Every generation of children are raised in a society just a little less free than the prior one
My solution is simple: we should destroy all technological and scientific knowledge acquired after about 1400 AD and go back to a feudal system. With me as king, obviously.
I feel like exercising my droit de seigneur on a naked, petrified Natalie Portman covered in hot grits right now.
It makes no difference to me whether ads I am forced to watch are targeted at me through detailed analysis of personal data, or just random. I ignore them anyway. If I want to buy something, I will go and find out about it myself.
Yes, you also pay for slashdot. Both with advertisement and subscription (optional) charges.
I don't see ads on slashdot and I most certainly don't pay a subscription. All I have "paid" is to give them my email address, and if I was that paranoid I could just have used a throwaway yahoo account or something anyway.
the cognitive dissonance that comes from a corporation's computers knowing you're gay or depressed or having an affair before your friends and family do
And what exactly is a corporation going to do with that information? Blackmail you? Target ads for musicals, the Samaritans and Interflora at you?
Who really cares?
There is a simple solution if you're really that bothered about privacy in the internet age: don't use the internet. It's not compulsory.
dropbox is a total raging clusterfuck for anything that you actually need to keep secure(I once caught a user storing fucking children's medical records on a personal dropbox account.
You can't really create a product that lets you easily store and share information then moan when some people store and share information inappropriately.
If someone wants to put their name, address, phone numbers and credit card details on facebook with no privacy settings, how are you going to stop them?
'"One of the common comments was that they felt an inclination to look down at the screen to see if it heard them correctly, so that could be one possible explanation of why they were not looking at the roadway more frequently,"
So voice texting (like all voice recongnition products I have ever come across) basically doesn't work very well despite the grandiose claims of the "we'll have real AI in 5 years time" fanatics?
I would love to see an experiment. Take two groups and give them the same job. Group one would be based on a typical American corporate structure with a Boss, Scheduler, budget person, middle management, supervisor, and finally people doing the work.
The other group would have the same number of people but only those that work. No schedule or budget just work until it's done. I wonder what the results would be?
If the "only people doing the work" group could get the same or better results than the "typical American corporate structure" group, do you really think that the corporation would not use the former and increase their profits overnight?
While there is certainly an element of inefficiency in any large organisation, at the end of the day a corporation is a money making machine, not a scheme to create jobs for the sake of it.
I don’t think a Tobin Tax is the answer. It is often put forward by people who are suspicious of the chaotic energy of the market and of wealthy people
Chaotic energy sounds sexy and cool, it has nothing to do with financing fucking businesses which is what the stock market is supposed to be for.
As for being suspicious of wealthy people, well yes. We don't all have the moral vacuum in our hearts which says that anything that makes money is good. Lots of people presumably make money from organised crime, that doesn't make it a good thing.
My uncle-in-law retired early, and well off, by writing scripts that key off certain reports & keywords. Trades in before actual people can, then trades out after ~1/4% change.
Yeah, and I've still got a few 50% shares in the Brooklyn Bridge for sale, plus an absolutely guaranteed way to beat the casino.
Try and start one and see how fast you are shut down because you are not complying with literally about fifty thousand regulations. It's not about one particular thing, it's about the fact of just how much you have to comply with before you can run your exchange. Obviously it does not do anything to make exchanges 'more safe' for anybody, what it does it prevents you from competing in that market.
Similarly, there are evil government regulations that prevent you from setting yourself up as a doctor, engineer, architect or lawyer without any qualifications. What a terrible intrusion on the free market.
No doubt you're a qualified doctor, engineer and lawyer as well as Financial Colossus and so could do all of those jobs with one hand tied behind your back. Meanwhile, in the real world, I like to know that if you build me a house or take my appendix out you have some idea of how to do it, and that I don't just have to rely on my grieving family to sue you after I've died of septicemia and fallen roof joists.
Regulations is what allows for "gambling and thievery", without regulations such behaviour would immediately be punished by the market.
Yes, and the only reason there are murders is because there are laws making it illegal to murder people.
In a pure free market you wouldn't need to make murder illegal, because the victim (or rather victim's family) would be able to sue the murderer and ruin him, therefore the logical outcome would be no more murders.
Once you abolish government, laws, regulations and taxes, mankind will revert to the pure innocence of a free market Eden. We'll have flowery meadows and rainbow skies, and rivers made of chocolate, where the children dance and laugh and play with gumdrop smiles. There will be just One Invisible Hand to rule us all.
Coherence is, I'm afraid, not really an option in a democracy
Hence the reason this country is supposed to be a Constitutional Republic.
Pure democracies suck.
In a true democracy everyone would own everything equally and have an equal amount of power, so that in the end the actual greatest good of the greatest number of people would inevitably occur.
But that would be communism from the viewpoint of a rugged individualist in the US.
Coherence is, I'm afraid, not really an option in a democracy
Hence the reason this country is supposed to be a Constitutional Republic.
Pure democracies suck.
You should try a Constitutional Monarchy,
You have a leader that you can love because she has not real power and all she does is make a nice speech at Christmas.
Or you could live in the UK where any sane person hates all the monarcy and families have a tradition of masturbating to goat porn rather than watch her fucking speech after Xmas lunch.
How about the Patriot Act (the most unpatriotic piece of legislation prior to Obama's NDAA), it turns banks and other financial institutions into FBI and IRS agents.
Good. If you are going to have laws and taxes, you should improve the ways of catching those who break or do not pay them.
I know your answer would be not to have the laws and taxes in the first place, but that is because you are an extreme libertarian with no concept of history, morality or real-life economics.
You want to revert to the Nineteenth Century world of a few ultra rich capitalists paying no tax and being effectively above the law, with the vast majority forced to live on starvation wages, and powerless to oppose their employers. You might say, and even believe, that what you will get is a country full of happy, successful individually free-trading businessmen, but you won't. You'll just have even more powerful corporations with no check on their power.
all of a sudden you have people who actually would be worried about their banks and financial institutions and start evaluating risks and rewards based on real market signals
How can normal people evaluate the risks and rewards of their bank or insurance company or pension provider? Because so-called experts certainly can't.
In case you missed the reference to slashdot's Robert A Heinlein, having a group of people on the moon would put them in a position to cause a lot of damage to those of us on Earth.
Corporate yahoos are the ones in charge now and libertarians are among those who don't like what the ones in charge now are doing. I suppose you're far from alone in confusing the corporatism we have now for the free markets that libertarians support, but that doesn't mean you're right to do so. They're nothing alike.
Sorry, but if you have unrestrained free markets, those seeking to maximise their wealth (and power) will inevitably band together into corporations, however you choose to name them. Bigger trading organisations have economies of scale for distribution, increased purchasing power, shared overhead expenses and so on. There is a reason that capitalism ended up with large corporations, they didn't magically appear out of nowhere to do evil.
Someone like Walmart makes huge profits because it is a huge organisation. If you split it up into thousands of small sole traders, then another group of small traders would see the opportunity to band together and form a new corporation.
What are you going to do? Have a law that forbids people from trading in groups of more than one? Two? A thousand?
You need government to control the power of corporations: libertarians would remove any check on their power.
Have fun with your front-row seat watching the next asteroid impact on Earth. You're right in that there is no short or medium term justification for manned space exploration. In the long term, simply having some of our eggs in a second basket is sufficient justification.
Another long-term justification for a space program is protecting the one basket of eggs we've got now better. If that can be done with robots, fine. If it requires men, let's do it.
So basically this moon colony would have to be able to accommodate most of the world's population? Or would it just be the usual heads of state and their girlfriends that were lucky enough to be evacuated and carry on the glorious destiny of mankind?
This space stuff is just an extension of America's history of expansion and the "wild west", translated into the modern era with WWII technology and German engineers.
I think your invitation to the Space Nutter Society Annual Xmas Ball just got cancelled.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't care who just did a really great big poo
Not even if it's Miley Cyrus?
Every generation of children are raised in a society just a little less free than the prior one
My solution is simple: we should destroy all technological and scientific knowledge acquired after about 1400 AD and go back to a feudal system. With me as king, obviously.
I feel like exercising my droit de seigneur on a naked, petrified Natalie Portman covered in hot grits right now.
It all depends on what you mean by freedom.
It makes no difference to me whether ads I am forced to watch are targeted at me through detailed analysis of personal data, or just random. I ignore them anyway. If I want to buy something, I will go and find out about it myself.
Yes, you also pay for slashdot. Both with advertisement and subscription (optional) charges.
I don't see ads on slashdot and I most certainly don't pay a subscription. All I have "paid" is to give them my email address, and if I was that paranoid I could just have used a throwaway yahoo account or something anyway.
the cognitive dissonance that comes from a corporation's computers knowing you're gay or depressed or having an affair before your friends and family do
And what exactly is a corporation going to do with that information? Blackmail you? Target ads for musicals, the Samaritans and Interflora at you?
Who really cares?
There is a simple solution if you're really that bothered about privacy in the internet age: don't use the internet. It's not compulsory.
in exchange for sex.
Spoken like a true virgin.
Who gives a twopenny toss about what a bunch of children think? They'll change their minds when they've grown up a bit anyway.
And no FBI snooping around your files!
I'm sure that's a valuable feature for those twats stupid enough to store information about their criminal activities on the fucking internet.
dropbox is a total raging clusterfuck for anything that you actually need to keep secure(I once caught a user storing fucking children's medical records on a personal dropbox account.
You can't really create a product that lets you easily store and share information then moan when some people store and share information inappropriately.
If someone wants to put their name, address, phone numbers and credit card details on facebook with no privacy settings, how are you going to stop them?
'"One of the common comments was that they felt an inclination to look down at the screen to see if it heard them correctly, so that could be one possible explanation of why they were not looking at the roadway more frequently,"
So voice texting (like all voice recongnition products I have ever come across) basically doesn't work very well despite the grandiose claims of the "we'll have real AI in 5 years time" fanatics?
What a surprise.
I would love to see an experiment. Take two groups and give them the same job. Group one would be based on a typical American corporate structure with a Boss, Scheduler, budget person, middle management, supervisor, and finally people doing the work.
The other group would have the same number of people but only those that work. No schedule or budget just work until it's done. I wonder what the results would be?
If the "only people doing the work" group could get the same or better results than the "typical American corporate structure" group, do you really think that the corporation would not use the former and increase their profits overnight?
While there is certainly an element of inefficiency in any large organisation, at the end of the day a corporation is a money making machine, not a scheme to create jobs for the sake of it.
Whoopy do.
I don’t think a Tobin Tax is the answer. It is often put forward by people who are suspicious of the chaotic energy of the market and of wealthy people
Chaotic energy sounds sexy and cool, it has nothing to do with financing fucking businesses which is what the stock market is supposed to be for.
As for being suspicious of wealthy people, well yes. We don't all have the moral vacuum in our hearts which says that anything that makes money is good. Lots of people presumably make money from organised crime, that doesn't make it a good thing.
My uncle-in-law retired early, and well off, by writing scripts that key off certain reports & keywords. Trades in before actual people can, then trades out after ~1/4% change.
Yeah, and I've still got a few 50% shares in the Brooklyn Bridge for sale, plus an absolutely guaranteed way to beat the casino.
Please.
Try and start one and see how fast you are shut down because you are not complying with literally about fifty thousand regulations. It's not about one particular thing, it's about the fact of just how much you have to comply with before you can run your exchange. Obviously it does not do anything to make exchanges 'more safe' for anybody, what it does it prevents you from competing in that market.
Similarly, there are evil government regulations that prevent you from setting yourself up as a doctor, engineer, architect or lawyer without any qualifications. What a terrible intrusion on the free market.
No doubt you're a qualified doctor, engineer and lawyer as well as Financial Colossus and so could do all of those jobs with one hand tied behind your back. Meanwhile, in the real world, I like to know that if you build me a house or take my appendix out you have some idea of how to do it, and that I don't just have to rely on my grieving family to sue you after I've died of septicemia and fallen roof joists.
Regulations is what allows for "gambling and thievery", without regulations such behaviour would immediately be punished by the market.
Yes, and the only reason there are murders is because there are laws making it illegal to murder people.
In a pure free market you wouldn't need to make murder illegal, because the victim (or rather victim's family) would be able to sue the murderer and ruin him, therefore the logical outcome would be no more murders.
Once you abolish government, laws, regulations and taxes, mankind will revert to the pure innocence of a free market Eden. We'll have flowery meadows and rainbow skies, and rivers made of chocolate, where the children dance and laugh and play with gumdrop smiles. There will be just One Invisible Hand to rule us all.
Coherence is, I'm afraid, not really an option in a democracy
Hence the reason this country is supposed to be a Constitutional Republic.
Pure democracies suck.
In a true democracy everyone would own everything equally and have an equal amount of power, so that in the end the actual greatest good of the greatest number of people would inevitably occur.
But that would be communism from the viewpoint of a rugged individualist in the US.
Coherence is, I'm afraid, not really an option in a democracy
Hence the reason this country is supposed to be a Constitutional Republic.
Pure democracies suck.
You should try a Constitutional Monarchy, You have a leader that you can love because she has not real power and all she does is make a nice speech at Christmas.
Or you could live in the UK where any sane person hates all the monarcy and families have a tradition of masturbating to goat porn rather than watch her fucking speech after Xmas lunch.
How about the Patriot Act (the most unpatriotic piece of legislation prior to Obama's NDAA), it turns banks and other financial institutions into FBI and IRS agents.
Good. If you are going to have laws and taxes, you should improve the ways of catching those who break or do not pay them.
I know your answer would be not to have the laws and taxes in the first place, but that is because you are an extreme libertarian with no concept of history, morality or real-life economics.
You want to revert to the Nineteenth Century world of a few ultra rich capitalists paying no tax and being effectively above the law, with the vast majority forced to live on starvation wages, and powerless to oppose their employers. You might say, and even believe, that what you will get is a country full of happy, successful individually free-trading businessmen, but you won't. You'll just have even more powerful corporations with no check on their power.
all of a sudden you have people who actually would be worried about their banks and financial institutions and start evaluating risks and rewards based on real market signals
How can normal people evaluate the risks and rewards of their bank or insurance company or pension provider? Because so-called experts certainly can't.
In case you missed the reference to slashdot's Robert A Heinlein, having a group of people on the moon would put them in a position to cause a lot of damage to those of us on Earth.
Corporate yahoos are the ones in charge now and libertarians are among those who don't like what the ones in charge now are doing. I suppose you're far from alone in confusing the corporatism we have now for the free markets that libertarians support, but that doesn't mean you're right to do so. They're nothing alike.
Sorry, but if you have unrestrained free markets, those seeking to maximise their wealth (and power) will inevitably band together into corporations, however you choose to name them. Bigger trading organisations have economies of scale for distribution, increased purchasing power, shared overhead expenses and so on. There is a reason that capitalism ended up with large corporations, they didn't magically appear out of nowhere to do evil.
Someone like Walmart makes huge profits because it is a huge organisation. If you split it up into thousands of small sole traders, then another group of small traders would see the opportunity to band together and form a new corporation.
What are you going to do? Have a law that forbids people from trading in groups of more than one? Two? A thousand?
You need government to control the power of corporations: libertarians would remove any check on their power.
What's on the moon is sunshine, real estate
Holy crap, moon spam!
Have fun with your front-row seat watching the next asteroid impact on Earth. You're right in that there is no short or medium term justification for manned space exploration. In the long term, simply having some of our eggs in a second basket is sufficient justification.
Another long-term justification for a space program is protecting the one basket of eggs we've got now better. If that can be done with robots, fine. If it requires men, let's do it.
So basically this moon colony would have to be able to accommodate most of the world's population? Or would it just be the usual heads of state and their girlfriends that were lucky enough to be evacuated and carry on the glorious destiny of mankind?
This space stuff is just an extension of America's history of expansion and the "wild west", translated into the modern era with WWII technology and German engineers.
I think your invitation to the Space Nutter Society Annual Xmas Ball just got cancelled.