The people who spend like you describe don't stay rich long. Most rich folks are only spending a small percentage of their annual income.
If by "rich" you mean slightly upper middle-class, sure. If by "rich" you mean the commonly-understood definition of multi-millionaires and above, no.
You have to report illegal income. To not report is how they get you. That is how they got Capone.
... who was already well-known to be a major criminal and was under a ton of scrutiny. Are you pretending that had nothing to do with it? That the government didn't try as hard as it could to nail him for anything they could prove and had to settle for tax evasion? That would be a denial of reality.
Even worse, this scheme encourages hoarding and discourages spending. Killing demand sure will be great for the economy.
Yes, just like state sales taxes have done. Oh, wait...
Why does everyone stop reading at the words "consumption tax" and ignore the actual facts related to the proposal?
Because the media is a very powerful force and that is what it has programmed them to do.
When you see these behaviors, you are not dealing with people who think for themselves, do their own research, and form their own conclusions. You are dealing with people who see that a bunch of vocal people dislike something and then assume it must be inherently bad. All while maintaining the illusion that they have made their own decision, which they proceed to defend passionately.
It's one of the very sickest tendencies human beings have. It is the root of many other forms of evil.
That your education was poor doesn't mean that all public educations are similarly poor.
I'll never comprehend this tendency to take a subject applicable to many millions of people, and make it personal. I'll never comprehend it because it makes no sense.
You see, my own education _was_ pretty good. I still didn't trust anything so important to random strangers like the school system, so I also made a serious effort to educate myself. It's what I did with time that others spent chasing after footballs and things like that which I found to be meaningless.
Precisely because I know that my personal experience is only anecdotal and not universal, I did not mention my own education in any way. Re-read my prior post and you will see that yourself.
Then take a hard look at the world around you, the kind of politicians who get elected and why, the kind of decisions that are made at the highest levels, the way most people are too busy conforming or running themselves ragged with their burn-out lifestyles to seriously question how things got to be this way, the way this nation is beginning to collapse not because of a foreign enemy, but because of simple mismanagement. You will then see that the general public does not understand the principles you were talking about. That is a problem that the public school system is nominally supposed to have prevented. That is what I was talking about.
The media is simply too powerful and benefits too much from the status quo for this to readily change. The average person is not going to review the methodology of a survey, or try to independently confirm what the talking heads tell them, or assume that advertisements are the most biased source of information imaginable, or assume that people with power are inherently untrustworthy. They'd rather believe that the guy they elect is their buddy who wants to make their life better. It's a sad state of affairs.
Poor people typically consume more of their money because their income and their "minimum spending necessary to survive" are closer together.
What is this modern obsession with how much of one's total income is spent? I certainly spend a higher percentage of my income to survive and make ends meet than anyone remotely "rich". And I don't care -- or rather, I feel no reason to charge them more in taxes as a response to it. That wouldn't put more money in my pocket because federal tax policy has had little to do with funding government for a very long time now.
What I want is to balance the federal budget, stop enforcing victimless-crime laws such as those concerning drug use, stop trying to be the world's police, stop enforcing at the federal level laws that did not involve crossing state boundaries and laws that otherwise local and state governments are able to handle, and to dissolve the Federal Reserve so we can issue interest-free currency. That would make everyone's burden easier, particularly in non-material terms of freedom.
And if, after all of that, a rich person gets to save more money than I do, good for them. I personally value time with loved ones more than 80-hour workweeks. I get what I want. If rich people value material possessions more than time with loved ones, well, to me they're getting the short end of the stick, but it's not my job to decide that for them. This idea that someone must be punished for being more fortunate (inheritance) or more successful (hard work) than I am is so fucking childish. Even if we somehow could make life perfectly fair for everyone, and we cannot, government is the very least trustworthy entity to bring this about.
This obsession with what somebody else makes and how much more than you they can save up tells me something. It tells me that you have more in common with rich people than you might care to admit. Both of you have an extremely materialistic point of view. You're like two denominations of the same basic faith.
It may be a mathematical solution, but it's antithetical to the American system.
Can you tell me how that would be worse than the current income tax system, with all the information the government must collect to implement it, and all the carrot-and-stick methods it enables? That's the part I am missing. "It's un-American" is rather nebulous.
If you think the federal government involved in commerce is bad, consider how much the IRS knows about your personal life. How much I spent making a transaction at a department store is small fry, especially when you consider that my name need not be recorded at all to implement a sales tax.
The bit you left out of your cherry-picked view is that the reason these programs are necessary is that the jobs that are available aren't able to support the people.
That's cute, I mentioned cherry-picking so you will show your superiority by using my term against me. With this you self-identify as one of the lemmings.
Now then, my comment was about how and why those programs are run and who benefits the most by keeping them the way they are. How you would construe that as an argument against the existence of such programs is mind-boggling, but I suppose you'd have less to rail against if you didn't.
But by gaming the system a person can do pretty well. A single mother with two kids making $29,000/year receives net income and benefits of over $57,000. Earning more income actually results in a net decrease in total income+benefits -- this is the "welfare cliff [aei-ideas.org]".
Make no mistake, this is by design. The politicians who designed it and refuse to change it benefit, because the recipients overwhelmingly tend to vote for those who promise more of the same (that's the carrot). When a family comes to depend on these benefits and wouldn't be able to make ends meet without them, they fear the possibility that they might be taken away (that's the stick).
With dependency comes power. You can be absolutely certain of one thing: politicians understand this. They have every incentive to keep people in the system.
I really wish the "mechanics" of power were universally taught in the public schools, along with propaganda techniques, particularly the myriad ways you can mislead someone by carefully crafting your message, all without ever making a single false statement. Framing, cherry-picking your facts, characterization, emotional appeals, bandwagon appeals, just to name a few, should be universally taught and understood. Of course, this is unrealistic. The government funds and operates those schools, and there is no way the government is going to sponsor that. It would be like asking Microsoft to recommend OSX.
Whether or not Oracle deserves a tax-deferred-savings account like mine, the fix of pushing the money back overseas, seems worse than the illness.
Yes but this calm, rational, mature, objective point of view doesn't provide the visceral "satisfaction" of punishing people who are easily demonized and easy (often with reason) to hate. So politically, it doesn't sell very well. It doesn't appeal at a base level to the masses who vote emotionally instead of taking the time to recognize certain cause-and-effect relationships.
Politics should be about how to best manage a nation, not what it's become now, which is how to ineffectively resolve one's discontentment with life by trusting liars who don't give a damn about you.
They are not a goal in itself. I repeat, a company is not a goal in itself.
How then do you explain someone like Bill Gates, who for some strange reason continued to work for a long time after having acquired enough wealth to secure the financial future of his great-great-great-great-etc grandchildren?
For some, it's a way of life. I think it's a shallow, hollow, materialistic, empty, and ultimately unsatisfying way of life that can appear glamorous for a while. But it is a way of life. Some people do live to work instead of working in order to live.
If you want to benefit from our civilization you should expect to have to pay for it as well.
You avoid all these problems by taxing consumption instead of income. Not to mention, rich people consume quite a bit more than poor people so this nebulously-defined "fair share" would be achieved. The Fair Tax Act would take care of all of this neatly without burdening the poor, since those at or below the poverty level would pay no net taxes.
Of course, like any proposal that would drastically reduce the government's control over us, the Fair Tax Act gets demagogued left and right by two major groups of people: political forces that love the carrot-and-stick methods of behavior control that an income tax provides, and those who have never seriously researched it and have no knowledge of it beyond hearsay.
1) Start a database or "registry" so you know who has the guns and what kind of guns they have.
2) Claim that the registry is totally not for purposes of future confiscation
Just like the US federal income tax was a "temporary wartime measure" and the Social Security Number was never, ever to be used as a form of ID.
What racism? Do you mean the ban on minarets? That isn't racism.
Pretty soon the word "racism" will be devoid of all meaning, due to being constantly diluted and trivialized by constantly being used where it does not apply.
It's possible to have a democracy in which every decision is made by majority rule, but the majority is dissatisfied with the majority of the decisions. You just have to have a small percentage that wins all the time.
Also, what is crazy (not humorous, but properly nuts) to one person is not crazy to another. e.g. a petition to deport someone for their views on gun control. Crazy? Yes, I think so, but those putting it up didn't think so. Needs a response? Equally, yes.
I realize that crazy people subjectively believe themselves to be sane. That's why so few of them want to change. The sign of such people is that they get angry and insulting when asked to explain their views. But you would hardly rely on people like this to derive your standard of sanity, unless of course you found them useful for providing a contrast.
In a nation which has the First Amendment, punishing someone for expressing an opinion is objectively crazy. If these people would like to make an attempt to amend the Constitution and remove such First Amendment protections, there is a process for doing so. Until then, not only would deporting someone for a mere view be both crazy and illegal, it is also the classic sign of insecurity shown by small-minded people who feel threatened by opposing points of view. These are not individuals who can stand on the merits of their own reason. These are sheep who must be part of a like-minded flock, to give themselves the illusion of legitimacy by the numbers of other sheep, else they feel alone, isolated, and threatened by the prospect of thinking for themselves.
No one who has sensible views based on solid principles feels a need to persecute and materially harm the lives of others merely for disagreeing. Those who are secure in their well-founded beliefs never deal with dissent by lashing out in such an infantile manner.
Maybe the government is just compiling a list of people who's votes should be filtered out if they sign a petition that the government is not to keen on?
That is one reason, among several good reasons, why we have a secret ballot.
Be assured that anyone wishing to change that has malicious intentions, no matter what excuse they provide.
Y'know guys... if there's an overwhelming number of petitions to dramatically change things, maybe, just maybe, you should consider actually fixing shit that's constantly being petitioned about instead of saying "no, fuck you", and closing the petition.
Okay. How about if there's an overwhelming number of petitions for ridiculous garbage like building Death Stars or annexing Canada? What should they consider doing then?
I'm thinking they should raise the number of signatures that trigger a response, but that's just me.
They should ignore the petitions about "building Death Stars" and respond to the realistic ones, such as legalizing marijuana.
Thank you, as well. I don't write many multi-paragraph semi-rants like that anymore, but some things need to be said. I didn't exactly have to stand in line behind a bunch of others who were going to say it.
Relatively early in life one gets used to seldom (or never) feeling represented by the opinions of the majority. It's actually rather liberating, once you understand that (sadly) so few are choosing to think for themselves and look beyond the presented/suggested/marketed points of view.
Don't you understand? People who sign up for Facebook *WANT* these things - their pathetic lives would be even less without their "friends". Without Facebook, many people have NOTHING!
Your "Troll" mod was not because you said anything inaccurate. It is because we live in an increasingly emotionally immature society where the pleasantness of a thing is considered more important than the truth of a thing. It is the result of being governed by emotion and not reason. Whoever modded you "Troll" is like that. Sadly, many people are unable to calmly articulate their own opinion, so they need to "get back at you" in some way for offending them. After all, you didn't constantly say things like "well just my opinion" (something already understood) and "hope it doesn't offend anyone" (that is their choice) to kiss their asses and placate their desire to climb up on their high horse and cry about how terrible you are. Their self-importance and false sense of entitlement demand that you show such undue deference, you know.
Anyway, when you have real friends whom you love and respect like family members, and a satisfying social life, Facebook has no appeal. All Facebook offers that cannot easily be had elsewhere is the exchange of trivia with and casual attention from strangers or superficial acquaintences. The trade-off of losing so much irretrievable privacy in exchange for something so devoid of real value makes no sense. To those who are not starved for attention, it is all minuses and no plusses. The bandwagon it has become is also unappealing to those who are not herd animals, who don't find "everyone else is doing it" to be a valid reason to do anything.
I can certainly see how those who otherwise would have no satisfying social life might find it appealing. This merely constitues Facebook taking advantage of a weakness/shortcoming and exploiting it in order to make money. The disrespect they frequently show to their userbase and the obvious disregard of basic privacy concerns makes it inherently exploitative in nature. It's something that a healthy, happy person who is not needy would refuse to tolerate. Zuckerberg's contempt for his own users has been repeatedly established by his very own statements. This is someone people want to trust with so much personal data? It's absurd and indicates that many people have no idea whom they're dealing with, or simply no real discerning standards for themselves.
If someone has to data-mine and connect lots of different dots and perform all kinds of automated searches in order to find you, it is because you didn't want to be found. That's why such vast systems and huge databases were necessary to do something that is otherwise so simple. If you want someone to be involved in your life in some way, none of that would be needed.
I do agree with your premise that for people who have little else, this kind of attention may actually be welcome. Of course that is pathological, used as a terrible substitute for real fulfillment and real quality time with people who actually love and understand you. This should be obvious, but when lots of people want to legitimize something, the first thing they must do is create confusion and complicate otherwise simple things. When enough people do that, it can make the obvious seem controversial when really it is merely inconvenient (the gun control "debate" is that way - wow criminals don't obey weapons restrictions, who'da thunk it?).
Finally, I wonder: how many people would have had to face and overcome their personal social weaknesses if they hadn't had Facebook as a readily available crutch?
So this is an idea: When you set your phone to "stealth", it will start broadcasting, maybe once per minute, some kind of bluetooth or wifi message that urges neighboring phones to go into stealth mode automatically. If the other phones pick up enough of these requests and are so configured, they will comply. Phones going into stealth mode automatically don't retransmit the request.
It only works when you have a large number of phones in a small area, which also happens to be when it needs to work. Possibility of abuse, some.
Anything to avoid being responsible adults, considerate of those around you, right?
it is far more about lawsuit liability, which leads to less financial loss, which leads to having more to survive with.
You are confusing cause with effect (cf. my username). A lawsuit is the effect of the kind of non-freak-accident I was talking about.
By acknowledging the valid concern corporations have about lawsuit liability, you are also acknowledging that there are people who would not correctly handle a deadly poison with the respect it deserves. The point is not that it could result in a lawsuit, though that is true. The point is that it would not be a freak accident.
This is plainly wrong - Warning labels are part of the natural selection. We survive better as a species by limiting the risk of falling victim to freak accidents by warning each other.
This would be akin to claiming that birds warning each others against predators would mess up the natural selection process. They don't. They just introduce additional complexity.
I have a good example for you to consider: bug spray. You know, that stuff that's so toxic that you can spray it on a filthy cockroach and the roach will drop dead?
When you have to tell someone that bug spray is poisonous and that ingesting it will harm them, well, you are no longer talking about a freak accident.
Lol the law and judge opinions aren't written in LATIN.
While that was not the OP's point, it is ironic that you focused on it because it is demonstrably not true.
Modern legal code is littered with latin phrases.
The AC to whom you are responding demonstrates why it is difficult sometimes for adults to have meaningful conversation. There are always small-minded people like him who not only do not appreciate it (which is their loss), but actively resent it and seek to interfere with it. They choose to be on the noise side of the signal-to-noise ratio.
I suspect that deep down, they have never learned to deeply appreciate much of anything because doing so generally doesn't fit into their ten-second attention spans. Rather than being "just their way of doing things", this is an inferior choice. They themselves know it, if only instinctively, and it comes out in the envious manner in which they try to disrupt others from enjoying it.
There are some sad, sad people on this planet, trying so hard to be self-important. Since they aren't finding real worth within themselves, they have to grasp for it in the outside world of other people. The only method available to them is denigrating someone else. It is too bad that they'd rather continue to act out such impulses, since they lack the introspection and the emotional maturity to recognize them as the character flaws that they are.
I actually had a great, if somewhat unusual, method of backing up my photographs- I got a deer to memorise them. I know it sounds weird, but it turned out to be quite effective, at least with the males (does, on the other hand, were less reliable). I trained it to understand basic commands and in response, it scratched out a basic reproduction of the requested image, eventually improving to quite impressive quality after a period of time.
In this way, I came to realise that I was using their brain as a sort of basic computer memory. This worked very well until I realised that my contract with the owner of the deer meant he had the right to reuse anything they had memorised.
Of course, this was not acceptable, so I no longer store my photos in stag RAM.
Slashdot Mirror
The people who spend like you describe don't stay rich long. Most rich folks are only spending a small percentage of their annual income.
If by "rich" you mean slightly upper middle-class, sure. If by "rich" you mean the commonly-understood definition of multi-millionaires and above, no.
You have to report illegal income. To not report is how they get you. That is how they got Capone.
... who was already well-known to be a major criminal and was under a ton of scrutiny. Are you pretending that had nothing to do with it? That the government didn't try as hard as it could to nail him for anything they could prove and had to settle for tax evasion? That would be a denial of reality.
Even worse, this scheme encourages hoarding and discourages spending. Killing demand sure will be great for the economy.
Yes, just like state sales taxes have done. Oh, wait...
Why does everyone stop reading at the words "consumption tax" and ignore the actual facts related to the proposal?
Because the media is a very powerful force and that is what it has programmed them to do.
When you see these behaviors, you are not dealing with people who think for themselves, do their own research, and form their own conclusions. You are dealing with people who see that a bunch of vocal people dislike something and then assume it must be inherently bad. All while maintaining the illusion that they have made their own decision, which they proceed to defend passionately.
It's one of the very sickest tendencies human beings have. It is the root of many other forms of evil.
That your education was poor doesn't mean that all public educations are similarly poor.
I'll never comprehend this tendency to take a subject applicable to many millions of people, and make it personal. I'll never comprehend it because it makes no sense.
You see, my own education _was_ pretty good. I still didn't trust anything so important to random strangers like the school system, so I also made a serious effort to educate myself. It's what I did with time that others spent chasing after footballs and things like that which I found to be meaningless.
Precisely because I know that my personal experience is only anecdotal and not universal, I did not mention my own education in any way. Re-read my prior post and you will see that yourself.
Then take a hard look at the world around you, the kind of politicians who get elected and why, the kind of decisions that are made at the highest levels, the way most people are too busy conforming or running themselves ragged with their burn-out lifestyles to seriously question how things got to be this way, the way this nation is beginning to collapse not because of a foreign enemy, but because of simple mismanagement. You will then see that the general public does not understand the principles you were talking about. That is a problem that the public school system is nominally supposed to have prevented. That is what I was talking about.
The media is simply too powerful and benefits too much from the status quo for this to readily change. The average person is not going to review the methodology of a survey, or try to independently confirm what the talking heads tell them, or assume that advertisements are the most biased source of information imaginable, or assume that people with power are inherently untrustworthy. They'd rather believe that the guy they elect is their buddy who wants to make their life better. It's a sad state of affairs.
Poor people typically consume more of their money because their income and their "minimum spending necessary to survive" are closer together.
What is this modern obsession with how much of one's total income is spent? I certainly spend a higher percentage of my income to survive and make ends meet than anyone remotely "rich". And I don't care -- or rather, I feel no reason to charge them more in taxes as a response to it. That wouldn't put more money in my pocket because federal tax policy has had little to do with funding government for a very long time now.
What I want is to balance the federal budget, stop enforcing victimless-crime laws such as those concerning drug use, stop trying to be the world's police, stop enforcing at the federal level laws that did not involve crossing state boundaries and laws that otherwise local and state governments are able to handle, and to dissolve the Federal Reserve so we can issue interest-free currency. That would make everyone's burden easier, particularly in non-material terms of freedom.
And if, after all of that, a rich person gets to save more money than I do, good for them. I personally value time with loved ones more than 80-hour workweeks. I get what I want. If rich people value material possessions more than time with loved ones, well, to me they're getting the short end of the stick, but it's not my job to decide that for them. This idea that someone must be punished for being more fortunate (inheritance) or more successful (hard work) than I am is so fucking childish. Even if we somehow could make life perfectly fair for everyone, and we cannot, government is the very least trustworthy entity to bring this about.
This obsession with what somebody else makes and how much more than you they can save up tells me something. It tells me that you have more in common with rich people than you might care to admit. Both of you have an extremely materialistic point of view. You're like two denominations of the same basic faith.
It may be a mathematical solution, but it's antithetical to the American system.
Can you tell me how that would be worse than the current income tax system, with all the information the government must collect to implement it, and all the carrot-and-stick methods it enables? That's the part I am missing. "It's un-American" is rather nebulous.
If you think the federal government involved in commerce is bad, consider how much the IRS knows about your personal life. How much I spent making a transaction at a department store is small fry, especially when you consider that my name need not be recorded at all to implement a sales tax.
The bit you left out of your cherry-picked view is that the reason these programs are necessary is that the jobs that are available aren't able to support the people.
That's cute, I mentioned cherry-picking so you will show your superiority by using my term against me. With this you self-identify as one of the lemmings.
Now then, my comment was about how and why those programs are run and who benefits the most by keeping them the way they are. How you would construe that as an argument against the existence of such programs is mind-boggling, but I suppose you'd have less to rail against if you didn't.
But by gaming the system a person can do pretty well. A single mother with two kids making $29,000/year receives net income and benefits of over $57,000. Earning more income actually results in a net decrease in total income+benefits -- this is the "welfare cliff [aei-ideas.org]".
Make no mistake, this is by design. The politicians who designed it and refuse to change it benefit, because the recipients overwhelmingly tend to vote for those who promise more of the same (that's the carrot). When a family comes to depend on these benefits and wouldn't be able to make ends meet without them, they fear the possibility that they might be taken away (that's the stick).
With dependency comes power. You can be absolutely certain of one thing: politicians understand this. They have every incentive to keep people in the system.
I really wish the "mechanics" of power were universally taught in the public schools, along with propaganda techniques, particularly the myriad ways you can mislead someone by carefully crafting your message, all without ever making a single false statement. Framing, cherry-picking your facts, characterization, emotional appeals, bandwagon appeals, just to name a few, should be universally taught and understood. Of course, this is unrealistic. The government funds and operates those schools, and there is no way the government is going to sponsor that. It would be like asking Microsoft to recommend OSX.
Whether or not Oracle deserves a tax-deferred-savings account like mine, the fix of pushing the money back overseas, seems worse than the illness.
Yes but this calm, rational, mature, objective point of view doesn't provide the visceral "satisfaction" of punishing people who are easily demonized and easy (often with reason) to hate. So politically, it doesn't sell very well. It doesn't appeal at a base level to the masses who vote emotionally instead of taking the time to recognize certain cause-and-effect relationships.
Politics should be about how to best manage a nation, not what it's become now, which is how to ineffectively resolve one's discontentment with life by trusting liars who don't give a damn about you.
They are not a goal in itself. I repeat, a company is not a goal in itself.
How then do you explain someone like Bill Gates, who for some strange reason continued to work for a long time after having acquired enough wealth to secure the financial future of his great-great-great-great-etc grandchildren?
For some, it's a way of life. I think it's a shallow, hollow, materialistic, empty, and ultimately unsatisfying way of life that can appear glamorous for a while. But it is a way of life. Some people do live to work instead of working in order to live.
So then we should have no taxes at all?
If you want to benefit from our civilization you should expect to have to pay for it as well.
You avoid all these problems by taxing consumption instead of income. Not to mention, rich people consume quite a bit more than poor people so this nebulously-defined "fair share" would be achieved. The Fair Tax Act would take care of all of this neatly without burdening the poor, since those at or below the poverty level would pay no net taxes.
Of course, like any proposal that would drastically reduce the government's control over us, the Fair Tax Act gets demagogued left and right by two major groups of people: political forces that love the carrot-and-stick methods of behavior control that an income tax provides, and those who have never seriously researched it and have no knowledge of it beyond hearsay.
Just like Lenin tried to do. The failure was that Lenin didn't have the support of the people and couldn't install a communism with democratic means.
And, being a True Believer, he didn't let a little implementation detail like that stop him. No, sir!
That's the problem with True Believers. They tend to think that the ends justify the means.
1) take away their guns...
How to take away their guns?
1) Start a database or "registry" so you know who has the guns and what kind of guns they have.
2) Claim that the registry is totally not for purposes of future confiscation
Just like the US federal income tax was a "temporary wartime measure" and the Social Security Number was never, ever to be used as a form of ID.
What racism? Do you mean the ban on minarets? That isn't racism.
Pretty soon the word "racism" will be devoid of all meaning, due to being constantly diluted and trivialized by constantly being used where it does not apply.
It's possible to have a democracy in which every decision is made by majority rule, but the majority is dissatisfied with the majority of the decisions. You just have to have a small percentage that wins all the time.
Here in the USA, we call them "lobbyists".
We all know guys in power are a bunch of chuckle heads already. Not sense giving them projects with which to prove it.
I don't know, it may distract them from serious matters, thereby limiting the damage they can do.
Also, what is crazy (not humorous, but properly nuts) to one person is not crazy to another. e.g. a petition to deport someone for their views on gun control. Crazy? Yes, I think so, but those putting it up didn't think so. Needs a response? Equally, yes.
I realize that crazy people subjectively believe themselves to be sane. That's why so few of them want to change. The sign of such people is that they get angry and insulting when asked to explain their views. But you would hardly rely on people like this to derive your standard of sanity, unless of course you found them useful for providing a contrast.
In a nation which has the First Amendment, punishing someone for expressing an opinion is objectively crazy. If these people would like to make an attempt to amend the Constitution and remove such First Amendment protections, there is a process for doing so. Until then, not only would deporting someone for a mere view be both crazy and illegal, it is also the classic sign of insecurity shown by small-minded people who feel threatened by opposing points of view. These are not individuals who can stand on the merits of their own reason. These are sheep who must be part of a like-minded flock, to give themselves the illusion of legitimacy by the numbers of other sheep, else they feel alone, isolated, and threatened by the prospect of thinking for themselves.
No one who has sensible views based on solid principles feels a need to persecute and materially harm the lives of others merely for disagreeing. Those who are secure in their well-founded beliefs never deal with dissent by lashing out in such an infantile manner.
Maybe the government is just compiling a list of people who's votes should be filtered out if they sign a petition that the government is not to keen on?
That is one reason, among several good reasons, why we have a secret ballot.
Be assured that anyone wishing to change that has malicious intentions, no matter what excuse they provide.
Okay. How about if there's an overwhelming number of petitions for ridiculous garbage like building Death Stars or annexing Canada? What should they consider doing then?
I'm thinking they should raise the number of signatures that trigger a response, but that's just me.
They should ignore the petitions about "building Death Stars" and respond to the realistic ones, such as legalizing marijuana.
This is not difficult.
Very well articulated, better than myself.
Thank you...
- Frosty
Thank you, as well. I don't write many multi-paragraph semi-rants like that anymore, but some things need to be said. I didn't exactly have to stand in line behind a bunch of others who were going to say it.
Relatively early in life one gets used to seldom (or never) feeling represented by the opinions of the majority. It's actually rather liberating, once you understand that (sadly) so few are choosing to think for themselves and look beyond the presented/suggested/marketed points of view.
I think you would understand.
Additional levels of automated stalking!!!
Don't you understand? People who sign up for Facebook *WANT* these things - their pathetic lives would be even less without their "friends". Without Facebook, many people have NOTHING!
Your "Troll" mod was not because you said anything inaccurate. It is because we live in an increasingly emotionally immature society where the pleasantness of a thing is considered more important than the truth of a thing. It is the result of being governed by emotion and not reason. Whoever modded you "Troll" is like that. Sadly, many people are unable to calmly articulate their own opinion, so they need to "get back at you" in some way for offending them. After all, you didn't constantly say things like "well just my opinion" (something already understood) and "hope it doesn't offend anyone" (that is their choice) to kiss their asses and placate their desire to climb up on their high horse and cry about how terrible you are. Their self-importance and false sense of entitlement demand that you show such undue deference, you know.
Anyway, when you have real friends whom you love and respect like family members, and a satisfying social life, Facebook has no appeal. All Facebook offers that cannot easily be had elsewhere is the exchange of trivia with and casual attention from strangers or superficial acquaintences. The trade-off of losing so much irretrievable privacy in exchange for something so devoid of real value makes no sense. To those who are not starved for attention, it is all minuses and no plusses. The bandwagon it has become is also unappealing to those who are not herd animals, who don't find "everyone else is doing it" to be a valid reason to do anything.
I can certainly see how those who otherwise would have no satisfying social life might find it appealing. This merely constitues Facebook taking advantage of a weakness/shortcoming and exploiting it in order to make money. The disrespect they frequently show to their userbase and the obvious disregard of basic privacy concerns makes it inherently exploitative in nature. It's something that a healthy, happy person who is not needy would refuse to tolerate. Zuckerberg's contempt for his own users has been repeatedly established by his very own statements. This is someone people want to trust with so much personal data? It's absurd and indicates that many people have no idea whom they're dealing with, or simply no real discerning standards for themselves.
If someone has to data-mine and connect lots of different dots and perform all kinds of automated searches in order to find you, it is because you didn't want to be found. That's why such vast systems and huge databases were necessary to do something that is otherwise so simple. If you want someone to be involved in your life in some way, none of that would be needed.
I do agree with your premise that for people who have little else, this kind of attention may actually be welcome. Of course that is pathological, used as a terrible substitute for real fulfillment and real quality time with people who actually love and understand you. This should be obvious, but when lots of people want to legitimize something, the first thing they must do is create confusion and complicate otherwise simple things. When enough people do that, it can make the obvious seem controversial when really it is merely inconvenient (the gun control "debate" is that way - wow criminals don't obey weapons restrictions, who'da thunk it?).
Finally, I wonder: how many people would have had to face and overcome their personal social weaknesses if they hadn't had Facebook as a readily available crutch?
So this is an idea: When you set your phone to "stealth", it will start broadcasting, maybe once per minute, some kind of bluetooth or wifi message that urges neighboring phones to go into stealth mode automatically. If the other phones pick up enough of these requests and are so configured, they will comply. Phones going into stealth mode automatically don't retransmit the request. It only works when you have a large number of phones in a small area, which also happens to be when it needs to work. Possibility of abuse, some.
Anything to avoid being responsible adults, considerate of those around you, right?
it is far more about lawsuit liability, which leads to less financial loss, which leads to having more to survive with.
You are confusing cause with effect (cf. my username). A lawsuit is the effect of the kind of non-freak-accident I was talking about.
By acknowledging the valid concern corporations have about lawsuit liability, you are also acknowledging that there are people who would not correctly handle a deadly poison with the respect it deserves. The point is not that it could result in a lawsuit, though that is true. The point is that it would not be a freak accident.
This is plainly wrong - Warning labels are part of the natural selection. We survive better as a species by limiting the risk of falling victim to freak accidents by warning each other. This would be akin to claiming that birds warning each others against predators would mess up the natural selection process. They don't. They just introduce additional complexity.
I have a good example for you to consider: bug spray. You know, that stuff that's so toxic that you can spray it on a filthy cockroach and the roach will drop dead?
When you have to tell someone that bug spray is poisonous and that ingesting it will harm them, well, you are no longer talking about a freak accident.
Lol the law and judge opinions aren't written in LATIN.
While that was not the OP's point, it is ironic that you focused on it because it is demonstrably not true. Modern legal code is littered with latin phrases.
The AC to whom you are responding demonstrates why it is difficult sometimes for adults to have meaningful conversation. There are always small-minded people like him who not only do not appreciate it (which is their loss), but actively resent it and seek to interfere with it. They choose to be on the noise side of the signal-to-noise ratio.
I suspect that deep down, they have never learned to deeply appreciate much of anything because doing so generally doesn't fit into their ten-second attention spans. Rather than being "just their way of doing things", this is an inferior choice. They themselves know it, if only instinctively, and it comes out in the envious manner in which they try to disrupt others from enjoying it.
There are some sad, sad people on this planet, trying so hard to be self-important. Since they aren't finding real worth within themselves, they have to grasp for it in the outside world of other people. The only method available to them is denigrating someone else. It is too bad that they'd rather continue to act out such impulses, since they lack the introspection and the emotional maturity to recognize them as the character flaws that they are.
I actually had a great, if somewhat unusual, method of backing up my photographs- I got a deer to memorise them. I know it sounds weird, but it turned out to be quite effective, at least with the males (does, on the other hand, were less reliable). I trained it to understand basic commands and in response, it scratched out a basic reproduction of the requested image, eventually improving to quite impressive quality after a period of time. In this way, I came to realise that I was using their brain as a sort of basic computer memory. This worked very well until I realised that my contract with the owner of the deer meant he had the right to reuse anything they had memorised. Of course, this was not acceptable, so I no longer store my photos in stag RAM.
This is why drugs are not for everyone.