rkbabang

What a nice mischaracterization of someone trying to be Mother Theresa. No, it's not about "enjoying the fact that people are sick and starving so that you can feel virtuous taking care of them". It is actually about helping people who are sick and starving. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/04/mother-teresa-myth_n_2805697.html

I think that is an instance of the same phenomenon you see in a lot of different areas of life. Altruism and sacrifice are implicitly held as a moral ideal and self interest is regarded as distasteful at best. But since altruism is impossible to practice in a principled fashion, you get get a bifurcation between people's ideals and their actions. Most people think they should be Mother Teresa but they don't actually want to be washing feet in India anymore than they want to commit suicide. The last thing the world needs is everyone to actually want to be Mother Teresa (as opposed to just saying that and feeling guilty because they don't really want it). Nothing corrupts the soul more than enjoying the fact that people are sick and starving so that you can feel virtuous taking care of them. I'll take a world full of greedy capitalists anyday.

Hmm, I grew up in a small town with a lot of mom and pop type businesses. I don't know which ones were highly profitable and which ones weren't. There was a great ice cream shop that only opened in the summer that everyone went to. There was a chinese restaurant named "Ho Toy" (only a Chinese place could get away with that). I have a feeling no one will have a post as interesting as Jurgis though. The moral of his post is that you can ban the market, but in that case the black market becomes the market.

Our Cities Will Be Beautiful In The Driverless Future—But First We Have To Get There "There might be social pressure, too. In our hypothetical future, you’ll be accustomed to zipping from place to place with no traffic jams and few bad drivers. Then you see a human holdout, somebody insisting on driving their own car. It hurtles through the placid waves of robot-piloted transport, causing your own car to swerve. You look up from your newspaper, tutting and shaking your head. "Go back to 2015, you moron," you think as loud as you can, before returning to your sudoku. Now imagine you are at dinner with friends, and somebody confesses that they’re driving themselves home. The reaction may be the same as a smoker or drink-driver might get today. Social pressure may be the biggest propellant of change in the world today. Sydney, Australia-based radio content director Charlie Fox says "I think if you drive your own car, you'll be perceived [as] lower class. It will become a status thing.""

:) http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/nhpr/files/201505/new-hampshire-welcome-sign.jpg This was the article which kicked off the idea of the Free State Project in July of 2001: Announcement:The Free State Project

The reason I moved to New Hampshire 4 years ago: https://freestateproject.org/

As Lysander Spooner said "But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.”

I know you have this magic word "democracy" which makes things like theft and murder legitimate as long you can convince a majority in an area to agree. Let's go back to the man robbing you at the ATM. If there were 2 men and only you, a vote would come up 2 to 1 that you need to give them your money. Would that make it not theft? No? What about 3 or 4 men robbing you at the ATM? If not what number turns theft into taxation? Certainly half+1 of the voters in your town makes theft into taxation. There are some pretty small towns in the country so it apparently doesn't take many people to make might into right.

I guess I should also clarify. Not all taxes are theft. Just the current form of income tax and how the U.S. gov't aims to collect. A VAT tax, as I supported earlier, would only tax those who purchase items. If you don't want to pay the tax, you don't get the item. Just like any other transaction. The whole transaction is voluntary and nobody goes to jail for deciding not to buy items (and thus avoid the tax) like you do now if you avoid your income taxes. You can have a tax system that doesn't rely on organized theft, but as long as the government is taking something from you from a non-voluntary transaction that uses coercive forces and threats of violence, then I think it's pretty fair to call it theft. I disagree. I wish to buy something, someone else wishes to sell it. Neither of us wish to pay the tax, but I pay the tax to prevent violence from being used against me. That is theft. If the mob takes a percentage of a merchants sales, and the merchant passes on the cost to the customer, this would work the exact same way as a sales tax. If nothing is purchased no tax is paid. It is still theft.

I've never bought used books on Amazon, but I've had good luck buying used books on half.com (owned by ebay) You usually pay very little for the book and about $3 shipping. It uses the ebay rating system so the seller can rate the buyer and the buyer can rate the seller, if you have an ebay account you can buy/sell there.

Ah the roads. Yes, grade a strip of land, put down some gravel and a few layers of asphalt. How could such a feat ever be accomplished without violence? My dad was a contractor, I grew up working for a paving crew in the summers as a teenager. Most of the laborers were Portuguese immigrants like my dad, most couldn't read or write. I can assure you it would be possible to pave a road without the backing of the United States Federal government violently robbing every productive person in the 3.8 million square mile area it claims sovereignty over. Whatever good the government does doesn't matter to me in the least. Suppose you were robbed one night at the ATM. The masked man showed you a gun just to let you know that he had it, then told you to withdraw the maximum amount your bank would let you (say $500). He then took your money and ran. Suppose you found out months later that he had a daughter dying of cancer and he used your money plus the money from hundreds of others he similarly robbed to fund his daughters treatment and this treatment saved her life. You might feel good that an innocent girl will now live, but I maintain that her father is still a criminal and completely in the wrong for robbing you and threatening you with violence. It doesn't matter how laudable your goals are (feeding the hungry, healthcare for the needy, building a road, saving a young girl's life) you need to find a way to achieve them without threatening to use violence against your fellow man.

Libertarians (or anarcho-capitalists to be precise). I usually refer to myself as a libertarian or anarcho-capitalist, but I don't object to being called a liberal. Liberal, based on the latin "līber", basically means "free man". It is a perversion of language for the socialists to be using the term to describe themselves.

Can we at least start with "theft is wrong"? Probably not if we are discussing taxes. Involuntary tax is wrong? I've never in my life paid a tax voluntarily without the threat of violence hanging over my head. You give to charity, they take taxes. Indeed. This shows the value of paying taxes is lower than the price and therefore that there shouldn't be any taxes. If people want to do something jointly they'll join up and collect funds voluntarily. In a 100 years states will be way way smaller (if they exist at all). Agreed. Just look at WEB, he supports higher taxes on the rich. Yet does he donate his own money voluntarily to the US government above what the law demands or does he donate it to charity when he has the choice? His actions, not his words, tells you which he thinks has more value. The US treasury is the right place for other peoples money, just not his own. I don't believe there is any law that says you can't donate money to the US government if you wish. The entire conversation in this thread (with a few exceptions) can be summed up as: A group of people speculating on what they'd like to see done with resources other people have created after those resources have been taken from its creators by force. It is always fun to speculate what you would do if you could rob a bunch of money from other people isn't it? Yes I think in 200 years the state is going to have about as much power in society as religion does now. And people will look back at the 20th century as we now look back on the middle ages. The 21st century (really with the internet starting in the late 20th century) is the beginning of the new enlightenment. Most people just don't realize it yet.

Can we at least start with "theft is wrong"? Probably not if we are discussing taxes. Involuntary tax is wrong? I've never in my life paid a tax voluntarily without the threat of violence hanging over my head. You give to charity, they take taxes.

We could also play the role of the Europeans. Even if there are many millions of advanced civilizations we may be the most advanced in our galaxy, so we may make first contact when we visit a less advanced species on their home planet. There is a huge leap from travel within your solar system to travel between solar systems, there is another huge leap from there to travel between galaxies. It is plausible that we will find less advanced life in our solar system long before an intergalactic species finds us.

Anybody who posits a "Great Filter" has to remember that it has to be very very good filter. There are billions of stars/planets. There's also billions of years in development. So "Great Filter" has to be something on the order of 1B:1 if not stronger. Most of the filters proposed here and elsewhere are much more leaky IMO. There could be multiple filters. What if only 1 in a billion planets which can support life ever develop it. What if 1 in a billion planets which have life ever develop multicelled organisms. What if 1 in a billion planets with multicelled organisms ever develop a species with a large brain. What if 1 in a billion species with large brains have appendages able to grasp tools. What if 1 in a billion of those species has the right combination of smarts/crazy/rebelliousness to build a technological civilization. What if only 1 in a billion technological civilizations fail to destroy themselves before discovering faster than light travel, .... and on and on. There could be a great number of filters all put together comprising a Great Filter.

I agree and disagree with you. I disagree that most intelligent (at the level of human or higher) species would have no desire to go to space. There are obvious everyday communication advantages in having the ability to put objects in orbit around your planet. These advantages would be even more important on a larger planet where the potential distances are even greater than on Earth. Also, any species intelligent enough to put satellites in orbit would be intelligent enough to think that it might not be a good idea to have all of your eggs in one basket. The idea of colonizing nearby moons, planets, large asteroids naturally follows. Now where I agree with you. I don't think a species without the right mix of smart/crazy to do those things would ever build cities or have anything like what we call a civilization. This quote comes to mind: “Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and ‘progress,’ everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man’s refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, ‘Disobedience was man’s Original Virtue.” Robert Anton Wilson Progress comes from the smart/crazy/rebelliousness in human nature, and all three of these qualities together are even rare in us, but without individuals who posses all three we would never have been anymore than chimpanzees are today. I wonder if there are a ton of worlds out there with the intelligence equivalents of chimps and orcas on them where no species with appendages able to grasp tools ever evolves the smart/crazy/rebelliousness attributes required for real progress? Maybe that is the great filter.

Can we at least start with "theft is wrong"? Probably not if we are discussing taxes.

I'm not sure what we would/should do, but at least we would know.

Stephen Hawking has said similar things, that might be what you are thinking of. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/apr/26/stephen-hawking-issues-warning-on-aliens

I'm curious. Why is adesigar not getting the same comment? +1 +1 My ancestors were all poor (my father grew up with dirt floors/no plumbing/no heat/ac/ never learned to read etc... in fact except for me most of my family are still what many here would consider poor. Yet I agree with Eric 100%, and don't think he is being a jerk in the least. You should keep what you create and be able to do whatever you wish with it before and after you pass on.

One possible reason for the paradox is the simulation argument. The more I think about it the more reasonable the argument seems. I can't see any way to disprove it. The short version is that as a civilization becomes more and more advanced and computing power becomes more and more powerful, they will likely run ancestor simulations. If they do this, they will run lots of them. Thus it is more probable that we are in one of those simulations rather than part of the "real" world. Maybe quantum mechanics is just the simulations quantized approximation of the physics of the real universe. There may be other life in the real universe, but no other life but on this planet in our simulation.

Yes that is the line they want us to believe. What portion goes to the "less fortunate" as opposed to the military industrial complex or fighting the war on drugs or spying on everyone on the planet or ... The only reason a few exceedingly tiny crumbs are thrown to the less fortunate or used to sure up some of the crumbling infrastructure at all is so that we can keep believing that these things are the raison d'être for their existence.

The size of the estate shouldn't matter. Depends on what your goal is. If you intend to limit one individual from being given too much, then it should be an inheritance tax instead of an estate tax. $10m inherited by an only child is very different from $20m inherited by 8 children (4 of them spouses) and 14 grandchildren (22 people all put together). It's not a dynasty when you inherit less than a million! $20m may look like a lot, but it really only matters how much each person is actually getting IMO. +1 and anything left to charity should be tax free, so someone with $20M could leave $1M each to 10 people and $10M to charity. Anything that keeps it out of the hands of the politicians is a good thing.

It's bizarre. I've been wondering myself for years why Google Finance didn't just zoom past Yahoo! like it did everything else. I always wondered the same thing. Now I'm wondering why Yahoo would remove the one feature that differentiated it from all of its competitors and made it useful. Bizarre indeed. I don't get it.