rkbabang

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.

Yuk, you know what that looks like in 40 years? 35% tax all income - Including capital gains, dividends, gifts with tons of exceptions, graduations, loopholes, deductions, all with complicated rules (see current tax code) 8.5% federal tax on all liquid assets and real estate with tons of exceptions, loopholes, deductions, complications etc 10.5% VAT on all goods and services with tons of exceptions, loopholes, complications, etc Get rid of cash - Everything must be done electronically (the ultimate surveillance/police state, see: Orwell, George, "1984") $2k tax credit per dependent with complicated rules and income limitations Family of 4 with a 400k house, 1M in liquid assets, making 180k per year pays much more than 26k in taxes. Family of 2 making 50k pays much more than $3600 (same as FICA now) Businesses- 45% Tax on all income (minus allowable expenses) with complicated rules, loopholes, deductions, exceptions, etc... 20.5% of all liquid assets and real estate with complicated rules, loopholes, deductions, exceptions, etc... 2% tax credit on payroll + benefits up to 12k per employee with complicated rules, loopholes, deductions, exceptions, etc... End result more taxes paid, more man-hours spent figuring out multiple different types of taxes, 10X worse off than we are now. At least if you make it one type of tax and simple, the worse that can happen is that it becomes complicated again and needs another reset.

How can anyone look at the current tax code and the enormous number of man-hours american citizens and corporations waste complying with it and not think that something drastic needs to be done? Rand Paul isn't even half the Libertarian his father is, but in many areas I agree with him, he's far and away better than the Clinton's, Bush's, and other candidates who spend hundred's of thousands of taxpayer's dollars gouging their fat faces on food.

Does google finance still not support options? Has anyone tried any of the software packages? Such as: http://www.investmentaccountmanager.com/ Most of the other online portfolio sites I can find work like Mint where it accesses your accounts directly and downloads info. These usually don't show you or report cost basis info. And they don't continuously update the quotes in real time during the day like yahoo does.

Oops, how could I forget the world famous Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer.

Perhaps http://www.amazon.com/Tuscan-Whole-Milk-Gallon-128/dp/B00032G1S0 or this http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001SNVXYA/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_3?pf_rd_p=1944687562&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B00032G1S0&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=0TDC96EFZAK69FX9QQ58 Thanks, I've seen the milk one, but I never saw the toilet seat ebook before. These are good as well: Accoutrements Yodelling Pickle The Mountain Three Wolf Moon Short Sleeve Tee Uranium Ore Sharp, Provolone Piccante Cheese (Whole Wheel) Approximately 60 Lbs

I've been using Yahoo Finance Portfolios feature to track my portfolio for a long time, I've got every trade I've made since August of 2000 in there and now today I get a popup which says: I guess I need to find some other way to easily track my portfolio. Many of the other free online options don't do foreign stocks, pinksheets, or options. Yahoo worked rather well until today, it even did bitcoin.

I buy a lot on Amazon and usually find the reviews helpful. You kind of have to filter them a bit though. For good reviews you can sometimes tell they have only used the product for a short amount of time and probably don't have much experience with it yet. I always take those "VINE" payed reviews with a grain of salt as well. For negative reviews I ignore the reviews that sound like the person writing the review is an idiot and bought the wrong product or couldn't figure out how to use it. I also ignore the "I got it and it was broken" or "There was an important part missing" type reviews because if that happens to me Amazon makes returns fairly easy. And you can sometimes tell the reviewer doesn't like the product and has all kinds of nasty things to say about it but hasn't purchased it or used it. This happens with books a lot, where someone disagrees politically with an author and will write a trashy review on a book without reading it. For a product that has a small number of reviews you probably need to be cautious about taking them as gospel, but for products with a large number of reviews you can usually get a feel for what the average person's experience with it is. What was your experience which prompted this poll? This?