Also, private schools are much more expensive than public...
How do you know this? Have you compared the rates private schools charge to the portion of everyone's taxes that go to public schools? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just wondering how you are sure. You're dead wrong here. And I mean absolutely dead wrong on every level. You're so out to lunch it's disgusting. The cost of private schools is almost certain far more than government funded schools relatively speaking for the poorer people. The bottom line is, since taxes are not even, the richer help the poorer pay for schooling. That in turn affords great opportunities for the overall prosperity of the community and nation. Sounds like I was pretty right. Public schools still cost a ton, and all you said was that other people will cover the high cost. Why do you believe the rich will not voluntarily donate money to schools, or that schools, constrained by budgets but unconstrained by rules, won't figure out how to teach children more effectively but cheaply? In your world, only the rich get educated.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's only in your fantasy world, where apparently all people are evil stingy assholes, and need authority to force them to behave. |
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Can we start with the axiom of "If it hurts me, and I don't want it to hurt me, it's a bad thing?"
No. You can't. Because you're trying to demonstrate that the alternative hurts you less, which you don't actually know, because you've never lived under such circumstances. What you perceive as a bad thing might be the best thing going. Huh? What alternatives? I'm just starting out with a hypothesis - "If it hurts me, it's bad." Can't we just explore from that starting point, and then expand into what things hurt me less? |
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Who did you vote for then? And abstaining from the vote is saying that you would rather let other people decide for you, in which case you deserve whichever leader you get.
Whom I voted for is irrelevant (if you must satiate your curiosity, it was Obama the first time, Gary Johnson the second). As for abstaining from the vote, that used to be the case, true. However, things have changed, and are continuing to change, in a way that allow me to abstain from the vote, AND from having to participate in the financial, regulatory, and tax environment. Basically, it's becoming easier and easier to abstain from government entirely. Well, taxation is morally ambiguous as well, as we can see as by the presence of two sides. Being forced to pay is immoral in my opinion, but...
There is no but. Its immoral, and you're trying to justify it with "at least you get something for it." It's no more moral than if I was to steal your debit card, drain $10,000 out of your bank account, and send you a "Thank You!" fruit basket. You're free to rationalize it any way you want, though. I used to as well for a long time. Where I live, the electricity and water companies are both state-owned. The water where I live is too toxic to drink so it has to be treated by a state-owned plant.
I see. Where I live, I think in most of my country, electricity company is privately owned, so obviously infrastructure can be provided by private companies as well. Are you really able to use and burn all the electricity you want, and never get an electric bill for it? You really should be mining bitcoin then! As for the toxic water, what exactly is it that the government is able to contribute to the treatment that a private entity would not be? Also, private schools are much more expensive than public...
How do you know this? Have you compared the rates private schools charge to the portion of everyone's taxes that go to public schools? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just wondering how you are sure. I guess I could have several smaller bills, but then they would each be more expensive.
Maybe, but there would be way fewer of them, so the total sum would be way cheaper, and you would actually choose what you want your money to go to. Don't like Big Oil? Don't pay their subsidies. Don't like big banks? Don't pay their bailouts. If every road was privately owned, I would have to pay a toll every time I passed a house as opposed to paying one sum and getting to use any road in the United States as much as I want.
Why can't roads be owned and administered by a single entity, like power lines, water pipes, gas pipes, or cell towers? You pay one entity that owns and maintains roads around a town or a large area, and pay extra to enter other towns. Plus, having to pay to use roads directly would allow people to see the true cost of roads (it's hidden as a tax now), meaning people would avoid driving, meaning there would be would have less sprawl around the country, people would be more tightly packed in cities, and other, likely faster and more convenient forms of transportation would become more popular (like rail for example). If water was privately owned by an independent company, they could charge through the roof. There's no way that the water purification plant near me is cheap. I fail to see how the bills would be smaller, since they would be paying for the same thing but with less people paying.
What would you do if the water company started charging you through the roof? I have some ideas, but I'm curious as to how you would solve that problem. Maybe it's just my location, but paying taxes is much cheaper than paying each individual private company.
Things cost money. It doesn't matter if that money comes from people paying for things personally, or from people being forced to pay taxes. In other words, what you are paying for with your tax dollars should, theoretically, cost exactly the same if you were all paying for it directly. So the only question is, what does the government do to make what you pay for cheaper? The underlying product costs the same to mine or produce. It costs the same to treat or to add features to. It costs the same to deliver to your house. So what does government add? Is it more efficient (stereotypically its not)? Does it pay employees less than a private company would? (well, yes, but that would also mean lower quality product). I respect that you don't want to pay taxes, but I find it hard to believe that you would opt out of all of the public utilities. If you aren't getting use from them, then you are making a poor decision because it's not hard to get your money's worth in tax dollars.
Getting my moneys worth is exactly the problem though. I pay a lot in taxes, but A LOT of that money goes to the military to fight wars I don't want, CIA and NSA to spy on people I don't want spied on, farm subsidies to grow corn we don't need, financial regulations we don't need, environmental and other regulations that are so ineffective as to be wasteful and actually harmful, crime enforcement and encarceration for crimes that shouldn't be crimes in the first place, etc. etc. etc. I'm basically paying a ton of money, in exchange for a little "Thank You!" fruit basket of roads, security, fire departments, and garbage collections (all of which can and is privately owned in other parts of the country) just to make me feel better  |
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"If false then true" is the way this logic works. Start with a false axiom and derive truisms from it.
Real science works in the opposite direction.
"I use my premise to prove something that is self evidently false, so my premise must be false" is how real science functions.
Can we start with the axiom of "If it hurts me, and I don't want it to hurt me, it's a bad thing?" |
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The difference between abstinence education and "regular" sex ed should be that in abstinence education the CHILDREN are encouraged to wait until marriage. Teaching how the reproductive system works, though, could and should wait until a biology class or the parents teach the children.
But, thanks to the over a decade of trials, we now know this doesn't work, and only leads to more teen pregnancies :p |
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If you go to cancer funding you will see a similar differential, namely breast cancer gets far more than other far deadlier cancers. Due to marketing, basically.
People just happen to like breasts a lot more than all those other cancer-prone organs. The market has spoken  |
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I see some people are still making the mistake of thinking that when someone has $10billion, they have that as just bags of money sitting in a pile somewhere.
A better analogy would be you sitting at a diner with a machine that is worth 100 muffins that makes English muffins at a rate of 18 an hour (3 every ten minute), and which only you know how to operate. If you had 50 starving people walk in, you could only feed 18 of them every hour. If you just give them your machine, then you have nothing, and they have no muffins because they don't know how to operate the machine.
Owning lots of money (even if just cash) is also similar to owning a machine: if you don't know how to operate that money, all you'll have is that money (like having a muffin machine without knowing how to use it), which you can at most just keep trading for something until it's gone. On the other hand, someone who knows how to operate the money will be able to keep making (creating) more and more. That's really the main difference between rich and poor - rich know how to operate the money to make more of it, while poor only know how to spend it. Good example of this is the so-called "Millionaire's Curse," where lottery winners who win millions of dollars often soon find themselves even more broke, destitute, and in debt than they were before they won the lottery.
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Ideally, the 99% should not only take from the 1%, but distribute to those below them.
Lol! Sure, instead of growing the pie, let's just keep it as is and spread it all around. Let's ALL be poor!  |
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Here's a good question: Is it morally right for me to steal from you, if you elected me as your chosen thief, and if the money that I steal from you goes towards public work projects and utilities that you and I both use?
If you elected someone to "steal" from you you're voluntarily willing to give up the money. That's not theft. Just like asking someone to "rape" you and willingly going along with it isn't actually rape. Both actions are consensual. If, on the other hand I elected someone else, and told them to steal from you to use the money for my own personal use, THEN it's theft. Is it morally right for you to complain about being stolen taxed when you benefit from the taxes that other people pay?
Complaining about something is morally ambiguous. It's just speech. There's no right or wrong. As for benefiting from things paid for by stolen money, it's morally right, because you did actually pay for those things, whether you wanted to or not. Being forced to pay for those things against your will is morally questionable. If you don't want to pay taxes, then don't use anything that those taxes pay for. No social security, no roads, no school, no water and electricity.
Deal! I invest enough in my IRA to retire without social security, I don't have kids, so don't need schools, and can use private ones if I do need them, I'm fine with sticking to private roads and roll roads, and my water and electricity are provided by companies, not government. In turn, are you ok with not taxing me? That's all a lot of us have been asking for: we won't use your services, you won't tax our income and property. Do people realize that these utilities aren't free? How are they supposed to be paid for without taxes?
Who pays for your electricity? Internet? Phone service? Do you get them for "free" after paying taxes? If not, why can't all the other things you use be provided by a private entity? The only difference will be that instead of having a single large tax bill going to one organization, you'll have a couple of smaller bills going to many organizations, paying only for services you need and use (plus whatever you want to donate to charity or needy causes) |
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I don't understand what is wrong with teaching kids, or anyone else for that matter, about anything. If you are just giving them facts, what's the harm?
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I would highly recommend GPU alt currency mining. My rig costs 2k and gets 0.15 BTC per day (ish), so it seems pretty good. Also, unlike ASICS, GPUs and mobos and such actually have resale value because they are multipurpose. Check out coinminingrigs.com for more info.
0.15 BTC * 30 days = 4.5BTC per month Assuming $100 per BTC, that's $450 per month I don't know what your electric cost is, but I can't imagine it being lower than $50 for such a rig, so profit is about $400 a month $2,000 / $400 = 5 months until you just pay off your rig and start earning some money. If this alt-coin difficulty goes up by 25% to 50%, that's another 1 to 2 months to wait. If the value of the altcoin goes up by some percent, then it's a toss-up between paying off your rig and start making a profit earlier, or making a profit right away by having bought $2,000 worth of this currency directly, instead of mining it. For example, if this alt currency goes up 10% every month, you'll pay off your rig in 4 months, and have a ~$600 profit at the end of month 5. If you had just bought $2,000 of that currency directly, at the end of 5 months it would have been worth ~$930, meaning you would have made $300 more just by buying instead of mining. Point is, this whole thing takes a lot of guessing, research, and planning. Plus, Bitcoin value continued to grow considerably over the last two years, due to actual adoption by the market, and thus the profits still stayed up despite more and more miners adding their hashing power. I just can't see alt coins growing is value for very long, since they don't offer any benefits over what Bitcoin provides (i.e. I only expect them to grow due to miner adoption, not the economy as a whole), while at the same time there is A LOT of freed up GPU power moving into it from Bitcoin miners that were replaced by ASICs. So, I think investing in an alt-coin miner is extremely risky right now, because I don't believe it will stay profitable for very long. |
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Sounds like the only solution is to ban all guns in all cities, then when people bring them from nearby, ban them in states, then when they bring them from neighboring states, ban them in the whole country, then when they bring them from neighboring countries, ban them in all countries. Unless the country you are trying to ban them in doesn't like you, and realizes that they have all the guns, and you don't Hell, even if you ban all the guns in the entire world, there's still the asshole effect, which is that it only takes one asshole (or one asshole country) to ruin it for everyone. Really? How is that working out for Japan? As I said, we don't really know. Is their crime rate low due to lack of guns, or due to their culture? Aren't there some places where guns are completely banned, where crime rates are really high? (like Washington DC) |
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...use at least 1.5 times the current difficulty to figure out how much you'll make by the time you actually get your rig.
Rassah, you're still living in like, 4 months ago. Use 2.5x current difficulty and expect it to increase 50% per month after I didn't want to scare the newbie |
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What's the difference between abstinence education and regular sex Ed, if, as you suggest, they both teach how the reproductive system works, and how to have safe sex with contraceptives? And, honestly, what's wrong with fisting?
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Sounds like the only solution is to ban all guns in all cities, then when people bring them from nearby, ban them in states, then when they bring them from neighboring states, ban them in the whole country, then when they bring them from neighboring countries, ban them in all countries. Unless the country you are trying to ban them in doesn't like you, and realizes that they have all the guns, and you don't Hell, even if you ban all the guns in the entire world, there's still the asshole effect, which is that it only takes one asshole (or one asshole country) to ruin it for everyone. Plus, again, with 3D printed guns, the issue becomes more complicated. What laws would you create against 3D printing guns, and how would you enforce them? |
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markets dont reveal the right answer as soon as you implement them. in fact they can give rather bad and arbitrary solutions early on, but they discover better and better solutions as time progresses. compare this with the state which becomes less and less efficient as time progresses.
Heh, it's rather ironic, sometimes, hearing these politics and economics discussion on this particular forum, where it's as if people forget where exactly it is they are arguing their positions. That sentence above really reminded me of how Bitcoin was about 20 years ago. In short, compared to today, it was godawful in every respect. Like the quote by a certain person who's name escapes me, "Bitcoin is an idea that doesn't work in theory, only in practice." That probably applies to all these other ancap ideas we keep tossing around, too  |
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Biology and nature issues
+ people are not aware of such issues
+ people do harm without realizing it
= we must set up an authority with rules and regulations that uses coercion to force people not to do harm, regardless of whether they are realizing it or not
and then you turn around and say "That formula has nothing to do with coercion," I get a little confused and start asking questions.
You're not just a little confused. You're very confused. Please demonstrate where I said such a formula has nothing to do with regulations. I simply assumed that regulations and coercion are pretty much the same thing. Or rather regulation is coercion, but coercion doesn't necessarily have to come from regulations. Then you suddenly said that you bringing up such issues had nothing to do with coercion, which made me wonder if you were simply stating facts about nature, since such a claim suggested that my belief that you claiming "people screw things up and thus need coercion to behave" may have been wrong. Instead, at your manipulative and nonproductive form of debate, you asked what trophic cascades and other such topics have to do with coercion, and I firmly corrected you on the matter, telling you that such topics having nothing to do with coercion.
I'm sorry, perhaps you misunderstood. I was wondering what those topics have to do with coercion in the context of our discussion. I know they themselves are just nature, but I was wondering why you would bring them up if it wasn't in the context of "protecting said topics through coercion." Then, in your continued method of nitpicking and turning a discussion on its side to somehow appear that you are winning the debate
My intention was never as such. I have no interest in "winning" a debate. All I want, pretty much ever, is clarification. That's why I nitpick - not to put you into a corner, but to figure out and be absolutely clear about what you were talking about. , and without ever providing any substance, you then accused me of being off topic because I'm not mentioning coercion, and so I had to explain to you why such topics are relevant, at which point you compared them to juggling chainsaws, where once again, I had to point out that if you ask what 1 + 1 is, and get a response of 2, it's not your right to claim the answer was obvious and not necessary, again prolonging a debate that you lost long ago, and then we get this ridiculous continuation, where you're trying to save face by insinuating the path of the conversation has you somehow as being the insightful one.
Please calm down. This whole thing I guess was from a misunderstanding from your "they have nothing to do with coercion" statement. I believed that you meant (or claimed) that you didn't bring up those nature topics with intent to discuss why regulations/coercion was necessary. You apparently claimed that those nature topics, in and of themselves, have nothing to do with regulation/coercion, but are no doubt sticking to your held belief that we all need regulation and coercion. Simple misunderstanding that got out of hand when I probed. It goes like this: if you wish to be willfully ignorant about your actions, then you should allow yourself to be coerced, and will most likely be coerced against your will, because it is necessary.
Thank you. On this we are not in disagreement. I believe the only part we would disagree on is how that specific coercion should be carried out, and more specifically by whom. Thanks. |
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You have the habit of not following the context of the dialog and then drawing conclusions that suit you based on your incomplete knowledge of the dialog, which, incidentally, is a nice metaphor for the subject at hand.
It's not my responsibility to explain the whole dialog to you.
But it definitely wasn't a no-brainer statement, given that you fucking asked me to explain it to you. If you ask what 1 + 1 is, and someone replies 2, don't come back with a stupid analysis such as you have just given. Sorry for getting riled, but you're the root cause of it.
I am really really sorry if I have upset you. That was not my intention. It's just that when the formula goes Biology and nature issues + people are not aware of such issues + people do harm without realizing it = we must set up an authority with rules and regulations that uses coercion to force people not to do harm, regardless of whether they are realizing it or not and then you turn around and say "That formula has nothing to do with coercion," I get a little confused and start asking questions. Like, Are you, or are you not, for coercion (or force, or whatever) carried out by some central body with a monopoly on law, power, and land ownership, which would be responsible for mitigating said issues? I thought you were, you suggested you weren't, so I just wanted to find out where you stand before we continue. i have changed my position on an issue many times as a result of losing a debate. i would legitimately LOVE for the statists here to defeat my arguments, if they did than i could use it as an opportunity to improve myself. Unfortunately before they could do that they would have to actually make an argument, not just rattle off random facts and assume they had defeated you because their facts were accurate.
These are my sentiments as well. Just a few years ago, I was a liberal democrat, understanding that complete fascism and complete anarchy were both bad, that we need a moderate government to mitigate and referee things, and that taxes were important for things business couldn't provide, even being proud to contribute to society, and thinking that all those anti-tax types were all cooky, and essentially stealing from us taxpayers. Then I lost a few arguments. Then I found Bitcoin, and lost even more arguments |
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I am considering building a cost effective mining rig and looking for any help or guides to do so. Any tips would be appreciated.
Expect to spend at least $2,500 just to start (don't bother with GPU any more), wait at least 2 to 3 months before you actually get your rig, Google Bitcoin Mining Calculator to get estimates on how much you'll make, and use at least 1.5 times the current difficulty to figure out how much you'll make by the time you actually get your rig. You can use this to get an idea for hardware specs out there. Why not bother with GPU's? Are you suggesting focusing on ASIC? Yes. GPUs are no longer profitable. For example, I have two 5830's, supposedly the most energy efficient mining cards out there. I can do 600MHash/s and burn about $45 a month in electricity (it's about $0.10 per watt or kilowatt or whatever here). If I check on http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator and enter my 600MHash/s mining power, I see that I can mine about $27.88 per month worth at the current difficulty and exchange rate. That's considerably lower than $45 I pay for electricity, and doesn't even include the initial cost of buying those cards (which I have paid off a long time ago). This tells me that, at present, I am much better off just buying bitcoin directly, or possibly trying to buy an ASIC, though I haven't looked into the efficiencies of those too closely. |
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Also, a lot of quoting is pretty boring.
Sorry about the excessive quoting. The person I was talking to had a tendency to swing to wildly different topics, points, and accusations, and I was forced to retain the list of conversations just so that I (and others) could follow what was actually being discussed. That was before I finally admitted that any discussions would be a complete waste of my time. Sorry if I have wasted yours as well. |
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