If you can assign an ideology a coordinate or a quadrant on some graph (who exactly is placing the origin?), that ideology is probably pretty meaningless.
Iluvcapra's opinion |*---------|neutral|----------| Antithesis of iluvcapra's opinion
Most libertarians I know are reasonable libertarians. They want some service and regulations, they just want such to be minimal and to be served by the lowest and most local level of government.
Everyone wants minimal government (since nobody wants to pay for useless things), they just disagree on what that entails.
Just enough for basic safety, a level playing field, equal opportunity and most importantly accountability to locals.
You do realize no society has ever achieved level playing field or equal opportunity, right? Nordic welfare states probably came closest at their peak, and I'm pretty sure any reasonable definition of (American) libertarianism excludes them or anything like them.
Not social engineering through the tax code or regulations, not consolidation of power in Washington DC and the lack of accountability to locals that results.
How would you propose government - or anyone else - would go about advancing "level playing field" or "equal opportunity" without resorting to social engineering?
Also, local government seems like a great idea until you realize that while the agendas of various groups of crackpots tend to cancel each other out over larger areas, they can easily get a local majority. So what happens when your local town council decides to limit your freedom of speech to what the local, say, majority religion finds acceptable, and there's no federal government powerful enough to stop them? Because that's what "accountability to locals" means.
Speaking is an action. The pen is mightier than the sword, because ultimately the sword obeys the pen. And like any weapon, the pen too can cut the user. Especially if they play around without thinking.
I agree, but i can only think of one instance that gotos are appropriate and that is cleanup. I think this is basically because C does not have any nice way to handle cleanup, a finally block would get rid of most valid uses of goto.
Problem is, a finally block effectively changes the meaning of code within it by tagging any return statements with extra code. A line being changed by another line far away seems far more inelegant and prone to confusion than goto.
That is the irony of Capitalism: it can only work as long as it has another system to compete against. As soon as Communism fell, Capitalism became a monopoly in the marketplace of political options, and like all monopolies, it became bloated and lazy. And now it's falling due to resulting internal problems. It'll be intersting to see what system will replace it.
Sure if I work hard and invest right I can earn a few million, but 175 million is just not going to happen any other way. I'm willing to spend a couple of dollars for that slim chance.
But by spending those few dollars, you're also affirming your approval of a system where "own 175 million dollas" is something people dream of. And why do they dream of it? Because it basically lets them quit the system - no more hard work (or, more importantly, all the bullshit that goes with it), no more worrying about whether market gods are pleased or require sacrifices, no more wondering if you manage to beat someone else in the game of musical chairs that is the job market, etc.
Lottery is a fine metaphor for modern economy, and most historical ones for that matter. But if the rich are the winners, who's running the game?
All is not lost. It has remained this way for centuries. Every once in a while, a revolution comes along which supplants the power structure with some new nobles.
All the while the basic assumption - that some have the right to more than others - remains unchallenged. It'll be interesting to see whether it can be overthrown before weapons of mass destruction beyond mere bombs will trickle down into common hands. 3D printing the parts for a home laboratory to assemble your homebrewn airborne Ebola strain isn't that far ahead.
As luck would have it, we're approaching an opportunite time in history for such radical shifts. Capitalism has been so succesful at concentrating wealth and making people economically insecure in the name of efficiency it's collapsing due to the resulting lack of demand. Painful as it might be, a lot of people are getting their faces forcefully shoved into the faults of the system as individual crises start melding into one huge ongoing one. Such breaks make it possible to see, for a brief time, what parts are objective reality and what was merely self-delusion. So I suppose there's at least a slight hope of surviving the coming storm.
Borrowing money to buy votes, and then trashing an economy and trying to extract money from people by violence. That's something else entirely.
The entire system of private ownership is based on violence. Claiming something as yours implies that either you, your gang or men in uniforms will use physical force to stop me if I try to "extract" it. And the same happens if I try to print my own euros rather than extract yours. That continued threat of violence is part of what's financed by your taxes.
So by all means, do condemn violence, but understand that your precious money is worth nothing without it. Which might not be a bad thing, but requires completely redesigning the entire economic system and all associated cultural norms and valuations.
Sadly, no, because freedom of speech simply means social media sites (or anyone else) are allowed to host horrific videos, not that they should. Social media sites and other institutions are not public but private entities, and as such are not required to offer free speech for their users. Perhaps they should be considered semi-public, and forced to play by rules somewhere between the government and mere humans, but currently they aren't.
Your "reasonable" doesn't sound too reasonable. Common 32 and 64 bit ints are only 9 or 20 decimal digits long, only most limited of embedded CPUs will run out of stack computing that.
But that also means you can use a precalculated table to look up the number of digits, making recursion pointless. Also, how much stack space has whatever function called this one used?
Not everyone requires arbitrary precision ints.
Which is a good thing since they don't exist;). And besides, in the real world the correct solution for printing the digits of an integer is to use printf. This entire excersize was purely academic in the first place.
But a faster, more elegant way is to write it recursively, with a routine that saves its remainder digit while it passes the quotient to a recursive call of itself. The bottom-level call finds it has a 1-digit number so it doesn't make the recursive call, but simply outputs its digit, and returns to the caller, which writes the 2nd digit, and so on. Students that understand this now know that recursion can sometimes simplify some (but not all) problems.
The problem is, that algorithm can't be tail-call optimized, so it's gonna run out of stack space and crash on reasonable-sized inputs. Which is why recursion should usually be avoided: it's a bad fit for common imperative programming languages, which are almost all stack-based - and don't necessarily guarantee tail-call optimization even in cases where it is possible, for that matter.
I'm sorry, you must be reading something different than what the rest of us are. Would you mind sharing?
So... do you often not read what you write?
And it should be noted that Nazi Germany was actually held in high regard at one time before it wasn't. It was the pinnacle of progressiveness.
Is that what this is really about? Good old "conservatives vs. progressives" politics? Because both have an increasing chance of spending a good long while of their final days in hospital bed, hoping death would just hurry up already.
But lets ignore reality for a while.
How about you stop ignoring reality and start focusing on today, not past sins of Germany or US?
However, I and society does have a right to stop others from purposely and intentionally ending the life of others for any reason that does not preserve the life of someone else. This is what this is about after all, doctor assisted- or in other words, someone else either doing so or helping to kill someone else with or without a terminal illness.
No. This is about people being allowed to end their own life, by using a doctor as their tool if necessary. This is about suicide, not murder or eugenics.
Either you are ignoring pertinent details or have some super secret document that says something different then what was presented to the rest of the world. Please share it with us either way.
Or it could simply be that I'm looking at actual facts, rather than demanding people suffer because a hypothetical Canadian Nazi government could do something bad with an euthanasia law.
But hey, that will never happen again right? Especially if we make ourselves so ignorant of the past that we do not know it happened before.
Every decision might end up having unintended consequences. So I suppose it's hypothetically possible that not forcing people suffer through end-state cancer might end up with Nazi death camps, despite Canada not being Nazi Germany. On the other hand, forcing people to suffer through end-state cancer amounts to torturing them to death, with no "might" about it. And an unfortunate side effect of medical science advancing is that it can keep people alive and suffering within broken bodies longer than they used to. So, the rational response would seem to be to allow assisted suicide under certain conditions and be careful to not vote anyone who starts making noises about ubermenschen.
Besides, what right do you have to lord it over other people's life and death, to either end them or force them to go on?
Except if a laser is so powerful... how exactly do you aim it without it burning out the prisms/mirrors that are utilised to aim it?
The same way you propel a shot without blowing up the cannon: a small portion of the vessel - the gun/laser barrel - can be reinforced to a far higher degree than what's feasible for the main part of the vessel.
But no, apparently incremental improvement in autonomous driving controls are unacceptable. Nothing less than Kit picking you up at the bar and driving to NY from Boston during Snowmageddon will suffice.
That is correct, because if the computer drives most of the time, you're out of practice when it refuses to. Furthermore, if people buy autonomous cars, they will take advantage of them by, for example, taking a few beers on the way. So the end result will be a lot of drunk, inexperienced drivers having little choice but to drive when the computer quits midway due to Snowmageddon.
There are some things where the options are "perfect" or "not at all", since anything between is just asking for trouble.
I'd rather lose those few (allegedly) "good" posts than read any more trolls. If it's too hard tell the difference between an semi-literate rant over "how angles save my sole" and a troll, the world isn't any worse off for not having the rant.
It's also not better off. Nothing forces you to read the rant, after all. On the other hand, all the good posts that are go with it are lost and unavailable.
Despite the apparent similarities, Twitter is not a legally protected soap box in the public square. It's a private service, and they can censor anyone they want for any reason.
While true, anyone is certainly allowed to express their opinion on Twitter's choices.
However, I question whether Twitter can really be called private, in all honesty. It's not a saloon or a general store. It's a publicly held corporation that has more global influence than most nation-states. Making it play by rules somewhere between a mom and pop store and the government seems just and reasonable - or at least more so than the current rather absurd pretension that a sole proprietorship is the same thing as a huge, potentially immortal institution.
Thats pretty strange logic; you can be sufficiently addicted to heroin to jump through whatever hoops you need to to get a fix. That doesnt mean that heroin doesnt impair your ability to live a normal life.
And perhaps it does. I don't drink alcohol, that makes me pretty abnormal in my social circle. Does this mean I should immediately head for the nearest booze store to resolve this issue, or does "normal life" really stand for "a life with priorities ordered as I want them to be"?
One of the key witnesses was a guy who ended up ruining his life by getting hooked on heroin and became a dealer on silk road.
So someone who made a lot of easy money in an illegal way is claiming to have been a helpless victim of someone else the prosecutor really wants convicted, all under a legal system notorious for extortion. Sounds legit.
If you're looking for evidence that drugs dont ruin your life this isnt it.
"Ruining a life" is another vague term. If you spend your free time arguing on Slashdot and another guy spends his shooting up heroin, why would one of these count as ruin and the other not? Judging an individual as functional or not can be done somewhat objectively, for example by whether they can hold a steady job, but judging recreational activites ends up as trying to force your values on others. Which is what the war on drugs is ultimately about, and also why it's failing so miserably.
If you know you're going to court with a dog shit defense, just plead guilty and hope for leniency.
There was no hope for that in this case. Silk Road embarassed the state twice: once by going uncaught for years and the second time by proving the drug war rethoric is bollocks - after all, every single customer was functional enough to operate rather complex technological systems. So there was no way in Hell Ulbricht would ever walk free again.
Wouldn't that mean letting Ulbricht mail-order all the drugs he wants whenever he wants? Because I'm pretty sure no private dungeons were involved in this case.
The problem is, the character it builds tends to be pretty destructive, to the person themselves and anyone unlucky enough to get drawn close to them. And in extreme cases, to the world in general.
Actually counterfeiting is what governments around the world are actively involved in, that's all the 'QE' crap, paper money printing is all about.
What are they counterfeiting, exactly speaking?
Roads, education, health care, communications, etc., none of it should have anything to do with government in the first place, unless of-course you want to have a monopoly on such things and have it protected with government military (which is why government military is also a horrid outdated idea).
If government military is an outdated idea, what's stopping you from living the way you want right now? Simply use whatever method you had in mind to deal with hostile foreign governments to free yourself from the US government.
Besides this, simply claiming something "shouldn't" be the domain of government is not a convincing argument. Why should roads, healthcare, communications, etc. have nothing to do with government? How would they be dealt with, and why would that be a superior way?
The only way to 'pull your weight' in a society is to be a productive member of it and to work in the private sector.
So, in your view, firefighters are not pulling their weight but mafia accountants are?
Government is the economic leech that destroys the productivity and wealth, it doesn't add anything to it.
Again, assertions require backing to be convincing.
All real productivity is done privately, all that governments do is theft (and in many cases murder), nothing else.
What do you mean by "real productivity"? Is there some kind of "false productivity" it contrasts with? How do you reconcile your claim with your own earlier assertion that "Roads, education, health care, communications, etc., none of it should have anything to do with government in the first place" which kinda implies that currently, government is doing all of these things?
Taxes shouldn't exist and they are not paying for civilization, they are paying for destruction, monopoly power, murder.
Schools, hospitals, firefighters, police, roads, telecommunications... How do you propose paying for these without taxes? Sucks for you if your parents can't afford to send you to a private school?
All legitimate economic activity is mandatory, nobody should ever be forced to do anything as a group by thugs with guns.
I'm going to assume you meant "voluntary". So, how do you propose to ensure a group of thugs with guns doesn't move in as soon as the police move out? Because this far you're doing a pretty poor job of convincing even people actually willing to talk about the issue, which most groups of thugs with guns probably aren't.
Slashdot Mirror
Iluvcapra's opinion |*---------|neutral|----------| Antithesis of iluvcapra's opinion
No, ignorance is binary: you either know or don't know. "Willful ignorance" is a nicer term for lying to yourself.
Everyone wants minimal government (since nobody wants to pay for useless things), they just disagree on what that entails.
You do realize no society has ever achieved level playing field or equal opportunity, right? Nordic welfare states probably came closest at their peak, and I'm pretty sure any reasonable definition of (American) libertarianism excludes them or anything like them.
How would you propose government - or anyone else - would go about advancing "level playing field" or "equal opportunity" without resorting to social engineering?
Also, local government seems like a great idea until you realize that while the agendas of various groups of crackpots tend to cancel each other out over larger areas, they can easily get a local majority. So what happens when your local town council decides to limit your freedom of speech to what the local, say, majority religion finds acceptable, and there's no federal government powerful enough to stop them? Because that's what "accountability to locals" means.
Speaking is an action. The pen is mightier than the sword, because ultimately the sword obeys the pen. And like any weapon, the pen too can cut the user. Especially if they play around without thinking.
if (AquireResource1()) {
if (AquireResource2()) {
if (AquireResource3()) {
DoStuffWithResources();
Cleanup3();
}
Cleanup2();
}
Cleanup1();
}
return;
}
Isn't this a textbook example of unwounding a stack?
Problem is, a finally block effectively changes the meaning of code within it by tagging any return statements with extra code. A line being changed by another line far away seems far more inelegant and prone to confusion than goto.
That is the irony of Capitalism: it can only work as long as it has another system to compete against. As soon as Communism fell, Capitalism became a monopoly in the marketplace of political options, and like all monopolies, it became bloated and lazy. And now it's falling due to resulting internal problems. It'll be intersting to see what system will replace it.
But by spending those few dollars, you're also affirming your approval of a system where "own 175 million dollas" is something people dream of. And why do they dream of it? Because it basically lets them quit the system - no more hard work (or, more importantly, all the bullshit that goes with it), no more worrying about whether market gods are pleased or require sacrifices, no more wondering if you manage to beat someone else in the game of musical chairs that is the job market, etc.
Lottery is a fine metaphor for modern economy, and most historical ones for that matter. But if the rich are the winners, who's running the game?
All the while the basic assumption - that some have the right to more than others - remains unchallenged. It'll be interesting to see whether it can be overthrown before weapons of mass destruction beyond mere bombs will trickle down into common hands. 3D printing the parts for a home laboratory to assemble your homebrewn airborne Ebola strain isn't that far ahead.
As luck would have it, we're approaching an opportunite time in history for such radical shifts. Capitalism has been so succesful at concentrating wealth and making people economically insecure in the name of efficiency it's collapsing due to the resulting lack of demand. Painful as it might be, a lot of people are getting their faces forcefully shoved into the faults of the system as individual crises start melding into one huge ongoing one. Such breaks make it possible to see, for a brief time, what parts are objective reality and what was merely self-delusion. So I suppose there's at least a slight hope of surviving the coming storm.
The entire system of private ownership is based on violence. Claiming something as yours implies that either you, your gang or men in uniforms will use physical force to stop me if I try to "extract" it. And the same happens if I try to print my own euros rather than extract yours. That continued threat of violence is part of what's financed by your taxes.
So by all means, do condemn violence, but understand that your precious money is worth nothing without it. Which might not be a bad thing, but requires completely redesigning the entire economic system and all associated cultural norms and valuations.
Sadly, no, because freedom of speech simply means social media sites (or anyone else) are allowed to host horrific videos, not that they should. Social media sites and other institutions are not public but private entities, and as such are not required to offer free speech for their users. Perhaps they should be considered semi-public, and forced to play by rules somewhere between the government and mere humans, but currently they aren't.
But that also means you can use a precalculated table to look up the number of digits, making recursion pointless. Also, how much stack space has whatever function called this one used?
Which is a good thing since they don't exist ;). And besides, in the real world the correct solution for printing the digits of an integer is to use printf. This entire excersize was purely academic in the first place.
The problem is, that algorithm can't be tail-call optimized, so it's gonna run out of stack space and crash on reasonable-sized inputs. Which is why recursion should usually be avoided: it's a bad fit for common imperative programming languages, which are almost all stack-based - and don't necessarily guarantee tail-call optimization even in cases where it is possible, for that matter.
So... do you often not read what you write?
Is that what this is really about? Good old "conservatives vs. progressives" politics? Because both have an increasing chance of spending a good long while of their final days in hospital bed, hoping death would just hurry up already.
How about you stop ignoring reality and start focusing on today, not past sins of Germany or US?
No. This is about people being allowed to end their own life, by using a doctor as their tool if necessary. This is about suicide, not murder or eugenics.
Or it could simply be that I'm looking at actual facts, rather than demanding people suffer because a hypothetical Canadian Nazi government could do something bad with an euthanasia law.
Every decision might end up having unintended consequences. So I suppose it's hypothetically possible that not forcing people suffer through end-state cancer might end up with Nazi death camps, despite Canada not being Nazi Germany. On the other hand, forcing people to suffer through end-state cancer amounts to torturing them to death, with no "might" about it. And an unfortunate side effect of medical science advancing is that it can keep people alive and suffering within broken bodies longer than they used to. So, the rational response would seem to be to allow assisted suicide under certain conditions and be careful to not vote anyone who starts making noises about ubermenschen.
Besides, what right do you have to lord it over other people's life and death, to either end them or force them to go on?
The same way you propel a shot without blowing up the cannon: a small portion of the vessel - the gun/laser barrel - can be reinforced to a far higher degree than what's feasible for the main part of the vessel.
That is correct, because if the computer drives most of the time, you're out of practice when it refuses to. Furthermore, if people buy autonomous cars, they will take advantage of them by, for example, taking a few beers on the way. So the end result will be a lot of drunk, inexperienced drivers having little choice but to drive when the computer quits midway due to Snowmageddon.
There are some things where the options are "perfect" or "not at all", since anything between is just asking for trouble.
It's also not better off. Nothing forces you to read the rant, after all. On the other hand, all the good posts that are go with it are lost and unavailable.
While true, anyone is certainly allowed to express their opinion on Twitter's choices.
However, I question whether Twitter can really be called private, in all honesty. It's not a saloon or a general store. It's a publicly held corporation that has more global influence than most nation-states. Making it play by rules somewhere between a mom and pop store and the government seems just and reasonable - or at least more so than the current rather absurd pretension that a sole proprietorship is the same thing as a huge, potentially immortal institution.
And perhaps it does. I don't drink alcohol, that makes me pretty abnormal in my social circle. Does this mean I should immediately head for the nearest booze store to resolve this issue, or does "normal life" really stand for "a life with priorities ordered as I want them to be"?
So someone who made a lot of easy money in an illegal way is claiming to have been a helpless victim of someone else the prosecutor really wants convicted, all under a legal system notorious for extortion. Sounds legit.
"Ruining a life" is another vague term. If you spend your free time arguing on Slashdot and another guy spends his shooting up heroin, why would one of these count as ruin and the other not? Judging an individual as functional or not can be done somewhat objectively, for example by whether they can hold a steady job, but judging recreational activites ends up as trying to force your values on others. Which is what the war on drugs is ultimately about, and also why it's failing so miserably.
There was no hope for that in this case. Silk Road embarassed the state twice: once by going uncaught for years and the second time by proving the drug war rethoric is bollocks - after all, every single customer was functional enough to operate rather complex technological systems. So there was no way in Hell Ulbricht would ever walk free again.
Wouldn't that mean letting Ulbricht mail-order all the drugs he wants whenever he wants? Because I'm pretty sure no private dungeons were involved in this case.
And if you pick your major wrong, you end up picking cabbages. I guess that proves the American Dream is alive and well !-)
The problem is, the character it builds tends to be pretty destructive, to the person themselves and anyone unlucky enough to get drawn close to them. And in extreme cases, to the world in general.
What are they counterfeiting, exactly speaking?
If government military is an outdated idea, what's stopping you from living the way you want right now? Simply use whatever method you had in mind to deal with hostile foreign governments to free yourself from the US government.
Besides this, simply claiming something "shouldn't" be the domain of government is not a convincing argument. Why should roads, healthcare, communications, etc. have nothing to do with government? How would they be dealt with, and why would that be a superior way?
So, in your view, firefighters are not pulling their weight but mafia accountants are?
Again, assertions require backing to be convincing.
What do you mean by "real productivity"? Is there some kind of "false productivity" it contrasts with? How do you reconcile your claim with your own earlier assertion that "Roads, education, health care, communications, etc., none of it should have anything to do with government in the first place" which kinda implies that currently, government is doing all of these things?
Schools, hospitals, firefighters, police, roads, telecommunications... How do you propose paying for these without taxes? Sucks for you if your parents can't afford to send you to a private school?
I'm going to assume you meant "voluntary". So, how do you propose to ensure a group of thugs with guns doesn't move in as soon as the police move out? Because this far you're doing a pretty poor job of convincing even people actually willing to talk about the issue, which most groups of thugs with guns probably aren't.
Using the term "tax loophole" is not forbidden by law. Neither is calling any particular behavior immoral.
No, I'm saying that confusing "legal" with "moral" leads to an infinity of laws.
Why do you attack a strawman?