks are still at Apple or if their experience is relevant. I do know that Apple have decades of *NIX experience from NeXT, which has been working with *NIX since 1985, and which took over Apple when Apple bought them out in 1997.
2500 square foot house: $170,000. Getting to live somewhere better than Indianapolis: $400,000. The market places a lot of value in being in the right place, although post-bubble, not quite as much value as it used to.
So if I don't support any of the candidates for Position A, I'm disenfranchised when I do want to vote for Position B?
And I don't think anyone has been thrown in jail for not voting. It's a small fine, $20 or so. I think that getting 95% of the population to participate in democratic elections is well worth the imposition.I certainly don't think getting 95% of the population to participate in democratic elections is desirable, either as a means or as an end, and I find the use of force to do so repugnant.
No, experience is the context you're looking for. In the Matrix, dream, and brain-in-vat counterexamples, reality is nothing like experience and no empirical study would tell the difference.
It's real simple: reason only gets you so far. It's a process of reaching conclusions from premises. It's not an oracle.
Then please explain to me, exactly, how the requirement to wear uniforms and meet the enemy in open battle instead of using stealth and infiltration serves that purpose. The answer is: it doesn't, it simply gives governments an unfair advantage over insurgents, which is why governments pass these laws and refer to anyone who dares to practice warfare without being a government as a terrorist. There's no morally significant difference between planting a bomb on a military target and dropping a bomb on a military target, all other things held equal.
Now, there is such a thing as terrorism, but it's more often than not carried out by governments. The term "terrorist" was originally coined to refer to the Jacobins, after all, and what was the Blitz if not a series of terror bombings? But the powers that be have changed the rules so that when they use terror as a weapon it's called "shock and awe" and when their enemies use terror as a weapon it's called "terrorism". And you've swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker.
When I first started reading Fake Steve Jobs, it was funny because I could tell it was an impression of him, and the parts that didn't seem realistic to me I could shrug off somewhat. When I found out it was a journalist, Daniel Lyons in particular, the errors seemed more glaring to me because I could think, "oh, he's a tech journalist, no wonder he didn't get that right". And when I found out he had a well-documented axe to grind against open source, it only made it worse--while I could imagine Steve Jobs acting dismissive towards Stallman, it was considerably less funny when I found out it was some guy from Forbes of all places projecting his opinions onto Steve Jobs.
It's also possible that the quality went down after the secret was revealed, but I think it's more likely that reading it, knowing who was writing it, made me more aware of flaws that were there the whole time. Add in a bit of disappointment (why did it have to be a professional tech journalist instead of some unknown satirist?) and it's no surprise I ended up removing Fake Steve Jobs from my RSS listing.