No it isn't. No more than any other law or agreement is enforced.
Do you honestly think that if you didn't honor your agreement to pay for the gasoline you pumped into your car, that there would not be a use of force to compel you to?
There's a key difference.
The gas station owner had to pay for the gasoline he owns before he could sell it to me. He did useful work to earn that property. When he bought that gasoline from a refinery, it was a mutual, voluntary transaction. Both the refinery wanted to sell the gasoline at that price and the gas station owner wanted to buy the gasoline at that price. No coercion. When I stop at the gas station and put 10 gallons into my car, I am voluntarily choosing to purchase that much at that price and the gas station owner is voluntarily choosing to put up for sale that gasoline at that price. No coercion. The money with which I purchase the gasoline was earned by another voluntary arrangement in which I performed useful work at a negotiated rate.
If I tried to take gasoline from the gas station owner without paying for it, that he did not tell me I may have for free, I am violating his wishes. I am unilaterally engaging in a transaction that does not have mutual consent. He did not consent for me to take it for free. By taking it anyway, I am effectively coercing him into an arrangement he does not want to be in. Thus, I am depriving him of his property rights.
Because in your hypothetical scenario I would be, without provocation, depriving the gas station owner of his property rights, it makes sense for the government to use force against me to stop this crime. That's one proper role of government, to prevent a person from using force or fraud to deprive another of natural rights.
With taxation, the difference is that the government is not trying to persuade me to give that money. Then it would be a mutually voluntary arrangement. Then it would not be theft. The government is taking it by threat of force, and the threat is very real. I would be a fool not to pay when they tell me to. If I have a problem with Big Macs I can choose not to purcahse McDonalds products. If I have a problem with fighting offensive overseas wars against countries that are no threat to us, because I believe them to be murder, I am not given a choice - I still have to financially support (effectively purchase a share in) those wars.
You have to get over this idea that there is something special about government, that its actions do not need to be justified morally/ethically the same way you would want an individual to be able to justify his or her actions. Government is just an abstraction of human beings and their actions. If it is theft for me to take someone's property against their will for what I believe is a really good reason, it is theft when government does the same. To say it is different in principle when government does it is the same thing as saying that "might makes right" since government has lots of armed men to carry out its wishes.
Government is special in one way: it is the only entity legally allowed to use force to achieve its goals. To any thinking man, that means it needs *more* justification for its actions compared to someone who does everything voluntarily, not less. To suggest otherwise is effectively a form of worship, a deification of government because you can imagine no force greater. When you call these things what they are, they become much more clear.
Randroids with mod points. As inevitable as death and taxes.
To answer the objection to that sig about taxes... taxation is done by force or threat of force. If you don't pay your taxes, armed men will come to take your assets eventually. If you resist these armed men, they will use force up to and including lethal force. We call them IRS agents or we call them police. In any other context this is known as robbery. The fact that the theft is legal and the proceeds taken by theft are often put to beneficial uses that serve a commn good does not change the fact that it is theft. You might steal your neighbor's TV, sell it, and donate 100% of the money to charity; you'd still be a thief. It's really that simple. We continue to use this model mostly because we have not yet implemented one that is more viable, not because it is inherently virtuous.
Ayn Rand's writings were the greatest gift ever... not to those whose political views tend towards the maximization of liberty and the minimization of coercion and hierarchy... but paradoxically she is most useful to those who want to dismiss such views. Think the burden of proof is on the person who recommends coercion by force or threat of force (otherwise known as police power)? Well you're just another Randbot, and we'll call you names like that to avoid explaining why we think our position is superior.
I hate to break it to you but what is now called (small-l) libertarian thought has been around for a long time. The Founding Fathers with their distrust of government, love of liberty, and general view of government as a necessary evil have this kind of philosophy. Also, Rand was a staunch materialist; there are lovers of freedom such as myself who reject a materialist view. I also have the non-Randian belief that logic is a tool, it's a stunningly versatile tool, yet like all tools there are situations where it does not apply. But no, we're all just mindless droids and labeling us as such lets you remain safely within the boundaries of your comfort zone where your own view never needs to be tested against other incompatible ideas.
After all, anyone who feels a need to name-call, pigeonhole, label, marginalize, and smugly dismiss other views is only demonstrating their personal security and the correctness of their own position. Right? People like me who cultivate an openness to new ideas and a willingness to entertain notions with which we disagree prior to dismissing them, well obviously we have no idea what we're doing. One day we'll learn. One day.
American culture is not Wall Street culture. There most definitely is a massive divide there
I'm afraid that's not really true, much as I'd like it to be. The proof is in the voting patterns: so many candidates get elected and reelected, even when they're known to be corrupt and worse, and even when they break all civilized boundaries in their campaigns. That tells me "Main Street culture" really doesn't much care about honesty, truth, justice or fair play. Sad, indeed.
If you are interested in truth and are willing to pursue it until you find it, no matter how harsh that truth is, no matter how unpopular it is, no matter how many names you get called for saying it... then at some point you are going to have to admit that no member of "main street culture" stands a chance of winning a major federal election and is unlikely to ever even get on the ballot. The last "main street culture" person who held high office was JFK. What was it he wanted to do? He wanted to get a lot of the secrecy out of government and he wanted to get a lot of the secret societies and sociopaths and cliques out of power. How'd that end for him again?
Bear in mind JFK was very much a fluke. He was educated. He was wealthy. He was connected. He was from one of the "right" families. The only reason he even made it to the ballot was that everyone with serious clout thought he was one of them. They thought he was a member of the aristocracy or the plutocracy or the corporatocracy or however you like to term it. Turns out he had a conscience and wasn't afraid to use it. He was a real American in every traditional sense of what that means. That could not be tolerated. All the rest since then have been bought, paid for, and know not to cross their purchasers having seen what happened to the last one who did.
This is one of the myseries of life: if you tell someone that a street criminal might shoot someone for the $20 in their pocket, you are readily believed. If you tell someone that powerful people who stand to lose billions if the status quo significantly or suddenly changed might kill (by proxy of course, they hate doing their own dirty work) to protect their economic empires, then you're a tin-foil hat wearing nut.
I use to think Alex Jones of infowars.com was a hoot to listen to. Now days, I find myself surprisingly shaking my head in agreement sometimes.
Most people who are ahead of their time and can see things coming from a long distance away are regarded with ridicule and contempt. Especially when they were right.
But don't worry. The fact that this has happened so many thousands of times never stops anyone from climbing up on their high horse and dismissing without examination anything and everything that doesn't fit their personal orthodoxy. The satisfaction of feeling for two whole seconds like they're better/wiser/smarter than someone else is much too precious to them.
Also they sure as hell won't question their personal orthodoxy or how it came to be. That's too painful for cowards who derive their security from conformity to a group. The really scary thing is what they might discover: that it's not really theirs at all. If you want a biological model, consider a virus that injects itself from without and takes over a cell from within.
Taking over a nation by force is the old, outdated, obsolete method and it's much too messy and risky for the modern tyrant. The sophisticated aristocracy of today simply brainwashes the masses by exploiting their ignorance and laziness and anti-intellectual culture. Then not only can you take control without firing a single shot, but they will actually elect you themselves. Eventually they'll have to because no one else will be on the ballot.
I've been called a tin-foil hatter etc. plenty of times. I am only too familiar with the shallow narrow-minded mentality that never has the guts to put forth its own viewpoint, or attempts to do so and can only come up with some regurgitated talking points that came from a sound bite. That mentality is the foremost reason why nearly every major Western nation is decaying from within.
The guy who got into Palin's Yahoo used a VPN server, and those guys were more than willing to burn him when the Feds came knocking.
I went to college with the guy who ran that VPN server.
The only reason he cooperated with the Feds so readily is because he didn't want them flagging him as a Person Of Interest.
Thanks for clearing that up. None of us could have imagined that our own federal government would find ways to make someone's life miserable when that person stands between them and someone they'd really love to apprehend. That's so unprecedented.
Sarcasm aside, I would never consider running a VPN sever or a proxy of any kind unless I had a log retention policy of 30 seconds, and/or all personally identifying information was scrubbed from all logfiles prior to their being written to disk.
Then proxy server providers get told to keep logs just like the ISPs to be perused at leisure by any LEO, who desires it. The guy who got into Palin's Yahoo used a VPN server, and those guys were more than willing to burn him when the Feds came knocking.
Staying under the radar hoping they won't target you next... that's not the same thing as fighting back.
The way to fix this is to make passing these kinds of laws even more detrimental to a career in politics, than, say, destroying Social Security.
Sometimes I think we should just hurry up and implement global fascism and get it over with. I'm tired of all the suspense. We can have neighbor snitching on neighbor for thoughtcrimes. We can have full-time martial law since that's cheaper than building enough prisons to house every man, woman, and child. Maybe we can make people fight their neighboring cities to save ourselves the transportation costs of fighting pointless wars overseas. That seems to be more like the society so many people really want to live in. That's why they keep swallowing the bullshit excuses for each baby-step towards its implementation.
Then when the whole thing collapses under its own weight we can all admit what we should have known from the very beginning: that the other way for politicians to feel secure is to be noble and to truly seve the people then they won't feel so threatened by unfettered exchange of information, that there was never a justification for fascism, for the nanny-state, or for ever telling consenting adults what they may do or how they may do it. Perhaps attempting to do so could be the only capital crime on the law books.
This does not mean that you are not spouting typical Libertarian talking points.
Relative self-sufficiency and a willingness to take responsibility for one's own choices was a high ideal long before the word "libertarian" existed.
And for most of history such an idea would get a person killed, usually by wild animals, long before he will have a chance to annoy his fellow humans with it.
By wild animals? If you are suggesting that the only way to be a responsible adult who can manage one's own affairs without undue interference is to become a hermit living in the wilderness, then you implicitly recognize the same problem I am talking about. Living totally apart from civilized society should not be a requirement for having personal liberty.
What really annoys fellow humans is when you try to tell consenting adults what they may do in their own homes, or with their own bodies, or what they may read, think, and believe. The ones who already agree would celebrate using state police power to force their ideals on others, of course.
There is no better example than the War on (some) Drugs. If someone is a responsible adult who holds down a job, does productive work, pays his bills on time, pays his taxes, never drives impaired, and otherwise harms no one at any point in time, why would you threaten them with punishment because they want to smoke a joint in their own home after a long day at work? What's it to you? If you think marijuana is some evil substance that brings out the worst in people, then don't smoke it. But if someone is using it responsibly, for what would you punish them? Offending you?
Now if someone is not responsible and is driving impaired, or is robbing someone else to get money for drugs, or can't hold down a job and needs public assistance for no reason other than drug abuse, by all means they should be dealt with. But it is not their drug use that is the problem. It is their inability to take responsibility for their own lives.
Relative self-sufficiency means that if I am able to take care of my own affairs and avoid becoming a burden to others, then I should do that. If circumstances do not allow me to do this, I should work to change them so that I am no longer a drain on others. This is not anarchy. It implies a government that can protect civil rights and prevent one person from using force or fraud against another person. The kind of society I want to live in doesn't just let its members starve either, but neither does it encourage dependency on hand-outs.
It has nothing to do with wild animals and whether they will become man-eaters. Maybe you're going to this extreme out of some kind of frustration. I suppose a lot of what I say has common ground with liberterians. I find a lot of kinship in (little-l) libertarian thought. They're about as tired as I am of the nanny-state and the downtrodden society of people who cannot think and act for themselves it produces. That does not mean I look to any group or organization to tell me what I should believe and why I should believe it, it means I learn what I can from whomever I can learn it. During this process I can't be concerned with whether you personally find them distasteful.
To deliberately identify me with a group just because I sound a bit like them is dismissive. It's a way to say that I'm not really an individual who can form his own opinions and positions on important topics. Did it ever occur to you that marching to the beat of this drummer or that drummer is exactly how we have inherited such a broken society? For the kind of stupidity and short-sightedness you see daily in the administration of the USA, that requires large masses of people who surrender their self-determination in exchange for group affiliation. This is often called groupthink. It comes from no appreciation of the monied interests and political gain driving most of modern party politics.
*sigh* There's a reason I went to the effort of using the word unlikely instead of the word impossible. The trolls are thick lately and I fear I just fed one.
With that you just dismissed a truly thoughtful and elegant post. It's too bad it was an AC. I would like to have at least known what the author calls themselves.
There's something in it I recognize. Whoever wrote that post respects the subject enough to have put a lot of thought into it. In all likelihood they have also invested time and energy into searching for real meaning and the view with which it could be interpreted and understood. You can also sense some hurt or some woundedness in it. Even exceptional trolls have difficulty faking that.
You didn't feed a troll. You inspired a thinking person. At first glance they can look similar.
You're right that the USA is not like Nazi Germany. We're making our own brand of tyranny. We're more like Germany during the 1920s, setting the stage for some real tyrants to move in.
Nazi Germany did things the old way. The old way means some government thug waves a gun in your face and demands that you shut up and obey. Most people can see what is wrong with being bullied and threatened and harassed and harmed bodily by thugs acting under color of law. Most people will look for ways to either resist it or to stay under the radar. That's why this is the more difficult way to enact tyranny.
We're pioneering the new way. The new way does not involve much physical force against people's bodies. It involves control of information, the ability to frame all debates concerning serious issues, and the ability to ridicule and marginalize alternative (unapproved) points of view. If what you want is compatible with Left-Right politics and mainstream thought, you stand a decent chance of being heard. If you realize that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans truly represent your interests or you want things that might mean a few monied interests make less profit (like copyright reform, legalization of marijuana, or no more pointless wars of aggression) then you're portrayed as a nutjob, a fringe lunatic, a conspiracy theorist, etc, and none of your views have any representation in major media.
From the perspective of a tyrant, the problem with the old way is that when you point a gun at someone and demand they comply, they know you are controlling them and they will hate you for it. But if you are a master of propaganda and can determine what does and does not become an "issue" in the media, those who support you are making the best choices they could make based on the (artificially limited) information available to them. They think their decisions and affiliations are really their own original ideas. The fact that there is so little diversity of thought and philosophy just makes them feel like their favorite ideas are the only correct ones. People who can't see past this will embrace their controllers.
If the US was a tyranny these guys would already be either in jail or dead.
If the US is a smart tyranny, these guys will be used as an excuse to pass more laws regulating the use of the Internet and giving government more surveillance powers over same.
Investigate what happens to people caught creating online vandalism or complaining about their government in countries like Iran, Syria, and N. Korea.
This requires very little investigation to understand. They create martyrs and eventually erode their own ability to control. Smart tyrants don't do that. Those are the actions of rank amateurs, small-time bullies who have control at this moment but not in any long-term sense.
The USA is not a military dictatorship. It is a corporatocracy or a plutocracy. As such, we have the very best, finest tyrants money can buy. Our tyranny is different. It is subtle. It is soft. When the average person doesn't know anything except what the TV tells them is important, and thinks that broadening their horizons and learning new things would be a terrible burden, well then the matter is sealed.
The reason you don't think the USA is headed towards tyranny is that the rulers (not the ones you see on C-SPAN but the ones behind the scenes, the real decision-makers who don't like the limelight, the old-money families who put Presidents into office, the ones who make and break legislators and judges) of the USA actually study history and they actually learn from it. They know that when a dictator rules by the sword, they eventually die of old age and the nation plunges into utter chaos or they get overthrown and are usually replaced by someone at least as bad (cf. Battista and Castro in Cuba). They know that openly ruling with an iron fist invites resistence. They have seen what happens
In that case of the young girl's suicide, it was a grown woman who was acting on the things she already knew the girl was struggling with. Her parents did what they could to try to keep her off the internet and away from it, but she got online anyway.
That's part of what I mean. If they are old enough to defeat your efforts to stop them, then a simple bureaucratic ban is not going to work. Instead, they should be granted the Internet access they desire and then given the proper supervision and guidance to ensure that they are mature enough to handle it. Don't just tell them "no internet for you" because that's a challenge. Instead, teach them that there are dangers, teach them what those dangers are, and teach them how to avoid them. The fact that anyone can lie and say they are anyone else to gain confidence is just one of them.
The woman posed for months as a young boy to spark a fake relationship and then used that to abuse an emotional young girl. Yes she did have an issue with depression to begin with, but it is entirely unfair to say her parents or the school system did not already know and attempt to help her. It was a vile, cruel and completely malicious woman who came up with her sick plot to lead that poor girl on for months, only to turn and tell her she didn't deserve to live. That poor girl thought she had a little boyfriend who cared about her and talked with her when she wanted company.
I think that kind of deception is an inherent weakness in the idea of forming serious, involved emotional relationships with people you will never see face-to-face. Even if the person is exactly who they claim to be, this is a mistake and it cannot end well. It's just the kind of thing that parents, schools, and other authorities and role models should be helping the kid to guard against. Again, this is one of the dangers she should have been taught about and equipped to handle, something no simple ban would ever accomplish.
If you actually quantified the effort involved in each, you would find that world-proofing the child is far easier than child-proofing the entire world and stopping every last person who might ever do anything malicious. Just like securing a system is much, much easier than catching every last black-hat who might break into an insecure system.
If she wants company and understanding so badly that she's trying to obtain it from random strangers, it's time to take a hard look at why those needs aren't being met by her friends and family. The failure to find it there is the only reason she was so vulnerable. It is better to address this root of the problem than to try and prevent every last unknown (until after it happens) person and event that could maliciously exploit it.
I don't believe you were completely informed on that particular situation. Mind, I'm not inherently at odds with your stance on the topic at hand, but in that situation it was simply not the same.
I am informed about it. What did you suppose reiterating it was going to do? Shock me with a terrible emotional weight that then causes me to abandon solid principle out of some misguided sense of guilt?
What you describe only reinforces the truth of what I am saying. The more horrible this particular event was, the more important it is to take solid, reasonable, well-founded steps to understand how it was possible and how to equip young people to deal with the world the way it truly is: full of petty, malicious, stupid people. Then perhaps we can get one baby step closer to changing that.
I suppose I could also be pedantic and remind you that I made no claims about having provided a comprehensive dissertation of the history of science in one paragraph and one sentence...
The point was, using Ptolomy's epicycles you could indeed predict things like where Mars would appear in the sky in 6 weeks. The mistake was to believe that this verified the truth of the theory on which it was based. It's the same deal with dark matter. They would seriously propose exotic new forms of matter never seen in a laboratory before admitting that maybe something other than gravity, something they were previously unwilling to seriously consider, could act on the ionized plasma that the majority of observable structures are made of.
Mark my words, cosmology is headed towards a serious crisis. Like almost every crises that ever happens anywhere, it will be because they failed to listen to the minority who saw it coming. It's the same basic arrogance you see within most organized, hierarchical social structures.
Relative self-sufficiency and a willingness to take responsibility for one's own choices was a high ideal long before the word "libertarian" existed.
Of course, if you don't like what I said but find it too difficult to refute with your own superior reasoning, namely because you have none, you can always try to lump me together with some group that you already have some talking points against. In your case that would be much easier than dealing with me as an individual because then you can pretend you already know what I believe without listening to a thing I say or evaluating the soundness of my reasoning. It's the nice easy way out of being an adult that you seem to be looking for.
The term for this weak technique is "pigeonholing" if you want to read about it for yourself.
He was lucky to have rich parents who floated him the capital he needed for his company, and connected parents who helped him get a contract with IBM.
As little children everywhere begin to discover, life is inherently unfair. I remember when I was a small child and started to notice this. I didn't like it much myself.
The question is whether they stay childish into their adult years or if they come to accept this and do the best they can with the hand they are dealt. That means trying to better your lot in life. That means being responsible for what you can control. Sometimes it means tightening your belt and saying "no" to some petty indulgence (or one not-so-petty for which you are not yet ready) so you can work towards a larger, more fulfilling goal -- what is called delayed gratification.
Maybe you wanted to have multiple children at the ripe old age of 19 instead of first getting an education and establishing a career and a stable two-parent household. Okay, you have that freedom. You can have what you want right now. But don't complain if you don't have the easy life you dreamed of. That's just one unusually common example of what is so often called "bad luck" and absolutely isn't. There's no way you didn't know what birth control was, be it rubbers or one of the dozen or so forms of non-surgical birth control methods available to women.
One sure sign of childishness is when you think it's the job of government or anyone else who can use force/coercion to try to force your particular brand of "fairness" on everyone else with no concern for whether they welcome it. No amount of hardship ever made me feel like I had the right to demand anything from anyone else. And naturally government's brand of "fairness" is to take someone else down a peg or two, it is seldom if ever about uplifting someone else so they can develop a marketable trade, business acumen, financial savvy, or other skills it takes to succeed on your own with no further help from anyone.
Government's brand of "fairness" is always about encouraging dependency and a deep sense of being cheated. It is a means to achieve political power by always being needed. The people who vote for this think they are being served. They think they are evening a score or spreading the wealth but this is false. They're being used like the useful iditos they are. Always the illusion is that you are being served or helped but the politicians are only helping themselves to you. We've been doing things this "progressive" way for a long time now and the wealth disparity between rich and poor has only become worse. Only an insane fool keeps trying the same thing over and over again despite all evidence that it isn't working, that it fails to achieve the desired result.
I'm not completely sure what any kind of "ultimate solution" would be, but I do know we will never even get a partially constructive solution if we are not willing to abandon failed ideas that have been given plenty of chances and have failed each time. Trying harder and harder to implement a failed idea just leads to more failure. I know why the politicians don't want to admit that. Until they finally do bankrupt the country, it works very much in their favor. What I don't understand is why so many ordinary citizens don't want to even consider the idea long enough to see if it might be valid.
This will be pushed and refuted for as long as [... ]
This is what bothers me. I consider it a serious flaw in all forms of government.
The advocates of this kind of fascism can just keep trying, again and again, defeat after defeat, to get this into law. They know that eventually they will find one set of legislators who will pass it. It's just a matter of persistence. Once it becomes law, it will never be repealed. No amount of protesting or lack of popularity will change that.
When our country is being compared to China in copyright issues that is just bad. Too many cheap people out their stealing.
You must be trolling, or you decided that complete ignorance about a subject shouldn't stop you from taking a position concerning it.
This bill is for law enforcement officers to obtain ISP information with less due process. Copyright infringement is generally not a crime. Therefore, it generally wouldn't involve police.
Instead, the vast majority of copyright infringement cases would involve discovery/subpoenas issued during a civil suit. That implies authorization by a court for such information to be obtained.
Even if you had a point, and you don't, I'd rather see every last copyright cartel go out of business and sell its assets at auction. In the scheme of things, that would be a far lesser loss compared to liberty and privacy.
You pulled a bill from a year ago, that has been effectively tabled by the fact that we just had an election? And where no current bill of the same authority is under consideration?
There is no bill, hence no discussion anymore, hence NO FUCKING STORY. Way to factcheck.
Yeah that is pretty lame.
Still, it is definitely a problem that anyone holding any public office would even think of doing this.
The legal definition of "treason" needs to be expanded to include "any elected official, appointed official, or employee or agent of either, who makes any effort to subvert, reduce, eliminate, or work around due process for any reason or no reason at all". For both the US and Canada. It's hard to think of more effective ways to permanently damage a nation.
They are victims if they no know better. Is it fair to steal candy from a baby? To rob the elderly because they are too weak to protect themselves?
There's lots of things I don't know how to do. I either learn how to do them (that's education) or I don't attempt them at all if learning how isn't worth the effort to me. Either way, I understand when I do and don't know what I am dealing with. This is the kind of common sense you can't really teach someone, except by example. It's not "education" in the standard sense, not at all. Lots of very educated people are still naive and gullible.
It would be wrong ("unfair" if you must view it that way) to steal candy from a baby. But then, I don't see babies soliciting investment opportunities in candy Ponzi schemes. I don't see them being actively involved in their own scamming. So you'd have to actually rob the baby, that is take something away by force. Like your example dealing with the elderly, robbery is considered a violent crime for a reason. It does not depend on anyone falling for anything. It is brute force or threat of same. It works on the wise and the stupid alike.
You can try to conflate falling for a scam with the violent crime of robbery if you think that's the only way you have an objection, but it's weak. It makes you look like you either don't really know what you're talking about or are very desperate and clutching at straws to make a point because you have a weak position. It's exactly like the copyright cartels when they try to pretend like infringing copyright is the same thing as theft when they know (or should know) damned well that it isn't. In their case, they're simply being dishonest. Are you?
Idiots, and guess what? The world is full of them.
Yes, it is. The funny thing about idiots is that they don't like learning even though they almost never have any sort of learning disability. They have libraries, books, people willing to teach them, schools, the Internet, and many other resources at their disposal which are either free or low-cost and accessible. They choose not to use them. They decide they have higher priorities. So be it. But that does not make them victims.
I know this, you know this, but everyday people like this take the money of people who don't. In the real world they often exploit the old and uneducated. We can either say it is ok for you to cheat your fellow man or we can say that it is not. I know where I stand.
Once again you're trying to twist what I said and once again I wonder if you are just emotionally reactive or if you are deliberately dishonest.
Not once did I say it's okay to scam and cheat others. I said it amounted to a stupidity tax. I said something that makes stupidity more difficult, more painful, and less sustainable amounts to a public service. I never once made a moral judgment on the matter. You can proudly proclaim your condemnation of the scammers and pretend like I celebrate what they do, if that makes you feel better and lets you dream of being superior to something. The tactics you are using in this discussion suggest a deep-seated need to do that. After all it's not good enough that you are right; someone else must also be wrong, right?
But now that you mention it, no I don't particularly like scammers. I just recognize widespread, rampant stupidity and an anti-intellectual culture of impulsiveness among adult people to be a far greater problem in the scheme of things. If you got rid of that, you'd also eliminate scammers simply because such scams would no longer be profitable. So, as I always advocate, I focus on the cause and not the myriad effects of that cause when I want to eliminate something. It has never mattered to me if every single other person insists on being distracted by the branches and twigs; I go for the root.
No, one of the worst things about a Ponzi scheme is being someone not screwed over by it, yet not knowing it's a scam.
A scam that stands up to even a small amount of serious scrutiny is an exceedingly rare entity. If you didn't know, you definitely could have obtained a good idea. While proving that something like this is a scam is usually difficult, knowing it is not. It's just a matter of basic due diligence.
But maybe you're the trusting sort who wants to believe that every random stranger who comes up to you with an offer that sounds great is an honest person who is looking out for your best interests. This is truly unwise, and enables the evil things people will do for money and other forms of selfish gain, but it happens. So in spite of the odds against you, you actually profited.
Why should I blame you for that? Why should anyone? This isn't a "why not" question, it's properly a "why" question. The burden of proof on the person who says you should be blamed.
Are you supposed to give the money back?
Since it is yours, you are "supposed" to do with it as you see fit. If you want to give it back, no one should stop you. If you don't want to give it back, no one should take it by force. No one should fashion weapons out of your heart-strings and guilt-trip you into giving it back either.
You could give it back for the wrong reason, not from your real desire but from some sense that you have to, usually with a reason that sounds noble on the surface. The problem is, that reason won't stand up to examination. I'll explain with the next paragraph.
What happens if someone finds out you didn't lose everything? They'll be very angry with you, because usually that first line of early-adopters are the people attacked, not the folks who started it.
The term for this is jealousy. If the jealousy of others is something you want to legitimize, something you want to feed so that it may grow and prosper, something you want to reward by giving it what it demands so that next time it will be even more insistent and self-assured, then give the money back because of someone who says you shouldn't have it because they didn't get it. I will say that if you actually give a damn about that person, you wouldn't feed their character weaknesses, not even if they hate you for refusing to do it.
If they make this a condition of talking with you, being civil to you, being your friend, etc, then they are not a friend because they are manipulating you. That's something no real friend would do. It then boils down to a matter of your own selfish impulses, like whether you need people around you to think you're a swell, likable guy no matter how phony it is, no matter how much you're actually enabling what's wrong with them. In that case you'll have to put on a show to stay in the business of winning their approval, which they will no doubt reward by telling you how good you are, that way your notion of your own goodness and self-worth becomes something they can give to you and withhold from you.
I hope that speaks to the deeper reason, the real reason why you're worried about this.
Because if you understood it fully then you are a scammer, not a victim. The only way to make money from a Ponzi scheme is to get in early, those who get in early are running the scam not victims.
Someone who invests in a thing without knowing all about it, without fully evaluating exactly what risk they are taking, is not a victim. They are consciously making a poor, risky decision. When they do this and lose their shirts you call them "victims". That's some kind of emotional sensation that sounds somewhat reasonable but does not stand up to examination.
From the scammers themselves, as quoted in TFA:
We set up our financial planning to be able to grow as fast as possible, but with increments that would enable us to efficiently reach our goals; not too fast, not too slow. Both going too slow or too fast would have stopped us too soon. We adapted our advertising to the financial planning. We only advertised in local chatboxes in solar systems. We had several reasons for this method. (One was to stay in control of the amount of attention our services received.
We slowly increased the amount of ads dropped per day. We intentionally didn't go big on the forums. The forums, market discussions specifically, have always been the place to "bash" any new services. A big drawback to forums is - information stays on forums forever. Every potential investor would read all the negativism. With ads in local, we got some negative responses too, but they disappeared after a very short while. That's how a chatbox works.
Generally, honest investment plans are done in the open. They do not fear a permanent record. They are prepared to answer any negative complaints and, if valid, they are also prepared to make it right. Honest investments also tend not to promise exceedingly large returns for little or no work. What kind of person really needs to have this explained to them as though it were new, mysterious information?
Whether it is virtual currency or real currency, scams like this are merely implementing a stupidity tax. As Thomas Tusser said, "a fool and his money are soon parted." As I believe the network effects of rampant stupidity are doing immeasurable damage to the economy and the general quality of life on this planet, I consider anything that makes (the strictly opt-in kind of) stupidity more painful to be a public service.
Whether it offends anyone or not, the truth is that there is a definite correlation between a) not investing in shady operations that shy away from openness and transparency and b) not getting screwed over. That's a bit like saying there's a definite correlation between not punching a brick wall and not having a painful hand, only the brick wall doesn't gain anything from that transaction so there's much less room for misplaced sympathy and all the confusion of simple facts it causes in that particular example.
It's not like the world has never seen a Ponzi scheme before, it's not like there are no definite signs when you are dealing with one, and it's not like you should invest funds you cannot afford to lose in shady operations. For those who refuse to see it that way, there is always what you call "victimhood".
2. It is a little weird that way, and as asdf7890 noted, they even do NXDOMAIN redirects. But I think their benefits (here) have to be weighed against that. Being up-front about their business model can't be ignored, either.
What's a little weird is that someone who wants parental controls and anti-phishing features really believes that DNS is the very best way to accomplish that. Those sound like features you'd roll out on your household/instutional LAN without breaking RFC on relatively basic protocols like DNS.
All I want DNS to do is return the IP address for a given hostname, or an NXDOMAIN if that hostname does not exist. You know, just those things it was designed and intended to do. Anything else is beyond the scope of DNS.
If you are worried about phishing, the solution is to stop giving your account information to every unverifiable random stranger who asks for it. Seriously if you can't understand why that's a bad idea, and really have no clue/savvy/street-wisdom about these matters, you have far bigger problems than a new DNS service is going to solve. If you are worried about parental controls, the solution is to be involved in your childrens' lives and teach them what is and is not acceptable, and perhaps if you think it is appropriate to install software designed for this purpose that manages to accomplish its tasks without usurping DNS (if they can defeat those, they can also change the default DNS server so no, OpenDNS is not a magic substitute for being a parent either).
I mean if you think OpenDNS is greater than sliced bread by all means use it. Your decision to use it meets the minimum standard for decency in that it does not affect my experience against my will. Nor am I trying to tell you that you shouldn't use OpenDNS. It's just that the whole "managed experience" deal never appealed to me, no matter what the subject is, no matter who does the managing. It most strongly appeals to those who want someone else to worry about what are really their own problems and are willing to cede to third parties the tremendous level of trust/influence this type of solution requires.
Cox has its own redirection.
Easily fixed by putting in 4.4.4.4 and 8.8.8.8 into your DNS servers.
However, this seems more invasive and abusive.
Running your own caching resolver is really not difficult. Personally I use Unbound but there is no shortage of choices.
I do need my ISP to provide me with a pipe and an IP address. That's inherent in the arrangement. But everywhere I have a choice in the matter, I see no good reason to depend on them to do the right thing. They obviously have multiple temptations to do otherwise.
You can detect dark matter. If it exists, we have already indirectly detected it. We have not yet directly detected it, but that is not because it not possible to do so, just that we have not succeeded yet. We are currently trying to do so.
Using similar methods, there was a time when you could "detect" epicycles, too. Like dark matter they were a theoretical fudge factor designed to prevent a cherished theory from falling apart due to its lack of successful predictions and explanatory power. In the case of epicycles, the cherished theory was geocentrism. You would have been ridiculed extensively (and quite possibly be in danger of the Inquisition) for questioning it, not because your own theory wasn't viable or couldn't also explain the observed results but because "everybody knew" how "well-established it is" that the earth is the center of the solar system...
If they teach scientists about the history of these things as part of their normal training, they don't do a very good job. At all.
I seem to recall there was some woman in the news recently who badgered some teenage girl with false messages purporting to be from schoolmates, eventually driving the the poor kid to suicide. Everyone knew the woman had done it, but there was no crime with which to charge her. I suppose in the UK that wouldn't have been a problem.
The fact is, if anything anyone can say online can cause someone to kill themselves, that person had serious problems to begin with.
I blame the parents and the school system for not noticing that this girl had serious emotional and psychological problems much more than I blame a random Internet asshat for being true to her nature. How many young people kill themselves without such an easily-demonized antagonist to blame? Aren't their deaths just as tragic and senseless?
I keep saying it in so many different ways... we as a society really, truly have a passionate, burning hatred for getting at the root causes of things. We'd rather preoccupy ourselves with effects. So we mourn that an asshat's cruel words precipitated a suicide rather than lamenting a society that so thoroughly fails to equip our young people to deal with the fact that the world is filled with asshats.
Slashdot Mirror
taxation is done by force or threat of force.
No it isn't. No more than any other law or agreement is enforced.
Do you honestly think that if you didn't honor your agreement to pay for the gasoline you pumped into your car, that there would not be a use of force to compel you to?
There's a key difference.
The gas station owner had to pay for the gasoline he owns before he could sell it to me. He did useful work to earn that property. When he bought that gasoline from a refinery, it was a mutual, voluntary transaction. Both the refinery wanted to sell the gasoline at that price and the gas station owner wanted to buy the gasoline at that price. No coercion. When I stop at the gas station and put 10 gallons into my car, I am voluntarily choosing to purchase that much at that price and the gas station owner is voluntarily choosing to put up for sale that gasoline at that price. No coercion. The money with which I purchase the gasoline was earned by another voluntary arrangement in which I performed useful work at a negotiated rate.
If I tried to take gasoline from the gas station owner without paying for it, that he did not tell me I may have for free, I am violating his wishes. I am unilaterally engaging in a transaction that does not have mutual consent. He did not consent for me to take it for free. By taking it anyway, I am effectively coercing him into an arrangement he does not want to be in. Thus, I am depriving him of his property rights.
Because in your hypothetical scenario I would be, without provocation, depriving the gas station owner of his property rights, it makes sense for the government to use force against me to stop this crime. That's one proper role of government, to prevent a person from using force or fraud to deprive another of natural rights.
With taxation, the difference is that the government is not trying to persuade me to give that money. Then it would be a mutually voluntary arrangement. Then it would not be theft. The government is taking it by threat of force, and the threat is very real. I would be a fool not to pay when they tell me to. If I have a problem with Big Macs I can choose not to purcahse McDonalds products. If I have a problem with fighting offensive overseas wars against countries that are no threat to us, because I believe them to be murder, I am not given a choice - I still have to financially support (effectively purchase a share in) those wars.
You have to get over this idea that there is something special about government, that its actions do not need to be justified morally/ethically the same way you would want an individual to be able to justify his or her actions. Government is just an abstraction of human beings and their actions. If it is theft for me to take someone's property against their will for what I believe is a really good reason, it is theft when government does the same. To say it is different in principle when government does it is the same thing as saying that "might makes right" since government has lots of armed men to carry out its wishes.
Government is special in one way: it is the only entity legally allowed to use force to achieve its goals. To any thinking man, that means it needs *more* justification for its actions compared to someone who does everything voluntarily, not less. To suggest otherwise is effectively a form of worship, a deification of government because you can imagine no force greater. When you call these things what they are, they become much more clear.
It was a lame joke based on my username, not a serious attempt at disputation.
Yeah, I considered that bit too. But I still say it's a decent start at trying to sort out causality.
Says you.
Randroids with mod points. As inevitable as death and taxes.
To answer the objection to that sig about taxes... taxation is done by force or threat of force. If you don't pay your taxes, armed men will come to take your assets eventually. If you resist these armed men, they will use force up to and including lethal force. We call them IRS agents or we call them police. In any other context this is known as robbery. The fact that the theft is legal and the proceeds taken by theft are often put to beneficial uses that serve a commn good does not change the fact that it is theft. You might steal your neighbor's TV, sell it, and donate 100% of the money to charity; you'd still be a thief. It's really that simple. We continue to use this model mostly because we have not yet implemented one that is more viable, not because it is inherently virtuous.
... not to those whose political views tend towards the maximization of liberty and the minimization of coercion and hierarchy ... but paradoxically she is most useful to those who want to dismiss such views. Think the burden of proof is on the person who recommends coercion by force or threat of force (otherwise known as police power)? Well you're just another Randbot, and we'll call you names like that to avoid explaining why we think our position is superior.
Ayn Rand's writings were the greatest gift ever
I hate to break it to you but what is now called (small-l) libertarian thought has been around for a long time. The Founding Fathers with their distrust of government, love of liberty, and general view of government as a necessary evil have this kind of philosophy. Also, Rand was a staunch materialist; there are lovers of freedom such as myself who reject a materialist view. I also have the non-Randian belief that logic is a tool, it's a stunningly versatile tool, yet like all tools there are situations where it does not apply. But no, we're all just mindless droids and labeling us as such lets you remain safely within the boundaries of your comfort zone where your own view never needs to be tested against other incompatible ideas.
After all, anyone who feels a need to name-call, pigeonhole, label, marginalize, and smugly dismiss other views is only demonstrating their personal security and the correctness of their own position. Right? People like me who cultivate an openness to new ideas and a willingness to entertain notions with which we disagree prior to dismissing them, well obviously we have no idea what we're doing. One day we'll learn. One day.
American culture is not Wall Street culture. There most definitely is a massive divide there
I'm afraid that's not really true, much as I'd like it to be. The proof is in the voting patterns: so many candidates get elected and reelected, even when they're known to be corrupt and worse, and even when they break all civilized boundaries in their campaigns. That tells me "Main Street culture" really doesn't much care about honesty, truth, justice or fair play. Sad, indeed.
If you are interested in truth and are willing to pursue it until you find it, no matter how harsh that truth is, no matter how unpopular it is, no matter how many names you get called for saying it ... then at some point you are going to have to admit that no member of "main street culture" stands a chance of winning a major federal election and is unlikely to ever even get on the ballot. The last "main street culture" person who held high office was JFK. What was it he wanted to do? He wanted to get a lot of the secrecy out of government and he wanted to get a lot of the secret societies and sociopaths and cliques out of power. How'd that end for him again?
Bear in mind JFK was very much a fluke. He was educated. He was wealthy. He was connected. He was from one of the "right" families. The only reason he even made it to the ballot was that everyone with serious clout thought he was one of them. They thought he was a member of the aristocracy or the plutocracy or the corporatocracy or however you like to term it. Turns out he had a conscience and wasn't afraid to use it. He was a real American in every traditional sense of what that means. That could not be tolerated. All the rest since then have been bought, paid for, and know not to cross their purchasers having seen what happened to the last one who did.
This is one of the myseries of life: if you tell someone that a street criminal might shoot someone for the $20 in their pocket, you are readily believed. If you tell someone that powerful people who stand to lose billions if the status quo significantly or suddenly changed might kill (by proxy of course, they hate doing their own dirty work) to protect their economic empires, then you're a tin-foil hat wearing nut.
I use to think Alex Jones of infowars.com was a hoot to listen to. Now days, I find myself surprisingly shaking my head in agreement sometimes.
Most people who are ahead of their time and can see things coming from a long distance away are regarded with ridicule and contempt. Especially when they were right.
But don't worry. The fact that this has happened so many thousands of times never stops anyone from climbing up on their high horse and dismissing without examination anything and everything that doesn't fit their personal orthodoxy. The satisfaction of feeling for two whole seconds like they're better/wiser/smarter than someone else is much too precious to them.
Also they sure as hell won't question their personal orthodoxy or how it came to be. That's too painful for cowards who derive their security from conformity to a group. The really scary thing is what they might discover: that it's not really theirs at all. If you want a biological model, consider a virus that injects itself from without and takes over a cell from within.
Taking over a nation by force is the old, outdated, obsolete method and it's much too messy and risky for the modern tyrant. The sophisticated aristocracy of today simply brainwashes the masses by exploiting their ignorance and laziness and anti-intellectual culture. Then not only can you take control without firing a single shot, but they will actually elect you themselves. Eventually they'll have to because no one else will be on the ballot.
I've been called a tin-foil hatter etc. plenty of times. I am only too familiar with the shallow narrow-minded mentality that never has the guts to put forth its own viewpoint, or attempts to do so and can only come up with some regurgitated talking points that came from a sound bite. That mentality is the foremost reason why nearly every major Western nation is decaying from within.
The guy who got into Palin's Yahoo used a VPN server, and those guys were more than willing to burn him when the Feds came knocking.
I went to college with the guy who ran that VPN server.
The only reason he cooperated with the Feds so readily is because he didn't want them flagging him as a Person Of Interest.
Thanks for clearing that up. None of us could have imagined that our own federal government would find ways to make someone's life miserable when that person stands between them and someone they'd really love to apprehend. That's so unprecedented.
Sarcasm aside, I would never consider running a VPN sever or a proxy of any kind unless I had a log retention policy of 30 seconds, and/or all personally identifying information was scrubbed from all logfiles prior to their being written to disk.
Then proxy server providers get told to keep logs just like the ISPs to be perused at leisure by any LEO, who desires it. The guy who got into Palin's Yahoo used a VPN server, and those guys were more than willing to burn him when the Feds came knocking.
Staying under the radar hoping they won't target you next ... that's not the same thing as fighting back.
The way to fix this is to make passing these kinds of laws even more detrimental to a career in politics, than, say, destroying Social Security.
Sometimes I think we should just hurry up and implement global fascism and get it over with. I'm tired of all the suspense. We can have neighbor snitching on neighbor for thoughtcrimes. We can have full-time martial law since that's cheaper than building enough prisons to house every man, woman, and child. Maybe we can make people fight their neighboring cities to save ourselves the transportation costs of fighting pointless wars overseas. That seems to be more like the society so many people really want to live in. That's why they keep swallowing the bullshit excuses for each baby-step towards its implementation.
Then when the whole thing collapses under its own weight we can all admit what we should have known from the very beginning: that the other way for politicians to feel secure is to be noble and to truly seve the people then they won't feel so threatened by unfettered exchange of information, that there was never a justification for fascism, for the nanny-state, or for ever telling consenting adults what they may do or how they may do it. Perhaps attempting to do so could be the only capital crime on the law books.
This does not mean that you are not spouting typical Libertarian talking points.
Relative self-sufficiency and a willingness to take responsibility for one's own choices was a high ideal long before the word "libertarian" existed.
And for most of history such an idea would get a person killed, usually by wild animals, long before he will have a chance to annoy his fellow humans with it.
By wild animals? If you are suggesting that the only way to be a responsible adult who can manage one's own affairs without undue interference is to become a hermit living in the wilderness, then you implicitly recognize the same problem I am talking about. Living totally apart from civilized society should not be a requirement for having personal liberty.
What really annoys fellow humans is when you try to tell consenting adults what they may do in their own homes, or with their own bodies, or what they may read, think, and believe. The ones who already agree would celebrate using state police power to force their ideals on others, of course.
There is no better example than the War on (some) Drugs. If someone is a responsible adult who holds down a job, does productive work, pays his bills on time, pays his taxes, never drives impaired, and otherwise harms no one at any point in time, why would you threaten them with punishment because they want to smoke a joint in their own home after a long day at work? What's it to you? If you think marijuana is some evil substance that brings out the worst in people, then don't smoke it. But if someone is using it responsibly, for what would you punish them? Offending you?
Now if someone is not responsible and is driving impaired, or is robbing someone else to get money for drugs, or can't hold down a job and needs public assistance for no reason other than drug abuse, by all means they should be dealt with. But it is not their drug use that is the problem. It is their inability to take responsibility for their own lives.
Relative self-sufficiency means that if I am able to take care of my own affairs and avoid becoming a burden to others, then I should do that. If circumstances do not allow me to do this, I should work to change them so that I am no longer a drain on others. This is not anarchy. It implies a government that can protect civil rights and prevent one person from using force or fraud against another person. The kind of society I want to live in doesn't just let its members starve either, but neither does it encourage dependency on hand-outs.
It has nothing to do with wild animals and whether they will become man-eaters. Maybe you're going to this extreme out of some kind of frustration. I suppose a lot of what I say has common ground with liberterians. I find a lot of kinship in (little-l) libertarian thought. They're about as tired as I am of the nanny-state and the downtrodden society of people who cannot think and act for themselves it produces. That does not mean I look to any group or organization to tell me what I should believe and why I should believe it, it means I learn what I can from whomever I can learn it. During this process I can't be concerned with whether you personally find them distasteful.
To deliberately identify me with a group just because I sound a bit like them is dismissive. It's a way to say that I'm not really an individual who can form his own opinions and positions on important topics. Did it ever occur to you that marching to the beat of this drummer or that drummer is exactly how we have inherited such a broken society? For the kind of stupidity and short-sightedness you see daily in the administration of the USA, that requires large masses of people who surrender their self-determination in exchange for group affiliation. This is often called groupthink. It comes from no appreciation of the monied interests and political gain driving most of modern party politics.
*sigh* There's a reason I went to the effort of using the word unlikely instead of the word impossible. The trolls are thick lately and I fear I just fed one.
With that you just dismissed a truly thoughtful and elegant post. It's too bad it was an AC. I would like to have at least known what the author calls themselves.
There's something in it I recognize. Whoever wrote that post respects the subject enough to have put a lot of thought into it. In all likelihood they have also invested time and energy into searching for real meaning and the view with which it could be interpreted and understood. You can also sense some hurt or some woundedness in it. Even exceptional trolls have difficulty faking that.
You didn't feed a troll. You inspired a thinking person. At first glance they can look similar.
Nazi Germany did things the old way. The old way means some government thug waves a gun in your face and demands that you shut up and obey. Most people can see what is wrong with being bullied and threatened and harassed and harmed bodily by thugs acting under color of law. Most people will look for ways to either resist it or to stay under the radar. That's why this is the more difficult way to enact tyranny.
We're pioneering the new way. The new way does not involve much physical force against people's bodies. It involves control of information, the ability to frame all debates concerning serious issues, and the ability to ridicule and marginalize alternative (unapproved) points of view. If what you want is compatible with Left-Right politics and mainstream thought, you stand a decent chance of being heard. If you realize that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans truly represent your interests or you want things that might mean a few monied interests make less profit (like copyright reform, legalization of marijuana, or no more pointless wars of aggression) then you're portrayed as a nutjob, a fringe lunatic, a conspiracy theorist, etc, and none of your views have any representation in major media.
From the perspective of a tyrant, the problem with the old way is that when you point a gun at someone and demand they comply, they know you are controlling them and they will hate you for it. But if you are a master of propaganda and can determine what does and does not become an "issue" in the media, those who support you are making the best choices they could make based on the (artificially limited) information available to them. They think their decisions and affiliations are really their own original ideas. The fact that there is so little diversity of thought and philosophy just makes them feel like their favorite ideas are the only correct ones. People who can't see past this will embrace their controllers.
If the US is a smart tyranny, these guys will be used as an excuse to pass more laws regulating the use of the Internet and giving government more surveillance powers over same.
This requires very little investigation to understand. They create martyrs and eventually erode their own ability to control. Smart tyrants don't do that. Those are the actions of rank amateurs, small-time bullies who have control at this moment but not in any long-term sense.
The USA is not a military dictatorship. It is a corporatocracy or a plutocracy. As such, we have the very best, finest tyrants money can buy. Our tyranny is different. It is subtle. It is soft. When the average person doesn't know anything except what the TV tells them is important, and thinks that broadening their horizons and learning new things would be a terrible burden, well then the matter is sealed.
The reason you don't think the USA is headed towards tyranny is that the rulers (not the ones you see on C-SPAN but the ones behind the scenes, the real decision-makers who don't like the limelight, the old-money families who put Presidents into office, the ones who make and break legislators and judges) of the USA actually study history and they actually learn from it. They know that when a dictator rules by the sword, they eventually die of old age and the nation plunges into utter chaos or they get overthrown and are usually replaced by someone at least as bad (cf. Battista and Castro in Cuba). They know that openly ruling with an iron fist invites resistence. They have seen what happens
That's part of what I mean. If they are old enough to defeat your efforts to stop them, then a simple bureaucratic ban is not going to work. Instead, they should be granted the Internet access they desire and then given the proper supervision and guidance to ensure that they are mature enough to handle it. Don't just tell them "no internet for you" because that's a challenge. Instead, teach them that there are dangers, teach them what those dangers are, and teach them how to avoid them. The fact that anyone can lie and say they are anyone else to gain confidence is just one of them.
I think that kind of deception is an inherent weakness in the idea of forming serious, involved emotional relationships with people you will never see face-to-face. Even if the person is exactly who they claim to be, this is a mistake and it cannot end well. It's just the kind of thing that parents, schools, and other authorities and role models should be helping the kid to guard against. Again, this is one of the dangers she should have been taught about and equipped to handle, something no simple ban would ever accomplish.
If you actually quantified the effort involved in each, you would find that world-proofing the child is far easier than child-proofing the entire world and stopping every last person who might ever do anything malicious. Just like securing a system is much, much easier than catching every last black-hat who might break into an insecure system.
If she wants company and understanding so badly that she's trying to obtain it from random strangers, it's time to take a hard look at why those needs aren't being met by her friends and family. The failure to find it there is the only reason she was so vulnerable. It is better to address this root of the problem than to try and prevent every last unknown (until after it happens) person and event that could maliciously exploit it.
I am informed about it. What did you suppose reiterating it was going to do? Shock me with a terrible emotional weight that then causes me to abandon solid principle out of some misguided sense of guilt?
What you describe only reinforces the truth of what I am saying. The more horrible this particular event was, the more important it is to take solid, reasonable, well-founded steps to understand how it was possible and how to equip young people to deal with the world the way it truly is: full of petty, malicious, stupid people. Then perhaps we can get one baby step closer to changing that.
I suppose I could also be pedantic and remind you that I made no claims about having provided a comprehensive dissertation of the history of science in one paragraph and one sentence...
The point was, using Ptolomy's epicycles you could indeed predict things like where Mars would appear in the sky in 6 weeks. The mistake was to believe that this verified the truth of the theory on which it was based. It's the same deal with dark matter. They would seriously propose exotic new forms of matter never seen in a laboratory before admitting that maybe something other than gravity, something they were previously unwilling to seriously consider, could act on the ionized plasma that the majority of observable structures are made of.
Mark my words, cosmology is headed towards a serious crisis. Like almost every crises that ever happens anywhere, it will be because they failed to listen to the minority who saw it coming. It's the same basic arrogance you see within most organized, hierarchical social structures.
lol Libertarians.
Relative self-sufficiency and a willingness to take responsibility for one's own choices was a high ideal long before the word "libertarian" existed.
Of course, if you don't like what I said but find it too difficult to refute with your own superior reasoning, namely because you have none, you can always try to lump me together with some group that you already have some talking points against. In your case that would be much easier than dealing with me as an individual because then you can pretend you already know what I believe without listening to a thing I say or evaluating the soundness of my reasoning. It's the nice easy way out of being an adult that you seem to be looking for.
The term for this weak technique is "pigeonholing" if you want to read about it for yourself.
He was lucky to have rich parents who floated him the capital he needed for his company, and connected parents who helped him get a contract with IBM.
As little children everywhere begin to discover, life is inherently unfair. I remember when I was a small child and started to notice this. I didn't like it much myself.
The question is whether they stay childish into their adult years or if they come to accept this and do the best they can with the hand they are dealt. That means trying to better your lot in life. That means being responsible for what you can control. Sometimes it means tightening your belt and saying "no" to some petty indulgence (or one not-so-petty for which you are not yet ready) so you can work towards a larger, more fulfilling goal -- what is called delayed gratification.
Maybe you wanted to have multiple children at the ripe old age of 19 instead of first getting an education and establishing a career and a stable two-parent household. Okay, you have that freedom. You can have what you want right now. But don't complain if you don't have the easy life you dreamed of. That's just one unusually common example of what is so often called "bad luck" and absolutely isn't. There's no way you didn't know what birth control was, be it rubbers or one of the dozen or so forms of non-surgical birth control methods available to women.
One sure sign of childishness is when you think it's the job of government or anyone else who can use force/coercion to try to force your particular brand of "fairness" on everyone else with no concern for whether they welcome it. No amount of hardship ever made me feel like I had the right to demand anything from anyone else. And naturally government's brand of "fairness" is to take someone else down a peg or two, it is seldom if ever about uplifting someone else so they can develop a marketable trade, business acumen, financial savvy, or other skills it takes to succeed on your own with no further help from anyone.
Government's brand of "fairness" is always about encouraging dependency and a deep sense of being cheated. It is a means to achieve political power by always being needed. The people who vote for this think they are being served. They think they are evening a score or spreading the wealth but this is false. They're being used like the useful iditos they are. Always the illusion is that you are being served or helped but the politicians are only helping themselves to you. We've been doing things this "progressive" way for a long time now and the wealth disparity between rich and poor has only become worse. Only an insane fool keeps trying the same thing over and over again despite all evidence that it isn't working, that it fails to achieve the desired result.
I'm not completely sure what any kind of "ultimate solution" would be, but I do know we will never even get a partially constructive solution if we are not willing to abandon failed ideas that have been given plenty of chances and have failed each time. Trying harder and harder to implement a failed idea just leads to more failure. I know why the politicians don't want to admit that. Until they finally do bankrupt the country, it works very much in their favor. What I don't understand is why so many ordinary citizens don't want to even consider the idea long enough to see if it might be valid.
This is what bothers me. I consider it a serious flaw in all forms of government.
The advocates of this kind of fascism can just keep trying, again and again, defeat after defeat, to get this into law. They know that eventually they will find one set of legislators who will pass it. It's just a matter of persistence. Once it becomes law, it will never be repealed. No amount of protesting or lack of popularity will change that.
When our country is being compared to China in copyright issues that is just bad. Too many cheap people out their stealing.
You must be trolling, or you decided that complete ignorance about a subject shouldn't stop you from taking a position concerning it.
This bill is for law enforcement officers to obtain ISP information with less due process. Copyright infringement is generally not a crime. Therefore, it generally wouldn't involve police.
Instead, the vast majority of copyright infringement cases would involve discovery/subpoenas issued during a civil suit. That implies authorization by a court for such information to be obtained.
Even if you had a point, and you don't, I'd rather see every last copyright cartel go out of business and sell its assets at auction. In the scheme of things, that would be a far lesser loss compared to liberty and privacy.
You pulled a bill from a year ago, that has been effectively tabled by the fact that we just had an election? And where no current bill of the same authority is under consideration?
There is no bill, hence no discussion anymore, hence NO FUCKING STORY. Way to factcheck.
Yeah that is pretty lame.
Still, it is definitely a problem that anyone holding any public office would even think of doing this.
The legal definition of "treason" needs to be expanded to include "any elected official, appointed official, or employee or agent of either, who makes any effort to subvert, reduce, eliminate, or work around due process for any reason or no reason at all". For both the US and Canada. It's hard to think of more effective ways to permanently damage a nation.
There's lots of things I don't know how to do. I either learn how to do them (that's education) or I don't attempt them at all if learning how isn't worth the effort to me. Either way, I understand when I do and don't know what I am dealing with. This is the kind of common sense you can't really teach someone, except by example. It's not "education" in the standard sense, not at all. Lots of very educated people are still naive and gullible.
It would be wrong ("unfair" if you must view it that way) to steal candy from a baby. But then, I don't see babies soliciting investment opportunities in candy Ponzi schemes. I don't see them being actively involved in their own scamming. So you'd have to actually rob the baby, that is take something away by force. Like your example dealing with the elderly, robbery is considered a violent crime for a reason. It does not depend on anyone falling for anything. It is brute force or threat of same. It works on the wise and the stupid alike.
You can try to conflate falling for a scam with the violent crime of robbery if you think that's the only way you have an objection, but it's weak. It makes you look like you either don't really know what you're talking about or are very desperate and clutching at straws to make a point because you have a weak position. It's exactly like the copyright cartels when they try to pretend like infringing copyright is the same thing as theft when they know (or should know) damned well that it isn't. In their case, they're simply being dishonest. Are you?
Yes, it is. The funny thing about idiots is that they don't like learning even though they almost never have any sort of learning disability. They have libraries, books, people willing to teach them, schools, the Internet, and many other resources at their disposal which are either free or low-cost and accessible. They choose not to use them. They decide they have higher priorities. So be it. But that does not make them victims.
Once again you're trying to twist what I said and once again I wonder if you are just emotionally reactive or if you are deliberately dishonest.
Not once did I say it's okay to scam and cheat others. I said it amounted to a stupidity tax. I said something that makes stupidity more difficult, more painful, and less sustainable amounts to a public service. I never once made a moral judgment on the matter. You can proudly proclaim your condemnation of the scammers and pretend like I celebrate what they do, if that makes you feel better and lets you dream of being superior to something. The tactics you are using in this discussion suggest a deep-seated need to do that. After all it's not good enough that you are right; someone else must also be wrong, right?
But now that you mention it, no I don't particularly like scammers. I just recognize widespread, rampant stupidity and an anti-intellectual culture of impulsiveness among adult people to be a far greater problem in the scheme of things. If you got rid of that, you'd also eliminate scammers simply because such scams would no longer be profitable. So, as I always advocate, I focus on the cause and not the myriad effects of that cause when I want to eliminate something. It has never mattered to me if every single other person insists on being distracted by the branches and twigs; I go for the root.
I would much rather people get a clue and st
A scam that stands up to even a small amount of serious scrutiny is an exceedingly rare entity. If you didn't know, you definitely could have obtained a good idea. While proving that something like this is a scam is usually difficult, knowing it is not. It's just a matter of basic due diligence.
But maybe you're the trusting sort who wants to believe that every random stranger who comes up to you with an offer that sounds great is an honest person who is looking out for your best interests. This is truly unwise, and enables the evil things people will do for money and other forms of selfish gain, but it happens. So in spite of the odds against you, you actually profited.
Why should I blame you for that? Why should anyone? This isn't a "why not" question, it's properly a "why" question. The burden of proof on the person who says you should be blamed.
Since it is yours, you are "supposed" to do with it as you see fit. If you want to give it back, no one should stop you. If you don't want to give it back, no one should take it by force. No one should fashion weapons out of your heart-strings and guilt-trip you into giving it back either.
You could give it back for the wrong reason, not from your real desire but from some sense that you have to, usually with a reason that sounds noble on the surface. The problem is, that reason won't stand up to examination. I'll explain with the next paragraph.
The term for this is jealousy. If the jealousy of others is something you want to legitimize, something you want to feed so that it may grow and prosper, something you want to reward by giving it what it demands so that next time it will be even more insistent and self-assured, then give the money back because of someone who says you shouldn't have it because they didn't get it. I will say that if you actually give a damn about that person, you wouldn't feed their character weaknesses, not even if they hate you for refusing to do it.
If they make this a condition of talking with you, being civil to you, being your friend, etc, then they are not a friend because they are manipulating you. That's something no real friend would do. It then boils down to a matter of your own selfish impulses, like whether you need people around you to think you're a swell, likable guy no matter how phony it is, no matter how much you're actually enabling what's wrong with them. In that case you'll have to put on a show to stay in the business of winning their approval, which they will no doubt reward by telling you how good you are, that way your notion of your own goodness and self-worth becomes something they can give to you and withhold from you.
I hope that speaks to the deeper reason, the real reason why you're worried about this.
Because if you understood it fully then you are a scammer, not a victim. The only way to make money from a Ponzi scheme is to get in early, those who get in early are running the scam not victims.
Someone who invests in a thing without knowing all about it, without fully evaluating exactly what risk they are taking, is not a victim. They are consciously making a poor, risky decision. When they do this and lose their shirts you call them "victims". That's some kind of emotional sensation that sounds somewhat reasonable but does not stand up to examination.
From the scammers themselves, as quoted in TFA:
We set up our financial planning to be able to grow as fast as possible, but with increments that would enable us to efficiently reach our goals; not too fast, not too slow. Both going too slow or too fast would have stopped us too soon. We adapted our advertising to the financial planning. We only advertised in local chatboxes in solar systems. We had several reasons for this method. (One was to stay in control of the amount of attention our services received.
We slowly increased the amount of ads dropped per day. We intentionally didn't go big on the forums. The forums, market discussions specifically, have always been the place to "bash" any new services. A big drawback to forums is - information stays on forums forever. Every potential investor would read all the negativism. With ads in local, we got some negative responses too, but they disappeared after a very short while. That's how a chatbox works.
Generally, honest investment plans are done in the open. They do not fear a permanent record. They are prepared to answer any negative complaints and, if valid, they are also prepared to make it right. Honest investments also tend not to promise exceedingly large returns for little or no work. What kind of person really needs to have this explained to them as though it were new, mysterious information?
Whether it is virtual currency or real currency, scams like this are merely implementing a stupidity tax. As Thomas Tusser said, "a fool and his money are soon parted." As I believe the network effects of rampant stupidity are doing immeasurable damage to the economy and the general quality of life on this planet, I consider anything that makes (the strictly opt-in kind of) stupidity more painful to be a public service.
Whether it offends anyone or not, the truth is that there is a definite correlation between a) not investing in shady operations that shy away from openness and transparency and b) not getting screwed over. That's a bit like saying there's a definite correlation between not punching a brick wall and not having a painful hand, only the brick wall doesn't gain anything from that transaction so there's much less room for misplaced sympathy and all the confusion of simple facts it causes in that particular example.
It's not like the world has never seen a Ponzi scheme before, it's not like there are no definite signs when you are dealing with one, and it's not like you should invest funds you cannot afford to lose in shady operations. For those who refuse to see it that way, there is always what you call "victimhood".
2. It is a little weird that way, and as asdf7890 noted, they even do NXDOMAIN redirects. But I think their benefits (here) have to be weighed against that. Being up-front about their business model can't be ignored, either.
What's a little weird is that someone who wants parental controls and anti-phishing features really believes that DNS is the very best way to accomplish that. Those sound like features you'd roll out on your household/instutional LAN without breaking RFC on relatively basic protocols like DNS.
All I want DNS to do is return the IP address for a given hostname, or an NXDOMAIN if that hostname does not exist. You know, just those things it was designed and intended to do. Anything else is beyond the scope of DNS.
If you are worried about phishing, the solution is to stop giving your account information to every unverifiable random stranger who asks for it. Seriously if you can't understand why that's a bad idea, and really have no clue/savvy/street-wisdom about these matters, you have far bigger problems than a new DNS service is going to solve. If you are worried about parental controls, the solution is to be involved in your childrens' lives and teach them what is and is not acceptable, and perhaps if you think it is appropriate to install software designed for this purpose that manages to accomplish its tasks without usurping DNS (if they can defeat those, they can also change the default DNS server so no, OpenDNS is not a magic substitute for being a parent either).
I mean if you think OpenDNS is greater than sliced bread by all means use it. Your decision to use it meets the minimum standard for decency in that it does not affect my experience against my will. Nor am I trying to tell you that you shouldn't use OpenDNS. It's just that the whole "managed experience" deal never appealed to me, no matter what the subject is, no matter who does the managing. It most strongly appeals to those who want someone else to worry about what are really their own problems and are willing to cede to third parties the tremendous level of trust/influence this type of solution requires.
Cox has its own redirection. Easily fixed by putting in 4.4.4.4 and 8.8.8.8 into your DNS servers. However, this seems more invasive and abusive.
Running your own caching resolver is really not difficult. Personally I use Unbound but there is no shortage of choices.
I do need my ISP to provide me with a pipe and an IP address. That's inherent in the arrangement. But everywhere I have a choice in the matter, I see no good reason to depend on them to do the right thing. They obviously have multiple temptations to do otherwise.
You can detect dark matter. If it exists, we have already indirectly detected it. We have not yet directly detected it, but that is not because it not possible to do so, just that we have not succeeded yet. We are currently trying to do so.
Using similar methods, there was a time when you could "detect" epicycles, too. Like dark matter they were a theoretical fudge factor designed to prevent a cherished theory from falling apart due to its lack of successful predictions and explanatory power. In the case of epicycles, the cherished theory was geocentrism. You would have been ridiculed extensively (and quite possibly be in danger of the Inquisition) for questioning it, not because your own theory wasn't viable or couldn't also explain the observed results but because "everybody knew" how "well-established it is" that the earth is the center of the solar system...
If they teach scientists about the history of these things as part of their normal training, they don't do a very good job. At all.
The fact is, if anything anyone can say online can cause someone to kill themselves, that person had serious problems to begin with.
I blame the parents and the school system for not noticing that this girl had serious emotional and psychological problems much more than I blame a random Internet asshat for being true to her nature. How many young people kill themselves without such an easily-demonized antagonist to blame? Aren't their deaths just as tragic and senseless?
I keep saying it in so many different ways... we as a society really, truly have a passionate, burning hatred for getting at the root causes of things. We'd rather preoccupy ourselves with effects. So we mourn that an asshat's cruel words precipitated a suicide rather than lamenting a society that so thoroughly fails to equip our young people to deal with the fact that the world is filled with asshats.