You know this touches on an insight of mine during the past year.
Women don't want you to look at their chest. So they put on a shirt with a deep "V" cut showing bare flesh. Then they deride you for looking at their chest.
I think if a men wore shirts cut like women, women would look at the men's chest too. It is hard not to look at this big "flesh arrow".
Have you been reading much of what I'm saying? I do not think Libertarian philosophy will benefit the common man in the real world. I think in the real world, it just allows the strong to do what they want at the expense of the weak.
The fact that the common man won't accept responsibility for their actions means it will not even work at the lowest level. You can only be free to ride without a helmut if you truly accept that you will be allowed to die on the side of the road when it becomes apparent that you waived your right to care by doing so. You can only be free to smoke when you accept that you will be allowed to die a painful death from cancer without any medical assistance. You can only be free from taxes when you accept that you may starve to death or be killed by the police when you try to get food without money.
It is clear from the various lawsuits we see every day that the majority of people don't accept that. They want low taxes *AND* the benefits of a high tax state. And a Libertarian organization only works when almost everyone buys in. In a pluralistic society, given the freedoms most people will not buy in- they will immediately start trying to take away other's freedoms (to use dope, to have various kinds of sex, to be taken care of by the government because they are too young or too old.)
Libertarian is a dead-end philosophy, it is no more, it is demised, it has passed on from the mortal coil. Only a few small elements of it can be plucked out and used elsewhere. As a whole, it is too unrealistic to be applied.
What makes you so sure that libertarianism wont work better than what we have now ?
I answered it... but I'll do it as directly as possible.
Long years of experience and observation of the *real* world where 80% of people have no loyalty, no ethics, where priests abuse young boys, where the strong prey on the weak, where every government in history except a few current ones have been corrupted (and in my view all current ones will be as well).
In the real world where the wealthy and powerful will *NOT* allow some utopian libertarian's to take away their wealth and power. In the real world where large fanatical groups of people are willing to kill themselves and you because you are covering your entire body in a 100+ degree climate. In the real world where people who oppose major power interests are destroyed or killed.
Long experience of observing *real* people. The majority of whom, through history, do what they want and don't have a clear sense of where "their right to swing their fist ends and your nose begins". Where people don't respect the rights of other people to their own property via various rationalizations.
Libertarian is a nice "utopian" philosophy that can contribute to the real world but it can't be made to work, and even if it started with a clean slate and a population of people with the proper attitudes, it would go bad within a hundred years (probably in less than a generation).
A lot of american men realize it- that is why they are not marrying american women like they used to.*
Whether they are nice or a bitch, at a fundamental level american women are taught early on that they do not need men and it comes through in just about everything they do or say. And they currently have the legal advantage over salaried men (but usually not "consultant" types) when it comes to breakups. It's not uncommon for them to get the kids, the house (with their new boyfriend), childsupport and alimony. Only in the last 2 years have I started seeing the pendulum swing the other way in favor of the men and it has *barely* moved so far. At least it stopped getting worse- so I guess that is something.
* some argue women are "too easy" so there is no reason for the men to marry them. This is a valid point if one presumes historically men had no way to get laid until they got married. I think this is a false point since brothels have existed forever. Men marry women who they connect with emotionally, who they feel safe with, and who they find sexually attractive. "Free" sex is not enough when you consider you may be paying $18,000 in alimony a year for the "free" sex for the rest of your life plus losing half of everything you own plus getting destroyed emotionally losing your kids except 4 days a month. Now that men are better informed of the options they are deciding not to participate. But the "easy" women probably do contribute some- just not as much as the "rules" lady asserts.
Yea, most men are 6x5 so they are a about 1.6" diameter. An 8x6 is about 1.9" diameter. I'm told anything over 6.5 circumferance (just over 2" diameter) starts to be intimidating/unpleasant. Clearly a baby head size piece would not be popular but I'll assume you meant thicker within normal human limits. B)
I'm just barely under a 7x6 now so no adult movie career for me.:) And that's actually up 1/2" in both directions from my longterm base through "jelqing" and "horse" presses that I stumbled across on the internet a few years back so it is possible to safely mildly enhance your size and thickness without surgery.
This game... created in the 1990's looks as good as ever. And in fact, recently went to a true 3d environment ("Spring"). All those tiny 1/2" objects were 3d objects from the beginning. As the 3d cards got better, the game got better.
Likewise, the AI engine and other aspects were forward thinking- table based, programmable and over the years the AI for the game and units and maps have all only improved with age.
It is the *only* game that I purchased back then that I still play and enjoy.
The only way libertarianism works is if we cut everyone off at a small level of wealth.
Since we can't do that locally, much less world-wide, it will not work.
Consider the case of Microsoft behaving illegally against Netscape and Doublespace. In both cases they were wrong, everyone knew they were wrong, but Microsoft had the resources to "win" the battle before it mattered. When you have enough money, you can ruin your competition. When you have enough competition you can kill a person's dog, "accidentally" bulldoze their house, and there is nothing they can do short of fighting you in court for years until they are out of money.
An *axiom* of Libertarian thought is that participants are roughly equal in power. A trivial look at reality shows us this is not true and never will be.
Don't get me wrong- I WISH it could work. But I there is no other logical conclusion.
We can argue for some libertarian positions. 1) freedom of action combined with responsibility (I can forgo wearing a helmut if I sign a waver that I have insurance or it is okay to let me die). 2) Government should be small. 3) But government should be powerful enough to stop corporations and political organizations from stepping on us.
The problem with 3 is that a powerful government is very easy to turn around on the little guy.
People in groups are like a cluster of algae growing on a pipe. Companies are like the fish swimming along the pipe eating the algae.
Companies have much more purpose than people in groups have. There is a definate leader and a definate agenda. People in groups are fairly disorganized- it's hard to keep them moving in the same direction and pretty easy to disrupt them if you can find differences to divide them.
You really havn't read much Ayn Rand and then looked at how she led her private life. Libertarian is about the strong doing what they want while the weak try to get by.
It is a *wonderful* philosophy if you are strong, healthy, well off, powerful, wealthy, etc.
In the 1950's hamburgers were a fraction of their current size, and most people were in the 5' range. 6' was considered tall back then. They slept in these "full" and "double" beds- king size was unneeded and queen size was enormous (my bedroom -built in the 1950's is built for a queen size in the master bedroom).
And both men *and* women have gotten much bigger over the last 100 years. A lot of "knights" armor and castles were clearly made for very small, short people. And then their are pigmies and other groups of people who are still naturally small (a lot of asians are still very petite).
Even at our current large size, anything over 8" requires that you take extra time and go slow until the lady warms up. An 8x6 is a monster of a piece that puts you in the top 1 to 2% of the population.
So for -most- women, having a 10 inch piece would be counter-selective at this time since it is too much. In the very recent past, even more so when most women were about 5' tall or less.
Secondly-- it only counts if a baby results in terms of selection.
Thirdly There are many other more visable things that matter too. Do you have hair, does your mouth stink, do you have black teeth, do you stink, do you have blackheads all over your nose, then... are you good looking in general, are you funny, sexy, confident, reliable, can you dance, are you good at other aspects of sex (oral, mental, tantric). On top of that, to some women these matter a lot more than size.
So pecker size is just a small piece of the puzzle. I would guess that a huge majority of straight and bi women want to do a guy with a big piece one time in their life as a checkmark.
The richer, more powerful libertarians get to decide policy. Big companies have more resources than almost any human will ever have and they protect their interests.
I was a libertarian until I realized the philosophy breaks down in the face of concentrated wealth and power. If we had lots of people with ten million dollars it would probably work. When we have a few hundred "people" (some human, some corporate) with billions of dollars, it doesn't work.
You can't even have a fair court system when the power/money becomes too unequal. One person gets the public defender who is falling asleep in court while the other side gets a team of top-notch, well connected lawyers backed up by a firm of bright assistants.
Got anything other than an ad hominem attack there?
Multi-nationals are a new development in history. They have no loyalty to any nations.
I don't see how the fact that we can buy teeny amounts of stock and share the profits addresses the problem that they control our governments. The fact that they build factories, hire people, or pump money into the economy doesn't change the fact that "our" representatives represent these multi-national corporations.
The issue I was talking about was *control*. Many of our government's decisions are made *despite* the will of the people these days.
Large corporations have too much power in our society. They have all the rights of people, are basically immortal, and suffer none of the punishments (they can't be imprisoned, they can't be put to death- they can only be fined which is always just a cost of doing business).
My point to the parent post was that "united states" is a misnomer when our government is controlled by a tiny minority of the population. Sure we have elections- and we get to choose from "corporate backed liberal candidate A, B, and C" or "corporate backed conservatie candidate D, E, F."
As recently as last month, one of our customers corrected their very peculiar connection issues by replacing their windows server with a linux server. For some reason the windows server was changing the acknoledgement part of the TCP header- for the same client- at the same computer- for every transmission.
Windows Servers/App languages doesn't seem to scale well. It's a *great* way to get your business up and running asap. But you run into growth problems and need to switch to an enterprise solution (oracle, as/400, java, linux, etc.) once you reach a certain size. I still prefer windows as a desktop OS for now. I still slightly prefer windows office to openoffice. I think part of that is years of using office makes me comfortable but openoffice gets closer every day to replacing it for my home and personal use. I will probably not buy another version of office unless it is super cheap ($50/included free on the PC I buy).
In a way you are right. If hollywood is making a million bucks, then your ISP wants a cut of that money to pay for the unexpected bandwidth usage because of things like this. Everyone will want a cut- new taxes, new royalties, new encoding fees-- if there is anyway to get into that million bucks, folks will find a way and raise it to two million bucks (and double your cost).
Part of the reason the internet took off so fast was that all these middlemen and overhead costs were negated for a while and you could get superior bargains (still can on a lot of things) but that window is slowly being closed over as time passes.
Yes but there are alternatives to paypal that are not in america. For example, when I purchased songs from allofmp3.com last year I paid my credit card which paid paypal which paid "Xorb" which paid allofmp3.com.
As others have pointed out, you could purchase coinage in multi player games, gamble there, then sell the coinage for real world money or goods at the end.
This is very slippery and will be hard to litigate without a lot of surveillance.
The US has really been overpowered/bought out by multi-national corporations who owe their allegience to no government. Our senators and congressmen almost certainly know this but the system has been set up so corporate money is now required to enter politics at any serious level.
What is referred to as the "US" is really 270 million people being pulled along and steered by a tiny minority. They give us the illusion that we have control but where it counts, we do not and have not for at least 30 to 40 years.
A lot of energy goes into the construction of a bug trap (local decrease in entropy) and the bug provides the energy to make the trap work. It would take a lot of bug bodies to repay that energy debt- and even more energy to collect the energy from those bodies.
They wanted someone to pre-edit them and take out the sex and violence and leave them with a clean version. Something that network television does every day.
I guess now, their only options are to a) not buy the entertainment. b) elect politicians who make it legal or who make the depicted acts illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
You know this touches on an insight of mine during the past year.
Women don't want you to look at their chest.
So they put on a shirt with a deep "V" cut showing bare flesh.
Then they deride you for looking at their chest.
I think if a men wore shirts cut like women, women would look at the men's chest too. It is hard not to look at this big "flesh arrow".
Have you been reading much of what I'm saying? I do not think Libertarian philosophy will benefit the common man in the real world. I think in the real world, it just allows the strong to do what they want at the expense of the weak.
The fact that the common man won't accept responsibility for their actions means it will not even work at the lowest level. You can only be free to ride without a helmut if you truly accept that you will be allowed to die on the side of the road when it becomes apparent that you waived your right to care by doing so. You can only be free to smoke when you accept that you will be allowed to die a painful death from cancer without any medical assistance. You can only be free from taxes when you accept that you may starve to death or be killed by the police when you try to get food without money.
It is clear from the various lawsuits we see every day that the majority of people don't accept that. They want low taxes *AND* the benefits of a high tax state. And a Libertarian organization only works when almost everyone buys in. In a pluralistic society, given the freedoms most people will not buy in- they will immediately start trying to take away other's freedoms (to use dope, to have various kinds of sex, to be taken care of by the government because they are too young or too old.)
Libertarian is a dead-end philosophy, it is no more, it is demised, it has passed on from the mortal coil. Only a few small elements of it can be plucked out and used elsewhere. As a whole, it is too unrealistic to be applied.
No. My entire point is not that libertarianism is like everything else.
Libertarianism is a utopian ideal.
It is not at all practical in the real world.
Your question:
What makes you so sure that libertarianism wont work better than what we have now ?
I answered it... but I'll do it as directly as possible.
Long years of experience and observation of the *real* world where 80% of people have no loyalty, no ethics, where priests abuse young boys, where the strong prey on the weak, where every government in history except a few current ones have been corrupted (and in my view all current ones will be as well).
In the real world where the wealthy and powerful will *NOT* allow some utopian libertarian's to take away their wealth and power. In the real world where large fanatical groups of people are willing to kill themselves and you because you are covering your entire body in a 100+ degree climate. In the real world where people who oppose major power interests are destroyed or killed.
Long experience of observing *real* people. The majority of whom, through history, do what they want and don't have a clear sense of where "their right to swing their fist ends and your nose begins". Where people don't respect the rights of other people to their own property via various rationalizations.
Libertarian is a nice "utopian" philosophy that can contribute to the real world but it can't be made to work, and even if it started with a clean slate and a population of people with the proper attitudes, it would go bad within a hundred years (probably in less than a generation).
A lot of american men realize it- that is why they are not marrying american women like they used to.*
Whether they are nice or a bitch, at a fundamental level american women are taught early on that they do not need men and it comes through in just about everything they do or say. And they currently have the legal advantage over salaried men (but usually not "consultant" types) when it comes to breakups. It's not uncommon for them to get the kids, the house (with their new boyfriend), childsupport and alimony. Only in the last 2 years have I started seeing the pendulum swing the other way in favor of the men and it has *barely* moved so far. At least it stopped getting worse- so I guess that is something.
* some argue women are "too easy" so there is no reason for the men to marry them. This is a valid point if one presumes historically men had no way to get laid until they got married. I think this is a false point since brothels have existed forever. Men marry women who they connect with emotionally, who they feel safe with, and who they find sexually attractive. "Free" sex is not enough when you consider you may be paying $18,000 in alimony a year for the "free" sex for the rest of your life plus losing half of everything you own plus getting destroyed emotionally losing your kids except 4 days a month. Now that men are better informed of the options they are deciding not to participate. But the "easy" women probably do contribute some- just not as much as the "rules" lady asserts.
Yea, most men are 6x5 so they are a about 1.6" diameter. An 8x6 is about 1.9" diameter. I'm told anything over 6.5 circumferance (just over 2" diameter) starts to be intimidating/unpleasant. Clearly a baby head size piece would not be popular but I'll assume you meant thicker within normal human limits. B)
:) And that's actually up 1/2" in both directions from my longterm base through "jelqing" and "horse" presses that I stumbled across on the internet a few years back so it is possible to safely mildly enhance your size and thickness without surgery.
I'm just barely under a 7x6 now so no adult movie career for me.
This game... created in the 1990's looks as good as ever. And in fact, recently went to a true 3d environment ("Spring"). All those tiny 1/2" objects were 3d objects from the beginning. As the 3d cards got better, the game got better.
Likewise, the AI engine and other aspects were forward thinking- table based, programmable and over the years the AI for the game and units and maps have all only improved with age.
It is the *only* game that I purchased back then that I still play and enjoy.
The only way libertarianism works is if we cut everyone off at a small level of wealth.
Since we can't do that locally, much less world-wide, it will not work.
Consider the case of Microsoft behaving illegally against Netscape and Doublespace. In both cases they were wrong, everyone knew they were wrong, but Microsoft had the resources to "win" the battle before it mattered. When you have enough money, you can ruin your competition. When you have enough competition you can kill a person's dog, "accidentally" bulldoze their house, and there is nothing they can do short of fighting you in court for years until they are out of money.
An *axiom* of Libertarian thought is that participants are roughly equal in power. A trivial look at reality shows us this is not true and never will be.
Don't get me wrong- I WISH it could work. But I there is no other logical conclusion.
We can argue for some libertarian positions.
1) freedom of action combined with responsibility (I can forgo wearing a helmut if I sign a waver that I have insurance or it is okay to let me die).
2) Government should be small.
3) But government should be powerful enough to stop corporations and political organizations from stepping on us.
The problem with 3 is that a powerful government is very easy to turn around on the little guy.
And despair.com put it best...
and it absolutely rocks.
(it being absolute power).
LoL.
Be informed in a society where up to 70% of local news pieces are created by corporations?
Vote when 90% of the districts are totally secure from turnover until the politician dies?
Vote when the list of candidates is basically hand selected by the wealthy and powerful?
Fight for your rights when the government won't even protect your property from the wealthy any more and that was a founding principle of the country?
And who said anything about socialism? I just said that libertarian philosophy breaks down very quickly when you have disparate power and wealth.
No.
People in groups are like a cluster of algae growing on a pipe.
Companies are like the fish swimming along the pipe eating the algae.
Companies have much more purpose than people in groups have. There is a definate leader and a definate agenda.
People in groups are fairly disorganized- it's hard to keep them moving in the same direction and pretty easy to disrupt them if you can find differences to divide them.
Dude,
You really havn't read much Ayn Rand and then looked at how she led her private life.
Libertarian is about the strong doing what they want while the weak try to get by.
It is a *wonderful* philosophy if you are strong, healthy, well off, powerful, wealthy, etc.
Otherwise... not so good.
First....
... are you good looking in general, are you funny, sexy, confident, reliable, can you dance, are you good at other aspects of sex (oral, mental, tantric). On top of that, to some women these matter a lot more than size.
In the 1950's hamburgers were a fraction of their current size, and most people were in the 5' range. 6' was considered tall back then. They slept in these "full" and "double" beds- king size was unneeded and queen size was enormous (my bedroom -built in the 1950's is built for a queen size in the master bedroom).
And both men *and* women have gotten much bigger over the last 100 years. A lot of "knights" armor and castles were clearly made for very small, short people. And then their are pigmies and other groups of people who are still naturally small (a lot of asians are still very petite).
Even at our current large size, anything over 8" requires that you take extra time and go slow until the lady warms up. An 8x6 is a monster of a piece that puts you in the top 1 to 2% of the population.
So for -most- women, having a 10 inch piece would be counter-selective at this time since it is too much. In the very recent past, even more so when most women were about 5' tall or less.
Secondly-- it only counts if a baby results in terms of selection.
Thirdly There are many other more visable things that matter too. Do you have hair, does your mouth stink, do you have black teeth, do you stink, do you have blackheads all over your nose, then
So pecker size is just a small piece of the puzzle. I would guess that a huge majority of straight and bi women want to do a guy with a big piece one time in their life as a checkmark.
That's the problem with a libertarian philosophy.
The richer, more powerful libertarians get to decide policy. Big companies have more resources than almost any human will ever have and they protect their interests.
I was a libertarian until I realized the philosophy breaks down in the face of concentrated wealth and power. If we had lots of people with ten million dollars it would probably work. When we have a few hundred "people" (some human, some corporate) with billions of dollars, it doesn't work.
You can't even have a fair court system when the power/money becomes too unequal. One person gets the public defender who is falling asleep in court while the other side gets a team of top-notch, well connected lawyers backed up by a firm of bright assistants.
Got anything other than an ad hominem attack there?
Multi-nationals are a new development in history. They have no loyalty to any nations.
I don't see how the fact that we can buy teeny amounts of stock and share the profits addresses the problem that they control our governments. The fact that they build factories, hire people, or pump money into the economy doesn't change the fact that "our" representatives represent these multi-national corporations.
The issue I was talking about was *control*. Many of our government's decisions are made *despite* the will of the people these days.
Large corporations have too much power in our society. They have all the rights of people, are basically immortal, and suffer none of the punishments (they can't be imprisoned, they can't be put to death- they can only be fined which is always just a cost of doing business).
My point to the parent post was that "united states" is a misnomer when our government is controlled by a tiny minority of the population. Sure we have elections- and we get to choose from "corporate backed liberal candidate A, B, and C" or "corporate backed conservatie candidate D, E, F."
It's okay.
Pulling numbers out of your ass is popular with 2/3 of internet posters.
As recently as last month, one of our customers corrected their very peculiar connection issues by replacing their windows server with a linux server. For some reason the windows server was changing the acknoledgement part of the TCP header- for the same client- at the same computer- for every transmission.
Windows Servers/App languages doesn't seem to scale well. It's a *great* way to get your business up and running asap. But you run into growth problems and need to switch to an enterprise solution (oracle, as/400, java, linux, etc.) once you reach a certain size. I still prefer windows as a desktop OS for now. I still slightly prefer windows office to openoffice. I think part of that is years of using office makes me comfortable but openoffice gets closer every day to replacing it for my home and personal use. I will probably not buy another version of office unless it is super cheap ($50/included free on the PC I buy).
In a way you are right.
If hollywood is making a million bucks, then your ISP wants a cut of that money to pay for the unexpected bandwidth usage because of things like this. Everyone will want a cut- new taxes, new royalties, new encoding fees-- if there is anyway to get into that million bucks, folks will find a way and raise it to two million bucks (and double your cost).
Part of the reason the internet took off so fast was that all these middlemen and overhead costs were negated for a while and you could get superior bargains (still can on a lot of things) but that window is slowly being closed over as time passes.
Yes but there are alternatives to paypal that are not in america.
For example, when I purchased songs from allofmp3.com last year I paid my credit card which paid paypal which paid "Xorb" which paid allofmp3.com.
As others have pointed out, you could purchase coinage in multi player games, gamble there, then sell the coinage for real world money or goods at the end.
This is very slippery and will be hard to litigate without a lot of surveillance.
I agree except for the statement "US".
The US has really been overpowered/bought out by multi-national corporations who owe their allegience to no government. Our senators and congressmen almost certainly know this but the system has been set up so corporate money is now required to enter politics at any serious level.
What is referred to as the "US" is really 270 million people being pulled along and steered by a tiny minority. They give us the illusion that we have control but where it counts, we do not and have not for at least 30 to 40 years.
Make newer entries show differently.
So brand new entries might be italic red.
Entries between a week and a month old show normal red.
Older entries go stable.
They also need to have some trusted editors who can audit the problem areas if this issue is reported.
Excellent example of how to use commas, commas and "and", and "and."
Wouldn't have thought of it without your example.
A lot of energy goes into the construction of a bug trap (local decrease in entropy) and the bug provides the energy to make the trap work. It would take a lot of bug bodies to repay that energy debt- and even more energy to collect the energy from those bodies.
Actually, that is exactly what was overridden.
They wanted someone to pre-edit them and take out the sex and violence and leave them with a clean version. Something that network television does every day.
I guess now, their only options are to
a) not buy the entertainment.
b) elect politicians who make it legal or who make the depicted acts illegal.
It's difficult to ignore when it gets to a certain point.
FOr example, this week at fry's. 17 inch monitor $99 after rebate. That's a full $50 less than any non-rebate sale price so far.