While your post has some merit - you don't mention that the Mayor of Houston managed to get the city turned into something called a "sanctuary". Basically, if you're an illegal immigrant, the city ain't gonna fuck with you. They won't ask, if you don't tell.
So basically, this politician suggests leaving alone people who aren't causing trouble? Oh the horror!
"Bring us your undocumented, homeless, drug addicted, child pimping, low life scuzzy law breaking dregs - Houston will provide SANCTUARY!"
Are you just trolling, or do you have any evidence for any of these accusations? Besides being undocumented and thus in violation of immigration laws, of course - but then again, since we allow capital to freely move around the world nowadays, why not people too?
Libertarians didn't lead this nation into war, that was the doing of NEOCONSERVATIVES.
Well, to nitpick, it were the corporate overlords of said neoconservatives. And rule by corporations is very much in line with libertarianism - except the most extreme version, which leads to rule by the biggest thug instead.
Whatever - the price of freedom is indeed eternal vigilance.
The price of freedom is getting enough property to live by capital gains rather than as a wage slave.
Whenever someone feels the need to say this, the post is off-topic;).
It all comes back to the same principle - we parents have lost control of what our children are being taught, and other organizations are filling in the gap.
Which is good, since the more conflicting information a child receives, the faster he realizes that people lie to him to manipulate him. Cynicism is the seed of wisdom; lack of cynicism makes you a gullible fool.
Parents having complete control of what their children are being taught would simply make it easy for them to indoctrinate them to whatever religion or ideology they happen to have blind faith in. We already have too many such people pushing ID, communism, libertarianism, homeopathy, and other assorted stupidity; we really can't afford having any more.
...And so, the market would determine what should be produced, instead of an arbitrary governor.
Where's the problem?
Arbitrary governor no longer gets to feel powerful, and his sex life will suffer as a result. Soon he'll start drinking - more, that is - and ends up wandering the harbor, a bitter man who's purpose in life has been lost.
It's a fine fate for a normal human being who loses his job on the altar of globalization, but surely you can't expect the nobility to suffer it?
In other words, Australia thinks it's adult subjects are children.
Australia is a democracy, so it has just the kind of government it deserves that treats its citizens exactly as they deserve, just like the USA deserved Bush and all the consequences and we Finns deserve the Middle Manager ministers in charge here.
Basically this one is about this: you have a server and X clients, and all clients are sending packets to all other clients. Think, an IRC channel, basically. So they propose that instead of dumbly routing between clients, the server aggregates the packets and sends the aggregates periodically.
Except that an IRC channel doesn't have clients sending messages directly to each other, they send them to the server which aggregates them and sends the aggregated traffic back for the channels you've joined. An IRC client can connect directly to another, usually for the purposes of transferring a file, but the normal mode of operation is letting the server aggregate and route the messages.
IRC also includes the ability to join multiple servers together, so that everyone on a particular channel sees the same content, no matter which server they connected to; and there's roleplaying going on on some channels. So even using this amazing innovation for gaming purposes has already been done a long time ago.
In short, this is a case about a patent troll going for a fishing expedition.
The information SHOULDN'T be filtered - that was my point. Either give the jurors full access to info, or just cut them out of aspects of a trial that they can't judge.
What happens if the information was gathered illegally by the police, for example by conducting an unauthorized home search? If said information is allowed to influence the outcome of a trial, then the cops have a huge incentive to ignore laws against illegal search, rendering protections from it effectively null and void; and the only way to keep it from influencing a jury's decision is to keep the jury from hearing it in the first place.
And this isn't even beginning to address issues such as baseless or at the very least very dubious rumours being spread by the press, various appeals to emotion from the family of the victim, etc etc. The very idea of a jury is that it's not made of professionals, but ordinary people, who thus can check the power of the legal system; but that very virtue also means that you can't trust a jury to differentiate between fact and fiction, since ordinary people aren't very good at it. You can demand that a professional judge ignores appeals to emotion and judges based on actual evidence; but while you can demand the same from a juror, it's the same as demanding that the Earth stops spinning.
Cue a hundred replies decrying perceived elitism, and completely ignoring the fact that "it's for the children" still works after decades of abuse. The cold fact is that remaining objective when someone is trying to manipulate you and there's a social pressure to give in to rage/pity is a skill that needs to be practised long and hard if it's to be mastered, especially against professional manipulators - which, let's face it, many if not most lawyers working on criminal cases are. Most people don't practise it, leaving their bullshit detector flabby and weak, and so the jury system needs to compensate.
Why do people keep thinking anecdotal evidence has any particular value at all?
Because it does. For example, "touching candle flame hurts" is anecdotal evidence and also quite valuable information.
Science long ago abandoned the idea that reliable and useful data could be gained by "After I did X, Y happened".
Um, what? That is standard experimental procedure. Statistical methods are only used in fields where it is impossible to exclude all other variables than the one under experimentation. Usually you do a single experiment, perhaps a single just-in-case recheck, and then publish your results.
Besides, even statistical data is really in that form. What did you think correlation means?
How can the law which every citizen expected to comply with be allowed to exist under Copyright?
You aren't expected to comply with laws. You are expected to be too afraid of having unknowingly broken one of them to dare do anything that would draw attention to you, such as speak out against your corporate or political overlords.
Since XBox is, by all reports, another fine example of the quality of Microsoft engineering, it's good to have a spare. Just remember to backup your games too.
It's all well and good for us to say "just don't worry about the pirates", but it's probably not a long term solution. Eventually, honest users feel like suckers for paying for music/software/movies/etc and they start moving towards taking stuff for free as well. I know that CD sales went up while Napster was big, but it is truly hard to imagine that such a situation unchecked would have continued for, say, a decade. At some point people just decide it's stupid to buy stuff they can get for free.
That depends. I feel no moral obligation whatsoever to care about copyright law, but I still buy DVDs simply because it's faster and more convenient than searching and downloading torrents. My "cutoff point" is around 6 euros; my local store has lots of older DVDs for sale at that price, and they put up a real fight to be picked over torrents. 20 euro brand-new movies? Not a chance.
For once, the free market seems to be doing its job: giving consumers more stuff cheaper.
Yes, some stuff will get created even without any notion of intellectual property, but some very valuable stuff won't get created in such a world.
Such as?
So without any other obvious solution to the problem, it's not so hard to see why DRM is attractive to desperate content creators.
Um, movies still make hundreds of millions of profit despite being on the Net the day they are released on the big screen, and often before that. Games, such as the much-copied World of Goo, also turn out nice gobs of money. Some don't, of course, but they aren't popular on torrent sites either.
If you are a "desperate" producer, stop producing shit and asking gold for it and the problem goes away. Don't blame "pirates" if no one wants your stuff; because if you aren't making a profit, the chances are that no one wants your stuff even for free.
I don't have a solution. But I do believe there will be a growing problem for funding digitizable media in the future.
Which is actually good if it happens, since it'll put the producers of 3D and other digital production software under pressure to make their products actually easy and efficient to use; the current ones are neither. For example, replacing voice actors with voice synthesizers would give cost savings, probably improve quality (WARNING, CYNICISM DETECTED;), and make modding easier, thus increasing the value of the final product. And if Spore's creature editor is as easy to use as everyone says (I haven't played it), how about using it to make the monsters to the next 3D shooter quick, easy and cheap?
That was the most appalling thing I've read all day. So what is YOUR life worth?
To me? More than all the money on the world combined. To you? How much would you pay to save my life? Would you, say, sacrifice every material comfort to taxation and persist on nothing but bread and water for the rest of your life to get me treatment that extended my life for another day?
In any case, we aren't talking about killing people for money, we are talking about sending up volunteer astronauts who not only volunteered but actually competed for the chance of doing just that. That gets morals completely out of the picture - unless you wish to assert that it's our moral responsibility to forbid sane adults of above-average intelligence from deciding to risk their own life for their goals without any kind of coercion by force or economics - leaving only costs and benefits to balance.
Whatever it is, you come across as a sociopath.
And you come across as a hysteric who's shooting from the hip. Then again, I suppose you shouldn't be blamed too much from that, considering the amount of actual sociopaths who seem to be on the loose these days.
Actually the U.S. Constitution is quite clear - the power to spend money on space launches belongs to the 50 State governments.
Actually, since space flight is essential for defence (spy satellites), general welfare (weather satellites) and interstate commerce (communication satellites), it is quite clearly within the power and duty of Federal government to spend money on.
So you're saying that Croatia magically became a new country when it split off from Yugoslavia, but Germany is the same country it was when it was run by Kaiser Wilhelm?
Well if it isn't, then your sentence is meaningless, since you don't qualify what country the "it" in "when it was run by Kaiser Wilhelm" is referring to.
It's simple: countries are "born" when they adopt a new form of government. The USA wasn't officially born before the adoption of the Constitution; the Articles of Confederation don't count, even though the member states were the same and the people running the government were mostly the same.
According to Wikipedia, the latest amendment to that Constitution was ratified in 1992, or seventeen years ago. I guess the USA is not quite up to drinking age yet;^).
Germany was started when it adopted a new government after its defeat in WWII.
I'm sure they'd wish that were true. It's not, thought. Pre-WWII history of Germany is still history of modern-day Germany, not some other unrelated Germany.
France started at the same time, when its bogus Vichy government was overthrown.
Who's bogus Vichy government? It can't be France's, if France only started after or at the moment said government was overthrown.
This is precisely why your definition of a country is ridiculous.
Russia didn't start until the early 1990s, because it doesn't resemble the old Soviet system at all any more.
It's run by the same people, and the people opposing them tend to meet unfortunate ends. Sounds very Soviet to me.
Maybe it's time to make the state pay for your defense when you're aquitted? If they have one valid charge, and pile on 9 other bogus ones to see if they stick, they pay 90% of your defense bill if you're aquitted of 9/10 of them.
IMHO the state should be forced to pay for your defence whether you're acquitted or convicted. Failure to do so has two unfortunate consequences:
You have to consider beforehand whether you can afford to fight a charge to the end. If you run out of money midway through the trial, you'll be convicted and have lost all your money, so it would be better to simply not defend yourself at all, even if you're innocent. This makes the rich and poor even more unequal before the law than they are now.
Lawyer fees will probably rise even higher, since the state will be paying in case of acquittal. This makes problem 1 even worse.
False history. Pre-WW1 Russia was an economic powerhouse. Yes it arrived late to the party, but the serfs had been liberated, the people were free to choose their own direction in life (pursuit of happiness), and Russia was like China today - on its way to becoming a major industrial power with tons of natural resources to fuel the factories.
AFAIK serfs were liberated in the West centuries before the Industrial Revolution (which marked the foundations of modern welfare). And AFAIK Russia pre-WW1 had very little heavy industry, being mainly an agricultural state (which Stalin managed to fuck royally with forced collectivization, to the point of needing imports from the USA).
The only thing it lacked was a democratically-elected Parliament to check the power of the King (like Britain has), but it would have come eventuallye. There was no need to have a revolution since liberal ideas were already modifying the government to be more like pre-WW1 Britain, France, and other democracies.
Again, AFAIK, there was every need for revolution, since the Tzar kept on getting into wars that he lost, and the government after the first revolution refused to pull out of WW1, which caused the second (communist) revolution.
Mind you, I could be wrong; my information is mainly based on Finland's pre- Soviet Collapse school education, which was very likely biased to not annoy the somewhat stronger and quite aggressive eastern Comrade. However, all information I've come online since then seems to suggest that Russia was pathetic before communist dominion, and only became a great power since then. If you have contrary information, do us all a favour and link to it.
I'm still running 2.6.24 because that's the newest that NVIDIA Legacy drivers for my Geforce 2 MX will support, which in turn is best my MVP7 motherboard will support (as in, start up with).
Not all of us have 4096 CPU rigs. Those of us who actually are on shoestring budget kinda suffer from the constant changes to the internal interfaces of the kernel.
I'm sure as heck no expert on this sort of thing, but if you have (in the extreme case) as many cores as you have threads, why would you ever have a context switch at all? It seems that increasing the number of cores serves precisely to decrease the number of context switches required.
It will decrease context switches (assuming a good scheduler, of course) but increase locking of cache memory pages instead. However, even my old 1GHz AMD Duron has no problem managing 1000 context switches per second, so I don't think that this is a significant problem.
Anyway, Linux seems to be heading towards microkernel architecture anyway, with some file systems (FUSE) and now serial devices in user space, so we'll see...
And of course nothing stops processor manufacturers from optimizing context switches more, if that turns out to be the trend.
Remember, the Russians had a system like this too, where people would all just live in government-owned apartments no matter what kind of job they had or how hard they worked, because all the wealth would be shared. The result was a massive economic collapse and a change to a free-market system.
Actually, no. Russia began from an agricultural backwater that had pretty much become the laughingstock of the world and finally collapsed in revolution in WWI, and became the second-most-powerful country in the world. Communism was a huge economic success story there. Collapse resulted from trying (and failing) to compete with the most powerful country (USA) in military strength, the dictatorial nature of government (which meant that having the occasional psychopath in charge gave them limitless power) and finally from "toning down" said dictatorship with predictable consequences. Contrast this with China, which has similar history but managed to avoid collapse and is likely going to take world leadership from the USA.
The lesson is simple: command economy is great for getting things running, but at some point the cost of running under a dictatorship eclipses the benefits.
Why bother working hard if you're not going to be rewarded for it, and your neighbor who does only the bare minimum sits around and plays Xbox all day and gets the same paycheck you do?
This is unavoidable, and trying to prevent all abuse is one of the reasons why welfare systems - or tax systems for that matter - tend to become horrible jungles over time. Ironically enough, this actually rewards someone who makes it his profession to find loopholes, and punishes the honest one who simply needs to get a living until he can find work.
My favourite solution to this is Guaranteed Minimum Income large enough to live on, which would remove the incentive to "have 8 babies by 8 baby-daddies" and similar shenigans, keep people from being indoctrinated to be subservient to bureaucracy (as current system does), free up resources from handling claims and encourage entrepreneurship by lessening the associated risk (here in Finland you can't get unemployment benefit if you've been an entrepreneur in the last year or so; I honestly can't imagine the kind of logic that would make that seem like a good idea).
As an added bonus you could remove all employee termination laws, since becoming unemployed would no longer be such a catastrophic event, and people wouldn't need to worry so much whether some company objects to their free-time activities. Also, I suspect that after the initial couch potato period most people would still feel the need to contribute to society somehow.
But yeah, some people would use the opportunity to play XBox all day long, so I don't think that this will ever happen. Economy, society and freedom would all benefit, but it's more important to keep the odd sloth from getting a free ride.
The reason why Rome was so poor was because it had evolved into a Serfdom (slavery) where people were tied to the land, and there was little desire to engage in entrepreneurship. It devolved into a parasitic slothfulness where nobody felt any need to do anything, and the overall wealth in 400 A.D. was vastly smaller than that which had existed in 100 A.D.
Rome's - and the whole Ancient world's - economy had always been based on slave labour. It was not a new development, and certainly not a cause for the fall.
Basically, Rome's political system was unstable, it was hit by disease and large-scale barbarian invasions simultaneously, and since the expansion had ceased war booty was no longer flowing to the coffers of the Empire, while the conquered areas still needed resources to guard. And even then, let's not forget that the eastern half of the empire actually survived and recovered under the name Byzantium.
Because if it doesn't benefit me, why should I allow it to exist? Repeal all laws concerning limited liability and corporate veil and let's see how the owners like being personally responsible for all debts and grievances anyone might have against their business.
Both wind up with psychopaths running things after a certain amount of time (Stalin, Mao, the lunatics at Enron, AIG, Citibank, etc.). But at least the command economies can keep the trains running on time.
In a command economy, the psychopaths control the country as a whole, so they have a vested interest to at least try to keep it running. In a fre-for-all economy, the psychopaths are running individual corporations and can jump from one to another, so their best bet is to loot the rest of the economy for the benefit of their corporation, then loot those profits and jump ship.
Even a psychopath might hesitate to pee on his own pool, but never on anyone elses.
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So basically, this politician suggests leaving alone people who aren't causing trouble? Oh the horror!
Are you just trolling, or do you have any evidence for any of these accusations? Besides being undocumented and thus in violation of immigration laws, of course - but then again, since we allow capital to freely move around the world nowadays, why not people too?
Common sense is indeed rare in a politician.
Well, to nitpick, it were the corporate overlords of said neoconservatives. And rule by corporations is very much in line with libertarianism - except the most extreme version, which leads to rule by the biggest thug instead.
The price of freedom is getting enough property to live by capital gains rather than as a wage slave.
Whenever someone feels the need to say this, the post is off-topic ;).
Which is good, since the more conflicting information a child receives, the faster he realizes that people lie to him to manipulate him. Cynicism is the seed of wisdom; lack of cynicism makes you a gullible fool.
Parents having complete control of what their children are being taught would simply make it easy for them to indoctrinate them to whatever religion or ideology they happen to have blind faith in. We already have too many such people pushing ID, communism, libertarianism, homeopathy, and other assorted stupidity; we really can't afford having any more.
Arbitrary governor no longer gets to feel powerful, and his sex life will suffer as a result. Soon he'll start drinking - more, that is - and ends up wandering the harbor, a bitter man who's purpose in life has been lost.
It's a fine fate for a normal human being who loses his job on the altar of globalization, but surely you can't expect the nobility to suffer it?
Australia is a democracy, so it has just the kind of government it deserves that treats its citizens exactly as they deserve, just like the USA deserved Bush and all the consequences and we Finns deserve the Middle Manager ministers in charge here.
Except that an IRC channel doesn't have clients sending messages directly to each other, they send them to the server which aggregates them and sends the aggregated traffic back for the channels you've joined. An IRC client can connect directly to another, usually for the purposes of transferring a file, but the normal mode of operation is letting the server aggregate and route the messages.
IRC also includes the ability to join multiple servers together, so that everyone on a particular channel sees the same content, no matter which server they connected to; and there's roleplaying going on on some channels. So even using this amazing innovation for gaming purposes has already been done a long time ago.
In short, this is a case about a patent troll going for a fishing expedition.
What happens if the information was gathered illegally by the police, for example by conducting an unauthorized home search? If said information is allowed to influence the outcome of a trial, then the cops have a huge incentive to ignore laws against illegal search, rendering protections from it effectively null and void; and the only way to keep it from influencing a jury's decision is to keep the jury from hearing it in the first place.
And this isn't even beginning to address issues such as baseless or at the very least very dubious rumours being spread by the press, various appeals to emotion from the family of the victim, etc etc. The very idea of a jury is that it's not made of professionals, but ordinary people, who thus can check the power of the legal system; but that very virtue also means that you can't trust a jury to differentiate between fact and fiction, since ordinary people aren't very good at it. You can demand that a professional judge ignores appeals to emotion and judges based on actual evidence; but while you can demand the same from a juror, it's the same as demanding that the Earth stops spinning.
Cue a hundred replies decrying perceived elitism, and completely ignoring the fact that "it's for the children" still works after decades of abuse. The cold fact is that remaining objective when someone is trying to manipulate you and there's a social pressure to give in to rage/pity is a skill that needs to be practised long and hard if it's to be mastered, especially against professional manipulators - which, let's face it, many if not most lawyers working on criminal cases are. Most people don't practise it, leaving their bullshit detector flabby and weak, and so the jury system needs to compensate.
Because it does. For example, "touching candle flame hurts" is anecdotal evidence and also quite valuable information.
Um, what? That is standard experimental procedure. Statistical methods are only used in fields where it is impossible to exclude all other variables than the one under experimentation. Usually you do a single experiment, perhaps a single just-in-case recheck, and then publish your results.
Besides, even statistical data is really in that form. What did you think correlation means?
You aren't expected to comply with laws. You are expected to be too afraid of having unknowingly broken one of them to dare do anything that would draw attention to you, such as speak out against your corporate or political overlords.
Who's gonna arrest them if they aren't - you ?-)
Since XBox is, by all reports, another fine example of the quality of Microsoft engineering, it's good to have a spare. Just remember to backup your games too.
But how long would it take before they decided to invade R'lyeh for Y'oil ?-)
That depends. I feel no moral obligation whatsoever to care about copyright law, but I still buy DVDs simply because it's faster and more convenient than searching and downloading torrents. My "cutoff point" is around 6 euros; my local store has lots of older DVDs for sale at that price, and they put up a real fight to be picked over torrents. 20 euro brand-new movies? Not a chance.
For once, the free market seems to be doing its job: giving consumers more stuff cheaper.
Such as?
Um, movies still make hundreds of millions of profit despite being on the Net the day they are released on the big screen, and often before that. Games, such as the much-copied World of Goo, also turn out nice gobs of money. Some don't, of course, but they aren't popular on torrent sites either.
If you are a "desperate" producer, stop producing shit and asking gold for it and the problem goes away. Don't blame "pirates" if no one wants your stuff; because if you aren't making a profit, the chances are that no one wants your stuff even for free.
Which is actually good if it happens, since it'll put the producers of 3D and other digital production software under pressure to make their products actually easy and efficient to use; the current ones are neither. For example, replacing voice actors with voice synthesizers would give cost savings, probably improve quality (WARNING, CYNICISM DETECTED ;), and make modding easier, thus increasing the value of the final product. And if Spore's creature editor is as easy to use as everyone says (I haven't played it), how about using it to make the monsters to the next 3D shooter quick, easy and cheap?
To me? More than all the money on the world combined. To you? How much would you pay to save my life? Would you, say, sacrifice every material comfort to taxation and persist on nothing but bread and water for the rest of your life to get me treatment that extended my life for another day?
In any case, we aren't talking about killing people for money, we are talking about sending up volunteer astronauts who not only volunteered but actually competed for the chance of doing just that. That gets morals completely out of the picture - unless you wish to assert that it's our moral responsibility to forbid sane adults of above-average intelligence from deciding to risk their own life for their goals without any kind of coercion by force or economics - leaving only costs and benefits to balance.
And you come across as a hysteric who's shooting from the hip. Then again, I suppose you shouldn't be blamed too much from that, considering the amount of actual sociopaths who seem to be on the loose these days.
Actually, since space flight is essential for defence (spy satellites), general welfare (weather satellites) and interstate commerce (communication satellites), it is quite clearly within the power and duty of Federal government to spend money on.
Well if it isn't, then your sentence is meaningless, since you don't qualify what country the "it" in "when it was run by Kaiser Wilhelm" is referring to.
According to Wikipedia, the latest amendment to that Constitution was ratified in 1992, or seventeen years ago. I guess the USA is not quite up to drinking age yet ;^).
I'm sure they'd wish that were true. It's not, thought. Pre-WWII history of Germany is still history of modern-day Germany, not some other unrelated Germany.
Who's bogus Vichy government? It can't be France's, if France only started after or at the moment said government was overthrown.
This is precisely why your definition of a country is ridiculous.
It's run by the same people, and the people opposing them tend to meet unfortunate ends. Sounds very Soviet to me.
IMHO the state should be forced to pay for your defence whether you're acquitted or convicted. Failure to do so has two unfortunate consequences:
Contributing to Wikipedia is a waste of time, since your changes or additions will be reverted or deleted. Don't bother, it's not worth it.
AFAIK serfs were liberated in the West centuries before the Industrial Revolution (which marked the foundations of modern welfare). And AFAIK Russia pre-WW1 had very little heavy industry, being mainly an agricultural state (which Stalin managed to fuck royally with forced collectivization, to the point of needing imports from the USA).
Again, AFAIK, there was every need for revolution, since the Tzar kept on getting into wars that he lost, and the government after the first revolution refused to pull out of WW1, which caused the second (communist) revolution.
Mind you, I could be wrong; my information is mainly based on Finland's pre- Soviet Collapse school education, which was very likely biased to not annoy the somewhat stronger and quite aggressive eastern Comrade. However, all information I've come online since then seems to suggest that Russia was pathetic before communist dominion, and only became a great power since then. If you have contrary information, do us all a favour and link to it.
I'm still running 2.6.24 because that's the newest that NVIDIA Legacy drivers for my Geforce 2 MX will support, which in turn is best my MVP7 motherboard will support (as in, start up with).
Not all of us have 4096 CPU rigs. Those of us who actually are on shoestring budget kinda suffer from the constant changes to the internal interfaces of the kernel.
It will decrease context switches (assuming a good scheduler, of course) but increase locking of cache memory pages instead. However, even my old 1GHz AMD Duron has no problem managing 1000 context switches per second, so I don't think that this is a significant problem.
Anyway, Linux seems to be heading towards microkernel architecture anyway, with some file systems (FUSE) and now serial devices in user space, so we'll see...
And of course nothing stops processor manufacturers from optimizing context switches more, if that turns out to be the trend.
Actually, no. Russia began from an agricultural backwater that had pretty much become the laughingstock of the world and finally collapsed in revolution in WWI, and became the second-most-powerful country in the world. Communism was a huge economic success story there. Collapse resulted from trying (and failing) to compete with the most powerful country (USA) in military strength, the dictatorial nature of government (which meant that having the occasional psychopath in charge gave them limitless power) and finally from "toning down" said dictatorship with predictable consequences. Contrast this with China, which has similar history but managed to avoid collapse and is likely going to take world leadership from the USA.
The lesson is simple: command economy is great for getting things running, but at some point the cost of running under a dictatorship eclipses the benefits.
This is unavoidable, and trying to prevent all abuse is one of the reasons why welfare systems - or tax systems for that matter - tend to become horrible jungles over time. Ironically enough, this actually rewards someone who makes it his profession to find loopholes, and punishes the honest one who simply needs to get a living until he can find work.
My favourite solution to this is Guaranteed Minimum Income large enough to live on, which would remove the incentive to "have 8 babies by 8 baby-daddies" and similar shenigans, keep people from being indoctrinated to be subservient to bureaucracy (as current system does), free up resources from handling claims and encourage entrepreneurship by lessening the associated risk (here in Finland you can't get unemployment benefit if you've been an entrepreneur in the last year or so; I honestly can't imagine the kind of logic that would make that seem like a good idea).
As an added bonus you could remove all employee termination laws, since becoming unemployed would no longer be such a catastrophic event, and people wouldn't need to worry so much whether some company objects to their free-time activities. Also, I suspect that after the initial couch potato period most people would still feel the need to contribute to society somehow.
But yeah, some people would use the opportunity to play XBox all day long, so I don't think that this will ever happen. Economy, society and freedom would all benefit, but it's more important to keep the odd sloth from getting a free ride.
Rome's - and the whole Ancient world's - economy had always been based on slave labour. It was not a new development, and certainly not a cause for the fall.
Basically, Rome's political system was unstable, it was hit by disease and large-scale barbarian invasions simultaneously, and since the expansion had ceased war booty was no longer flowing to the coffers of the Empire, while the conquered areas still needed resources to guard. And even then, let's not forget that the eastern half of the empire actually survived and recovered under the name Byzantium.
Because if it doesn't benefit me, why should I allow it to exist? Repeal all laws concerning limited liability and corporate veil and let's see how the owners like being personally responsible for all debts and grievances anyone might have against their business.
Legal fiction can be unimagined. Just saying.
In a command economy, the psychopaths control the country as a whole, so they have a vested interest to at least try to keep it running. In a fre-for-all economy, the psychopaths are running individual corporations and can jump from one to another, so their best bet is to loot the rest of the economy for the benefit of their corporation, then loot those profits and jump ship.
Even a psychopath might hesitate to pee on his own pool, but never on anyone elses.