[sarcasm]Yeah, we all know the only thing the government, police, and army of any country does is abuse its own people. We all know that's the only reason for their existence. They couldn't have any legitimate reason for existing.[/sarcasm]
The government, police and army of any country have very good reasons for existing: namely, to limit the power of the rich people over the rest of us. It's just that they often have trouble remembering these reasons, and need to be reminded.
Seriously, the average American learned about economics in High School, and that's it. A good portion of people who THINK they know about economics learned about it from partisan blogs/TV/radio, and end up believing that 'government spending destroys jobs' or that 'the US has never defaulted.'
And precisely because economics is a subject of partisan politics, it can't be taught in school. After all, who (which party) gets to decide what is taught? Wouldn't you object to your children being brainwashed into believing vile, vicious falsehoods should the Other Team win?
Just look at the idiocy surrounding Creationism (or Intelligent Design or whatever it's called nowadays), and imagine the same thing, only with far more money and power riding on the outcome.
Why would a hardcore extremist be living with mommy?
Because living alone requires income, and I would imagine that wearing neo-nazi t-shirts would make it somewhat hard to find work, especially in Germany.
Lincoln and Kennedy were assassinated for wanting the Congress to control the currency. Huey Long was taken out for speaking out about the bankster's greed. Screw the credit rating bureaus, jail all the international banksters, back all currencies with precious metals (after confiscating them from the bankstrers).
Congress control of currency and currency backed by precious metal are direct opposites. You can't control a gold-backed currency, unless you can create and destroy gold at will; if you can exert such control without said powers, your "gold-backing" is at most nominal, since either the amount of gold a single dollar redeems varies or you end up backed by gold you don't actually have; and if you do have such powers, the situation does not differ from the current one (except that inflation will make gold really cheap soon enough).
When the critical mass of programmers just don't worry about efficiency you get this sort of behavior of the type that makes other engineers cringe. Software right now is sort of like the auto industry in the 50's, we're all about adding cool looking tail fins while sticking a cast iron engine block up front.
No, software right now is turning from a craft into an industry, which means that artisans are being replaced by minimum-wage drones and automated code generators. Of course quality is going to suffer as a result.
Free speech is the ability for you state your beliefs without having to worry about the government jailing you for saying it.
Or your employer firing your, a potential future employee not giving a job to you, or a lone lunatic deciding you need to die.
Humans are a social species living in interdependent societies, and as long as that remains true you need anonymity to have free speech.
Nothing about doing it anonymously. Free Speech is something to be valued and not used anonymously. If you are going to stand out and say something important then you should do it so people know who you are, and realize that even in a place of Free Speech there is risks.
Tough words, "jellomizer". Do you have the guts to stand behind them, or did you just spam the discussion with something even you think is unimportant?
Or is this one of those things that only apply to others?
It's also my main gripe with people who think that taking care of the world's needs will bring some kind of utopian future. If I didn't have to go to work, I wouldn't do work. I'd be the best damn video game player in the world.
Being able to do whatever you want with your time seems pretty utopian to me.
Why is it so many/. posts demand socialistic freebees and but a capitalist paycheck.
Because capitalism assumes low barriers of entry to a market (so that if AT&T charges too much, new startups pop up to eat their market share), while phone industry has extremely high barriers. Because the assumptions behind capitalism don't hold for phone industry, it would be stupid to insist running said industry by it, unless one has some kind of ideological commitment to capitalism - and we only need to look at the ruins of the USSR to see what happens when you insist that ideology should take precedence over reality in managing your economy.
Oh well. Maybe the lesson finally sinks in once the US collapses too. But more likely, capitalists will blame socialism and socialists capitalism when in reality it's the blind adherence to One True Economic Theory and trying to force it on everything, whether it makes sense or not, that's the problem. Well, that and plenty of rich people ruthlessly exploiting that blind spot to get richer at other people's expense.
Its should only be free (and socialist) when its out of someone else's pocket.
Public utilities are so called because they can't operate without public support, such as right-of-way. Because they require public support, the public also gets a say in how they operate and at what price. Which is only fair, unless you are suggesting that these companies should get freebies from everyone else's pocket?
I guess the entitled generation has spoken.
Let's hope it speaks more often, then, so that we can start weaning people off the strange notion that society exists to help corporations make profit, rather than the other way round.
So you approve of an unfair society where people are given things that they did not earn by having it forcefully taken from someone who did earn it?
No, I think he approves the extremely fair society where people are given things that they did not earn by having them forcefully taken from someone who didn't earn it either, such as a CEO, banker, high frequency stock trader, etc. Seeing how most of the nation's wealth is currently in the hands of people who didn't earn it, there shouldn't be a shortage of things that can be justly redistributed any time soon.
Call me crazy, but doesn't the dictionary define that sort of behavior as "theft"?
No, thievery means taking something you don't own, not something you didn't earn.
Also, I find it horribly ironic that you talk about the evil "greedy" people, yet you fail to see the greed in thinking you should get something that you didn't earn.
The alternative to people getting things they didn't earn is the return to feudalism, where the local lord owns the means of production and other people obey him or die. Capitalism concentrates a larger and larger share of the wealth into fewer and fewer hands, so you either have mechanisms to redistribute it or accept that most people will get a life of miserable poverty.
How do you justify the First World not simply sharing half its wealth with the Third World?
Because at a national level wealth is not money, wealth is production capacity, which means factories; and factories require functional social and physical infrastructure to operate, and most of the Third World has neither - and the parts that do, such as India and China, are actually doing pretty well for themselves and getting richer as is.
"Sharing half the wealth" would in practice require conquering the societies in question, enforcing order, destroying all aspects of the local cultures that get in the way, and forcefully converting them into industrial societies. Then we'd have to stay in for a few generations to ensure the indoctrination was succesful and the old culture dead and gone.
Whether or not this project would be right or likely succesful is an interesting moral debate - people die in wars but people also die from starvation, and destruction of culture is immoral but so is sacrificing people for the sake of preserving it - but I doubt those who would support the goal would approve of the methods needed, so we're stuck to sending aid which mostly gets stolen by local warlords.
At the same time, what are the medium-to-long term projections/expectations for every developed economy? That's right: exponential growth.
Yet growth can come from simply more efficient methods and products. Given fixed resources you get growth simply from advancing technology.
Nor do atheists define their identity through not believing a god.
Calling oneself "atheist" is doing just that.
Just because some atheists actively disbelieve doesn't make that a requirement of atheism.
Claims like this are largely a matter of definition. The problem is, there's a huge difference in behaviour between people who actively disbelieve and people who just don't think about the whole matter. If we include the latter in atheists, then what do we call the former? I doubt Dawkins and his ilk would like to be called atheist fundamentalists, even if such a term seems to describe them quite well.
Also, I question the motives behind wishing to make the definition of "atheist" as broad as possible. It seems to me that the main drive is to make the speaker seem part of a large group, which may have relatively harmless motives - herd instincts and delusions of crusaderhood - or more sinister ones, namely a power grab.
Your (a) does not follow from your (b). That's like saying not collecting stamps is a hobby just because you have one fewer stamp book than the lowliest philatelist.
People who don't collect stamps don't call themselves "aphilatelists". They don't define their identity through not collecting stamps. They don't post on online forums condemning the evil and madness of stamp-collecting, nor do they care if someone calls not collecting stamps a hobby - they just shrug their shoulders and go on with their lives.
There are probably plenty of people who don't care about divinity one way or another, but they do not self-identify as "atheists", for that would require taking an active stance on the matter rather than just not having any faith - and that, in turn, most certainly is a religious stance. This, combined with the denial about the nature of their stance, tends to make atheists easy targets for trolling.
Of course that could all just be religious folks trying to understand atheists on their terms. Does it really matter/why does anyone care?
From the simple fact of our existence which is essentially what deists mean when they say that men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. The rights come part and parcel with being created, whatever the mechanism.
On what basis do you claim either your creator or your existence endows you with rights? The only entity that has ever actually lifted a finger to back any of them is We the People.
I thought the lottery was for those who were bad at math?
Only if you're rich. If you're poor, the small chance of winning * the utility of getting rich is far greater than the great chance of losing * the small utility of the price of a lottery ticket, thus making the total utility greater than zero.
The utility (value) of money is an s-curve that asymptomatically but monotonically nears a fixed value in both extreme debt and extreme wealth.
Keep dreaming, kid, but don't cry too much when you'll have to wake up. The sad, inescapable reality is that all throughout history people had to work for a living (even animals do) and will continue to do so.
And yet, as automation advances this will likely change, simply because humans aren't really well-suited to working: flesh is weak and spirit is error-prone and easily distracted. Even slave labour can't keep up with tractors; give it a few more iterations and computers will outperform people in mental work as well, at least in all areas required to produce basic food and stuff.
The problem with you old-timers is that you think what you've seen is all there is. You haven't Things have changed throughout history. World is a very different place now than it was just a few hundred years before, and it was different then than it was a few thousand years earlier. Things change, and changes come faster and faster, and all trends point towards eliminating humans from producing everyday consumables. Once that's done, the reason you have to work for a living disappears; food will appear on the table without anyone having to lift a finger.
That's called "progress", grandpa.
What should - hopefully - be passing is the current crazy phase where so many have to work their life off so they can just keep existing.
Well, that depends on which way this all goes.
There's nothing inherently wrong in working for a living
I didn't say there is, just that it's pointless once the stuff you need to live can be produced without requiring any work done by humans. And once it's pointless, why keep doing it? Why not free people to do whatever they want with their lives, with no need to worry about "making a living"? Especially when that pretty much guarantees a stream of both cultural and scientific discoveries - not everyone can be content to sit in front of the telly all day long.
- unless you're a lazy loserboy who should be forced to pick up dog turds off the street by hand - but there's a lot wrong in the concept of living to work.
My, you seem to have some issues. Is it losers or lazy people you hate? Or just the combination of both? Or is it the male gender you despise?
Whatever it is, I hope that you can overcome your irrational hatred of lazy loserboys, just as I hope they can get over their laziness and realize their potential.
They do not work well for large blobs like movie files or for unstructured documents like medical records.
Neither movie files or medical records are unstructured. No data with meaning is.
In fact, there's a great case for putting your "blob" to a relational database through a filter that gives it structure - after all, it's a good thing a doctor could access his patient's entire medical history but not name, right? Easy to do with SQL, impossible to do with blobs.
If people could demand a cut of the profits when other companies use their invention or discovery but could not prevent them from producing it in the first place, we'd be so much better off!!!
Actually, that's... brilliant. It solves almost all of our patent problems in one neat go. But, to improve it even further:
"If people could demand a cut of the taxes when other companies use their invention or discovery but could not prevent them from producing it in the first place, we'd be so much better off!!!"
Let the BigCorp and Government duke it out, without getting SmallGuy involved. And it also has the added benefit of putting anomosity between them, thus discouraging collaboration and encouraging them to stick to their respective roles: pulling the plowshare of economy and keeping the reins on the corporate horse, respectively.
Until replicators exist, and you can instantly generate anything you want, there will continue to be some sort of money to exchange for goods and services.
We don't need replicators, we simply need a stronger AI to handle menial work. Most of the muscle-intesive work is already done by machines with humans merely pushing buttons; all we need is smarter computers to push the correct buttons for us.
I'd give it 10, 20 years at most to complete. It's already well on its way, as permanent unemployment in all industrial countries proves. The question is: will all this lead to an era of unprecedented splendor, or of poverty? I'd say it depends on how fast we can wean ourselfs off of our ideological commitment to capitalism and turn to some form of socialism (technically, a post-scarcity society).
And once we will get to the point where working for a living is a mere memory, it'll herald a glorious new dawn for tje human race. After all, as projects like Wikipedia and tvtropes - and, for that matter, ancient Greek philosophical and mathematical achievements - prove, once people are free from worrying about their basic needs, they'll start worrying about prestige instead - and the best way to get prestige is to contribute to your community. Even 4chan and company are proving that, twisted as those communities might be.
Our current money-based economy is just a passing phase, just like all the others.
Yes it would be nice if unlimited meant truly unlimited, but we are all adult enough to realize that was never the case in any market for any commodity at any time in the history of earth. There are always limits.
If you make a contract for a 20-kilowatt grid connection, you can pull 20 kilowatts 24/7, all year long. Electricity is a limited commodity, of course, but you get what you pay for, rather than paying for lots and getting little. So it's the broadband market that's unique in history, in that there the providers can make deals and then decide they don't feel like delivering what they promised, yet keep the money, and this is all legal.
Also, implying that disagreeing with you is a sign of immaturity only works on immature people.
However, for the vast majority of punters, it will make subversive activities much harder.
Most people simply want to be left alone. Making them feel threatened posting shit on discussion boards or downloading porn or games - or even browsing Wikipedia - is a sure way of turning someone who doesn't care about the government one way or another into someone who actively hates it. Consequently, this will actually make any subversive actions easier, since it increases the pool of people willing to go out of their way to subvert their government.
If we really had wanted to move forward, we should have set-out to create a permanent presence on the moon, not in LEO.
That is exactly backwards. To reach further, we need to get a permanent presence on the LEO. Once we have, once we can reach it cheaply and reliably, reaching other planets - including the Moon - is relatively simple.
Reaching Earth orbit is the hard part of space exploration. Once you've done it, you can move using cheap, low-thrust engines - or even solar sails. But getting there (and also getting back down in one piece) is hard. At this point, all our attention should be focused on LEO. Once it's ours Moon, Mars, etc. are within reach. But not before.
It would take a large amount of energy for it to reach escape velocity.
Which would provide an excellent opportunity to test solar sails or ion engines, especially if you could rig cameras and other equipment to provide telemetry from the inside. We could then use it as the first prototype of an interplanetary manned vehicle.
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The government, police and army of any country have very good reasons for existing: namely, to limit the power of the rich people over the rest of us. It's just that they often have trouble remembering these reasons, and need to be reminded.
And precisely because economics is a subject of partisan politics, it can't be taught in school. After all, who (which party) gets to decide what is taught? Wouldn't you object to your children being brainwashed into believing vile, vicious falsehoods should the Other Team win?
Just look at the idiocy surrounding Creationism (or Intelligent Design or whatever it's called nowadays), and imagine the same thing, only with far more money and power riding on the outcome.
Because living alone requires income, and I would imagine that wearing neo-nazi t-shirts would make it somewhat hard to find work, especially in Germany.
Congress control of currency and currency backed by precious metal are direct opposites. You can't control a gold-backed currency, unless you can create and destroy gold at will; if you can exert such control without said powers, your "gold-backing" is at most nominal, since either the amount of gold a single dollar redeems varies or you end up backed by gold you don't actually have; and if you do have such powers, the situation does not differ from the current one (except that inflation will make gold really cheap soon enough).
No, software right now is turning from a craft into an industry, which means that artisans are being replaced by minimum-wage drones and automated code generators. Of course quality is going to suffer as a result.
Or your employer firing your, a potential future employee not giving a job to you, or a lone lunatic deciding you need to die.
Humans are a social species living in interdependent societies, and as long as that remains true you need anonymity to have free speech.
Tough words, "jellomizer". Do you have the guts to stand behind them, or did you just spam the discussion with something even you think is unimportant?
Or is this one of those things that only apply to others?
Being able to do whatever you want with your time seems pretty utopian to me.
Didn't you kinda answer your own question here?
Because capitalism assumes low barriers of entry to a market (so that if AT&T charges too much, new startups pop up to eat their market share), while phone industry has extremely high barriers. Because the assumptions behind capitalism don't hold for phone industry, it would be stupid to insist running said industry by it, unless one has some kind of ideological commitment to capitalism - and we only need to look at the ruins of the USSR to see what happens when you insist that ideology should take precedence over reality in managing your economy.
Oh well. Maybe the lesson finally sinks in once the US collapses too. But more likely, capitalists will blame socialism and socialists capitalism when in reality it's the blind adherence to One True Economic Theory and trying to force it on everything, whether it makes sense or not, that's the problem. Well, that and plenty of rich people ruthlessly exploiting that blind spot to get richer at other people's expense.
Public utilities are so called because they can't operate without public support, such as right-of-way. Because they require public support, the public also gets a say in how they operate and at what price. Which is only fair, unless you are suggesting that these companies should get freebies from everyone else's pocket?
Let's hope it speaks more often, then, so that we can start weaning people off the strange notion that society exists to help corporations make profit, rather than the other way round.
No, I think he approves the extremely fair society where people are given things that they did not earn by having them forcefully taken from someone who didn't earn it either, such as a CEO, banker, high frequency stock trader, etc. Seeing how most of the nation's wealth is currently in the hands of people who didn't earn it, there shouldn't be a shortage of things that can be justly redistributed any time soon.
No, thievery means taking something you don't own, not something you didn't earn.
The alternative to people getting things they didn't earn is the return to feudalism, where the local lord owns the means of production and other people obey him or die. Capitalism concentrates a larger and larger share of the wealth into fewer and fewer hands, so you either have mechanisms to redistribute it or accept that most people will get a life of miserable poverty.
Because at a national level wealth is not money, wealth is production capacity, which means factories; and factories require functional social and physical infrastructure to operate, and most of the Third World has neither - and the parts that do, such as India and China, are actually doing pretty well for themselves and getting richer as is.
"Sharing half the wealth" would in practice require conquering the societies in question, enforcing order, destroying all aspects of the local cultures that get in the way, and forcefully converting them into industrial societies. Then we'd have to stay in for a few generations to ensure the indoctrination was succesful and the old culture dead and gone.
Whether or not this project would be right or likely succesful is an interesting moral debate - people die in wars but people also die from starvation, and destruction of culture is immoral but so is sacrificing people for the sake of preserving it - but I doubt those who would support the goal would approve of the methods needed, so we're stuck to sending aid which mostly gets stolen by local warlords.
Yet growth can come from simply more efficient methods and products. Given fixed resources you get growth simply from advancing technology.
Calling oneself "atheist" is doing just that.
Claims like this are largely a matter of definition. The problem is, there's a huge difference in behaviour between people who actively disbelieve and people who just don't think about the whole matter. If we include the latter in atheists, then what do we call the former? I doubt Dawkins and his ilk would like to be called atheist fundamentalists, even if such a term seems to describe them quite well.
Also, I question the motives behind wishing to make the definition of "atheist" as broad as possible. It seems to me that the main drive is to make the speaker seem part of a large group, which may have relatively harmless motives - herd instincts and delusions of crusaderhood - or more sinister ones, namely a power grab.
People who don't collect stamps don't call themselves "aphilatelists". They don't define their identity through not collecting stamps. They don't post on online forums condemning the evil and madness of stamp-collecting, nor do they care if someone calls not collecting stamps a hobby - they just shrug their shoulders and go on with their lives.
There are probably plenty of people who don't care about divinity one way or another, but they do not self-identify as "atheists", for that would require taking an active stance on the matter rather than just not having any faith - and that, in turn, most certainly is a religious stance. This, combined with the denial about the nature of their stance, tends to make atheists easy targets for trolling.
Of course that could all just be religious folks trying to understand atheists on their terms. Does it really matter/why does anyone care?
On what basis do you claim either your creator or your existence endows you with rights? The only entity that has ever actually lifted a finger to back any of them is We the People.
Your query can't be answered, for it requires taking the intersection of two sets, which is SQL-like stuff nobody uses.
That's fine by me, I own no stock and get paid by the hour.
Only if you're rich. If you're poor, the small chance of winning * the utility of getting rich is far greater than the great chance of losing * the small utility of the price of a lottery ticket, thus making the total utility greater than zero.
The utility (value) of money is an s-curve that asymptomatically but monotonically nears a fixed value in both extreme debt and extreme wealth.
And yet, as automation advances this will likely change, simply because humans aren't really well-suited to working: flesh is weak and spirit is error-prone and easily distracted. Even slave labour can't keep up with tractors; give it a few more iterations and computers will outperform people in mental work as well, at least in all areas required to produce basic food and stuff.
The problem with you old-timers is that you think what you've seen is all there is. You haven't Things have changed throughout history. World is a very different place now than it was just a few hundred years before, and it was different then than it was a few thousand years earlier. Things change, and changes come faster and faster, and all trends point towards eliminating humans from producing everyday consumables. Once that's done, the reason you have to work for a living disappears; food will appear on the table without anyone having to lift a finger.
That's called "progress", grandpa.
Well, that depends on which way this all goes.
I didn't say there is, just that it's pointless once the stuff you need to live can be produced without requiring any work done by humans. And once it's pointless, why keep doing it? Why not free people to do whatever they want with their lives, with no need to worry about "making a living"? Especially when that pretty much guarantees a stream of both cultural and scientific discoveries - not everyone can be content to sit in front of the telly all day long.
My, you seem to have some issues. Is it losers or lazy people you hate? Or just the combination of both? Or is it the male gender you despise?
Whatever it is, I hope that you can overcome your irrational hatred of lazy loserboys, just as I hope they can get over their laziness and realize their potential.
Neither movie files or medical records are unstructured. No data with meaning is.
In fact, there's a great case for putting your "blob" to a relational database through a filter that gives it structure - after all, it's a good thing a doctor could access his patient's entire medical history but not name, right? Easy to do with SQL, impossible to do with blobs.
Actually, that's... brilliant. It solves almost all of our patent problems in one neat go. But, to improve it even further:
"If people could demand a cut of the taxes when other companies use their invention or discovery but could not prevent them from producing it in the first place, we'd be so much better off!!!"
Let the BigCorp and Government duke it out, without getting SmallGuy involved. And it also has the added benefit of putting anomosity between them, thus discouraging collaboration and encouraging them to stick to their respective roles: pulling the plowshare of economy and keeping the reins on the corporate horse, respectively.
We don't need replicators, we simply need a stronger AI to handle menial work. Most of the muscle-intesive work is already done by machines with humans merely pushing buttons; all we need is smarter computers to push the correct buttons for us.
I'd give it 10, 20 years at most to complete. It's already well on its way, as permanent unemployment in all industrial countries proves. The question is: will all this lead to an era of unprecedented splendor, or of poverty? I'd say it depends on how fast we can wean ourselfs off of our ideological commitment to capitalism and turn to some form of socialism (technically, a post-scarcity society).
And once we will get to the point where working for a living is a mere memory, it'll herald a glorious new dawn for tje human race. After all, as projects like Wikipedia and tvtropes - and, for that matter, ancient Greek philosophical and mathematical achievements - prove, once people are free from worrying about their basic needs, they'll start worrying about prestige instead - and the best way to get prestige is to contribute to your community. Even 4chan and company are proving that, twisted as those communities might be.
Our current money-based economy is just a passing phase, just like all the others.
If you make a contract for a 20-kilowatt grid connection, you can pull 20 kilowatts 24/7, all year long. Electricity is a limited commodity, of course, but you get what you pay for, rather than paying for lots and getting little. So it's the broadband market that's unique in history, in that there the providers can make deals and then decide they don't feel like delivering what they promised, yet keep the money, and this is all legal.
Also, implying that disagreeing with you is a sign of immaturity only works on immature people.
Most people simply want to be left alone. Making them feel threatened posting shit on discussion boards or downloading porn or games - or even browsing Wikipedia - is a sure way of turning someone who doesn't care about the government one way or another into someone who actively hates it. Consequently, this will actually make any subversive actions easier, since it increases the pool of people willing to go out of their way to subvert their government.
I guess the choice will be the Pirate Bay Edition, then.
That is exactly backwards. To reach further, we need to get a permanent presence on the LEO. Once we have, once we can reach it cheaply and reliably, reaching other planets - including the Moon - is relatively simple.
Reaching Earth orbit is the hard part of space exploration. Once you've done it, you can move using cheap, low-thrust engines - or even solar sails. But getting there (and also getting back down in one piece) is hard. At this point, all our attention should be focused on LEO. Once it's ours Moon, Mars, etc. are within reach. But not before.
Which would provide an excellent opportunity to test solar sails or ion engines, especially if you could rig cameras and other equipment to provide telemetry from the inside. We could then use it as the first prototype of an interplanetary manned vehicle.