The plan only failed because the guy never actually bought the land, and was only running a scam by claiming the land was his. My guess is that his plan was to temporarily cripple local law enforcement and then sell off parts of "his" land before anyone figured out that it wasn't actually his. The whole libertarian-takeover thing was just a cover story for a real-estate scam.
If he had legitimately bought the land, things would have turned out much differently.
There was an incredibly depressing book I once read that talked about something very similar, except it was a social contagion that caused hive-mind behavior (the book called it "the meme"), and the only way to "cure" it was to erase every memory the person had formed since being exposed to the meme
In the book, the entire earth is "infected" with it, and the only non-memed people lived on an isolated moon base (which is where the book takes place)
I tried to find the author or the name of the book on Google, but had no luck
It's easy to boycott a real store, you just stand outside with a sign and a bullhorn (and a copy of your rights, for the rights-impaired officer that tries to make you leave). It's a bit harder to boycott a website where none of the customers ever meet each other.
Even the public shaming that SportsDirect.com got from prime-time UK TV wasn't enough to convince them to change. (And they clearly knew about it, because they responded to the show by saying "we are doing nothing wrong, we will not change, it's the customer's fault for not removing the crap we added")
But it's clear that the law was extremely effective, because they immediately changed their behavior.
I have a news flash for you, corporations don't care AT ALL what the public thinks. Comcast and Time Warner's refusal to change behavior despite winning the "Most hated company in America" award is a clear example of that. Sometimes even a boycott (or public shaming) isn't enough, and you need stronger measures.
The system you are describing is basically the current semi-socialist US system of high(ish) taxes on high income, and high welfare on low income, except you are basing it on amount of land owned, instead of income.
The problem is that, in switching to this system, the one group that will feel most harmed by this change is the people who currently own the most land, which also tends to be the same people flooding the government with lobbyist money, meaning that this will likely never happen (without some sort of peasant revolt anyway).
It's the same thing standing in the way of any significant social reform. The people in power want the system to stay broken, because it's the brokenness of the system (and their exploitation of it) that gives them that power in the first place.
You really want to fix the problem for good? Make voting power unequal, and inverse to land ownership. The more land you own, and the more money you have, the LESS voting power you get. Make power and wealth mutually exclusive.
You could even go as far as adding poverty to the requirement of being president. Not only do you need to be US-born, you also need to have lived in 400 sqft apartment (or less) and eaten nothing but food-shelf and soup kitchen for a minimum of 2 consecutive years (during your adult life).
If it was legal to pay whatever the employer wanted to pay, the average McDonalds worker would be making 45 cents an hour. It doesn't matter how little the amount is, you will always find someone desperate enough to work for literal peanuts, therefore market pressure alone can't raise wages. If market pressure can't do it, the law has to (or it will never get done).
There are things that MUST be done (like making sure everyone is housed, fed, and healthy) that market pressures have no incentive to do. You employer doesn't care if you you are starving or sick, because when you become too ill to work, he can just replace you. It's the government's job to FORCE the employer to provide proper wages for his employees, because he has no other incentives to do so beyond legal repercussions
You have 3 options: A) Provide a minimum wage so that everyone can afford food and rent. (current US method) B) Drastically raise taxes to provide food and housing directly to the people who need it. (socialist method) C) Just let the starving and homeless people die (Tea Party/Libertarian method)
Different kind of "free". I think he was referring to "free(with ads)" not "free, as in open source" Also, some download sites are wrapping free software inside their own adware-spewing "installer"
A few years ago, UK-based SportsDirect.com got into trouble with the consumer-rights TV show Watchdog, because it was secretly adding a coffee mug and sports magazine to everyone's shopping cart. When I saw the old reruns of the show last week I decided to check out the site and they were still doing this crap even as recent as last week.
I checked the site just now, and they have finally stopped.
It just proves that no amount of public outcry will ever be as effective as simply using the law to regulate business. If you don't like the way a company does things, the only way to make them change is to FORCE them to change.
If the wire was used entirely for broadband, instead of 300 channels of crap nobody watches and 10 million phone lines that nobody wanted, it would be enough bandwidth to make the entire fiber-optic debate moot (for another 30 years anyway)
IRC would be the perfect test bed for a turing test. The AI only has to be as convincing as a real IRC user, and some of those "real users" would barely pass a normal Turing test.
A recent study of World of Warcraft players showed that male players who played as female avatars had a subconscious tendency to adopt female speaking characteristics.
"When selecting female avatars, these men strongly preferred attractive avatars with traditional hairstyles—long, flowing locks as opposed to a pink mohawk. And their chat patterns shifted partway toward how the real women spoke: These men used more emotional phrases and more exclamation points than the men who did not gender-switch. In other words, these men created female avatars that were stereotypically beautiful and emotional."
Then why are they trying so hard to make sure that only the wealthiest of the wealthy have any hope of winning even a single bitcoin from this auction?
It's not like a house or car or something that can't be subdivided and must be sold as a single item. They could break this auction into any number of smaller lots, but they intentionally chose to break it into as few as possible, in order to artificially raise the barrier to entry so that only those people with a spare $2 million in cash are allowed to bid.
But you generally don't see 100 yachts sold as a single item. They have $18 million worth of property, and there only breaking it into $2 million chunks.
A more real-world example would be a car collection seized from a drug dealer, they don't auction the entire collection as one single item do they?
If you destroyed the keys (and they were the only copy) wouldn't you be effectively destroying the bitcoins as well (since they can never again be spent)?
If they have 29,000 bitcoins, why do they have to sell them in such large chunks? Even switching to 29 lots of 1000 would open the door to significantly more bidders/ When they bust a drug dealer, they don't sell his entire car collection in a single massive lot, so why are they doing such large bundles this time?
I think the government doesn't really want the public to have these bitcoins, and they are only selling them because they are legally required auction-off seized assets. Their ideal buyer would be someone who never shares them and never spends them, effectively removing them from circulation.
I suspect that there is some other law setting a maximum value for lots, otherwise they would have just sold the entire thing as one lot, in the hope that NOBODY would buy them, and the asset could be declared valueless and simply destroyed.
This reminds me of something one of my friends told me about signing up for facebook in the early days.
He had created an account, and started following a few famous actors and such, then lost interest in it for a while because nobody really used it yet.
Later, when it became popular, he decided to log in again. In his news feed was the strangest stuff being posted by one of the actors he was following.
The profile was called "The Tony Danza". He had thought he was following the profile of the actor at the time, when in reality "The Tony Danza" is a sex move. http://www.urbandictionary.com...
Maybe some states would finally have suitable vehicles to use as snow plows, when they suddenly get more snow in 24 hours that they usually get in 3 years
I agree in this case. Being the only reasonably big town in the middle of nowhere makes you the middle of a 3 ring circus when a natural disaster hits. The more communications capability you have, the better off you are.
Hopefully they were smart enough to make sure the thing actually operates on civilian frequencies, and not just the military ones.
There is a big difference between driving style and driving reflex, and when you are in a panic stop situation it's all reflex. Just switching between manual and automatic is hard for some people, and that isn't even a panic situation.
Also, it doesn't help when it's not your car, and you had no idea it had ABS.
The biggest problem is that the two control styles are mutually incompatible, the best technique for one is the worst technique for the other.
Slashdot Mirror
The plan only failed because the guy never actually bought the land, and was only running a scam by claiming the land was his.
My guess is that his plan was to temporarily cripple local law enforcement and then sell off parts of "his" land before anyone figured out that it wasn't actually his. The whole libertarian-takeover thing was just a cover story for a real-estate scam.
If he had legitimately bought the land, things would have turned out much differently.
I sure wish slashdot had an edit button.....
Anyways, The author is John Barnes, and the book was part of the "Meme Wars" series
There was an incredibly depressing book I once read that talked about something very similar, except it was a social contagion that caused hive-mind behavior (the book called it "the meme"), and the only way to "cure" it was to erase every memory the person had formed since being exposed to the meme
In the book, the entire earth is "infected" with it, and the only non-memed people lived on an isolated moon base (which is where the book takes place)
I tried to find the author or the name of the book on Google, but had no luck
Can't they subpoena data from everyone else at the IRS who sent or received emails from the employees under investigation?
By it's very nature, there are always 2 copies of every email, one on the sender's PC and one on the receiver's PC.
It's easy to boycott a real store, you just stand outside with a sign and a bullhorn (and a copy of your rights, for the rights-impaired officer that tries to make you leave). It's a bit harder to boycott a website where none of the customers ever meet each other.
Even the public shaming that SportsDirect.com got from prime-time UK TV wasn't enough to convince them to change. (And they clearly knew about it, because they responded to the show by saying "we are doing nothing wrong, we will not change, it's the customer's fault for not removing the crap we added")
But it's clear that the law was extremely effective, because they immediately changed their behavior.
I have a news flash for you, corporations don't care AT ALL what the public thinks. Comcast and Time Warner's refusal to change behavior despite winning the "Most hated company in America" award is a clear example of that. Sometimes even a boycott (or public shaming) isn't enough, and you need stronger measures.
The system you are describing is basically the current semi-socialist US system of high(ish) taxes on high income, and high welfare on low income, except you are basing it on amount of land owned, instead of income.
The problem is that, in switching to this system, the one group that will feel most harmed by this change is the people who currently own the most land, which also tends to be the same people flooding the government with lobbyist money, meaning that this will likely never happen (without some sort of peasant revolt anyway).
It's the same thing standing in the way of any significant social reform. The people in power want the system to stay broken, because it's the brokenness of the system (and their exploitation of it) that gives them that power in the first place.
You really want to fix the problem for good? Make voting power unequal, and inverse to land ownership. The more land you own, and the more money you have, the LESS voting power you get. Make power and wealth mutually exclusive.
You could even go as far as adding poverty to the requirement of being president. Not only do you need to be US-born, you also need to have lived in 400 sqft apartment (or less) and eaten nothing but food-shelf and soup kitchen for a minimum of 2 consecutive years (during your adult life).
If it was legal to pay whatever the employer wanted to pay, the average McDonalds worker would be making 45 cents an hour. It doesn't matter how little the amount is, you will always find someone desperate enough to work for literal peanuts, therefore market pressure alone can't raise wages. If market pressure can't do it, the law has to (or it will never get done).
There are things that MUST be done (like making sure everyone is housed, fed, and healthy) that market pressures have no incentive to do. You employer doesn't care if you you are starving or sick, because when you become too ill to work, he can just replace you. It's the government's job to FORCE the employer to provide proper wages for his employees, because he has no other incentives to do so beyond legal repercussions
You have 3 options:
A) Provide a minimum wage so that everyone can afford food and rent. (current US method)
B) Drastically raise taxes to provide food and housing directly to the people who need it. (socialist method)
C) Just let the starving and homeless people die (Tea Party/Libertarian method)
Different kind of "free". I think he was referring to "free(with ads)" not "free, as in open source"
Also, some download sites are wrapping free software inside their own adware-spewing "installer"
A few years ago, UK-based SportsDirect.com got into trouble with the consumer-rights TV show Watchdog, because it was secretly adding a coffee mug and sports magazine to everyone's shopping cart. When I saw the old reruns of the show last week I decided to check out the site and they were still doing this crap even as recent as last week.
I checked the site just now, and they have finally stopped.
It just proves that no amount of public outcry will ever be as effective as simply using the law to regulate business. If you don't like the way a company does things, the only way to make them change is to FORCE them to change.
If the wire was used entirely for broadband, instead of 300 channels of crap nobody watches and 10 million phone lines that nobody wanted, it would be enough bandwidth to make the entire fiber-optic debate moot (for another 30 years anyway)
IRC would be the perfect test bed for a turing test. The AI only has to be as convincing as a real IRC user, and some of those "real users" would barely pass a normal Turing test.
A recent study of World of Warcraft players showed that male players who played as female avatars had a subconscious tendency to adopt female speaking characteristics.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut...
"When selecting female avatars, these men strongly preferred attractive avatars with traditional hairstyles—long, flowing locks as opposed to a pink mohawk. And their chat patterns shifted partway toward how the real women spoke: These men used more emotional phrases and more exclamation points than the men who did not gender-switch. In other words, these men created female avatars that were stereotypically beautiful and emotional."
Then why are they trying so hard to make sure that only the wealthiest of the wealthy have any hope of winning even a single bitcoin from this auction?
It's not like a house or car or something that can't be subdivided and must be sold as a single item. They could break this auction into any number of smaller lots, but they intentionally chose to break it into as few as possible, in order to artificially raise the barrier to entry so that only those people with a spare $2 million in cash are allowed to bid.
But you generally don't see 100 yachts sold as a single item.
They have $18 million worth of property, and there only breaking it into $2 million chunks.
A more real-world example would be a car collection seized from a drug dealer, they don't auction the entire collection as one single item do they?
If you destroyed the keys (and they were the only copy) wouldn't you be effectively destroying the bitcoins as well (since they can never again be spent)?
They could still do 29 lots of 1000, instead of 9 lots of 3000
They just don't want the public to have bitcoins.
If they have 29,000 bitcoins, why do they have to sell them in such large chunks? Even switching to 29 lots of 1000 would open the door to significantly more bidders/
When they bust a drug dealer, they don't sell his entire car collection in a single massive lot, so why are they doing such large bundles this time?
I think the government doesn't really want the public to have these bitcoins, and they are only selling them because they are legally required auction-off seized assets.
Their ideal buyer would be someone who never shares them and never spends them, effectively removing them from circulation.
I suspect that there is some other law setting a maximum value for lots, otherwise they would have just sold the entire thing as one lot, in the hope that NOBODY would buy them, and the asset could be declared valueless and simply destroyed.
This reminds me of something one of my friends told me about signing up for facebook in the early days.
He had created an account, and started following a few famous actors and such, then lost interest in it for a while because nobody really used it yet.
Later, when it became popular, he decided to log in again. In his news feed was the strangest stuff being posted by one of the actors he was following.
The profile was called "The Tony Danza". He had thought he was following the profile of the actor at the time, when in reality "The Tony Danza" is a sex move. http://www.urbandictionary.com...
From what I understand, that would mean that Joe Democrat CAN'T vote during the Demomcrat primary, if he has already voted in the Republican one.
The biggest one that most people worry about in their yard is dandelions, because of how far they can spread.
Hopefully it's possible to remove some of the bottom armor to save weight.
Depending on where you live, tall grass can become a habitat for poisonous snakes.
Mostly they are just worried about the weeds from your yard spreading to the neighbors' yards.
Maybe some states would finally have suitable vehicles to use as snow plows, when they suddenly get more snow in 24 hours that they usually get in 3 years
I agree in this case. Being the only reasonably big town in the middle of nowhere makes you the middle of a 3 ring circus when a natural disaster hits. The more communications capability you have, the better off you are.
Hopefully they were smart enough to make sure the thing actually operates on civilian frequencies, and not just the military ones.
There is a big difference between driving style and driving reflex, and when you are in a panic stop situation it's all reflex.
Just switching between manual and automatic is hard for some people, and that isn't even a panic situation.
Also, it doesn't help when it's not your car, and you had no idea it had ABS.
The biggest problem is that the two control styles are mutually incompatible, the best technique for one is the worst technique for the other.