But... if you can objectively put everything in a nested hierarchy -- like biologists repeatedly claim is confirmation of modern evolutionary theory -- why would there be any debate about what goes in which hierarchy? Why is this belief "becoming" popular if the nested hierarchy is so clear and objective?
As it stands now, Google seems to be the only large capitalist entity that would further its interests by tearing down any and all restrictions on information/data/operating code.
Unless, of course, we're talking about the code to its search engine.
What was that about capitalists restricting information again?
We'll never run out of coal or oil for the same reason we didn't run out of whale oil or copper. As the resource dwindles, investment in alternatives rachets up until someone discovers something that obviates the need for coal or oil. They thought we would run out of whale oil until someone found that crude oil can be used for lighting. They thought we would run out of copper for telephone wire until they found alternate materials, and later, satellites, to do the same thing.
>>False and false. A designer would also make species hungry.
Simply because a designer would do it doesn't mean it's trivial.
Wrong, it makes it the very definition of trivial. Name one theory that would not predict animals being "hungry" in some sense of the word.
>>Further, a scientist will always say that an animal eating "must be hungry"... how would you prove otherwise?
Check the hormones and neurotransmitters that account for the hunger response.
And if the "corresponding" (whatever that means) components of that animal did not activate, scientists would conclude that the animal was not hungry, or that the animal was hungry, but has different neurotransmitters? How do you distinguish between a conscious, deliberate desire for a species to sustain itself, and "hunger"?
>>Okay, but that's not what the claim I gave said. It referred to the "basic building blocks" which could mean anything - including the carbon atom.
Actually your original claim was exactly that "'All organisms will have the same basic DNA building blocks' is non-falsifiable." The DNA building blocks are all A, T, G, C.
No, you diverged from the claim I gave and changed to specific, named "building blocks". The claim I gave said nothing about ATCG. It talked about building blocks. That can mean anything down to and including quarks. You cannot non-arbitrarily draw the line and say "If all species are similar in this respect, obviously they came from a common ancestor."
>>I can 100% guarantee you if a species were found with just A and T, scientists would just cite the A and T as evidence that we all have the "same basic DNA building blocks"... ergo, non-falsfiable.
Firstly, it's not possible A T would be unable to create a number of proteins needed to live,
Okay, so it's possible, great.
>>Now you're reverting to Darwin's claim, not the claim I started out with, which said that no member of any species will perform an act of self-sacrifice for another species. That is falsified.
Actually I was pretty much quoting Dawkins. The self-sacrifice for another species is not a claim of evolution.
Just a prominent proponent of evolution (Douglas Futuyma).
It doesn't seem as though it would be evolutionarily helpful, but it's not something that would be impossible to fathom. But, it should be quite rare. In humans and your example, it's simply a result of a large brain, that can override natural drives.
Environmentalism is rare? Suicide is rare? Birth control is rare? Homosexuality is rare? Charity is rare?
>>Let's say we found some gland on some animal A that, when coaxed, produced something that could ONLY be consumed by another species B, and was poison to all other species. Surely this is a counterexample to Darwin!
No. The idea that one species producing something to be consumed by other species is an example of coevolution....
So I was right, any part "for" another species you can write off as coevolution. So Darwin's (or, if you prefer, Dawkins') claim says nothing.
>>Any part "for" the sole benefit of another species B necessarily helps A. So you cannot falsify.
You were saying that this could be falsified (and moreover was). You slipped off topic.
WRONG, Mr. Short Attention Span. Read our previous posts *one more time* starting from where I came in. I'm trying to help you all see how so-called "predictions" of evolution are either trivial, non-falsifiable, or falsified. Remember? Yeah. I listed an example of a falsified claim - that no member of any species would sacrifice itself for another species. You altered the claim to "no part of any species is ever formed for the sole benefit of another species". Change the claim, change the flaw. That's no longer falsified - it's now non-falsifiable. For the reasons I gave and which you
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Thanks! Goodness knows I need them after some recent comments. Maybe you could put me on your friends list to help reduce the freak/fan ratio?
Hunger itself is quite non-trivial. Eating while hungry is also non-trivial.
False and false. A designer would also make species hungry. Further, a scientist will always say that an animal eating "must be hungry"... how would you prove otherwise?
>>What does it mean to have the same "basic" building blocks?
In regard to DNA? It means A, C, G, T.
Okay, but that's not what the claim I gave said. It referred to the "basic building blocks" which could mean anything - including the carbon atom. Now do you see why it's non-falsifiable?
>>And if the bases were all different for every species, you'd be saying "well, they all have carbon".
If the bases were different for every species there might actually be some truth behind intelligent design. If each species had a different type of genetic code it would completely strike down common descent. Thus, falsifing it. Your comment wasn't a general building blocks comment, it was a DNA building blocks. DNA is a huge amount of evidence for common descent, and has proved itself to be a much better indicator of descent than dentition and other things we use.
False. Imagine alternate universes in which some subset of DNA were the fundamental building block. Then people would count that as evidence. That you cannot non-arbitrarily draw the line on what consistutes fundamental similarity means it's non-falsifiable. I can 100% guarantee you if a species were found with just A and T, scientists would just cite the A and T as evidence that we all have the "same basic DNA building blocks"... ergo, non-falsfiable.
>>I was referring to the befit[sic] of another species, as everyone but you understood it to mean.
Ah, sorry I assumed you had said something much less retarded. The VHEM is unique to humans, and a byproduct of large brains. Large brains are a huge evolutionary leap forward but do produce some counterevolutionary results. But the benifit of a large brain more than outweighs all the suicide and people not wanting to have children. You don't find such results in species that can't overrule their own personal drives (non-humans). You could also argue that art and religion and such wastes time, better spent mating.
Now you're reverting to Darwin's claim, not the claim I started out with, which said that no member of any species will perform an act of self-sacrifice for another species. That is falsified. Now, let's look at your claim. How is it falsifiable? How could you establish that a part of one species is "for" the sole benefit of another species? What does it mean to be "for" another species? It's ill-defined. Let's say we found some gland on some animal A that, when coaxed, produced something that could ONLY be consumed by another species B, and was poison to all other species. Surely this is a counterexample to Darwin! No, some genius would just say "but by having that gland for species B, B gains an incentive to maintain the presence of A, and thus, that helps A". See? Any part "for" the sole benefit of another species B necessarily helps A. So you cannot falsify. Rather, you label it co-evolution or something.
>>Except that this is not unique to evolutionary theory.
It falls squarely in evolution's corner. Because some objects fit perfectly into the predictions of both Newton and Einstein does not mean that the evidence is does not support that theory, it supports both and all theories that properly predicted such a thing. Where the theories predict different things is what weeds out other theories. Although, what other theory predicted such a thing?
If I posited that bacteria were designed, the observation you listed would be consistent with that. Ergo, it's trivial since pretty much any other explanation would allow for it.
>>You can totally dispute how species formed according ot it, yet still agree that antibiotics will spare all who were resistant to
Of course not. There are still planets to discover, and previously-though-useless things to be discovered as useful (oil used to be a nuisance, now it's money). Even if you want to focus on land on earth*, recall that "land" in the sense that Georgists use the term, is economic land, i.e., all nature-given material and opportunities external to the human body. So they want to auction oil extraction rights, for example. That is, if you discover oil, the state seizes it, auctions it, and gives the proceeds to everyone in equal shares. Thus, you have pretty much no incentive to "find new land".
If in the 1400's, Georgism had been implemented, people would be less enthusiastic about finding a new continent, since someone would collect its rent.
*This is actually an interesting point for Georgists. You could concede that "we all own the earth (but nothing outside)" and then, once space colonization proceeds, their policies become less and less relevant.
Libertarians are generally divided on what is the "best" tax, assuming there need be a tax at all. (i.e., you could fund the justice system by making criminals pay compensation plus admin costs divided by the recovery rate so courts and police are self-funded).
The people you're referring to in your post are called "geo-libertarians" or [Henry] Georgist libertarians. See
Most libertarians, however, do not regard land as a "common resource" that everyone must share (or share the rent of). Many of them (like me) see a low LVT as the least bad tax. Georgists see the land value tax as being so good that even if you collected it and burned the money, you'd do everyone a favor.
The Georgist LVT gains its popularity from the idea that "so what if you tax land? It can't run away!" and "no one made land, why should you keep its value?". (The second ignores that land has to be discovered.)
There are a lot of taxes you can point to as being bad, like the income tax, but the biggest burden right now is how there are so damn many kinds of taxes! Just keeping up with them all and doing your tax preparations is a nightmare and HUGE time/money waster for millions of Americans. If we just switched to one tax, that simplifcation alone would save billions of dollars in explicit compliance costs alone (and billions more in redirecting people to doing what they like, not what has tax advantages).
Just ask yourself: how much is your time worth, and how much time did you spend preparing taxes? How much did you pay someone to do your taxes? What things did you do differently because of tax advantages? What did your company or employer do differently? How much does it spend on compliance because of the different kinds of taxes?
But then every time someone comes up with the simplifcation idea, like a Flat Tax or the so-called "FairTax", some genius figures out it will benefit the rich. Except that reducing this tremendous burden from the economy helps the poor too. This is not about "screwing the poor". If you want to make transfers to the poor, make a separate program. Don't complicate everyone's taxes to help. Seriously, I'm beginning to think some people have a scorched earth policy toward the rich - they'll advocate policies to hurt them even if they hurt the poor even more!
Now, I'm not necessarily endorsing the Flat Tax or "FairTax", but they're on the right track - if you just had one kind of tax (or even just one kind of tax for each level of government) the savings from this simplification alone would make the world a lot less kafkaesque and eliminate complications like in TFA.
According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, you could get at least 300 miles (480 km) before refueling. But let's say you could only get 100. With all the savings of not using gasoline (spend about 25% as much on fuel per mile), I'm sure a lot of people would be willing to swap out one car for an air car if it's just goint to be used to get to and from work, and just recharge it when you get home. You could recharge it anywhere there's an outlet, so you wouldn't even have to wait for that.
Also it should be mentioned that the oil industry owns stock in these American automobile companies so they have a financial incentive to create gas guzzlers.
Good thing they don't own stock in the Japanese car companies that will be competing with them... and that they'll... have to... imitate one day...
How come no one's trying to develop an air car? That is, you store the energy in compressed air. You could charge it with any kind of electricity, and no pollution would be emitted from the car while driving. Google "air car". The efficiency (ratio of output mechanical energy to stored energy) would be much higher, and because you just plug it in to recharge, the energy is much cheaper. All technology is already available except you may need a stronger tank for bigger loads.
Or I could just save time and use browsers that don't pose the risk of deleting all of my bookmarks just because I decided to upgrade, like IE. (okay, they're called favorites, but it's the same principle)
I'm not sure why I should have to risk having all of the bookmarks I've acquired over the years get deleted just because YAY! newest version of Firefox released!
No, communism is when everyone owns an equal share of all means of production. The model you've described is capitalism, but with different workers privately owning some of the MOP. Now, for some problems with this business model:
-You said it yourself: you either give freebies, or make employees pay to get in. Most don't like paying to have a job. -The incentive structure doesn't look anything like what you've described. If I get an idea that adds $1000 in value to the company, and I implement it, that $1000 is dispersed over thousands of people. So I might get a few coins. Not an incentive to really work harder. To have true incentives you'd reward people for each contribution - but businesses already do that to the extent that they can identify it. -Workers tend to want their cash now, not, you know, whenever the business becomes profitable. Most business plans involve "profit" way down the road. 1. Build the capital goods. 2. ??? = wait a long time. 3. Profit! -Workers would, in effect, put all their eggs in one basket. If the firm does well, they grow rich, but if they encounter stiff competition, they could lose everything - their job and their portfolio. It would make more sense for workers to trade their shares for shares in a broad array of businesses. The predictable result would look much like the form of organization we have today: workers collect a fee for services and the distributed owners of the firm collect the variable profits and losses. Now, you could ban selling of shares, but this wouldn't accomplish much except to drive the practice underground and force workers to live with enormous risk. -Most importantly, if you were really confident this would work, why not make a bet with some business. If they implement it and profits increase, they pay you; if not, you pay them. Since this is such a sure-fire way to improve productivity why not do it? Or get investors and start your own firm?
Nobody does this today because it's not efficient (including from the worker's point of view). Worker owned firms are already heavily favored by tax laws.
That's a clever excuse. I could just as easily claim others did it to me. Like the people who changed "same basic DNA building blocks" to "the bases GTAC". Or the guy who inserted the word "only" into my claims. Or the guy who claimed (repeatedly) that I was trying to say evolution makes claims about individuals, when I was actually quoting a biologist who said so.
Once again, another very transparent claim. Give up while you're only sort of behind.
Well, this paradox arises in other areas too. Say you take nude photos of someone without their consent and without their face in it and publish them. The victim sues you. Then you say "How do you know they were photos of your body? We have to compare." Then someone would complain that this comparison was not made public.
Then why has everyone missed the point that I made in the post you just replied to? Why do they resort to "catching" me quote the same passage someone else did? Do you have a reply to the argument in the post you replied to? You do not.
1. The math used in the link assumes 40/h weeks for an entire summer? Google paid for the project, NOT for the hours. I could have just as easily worked 5 hours on a project and make several hundred dollars per hour. 2. It was more like a grant, or even a contract. There was no requirement that the participant work X hours, or a particular timeframe. Google paid for the project, not for the hours worked on it.
These are actually the same point, but if you feel the need to artificially inflate the appearance of support for your position, I completely understand.
According to you and only you, if I hire Mexicans to pick fruit for me, but pay them per-fruit-picked such that their wages come out to be under minimum wage, that's 100% acceptable, violates no laws, and should not be illegal. So I guess you don't really support minimum wage laws, you just support laws regarding how employers have to phrase their compensation.
3. Google Summer of Code != (does not equal for the layman) Current Plans to work on OO.o.
(Note: this is actually the second point.) Of course not. The point is Google is buying labor at below market rates, and they'll probably try the same thing for this project by digging up cheaper labor.
4. Your original argument stated below minimum wage, which last time I checked, was WELL below $9.30/h.
??? Oh, I understand. What you're trying to say is (thought in a rather roundabout way) is that you're not familiar with the laws of California and the cities therein. That's all you had to say.
By the way, I think the point was that if the project took longer, they could have been paid even under the federal min. wage.
What about other projects? Should we boycott Linux because thousands of Linux developers have been underpaid, or even gasp, not paid at all for contributions they've made to the kernel? Maybe you should think about boycotting Slashdot, the infrastructure is supported by open source applications written by developers who were either paid very low, or not paid at all.
If you look back at my original post, you'll see that it's satire. How refuting satire got you to +2 informative, I have no idea. Yes, it's good thing when people willing to work for less than the market rate contribute labor. I'm merely mocking the argument of those who claim it "steals jobs". Get it?
So again, I ask, what do you have to actually back up the statement that Google is going to underpay Indians and Chinese people to work on OO.o?
I have none. If what you actually meant was the claim that Google will pay them below what California programmers would get, and potentially below California's minimum wage, see... well, just reread everything I've posted.
Really? Then why didn't he say "No one has ever found a species altruistically serving another, without any gain for itself." ? Exactly as predicted, your defense morphs into "He just used unnecessary words, no big deal."
And there's a bigger problem too. Now that you've changed his claim into "No species has ever altruistically served another without any gain for itself" you've - oops - turned it into a trivial claim. You don't have to accept any of the controversial aspects of the theory of evolution in order to believe that a species that merely serves others without regard for itself *tends to go extinct*.
And then there's the falsifiability issue. Let's say there was some species similiar to a cow that would just run up to members of another species (like humans) and stand still until it was milked. This is altruistically serving another species without any gain for itself, right? No, because some genius would come along and say "this supposed altruism is just the quasi-cow trying to rook humans into taking care of it to ensure a milk supply and thus the survival of the species." The fact is, if you try hard enough, you can easily come up with an argument that some altruistic action of an entire species is really for its benefit. The only conclusive proof otherwise might be extinction but again... is "species that don't look after themselves tend to go extinct" really unique to the theory that all life on earth has a common ancestor? It is not.
Corporations don't pay taxes. Any tax they pay is passed on as a tax on employees, customers, or investors. You know, people. Cutting "hella" down on their taxes means employees, customers, or investors pay less tax. The corporate tax is one of the least efficient and most corrupt taxes. If your neighbor cheats on his taxes and you don't, you still earn an income. If one corporation cheats on its taxes and other does not, the non-cheating one is driven out of business. Not because of the other's acument in satisfying consumer needs, but because it can work the system better.
Oh, okay. And what makes you think I got it from the web? I really can't believe I'm continuing to dignify this. Your principle really does mean that if ANYONE ELSE has ever quoted the same passage, you have to also quote them. You and I both know that's wrong, so you can spare me the lecture. I bolded the passage, not because someone else happened to do it a few years ago in an obscure little internet article, but because that is the part I wanted to emphasize! And guess what? I sorta kinda mentioned that I added the bold.
You know what my favorite intro to a book is? It's the one in A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. It goes "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." (p. 1, bold added) as quoted in
According to you and only you, I have to quote all those webpages whenever I want to quote the first like of that book. Otherwise, it's plagiarism. Oh, and I better cross my fingers and hope no one has bolded any part of that sentence.
Well, good work. You got me to dignify another person who really doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
But... if you can objectively put everything in a nested hierarchy -- like biologists repeatedly claim is confirmation of modern evolutionary theory -- why would there be any debate about what goes in which hierarchy? Why is this belief "becoming" popular if the nested hierarchy is so clear and objective?
Here's a good article on it:
http://www.mises.org/story/1835
As it stands now, Google seems to be the only large capitalist entity that would further its interests by tearing down any and all restrictions on information/data/operating code.
Unless, of course, we're talking about the code to its search engine.
What was that about capitalists restricting information again?
We'll never run out of coal or oil for the same reason we didn't run out of whale oil or copper. As the resource dwindles, investment in alternatives rachets up until someone discovers something that obviates the need for coal or oil. They thought we would run out of whale oil until someone found that crude oil can be used for lighting. They thought we would run out of copper for telephone wire until they found alternate materials, and later, satellites, to do the same thing.
Americans landed on the moon first and put a flag there. How much of it would the government have to cede to China if it also landed there?
>>False and false. A designer would also make species hungry.
... how would you prove otherwise?
...
Simply because a designer would do it doesn't mean it's trivial.
Wrong, it makes it the very definition of trivial. Name one theory that would not predict animals being "hungry" in some sense of the word.
>>Further, a scientist will always say that an animal eating "must be hungry"
Check the hormones and neurotransmitters that account for the hunger response.
And if the "corresponding" (whatever that means) components of that animal did not activate, scientists would conclude that the animal was not hungry, or that the animal was hungry, but has different neurotransmitters? How do you distinguish between a conscious, deliberate desire for a species to sustain itself, and "hunger"?
>>Okay, but that's not what the claim I gave said. It referred to the "basic building blocks" which could mean anything - including the carbon atom.
Actually your original claim was exactly that "'All organisms will have the same basic DNA building blocks' is non-falsifiable." The DNA building blocks are all A, T, G, C.
No, you diverged from the claim I gave and changed to specific, named "building blocks". The claim I gave said nothing about ATCG. It talked about building blocks. That can mean anything down to and including quarks. You cannot non-arbitrarily draw the line and say "If all species are similar in this respect, obviously they came from a common ancestor."
>>I can 100% guarantee you if a species were found with just A and T, scientists would just cite the A and T as evidence that we all have the "same basic DNA building blocks"... ergo, non-falsfiable.
Firstly, it's not possible A T would be unable to create a number of proteins needed to live,
Okay, so it's possible, great.
>>Now you're reverting to Darwin's claim, not the claim I started out with, which said that no member of any species will perform an act of self-sacrifice for another species. That is falsified.
Actually I was pretty much quoting Dawkins. The self-sacrifice for another species is not a claim of evolution.
Just a prominent proponent of evolution (Douglas Futuyma).
It doesn't seem as though it would be evolutionarily helpful, but it's not something that would be impossible to fathom. But, it should be quite rare. In humans and your example, it's simply a result of a large brain, that can override natural drives.
Environmentalism is rare? Suicide is rare? Birth control is rare? Homosexuality is rare? Charity is rare?
>>Let's say we found some gland on some animal A that, when coaxed, produced something that could ONLY be consumed by another species B, and was poison to all other species. Surely this is a counterexample to Darwin!
No. The idea that one species producing something to be consumed by other species is an example of coevolution.
So I was right, any part "for" another species you can write off as coevolution. So Darwin's (or, if you prefer, Dawkins') claim says nothing.
>>Any part "for" the sole benefit of another species B necessarily helps A. So you cannot falsify.
You were saying that this could be falsified (and moreover was). You slipped off topic.
WRONG, Mr. Short Attention Span. Read our previous posts *one more time* starting from where I came in. I'm trying to help you all see how so-called "predictions" of evolution are either trivial, non-falsifiable, or falsified. Remember? Yeah. I listed an example of a falsified claim - that no member of any species would sacrifice itself for another species. You altered the claim to "no part of any species is ever formed for the sole benefit of another species". Change the claim, change the flaw. That's no longer falsified - it's now non-falsifiable. For the reasons I gave and which you
Thanks! Goodness knows I need them after some recent comments. Maybe you could put me on your friends list to help reduce the freak/fan ratio?
Hunger itself is quite non-trivial. Eating while hungry is also non-trivial.
... how would you prove otherwise?
False and false. A designer would also make species hungry. Further, a scientist will always say that an animal eating "must be hungry"
>>What does it mean to have the same "basic" building blocks?
In regard to DNA? It means A, C, G, T.
Okay, but that's not what the claim I gave said. It referred to the "basic building blocks" which could mean anything - including the carbon atom. Now do you see why it's non-falsifiable?
>>And if the bases were all different for every species, you'd be saying "well, they all have carbon".
If the bases were different for every species there might actually be some truth behind intelligent design. If each species had a different type of genetic code it would completely strike down common descent. Thus, falsifing it. Your comment wasn't a general building blocks comment, it was a DNA building blocks. DNA is a huge amount of evidence for common descent, and has proved itself to be a much better indicator of descent than dentition and other things we use.
False. Imagine alternate universes in which some subset of DNA were the fundamental building block. Then people would count that as evidence. That you cannot non-arbitrarily draw the line on what consistutes fundamental similarity means it's non-falsifiable. I can 100% guarantee you if a species were found with just A and T, scientists would just cite the A and T as evidence that we all have the "same basic DNA building blocks"... ergo, non-falsfiable.
>>I was referring to the befit[sic] of another species, as everyone but you understood it to mean.
Ah, sorry I assumed you had said something much less retarded. The VHEM is unique to humans, and a byproduct of large brains. Large brains are a huge evolutionary leap forward but do produce some counterevolutionary results. But the benifit of a large brain more than outweighs all the suicide and people not wanting to have children. You don't find such results in species that can't overrule their own personal drives (non-humans). You could also argue that art and religion and such wastes time, better spent mating.
Now you're reverting to Darwin's claim, not the claim I started out with, which said that no member of any species will perform an act of self-sacrifice for another species. That is falsified. Now, let's look at your claim. How is it falsifiable? How could you establish that a part of one species is "for" the sole benefit of another species? What does it mean to be "for" another species? It's ill-defined. Let's say we found some gland on some animal A that, when coaxed, produced something that could ONLY be consumed by another species B, and was poison to all other species. Surely this is a counterexample to Darwin! No, some genius would just say "but by having that gland for species B, B gains an incentive to maintain the presence of A, and thus, that helps A". See? Any part "for" the sole benefit of another species B necessarily helps A. So you cannot falsify. Rather, you label it co-evolution or something.
>>Except that this is not unique to evolutionary theory.
It falls squarely in evolution's corner. Because some objects fit perfectly into the predictions of both Newton and Einstein does not mean that the evidence is does not support that theory, it supports both and all theories that properly predicted such a thing. Where the theories predict different things is what weeds out other theories. Although, what other theory predicted such a thing?
If I posited that bacteria were designed, the observation you listed would be consistent with that. Ergo, it's trivial since pretty much any other explanation would allow for it.
>>You can totally dispute how species formed according ot it, yet still agree that antibiotics will spare all who were resistant to
Of course not. There are still planets to discover, and previously-though-useless things to be discovered as useful (oil used to be a nuisance, now it's money). Even if you want to focus on land on earth*, recall that "land" in the sense that Georgists use the term, is economic land, i.e., all nature-given material and opportunities external to the human body. So they want to auction oil extraction rights, for example. That is, if you discover oil, the state seizes it, auctions it, and gives the proceeds to everyone in equal shares. Thus, you have pretty much no incentive to "find new land".
If in the 1400's, Georgism had been implemented, people would be less enthusiastic about finding a new continent, since someone would collect its rent.
*This is actually an interesting point for Georgists. You could concede that "we all own the earth (but nothing outside)" and then, once space colonization proceeds, their policies become less and less relevant.
Libertarians are generally divided on what is the "best" tax, assuming there need be a tax at all. (i.e., you could fund the justice system by making criminals pay compensation plus admin costs divided by the recovery rate so courts and police are self-funded).
The people you're referring to in your post are called "geo-libertarians" or [Henry] Georgist libertarians. See
www.landvaluetax.org
www.henrygeorge.org
www.progress.org
Most libertarians, however, do not regard land as a "common resource" that everyone must share (or share the rent of). Many of them (like me) see a low LVT as the least bad tax. Georgists see the land value tax as being so good that even if you collected it and burned the money, you'd do everyone a favor.
The Georgist LVT gains its popularity from the idea that "so what if you tax land? It can't run away!" and "no one made land, why should you keep its value?". (The second ignores that land has to be discovered.)
There are a lot of taxes you can point to as being bad, like the income tax, but the biggest burden right now is how there are so damn many kinds of taxes! Just keeping up with them all and doing your tax preparations is a nightmare and HUGE time/money waster for millions of Americans. If we just switched to one tax, that simplifcation alone would save billions of dollars in explicit compliance costs alone (and billions more in redirecting people to doing what they like, not what has tax advantages).
Just ask yourself: how much is your time worth, and how much time did you spend preparing taxes? How much did you pay someone to do your taxes? What things did you do differently because of tax advantages? What did your company or employer do differently? How much does it spend on compliance because of the different kinds of taxes?
But then every time someone comes up with the simplifcation idea, like a Flat Tax or the so-called "FairTax", some genius figures out it will benefit the rich. Except that reducing this tremendous burden from the economy helps the poor too. This is not about "screwing the poor". If you want to make transfers to the poor, make a separate program. Don't complicate everyone's taxes to help. Seriously, I'm beginning to think some people have a scorched earth policy toward the rich - they'll advocate policies to hurt them even if they hurt the poor even more!
Now, I'm not necessarily endorsing the Flat Tax or "FairTax", but they're on the right track - if you just had one kind of tax (or even just one kind of tax for each level of government) the savings from this simplification alone would make the world a lot less kafkaesque and eliminate complications like in TFA.
According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, you could get at least 300 miles (480 km) before refueling. But let's say you could only get 100. With all the savings of not using gasoline (spend about 25% as much on fuel per mile), I'm sure a lot of people would be willing to swap out one car for an air car if it's just goint to be used to get to and from work, and just recharge it when you get home. You could recharge it anywhere there's an outlet, so you wouldn't even have to wait for that.
I admit I'm fuzzy on the maintainance (sp).
Also it should be mentioned that the oil industry owns stock in these American automobile companies so they have a financial incentive to create gas guzzlers.
... and that they'll ... have to ... imitate one day...
Good thing they don't own stock in the Japanese car companies that will be competing with them
What was your point again?
Let's promote a browser that everyone must independently find and install additional software for just so they can keep bookmarks between upgrades.
How come no one's trying to develop an air car? That is, you store the energy in compressed air. You could charge it with any kind of electricity, and no pollution would be emitted from the car while driving. Google "air car". The efficiency (ratio of output mechanical energy to stored energy) would be much higher, and because you just plug it in to recharge, the energy is much cheaper. All technology is already available except you may need a stronger tank for bigger loads.
Or I could just save time and use browsers that don't pose the risk of deleting all of my bookmarks just because I decided to upgrade, like IE. (okay, they're called favorites, but it's the same principle)
I'm not sure why I should have to risk having all of the bookmarks I've acquired over the years get deleted just because YAY! newest version of Firefox released!
No, communism is when everyone owns an equal share of all means of production. The model you've described is capitalism, but with different workers privately owning some of the MOP. Now, for some problems with this business model:
-You said it yourself: you either give freebies, or make employees pay to get in. Most don't like paying to have a job.
-The incentive structure doesn't look anything like what you've described. If I get an idea that adds $1000 in value to the company, and I implement it, that $1000 is dispersed over thousands of people. So I might get a few coins. Not an incentive to really work harder. To have true incentives you'd reward people for each contribution - but businesses already do that to the extent that they can identify it.
-Workers tend to want their cash now, not, you know, whenever the business becomes profitable. Most business plans involve "profit" way down the road. 1. Build the capital goods. 2. ??? = wait a long time. 3. Profit!
-Workers would, in effect, put all their eggs in one basket. If the firm does well, they grow rich, but if they encounter stiff competition, they could lose everything - their job and their portfolio. It would make more sense for workers to trade their shares for shares in a broad array of businesses. The predictable result would look much like the form of organization we have today: workers collect a fee for services and the distributed owners of the firm collect the variable profits and losses. Now, you could ban selling of shares, but this wouldn't accomplish much except to drive the practice underground and force workers to live with enormous risk.
-Most importantly, if you were really confident this would work, why not make a bet with some business. If they implement it and profits increase, they pay you; if not, you pay them. Since this is such a sure-fire way to improve productivity why not do it? Or get investors and start your own firm?
Nobody does this today because it's not efficient (including from the worker's point of view). Worker owned firms are already heavily favored by tax laws.
Old features
* 666999 - Still deletes your old bookmarks on updates.
That's a clever excuse. I could just as easily claim others did it to me. Like the people who changed "same basic DNA building blocks" to "the bases GTAC". Or the guy who inserted the word "only" into my claims. Or the guy who claimed (repeatedly) that I was trying to say evolution makes claims about individuals, when I was actually quoting a biologist who said so.
Once again, another very transparent claim. Give up while you're only sort of behind.
Well, this paradox arises in other areas too. Say you take nude photos of someone without their consent and without their face in it and publish them. The victim sues you. Then you say "How do you know they were photos of your body? We have to compare." Then someone would complain that this comparison was not made public.
Then why has everyone missed the point that I made in the post you just replied to? Why do they resort to "catching" me quote the same passage someone else did? Do you have a reply to the argument in the post you replied to? You do not.
1. The math used in the link assumes 40/h weeks for an entire summer? Google paid for the project, NOT for the hours. I could have just as easily worked 5 hours on a project and make several hundred dollars per hour.
2. It was more like a grant, or even a contract. There was no requirement that the participant work X hours, or a particular timeframe. Google paid for the project, not for the hours worked on it.
These are actually the same point, but if you feel the need to artificially inflate the appearance of support for your position, I completely understand.
According to you and only you, if I hire Mexicans to pick fruit for me, but pay them per-fruit-picked such that their wages come out to be under minimum wage, that's 100% acceptable, violates no laws, and should not be illegal. So I guess you don't really support minimum wage laws, you just support laws regarding how employers have to phrase their compensation.
3. Google Summer of Code != (does not equal for the layman) Current Plans to work on OO.o.
(Note: this is actually the second point.) Of course not. The point is Google is buying labor at below market rates, and they'll probably try the same thing for this project by digging up cheaper labor.
4. Your original argument stated below minimum wage, which last time I checked, was WELL below $9.30/h.
??? Oh, I understand. What you're trying to say is (thought in a rather roundabout way) is that you're not familiar with the laws of California and the cities therein. That's all you had to say.
By the way, I think the point was that if the project took longer, they could have been paid even under the federal min. wage.
What about other projects? Should we boycott Linux because thousands of Linux developers have been underpaid, or even gasp, not paid at all for contributions they've made to the kernel? Maybe you should think about boycotting Slashdot, the infrastructure is supported by open source applications written by developers who were either paid very low, or not paid at all.
If you look back at my original post, you'll see that it's satire. How refuting satire got you to +2 informative, I have no idea. Yes, it's good thing when people willing to work for less than the market rate contribute labor. I'm merely mocking the argument of those who claim it "steals jobs". Get it?
So again, I ask, what do you have to actually back up the statement that Google is going to underpay Indians and Chinese people to work on OO.o?
I have none. If what you actually meant was the claim that Google will pay them below what California programmers would get, and potentially below California's minimum wage, see... well, just reread everything I've posted.
Really? Then why didn't he say "No one has ever found a species altruistically serving another, without any gain for itself." ? Exactly as predicted, your defense morphs into "He just used unnecessary words, no big deal."
And there's a bigger problem too. Now that you've changed his claim into "No species has ever altruistically served another without any gain for itself" you've - oops - turned it into a trivial claim. You don't have to accept any of the controversial aspects of the theory of evolution in order to believe that a species that merely serves others without regard for itself *tends to go extinct*.
And then there's the falsifiability issue. Let's say there was some species similiar to a cow that would just run up to members of another species (like humans) and stand still until it was milked. This is altruistically serving another species without any gain for itself, right? No, because some genius would come along and say "this supposed altruism is just the quasi-cow trying to rook humans into taking care of it to ensure a milk supply and thus the survival of the species." The fact is, if you try hard enough, you can easily come up with an argument that some altruistic action of an entire species is really for its benefit. The only conclusive proof otherwise might be extinction but again... is "species that don't look after themselves tend to go extinct" really unique to the theory that all life on earth has a common ancestor? It is not.
Corporations don't pay taxes. Any tax they pay is passed on as a tax on employees, customers, or investors. You know, people. Cutting "hella" down on their taxes means employees, customers, or investors pay less tax. The corporate tax is one of the least efficient and most corrupt taxes. If your neighbor cheats on his taxes and you don't, you still earn an income. If one corporation cheats on its taxes and other does not, the non-cheating one is driven out of business. Not because of the other's acument in satisfying consumer needs, but because it can work the system better.
Oh, okay. And what makes you think I got it from the web? I really can't believe I'm continuing to dignify this. Your principle really does mean that if ANYONE ELSE has ever quoted the same passage, you have to also quote them. You and I both know that's wrong, so you can spare me the lecture. I bolded the passage, not because someone else happened to do it a few years ago in an obscure little internet article, but because that is the part I wanted to emphasize! And guess what? I sorta kinda mentioned that I added the bold.
l
s dic101118.html
6 1104a.htm
i mes-it-was-the-worst-of-times
5 62_0_10_0_C
t _of_times-it_was_the_worst_of/147366.html
You know what my favorite intro to a book is? It's the one in A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. It goes "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." (p. 1, bold added) as quoted in
http://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/cities.htm
http://www.bartleby.com/59/6/itwasthebest.html
http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/29595.html
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/c/charle
http://www.epinions.com/content_3173621892
http://www.courierpostonline.com/columnists/cxan0
http://www.answers.com/topic/it-was-the-best-of-t
http://www.alwayson-network.com/comments.php?id=7
http://en.thinkexist.com/quotation/it_was_the_bes
According to you and only you, I have to quote all those webpages whenever I want to quote the first like of that book. Otherwise, it's plagiarism. Oh, and I better cross my fingers and hope no one has bolded any part of that sentence.
Well, good work. You got me to dignify another person who really doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.