The capital gains tax is not a negligible transaction cost. Suppose today I buy a gold coin for $100. Suppose, because of monetary inflation, the value of this coin increases to $200 in seven years. I cannot exchange my money for $200 worth of anything (even dollars), for I'd have a $100 realized capital gain that is taxable. What competing currencies does is to remove this tax.
From Wikipedia:
Monetary inflation is the term used by economists of the monetarist, neoclassical or Austrian school of economics to differentiate the primary or direct inflation in the money supply from price inflation which they view as a result or symptom of the former. Originally "inflation" was used to refer to monetary inflation, whereas in present usage it commonly refers to price inflation. By the way, I agree that a paper standard run by angels would be superior to a gold standard.
(The gold standard, by the way, completely fails to maintain a constant value due to deflation.)
On the gold standard, there is no such thing as monetary deflation. What, do you evaporate gold?
Fiat currencies throughout the world have, for the most part, been managed well enough to function better as currency than gold would. Most exceptions have had everything to do with blatant corruption and not fiat currency in and of itself.
So, fiat money works better than gold, except for when it doesn't. I agree. It's the exceptions that make gold invaluable.
For example, how exactly is he going to move a $7 trillion economy back to the gold standard when there's less than $3 trillion in gold on the planet?
It is a baseless assumption that the value of all outstanding units of currency must equal the size of the economy. It is actually demonstrably false. Imagine an economy with just two people, you and your neighbor. Together you decide it would be best for you to mow his lawn on Tuesday and for him to mow yours on Friday. For a currency you write an IOU on a piece of paper equal to "One lawn mowing." Over the course of a year there will have been some 100 lawn mowings. Yet the value of all outstanding units of currency is merely 1.
Also, where do you get your figures from? According to the CIA World Factbook, the US's GDP = $13t.
Maybe Ron Paul appears the loon only to illogical nonfactcheckers.
You think the commuted punishment is fair. In what way? According to your own personal sense of crime and punishment, or according to the punishment a normal person would have gotten for the crimes? Only you can be the judge in the former sense. But it is undeniable that preferential treatment under the law because of who you know violates the moral principle of equality and makes a mockery of the law, which by definition is supposed to treat people equally. (Law, in the scientific sense, connotes a uniformity of its application to things some certain of whose characteristics are the same. I submit that any valid conception of law, in the legal sense, must inherit this connotation.)
I can't imagine an experiment which would test the shape of the universe. I can't even comprehend the notion of a universe's shape.
Maybe the rest of the posters are privy to "God"'s brain.
Have children no stake in the blessings of liberty? If Gonzales really wants to protect the children, perhaps he should weigh their interest in living in a society free from invasive government.
I was using doublespeak. Obviously there is nothing very patriotic about the thievery of property and liberty that is our government's modus operandi. My use of "modern-day patriot" refers to what our society thinks is a patriot, not what actually is a patriot. In my opinion a modern-day patriot (in my sense) is not only not a patriot (in your sense), he is its antithesis--someone striving to destroy the notions of property and liberty that the true patriot fights to preserve.
Were I a modern-day patriot, I would be notifying the IRS of your mis-interpretation of the Income Tax statutes. Barter transactions are taxable. But I rather admire your skirting of the system.
Still, maybe you have fun living in a fucked-up system, since it allows you to be a nominal rebel by doing what is on a moral basis, most likely, right. I am not so masochistic. I would have more fun changing the system so that I could do what is right without becoming a criminal.
I take your point to be that I am represented, so all this taxation is legitimate. I have two objections.
(No representation ==> No taxation) does not imply (Representation ==> Any taxation). In other words, some taxes are inherently unjust, in that they forcefully transfer property from the deserving (the earners) to the nondeserving (the non-earners). And what if I disagree with how my money is being spent, on bombs and death (or as some say, securing the homeland)? My only recourse is to become unproductive. I can sit on my ass all day and collect money, or work my ass off and be forced to decide between my liberty (being free from prison) and my morality (not killing or stealing from innocent people across the globe). A fucked-up society has our gross taxation made.
Also, I don't really feel represented in Congress. I disagree with my house representative and two senators about fundamental things, like the Constitution. All of them voted recently for the proposed Amendment to the Constitution that would have banned "flag desecration". Such an amendment, striving to save a symbol, is anathema to the spirit of the Constitution, and desecrates something much more than a symbol, the actual fundamental basis for our nation.
But technically you are right in that I am represented, for I am only a small part of my neighborhood, and my neighbors chose collectively these Constitutional ignoramuses to represent our neighborhood, hence me. My problem is that these representatives, along with most others around the nation, exceed their power, while my Constitutional protections are no longer protecting me. Hell, the Constitution is having a hard enough time protecting itself.
This is not the failure of Freedom, nor the failure of the Free Market. For we live not Free in action or in market. This is the failure of Keynesian economics, socialist intervention, &c, posing as free enterpriese. Watch, when the U.S. collapses we will blame free markets for the fall, when the culprit is socialism. We will increase socialism & turn America into a shit hole. Freedom follows intelligence.
The dollar may be falling, but the good ole penny is soaring! One pre-1981 penny (that is, a copper penny) is now worth 2 cents, approximately, by mass. Newer pennies (zinc ones) are now worth 0.8 cents, by mass.
This discrepancy provides a risk-free arbitrage oppurtunity:
Invest, as a fixed cost, in a smith's education and tools.
Exchange, at a bank, a large sum, N, of dollars for 100 times that number of pennies.
(Take these pennies, with your tools, out of the country, perhaps to Mexico or Canada.)
Melt these pennies into ingots of copper (and zinc, in the future).
Sell, on the metal market, this metal for approximately $2N.
Go to Step 2, replacing N with 2N, until you are satisfactorily rich.
This is a risk-free opportunity because, should the copper price collapse, to, say, 1/10th its current value, you would still be holding $N. In other words, the fiat of the money is your floor.
(It is left as an exercise for the reader to consider the `frictional' costs (e.g. shipping, electric) relevant to the above `algorithm for richness,' one of but many such algorithms provided to you courtesy of an idiotic Fed & an equally aloof citizenry.)
We know that sometimes, you don't want a particular chat, or chats with a specific person, to be saved. Most existing IM services give no indication of whether the person you're chatting with is saving your conversation. But when chatting in Gmail or Google Talk, you can go "off the record," so that nothing typed from that point forward gets saved in anyone's Gmail account.
Unless I am missing something, this is a perfect example of the ambiguity of their Terms of Service/Privacy Policy. The user may wrongfully infer from the user interface that "off the record" means "no one, whether a user or Google, can save this chat." Yet nowhere have I seen any promise that Google will not save the content of your chat, whether any option is selected or not.
I own this classic, and seminal, guide and happened to notice that you only gave the concise form of the `genius plan' (as the author frequently calls it). The plan branches into two detailed versions based on frequency of occurence. I figured the Slashdot crowd (of all crowds) could benefit from the detail.
The uncommon form, but `the one most guys, idiots, anticipate' (69) is:
Sue Google.
Win
Profit!
Get laid!
This is the uncommon form because rarely do you ever win the lawsuit. If you should happen to win, however, we can explicitly extract `Profit!' from `???' in the concise form to get the uncommon form just above. In this case 4) is a corollary to 3); everyone knows that `when you've got the riches you can lay the bitches' (138). But we really do not expect to win the lawsuit, so the above information is included mainly for completeness.
The common form, the `one you paid $43.95 to see' (inside flap), is:
Sue Google.
Lose.
Get Laid!
The main gem of this classic work is the knowledge that `hotties love losers' (207).
So, to sum up, hotties love money and hotties love losers. By suing Google you are destined to either lose or get rich. In either case, you will get laid!
You agree that Google may access or disclose your personal information, including the content of your communications, if Google is required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order). [Emphasis added]
When you use Google Talk, we may record information about your usage, such as when you use Google Talk, the size of your contact list and the contacts you communicate with, and the frequency and size of data transfers.
But regarding to the content of your chats, their Privacy Policy only says:
You may choose to store the contents of text chats as Gmail messages in your Gmail account.
Note that it does not say whether Google saves or does not save the content of your chats elsewhere on their computers (i.e. not as Gmail messages). I suppose their right to access the content grants them the right to save it, although it is a bit odd that they don't flat-out state this (or deny it) on their Privacy Policy.
Damn. I guess you weren't fucking kidding. Please excuse my ignorance.
Perhaps I can make up for my error by adding something not flat-out wrong to the discussion. There are three conditions that need to be met for a Bush's use of this power to be constitutional today. Whether we are indeed being invaded is a condition already being discussed. Whether the public Safety requires it certainly depends on whom you ask, but is probably the least attackable condition. The last condition is a subtle one: that habeas corpus can be only suspended. If the "War on Terror" does classify as an invasion, one which will likely last for hundreds, or thousands, of years (how do we eradicate evil?), how do we differentiate between constitutional suspensions of habeas corpus, which must be temporary, and unconstitutonal permanent debarments?
I think you have over-complicated things. The original maxim still applies. What you want is its contrapositive: That which can't be attributed to stupidity may perhaps be attributed to malice.
You mention "the President's ennumerated authority under the constution to suspend the Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus." Are you fucking kidding? So all the fuss about Lincoln violating the Constitution for suspending that said right (or as you errroneously call it, privilege) is for nought, and the same with FDR and his mistreatment of Japanese Americans in WWII. Please tell me where in the Constitution is this enumeration, so I can correct my doubts of the constitutionality of George Bush's actions.
That's funny. I believe that most of those buildings were designed to withstand such impacts and heat and not fall, inwards or at all, should something like that occur.
Memo to demolition companies: Due to technologies designed no later than 1973 your work will only be needed for pre-1973 buildings. We can cleanly demolish modern buildings with jet fuel and a match.
The government sure does love these quasi wars. The idea of a war on drugs or a war on terrorism is nonsensical. One of the defining characteristics of war is that it is not peace. It follows that war must be realistically endable, or else we have resigned ourselves to a life of perpetual war. The war on terrorism is not endable, as it would necessitate the end of all evil (even that evil which is really noble but just in opposition to our true evil [i.e. the enemy of me is bad]). And regarding the war on drugs, are drugs (marijuana, for instance) even something worth fighting against?
By convincing the public that we are engaged in this oxymoronic forever-war, the government is positioning itself to usurp more of those liberties of ours which we take, by some crappy reasoning, to be less applicable in wartime. Judging by the American people's actions, I think the answer to your question is, on the whole, "Yes, we hate freedom."
The purpose of the plan is not to catch drug dealers. That's goverment doublespeak. In reality, the reason we call drug dealing a federal crime is so we can `rationalize' such liberty-encroaching plans.
If I were that doctor, I'd have to make an assessment of the various options. Are those pager-answering blokes reliable, from past experience, enough so to justify the risk me missing a page? If not, and I really wanted to see the movie, I might hire my own reliable pager-answering bloke. And if I couldn't bring myself to pay for a personal pager-answerer, I might just be forced to take that tragic option of not seeing the movie.
As long as people have the option not to see the movie, I see no `crime' on the part of any theater which wanted to institute a no-pager/cell-phone policy, as long as that policy is not implicitly denied, lest doctors and others wrongly rely on that implicit assumption to severe consequences.
Yours is an important point. Also relevant is the fact that the original images are being publicly displayed, while the orignal songs are not. To make the analogy correct regarding my point, we would need to imagine either Google scanning in images only available in a magazine or a book or the music distributors posting full WAV files for free on their websites.
Slashdot Mirror
The capital gains tax is not a negligible transaction cost. Suppose today I buy a gold coin for $100. Suppose, because of monetary inflation, the value of this coin increases to $200 in seven years. I cannot exchange my money for $200 worth of anything (even dollars), for I'd have a $100 realized capital gain that is taxable. What competing currencies does is to remove this tax.
On the gold standard, there is no such thing as monetary deflation. What, do you evaporate gold?
Fiat currencies throughout the world have, for the most part, been managed well enough to function better as currency than gold would. Most exceptions have had everything to do with blatant corruption and not fiat currency in and of itself.
So, fiat money works better than gold, except for when it doesn't. I agree. It's the exceptions that make gold invaluable.
It is a baseless assumption that the value of all outstanding units of currency must equal the size of the economy. It is actually demonstrably false. Imagine an economy with just two people, you and your neighbor. Together you decide it would be best for you to mow his lawn on Tuesday and for him to mow yours on Friday. For a currency you write an IOU on a piece of paper equal to "One lawn mowing." Over the course of a year there will have been some 100 lawn mowings. Yet the value of all outstanding units of currency is merely 1.
Also, where do you get your figures from? According to the CIA World Factbook, the US's GDP = $13t. Maybe Ron Paul appears the loon only to illogical nonfactcheckers.
You think the commuted punishment is fair. In what way? According to your own personal sense of crime and punishment, or according to the punishment a normal person would have gotten for the crimes? Only you can be the judge in the former sense. But it is undeniable that preferential treatment under the law because of who you know violates the moral principle of equality and makes a mockery of the law, which by definition is supposed to treat people equally. (Law, in the scientific sense, connotes a uniformity of its application to things some certain of whose characteristics are the same. I submit that any valid conception of law, in the legal sense, must inherit this connotation.)
I can't imagine an experiment which would test the shape of the universe. I can't even comprehend the notion of a universe's shape. Maybe the rest of the posters are privy to "God"'s brain.
Have children no stake in the blessings of liberty? If Gonzales really wants to protect the children, perhaps he should weigh their interest in living in a society free from invasive government.
I was using doublespeak. Obviously there is nothing very patriotic about the thievery of property and liberty that is our government's modus operandi. My use of "modern-day patriot" refers to what our society thinks is a patriot, not what actually is a patriot. In my opinion a modern-day patriot (in my sense) is not only not a patriot (in your sense), he is its antithesis--someone striving to destroy the notions of property and liberty that the true patriot fights to preserve.
Still, maybe you have fun living in a fucked-up system, since it allows you to be a nominal rebel by doing what is on a moral basis, most likely, right. I am not so masochistic. I would have more fun changing the system so that I could do what is right without becoming a criminal.
- (No representation ==> No taxation) does not imply (Representation ==> Any taxation). In other words, some taxes are inherently unjust, in that they forcefully transfer property from the deserving (the earners) to the nondeserving (the non-earners). And what if I disagree with how my money is being spent, on bombs and death (or as some say, securing the homeland)? My only recourse is to become unproductive. I can sit on my ass all day and collect money, or work my ass off and be forced to decide between my liberty (being free from prison) and my morality (not killing or stealing from innocent people across the globe). A fucked-up society has our gross taxation made.
- Also, I don't really feel represented in Congress. I disagree with my house representative and two senators about fundamental things, like the Constitution. All of them voted recently for the proposed Amendment to the Constitution that would have banned "flag desecration". Such an amendment, striving to save a symbol, is anathema to the spirit of the Constitution, and desecrates something much more than a symbol, the actual fundamental basis for our nation.
But technically you are right in that I am represented, for I am only a small part of my neighborhood, and my neighbors chose collectively these Constitutional ignoramuses to represent our neighborhood, hence me. My problem is that these representatives, along with most others around the nation, exceed their power, while my Constitutional protections are no longer protecting me. Hell, the Constitution is having a hard enough time protecting itself.This is not the failure of Freedom, nor the failure of the Free Market. For we live not Free in action or in market. This is the failure of Keynesian economics, socialist intervention, &c, posing as free enterpriese. Watch, when the U.S. collapses we will blame free markets for the fall, when the culprit is socialism. We will increase socialism & turn America into a shit hole. Freedom follows intelligence.
This discrepancy provides a risk-free arbitrage oppurtunity:
This is a risk-free opportunity because, should the copper price collapse, to, say, 1/10th its current value, you would still be holding $N. In other words, the fiat of the money is your floor.
(It is left as an exercise for the reader to consider the `frictional' costs (e.g. shipping, electric) relevant to the above `algorithm for richness,' one of but many such algorithms provided to you courtesy of an idiotic Fed & an equally aloof citizenry.)
The uncommon form, but `the one most guys, idiots, anticipate' (69) is:
This is the uncommon form because rarely do you ever win the lawsuit. If you should happen to win, however, we can explicitly extract `Profit!' from `???' in the concise form to get the uncommon form just above. In this case 4) is a corollary to 3); everyone knows that `when you've got the riches you can lay the bitches' (138). But we really do not expect to win the lawsuit, so the above information is included mainly for completeness.The common form, the `one you paid $43.95 to see' (inside flap), is:
The main gem of this classic work is the knowledge that `hotties love losers' (207).So, to sum up, hotties love money and hotties love losers. By suing Google you are destined to either lose or get rich. In either case, you will get laid!
Perhaps I can make up for my error by adding something not flat-out wrong to the discussion. There are three conditions that need to be met for a Bush's use of this power to be constitutional today. Whether we are indeed being invaded is a condition already being discussed. Whether the public Safety requires it certainly depends on whom you ask, but is probably the least attackable condition. The last condition is a subtle one: that habeas corpus can be only suspended. If the "War on Terror" does classify as an invasion, one which will likely last for hundreds, or thousands, of years (how do we eradicate evil?), how do we differentiate between constitutional suspensions of habeas corpus, which must be temporary, and unconstitutonal permanent debarments?
I think you have over-complicated things. The original maxim still applies. What you want is its contrapositive: That which can't be attributed to stupidity may perhaps be attributed to malice.
You mention "the President's ennumerated authority under the constution to suspend the Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus." Are you fucking kidding? So all the fuss about Lincoln violating the Constitution for suspending that said right (or as you errroneously call it, privilege) is for nought, and the same with FDR and his mistreatment of Japanese Americans in WWII. Please tell me where in the Constitution is this enumeration, so I can correct my doubts of the constitutionality of George Bush's actions.
Memo to demolition companies: Due to technologies designed no later than 1973 your work will only be needed for pre-1973 buildings. We can cleanly demolish modern buildings with jet fuel and a match.
By convincing the public that we are engaged in this oxymoronic forever-war, the government is positioning itself to usurp more of those liberties of ours which we take, by some crappy reasoning, to be less applicable in wartime. Judging by the American people's actions, I think the answer to your question is, on the whole, "Yes, we hate freedom."
The purpose of the plan is not to catch drug dealers. That's goverment doublespeak. In reality, the reason we call drug dealing a federal crime is so we can `rationalize' such liberty-encroaching plans.
As long as people have the option not to see the movie, I see no `crime' on the part of any theater which wanted to institute a no-pager/cell-phone policy, as long as that policy is not implicitly denied, lest doctors and others wrongly rely on that implicit assumption to severe consequences.
Yours is an important point. Also relevant is the fact that the original images are being publicly displayed, while the orignal songs are not. To make the analogy correct regarding my point, we would need to imagine either Google scanning in images only available in a magazine or a book or the music distributors posting full WAV files for free on their websites.
...is do not call it a propaganda machine.