You get that automatically if you have home directory encryption enabled
No, you don't. While you are logged in, your password file will be decrypted and visible to anybody who wants to read it, like a malware app. Home directory encryption is there to protect against offline attacks only, when your hard drives are stolen. To protect against malware running as you the password file must not be accessible to you.
Every computer programmer knows that any random number he generates programmatically is not "mathematically random". The strict definition being that the program to produce the number must be longer than the number, which, of course, is impractical. Pseudorandom is really the best we can do without special hardware.
But even if we could, it is still about unpredictability. Just because you can't predict the output of an RNG, doesn't mean it will always be unpredictable. People find new patterns that may fit your RNG's output and make it non-random. Randomness is not a permanent quality, as you can see, but exists only as long as we are unable to come up with some deterministic explanation for it.
People need to use the browser's password manager to avoid remembering or entering any passwords. There is no reason to keep it in your head when your computer is perfectly capable of doing it.
The problem with the current implementation is that you still have to enter the master password every time you start the browser, which leads most people to just not set one, which leads to the passwords being stored on the disk unencrypted and easily stolen.
The solution we need is to integrate authentication for the password manager with the login process. Store the passwords in an encrypted file, with the account password as the key. A password daemon, like ssh-agent, running as root can securely load and decrypt your password file at login time. It will remain unaccessible except through a specific interface. The interface can authenticate the calling application by using socket credentials passing and allow the user to explicitly let the firefox password manager (which will have to be a separate process and executable for this purpose) access the passwords.
This way the passwords are not accessible to any remote threat and are encrypted on disk to thwart any local threats. The user never has to enter any passwords except at login. Convenience and security.
Excuuuse me for not knowing whether my overpriced phone conforms to an undefined standard. What the hell is 4G anyway? And what do I care if iPhone 4 has 4G or not? Yeah, it may mean a 30% faster network, but with signal strength variations, congestion variations, and outrageous traffic pricing, I seriously doubt you could tell the difference between 4G and 3G or even 2G.
I get a tarball for some old project and get it to compile without warnings with g++. The task can take hours as I have to deal with old C programmers' hatred for const correctness, uberclever macros, use of variables called "class" and "new", reinvented containers, and general disregard for maintainer sanity. Approached with the right mindset this can become as entertaining as a video game, with frequent exclamations of "what kind of a moron would do this?!?"
I highly recommend Omega roguelike game for this purpose. In addition to all of the above mentioned qualities, it's got tons of entertaining content, being probably the best roguelike out there. It is relatively challenging to convert to an event-driven model suitable for a modern UI approach. And heck, it is just plain darn fun and easy to debug.
This rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy, robbing our cities and States of critical investments in infrastructure like bridges, ports, and levees; robbing our families and our children of critical investments in education and health care reform; robbing our seniors of the retirement and health security they have counted on. Every dollar we pay in interest is a dollar that is not going to investment in America's priorities.
why is your answer to EVERYTHING give the rich people more money?
First of all, the question is not whether to "give the rich people more money", but whether to take more money from them. Eliminating a tax exemption is raising taxes, so call it what it is.
Second, this tax hike will not take money from the rich - it will take money from you. The proposals under debate would raise taxes on oil companies, not "the rich". The oil companies are simply going to take that increase and pass it on to the price of oil, which raises the price of gas, which in turn will be paid by you and other poor shmucks all over the recession-hit-unemployed country.
Can you name ONE time your "give the rich more money" policy has EVER worked?
Can you name ONE time your "soak the rich" policy has EVER worked? Even one? Whenever you try to tax the rich, they always pass it on to you. Any business owner will pass the increased costs to the customers. A wealthy man can easily afford lawyers and accountants to find a way around the taxes. If no way can be found, he can pick up and move to another country - something you can't afford to do. In Maryland, for example, the governor recently decided to raise taxes on millionaires to raise revenue. Did any revenue get raised? Nope. Instead, the state's millionaire population was reduced in half. They just picked up and left. If any of them owned businesses, they probably took them too (that's not a public statistic, so I don't know)
In California, the governor decided to soak Amazon to get more sales tax revenue. Did that work? Of course not. Amazon stopped doing business in the state, taking all those "affiliates" and their jobs out of state. Here at least you have a plain example that raising taxes kills jobs. Here you can point to each business and say: the lost jobs went that way.
This is a good time to reread Marshall Brain's Manna, a short story about an automated manager system that turned the whole country into a jobless prison.
www.nearlyfreespeech.net will register your domains, host your website, forward your mail, and do it all without the soul-sucking experience you get everywhere else. Speaking as a satisfied customer.
Competition in a free market is desirable over government regulation for the reason that it gives you what you want rather than what some bleeding heart government official wants. If competition creates an environment filled with cheap, dangerous, low margin airlines, it would be because that's what people want. You may think it isn't good for them, or that dying from freak accidents is hurting their families, or whatever. The bottom line is that by buying what they wanted - cheap tickets - they signalled the market what sort of products should exist and the market delivered. Getting what you want is happiness. If you want a supersafe airline, you certainly are welcome to buy a plane and start one. Start with a small Cessna and as you get profits you can buy larger planes. On a free market that's easy. Today, government regulations on commercial air travel pretty much ensure you can't.
Offline mode. You can read your mail offline, write your mail offline, and queue it all up for sending all at once. This is particularly useful for those of us who still have no broadband in our area and have to rely on dialup or satellite instead of an always-on connection.
Speaking of offline mode: you also edit your emails in a decent editor which doesn't suck like all Web 2.0 usually does. It also auto-saves your progress, so if you lose network connectivity, you don't lose your message.
Push email. Thunderbird uses IMAP IDLE protocol to notify you of email as soon as it comes in. This way you don't have to keep checking it.
Plugins. Encryption in particular is not easy to do with gmail. There used to be a firefox plugin for it, but it is not maintained any more. With thunderbird you get enigmail which can automatically handle encryption for you.
I wonder why so few motherboards come with a TPM chip. With TPM you could set up a trusted boot sequence to immediately detect any tampering with the boot sector or the OS. I definitely intend to get a TPM-enabled board on my next upgrade. Unfortunately, now there's only Asus P7 series where you can buy the TPM module to plug in. Anybody know why it isn't available more widely?
As a college graduate with a BS in CS I can tell you straight out that college education is very much overestimated. If I hadn't wasted those years in college, I wouldn't have been any worse off.
If you want to learn something, don't go to college; go to a college library and just read about whatever it is you want to know. All the humanity courses in particular are a giant waste of time. It isn't that the subjects are necessarily worthless; it is the professors and their ultra-left-wing mindset that you are forced to adopt (at least for a while) in order to pass their courses. Thankfully, most of them can be avoided.
If employers didn't require a college degree, people wouldn't have been going to college quite so much and the world would be better off. As things are now, you don't go to college to learn - you go there to get a degree. You don't get a degree to become proficient at something - you merely need the degree to be employed doing the things you already know how to do. All these ramblings from other posters are totally off-topic; I don't want a liberal education, so stop preaching already how "valuable" it is.
I don't want anyone to pay more than their fair share in taxes
Well then you obviously must support raising taxes on the poor to pay for healthcare. After all, half the country pays no taxes, and the richest 10% pay three quarters of all taxes. Surely you don't think this fair? The poor are the ones who will be using this universal health care, so why should the rich be the ones to pay for it all? I don't know what definition of "fair" you could have in that twisted mind of yours, but this situation certainly does not fit mine.
I would gladly pay more than I do know if that is what it took to provide healthcare to all. How you can live with yourself when you believe innocent children and anyone too infirm to work should die I do not know.
The issue is not whether they should die or not. The issue is whether you have the right to use force to take my money to pay for their survival. There is a huge difference between charity and welfare: the former is voluntary, the latter is done at the point of a gun. You said that you would gladly pay more to provide universal health care; so why don't you do that? There are charities that provide free health services to the poor and you are free to contribute. Why do you insist that I and everyone else in the country must be robbed in order to pay for these services? How can you live with yourself when you advocate using violence to deprive people of their hard-earned property?
you believe the poor should die. because that's what will happen in your world. oh i know you won't come out and say that. and the idea probably repulses you
All right, I'll say it: the poor who can't afford treatment for their fatal illness should be allowed to die. Note that I didn't say "killed"; with you left wingers one must emphasise that. There is a big difference between killing somebody and not preventing his death. The former is what the right wing does not want, the latter is what the left wing does not want.
people can't afford their bills, avoid them, and the govt continually bails out the hospitals from going bankrupt. PAID FOR WITH YOUR TAXES
I don't know where you get that. If you "avoid" your bills, you will have to deal with debt collectors who will either try to legally force you to pay for what you have received, or force a bankrupcy. Yes, this is a negative outcome, but you got something you didn't pay for; that's stealing, so you very well deserve it.
now all i'm asking you to do IS STOP STICKING UP FOR FREELOADERS who avoid their bills
I couldn't agree with you more here. The freeloading practice should stop. You advocate forcing everyone in the country to pay for these people at gunpoint (remember, that's how taxes are collected). I advocate not treating them in the first place. If you can't afford it -- you don't get treated. End of story. Yes, if you have something fatal, then you will die. Tough. You have no right to rob the rest of us to prolong your life.
In other words: you keep saying that we should steal money from people to pay for these freeloaders, while I say we should not do that and let them get what they deserve. You are advocating a crime. I'm advocating justice.
Oh noes rationing, the same exact thing US healthcare does using money instead of another metric.
That's right; money is a method of rationing. It is, however, a just method of rationing. It gives you exactly what you have earned, and nothing more. That is called justice, and it is something we on the right wing belive in.
Those who can't afford it, don't get a choice. They would much prefer to live than have your foolish pride.
Sure they get a choice: earn the money or not. If you have not saved your earnings and decided instead to spend it all drinking at the pub, then it is your own fault that you have no money to spend on your medical treatment. The day of reckoning has come, grasshopper, and the your need alone will not persuade the ant to give you what he has saved.
Oh, you say, but medical treatment is so expensive that no average person can afford it. Well, tough. Then you will die. If you have not earned enough to trade for that expensive treatment, what right do you have to demand it by force? Yes, getting the money through taxing others is getting it by force. You think you are justified in your violent act because you are merely using it to buy your life rather than drugs. But what is your life worth to society? You know what it's worth; we measure that in money. However much money you have, that's how much your life is worth. If your life is not worth preserving, you will die. That is justice.
We on the right wing belive in justice: to everyone exactly what he has earned and nothing more. You on the left, don't. This is a core value and can not be changed by argument. You either believe it or you don't. I don't know how this happens; maybe you've had a screwed up childhood. The fact is, the value won't change, and neither will your view of equality and, consequently, of universal health care. So I say shut the fuck up and vote. The votes will be counted and we'll see if you get to force your views on the whole country or not. Democracy is a really bad system of government this way. Except for all the others, of course.
Nope, just a bare minimum for everyone. With each who can afford more free to purchase more.
That's exactly what Soviet Union doctrine was. Of course, anyone who could afford more was labeled "kulak", robbed, and sent to Siberia. Socialists everywhere hate the rich. If they can not kill the rich, they suck them dry with taxes. There is, of couse, another name for this philosophy: envy. You socialists are really just petty thieves, wanting what you have not earned, and lacking even the courage to physically steal it, resorting instead of forcing the government to do the dirty work for you. "Bare minimum" you say? Yeah, that's what you all say, until you get whatever that may be, then you inevitably raise the minimum. There are no natural limits to envy.
But the amount, of course, is beside the point. The point is that you want what you have not earned. Period. Starving and want food? Better earn your living then. Come up with something valuable, usually your labour, to exchange for food, or medicine, or whatever else you want. That honest practice is called living by economic means. Stealing food directly or getting money by mugging people or through taxes or by invading another country, are all the dishonest ways of living by political means. The honest way is capitalism, with property and value-for-value exchange. The dishonest way is socialism, with everything obtained by force. How you can belive in the latter and live with yourself I don't know.
>> that of universal equality and public service > You can try to redefine language however you like, good luck with that.
You're the one redefinining language. I'm russian and I've been thoroughly indoctrinated in socialist philosophy. Heck, the Soviet Union is the authority on socialism. If you disagree with a russian on socialism, you are WAY out of your league. Your arguments for health care, for example, are directly based on the "universal equality" value. You believe that everyone deserves the same thing everyone else is getting. In the Soviet Union that policy was pursued with a vengeance and resulted in everyone (except the power elite) becoming dirt poor. Yeah, we had free health care, and everyone got the same poor quality treatment. I'll choose a free country over that any day. The problem, of course, is finding a free country, since the whole world is becoming a socialist hellhole.
see their "socialist health care plans"? I ask because I have and I quite liked it.
I guess you haven't had anything serious yet, or you might have ended up in the news as yet another socialist health care horror story as you can't get drugs due to rationing or just die while you wait months for treatment. Heck, even the NHS director herself could not get treatment and died in her own hospital. In the US you won't get treated if you can't afford it, but when you can afford it, you will get treated. I'll take that over your lousy universal health care any day.
Oh, and once you let the government "take care of you", it immediately decides it has the right to tell you how to live, and if you have some unhealthy habit you will become a criminal. You can keep your socialist health care and I'll keep my freedom to do whatever the heck I want with my body and die when I choose, not you.
Please remember that when you get old. I don't want to hear about you collecting any SS or disability money.
Why don't you? I've been paying all that money into SS, so why shouldn't I take payments until I get it all back? I think that's fair. It is not immoral to take back what was stolen from you. It would be better to abolish social security in the first place though, and I would vote for anybody who wants to try.
For your information Socialist is not an insult, nor is it an accurate description of the political beliefs
Of course it isn't to you. When I tell you what you believe in, you are probably even proud of it. As for "accurate description", it is close enough. You keep changing the name of your beliefs as the names become derogatory to avoid believing in an insult. You also secretly believe that just because you change the name, people won't catch on. Well, I don't care what you call it. Socialism by any other name is socialism still. The core belief is still there - that of universal equality and public service. As long as that's still there, whatever name you choose I will treat as an insult.
No, I don't. I don't believe that letting the poor sick die will improve the "evolutionary level of society". I merely believe that a society achieves such a higher level through removing the use of force (such as the collection of taxes) against any individual. By forcing me at gunpoint (yes, you socialists tend to forget that tax collection is enforced with guns; taxes are not paid voluntarily) to pay for someone's healthcare, you are making society less free, and that is my primary objection.
What you believe, is that by treating the poor sick you will improve society, which is a much better fit to the concept of social darwinism, only in reverse. You want to help those who can not help themselves, thus encouraging the survival of the least fit. Perhaps it is because you believe you will yourself benefit from such a policy because you see yourself as one of them.
Dear Socialist, I am tired of explaining how on the right wing we do not consider health care to be a "right". How we do not think that everyone must receive treatment regardless of whether he can pay for it or not. How we do not think that robbing one man to pay for another's healthcare is moral. Or, heck, how those socialist health care plans in european countries don't really work as well as you think. I am tired of arguing, so I'll just tell you this: shut up and vote. You'll vote for universal health care, I'll vote against; the votes will be counted and the result will emerge. That's how democracy works. The loser gets to shut up, go home, and sulk.
It used to be that if you were broke and homeless, you could drop your hat on a street corner and make some cash playing music. I guess now being a performing artist is going to be illegal, and you'll just have to beg.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you don't. While you are logged in, your password file will be decrypted and visible to anybody who wants to read it, like a malware app. Home directory encryption is there to protect against offline attacks only, when your hard drives are stolen. To protect against malware running as you the password file must not be accessible to you.
Every computer programmer knows that any random number he generates programmatically is not "mathematically random". The strict definition being that the program to produce the number must be longer than the number, which, of course, is impractical. Pseudorandom is really the best we can do without special hardware.
But even if we could, it is still about unpredictability. Just because you can't predict the output of an RNG, doesn't mean it will always be unpredictable. People find new patterns that may fit your RNG's output and make it non-random. Randomness is not a permanent quality, as you can see, but exists only as long as we are unable to come up with some deterministic explanation for it.
People need to use the browser's password manager to avoid remembering or entering any passwords. There is no reason to keep it in your head when your computer is perfectly capable of doing it.
The problem with the current implementation is that you still have to enter the master password every time you start the browser, which leads most people to just not set one, which leads to the passwords being stored on the disk unencrypted and easily stolen.
The solution we need is to integrate authentication for the password manager with the login process. Store the passwords in an encrypted file, with the account password as the key. A password daemon, like ssh-agent, running as root can securely load and decrypt your password file at login time. It will remain unaccessible except through a specific interface. The interface can authenticate the calling application by using socket credentials passing and allow the user to explicitly let the firefox password manager (which will have to be a separate process and executable for this purpose) access the passwords.
This way the passwords are not accessible to any remote threat and are encrypted on disk to thwart any local threats. The user never has to enter any passwords except at login. Convenience and security.
Excuuuse me for not knowing whether my overpriced phone conforms to an undefined standard. What the hell is 4G anyway? And what do I care if iPhone 4 has 4G or not? Yeah, it may mean a 30% faster network, but with signal strength variations, congestion variations, and outrageous traffic pricing, I seriously doubt you could tell the difference between 4G and 3G or even 2G.
I get a tarball for some old project and get it to compile without warnings with g++. The task can take hours as I have to deal with old C programmers' hatred for const correctness, uberclever macros, use of variables called "class" and "new", reinvented containers, and general disregard for maintainer sanity. Approached with the right mindset this can become as entertaining as a video game, with frequent exclamations of "what kind of a moron would do this?!?"
I highly recommend Omega roguelike game for this purpose. In addition to all of the above mentioned qualities, it's got tons of entertaining content, being probably the best roguelike out there. It is relatively challenging to convert to an event-driven model suitable for a modern UI approach. And heck, it is just plain darn fun and easy to debug.
On Linux we've been doing that for years
in 2006. Here's then Senator Obama's argument against raising the debt ceiling:
I agree completely.
First of all, the question is not whether to "give the rich people more money", but whether to take more money from them. Eliminating a tax exemption is raising taxes, so call it what it is.
Second, this tax hike will not take money from the rich - it will take money from you. The proposals under debate would raise taxes on oil companies, not "the rich". The oil companies are simply going to take that increase and pass it on to the price of oil, which raises the price of gas, which in turn will be paid by you and other poor shmucks all over the recession-hit-unemployed country.
Can you name ONE time your "soak the rich" policy has EVER worked? Even one? Whenever you try to tax the rich, they always pass it on to you. Any business owner will pass the increased costs to the customers. A wealthy man can easily afford lawyers and accountants to find a way around the taxes. If no way can be found, he can pick up and move to another country - something you can't afford to do. In Maryland, for example, the governor recently decided to raise taxes on millionaires to raise revenue. Did any revenue get raised? Nope. Instead, the state's millionaire population was reduced in half. They just picked up and left. If any of them owned businesses, they probably took them too (that's not a public statistic, so I don't know)
In California, the governor decided to soak Amazon to get more sales tax revenue. Did that work? Of course not. Amazon stopped doing business in the state, taking all those "affiliates" and their jobs out of state. Here at least you have a plain example that raising taxes kills jobs. Here you can point to each business and say: the lost jobs went that way.
This is a good time to reread Marshall Brain's Manna, a short story about an automated manager system that turned the whole country into a jobless prison.
www.nearlyfreespeech.net will register your domains, host your website, forward your mail, and do it all without the soul-sucking experience you get everywhere else. Speaking as a satisfied customer.
Competition in a free market is desirable over government regulation for the reason that it gives you what you want rather than what some bleeding heart government official wants. If competition creates an environment filled with cheap, dangerous, low margin airlines, it would be because that's what people want. You may think it isn't good for them, or that dying from freak accidents is hurting their families, or whatever. The bottom line is that by buying what they wanted - cheap tickets - they signalled the market what sort of products should exist and the market delivered. Getting what you want is happiness. If you want a supersafe airline, you certainly are welcome to buy a plane and start one. Start with a small Cessna and as you get profits you can buy larger planes. On a free market that's easy. Today, government regulations on commercial air travel pretty much ensure you can't.
I wonder why so few motherboards come with a TPM chip. With TPM you could set up a trusted boot sequence to immediately detect any tampering with the boot sector or the OS. I definitely intend to get a TPM-enabled board on my next upgrade. Unfortunately, now there's only Asus P7 series where you can buy the TPM module to plug in. Anybody know why it isn't available more widely?
People used to go to the wilderness to get away from it all. These days they go for the livejournal entries.
As a college graduate with a BS in CS I can tell you straight out that college education is very much overestimated. If I hadn't wasted those years in college, I wouldn't have been any worse off.
If you want to learn something, don't go to college; go to a college library and just read about whatever it is you want to know. All the humanity courses in particular are a giant waste of time. It isn't that the subjects are necessarily worthless; it is the professors and their ultra-left-wing mindset that you are forced to adopt (at least for a while) in order to pass their courses. Thankfully, most of them can be avoided.
If employers didn't require a college degree, people wouldn't have been going to college quite so much and the world would be better off. As things are now, you don't go to college to learn - you go there to get a degree. You don't get a degree to become proficient at something - you merely need the degree to be employed doing the things you already know how to do. All these ramblings from other posters are totally off-topic; I don't want a liberal education, so stop preaching already how "valuable" it is.
Well then you obviously must support raising taxes on the poor to pay for healthcare. After all, half the country pays no taxes, and the richest 10% pay three quarters of all taxes. Surely you don't think this fair? The poor are the ones who will be using this universal health care, so why should the rich be the ones to pay for it all? I don't know what definition of "fair" you could have in that twisted mind of yours, but this situation certainly does not fit mine.
The issue is not whether they should die or not. The issue is whether you have the right to use force to take my money to pay for their survival. There is a huge difference between charity and welfare: the former is voluntary, the latter is done at the point of a gun. You said that you would gladly pay more to provide universal health care; so why don't you do that? There are charities that provide free health services to the poor and you are free to contribute. Why do you insist that I and everyone else in the country must be robbed in order to pay for these services? How can you live with yourself when you advocate using violence to deprive people of their hard-earned property?
All right, I'll say it: the poor who can't afford treatment for their fatal illness should be allowed to die. Note that I didn't say "killed"; with you left wingers one must emphasise that. There is a big difference between killing somebody and not preventing his death. The former is what the right wing does not want, the latter is what the left wing does not want.
I don't know where you get that. If you "avoid" your bills, you will have to deal with debt collectors who will either try to legally force you to pay for what you have received, or force a bankrupcy. Yes, this is a negative outcome, but you got something you didn't pay for; that's stealing, so you very well deserve it.
I couldn't agree with you more here. The freeloading practice should stop. You advocate forcing everyone in the country to pay for these people at gunpoint (remember, that's how taxes are collected). I advocate not treating them in the first place. If you can't afford it -- you don't get treated. End of story. Yes, if you have something fatal, then you will die. Tough. You have no right to rob the rest of us to prolong your life.
In other words: you keep saying that we should steal money from people to pay for these freeloaders, while I say we should not do that and let them get what they deserve. You are advocating a crime. I'm advocating justice.
That's right; money is a method of rationing. It is, however, a just method of rationing. It gives you exactly what you have earned, and nothing more. That is called justice, and it is something we on the right wing belive in.
Sure they get a choice: earn the money or not. If you have not saved your earnings and decided instead to spend it all drinking at the pub, then it is your own fault that you have no money to spend on your medical treatment. The day of reckoning has come, grasshopper, and the your need alone will not persuade the ant to give you what he has saved.
Oh, you say, but medical treatment is so expensive that no average person can afford it. Well, tough. Then you will die. If you have not earned enough to trade for that expensive treatment, what right do you have to demand it by force? Yes, getting the money through taxing others is getting it by force. You think you are justified in your violent act because you are merely using it to buy your life rather than drugs. But what is your life worth to society? You know what it's worth; we measure that in money. However much money you have, that's how much your life is worth. If your life is not worth preserving, you will die. That is justice.
We on the right wing belive in justice: to everyone exactly what he has earned and nothing more. You on the left, don't. This is a core value and can not be changed by argument. You either believe it or you don't. I don't know how this happens; maybe you've had a screwed up childhood. The fact is, the value won't change, and neither will your view of equality and, consequently, of universal health care. So I say shut the fuck up and vote. The votes will be counted and we'll see if you get to force your views on the whole country or not. Democracy is a really bad system of government this way. Except for all the others, of course.
That's exactly what Soviet Union doctrine was. Of course, anyone who could afford more was labeled "kulak", robbed, and sent to Siberia. Socialists everywhere hate the rich. If they can not kill the rich, they suck them dry with taxes. There is, of couse, another name for this philosophy: envy. You socialists are really just petty thieves, wanting what you have not earned, and lacking even the courage to physically steal it, resorting instead of forcing the government to do the dirty work for you. "Bare minimum" you say? Yeah, that's what you all say, until you get whatever that may be, then you inevitably raise the minimum. There are no natural limits to envy.
But the amount, of course, is beside the point. The point is that you want what you have not earned. Period. Starving and want food? Better earn your living then. Come up with something valuable, usually your labour, to exchange for food, or medicine, or whatever else you want. That honest practice is called living by economic means. Stealing food directly or getting money by mugging people or through taxes or by invading another country, are all the dishonest ways of living by political means. The honest way is capitalism, with property and value-for-value exchange. The dishonest way is socialism, with everything obtained by force. How you can belive in the latter and live with yourself I don't know.
>> that of universal equality and public service
> You can try to redefine language however you like, good luck with that.
You're the one redefinining language. I'm russian and I've been thoroughly indoctrinated in socialist philosophy. Heck, the Soviet Union is the authority on socialism. If you disagree with a russian on socialism, you are WAY out of your league. Your arguments for health care, for example, are directly based on the "universal equality" value. You believe that everyone deserves the same thing everyone else is getting. In the Soviet Union that policy was pursued with a vengeance and resulted in everyone (except the power elite) becoming dirt poor. Yeah, we had free health care, and everyone got the same poor quality treatment. I'll choose a free country over that any day. The problem, of course, is finding a free country, since the whole world is becoming a socialist hellhole.
I guess you haven't had anything serious yet, or you might have ended up in the news as yet another socialist health care horror story as you can't get drugs due to rationing or just die while you wait months for treatment. Heck, even the NHS director herself could not get treatment and died in her own hospital. In the US you won't get treated if you can't afford it, but when you can afford it, you will get treated. I'll take that over your lousy universal health care any day.
Oh, and once you let the government "take care of you", it immediately decides it has the right to tell you how to live, and if you have some unhealthy habit you will become a criminal. You can keep your socialist health care and I'll keep my freedom to do whatever the heck I want with my body and die when I choose, not you.
Why don't you? I've been paying all that money into SS, so why shouldn't I take payments until I get it all back? I think that's fair. It is not immoral to take back what was stolen from you. It would be better to abolish social security in the first place though, and I would vote for anybody who wants to try.
Of course it isn't to you. When I tell you what you believe in, you are probably even proud of it. As for "accurate description", it is close enough. You keep changing the name of your beliefs as the names become derogatory to avoid believing in an insult. You also secretly believe that just because you change the name, people won't catch on. Well, I don't care what you call it. Socialism by any other name is socialism still. The core belief is still there - that of universal equality and public service. As long as that's still there, whatever name you choose I will treat as an insult.
No, I don't. I don't believe that letting the poor sick die will improve the "evolutionary level of society". I merely believe that a society achieves such a higher level through removing the use of force (such as the collection of taxes) against any individual. By forcing me at gunpoint (yes, you socialists tend to forget that tax collection is enforced with guns; taxes are not paid voluntarily) to pay for someone's healthcare, you are making society less free, and that is my primary objection.
What you believe, is that by treating the poor sick you will improve society, which is a much better fit to the concept of social darwinism, only in reverse. You want to help those who can not help themselves, thus encouraging the survival of the least fit. Perhaps it is because you believe you will yourself benefit from such a policy because you see yourself as one of them.
Dear Socialist,
I am tired of explaining how on the right wing we do not consider health care to be a "right". How we do not think that everyone must receive treatment regardless of whether he can pay for it or not. How we do not think that robbing one man to pay for another's healthcare is moral. Or, heck, how those socialist health care plans in european countries don't really work as well as you think. I am tired of arguing, so I'll just tell you this: shut up and vote. You'll vote for universal health care, I'll vote against; the votes will be counted and the result will emerge. That's how democracy works. The loser gets to shut up, go home, and sulk.
It used to be that if you were broke and homeless, you could drop your hat on a street corner and make some cash playing music. I guess now being a performing artist is going to be illegal, and you'll just have to beg.