rkbabang

Amazon is just not good at designing their own products/hardware. Even the Kindle, which is their only technical product that's been real successful, isn't a great product. It's value comes from Amazon's vast eBook library. The operating system is still pretty bad. The Kindle HD is also terrible. My wife had one and got so frustrated with it that she just started using my iPad all of the time, so I had to buy her an iPad too. Amazon should stick to letting other companies handle the hardware and focus on delivering books/ebooks and other products. But as far as e-ink readers go there is no really good product on the market. I've owned a Nook and the Kobo Aura-HD, and the operating systems on both of those are difficult to navigate and library management is an impossible task if you have more than 10-20 books on it (I have over a thousand). I haven't tried the Kindle because a) I've heard that it is no better than the others, and b) most of my books are in epub format and I don't wish to spend the time it would take to convert them all to mobi. So back to the topic of this thread: My product wish is an excellent e-reader with an 7-8 inch e-ink screen (300+ DPI, capacitive multi-touch) , built in lighting like the newest Kindle and Kobo's have, an easy to use OS, easy library management of thousands of books, good wi-fi and web browser, supports all common formats (mobi,epub,PDF, doc, etc), handles PDF files well (none the ereaders I've tried do a good job with PDF files), has expandable memory or at least 32GB built in, light weight, thin, waterproof, a fast processor (for snappy web-browsing, quick page turns, fast app opening, etc), and under $400. I'd buy it in about a second.

I understand the economics of scarcity and of supply and demand. My bafflement isn't about the economics of the situation, but the human motivation. Let me try to explain. Say a bunch of very rich people all decided that it would be awesome to own a stool sample from a famous person. Somewhere someone found a piece of turd from Albert Einstein and it was in high demand. I understand that because so many people want it, and it is a one of a kind item, that the price could be extreme. My question wouldn't be an economic one such as: "How could the price get so high?". Rather it would be the same question I have for this art: "Why do people want it at all, it's just a turd?".

You are correct to a point. Art is very personal. But when people start spending $M on movies which look like they are filmed by 3 year olds I think I'll start complaining about that too. :) I might not like every movie, but even Killer Clowns From Outer Space couldn't have been written, directed, and filmed by a 3 year old. Yeah, I'd love to find something I could buy cheap and sell to one of these art collectors for real money. The greater sucker theory.

Amazon is pretty damn good at this. Maybe not for TV shows yet, but I assume they'd get there for fireStick users. I agree with SpecOps: none of the recommendation services are good. Amazon is not good either: they push the stuff that is already in my wish list; they push the stuff that I recently bought: no, I don't need another GPS unit if I just bought one, I don't need another travel guide to Spain if I just bought one. Even with books they sometimes veer onto really weird directions. No, I am not interested in technical analysis or stock options, did I ever buy a book on this? :) With music - I don't think I got a single recommendation that I either did not know/own before or was any good. Overall though, this is a very hard problem even though there are tons of recommender systems and research on them. The fact that I like Matrix movie does not mean that I will like Matrix sequels that are horrible. The fact that I like "Paul" ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1092026/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 ) does not mean I will like "Hot Fuzz" ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425112/?ref_=nv_sr_1 ). Ratings of other people (even friends) are not a reliable indicator of your preferences. You might agree with someone on 10 movies, but violently disagree on the 11th. Sure, statistical machine learning approaches work somewhat, but not greatly. You pretty much need a full-AI psychologist entity to analyze users' worldview/thoughts/feelings/etc. to figure out what they like and why. ;) This seems like an easier problem than, for example, driverless cars, but in reality it is likely harder. :) I agree this is a much harder problem. I've been using Amazon multiple times per week for at least 10 years now, and less often for years before that and in all that time I don't think I have ever purchased something I found as a recommendation. I go there looking for something and I search until I find it. A good recommendation system would recommend things I wanted before I even knew I wanted them, I've never experienced that. The only recommendation system I've been somewhat happy with is Netflix, but that is an easier problem, because they already know the general category (you are looking to watch a TV show or movie) and they have many years worth of data on what you've already watched. When I go to Amazon.com they have no idea what I am going to search for. They don't know that my meat thermometer just broke and I am now interested in one of those even though I've never bought one from Amazon before. It is an impossible problem to solve. Maybe they should use the Amazon Echo to listen in to the conversations going on in peoples home so that they know when someone mentions that they need a certain item...

This is unbelievable. I can't be the only one who thinks these sculptures aren't any good. They look like a high school art project gone wrong where the teacher gave the student a D because he didn't even try. The same goes for Picasso's cartoon character paintings that are selling for crazy amounts. I've seen better paintings at the flea-market. I have a few oil paintings in my house (all of which I paid a lot more for the frames than for the art) which where all painted by people with more talent than Picasso in my opinion. I have no artistic talent at all, so I obviously need to become an artist. After I'm dead my family can sell my "art" for millions. If you actually paint a realistic person or a landscape that looks like something, it is crap. If you paint abstract finger paintings or cartoon boobs on cartoon women (like the recently sold Picasso "masterpiece") you are a genius. The funny thing is my kids could finger paint just fine when they were 3 years old. Adults do it and they are geniuses. I don't get it. What a waste of money.

A great novel! :) Thank you very much, Gio No problem Gio. It was really good. I just finished the Musk book last night and loved it. I read it in 3 days, which is pretty quick for me. A book that size would usually require 5-7. I started reading at my normal time then stayed up later than I should have all 3 nights. Between Seveneves and the Elan Musk biography I've been doing that too often lately. I'm going to have to read something a little more boring next so I can get some sleep. :)

TSLA, NFLX, CMG The stocks are not priced reasonably, but one of the reasons for that is that the management have done amazing things building these companies from the ground up. AMZN belongs on this list as well, but it has already been mentioned.

Wow, these guys sound horrible. Luckily, since they're so awful, you should have no problem convincing the electorate to vote for someone who will abolish them. Democracy rocks--it's so awesome that you can have a huge gripe like this and, when you convinced the electorate to agree with you, vote in a government to address your concerns. It's such a great example of true accountability, society avoiding fringe views only held by a few ideologues who haven't really thought things through in any depth, while still providing justice for people like you with righteous causes that everyone cannot help but agree with. Most people literally don't care who Obama murders. They've been programmed from their earliest age by the state to worship it. Look at the programming by the church hundreds of years ago, it doesn't mean the majority are correct in their thinking simply because they are the majority, especially after undergoing decades of extensive brainwashing. I know I'm wasting my time here, it is like trying to convince a cult member that their charismatic leader isn't really going to lead them to the comet which will carry them to the promised land as soon as they drink the cool-aid... Hundreds of millions have died at the hands of the state and hundreds of millions of more will die before humanity wises up.

Therein is the answer you seek. Elected positions in the USA aren't mostly unaccountable, they just seem that way sometimes. Good one! I almost forgot about the yearly calls from the IRS fund raisers detailing what the government plans on doing with my money in the next year (what companies they plan to subsidize, what weapons they plan to build, who they plan to send drones to murder, etc) and asking me if I'd still wish to contribute. "Can we count on the same generous donation as last year?"... Silly me, I'm acting as if I don't pay they'd send armed men to kidnap me and put me in a cage like an animal, or kill me if I resist.

Does anyone see the glass as refillable? Refillable doesn't necessarily mean it will ever be filled past the half way mark, but the entrepreneur would certainly see it as an opportunity to sell the owner more to drink.

The next paragraph is good as well: "A pessimist sees the glass as half empty. An optimist sees the glass as half full. The engineer sees the glass as twice the size it needs to be.” To the others, the glass is a metaphor. Nonsense, the engineer says. The specifications are off. He doesn't give free rein to temperament; he assesses the object. These jokes, like many of the jokes people tell about themselves, are grievances. The engineer doesn't understand why the rest of us can’t make sense of the world the way he does."

The only true premise is that people are inherently selfish and will act in their own best interest. That's it. Trying to catch up on all the posts here, but I'll respond to this one now. People always act in what they think is their own self interest at the time (it doesn't always turn out to be obviously). This is the reason a government made up of people can not work. People can't be trusted, but they somehow get a set of angles wings once being elected or appointed to a position of mostly unaccountable power? How does this magic happen? People do not change their stripes, as a matter of fact quite the opposite is true. Power brings out the worst in otherwise good people. Power both corrupts and attracts the already corrupted.

There are 9 states with no state capital gains taxes (just one of the reasons I moved to NH). Alaska Florida Nevada New Hampshire South Dakota Tennessee Texas Washington Wyoming http://www.fool.com/personal-finance/taxes/2014/10/04/the-states-with-the-highest-capital-gains-tax-rate.aspx http://g.foolcdn.com/editorial/images/146424/states-highest-capital-gains-tax-rate_large.PNG

Whoa thanks for posting! Never seen this before, seems like the best way to browse. No problem, I suspected that a lot of people never noticed it, because it was a long time before I did.

This is the link I use most often when visiting the board: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/unread/ It is up at the top of every page right under your username where it says: "Show unread posts since last visit." It will immediately show you all of the recent posts that you have not read by topic. You can quickly scan the topics and click on the ones that interest you while ignoring the ones that don't. It is much better than going to the home screen and just seeing the last so many posts.

You can't get rid of crime, obviously. Even with all the police and force of government crime still exists. Even in jails where people are kept in cells and guarded 24/7 crime still exists. You can turn society into a high security prison and crime would still exist. Calling someone else's ideas "Nirvana" is just trying to use ridicule by creating a straw man argument. No one ever said we can get rid of crime. When you say how would X (crime, education, roads, torts, etc) be handled you are making the implicit assumption that it is being handled well now, but in many cases it demonstrably isn't. I don't think you can get rid of crime completely, it is about minimizing it the best you can and protecting yourself from it the best you can. It is quite possible that private theft would increase in my ideal society, but I don't think the average person would loose over half of everything they produce to theft, the way they do now to taxation. In our current society we loose very little to private theft and an enormous amount to public theft. Would you pay an insurance company $900,000.00 to insure your $30,000 car from theft? It just doesn't make sense. I'm not envisioning an Nirvana paradise where people are good to one another, but I think children could be educated and roads could built without theft, and I think we could protect ourselves from private criminals (sufficiently, but not perfectly) without becoming criminals ourselves. I have no problem with defensive force only the initiation of force. Yes calling government taxation theft is meant to be shocking. But if you put your programming aside and think about it, it is only shocking that you have lived this long and never thought about it from that angle. We are all so heavily trained to see things from only one point of view that simply calling the forcible taking of wealth "theft" becomes shocking when someone says it. It is like saying "invading another country makes you an aggressor and war criminal, it is the people shooting back that are protecting their country from you" or simply "war is murder" it can be shocking to hear that if all you ever hear is "support the troops", "The troops are protecting your freedom", "Freedom isn't free" etc.. The reason for government run schools has nothing to do with education (there would be a huge market for education in a modern free society as everyone wants their children to be educated) and it has everything to do with installing these statist points of view into the minds of next generation. Stand up, put your hand on your heart, and repeat after me "I pledge allegiance to the flag..."

I suppose not. Democracy is the system based on the theory "there are more of us than there are of you, so do what we say or else". The political manifestation of might makes right. Yes there are more people who think like you than who think like me, and yes the threat of violence from the majority is what keeps me paying my taxes. Force is additive while things like intelligence, empathy, and morality are not. It is the tragedy of the human condition. You are stronger so for now you win.

I never understood the whole "count yourself lucky" line of thinking. Unless you live in the worse society imaginable, it could always be worse. So anyone, in any place, in almost any time in history could have counted themselves lucky that it wasn't worse. Yes, I am glad that I live in modern America rather than medieval Europe or Soviet Russia, but that doesn't mean there is no room for improvement. In fact I think there is quite a bit of room. The whole join the mob and change it from the inside line of thinking is ridiculous when the whole system is based on violence. All I'm asking is to be allowed to opt out.

Cause obviously you have tons of real world examples of your libertarian nirvana working in practice. Not. You don't have a single one since it does not exist. And hundreds of years of progress in a mixed free market and government regulated economies can be written off as " legitimizing theft and violence by paying protection money to thugs" Nice. I'm sorry, but words mean things. Taxation is the taking of wealth from one person by another. That is also called "theft". I'm not writing it off, I'm calling it what it is. And it is immoral, regardless of what the thieves do with the money. Also so I don't have to write it all over again, read my post at the link which I just posted for a more thorough explanation of my views on the subject. When a society had never existed without slavery, it didn't make slavery just. Oh hell I'll just cut and paste: ---------------------------------------- I don’t think you can go from a massive state which has millions of people depending on it for their livelihood on a daily basis to an anarchistic society overnight. It would have to be more evolutionary rather than revolutionary. If the state disappeared tomorrow into thin air in the U.S. or Canada it WOULD be chaos. Millions would be out of work, social security and other entitlements would just stop coming, many people would not know what to do with themselves. Hell, even people in the private sector who have jobs would look at the very money they use and say “what is backing this now?” If the state is to be dismantled it has to be because of a cultural change in the population that wants it to be dismantled. Not because they are stereotypical "bomb throwing anarchists" who love chaos, but because they realize that the state does more harm than good in a civilized society and that violence begets more violence, so violence shouldn't be an accepted device used to solve societal problems. This is Somalia's problem, they have no state, but they do not have a culture of freedom either. Yet, do some research on Somalia, they are clearly better off than they were in the 1980’s and they are better off than some of the societies that surround them. All things being equal in their society as it stands culturally they are arguably better off without a state, than with one. The culture needs some evolution to create a peaceful and prosperous society, but that would be true whether or not they have a government. If Somalia forms a government tomorrow, who will control it? Most likly one of the warlord groups that are causing so much chaos in stateless Somalia today. This will not bring peace and order, it will most likely bring corruption and widespread persecution of other competing groups. All of this is also true in many of the countries in that part of the world. You could not go back in time to medieval Europe, for instance, kill the kings and all of the other royalty, tell the serfs that they are now free and expect life to immediately improve. People get used to a certain way of life and do not handle quick structural changes well. These things take time. Over the course of human history our culture has been evolving towards more distributed less concentrated power and towards more civilized, less barbarous and violent societies. Of course sometimes we take 2 steps forward and 1 step back, but that has been the general direction. Someday there will be no state, and historians will look back at our society and think of how primitive our culture was to still cling to our tribal leaders marked off by boundaries on a map even though we had relatively easy global trade, global transportation, and global communication (even if crude by the standards of the future of those things). The same way we look back at god-kings and think “how primitive”. There we're no biological differences between the humans under the god-kings and us. The only things that have evolved since then, the only difference between them and us, is our technology and our culture. Both will continue to evolve, each of us has the choice of either helping the process along or stand in its way. How much more speedily and bloodlessly would slavery have been gotten rid of if there were more abolitionists and less people who thought "slavery has always been part of human society and we couldn't function as a society without it"? As far as crime goes I think you give the state way too much credit in that area. Many murders are never solved and the vast majority of property crimes go unsolved. If your house gets broken into you will almost certainly never get your stuff back. The police will make a report, place it in a file, and that will be the extent of it. Then your insurance company will pay your claim. This is very similar to how it would work in a free market as well. You will contract with a protection agency or maybe this will be run by your insurance company. You will call them to file a claim, they will investigate and pay your claim. If you call 911 because you have an intruder tonight, I hope you have some way to keep yourself alive in the 10-15minutes it may take for the police to get there. Again, this will be the same in a free society with the exception that if you aren’t happy with your protection services company you can do business with someone else instead. Walk around your average mid-to-large city and chances are you don’t see a cop anywhere or at least not very often. The reason the people around you aren’t robbing you is because they are civilized, not because they are afraid of the government. Will there always be crime? Of course there will, it is how we deal with it that is under discussion. Only statists think that there is some magic in words on paper called “law” that “solves” crime. It just isn’t so. These laws, and the institutions that evolve to enforce them, are much more concerned with politically motivated “crimes” and fighting the "culture war" which the politicians use to get votes rather than really protecting people from violence. Most people in jail are not murderers and rapists, they are minorities who are there for violating drug laws. Middle class whites are simply not arrested and thrown in jail for these “crimes” even though they do drugs at a rate similar to poorer minorities. And since nothing will hold down your earnings potential like a criminal record, the “justice” system is used to keep the underclass in its place. It is a sick, disgusting and thoroughly broken system that needs to be done away with if our society is going to move forward and prosper. There are many books written about how crime could be handled in a free society. Milton Freidman’s son David Friedman who is a professor of economics and law at the Santa Clara University Law School wrote an excellent book called “The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism” which I highly recommend. Also some good and quick reads (and free) which deal with the subject, are Stefan Molyneux’s “Everyday Anarchy” and “Practical Anarchy”. These books are excellent. The free versions are in PDF, HTML, and the audiobook in MP3. You have to buy and pay for the print versions if you prefer paper. Other excellent books if you’ve read the above and would like to delve deeper into the subject is “The Conscience of an Anarchist: Why It's Time to Say Good-Bye to the State and Build a Free Society” by Gary Chartier “Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty”, by Gary Chartier And the classic: “For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto”, Murray N. Rothbard. This book is a good introduction to a free society and how it might work. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Some of the same things could be said about not having a king or dictator. Show me an example in all the thousands of years in human history where a society has successfully gotten rid of its monarchs for any length of time? Even our recent few hundred years of Republican government isn’t much proof, the Roman Republic lasted longer than ours yet still deteriorated to dictatorship in the end. Looking only at history you could make a good case that human society needs to be organized as a dictatorship. Remember that even a relatively short time ago in human history you could have said. “Show me one modern agricultural society that has ever functioned without slavery. None has ever existed. Please explain how we could feed our population in a world without slavery. How could a labor intensive product like say, cotton, ever be grown, harvested, and brought to market profitably without the institution of slavery? And what would these slaves all do if you set them free? They have no education, no idea what it is like to live on their own and be responsible for themselves. They have no idea what it is like to be a productive and civilized member of society? How to you integrate such people into a modern society without causing all kinds of problems?” These questions (and many more like them) where asked many times. The answer of course is that it doesn’t matter. Slavery is wrong and whatever the consequences, we will either find solutions to these problems or we won’t, but it simply isn’t morally acceptable to treat human beings like animals. And of course in the end once it was clear that slavery would come to an end, labor saving devices were invented and cotton and other crops were successfully farmed (who would bother trying to invent such devices if slavery was not outlawed). And it was sometimes a little rocky, but the former slaves were integrated into society. I would say the same things about the state. It simply isn’t acceptable to take by force from people to educate children, help the poor, build the roads, and protect us from crime. Will people come up with innovative ways of solving these problems when the state is on its way out? I think they will. There is a huge market for all of these things, because almost everyone wants all of those things. I can’t tell you how these problems will be solved any more than someone in the 18th century could have predicted tractors and the cotton gin. If human beings are good at anything it is problem solving, especially when there is a profit motive behind it. Some people have come up with ideas on how many of these problems would be solved (read some of the books I linked to in my last post), some of them sound plausible, but those are just that, plausible sounding ideas. As Yogi Berra said “Prediction is very hard, especially about the future”. No one will know for sure until it is hammered out on the forge of the marketplace.

Here's an older post of mine on the topic: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/a-couple-more-dictators-taken-down-a-peg!/msg71111/#msg71111

Just out of curiousity, in your libertarian Nirvana, what happens when someone takes something they don't own, poisons a river they don't own, or takes a human life they don't own? What's the alternative to society agreeing to beat such a person with a big stick? Thanks, Richard First tell me what happens in your government controlled Nirvana, when large corporations are allowed to poison a river and given limited or even no liability for their actions? What happens in your government controlled Nirvana when someone wishes to take a drug your government doesn't approve? And why are there millions imprisoned for non-violent "crimes" when 40% of murders go unsolved? Who is unrealistic? The person who thinks that some problems aren't easily solved, but the free market (in law) is the best humans can do, or the person who thinks all of mankind's' problems can be solved simply by writing things down on paper and giving people the magic power to turn the mere scribbles into "LAW"? Then allowing these people to steal as much as they want from you (through taxes and inflation), using the money to spend 12 years programming your children, and using the stolen funds to buy as many weapons as they wish. Sorry, but I'm not looking for Nirvana or easily solved problems (which cause more problems then they solve). Tell me how your government controlled Nirvana will "solve" the problem of crime, it's had 7000 years or so to do it and it hasn't yet. I have some ideas about how these things could be solved with competing private systems, but I'm not going to write a book on a web forum. I also know what doesn't work, legitimizing theft and violence by paying protection money to thugs.

Something which Snowden, Assange and Manning also only know too well. Btw my compliments for bringing this up rkabang. Takes some guts to voice this opinion on a board where potentially no-one will agree and just think you're crazy. Thanks. I've held basically the same political opinions as I do now since the mid '90s. I'm used to people thinking I'm crazy and I'm long past caring.

If this bubble is anything like Canadian housing then who knows how long it will last. People have been talking about the Canadian housing bubble for a long time now. http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/not-going-to-end-well!/ http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/canadian-housing-prices/ http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/canadian-housing-correction-coming/ http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/canadian-housing-bubble/ http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/merrill-warns-of-canadian-housing-bubble/ http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/shorting-the-housing-bubble-in-canada/ http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/canada-housing-sentiment/ http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/general-discussion/canadas-housing-boom-among-longest-in-western-world/ I'm sure I didn't find all of the threads, these were just the first to come up in a quick search. You could still be talking about this bubble or the social media bubble in five+ years.

I agree. Especially when the government backs it up with guns.

Some excellent quotes from him can be found here. Collected Quotations Of The Dread Pirate Roberts, Founder Of Underground Drug Site Silk Road And Radical Libertarian Here are the first two: “Silk Road was founded on libertarian principles and continues to be operated on them. It is a great idea and a great practical system…It is not a utopia. It is regulated by market forces, not a central power (even I am subject to market forces by my competition. No one is forced to be here). The same principles that have allowed Silk Road to flourish can and do work anywhere human beings come together. The only difference is that the State is unable to get its thieving murderous mitts on it.” [10/1/2012] “Silk Road has already made an impact on the war on drugs. The effect of the war is to limit people’s access to controlled substances. Silk Road has expanded people’s access. The great thing about agorism is that it is a victory from a thousand battles. Every single transaction that takes place outside the nexus of state control is a victory for those individuals taking part in the transaction. So there are thousands of victories here each week and each one makes a difference, strengthens the agora, and weakens the state.” [9/23/2012]