Yeah, but you can't do much with people who rolled really poorly in health or family. Yes, provide support for the handicapped. About the children of junkies... Can't do much there, cause if you try, you risk becoming a tyrant right from the get-go. Consider that in the 1930's to 1950's Australia considered that children born to Aboriginal natives were going to grow up with a really terrible life. So they took the children away from their families and raised them in boarding schools. So the children grew up with what a British subject would consider a good school education. But the Aboriginal culture was severely damaged. And there was the charge of racism, etc.
Some form of "tyranny" is pretty much inevitable if these festering societal wounds are to be ever healed and self-perpetuating cycles broken. The problem is of course that the part of the society that tries to do the damage control has to itself be well. Not to mention that simplistic solutions to complicated problems are not likely to be effective either. Case in point: boarding schools do not substitute for parents. If the society was very healthy and capable of sustaining very high levels of satisfaction amongst all kinds of its members, then taking children whose parents suffer from some sort of mental damage (either culture, religion or drug induced) away at a very young age to be raised through adoption would work much better. As to the "destruction of culture" it is meaningless. Culture is in a state of constant flux and attempting to preserve some fragment of it, usually a mess of superstitions, phobias and prejudices, is pretty much pointless. In a span of a few decades it would evolve beyond recognition anyways. Not to mention that most of the so-called "culture" is not worth preserving in the first place.
About CEOs... Pretty much every dime they get, goes back out.
Yea, the ever popular "trickle-down" theory... too bad empirical evidence shows otherwise. The CEO pay is unspendable by an individual, no matter how ostentatious, in the real world, because they earn so much as to rival the GDP of small countries. Since no human being can possibly piss away so much money on toys, they "invest" all of that money into vacuous make-believe shit like stock and "derivative" securities. None of which leaves the closed circle of Wall Street temples, remaining represented as bits in various banking computers, until a time when these "obligations" for one reason or another need to be tested against reality and subsequently pull down the whole economy down with them.
And then there is of course the teeny-weeny problem of societal justice and correlation of wealth and merit.
Over time, I put $7k into a 401k in the late 80's, and never a penny more (into that account). In 2007, it was up to ~$40k, today it's down to ~$21k. So I still have a 3x gain. I have faith that I'll gain that 6x again in ten years.
Give it a few more months and you will be back to $7k or maybe less.
Also you probably should note, since you are talking gain over time, that the purchasing power of US wages has stagnated (or fell behind, as measured versus productivity) starting back in the 1970 and never moved since. Your 401k, as well as the stock market is rolling you back to that time, and perhaps to times before, pealing off like an onion layer after layer of bogus "trickle-down" and "supply-side" economic mumbo-jumbo.
Can we just give money to people for doing nothing? Not likely to work well, it's best to give them an opportunity to be something.
Back to your pre-conceptions that the only motivation for doing anything is greed and that the whole of human life should be measured exclusively in money.
I'm not too quick to say that people in Africa have it all bad, they have what they're used to. Some have it really bad, where they are being
Her Grandfather died and left her nothing, as she is able to do about $5m with her image.
Oh, I forgot. You are confused. She will inherit the (poooh wittle) $5 million (after taxes), in addition to her entire socialite life-style being funded up to now by the fortune of her family. That's some "pulling yourself by the bootstraps" you chose to extol as your example, even if one considers her looks (which constitute the entire foundation of her celebrity "assets") to be somehow the results of her own effort and not a win in the DNA casino in the first place...
Me, I'm happy to work a bit, have a comfortable income, and a decent lifestyle.
Great. Now consider those who got dealt far shittier cards then you. Born with muscular atrophy or some other debilitating diseases. Born into junkie families in some ghetto. Born in some slum in Africa with no chance to even learn reading and writing. The point of a sane society constructed by sentient, reasonable beings would be to make sure that even those people are given something resembling a "decent lifestyle". Capitalism, as we presently have it, and as some rabid "libertarians" would even "improve" upon its viciousness, is geared to essentially to treat people as meat and consider these individuals as "disposable". What counts is "resources" (exemplified by "money") not actual individuals.
And then come along veritable assholes claiming that what you are in this society is a direct result of your "smarts and hard work". Well I would like to see one of them make it into a multi-million VP position of some corporation starting with, say, severe cerebral palsy when they are born into some low income family. And that of course not even mentioning the related issue of attribution of credit for that company's "success" between the managers, CEO and the 10,000 employees or so, and the fact that some of these jerks believe it to be 99% or more in the upper levels of management and structure the "rewards" accordingly.
Face it, random chance plays a pivotal, overriding role in the "success" in our society, and unless we acknowledge this and organize ourselves to account for a very great number of those people for whom the dice rolled snake eyes, we will have all sorts of nasty shit happening to our society, complete with an occasional bloody revolution. Many, if most, people do not take kindly to realization that they've been living a Las Vegas casino while being sold a "system to beat the Roulette" by the very few past winners as a "solution" to this arrangement.
Busts occur because people keep doing things that no longer work and resources are wasted on useless things. It is logical to pursue success where one has found success in the past. Hence in capitalism individuals throng to the same, successful investments. No one wants to be left behind. In communism the fearless leaders do the same thing in their allocation of resources, e.g. the 5 year plans made so famous by the Soviet Union. However, given that change is the only constant, sometimes lack of adequate information, political, and/or sentimental forces cause those directing production to do something suboptimal. Sometimes the forces at hand are so strong that the same failed strategy is pursued well past the point it becomes obvious that it ought to have been ended. This is a
vulnerability in any real human organization and no amount of "sentience" is going to fix it.
What you presented is of course simply an argument for a strong social safety-net so that when things go pear shaped, for whatever reason, people do not end up rioting over food and medicine (which might end up being the case if things keep going on the course they are presently). It is also a supporting argument for diversification i.e. limiting the size of individual businesses as not only to avoid the "too big to fail" syndrome occurring in the extreme, but to increase competition across the board in ordinary circumstances.
But on the philosophical scale of things, Soviet Union and their totalitarian socialism are not exactly the only possible co-operative scenario out there. As a matter of fact it is simply an example of where not to go. There are many other alternatives. Are they all feasible? Optimal? Who knows, until they are tried we will probably not know. What we do know for sure is that the "capitalism" as we have it now is not only prone to disastrous malfunctions (just as Soviet socialism was, I grant you that), but from a moral perspective is only marginally better then outright feudalism.
In your ideal world, where does the omniscient coordination of the entire human economy come from?
Advanced information technology perhaps? Radically different upbringing and social norms? The point is that as our knowledge and technology improves, there are new options being introduced which were not there yesterday. And we should honestly examine them.
It's a pipe dream to think that it is achievable by any system, but the virtue of capitalism aided by openly available information is that busts are relatively short while investors figure out what sorts of endeavors are worth investing in (and thus employing people to do the work associated with them). There is always motivation to invest, and thus is native human greed turned to societal benefit. Does politics get in the way of that? Of course. But is does so for every system tried to date, including communism
This of course is quite telling. You assume without a second thought that "me-mine-I-myself-all-mine" mindset, motivated strictly by base, animalistic greed is, and should be, the default behaviour, a base upon all human activity is constructed. Despite evidence that not all people, even now, are motivated by greed. What if there was a society wide change of norms whereby "keeping up with the Johnses" was not a desirable activity at all and in fact a shunned behaviour? How would that impact your whole notion of economy? It is precisely this kind of unexamined, almost religious dogmas that lead to all sorts of flawed, restricted and ultimately failing societal models. Objective examination of such factors followed by a design of optimal societal structure should be what sentient beings would do, even if it involves serious alterations of these very beings' own characteristics to accomplish.
The unfortunate aspects of communism are:
1. that historically it has been unstable, shifting readily to totalita
"Society" does not have resources that people "allocate to themselves".
Of course it does. The fact that a society is "greater then the sum of its parts" is the very reason why we flock together to form a society in the first place. Then there are questions like: who do the natural resources of planet Earth belong to? What merit does a dude who essentially does no work at all but merely "owns" a mine (inherited from his great-great-grandfather) and charges everyone for the ore (which is separate from the actual process of digging it up and processing it) bring to society to merit his rewards? Does his existence or actions create the ore? Isn't high merit-to-reward correlation the whole point of this whole "capitalist" exercise? And on and on and on it goes.
That one phrase gives away your basic worldview, and explains the vehemence you feel toward anyone who believes that they can achieve individual success - that any one can earn what they have.
My "vehemence" is toward people who out of self-centered reasons attempt to downplay or outright deny the very significant role random chance plays in their "success". They do so out of a (justified) fear that acknowledging that would severely weaken their claim to the magnitude of the "rewards" they receive. It is as simple as that.
But do you really believe that individual skill and effort has no effect on that individual's personal outcome?
They clearly do, however the extent of that effect is what is in question here. I simply pointed out that fortuitous circumstances play a far greater role in such "success" than most "successful" people's egos allow them to admit to. And this has a direct impact on the ways of allocating the "rewards" for their "merit" to the society, which again is the whole supposed purpose of "capitalism". In other words that societal formula is way off and that causes all sorts of systemic problems, the recent financial fiasco being just the latest in a long, long line of such.
That their actual outcomes are truly defined by external factors not within their control, and not, perhaps, by their ability to foresee, plan for, and possibly deal with those facts?
They clearly are to a very large extent. Would Bill Gates be born just a few years later, he would not take his present place in the history of computing, and thus would not achieve his riches, because the exact conditions for emergence of Microsoft would be long past by the time he was ready to act. Some other company (or perhaps a group of them) would have already taken its place in the world, led by people who despite their skill and effort never got their chance in our version of history. It is really as simple as that. History is choke-full of such examples, such as the famous Graham Bell / Elisha Gray scenario. Was Gray dumber or less hard working then Bell? Clearly not so. But he got virtually nothing out of the same (or perhaps greater as some historians would have it) effort and skill. The "spoils of victory" went all to Bell.
The view that individuals never actually deserve to have more than others, that they just grab an unfair cut from a collectively-owned pool of "resources", is really just hatred of others for being successful.
Under the current societal philosophy it is clear that some people are indeed entitled to "rewards" based on their "merit" to the society. Capitalism is in fact (a rather feeble - but so far the best available) attempt to bring these rewards in line with merit. And I have no problem per-se with the overall idea, given the current conditions, it is the pathetic implementation that bothers me to no end. The philosophy, as presently applied, is simply wholly internally inconsistent and utterly illogical.
On a larger scale, wide-scope existential questions remain: what is the "purpose"
If you operate on the assumption that there are an infinite number of fortuitous events and you have the aforementioned traits, perhaps the chances of encountering a life changing circumstance or
event and capitalizing on that circumstance or event is in fact greater than it would be if you lacked the aforementioned traits.
Unfortunately empirical evidence does not support your claim. Many, many people (in fact a majority of world's population) are placed in a position where no amount of "maximizing one's chances" will make you a Wall Street executive. You might perhaps rise in the ranks of some local war-lord thug's militia before you get your head blown off or some such or receive "advanced religious education" in some madrassa to become a "cleric" with your own fatwa-dispenser, but that's pretty much it. It is because you were dealt a losing set of cards at the outset and no amount of cleverness will do anything about it. In a Western society one can compare a trust-fund kid whose starting position is a VP or a child of the inner-city whose starting position (at a ripe age of 12) is a gang-banger drug pusher. I guess there are "career advancement opportunities" in both, but again...
What purpose does your apparent desire for egalitarianism serve? Do you merely want to skate through life doing the minimum possible and maximizing your personal recreational time?
As someone else pointed out to you, it is really an existential question. What is the "purpose" of life? Is "hard work and sacrifice and pain for uncertain rewards largely based on random chance" the only way to live? Is an attempt to reduce the "risk/reward" ratio for everyone an evil deed? Or is life supposed to be like a Las Vegas casino where nearly everyone loses so that some extremely rare random person can win the "jackpot" somehow superior? (and the person in question promptly going on TV to extol his/her "skill" and "perseverance" at pulling the machine's lever to a chorus of adoring true-believers) Is co-operation the superior way of an sentient species, or vicious competition to the death for scraps in an endless winner-takes-almost-all game?
I think you misplace the blame for the recent unsustainable boom...
Your excuses would sound more sincere if this was the first "boom" ever caused by the systemic instability of the "winner-takes-most" society. Or a second... or maybe a third... but this has been going on so long that some dusty 19th century books are still around excusing busts of that time... equally insincerely. And going further back one can see more busts and booms and wars and famines and what not caused by various different incarnations of greed-and-power based societies. It is endless really. I do think that sentient beings should be able to do much better than this.
In some circles, hard work and sacrifice must be considered repugnant, but in the circles where I circulate, those are considered positive attributes of successful people.
It figures that you would offer a meaningless platitude. The phrase "hard work and sacrifice" can apply equally to a baker, a scientist, a doctor... or a highway robber, a safe-cracker.. or a thief of a Wall Street variety. They all "work hard", and in case of some of the thieves "really hard" - complete with putting their lives on the line in shootouts with cops, to pull off their heists.
So "hard work and sacrifice" by themselves are not sufficient criteria to determine merit... and thus allocation of resources. And this is the exact core of the problem, the dis-association of "merit" and "reward" in purely "capitalist" society. The defenders of status quo however do wish with all their might to avoid any examination of this fact.
No one is talking about "even", but we are talking about something that even remotely approaches "sane". And "sane" takes into account many other factors other then just someone's overpowering ego and desire to viciously claw his/her way to riches over the dead bodies of everyone else around them. "Sane" does not involve tailoring the society's structure to people who measure their "success" based upon the number of others they can piss on with impunity.
And any sane approach must acknowledge that random events beyond one's control play a pivotal role in one's life and that "self-made" men do not really exist beyond the realm of wishful thinking. That in practice translates into strong social safety nets, universal health coverage, access to education, limits on sizes of businesses etc, all resulting in much much smaller disparities between the "successful" denizens and the "average" ones. A situation where one person earns the income of a 1000000 others is simply a case of rabid societal idiocy and is not sustainable in the long term any more than totalitarian societies masquerading as "communist" are.
Not true at all. You only notice (and catregorize as "successful") a tiny percentage of all those who did all these things, but of whom a vast majority failed regardless. You are simply ignoring them because they do not fit your theory. It takes only one unfortunate event beyond one's control, of which there is an essentially an infinite supply, to utterly destroy and erase years of hard work and many, many long-odds "victories". On the other hand a one-off fortunate random event of great magnitude is not consistent with the attribution of the reasons for "success" you present, only a long series of hard-earned ones fits the bill. Subsequently, given equal effort, far many more people will fail then will succeed. It's simple probability distribution.
But of course this patently obvious reasoning is severely inconvenient for people who demand massive privileges and wholly insane allocation of society's resources toward themselves based upon their notion of single-handedly "raising themselves by their bootstraps" or some such nonsense, an image which is massively damaged when one starts any sort of analysis of influence external factors on their "self-made" success. Which in the end is no different really from the kings of old who believed the same based upon "divine providence" and were equally upset when someone dared to question their claim to their disproportionate privileges.
As others pointed out to you, you have no clue how routing works. Most routers past your home NAT box do not consider individual connections, merely individual packets. A new connection, as far as a router at an ISP is supposed to be concerned (unless it is spying on you for the cops or blocking contents for "your own good"), is just yet another packet to route, except this one has one bit different (the SYN flag) in its header. So as far as ISPs are concerned it makes absolutely no difference if you open 1000 connections to 1000 people per second or you simply send the same 1000 packets to one other peer.
Where you probably got confused is that most home routers do care about the number of connections because, unlike core routers at the ISPs, they must also perform extra per-connection tasks involved in maintaining the NAT functionality. That is what makes it possible for 5 home computers to appear as all being on the same IP address on the Internet that your ISP assigned to you.
The only thing I would object to is your roumaji. Although there are many wacky systems, a more sensible phonetic representations would be Hepburn-nish "kahohayushi", "kahahayushi" etc. At least the "shi" makes more sense then "si" phonetically.
While true, Working on reducing piracy would increase revenue to some degree, so therefore would increase their bottom line.
There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that this is the case. Most modern "entertainment" is of such poor quality and in such vast quantity that it is only logical to assume that most copies downloaded would not have been should a fee be involved. Then there is the fact that many of those downloading a $20 DVD live in places where $20 constitutes 20 days of living expenses or are on an equivalent budget (i.e. kids). This combined with the amount of downloads occurring for the explicit purpose of locating otherwise near impossible to locate quality contents by those who actually buy the product, and combined with vast expenditures, technological, political and legal to fight the phenomenon on the part of the "contents producers" and the final tally is by no means obviously biased toward increased revenue if "piracy" were to be eliminated.
That some vast, multi-multi-billion pie-in-the-sky mountain of money is being "stolen" by insidious "thieves" is merely a common delusion of various corporate executives, and stems from the nature of corporate executives, who being hyper-greedy thieves themselves (see any recent newspaper using keyword: Wall Street) cannot conceive of anyone doing positively anything not out of utter, sheer, base greed. And the executives do their best to share that avarice-induced fever with their pet politicians, who add their own flavour of opportunism, seeing a possibility of expanding their power or control over populace's access to information in the guise of "combating piracy/terrorism/child-porn/name-your-bogeyman". And the rest is history.
Remember that if ever a site is available that points somebody towards your credit card/bank information.
That is a flawed argument because the problem is not with the credit card info itself. The problem is with the unsecured system of authorization which allows mere credit card number/bank account number to be used by someone unauthorized to do so.
A properly designed (read: less convenient and less profitable) system would involve much more difficult to crack methods, such as one-time passwords and security tokens. In which case one could have all the sites with all the credit card numbers in the world and it would do a criminal no good whatsoever.
But, just like with the "intellectual property" bullshit, it is far easier to shoot the messenger and to keep pretending that the problem lies with those who dare to expose the actual corporate thieves and their buddy politician crooks running the whole crapola show for what they really are.
Removal of net neutrality would have some key effects:
An ability for ISPs to collude with large commercial interests/government to simply suffocate small operators and individual websites, particularly of "inconvenient" to the ruling elites' contents, by selling all the "priority" bandwidth to large corporations/government and throttling the rest severely. This allows for censorship and creation of monopolies all under a pretense of "market forces" at work.
It would mean the end to all peer-to-peer applications, large chunk of Internet gaming, small scale VPNs etc by introduction of massive latency resulting from now legalized throttling of all "not sufficiently profitable" traffic.
Massive increase of costs for most commercial websites, which of course would simply be passed on consumers, which would in turn drive prices up for Internet commerce significantly, all with absolutely no improvement to the operation of these sites and with an overall deterioration of Internet service in general as mentioned above.
You think economists are running the economy and that we are in the situation we're in because we have a "free market"? Hah! Good one!
No, the economists do not run the economy (although it is their dearest wet dream) but they serve the same role once occupied by the High Priests of Ra. They offer, with great pompous gravitas, dire "predictions" as to what will happen if their hare-brained-scheme of the week is not acted upon post-haste by the ruling class and not received in awe by the plebs, or else the Lord Mammon will be very, very angry indeed, and He shall smite the unbelievers, verily. Or more accurately the unbelievers' bank accounts.
And yes we are in this situation because we have free-for-all, dog-eat-dog "free market" where it does not belong, say in financial derivative "securities" and race-to-the-bottom offshore consumer goods manufacturing. All of it "financed" via the make-believe "money" schemes the "economists" and their buddy bankers have cooked up, like for example systemic and deliberate creation of an illusion of prosperity via ever more massive debt while real wages go down or stagnate across the board for the last 30+ years (see also under: "globalization") in order to keep the victim dupes of the brainless schemes in the dark. The wee catch of course being that at some point even the funny "money" runs out as the illusion becomes unsustainable. Which is when the dupes discover that they are on the hook for some $450 trillion (optimistically).
And the list of religious gobledey-gook goes onto the howling in insanity demands of perpetual corporate "growth" and spittle saturated mantras of never-ending increases in "productivity" etc etc and on and on and on.
That's an often cited ideological dogma, not a fact. In fact the "economists" (or more accurately the "monetary voodoo witch doctors") who came up with this turd have absolutely no clue as to the workings of the economy, something which they have proven repeatedly, by consistently offering prognostications with less accuracy then mere random chance and even by setting up companies like the LTCM based on their great "knowledge", which were one the first multi-billion dollar bankruptcies in history.
So before you mindlessly repeat their "wisdom", perhaps you should first examine the record of these "free market" "gurus". Or just read this week's newspaper.
You totally miss the point of Midnight Commander. It is here NOT to make it possible for some clueless newb to get around learning of the CLI. It is here for those of us who use CLI all the time to speed things up immensely. I can move/copy/make quick changes to files/etc orders of magnitude faster with MC then by using raw CLI even with fancy auto-complete functionality. And then there is the Meta-Enter combo which pastes the currently selected file into your commands. MC is a great improvement in productivity for me, to the point that I get the feeling of things slowing down to a crawl when MC is not available on whatever system I am working on.
Us "working slobs" were the ones funding the investments and not pulling our money out in the first place, if you track the money all the way back to the source.
Not really. A vast majority of the "wealth" that was "created" is in the "derivatives" market where the "money" literally came into existence the moment US banks made transactions with each other due to fractional reserve rules. The same applies to all the other types of credit financing promulgated by the US "investment banks". The actual money in retirement funds and other silly "investments" into which the working slobs were conned amount to pidley-squat in the overall picture, although they will certainly be eaten by the out of control financial monster created by the "high flying" business class crooks. In short the real world wealth of working people has been consumed by the far, far larger fictional paper "wealth" Ponzi scheme that is the US financial markets.
Far too many people think of the stock market as non-risky. 401(k) tax benefits have motivated far too many people to "invest" in the stock market than should be.
Again, collusion of billionaire crooks and politicians urged the working slob to defer to the "financial experts" who extolled the virtues of "private enterprise" and "free markets" as cure-all solution to all ills of the Universe, and retirement funding in particular.
Investment money is supposed to be money you do not need to live on. How many people above the age of 45 in most 401(k) programs are still 100% in stocks, and haven't demanded money market or other simpler/safer/less risky investments?
Except there are no "safer" investments left anywhere, including hoarding cash under the pillow. Even government bonds have 10 year yield of something like 2%, which is way below any sort of expected inflation. The system is thoroughly and comprehensively fucked.
The greed wasn't just on Wall Street, it was the people on Main Street who saw the stock market as a get rich quick scheme.
Sure, but that was so due to incessant propaganda by the government under control of the Wall Street crooks. Case in point: the Bush crowd was not so long ago demanding privatization (read transfer to Wall Street) of all funds of the Social Security.
You might also remember (or maybe not if you are too young) that Wall Street was (rightfully) regarded as a "rich man's casino" by the working class of the generations born in 1920s-1940s. The overwhelming greed began to be cultivated with the "baby boomer" generation who never remembered first hand the effects of what these rich crooks were capable of, and who begun to think of themselves as "rich" and entitled. Which the crooks wholeheartedly encouraged.
Yes, the market does about 10% annually over TIME. But if you're 45+ years old and you know "times are good", it was time to diversify.
Even that is questionable as the "market" is composed mostly of essentially fake "wealth", amount of which can vary wildly and rapidly. Subsequently it is impossible to depend on any real return in the "market" as 15 years of +10% can be instantly nullified by being followed by one year of -50% resulting in total negative average yearly return over those 16 years. Essentially the market is an unpredictable lottery, no different then playing dice or betting on horses. Therefore there is no such thing as an "investment" in the market. There are only bets.
Those that didn't, get burnt... like they always do. History repeats. All one had to do was read any financial book's warnings at the local library (just to give a FREE information example), to know this.
True, however what you are espousing is one of the fundamental flaws in the so-called "free market" (and one of the chief reasons why such market is impossible in practise):
Those guys sold the company a few years later for 3.5 million, and are on to working on their next company.
Both the purchase of the old and the startup costs of the new financed by the "investment banks" who pulled the "money" out of collective asses of the "derivatives market".
And as a final result of which, now we, that all of us working slobs, get to pay for these "smart" people's "entrepreneurial spirit" to the tune of 450 trillion dollars or so (or perhaps even more as the size of the collapsing fake "wealth" in that market is anyone's guess due to all the cooked books on Wall Street)....
So to make long story short, you are telling us to idolize a culture of reckless stupidity, made possible by, and backed by astronomical scale thievery and fraud because the incompetent, self-absorbed jackasses got away with the money while leaving all those who they abused eating dirt? No thought as to the consequences?
For you see if you keep this up long enough, it will not come as a surprise to me at all if driving to the cocktail party at the marina in one's Ferrari might become a serious hazard for sniper fire and IEDs...
Go do something useful today.
Like making sure your rifle is in good working condition...
Not so. There was no controversy about the reading amongst sane people but what occured was simply the result of ever increasing appetite of the government for new powers to "protect" the poor citizens from whatever bogeyman could be conjured at the moment. So it took until 1878 to reach the point in time when the ever expanding governmental powers attempted to cross the line into inspection of everyone's mail. Hence that court case.
That ever increasing expansion of course never ceased, it merely changed course, until finally the government successfully circumvented that ruling by attacking the new technologies which rendered snail-mail obsolete, and with this manoeuvre spelling the death knell of the 4th amendment as well.
All of which was entirely predictable as this insane hunger of power was well foreseen by the Founding Fathers and keeping it at bay was one of the fundamental purposes of the Constitution. Unfortunately the attempt, however clever and visionary, has clearly failed at this point according to available empirical evidence.
That still does not work. Firstly, even if one agrees with that interpretation, it would require a determination if the other party is in fact not a US citizen traveling abroad. But more importantly by opening that letter you are still violating the rights of the other end of the communication, i.e. the US citizen on US soil. There is simply no way around it because as far as the violation of the 4th amendment is concerned, the two ends of the postal communication cannot be arbitrarily separated (the "papers" in question belong to both the sender and the recipient at the same time while in transit).
Frankly i hope that we have numerous assassins at work both inside and outside our own borders killing off those that preach death to America, death to Christians, death to Israel etc.. If they spew that rhetoric that is enough to justify being strangled in the night.
You mean the very thing you just spewed? This "strangle in the night everyone who disagrees with me and whom I deem worth of strangling"? But then again, based on your inane post, it is probably too much to hope that you realize that your own very words put you on that very list of yours of people to "strangle"...
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Some form of "tyranny" is pretty much inevitable if these festering societal wounds are to be ever healed and self-perpetuating cycles broken. The problem is of course that the part of the society that tries to do the damage control has to itself be well. Not to mention that simplistic solutions to complicated problems are not likely to be effective either. Case in point: boarding schools do not substitute for parents. If the society was very healthy and capable of sustaining very high levels of satisfaction amongst all kinds of its members, then taking children whose parents suffer from some sort of mental damage (either culture, religion or drug induced) away at a very young age to be raised through adoption would work much better. As to the "destruction of culture" it is meaningless. Culture is in a state of constant flux and attempting to preserve some fragment of it, usually a mess of superstitions, phobias and prejudices, is pretty much pointless. In a span of a few decades it would evolve beyond recognition anyways. Not to mention that most of the so-called "culture" is not worth preserving in the first place.
Yea, the ever popular "trickle-down" theory ... too bad empirical evidence shows otherwise. The CEO pay is unspendable by an individual, no matter how ostentatious, in the real world, because they earn so much as to rival the GDP of small countries. Since no human being can possibly piss away so much money on toys, they "invest" all of that money into vacuous make-believe shit like stock and "derivative" securities. None of which leaves the closed circle of Wall Street temples, remaining represented as bits in various banking computers, until a time when these "obligations" for one reason or another need to be tested against reality and subsequently pull down the whole economy down with them.
And then there is of course the teeny-weeny problem of societal justice and correlation of wealth and merit.
Give it a few more months and you will be back to $7k or maybe less.
Also you probably should note, since you are talking gain over time, that the purchasing power of US wages has stagnated (or fell behind, as measured versus productivity) starting back in the 1970 and never moved since. Your 401k, as well as the stock market is rolling you back to that time, and perhaps to times before, pealing off like an onion layer after layer of bogus "trickle-down" and "supply-side" economic mumbo-jumbo.
Back to your pre-conceptions that the only motivation for doing anything is greed and that the whole of human life should be measured exclusively in money.
Oh, I forgot. You are confused. She will inherit the (poooh wittle) $5 million (after taxes), in addition to her entire socialite life-style being funded up to now by the fortune of her family. That's some "pulling yourself by the bootstraps" you chose to extol as your example, even if one considers her looks (which constitute the entire foundation of her celebrity "assets") to be somehow the results of her own effort and not a win in the DNA casino in the first place ...
Great. Now consider those who got dealt far shittier cards then you. Born with muscular atrophy or some other debilitating diseases. Born into junkie families in some ghetto. Born in some slum in Africa with no chance to even learn reading and writing. The point of a sane society constructed by sentient, reasonable beings would be to make sure that even those people are given something resembling a "decent lifestyle". Capitalism, as we presently have it, and as some rabid "libertarians" would even "improve" upon its viciousness, is geared to essentially to treat people as meat and consider these individuals as "disposable". What counts is "resources" (exemplified by "money") not actual individuals.
And then come along veritable assholes claiming that what you are in this society is a direct result of your "smarts and hard work". Well I would like to see one of them make it into a multi-million VP position of some corporation starting with, say, severe cerebral palsy when they are born into some low income family. And that of course not even mentioning the related issue of attribution of credit for that company's "success" between the managers, CEO and the 10,000 employees or so, and the fact that some of these jerks believe it to be 99% or more in the upper levels of management and structure the "rewards" accordingly.
Face it, random chance plays a pivotal, overriding role in the "success" in our society, and unless we acknowledge this and organize ourselves to account for a very great number of those people for whom the dice rolled snake eyes, we will have all sorts of nasty shit happening to our society, complete with an occasional bloody revolution. Many, if most, people do not take kindly to realization that they've been living a Las Vegas casino while being sold a "system to beat the Roulette" by the very few past winners as a "solution" to this arrangement.
What you presented is of course simply an argument for a strong social safety-net so that when things go pear shaped, for whatever reason, people do not end up rioting over food and medicine (which might end up being the case if things keep going on the course they are presently). It is also a supporting argument for diversification i.e. limiting the size of individual businesses as not only to avoid the "too big to fail" syndrome occurring in the extreme, but to increase competition across the board in ordinary circumstances.
But on the philosophical scale of things, Soviet Union and their totalitarian socialism are not exactly the only possible co-operative scenario out there. As a matter of fact it is simply an example of where not to go. There are many other alternatives. Are they all feasible? Optimal? Who knows, until they are tried we will probably not know. What we do know for sure is that the "capitalism" as we have it now is not only prone to disastrous malfunctions (just as Soviet socialism was, I grant you that), but from a moral perspective is only marginally better then outright feudalism.
Advanced information technology perhaps? Radically different upbringing and social norms? The point is that as our knowledge and technology improves, there are new options being introduced which were not there yesterday. And we should honestly examine them.
This of course is quite telling. You assume without a second thought that "me-mine-I-myself-all-mine" mindset, motivated strictly by base, animalistic greed is, and should be, the default behaviour, a base upon all human activity is constructed. Despite evidence that not all people, even now, are motivated by greed. What if there was a society wide change of norms whereby "keeping up with the Johnses" was not a desirable activity at all and in fact a shunned behaviour? How would that impact your whole notion of economy? It is precisely this kind of unexamined, almost religious dogmas that lead to all sorts of flawed, restricted and ultimately failing societal models. Objective examination of such factors followed by a design of optimal societal structure should be what sentient beings would do, even if it involves serious alterations of these very beings' own characteristics to accomplish.
Of course it does. The fact that a society is "greater then the sum of its parts" is the very reason why we flock together to form a society in the first place. Then there are questions like: who do the natural resources of planet Earth belong to? What merit does a dude who essentially does no work at all but merely "owns" a mine (inherited from his great-great-grandfather) and charges everyone for the ore (which is separate from the actual process of digging it up and processing it) bring to society to merit his rewards? Does his existence or actions create the ore? Isn't high merit-to-reward correlation the whole point of this whole "capitalist" exercise? And on and on and on it goes.
My "vehemence" is toward people who out of self-centered reasons attempt to downplay or outright deny the very significant role random chance plays in their "success". They do so out of a (justified) fear that acknowledging that would severely weaken their claim to the magnitude of the "rewards" they receive. It is as simple as that.
They clearly do, however the extent of that effect is what is in question here. I simply pointed out that fortuitous circumstances play a far greater role in such "success" than most "successful" people's egos allow them to admit to. And this has a direct impact on the ways of allocating the "rewards" for their "merit" to the society, which again is the whole supposed purpose of "capitalism". In other words that societal formula is way off and that causes all sorts of systemic problems, the recent financial fiasco being just the latest in a long, long line of such.
They clearly are to a very large extent. Would Bill Gates be born just a few years later, he would not take his present place in the history of computing, and thus would not achieve his riches, because the exact conditions for emergence of Microsoft would be long past by the time he was ready to act. Some other company (or perhaps a group of them) would have already taken its place in the world, led by people who despite their skill and effort never got their chance in our version of history. It is really as simple as that. History is choke-full of such examples, such as the famous Graham Bell / Elisha Gray scenario. Was Gray dumber or less hard working then Bell? Clearly not so. But he got virtually nothing out of the same (or perhaps greater as some historians would have it) effort and skill. The "spoils of victory" went all to Bell.
Under the current societal philosophy it is clear that some people are indeed entitled to "rewards" based on their "merit" to the society. Capitalism is in fact (a rather feeble - but so far the best available) attempt to bring these rewards in line with merit. And I have no problem per-se with the overall idea, given the current conditions, it is the pathetic implementation that bothers me to no end. The philosophy, as presently applied, is simply wholly internally inconsistent and utterly illogical.
On a larger scale, wide-scope existential questions remain: what is the "purpose"
Unfortunately empirical evidence does not support your claim. Many, many people (in fact a majority of world's population) are placed in a position where no amount of "maximizing one's chances" will make you a Wall Street executive. You might perhaps rise in the ranks of some local war-lord thug's militia before you get your head blown off or some such or receive "advanced religious education" in some madrassa to become a "cleric" with your own fatwa-dispenser, but that's pretty much it. It is because you were dealt a losing set of cards at the outset and no amount of cleverness will do anything about it. In a Western society one can compare a trust-fund kid whose starting position is a VP or a child of the inner-city whose starting position (at a ripe age of 12) is a gang-banger drug pusher. I guess there are "career advancement opportunities" in both, but again...
As someone else pointed out to you, it is really an existential question. What is the "purpose" of life? Is "hard work and sacrifice and pain for uncertain rewards largely based on random chance" the only way to live? Is an attempt to reduce the "risk/reward" ratio for everyone an evil deed? Or is life supposed to be like a Las Vegas casino where nearly everyone loses so that some extremely rare random person can win the "jackpot" somehow superior? (and the person in question promptly going on TV to extol his/her "skill" and "perseverance" at pulling the machine's lever to a chorus of adoring true-believers) Is co-operation the superior way of an sentient species, or vicious competition to the death for scraps in an endless winner-takes-almost-all game?
Your excuses would sound more sincere if this was the first "boom" ever caused by the systemic instability of the "winner-takes-most" society. Or a second... or maybe a third ... but this has been going on so long that some dusty 19th century books are still around excusing busts of that time ... equally insincerely. And going further back one can see more busts and booms and wars and famines and what not caused by various different incarnations of greed-and-power based societies. It is endless really. I do think that sentient beings should be able to do much better than this.
It figures that you would offer a meaningless platitude. The phrase "hard work and sacrifice" can apply equally to a baker, a scientist, a doctor ... or a highway robber, a safe-cracker .. or a thief of a Wall Street variety. They all "work hard", and in case of some of the thieves "really hard" - complete with putting their lives on the line in shootouts with cops, to pull off their heists.
So "hard work and sacrifice" by themselves are not sufficient criteria to determine merit ... and thus allocation of resources. And this is the exact core of the problem, the dis-association of "merit" and "reward" in purely "capitalist" society. The defenders of status quo however do wish with all their might to avoid any examination of this fact.
No one is talking about "even", but we are talking about something that even remotely approaches "sane". And "sane" takes into account many other factors other then just someone's overpowering ego and desire to viciously claw his/her way to riches over the dead bodies of everyone else around them. "Sane" does not involve tailoring the society's structure to people who measure their "success" based upon the number of others they can piss on with impunity.
And any sane approach must acknowledge that random events beyond one's control play a pivotal role in one's life and that "self-made" men do not really exist beyond the realm of wishful thinking. That in practice translates into strong social safety nets, universal health coverage, access to education, limits on sizes of businesses etc, all resulting in much much smaller disparities between the "successful" denizens and the "average" ones. A situation where one person earns the income of a 1000000 others is simply a case of rabid societal idiocy and is not sustainable in the long term any more than totalitarian societies masquerading as "communist" are.
Not true at all. You only notice (and catregorize as "successful") a tiny percentage of all those who did all these things, but of whom a vast majority failed regardless. You are simply ignoring them because they do not fit your theory. It takes only one unfortunate event beyond one's control, of which there is an essentially an infinite supply, to utterly destroy and erase years of hard work and many, many long-odds "victories". On the other hand a one-off fortunate random event of great magnitude is not consistent with the attribution of the reasons for "success" you present, only a long series of hard-earned ones fits the bill. Subsequently, given equal effort, far many more people will fail then will succeed. It's simple probability distribution.
But of course this patently obvious reasoning is severely inconvenient for people who demand massive privileges and wholly insane allocation of society's resources toward themselves based upon their notion of single-handedly "raising themselves by their bootstraps" or some such nonsense, an image which is massively damaged when one starts any sort of analysis of influence external factors on their "self-made" success. Which in the end is no different really from the kings of old who believed the same based upon "divine providence" and were equally upset when someone dared to question their claim to their disproportionate privileges.
Oops, something went haywire, my other post was a reply to the GP not to yours. Please consider it as such.
As others pointed out to you, you have no clue how routing works. Most routers past your home NAT box do not consider individual connections, merely individual packets. A new connection, as far as a router at an ISP is supposed to be concerned (unless it is spying on you for the cops or blocking contents for "your own good"), is just yet another packet to route, except this one has one bit different (the SYN flag) in its header. So as far as ISPs are concerned it makes absolutely no difference if you open 1000 connections to 1000 people per second or you simply send the same 1000 packets to one other peer.
Where you probably got confused is that most home routers do care about the number of connections because, unlike core routers at the ISPs, they must also perform extra per-connection tasks involved in maintaining the NAT functionality. That is what makes it possible for 5 home computers to appear as all being on the same IP address on the Internet that your ISP assigned to you.
The only thing I would object to is your roumaji. Although there are many wacky systems, a more sensible phonetic representations would be Hepburn-nish "kahohayushi", "kahahayushi" etc. At least the "shi" makes more sense then "si" phonetically.
There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that this is the case. Most modern "entertainment" is of such poor quality and in such vast quantity that it is only logical to assume that most copies downloaded would not have been should a fee be involved. Then there is the fact that many of those downloading a $20 DVD live in places where $20 constitutes 20 days of living expenses or are on an equivalent budget (i.e. kids). This combined with the amount of downloads occurring for the explicit purpose of locating otherwise near impossible to locate quality contents by those who actually buy the product, and combined with vast expenditures, technological, political and legal to fight the phenomenon on the part of the "contents producers" and the final tally is by no means obviously biased toward increased revenue if "piracy" were to be eliminated.
That some vast, multi-multi-billion pie-in-the-sky mountain of money is being "stolen" by insidious "thieves" is merely a common delusion of various corporate executives, and stems from the nature of corporate executives, who being hyper-greedy thieves themselves (see any recent newspaper using keyword: Wall Street) cannot conceive of anyone doing positively anything not out of utter, sheer, base greed. And the executives do their best to share that avarice-induced fever with their pet politicians, who add their own flavour of opportunism, seeing a possibility of expanding their power or control over populace's access to information in the guise of "combating piracy/terrorism/child-porn/name-your-bogeyman". And the rest is history.
That is a flawed argument because the problem is not with the credit card info itself. The problem is with the unsecured system of authorization which allows mere credit card number/bank account number to be used by someone unauthorized to do so.
A properly designed (read: less convenient and less profitable) system would involve much more difficult to crack methods, such as one-time passwords and security tokens. In which case one could have all the sites with all the credit card numbers in the world and it would do a criminal no good whatsoever.
But, just like with the "intellectual property" bullshit, it is far easier to shoot the messenger and to keep pretending that the problem lies with those who dare to expose the actual corporate thieves and their buddy politician crooks running the whole crapola show for what they really are.
Removal of net neutrality would have some key effects:
No, the economists do not run the economy (although it is their dearest wet dream) but they serve the same role once occupied by the High Priests of Ra. They offer, with great pompous gravitas, dire "predictions" as to what will happen if their hare-brained-scheme of the week is not acted upon post-haste by the ruling class and not received in awe by the plebs, or else the Lord Mammon will be very, very angry indeed, and He shall smite the unbelievers, verily. Or more accurately the unbelievers' bank accounts.
And yes we are in this situation because we have free-for-all, dog-eat-dog "free market" where it does not belong, say in financial derivative "securities" and race-to-the-bottom offshore consumer goods manufacturing. All of it "financed" via the make-believe "money" schemes the "economists" and their buddy bankers have cooked up, like for example systemic and deliberate creation of an illusion of prosperity via ever more massive debt while real wages go down or stagnate across the board for the last 30+ years (see also under: "globalization") in order to keep the victim dupes of the brainless schemes in the dark. The wee catch of course being that at some point even the funny "money" runs out as the illusion becomes unsustainable. Which is when the dupes discover that they are on the hook for some $450 trillion (optimistically).
And the list of religious gobledey-gook goes onto the howling in insanity demands of perpetual corporate "growth" and spittle saturated mantras of never-ending increases in "productivity" etc etc and on and on and on.
That's an often cited ideological dogma, not a fact. In fact the "economists" (or more accurately the "monetary voodoo witch doctors") who came up with this turd have absolutely no clue as to the workings of the economy, something which they have proven repeatedly, by consistently offering prognostications with less accuracy then mere random chance and even by setting up companies like the LTCM based on their great "knowledge", which were one the first multi-billion dollar bankruptcies in history.
So before you mindlessly repeat their "wisdom", perhaps you should first examine the record of these "free market" "gurus". Or just read this week's newspaper.
You totally miss the point of Midnight Commander. It is here NOT to make it possible for some clueless newb to get around learning of the CLI. It is here for those of us who use CLI all the time to speed things up immensely. I can move/copy/make quick changes to files/etc orders of magnitude faster with MC then by using raw CLI even with fancy auto-complete functionality. And then there is the Meta-Enter combo which pastes the currently selected file into your commands. MC is a great improvement in productivity for me, to the point that I get the feeling of things slowing down to a crawl when MC is not available on whatever system I am working on.
The truly ironic part of course is that such a policy ultimately leads to loss of all safety for those who try to "protect" themselves so.
Not really. A vast majority of the "wealth" that was "created" is in the "derivatives" market where the "money" literally came into existence the moment US banks made transactions with each other due to fractional reserve rules. The same applies to all the other types of credit financing promulgated by the US "investment banks". The actual money in retirement funds and other silly "investments" into which the working slobs were conned amount to pidley-squat in the overall picture, although they will certainly be eaten by the out of control financial monster created by the "high flying" business class crooks. In short the real world wealth of working people has been consumed by the far, far larger fictional paper "wealth" Ponzi scheme that is the US financial markets.
Again, collusion of billionaire crooks and politicians urged the working slob to defer to the "financial experts" who extolled the virtues of "private enterprise" and "free markets" as cure-all solution to all ills of the Universe, and retirement funding in particular.
Except there are no "safer" investments left anywhere, including hoarding cash under the pillow. Even government bonds have 10 year yield of something like 2%, which is way below any sort of expected inflation. The system is thoroughly and comprehensively fucked.
Sure, but that was so due to incessant propaganda by the government under control of the Wall Street crooks. Case in point: the Bush crowd was not so long ago demanding privatization (read transfer to Wall Street) of all funds of the Social Security.
You might also remember (or maybe not if you are too young) that Wall Street was (rightfully) regarded as a "rich man's casino" by the working class of the generations born in 1920s-1940s. The overwhelming greed began to be cultivated with the "baby boomer" generation who never remembered first hand the effects of what these rich crooks were capable of, and who begun to think of themselves as "rich" and entitled. Which the crooks wholeheartedly encouraged.
Even that is questionable as the "market" is composed mostly of essentially fake "wealth", amount of which can vary wildly and rapidly. Subsequently it is impossible to depend on any real return in the "market" as 15 years of +10% can be instantly nullified by being followed by one year of -50% resulting in total negative average yearly return over those 16 years. Essentially the market is an unpredictable lottery, no different then playing dice or betting on horses. Therefore there is no such thing as an "investment" in the market. There are only bets.
True, however what you are espousing is one of the fundamental flaws in the so-called "free market" (and one of the chief reasons why such market is impossible in practise):
Both the purchase of the old and the startup costs of the new financed by the "investment banks" who pulled the "money" out of collective asses of the "derivatives market".
And as a final result of which, now we, that all of us working slobs, get to pay for these "smart" people's "entrepreneurial spirit" to the tune of 450 trillion dollars or so (or perhaps even more as the size of the collapsing fake "wealth" in that market is anyone's guess due to all the cooked books on Wall Street) ....
So to make long story short, you are telling us to idolize a culture of reckless stupidity, made possible by, and backed by astronomical scale thievery and fraud because the incompetent, self-absorbed jackasses got away with the money while leaving all those who they abused eating dirt? No thought as to the consequences?
For you see if you keep this up long enough, it will not come as a surprise to me at all if driving to the cocktail party at the marina in one's Ferrari might become a serious hazard for sniper fire and IEDs ...
Like making sure your rifle is in good working condition...
Not so. There was no controversy about the reading amongst sane people but what occured was simply the result of ever increasing appetite of the government for new powers to "protect" the poor citizens from whatever bogeyman could be conjured at the moment. So it took until 1878 to reach the point in time when the ever expanding governmental powers attempted to cross the line into inspection of everyone's mail. Hence that court case.
That ever increasing expansion of course never ceased, it merely changed course, until finally the government successfully circumvented that ruling by attacking the new technologies which rendered snail-mail obsolete, and with this manoeuvre spelling the death knell of the 4th amendment as well.
All of which was entirely predictable as this insane hunger of power was well foreseen by the Founding Fathers and keeping it at bay was one of the fundamental purposes of the Constitution. Unfortunately the attempt, however clever and visionary, has clearly failed at this point according to available empirical evidence.
That still does not work. Firstly, even if one agrees with that interpretation, it would require a determination if the other party is in fact not a US citizen traveling abroad. But more importantly by opening that letter you are still violating the rights of the other end of the communication, i.e. the US citizen on US soil. There is simply no way around it because as far as the violation of the 4th amendment is concerned, the two ends of the postal communication cannot be arbitrarily separated (the "papers" in question belong to both the sender and the recipient at the same time while in transit).
You mean the very thing you just spewed? This "strangle in the night everyone who disagrees with me and whom I deem worth of strangling"? But then again, based on your inane post, it is probably too much to hope that you realize that your own very words put you on that very list of yours of people to "strangle" ...