1) Buy or borrow a directional speaker, and aim it at his house.
2) Download an mp3 of a dog barking
3) Play on a loop
4) Call him to complain that his device is making your dog bark.
Their is no reason a single ruler, rather than a town council or even a direct democracy cannot manage a communist community of some size.
I didn't claim communism required a single ruler, I claimed it required "authoritarian rule". Sure, a totalitarian democracy works just as well as a totalitarian autocracy. The point is that the state/commune must have complete power over the economic life of the individual. Either way, count me out.
Anecdotal evidence is all well and good, but it hardly applies in this day and age and their is plenty of anecdotal evidence to show it did not apply in the past. Think of all the monasteries that flourished and flourish around the world.
While I grant that the Plymouth Pilgrims are but a single example, I would hardly characterize it as anecdotal evidence. It's a thoroughly documented experiment in self-governance among a group of isolated people who tried it both with and without communal property and production, with a bias toward making it work with communism. If I had said, "I knew this guy, and he joined a commune, and it didn't work out at all," that would be anecdotal evidence.
On the other hand, I know of not one example of an economically succesful or sustainable commune. Nor have I ever heard of a self-sustaining monastery. In all instances I'm aware of, monasteries (Egyptian, Christian or Bhuddist) are sustained by the outside community through either donations, offerings, or most often, some form of taxation. And they are always authoritarian.
This demonstrates that [the Pilgrims] lacked a proper decision making method and enforcement of equality, not that the model is flawed. I hardly think citations from a bunch of religious zealots who were exiled for their dangerously antisocial behavior is an appropriate test case.
Wow, who would have expected RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY from a COMMUNIST??? The Pilgrims were neither zelots, nor dangerous, nor antisocial, nor exiled. The Pilgrims' decision-making method was open public debate and a combination of majority vote and decisions by the elected leadership. As for "enforcement of equality," I have no idea what that means, but it certainly doesn't sound pleasant.
We can reduce violence by removing the need for individuals to make that choice, we have succeeded in our goal to reduce violence.
There is a need for violence?? The error is in thinking that violence has an economic cause. It does not. While I agree it's not up to the government to instill morality, immorality is nevertheless the cause of violence. While I also agree that it's the responsibility of the government to mitigate the effects of violence, that can only be done by the administration of justice, where by people who commit crimes are removed from the society -- not the falacious concept of economic justice, where people cease to be violent because they're given so much material wealth.
feel free to make [a surfboard] out of a tree (if you own a tree). Heck, make a few and give them to your friends, or trade them for booze, or sell them and buy some booze.
What the heck are you talking about?? That's capitalism!!! As soon as I finish making my surfboard, it's a work product that belongs to the collective to be distributed!! You're telling me I can not only make a surfboard and keep it but I can open a business selling surfboards for money??? How much money can I accumulate before they come to get me? Can I hire employees? Go multi-national? Sell stocks? Is this the new Chinese "communism"?
The truth is, we have the capability to provide that life to the whole world with very little work. We don't because artificial scarcity is a lot more profitable and allows for a few to gain power over others...Maybe you've heard of this thing called "technology?" As we advance technologically, it
The USPS is a self-sustaining company, which in 2005 recieved $37 million from the federal government - which paid for sending congressional mail.
No, sorry, regardless of what your balance sheet says, you don't get to call yourself a self-sustaining company when you have a government-mandated monopoly. That's the force of law that is sustaining you, not your business practices.
It's only purpose is to protect the postage rates, and reliability of delivery of Joe-The-Goat-Farmer that lives out 42 miles from the nearest Post Office... If there wasn't a government monoply in place, you think you could get a a one ounce letter delivered to Auntie Jo by UPS or FedEx in a location like this for less than $20? Or do you think Uncle Mike could pay his bills via outgoing mail for a couple of dollars a month?
I seriously doubt that even the USPS is obscene enough to drive 84 miles round trip to see of Joe-The-Goat-Farmer has a letter in his mailbox today. If they are, so much the worse. In point of fact, the previous zip code I lived in had no mail delivery service at all! Everyone had to pick up and drop off their mail at the post office. Beyond that, the woman who's house we rented an apartment in was confined to a wheelchair, and could never leave the house. If she didn't have family and friends in the area to take care of her, the only LEGAL way she would have to pay her bills would be to pack them in freakin BOXES and call UPS for a home pick-up! If competition were allowed, then companies would find creative ways to provide economical services to people like that, and to Joe-The-Goat-Farmer, so he DOESN'T have to make a monthly trip in to town to pay his bills -- like a fixed-fee monthly mail pickup, or whatnot.
Communism is more efficient for small units than capitalism, but breaks down when the units get too large. For example, very few people would argue that capitalism is a good model within a family unit...Communities of a few hundred people that formed communes could share resources, without running into the pitfalls of communism on a large scale.
With a family unit, absolutely. But in a family unit, there is typically a head of the household who is ultimately responsible for the family's economic wellbeing, who will impose work upon family members who should be contributing, but are not. Beyond that, family members have a different kind of moral responsibility to each other than do mere acquaintances, which makes this relationship more fitting.
But a commune of hundreds?? A commune of even 50 or less could only work if it was under a strict authoritarian rule, such as the former tribes of American Indians. But that would not be compatible with the taste we've developed for freedom and individuality. But even that wouldn't likely be efficient enough to let people survive. There were once 105 people who formed an independent communist government in Massachusetts. They were extrodinarily industrious and religious people. Yet after a couple years, very many had starved to death, and after some debate on how to manage to stop starving to death, their governor, William Bradford, wrote that, concerning their system of communism, "it was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort." So he parcelled up and distributed ownership of the land to the families, making each responsible for their own production. The result was that "much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been," and they recovered, and thrived, invented Thanksgiving Day, yadda yadda, and went on to become the world's only superpower. (For non-(or ill-educated-)Americans, I'm talking about a group of families who called themselves Pilgrims and wore funny hats, who in 1620 procured a ship called the Mayflower, and established England's first colony in America, at Plymouth.) Bradfords expressed some amazing insights, 300 years before communism became all the rage.
This one paints the picture: "The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression."
And: "The experience that was had in this [communist system], tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's and other ancients applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God."
And: "If [communism] did not cut off those relations that God hath set amongst men, yet it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them. And would have been worse if they had been men of another condition. Let none object this is men's corruption, and nothing to the [system] itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another [system] fitter for them."
I'd love to see a society try the model of thousands of communities who share resources competing with one another in a capitalist market.
Indeed, if the communities are families, that works great. It existed in America, until less than 100 years ago, when the "New Deal" enabled children to relinquish responsibility for their older parents, and move out with their own children. And subsequent changes in law and society made marriage itself no longer a permanent institution, and we became a nation of individuals, rather than families.
A social safety net prevents desperation, which leads to violence and other n
Next question... How do you remove paranoid executives from positions of power and stop them from inflating operating costs through needless and morale busting authoritarian technology
Seriously! The CIO here is maniacal about tracking the websites everyone in the firm visits, blocking bad sites, and getting reports on who's visiting what kind of sites, for how much time, with how much bandwith, etc. The ammount of money lost to this system, by divers causes must be astronomical. For us developers who need to download stuff all the time, it became unworkable. So naturally I installed a proxy server on one of the servers in the DMZ, and now I, and those other developers brave enough to use it, are finally off the grid. I cannot tolerate working in a place that will not let me do my job efficiently, however, I'm not too proud to help them out be being efficient behind their backs.
The alternate spin being, "most women still run to men when their computer does something unexpected." (Which is not a put-down. We run to them for the really important stuff.)
Of course if the USPS didn't have a government-sponsered letter monopoly to use to gouge the letter-sending public, they couldn't ship packages below cost to undercut UPS and FedEx, and then no one would use those bums for anything.
First of all, the future depicted in 1984 is fast approaching, or did you miss the fact that there's a lawsuit proceeding (besides the one just thrown out) against AT&T for allowing the feds to tap their communications? Sure, it's twenty years late, but he was remarkably aware of the date.
Holy Crap! I think the government must have cut that part out of my copy of 1984! Either that, or I read it and then the government erased my memory because I wan't wearing my aluminum foil!
Females are mean, nasty, egocentric furies bent of World domination...females wish to exploit male generosity to climb to the top, giving little in return for our help. What can we do about it?
The only workable strategy is to form an alliance with one of them.
I think that IQ's are definitely rising. (Given a fixed scale, of course.) Just try watching any given TV show from the 70's. It must have taken monumental stupidity a) to write that stuff, b) to watch that stuff. I bet if you took an episode of "Lost" or "24" back in time and aired it, people would get so confused they'd be frantically changing the channel back to "Love Boat" or "Three's Company" to regain their senses. But we shouldn't get too cocky. We have a lot to make up before we get back to the intelligence of Newton, Beethoven, et al.
That's why CEO's get $50mega bucks per year. Its not because they work any harder or have studied any harder than the construction worker (ye olde Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard in the first year). But is it fair? Of course not.
It is absolutely fair. Hard work and education are means of becoming highly productive. But no fair system gives monetary rewards merely for hard work or education, only for productivity. A CEO is often in a position to have more of a positive influence on productivity than anyone else in the corporation, which is why corporations should spend as much as necessary to get the best one they can. Barring some sort of corruption, kickbacks, or whatnot, this is completely fair.
The minumum wage is a reasonable attempt at making life more fair.
Minimum wage is inherently unfair. It prevents a person from hiring another person at the fair rate determined by supply and demand. That in turn, can, and does, mean that businesses go out of business, and people go out of work. For a person to make enough money for food, clothing, and shelter, he MUST produce the economic equivilent amount of wealth by his work. Nothing else is sustainable, and despite the rhetoric, no minimum wage law can change that reality.
Here is a reason to support making life more fair: If you don't, then poor people who have been taken advantage of will eventually stop listening to southern accent affecting Presidents and their church preachers and will burn your rich ass into a pile of ash in that brand new exurb of yours. Its happened in many many places when the wealth balance gets too whacked. That's why rich folks should support the minimum wage.
First of all, unlike the histories you're undoubtedly thinking of, there aren't nearly enough poor to fight against the middle class. Second, it's not the poor who want a revolution, anyway, it's the liberals, poor and rich, who think the poor are exploited. Thirdly, the liberals, poor and rich, don't generally believe that a man ought to be self-sufficient, and so... they generally don't have any guns. Conservatives, knowing that there's a world full of liberals who want to take all their posessions, and furthermore that they have a responsibility to protect the welfare of their family, generally do own guns. And the armed forces are also overwhelmingly made up of conservatives. And they typically own guns as well. So you can stop worrying about the impending revolution.
Its also why [the rich] should pay more in taxes, because they benefit the most from a structured society. Its called nobility, and only snobs don't have it.
Not true, the lower middle class and the poor benefit the most from a structured society. Those who can fend for themselves in a structured society can also fend for themselves in a unstructured one. The well-off can afford to protect themselves and their interests, and could in many instances do so better without the police. The law is great because it protects those who couldn't otherwise protect themselves. Structured society is what limits the power of the rich, and even siphons off their riches!
Everyone in the wealthiest nation in the world should have enough to "pay for housing, utilities, health care, transportation, and a little extra for some fun."
Ok, if we do that for 10 years, so that we're no longer the wealthiest nation in the world, can we stop and return to actual freedom and sanity? Should everyone in that nation have all that even if no one works? If so, where would it come from? In the past, nations have done that, and they've gotten their wealth through conquest. But that doesn't seem very nice.
Basically, we should not be complete slaves to our economic conditions. In other words, we should be FREE and have the full rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Yeah, just like the monkeys in the zoo. Who do you want to free you from your economic conditions? Me? But I was going to pursue my own happiness! The government? If you're free, the government is you! The freedom to pursue happiness means the freedom to FREE YOURSELF from your economic conditions. You can do it by any means you like -- find anything you can do that will be of value to other people, and you can use it to free yourself from your economic conditions. It seems like more and more people detest freedom, and would rather be taken care of. That is an ok way for children to think. But it certainly does not befit men.
These ideas are not communist. They're as democratic and American as mom and the flag and apple pie.
Sure, if by "mom and the flag and apple pie" you mean Mother Russia, the hammer and sickle, and an empty bottle of vodka.
The CEOs that run the corporations decide what people get paid....{more of the Provda editorial page}...
I feel like every time I hear this rhetoric from anyone, it gets a tiny bit closer to "so we must line up the CEO's against a wall shoot them, or put them in concentration camps. Only then can Germ.., I mean Russ.., I mean America be great.
The corporation is not a democracy. It's a dictatorship.
No, it's a corporation. In a free society, people can form whatever free-will associations that they please. If they register with the state to be taxed, they become a corporation. If you ask to join someone else's corporation, you do so on whatever terms are agreeable to both you and them. And you leave whenever those terms stop being agreeable. That is freedom. If the government tells one or both parties what is or isn't agreeable, then that ceases to be freedom (and, as it happens, also ceases to be prosperous). But the wonderful thing is, if there is anything useful you can do, you can start your own corporation, and do everything your own way. But that's hard work. It's much easier to freeload off someone else's corporation. And then if you can convince people to make laws saying that you have to get a lot of pay for a little productivity, and can't be fired, well, I guess that might seem ideal to you. However, it's not sustainable.
Why should extremely gifted or the extremely lucky be the only ones to partake of what life has to offer? It's a sad commentary on the history of human civilization that after 5,000 years we still haven't evolved beyond exploiting one another.
Don't lose hope. There are wonderful meccas of freedom emerging. There's Cuba, there's the Soviet U... oh that one didn't work out so well... there's North Korea. China sold out, to the point that now even their own gvt-run newspaper complains about the disparity between rich and poor. But we have Cuba and N Korea. Let's build a raft and make a break for it. No one will think we're insane.
See that? That's how stupid you sound. It's also why any logical debate with you would be a complete waste of time.
Not only a waste of time, but an impossibility, seeing how your capacity for logic is apparently limited to determining whether or not a thing "sounds stupid" to you.
That's interesting. I've always heard it said that your character is determined by how you behave when you know nobody is watching.
So, if you are a Christian or a member of another religion that believes in an omniscient deity, how can you honestly say you know yourself?
1) Because the knowledge of God's presence is never forced upon anyone. If we could actually percieve how all our life comes from God, we would indeed have no freedom.
2) Because the independence of the existence of man is an illusion. One who doesn't know his relationship with God, inherently cannot know himself.
What do you hear in the silence of your soul, apart from an ever-present, nearly-inaudible mewl of submission?
Interesting question. As for me, I hear the gushing waters of life flowing in from God's mercy and love.
Surveillance and control are intimately linked. Once you remove the barriers against observation, you also remove the barriers against control. This would be one of the main themes of that entire book.
But we're not removing those barriers, we're adding more barriers. Observation has existed as long as civil law. Civil law would be impossible without it, and thus therefore would freedom. Every technological advance has increased the capacity for going unobserved. Today we can send messages encrypted, so the government has no ability to read them. That certainly was not possible in the past.
It is very relevant because in our hyper-informational society, it is becoming easier to surveille people than ever, and information is being used *against* us as opposed to *for us*.
Technology makes it easier to collect and process information, but not necessarily to observe in the first place. It's subjective to say whether it's used against or for us. It falls to our elective representatives (hopefully, rather than the unelected judiciary) to decide what uses should be pursued. And the majority of the people want the government to be clever and resourceful in finding terrorists and other criminals who prey on the people.
The government should not be able to leverage what you do in your private life, what you do with your property, what you do with your money, against you, as long as you're not harming anyone else with your actions - and even when we do harm other people, we have institutions in place to protect ourself against the government - habeas corpus, the right to not incriminate ourselves, etc. It's the government that should be transparent and open to surveillance - not the populace. This is, after all, a *democracy* where the people, not any autocratic police government, are in power.
The people exercise their power through a government of representatives (ignoring the judicial usurpers for now). And while I agree that the government, in general, should be transparent, niether criminal investigations nor military intelligence gathering can be transparent and still function. And the people overwhelmingly want those things to function. Again it's a basic fact that without observation, there can be no enforcement of law, and so no freedom, and no enforcement of the laws through which the people express their power. And the more life, both public and private, moves into the virtual domain, the more it is necessary to move observation into the virtual domain as well for the same reasons. Not to change the nature of the observation, just the setting.
If at any moment it is possible that you are being observed by someone - anyone - aren't you less inclined to exercise your freedoms? I certainly am.
I am certainly not. What good is free speech if no one is listening? And if the government wrongly wants to outlaw what I want to be freely do, I would rather do it defiantly than secretly. If I really want to say something privately, I use x-im.
"Literally" in the sense of "metaphorically" can be traced back to the 1760s, and futile prescriptivist whining about it can be traced back to the early 20th century (source). So given that this is an example of modification over time, how exactly is it different?
Ok, I read all the commentaries defending this use of "literally"... and they are all wrong. "Literally" never has been used purely as an intensifier. No one says, "that literally is big." It is used as an intensifier when a literal reading of phrase is gives the intensive meaning -- like "I have literally no optimism for the future of the English language."...which is to say, that it's not just that I have a little, and I'm exaggerating, I literally have none. As is clearly implied by the American Heritage (dictionary.com) definition, the usage as a figurative intensifier is not from a change in meaning but an accidental application arising from the habit of using it in similar-feeling word paterns to intensify a word or phrase by disclaiming any figurative interpretation. I.e., IT'S A MISTAKE. I don't care if Twain and Dickens used it. They're not gods, they made a mistake. And I don't care if it took 120 years of people making the mistake before anyone noticed. That doesn't make it not a mistake. I ask you, did myspace.com literally explode? You know exactly what I'm asking, even though it's a nonsensical question -- as intangible things cannot literally explode -- because "literally explode" only has one actual meaning in the English language, and that meaning is not "greatly figuratively explode", which was the intended meaning in the OP. Therefore, its use was a mistake. Q.E.D.
Problem 1: Your average person is not very tech savvy, so your average internet router comes unsecured so that it works straight out of the box for your average version. This means that the vast majority of wireless routers are open unintentionally by people who don't read instructions or know anything about security. And why read the instructions if they don't have to? If it works right out of the box, why spend time reading the damn booklet? This means that the majority of unsecured wireless connections are likely that way because people don't know any better, not because they're Just Like You(tm) and want to share.
I don't know if wireless routers mostly work right out of the box without configuration. I wouldn't have thought so, but regardless... A decent respect for your fellow man requires a respect for his actions, which at the very least requires the presumption that they are intentional, in the absence good reason to think otherwise.
Problem 2: Even if these people left them open for convenience, sharing, etc - their terms of service with their ISP almost always have a clause saying that service is to be used only be residents of the billing address. By using their connection, whether they want you to or not, you are aiding them in breaking their TOS.
I've never heard of an ISP TOS agreement limiting which individuals may use the bandwidth, although I guess it's possible... but then if he stands on his curb handing out cookies, I don't know whether or not he's signed an agreement promising not to share the cookies either. And yet I graciously eat them. But then a contract, by its nature is really only the business of the parties to it. If I do happen to know that it violates his contract, then that's a different question.
Problem 3: No, seriously, get it through your thick skull - that network isn't open because the guy who owns it reads slashdot and agrees with you. It's open because the guy doesn't know any better. However, his "stupidity" (reality: lack of interest in technology to the degree of yours) does not give you the "right" to steal.
No, seriously, even if most people are completely stupid, a society simply cannot function if we proceed on that assumption. People must be responsible for their own actions. And his action was to deploy technology to provide Internet connectivity with any computer within range of his transmitter. It has nothing to do with rights, and it has nothing to do with stealing.
Problem 4: You can say "if it doesn't hurt his bandwidth usage, it's fine", but that becomes a slippery slope. How many people get to borrow Unsuspecting Bob's internet connection then?
As many as he lends it to. You know, we could make the same complaint about Bob. People are driving along past Bob's house, and his router keeps connecting unsuspected with their laptops, which they've naively left configured to connect to any router it finds, thus using up their precious CPU cycles with all those connections. BAD BOB!
Problem 5: If you were to win the argument that people should be free to share their connections with the world, you would kill ISPs as a business. It's tantamount to arguing that it should be perfectly legal for one guy at the top of an apartment building to pay for cable internet, and for every resident of that building to mod a Linksys router and get the whole building on a WDS mesh through one connection. I'm no fan of the cable company, believe me, but doing this is still not fair to business.
First of all, what is this, trickle-down electromagnetic wave theory? Radio waves propagate in all directions, not just down. They're funny like that.;-) Secondly, if the ISP doesn't like it, they should prohibit it in the service contract. If they do already, then they should enforce the contract. This doesn't seem like it would be a difficult thing to detect.
When they came for the gypsies, I did not speak, for I am not a gypsy. When they came for the jews,I did not speak, because I wasn't a Jew. When they came for the Catholics, I did not speak, for I am not a Catholic. And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak.
Dude, you're comparing technology licensing issues to genocide?
No. You're welcome to talk about whatever you want to, not necessarily qualified to. Unless, of course, what you talk about counts as hate speech. Then you may speak of it, but only if you accept that you could be prosecuted legally--you do not, in Canada, have the right to say whatever you want, whenever you want.
Sort of like post-war Germany... the Germans are so sorry for having been Nazis, and so eager to show the world how tolerant they have become, that now if anyone in their country professes Nazi-like beliefs, they are sent right to the gas chambers.
I think Western science is closing in on a similar enlightened liberal attitude. Today, questioning thoughts about human evolution or global warming are practically considered hate speech. Maybe tomorrow we can resolve the BH/MECO question this way as well!
I'm sorry, so they hypnotized people to think they had seen a word before, and that made half of them feel like they had seen the word before... and of the successfully hypnotized, only half of them reported that the familiarity felt like deja vu?? And this gets you in New Scientist magazine???
Meanwhile, there are real, hardworking, professional hypnotists out there, who go out every day and make people believe that they're chickens, and they don't hear a peep from New Scientist!
Oh yeah, in other news, scientists have recreated under laboratory conditions the pins-and-needles sensation some people experience when their foot goes to sleep by sticking test subjects in the foot with pins and needles. Nobel prizes are expected.
Investing that money in any stock or mutual fund is the worst thing you could do. The only money you should ever invest like that is money that you can afford to leave alone until the market recovers from a crash. For liquidity, safety and good return, use something like a Vanguard Prime Money Market account.
This concept depends upon the ability to perpetually cool the liquid to below 58 degrees F, which presumably means putting some pipe down a hole in the ground. (Unless it happens to be located next to a cold mountain spring) I'm actually digging such a hole for an improvised cooling system, and the research I've found shows that at around 20 feet down, depending on soil composition, the anual temperature fluctuation will be 180 degrees out of phase with the surface temperature, making it the coolest depth in the middle of summer, and the warmest depth (until geothermal depths are reached) in the middle of winter -- a typical result being maybe 3 or 4 degrees F below, and 3 or 4 degrees above average surface temp, respectively. This is in a typical temperate climate. Of course, in a tropical or sub-tropical climate, you're completely screwed (barring the cold mountain spring). So say you have 50 degree F water you can circulate out of your hole in the ground. Which makes more sense, use it to cool your 150 degree fluid down to 80 degrees, so you can heat it back up again to turn a turbine, to generate electricity, to compress freon into a hot liquid, and pump it outside to cool, and then back inside and evaporate it to cool it more, and send it through a radiator and blow a fan across it? Or just send the 50 degree water you already have through a radiator, and blow a fan across it? Personally, I'm trying the latter.
Even if their system could produce enough power to run an AC, suppose it was air conditioning all of manhatten... how long do you think the ground layer at 20ft under manhatten would stay at 50 degrees with all that 80 degree water being circulated through it??
Slashdot Mirror
1) Buy or borrow a directional speaker, and aim it at his house. 2) Download an mp3 of a dog barking 3) Play on a loop 4) Call him to complain that his device is making your dog bark.
I didn't claim communism required a single ruler, I claimed it required "authoritarian rule". Sure, a totalitarian democracy works just as well as a totalitarian autocracy. The point is that the state/commune must have complete power over the economic life of the individual. Either way, count me out.
While I grant that the Plymouth Pilgrims are but a single example, I would hardly characterize it as anecdotal evidence. It's a thoroughly documented experiment in self-governance among a group of isolated people who tried it both with and without communal property and production, with a bias toward making it work with communism. If I had said, "I knew this guy, and he joined a commune, and it didn't work out at all," that would be anecdotal evidence.
On the other hand, I know of not one example of an economically succesful or sustainable commune. Nor have I ever heard of a self-sustaining monastery. In all instances I'm aware of, monasteries (Egyptian, Christian or Bhuddist) are sustained by the outside community through either donations, offerings, or most often, some form of taxation. And they are always authoritarian.
Wow, who would have expected RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY from a COMMUNIST??? The Pilgrims were neither zelots, nor dangerous, nor antisocial, nor exiled. The Pilgrims' decision-making method was open public debate and a combination of majority vote and decisions by the elected leadership. As for "enforcement of equality," I have no idea what that means, but it certainly doesn't sound pleasant.
There is a need for violence?? The error is in thinking that violence has an economic cause. It does not. While I agree it's not up to the government to instill morality, immorality is nevertheless the cause of violence. While I also agree that it's the responsibility of the government to mitigate the effects of violence, that can only be done by the administration of justice, where by people who commit crimes are removed from the society -- not the falacious concept of economic justice, where people cease to be violent because they're given so much material wealth.
What the heck are you talking about?? That's capitalism!!! As soon as I finish making my surfboard, it's a work product that belongs to the collective to be distributed!! You're telling me I can not only make a surfboard and keep it but I can open a business selling surfboards for money??? How much money can I accumulate before they come to get me? Can I hire employees? Go multi-national? Sell stocks? Is this the new Chinese "communism"?
With a family unit, absolutely. But in a family unit, there is typically a head of the household who is ultimately responsible for the family's economic wellbeing, who will impose work upon family members who should be contributing, but are not. Beyond that, family members have a different kind of moral responsibility to each other than do mere acquaintances, which makes this relationship more fitting.
But a commune of hundreds?? A commune of even 50 or less could only work if it was under a strict authoritarian rule, such as the former tribes of American Indians. But that would not be compatible with the taste we've developed for freedom and individuality. But even that wouldn't likely be efficient enough to let people survive. There were once 105 people who formed an independent communist government in Massachusetts. They were extrodinarily industrious and religious people. Yet after a couple years, very many had starved to death, and after some debate on how to manage to stop starving to death, their governor, William Bradford, wrote that, concerning their system of communism, "it was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort." So he parcelled up and distributed ownership of the land to the families, making each responsible for their own production. The result was that "much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been," and they recovered, and thrived, invented Thanksgiving Day, yadda yadda, and went on to become the world's only superpower. (For non-(or ill-educated-)Americans, I'm talking about a group of families who called themselves Pilgrims and wore funny hats, who in 1620 procured a ship called the Mayflower, and established England's first colony in America, at Plymouth.) Bradfords expressed some amazing insights, 300 years before communism became all the rage.
This one paints the picture: "The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression."
And: "The experience that was had in this [communist system], tried sundry years and that amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato's and other ancients applauded by some of later times; that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God."
And: "If [communism] did not cut off those relations that God hath set amongst men, yet it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them. And would have been worse if they had been men of another condition. Let none object this is men's corruption, and nothing to the [system] itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another [system] fitter for them."
Indeed, if the communities are families, that works great. It existed in America, until less than 100 years ago, when the "New Deal" enabled children to relinquish responsibility for their older parents, and move out with their own children. And subsequent changes in law and society made marriage itself no longer a permanent institution, and we became a nation of individuals, rather than families.
The alternate spin being, "most women still run to men when their computer does something unexpected." (Which is not a put-down. We run to them for the really important stuff.)
Of course if the USPS didn't have a government-sponsered letter monopoly to use to gouge the letter-sending public, they couldn't ship packages below cost to undercut UPS and FedEx, and then no one would use those bums for anything.
I'm guessing they're not setting up shop in portable trailers around the AFB. Presumably they're building a new underground facility there.
I think that IQ's are definitely rising. (Given a fixed scale, of course.) Just try watching any given TV show from the 70's. It must have taken monumental stupidity a) to write that stuff, b) to watch that stuff. I bet if you took an episode of "Lost" or "24" back in time and aired it, people would get so confused they'd be frantically changing the channel back to "Love Boat" or "Three's Company" to regain their senses. But we shouldn't get too cocky. We have a lot to make up before we get back to the intelligence of Newton, Beethoven, et al.
Minimum wage is inherently unfair. It prevents a person from hiring another person at the fair rate determined by supply and demand. That in turn, can, and does, mean that businesses go out of business, and people go out of work. For a person to make enough money for food, clothing, and shelter, he MUST produce the economic equivilent amount of wealth by his work. Nothing else is sustainable, and despite the rhetoric, no minimum wage law can change that reality.
First of all, unlike the histories you're undoubtedly thinking of, there aren't nearly enough poor to fight against the middle class. Second, it's not the poor who want a revolution, anyway, it's the liberals, poor and rich, who think the poor are exploited. Thirdly, the liberals, poor and rich, don't generally believe that a man ought to be self-sufficient, and so... they generally don't have any guns. Conservatives, knowing that there's a world full of liberals who want to take all their posessions, and furthermore that they have a responsibility to protect the welfare of their family, generally do own guns. And the armed forces are also overwhelmingly made up of conservatives. And they typically own guns as well. So you can stop worrying about the impending revolution.
Not true, the lower middle class and the poor benefit the most from a structured society. Those who can fend for themselves in a structured society can also fend for themselves in a unstructured one. The well-off can afford to protect themselves and their interests, and could in many instances do so better without the police. The law is great because it protects those who couldn't otherwise protect themselves. Structured society is what limits the power of the rich, and even siphons off their riches!
Yeah, just like the monkeys in the zoo. Who do you want to free you from your economic conditions? Me? But I was going to pursue my own happiness! The government? If you're free, the government is you! The freedom to pursue happiness means the freedom to FREE YOURSELF from your economic conditions. You can do it by any means you like -- find anything you can do that will be of value to other people, and you can use it to free yourself from your economic conditions. It seems like more and more people detest freedom, and would rather be taken care of. That is an ok way for children to think. But it certainly does not befit men.
Sure, if by "mom and the flag and apple pie" you mean Mother Russia, the hammer and sickle, and an empty bottle of vodka.
I feel like every time I hear this rhetoric from anyone, it gets a tiny bit closer to "so we must line up the CEO's against a wall shoot them, or put them in concentration camps. Only then can Germ.., I mean Russ.., I mean America be great.
No, it's a corporation. In a free society, people can form whatever free-will associations that they please. If they register with the state to be taxed, they become a corporation. If you ask to join someone else's corporation, you do so on whatever terms are agreeable to both you and them. And you leave whenever those terms stop being agreeable. That is freedom. If the government tells one or both parties what is or isn't agreeable, then that ceases to be freedom (and, as it happens, also ceases to be prosperous). But the wonderful thing is, if there is anything useful you can do, you can start your own corporation, and do everything your own way. But that's hard work. It's much easier to freeload off someone else's corporation. And then if you can convince people to make laws saying that you have to get a lot of pay for a little productivity, and can't be fired, well, I guess that might seem ideal to you. However, it's not sustainable.
2) Because the independence of the existence of man is an illusion. One who doesn't know his relationship with God, inherently cannot know himself.
Interesting question. As for me, I hear the gushing waters of life flowing in from God's mercy and love.
Technology makes it easier to collect and process information, but not necessarily to observe in the first place. It's subjective to say whether it's used against or for us. It falls to our elective representatives (hopefully, rather than the unelected judiciary) to decide what uses should be pursued. And the majority of the people want the government to be clever and resourceful in finding terrorists and other criminals who prey on the people.
The people exercise their power through a government of representatives (ignoring the judicial usurpers for now). And while I agree that the government, in general, should be transparent, niether criminal investigations nor military intelligence gathering can be transparent and still function. And the people overwhelmingly want those things to function. Again it's a basic fact that without observation, there can be no enforcement of law, and so no freedom, and no enforcement of the laws through which the people express their power. And the more life, both public and private, moves into the virtual domain, the more it is necessary to move observation into the virtual domain as well for the same reasons. Not to change the nature of the observation, just the setting.
I am certainly not. What good is free speech if no one is listening? And if the government wrongly wants to outlaw what I want to be freely do, I would rather do it defiantly than secretly. If I really want to say something privately, I use x-im.
I've never heard of an ISP TOS agreement limiting which individuals may use the bandwidth, although I guess it's possible... but then if he stands on his curb handing out cookies, I don't know whether or not he's signed an agreement promising not to share the cookies either. And yet I graciously eat them. But then a contract, by its nature is really only the business of the parties to it. If I do happen to know that it violates his contract, then that's a different question.
No, seriously, even if most people are completely stupid, a society simply cannot function if we proceed on that assumption. People must be responsible for their own actions. And his action was to deploy technology to provide Internet connectivity with any computer within range of his transmitter. It has nothing to do with rights, and it has nothing to do with stealing.
As many as he lends it to. You know, we could make the same complaint about Bob. People are driving along past Bob's house, and his router keeps connecting unsuspected with their laptops, which they've naively left configured to connect to any router it finds, thus using up their precious CPU cycles with all those connections. BAD BOB!
First of all, what is this, trickle-down electromagnetic wave theory? Radio waves propagate in all directions, not just down. They're funny like that.;-) Secondly, if the ISP doesn't like it, they should prohibit it in the service contract. If they do already, then they should enforce the contract. This doesn't seem like it would be a difficult thing to detect.
I think Western science is closing in on a similar enlightened liberal attitude. Today, questioning thoughts about human evolution or global warming are practically considered hate speech. Maybe tomorrow we can resolve the BH/MECO question this way as well!
I'm sorry, so they hypnotized people to think they had seen a word before, and that made half of them feel like they had seen the word before... and of the successfully hypnotized, only half of them reported that the familiarity felt like deja vu?? And this gets you in New Scientist magazine???
Meanwhile, there are real, hardworking, professional hypnotists out there, who go out every day and make people believe that they're chickens, and they don't hear a peep from New Scientist!
Oh yeah, in other news, scientists have recreated under laboratory conditions the pins-and-needles sensation some people experience when their foot goes to sleep by sticking test subjects in the foot with pins and needles. Nobel prizes are expected.
Investing that money in any stock or mutual fund is the worst thing you could do. The only money you should ever invest like that is money that you can afford to leave alone until the market recovers from a crash. For liquidity, safety and good return, use something like a Vanguard Prime Money Market account.
This concept depends upon the ability to perpetually cool the liquid to below 58 degrees F, which presumably means putting some pipe down a hole in the ground. (Unless it happens to be located next to a cold mountain spring) I'm actually digging such a hole for an improvised cooling system, and the research I've found shows that at around 20 feet down, depending on soil composition, the anual temperature fluctuation will be 180 degrees out of phase with the surface temperature, making it the coolest depth in the middle of summer, and the warmest depth (until geothermal depths are reached) in the middle of winter -- a typical result being maybe 3 or 4 degrees F below, and 3 or 4 degrees above average surface temp, respectively. This is in a typical temperate climate. Of course, in a tropical or sub-tropical climate, you're completely screwed (barring the cold mountain spring). So say you have 50 degree F water you can circulate out of your hole in the ground. Which makes more sense, use it to cool your 150 degree fluid down to 80 degrees, so you can heat it back up again to turn a turbine, to generate electricity, to compress freon into a hot liquid, and pump it outside to cool, and then back inside and evaporate it to cool it more, and send it through a radiator and blow a fan across it? Or just send the 50 degree water you already have through a radiator, and blow a fan across it? Personally, I'm trying the latter.
Even if their system could produce enough power to run an AC, suppose it was air conditioning all of manhatten... how long do you think the ground layer at 20ft under manhatten would stay at 50 degrees with all that 80 degree water being circulated through it??