The better system is one in which government doesn't steal the fruits of your labor and then use the wealth to pick winners and losers in the economy. A system in which government does not interfere in contracts to benefit special constituencies. A system where private banks do not get the privilege of controlling the money supply. And a system where interests rates are set by the market rather than by a secretive cartel of central bankers.
I would argue that we haven't had real capitalism in the USA since the inception of The Federal Reserve in 1913. What could be more fundamental than the interest rate when making decisions about when and how to allocate capital? Artificial interest rates send confused signals and lead to malinvestments which hurt the economy.
It's not a question of siding with/against corporations. It's a question of deciding what powers the federal government has or does not have.
The Citizens United decision stated that the government could NOT make it illegal for a group of people to run political advertisements. The First Amendment is very explicit about laws infringing on free speech. That decision should have been 9-0.
FYI, Scalia was part of the dissent in the Kelo v. New London case. i.e. arguing that the government did NOT have the power to seize private property for the benefit of a corporation.
Does the government have the power to grant a patent on genes? I wish they didn't, but based on The Constitution Article I. Section 8, I would say "Yes". However, this is a power granted to Congress. I think they would be well within their power to invalidate patents on genes.
I think the only reason we were able to beat SOPA/PIPA was that there were some big corporations on our side during that fight. Obviously they've now re-written the bill so that all of the big corporations will profit and only the little people will suffer.
I find this really frustrating. We're forced to fund the federal government under threat of violence and they turn around and use the fruits of our labor to make our lives miserable. They can afford to be relentless in their efforts because it costs them nothing. We defeat SOPA/PIPA (using our free time and after tax income), they just turn around and re-introduce even more sinister legislation in its place.
If you have the slightest wish to give government more wealth and more power e.g. to ban guns, to regulate free speech, to provide healthcare or to fix "climate change" you're out of your bloody mind! Washington DC is literally INCAPABLE of passing ANY legislation which benefits the average working American. Their stated intentions are meaningless. The substance of any new law will be to your detriment no matter what. Just say "No" to everything they propose.
"In the united states, on the other hand, there are only two choices."
Wrong. People are just too brainwashed to consider ALL of their choices.
"each party would sooner take a bullet than agree with something the other said."
Wrong again. What you're watching is political theater. For example, a big argument about an $80B reduction in the annual spending increase is ridiculous in the context of a $1.3T budget deficit. Both parties obviously agree that we should have a massive government and do nothing about the deficit. The other big arguments are mostly emotional BS like gay marriage and abortion. The genuinely important things like war, fiscal policy, trade policy, monetary policy and civil liberties are never the subjects of bitter debate. Gun control is probably the only important issue where there is real political opposition.
As long as we're using stereotypes, the far left in the US are not open to simple mathematical facts regarding revenue, deficits, rates of growth and monetary policy. They are likewise immune to the historical record of big government and central planning. What's worse? Considering the plausibility of non-mainstream ideas (you call "conspiracy theories") or believing that government is a magic wealth generating machine which can defy mathematics? Despite overwhelming historical evidence demonstrating that governments cannot be trusted, that power is inherently corrupting and that central planning is a failure, the left remains rigid in their belief that more and bigger government is the answer to all of our problems. Talk about people who are "convinced".
BS. His conversations with that douchebag LAME-O were mainly a discussion about his personal moral dilemma. He wasn't bragging about his "hacking skills" one bit. He had access to the information so there was no technical prowess required. He recently made a statement in court (which of course the government didn't want the public to hear) that was surreptitiously recorded. You should listen to it.
"To be useful in commerce, a currency must be stable..."
There has been explosive growth in the amount of commerce being conducted via bitcoins. I think it's way too early to pass a final judgment. Due to the fact that the supply of bitcoins is capped, it should stabilize in price. Unlike Federal Reserve Notes which can be arbitrarily created. I attribute the Bitcoin volatility to the fact that this is a new phenomenon. The increase in the number of goods and services that can be swapped for bitcoins can only drive up the value. The recent run-up in the BC/USD has also attracted speculators.
What sort of time frame are you talking about when you say "stable", and in terms of what? The USD has lost 95% of its value over the past 100 years. The EUR/USD has ranged from 1.25 to 1.50 over the past 2 years. Does that constitute "instability"?
I'm taking a "wait and see" approach. Still, I think that any transaction conducted with Bitcoins is a thumb in the eye of the banking cartel and their money monopoly, so I applaud the new popularity.
It's mid-April and this politician in the federal government is trying to explain how it's the evil Russians, Chinese and Iranians that are trying to steal from us?
The 7.x% "unemployment" number is the manipulated statistic. It's a fallacy because the BLS arbitrarily adjusts the size of the "work force". Did 600k people REALLY leave the work force in March?
Look up "Employment Rate of the Population" instead
This is a simple ratio between the number of employed people vs. the whole population. It can't be manipulated by arbitrary estimates of who is or isn't in the work force. This data show that there has been no material improvement in the employment picture since 2008.
I'm not trying to make any particular individual look bad. However, I think it's clear that the government's policy of massive deficit spending and Ben Bernanke's "Quantitative Easing" policies are making things worse, not better.
Exactly. Government employees are never held responsible for their under-performance or even their criminal activities. Warrantless wiretapping was a clear violation of the FISA law with both civil and criminal penalties, but nobody is held responsible. ATF smuggles guns to the Mexican cartels, they do an internal investigation and nothing happens. The OTS, SEC and FDIC have clearly defined obligations (the agency SHALL....) to regulate banks, but they ignore those obligations. Their failures result in financial turmoil, but there are no consequences for the so-called "regulators".
I'd like to see transparency too, but it doesn't really matter. The FISA Revisions Act of 2007 basically shredded any privacy agreements we might have with the telecom companies and absolved them of any legal responsibility for protecting their customers' information.
The feds didn't want any details of their blatantly illegal and unConstitutional warrantless surveillance program leaking out. Therefore, they came along and granted all the telecom providers complete immunity from civil suits or any criminal investigations and prosecutions.A civil suit or state level criminal prosecution had the potential for revealing their crimes, so the telecoms get complete immunity. Your privacy agreement with them doesn't matter one bit.
Actually, if your company provides any insurance benefits with no premiums attached, you do get taxed. My company provides a minimal amount of life insurance coverage for free. The IRS taxes us on that benefit by guessing what it would cost on the free market and then adding the cost as income.
Grass is a renewable natural resource that grows wild across huge sections of the planet. It doesn't require any petroleum based fertilizer or pesticides to produce. The only harvesting and processing required (in colder climates) is to cut it down and store it for the winter.
How is that enviro-unfriendly? It's certainly much friendlier and healthier than the grain-fed variety.
If getting lunch from your employer is a taxable benefit, doesn't this mean that an employee bringing their own lunch could write it off as a business expense? I figure that lunch + coffee + snacks runs about $10 per day on average. I could use another $2400 in deductions.
They also predicted that there is no way to escape the crash precipitated by an arbitrary credit expansion (Greenspan monetary policy and the housing bubble). For the last 4+ years the Keynesians have borrowed and spent over $5T and the Fed has pumped trillions in additional credit into the economy with no real recovery. This can only end with a collapse of the currency. If the Euro and the Yen were not in trouble, there's no way the dollar would be this strong. I hope you don't trust The Fed when they tell you that there is no inflation. What do you think this stock-market run-up is all about if not asset price inflation? Have you looked at food prices lately? Notice any package down-sizing to hide price increases?
Not migrating a few accounts at a time does seem to be an over-achievement in dumb-assery. Don't be too harsh on the IT staff however. I'm sure some manager/bean counter types made the decision to migrate based on cost only. Then, the project gets dumped on an already over-burdened IT staff under a tight schedule. Even "competent" IT people can screw up when they're given unrealistic requirements.
I'm not necessarily disputing your assertion, but at my former employer, the penny-pinchers were constantly making "cost saving" decisions with no understanding of the technical implications.
I don't quite understand this. Why doesn't the ISP have its own mail servers? What does this look like to you as the end user? Are the server settings on your e-mail client referencing mail.yourisp.com or some yahoo.com server? When the change occurred, what happened to usernames and e-mail addresses from your ISP that conflicted with Yahoo! usernames?
Wealthy political and banking elites are in control right now. Your "partly democratically accountable" governments are just a facade and I think you probably know it.
Even if rich well-armed people were directly "in control", any acts of aggression, theft, kidnapping and murder would be clearly recognized as criminal behavior. Plenty of well armed poor people could put a stop to that. When the same wealthy elites use "government" as their intermediary, the extortion and intimidation of the population is done under the color of "law" and their violence is legitimized.
One of my best friends in college dated this English lit major (not sure how that happened) so I was reluctantly in her presence from time to time. Her haughty condemnation and utter disdain for the types of fiction I enjoyed reading was enough to ruin any prospects of friendship. She wouldn't even consider the idea that the concepts of "good" or "bad" as applied to art and literature were subjective. No, her advanced knowledge made her uniquely qualified to provide such assessments. Snotty bitch. Thank $deity they split up.
" we can easily afford a basic income, and challenges to stimulate individuals"
Who the hell is "we"? Society? The productive people IN society who do the innovation and perform the real work of providing valuable goods and services? These people should sacrifice the fruits of their labor so that others can "study what they want", regardless of how useful/useless the results of their studies might be?
People who want to study useless $H!T like art and literature should do so on their own dime and make sure they have a plan to earn a basic income of their own.
Are you sure that was written by Paul Simon? I've never heard it, but it looks like it would be terrible to sing. None of the verses even rhyme, some are ridiculously long compared to others and there's no chorus.
Perhaps in a society which had abundance and egalitarianism that wasn't implemented by force, attitudes would be much different. However, think of the people whom you know personally that grew up in an environment of endless bounty and had everything they wanted (or maybe that's you?) Are they enlightened and benevolent people, or are they just rich snobs with a superiority complex? I suppose that if everyone grew up in similar circumstances, such snobbishness and feelings of superiority would be absurdities. That doesn't mean that their social inferiors from other "cultures" can't be the target of their derision however.
Yes, I definitely think I sympathize more with Horza than with any character I've encountered thus far in the entire series.
I appreciate the fact that "The Culture" series stands in stark contrast to the far more more numerous novels which envision a dystopian future. It is a very refreshing and hopeful vision.
I'm enjoying this dialogue. Maybe I've been too harsh on The Culture? I just started "Look to Windward" and I'll try to more fully entertain your perspective and give them the benefit of the doubt.
First off, I've only read the first four culture novels (skipped the short story collection) so maybe my impression will be different when I finish the rest. Based on this reminder, I'm going to start tonight.:-)
I obviously meant a "superior power" in purely military terms and I hadn't given the slightest thought as to motive. Perhaps the reality of human cultures makes it difficult for me to imagine the co-existence of vast power with entirely benevolent motives? Power corrupts, and I think Banks plays on that theme, but very delicately. Even in The Culture, for all of their presumed benevolence, it seems that the temptation to exercise their power to mess around with their technological inferiors is irresistible. IMHO, this is "bad", even when it's done out of a desire to do "good" because there's always an element of imperfect knowledge and subjective morality involved. The Idirans probably thought they were doing people a favor by imposing their religion on the universe. The Culture intervened in so many other cultures that I thought it would be only fitting if they were on the other end of that experience for once.
Having a final culture novel which describes their downfall, even if it's ten billion years in the future, and even if it's not due to an alien invasion, also appeals to my literary taste more than "they all lived happily for the rest of eternity".
Anyway, thinking about these sorts of questions is what makes the books so enjoyable.
"Are you secretly a very grumpy cat..."
I was, but The Minds designed a gene therapy treatment for me, and I glanded some Sperk before replying.
Slashdot Mirror
The better system is one in which government doesn't steal the fruits of your labor and then use the wealth to pick winners and losers in the economy. A system in which government does not interfere in contracts to benefit special constituencies. A system where private banks do not get the privilege of controlling the money supply. And a system where interests rates are set by the market rather than by a secretive cartel of central bankers.
I would argue that we haven't had real capitalism in the USA since the inception of The Federal Reserve in 1913. What could be more fundamental than the interest rate when making decisions about when and how to allocate capital? Artificial interest rates send confused signals and lead to malinvestments which hurt the economy.
It's not a question of siding with/against corporations. It's a question of deciding what powers the federal government has or does not have.
The Citizens United decision stated that the government could NOT make it illegal for a group of people to run political advertisements. The First Amendment is very explicit about laws infringing on free speech. That decision should have been 9-0.
FYI, Scalia was part of the dissent in the Kelo v. New London case. i.e. arguing that the government did NOT have the power to seize private property for the benefit of a corporation.
Does the government have the power to grant a patent on genes? I wish they didn't, but based on The Constitution Article I. Section 8, I would say "Yes". However, this is a power granted to Congress. I think they would be well within their power to invalidate patents on genes.
I think the only reason we were able to beat SOPA/PIPA was that there were some big corporations on our side during that fight. Obviously they've now re-written the bill so that all of the big corporations will profit and only the little people will suffer.
I find this really frustrating. We're forced to fund the federal government under threat of violence and they turn around and use the fruits of our labor to make our lives miserable. They can afford to be relentless in their efforts because it costs them nothing. We defeat SOPA/PIPA (using our free time and after tax income), they just turn around and re-introduce even more sinister legislation in its place.
If you have the slightest wish to give government more wealth and more power e.g. to ban guns, to regulate free speech, to provide healthcare or to fix "climate change" you're out of your bloody mind! Washington DC is literally INCAPABLE of passing ANY legislation which benefits the average working American. Their stated intentions are meaningless. The substance of any new law will be to your detriment no matter what. Just say "No" to everything they propose.
There was this nice app to cure acne and the damned FTC killed it. WTF does the FTC know about skin treatments anyway?
http://news.consumerreports.org/money/2011/09/ftc-anti-ance-smart-phone-apps-marketers-fined-for-baseless-claims.html
"In the united states, on the other hand, there are only two choices."
Wrong. People are just too brainwashed to consider ALL of their choices.
"each party would sooner take a bullet than agree with something the other said."
Wrong again. What you're watching is political theater. For example, a big argument about an $80B reduction in the annual spending increase is ridiculous in the context of a $1.3T budget deficit. Both parties obviously agree that we should have a massive government and do nothing about the deficit. The other big arguments are mostly emotional BS like gay marriage and abortion. The genuinely important things like war, fiscal policy, trade policy, monetary policy and civil liberties are never the subjects of bitter debate. Gun control is probably the only important issue where there is real political opposition.
As long as we're using stereotypes, the far left in the US are not open to simple mathematical facts regarding revenue, deficits, rates of growth and monetary policy. They are likewise immune to the historical record of big government and central planning.
What's worse? Considering the plausibility of non-mainstream ideas (you call "conspiracy theories") or believing that government is a magic wealth generating machine which can defy mathematics? Despite overwhelming historical evidence demonstrating that governments cannot be trusted, that power is inherently corrupting and that central planning is a failure, the left remains rigid in their belief that more and bigger government is the answer to all of our problems. Talk about people who are "convinced".
Well said. The government is now classifying anything that might make the government look bad.
BS.
His conversations with that douchebag LAME-O were mainly a discussion about his personal moral dilemma. He wasn't bragging about his "hacking skills" one bit. He had access to the information so there was no technical prowess required.
He recently made a statement in court (which of course the government didn't want the public to hear) that was surreptitiously recorded. You should listen to it.
"To be useful in commerce, a currency must be stable..."
There has been explosive growth in the amount of commerce being conducted via bitcoins. I think it's way too early to pass a final judgment. Due to the fact that the supply of bitcoins is capped, it should stabilize in price. Unlike Federal Reserve Notes which can be arbitrarily created. I attribute the Bitcoin volatility to the fact that this is a new phenomenon. The increase in the number of goods and services that can be swapped for bitcoins can only drive up the value. The recent run-up in the BC/USD has also attracted speculators.
What sort of time frame are you talking about when you say "stable", and in terms of what? The USD has lost 95% of its value over the past 100 years. The EUR/USD has ranged from 1.25 to 1.50 over the past 2 years. Does that constitute "instability"?
I'm taking a "wait and see" approach. Still, I think that any transaction conducted with Bitcoins is a thumb in the eye of the banking cartel and their money monopoly, so I applaud the new popularity.
It's mid-April and this politician in the federal government is trying to explain how it's the evil Russians, Chinese and Iranians that are trying to steal from us?
The 7.x% "unemployment" number is the manipulated statistic. It's a fallacy because the BLS arbitrarily adjusts the size of the "work force". Did 600k people REALLY leave the work force in March?
Look up "Employment Rate of the Population" instead
This is a simple ratio between the number of employed people vs. the whole population. It can't be manipulated by arbitrary estimates of who is or isn't in the work force. This data show that there has been no material improvement in the employment picture since 2008.
I'm not trying to make any particular individual look bad. However, I think it's clear that the government's policy of massive deficit spending and Ben Bernanke's "Quantitative Easing" policies are making things worse, not better.
Exactly. Government employees are never held responsible for their under-performance or even their criminal activities. Warrantless wiretapping was a clear violation of the FISA law with both civil and criminal penalties, but nobody is held responsible. ATF smuggles guns to the Mexican cartels, they do an internal investigation and nothing happens. The OTS, SEC and FDIC have clearly defined obligations (the agency SHALL ....) to regulate banks, but they ignore those obligations. Their failures result in financial turmoil, but there are no consequences for the so-called "regulators".
Expect non-performance.
I'd like to see transparency too, but it doesn't really matter. The FISA Revisions Act of 2007 basically shredded any privacy agreements we might have with the telecom companies and absolved them of any legal responsibility for protecting their customers' information.
The feds didn't want any details of their blatantly illegal and unConstitutional warrantless surveillance program leaking out.
Therefore, they came along and granted all the telecom providers complete immunity from civil suits or any criminal investigations and prosecutions.A civil suit or state level criminal prosecution had the potential for revealing their crimes, so the telecoms get complete immunity. Your privacy agreement with them doesn't matter one bit.
Actually, if your company provides any insurance benefits with no premiums attached, you do get taxed. My company provides a minimal amount of life insurance coverage for free. The IRS taxes us on that benefit by guessing what it would cost on the free market and then adding the cost as income.
Grass is a renewable natural resource that grows wild across huge sections of the planet. It doesn't require any petroleum based fertilizer or pesticides to produce. The only harvesting and processing required (in colder climates) is to cut it down and store it for the winter.
How is that enviro-unfriendly? It's certainly much friendlier and healthier than the grain-fed variety.
If getting lunch from your employer is a taxable benefit, doesn't this mean that an employee bringing their own lunch could write it off as a business expense? I figure that lunch + coffee + snacks runs about $10 per day on average. I could use another $2400 in deductions.
They also predicted that there is no way to escape the crash precipitated by an arbitrary credit expansion (Greenspan monetary policy and the housing bubble).
For the last 4+ years the Keynesians have borrowed and spent over $5T and the Fed has pumped trillions in additional credit into the economy with no real recovery. This can only end with a collapse of the currency. If the Euro and the Yen were not in trouble, there's no way the dollar would be this strong.
I hope you don't trust The Fed when they tell you that there is no inflation. What do you think this stock-market run-up is all about if not asset price inflation? Have you looked at food prices lately? Notice any package down-sizing to hide price increases?
Not migrating a few accounts at a time does seem to be an over-achievement in dumb-assery. Don't be too harsh on the IT staff however. I'm sure some manager/bean counter types made the decision to migrate based on cost only. Then, the project gets dumped on an already over-burdened IT staff under a tight schedule. Even "competent" IT people can screw up when they're given unrealistic requirements.
I'm not necessarily disputing your assertion, but at my former employer, the penny-pinchers were constantly making "cost saving" decisions with no understanding of the technical implications.
"Our ISP moved its email to Yahoo "
I don't quite understand this. Why doesn't the ISP have its own mail servers? What does this look like to you as the end user? Are the server settings on your e-mail client referencing mail.yourisp.com or some yahoo.com server? When the change occurred, what happened to usernames and e-mail addresses from your ISP that conflicted with Yahoo! usernames?
Wealthy political and banking elites are in control right now. Your "partly democratically accountable" governments are just a facade and I think you probably know it.
Even if rich well-armed people were directly "in control", any acts of aggression, theft, kidnapping and murder would be clearly recognized as criminal behavior. Plenty of well armed poor people could put a stop to that. When the same wealthy elites use "government" as their intermediary, the extortion and intimidation of the population is done under the color of "law" and their violence is legitimized.
I can understand that.
One of my best friends in college dated this English lit major (not sure how that happened) so I was reluctantly in her presence from time to time. Her haughty condemnation and utter disdain for the types of fiction I enjoyed reading was enough to ruin any prospects of friendship. She wouldn't even consider the idea that the concepts of "good" or "bad" as applied to art and literature were subjective. No, her advanced knowledge made her uniquely qualified to provide such assessments. Snotty bitch. Thank $deity they split up.
" we can easily afford a basic income, and challenges to stimulate individuals"
Who the hell is "we"? Society? The productive people IN society who do the innovation and perform the real work of providing valuable goods and services? These people should sacrifice the fruits of their labor so that others can "study what they want", regardless of how useful/useless the results of their studies might be?
People who want to study useless $H!T like art and literature should do so on their own dime and make sure they have a plan to earn a basic income of their own.
Are you sure that was written by Paul Simon? I've never heard it, but it looks like it would be terrible to sing. None of the verses even rhyme, some are ridiculously long compared to others and there's no chorus.
Perhaps in a society which had abundance and egalitarianism that wasn't implemented by force, attitudes would be much different. However, think of the people whom you know personally that grew up in an environment of endless bounty and had everything they wanted (or maybe that's you?) Are they enlightened and benevolent people, or are they just rich snobs with a superiority complex? I suppose that if everyone grew up in similar circumstances, such snobbishness and feelings of superiority would be absurdities. That doesn't mean that their social inferiors from other "cultures" can't be the target of their derision however.
Yes, I definitely think I sympathize more with Horza than with any character I've encountered thus far in the entire series.
I appreciate the fact that "The Culture" series stands in stark contrast to the far more more numerous novels which envision a dystopian future. It is a very refreshing and hopeful vision.
I'm enjoying this dialogue. Maybe I've been too harsh on The Culture? I just started "Look to Windward" and I'll try to more fully entertain your perspective and give them the benefit of the doubt.
First off, I've only read the first four culture novels (skipped the short story collection) so maybe my impression will be different when I finish the rest. Based on this reminder, I'm going to start tonight. :-)
I obviously meant a "superior power" in purely military terms and I hadn't given the slightest thought as to motive. Perhaps the reality of human cultures makes it difficult for me to imagine the co-existence of vast power with entirely benevolent motives? Power corrupts, and I think Banks plays on that theme, but very delicately. Even in The Culture, for all of their presumed benevolence, it seems that the temptation to exercise their power to mess around with their technological inferiors is irresistible. IMHO, this is "bad", even when it's done out of a desire to do "good" because there's always an element of imperfect knowledge and subjective morality involved. The Idirans probably thought they were doing people a favor by imposing their religion on the universe. The Culture intervened in so many other cultures that I thought it would be only fitting if they were on the other end of that experience for once.
Having a final culture novel which describes their downfall, even if it's ten billion years in the future, and even if it's not due to an alien invasion, also appeals to my literary taste more than "they all lived happily for the rest of eternity".
Anyway, thinking about these sorts of questions is what makes the books so enjoyable.
"Are you secretly a very grumpy cat..."
I was, but The Minds designed a gene therapy treatment for me, and I glanded some Sperk before replying.