That may be going a bit too far  I agree, I ought not have stooped to his level. It seemed that any lesser response was falling on deafness. His incessant assertions of invidious motive, that I/we do not have compassion for the innocents who have suffered from violence, that we are the problem, that our desire and actions are to arm criminals. His unspeakable ad hominems, which ought not have been repeated... All this pointed out creates no learning in his mind. Even so, a demonstration to him of his rhetorical tactics reflected back to him, ought not be done as public display. Retracted, I've deleted it. Feel welcome to do likewise, or not, as you like. |
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Just say: *Bitcoin for Pearls!*that'll get our attention  How about GOLD and SILVER, emblazoned with the head of a deeply inspiring architypical female (Liberty)? Hey have you heard? Once again the US Government is copying US. Liberty Dollar was the first to use the $ sign minted on pieces in the USA (now the govt does it on the $1 coin), now they are returning to putting Liberty on a bunch of their coins. They keep following our model. Next they come after us for counterfeiting their base metal coins with our silver, as if that were even possible!!! http://news.coinupdate.com/bill-seeks-circulating-coins-celebrating-american-liberty-2062/Buy ours with your BTC, and own the original. |
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Matched by Warren Buffet (who is leaving less than 1/10000th of his wealth to his heirs and the rest to charity).
You don't know how inheritance works, do you?  No matter, help me with my math: Would 1/10000th of 60 billion dollars make me a pauper? I do. The Buffet endowment is premortem. Is your goal that all ought be paupers? No. According to you, that was Andrew Carnegie's goal. He failed. A great man, nonetheless. B+ for trying. Non-sequitor? Apropos of nothing. (Unless you are imagining that I am saying Carnegie was trying to impoverish the nation by endowing libraries Hint:I am not saying that) He paid for his kid's educations, + they get about US$1mil.
So if they are going to be jet-set, they have to earn that on their own.
He lives a relatively modest life himself as well.
Either you do not know how inheritance works, or you assume that i do not. The goal, my friend, is to pass on much while, on paper, appearing to pass on nothing. In his case, nothing is not plausible, so he *claims* that he's *planning* to leave the minimum creditable amount. Much lower than the minimum creditable amount according to current tax law, in fact. Your assumption that your goals and his are the same is your error here, you assume invidious motives in him which are not in evidence other than your imagination about how people with more money than you *must* think. Instead he is less evil than you are, apparently, as it appears were all of these .00001%ers under discussion. Fascinating. Have you checked out the Bill and Mel Gates fund and their work? The same ruthlessness and business acumen that brought his wealth being used to target some of the biggest problems worldwide is a marvel to behold. As an NGO, they do far more than any government could on these matters. He is doing it with his own money and his time and energy. This is how he spends his life, giving and making a difference. You keep comparing these people that gained wealth by doing things that the world craved, and then giving back what they made...with people that are less innovative and less energetic and less creative as if they merit the same decision making power (money). Some folks might image that people who make really good decisions over and over and over, might be better than average at doing that. Why not let them spend it on doing good... rather than take it at gunpoint, and have the highest bidder for government favor make that decision instead? |
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TL/DR version:
FinCEN wanted to regulated Bitcoin exchanges. The proper thing to do would get Congressional oversight in the form of expanded regulatory powers but that might have taken years. FINCEN did a bunch of mental gymnastics and called exchanging currency money transmission and that is what we are stuck with.
The Foundation challenged this in its response letter. It may yet get litigated if not legislated. Agreed however US law is slanted against such action. There is an issue of standing. For example the foundation has not registered as a MT, they have not been indicted by the SEC, by their own admission they are not a MT. Therefore they have no standing to fight this in federal court. ...familiar examples snipped Yes. They do not have standing today. It is early days yet. Standing may come if CA contests the response. The case could likely arise in State Superior, and could get fed jurisdiction on a challenge to the California Money Transmission Act of 2010. At minimum, we may get a hearing on "Whenever the commissioner believes from evidence satisfactory to the commissioner that any person has violated or is about to violate..." language in California Money Transmission Act on the matter of Prior Restraint. http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=fin&group=02001-03000&file=2030-2043See 22713. (a) There are lots of problems with the law. It looks to be crafted by BIG banking alone without much review, and is deeply anti-business and against California's general interests. |
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Matched by Warren Buffet (who is leaving less than 1/10000th of his wealth to his heirs and the rest to charity).
You don't know how inheritance works, do you? No matter, help me with my math: Would 1/10000th of 60 billion dollars make me a pauper? I do. The Buffet endowment is premortem. Is your goal that all ought be paupers? He paid for his kid's educations, + they get about US$1mil. So if they are going to be jet-set, they have to earn that on their own. He lives a relatively modest life himself as well. No matter how many times i hear this argument, it never loses its freshness or fails to entertain. If your logic works for the rich, it works equally well for taxes: let the government tax the shit out of you, and in return you'll get some of it back in "charities" like better roads, schools, libraries & aht mooseums.  You are entertaining me as well. Visit a library yourself, and you might have learned that most of the libraries in the US are not from taxes, but from private donation (Carnegie did the most there). Most of the best Museums also bear the names of their endowing patron. (Getty, Ahmanson, Smithsonian, etc). Your Government tax and spend preference is the more wasteful means of redistribution and creates the most corruption, the difference is not small. It is not "equally well" at all. They can't take it with them anyhow, and most of the US super-rich prefer to use a more reasoned method of redistribution rather than shift the decision-making to politicians that must seek re-election through special interest funded advertising spending. They skip your middlemen and end up doing more good, voluntarily. The US does not have the tradition of honoring the Aristocracy in the same way as other geographies. The Marx model and class jealousy is a poor match for contemporary US. It was born in the industrial revolution and tied closely to that historical period's particularly odd changes. |
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Bitcoiners are far more attractive than the average person. Here is just a brief list of why smart women like us bitcoin geeks... and why smart men like bitcoin geek women... - We are generally available. - Others will tend not to steal us away. - We can fix things. - Your parents will love us. - We're smart. - We can carry conversations on many interesting topics (well, at least to us). - We are more grateful than average for the positive attention, and less likely to take it for granted. |
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TL/DR version:
FinCEN wanted to regulated Bitcoin exchanges. The proper thing to do would get Congressional oversight in the form of expanded regulatory powers but that might have taken years. FINCEN did a bunch of mental gymnastics and called exchanging currency money transmission and that is what we are stuck with.
The Foundation challenged this in its response letter. It may yet get litigated if not legislated. |
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Those are saints, very rare both in the 99% and the 1%. Being poor is no assurance of sainthood -- people are poor by birth, through circumstance & all sorts of personal shortcomings. Being wealthy, otoh, nearly precludes sainthood -- a (Christian) saint who happened onto wealth gives it away. This is in no way a sermon, i don't advocate sainthood or shoot for it myself -- simply an analysis: If you want to find a saint, looking among the 1% is impractical.
And yet in the .0001% is where you find most of the funding for our enduring charitable foundations. More so in the US than elsewhere though. Andrew Carnegie, a century ago, declared it disgraceful to die rich. Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the founder of modern philanthropy in the USA, wrote in 1740, the goal of philanthropic giving is to change society so as to do away with the need for charity. Some examples George Soros has devoted $10 billion—half of his total fortune over the last 20 years—to helping dissidents in Central Europe, financing drug-rehabilitation programs in Baltimore, and educating the persecuted Roma people of Hungary. Bill and Melinda Gates give $4 billion annually to develop African agriculture and to eradicate malaria. Matched by Warren Buffet (who is leaving less than 1/10000th of his wealth to his heirs and the rest to charity). New York financier John Paulson gave $100 million for the upkeep of Central Park, Stephen Schwarzman, a Wall Street investor, donated $100 million to renovate the New York Public Library and another $100 million to finance scholarships for American students in China. Private giving underwrites almost all American cultural institutions and major universities. By contrast, in Europe, such institutions rely on public money more commonly. I remember the disaster relief giving for tsunami and such, how there would be lists circulated about what countries gave what money. Folks were calling the US stingy because the government money was not considered high enough. But in the US more was given by private donation than any single nation, including the US, but that doesn't make the papers internationally. Folks like their stereotypes. |
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tl;dr: ITT bitcoin millionaires talk about why the 1% isn't bad
lol, you realise I have fuck all right in my Bitcoin wallet right now? either way, my opinion won't change on this, not until the people screaming about taxing the rich say it's okay to tax themselves as well. Not that you specifically mentioned flat tax per se, but I'd still like to point out that taking $100 tax from somebody who makes $1000 a month might make it so they can't eat, while taking $1000 from somebody who makes $10000 a month will not put that same pressure on them. Most every flat tax I've seen proposed had a minimum level below which no tax is extorted. |
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The problem of poor people is how well they can get out of poverty, not how the high-level part of society distributes wealth. Any redistribution in just Europe or the USA that decreases overall efficiency would just starve more people in poor countries. I don't remember seeing protest banners reading "We speak for the 1.29 billion", the people below the poverty line who are likely to die from lack of food and medicine. Is it not hypocrisy to call some exact distribution near the top "unfair" while neglecting over a BILLION people elsewhere?
Absolutely. "Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." And "cast the first stone," and all that stuff. 99-percenters are just as rotten as 1-percenters. And some are whinier. Many of the 99% are in the 1% globally. When we see our burden as tormenting those above rather than aiding those below...jealousy is greed. Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And, what is more, they find it everywhere.
-Van Wyck Brooks |
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The BTC came from various locations in US and HongKong. One of the IPs looks like a hijacked server (maybe used as proxy): http://yojimbo.wktel.com/ One other looks like a VPN-Provider ( http://boozepoint.com). Someone is trying to hide his ass here. IMO bad for bitcoin unless we can reveal the user as non-threatening for the network. Since it is non-threatening / non-hostile to bitcoin and obvious that it wishes to be anonymous, let it be. |
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Sure, and I am fine with that.
That's the problem. If you have a problem with my opinion, you will probably have to live with that. I used to think like you, I came to my senses. I've seen the results of defenseless women, when it mattered. I will have to live with that. The supply is not "free flowing".
How did you arrive at such an erroneous conclusion given the statistics? I looked up "free" and "law" in the dictionary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_the_United_StatesWow, seems I am right and you are wrong, huh. Big surprise. What specifically are you hoping to accomplish after you have disarmed the relatively innocent? |
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300 million guns is the result of the free flowing supply, as advocated by the NRA, and gun advocates such as yourself. The U.S., by virtue of its guns per capita, and its ineffective laws enforced ineffectively, has created that gun inventory.
I'm not to blame for the existence of 300 million guns in the U.S. Gun advocates, and gun buyers are to blame for it.
Also, are you aware that there is direct correlation between guns per capita and gun deaths, worldwide, when viewed on a 2d chart, depicting the position of each country on the intersection of guns per capita and gun deaths?
Sure, and I am fine with that. I am sorry you are so afraid. You should probably look for a good therapist. For what it is worth, I am also not interested in government mandating that folks be covered in bubblewrap, even if it saves lives. The supply is not "free flowing". There are a great amount of laws governing how, where, who can sell to whom, and more laws most every year. If 300 million guns is the wrong number for you... What is the right number for you? What percentage of those guns should be held by your governments? I am not an advocate of guns, also not an NRA member, am not political at all really though I do appreciate their work. I also appreciate what freedoms remain, on a wide variety of other issues. Freedoms tend to lead to prosperity, this one included. It seems a bizarre thing to get worked up over. Assault weapons? Really? The sky is just not falling in this neck of the woods, and certainly not a problem worthy of further extracting taxes of my fellows in order to hire a bunch of government gunslingers to run around trying to disarm citizens. |
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Others in this thread seem to think they only get them from other criminals.
Yes, but only to the extent that pretty much all adult citizens are criminals. The reality is they get them because people such as yourself (gun advocates) insist on allowing a free flowing path of guns into their hands.
In what jurisdiction are you, that has guns "free flowing" into anyone's hands, much less criminals? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_the_United_States_by_stateLooks like there are some laws about who and what guns can be sold pretty much everywhere, as well as at Federal and local government levels. For what its worth, I don't think of myself as a gun advocate at all. I do like liberty though, and I think we have more than enough laws. |
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Most of the questions don't make much sense. Nor does the assault weapon ban if any of these statistics are proclaimed as the reason. Assault weapons and rifles are about 1% of the "gun crimes" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_-N9_tnWBoIt doesn't solve the problem they pretend that it solves. What it does is make them feel good about attempting to use government to "do something" against their fellow citizens with whom they disagree.  |
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Guns are pretty easy to make. The technology has been around for a long long time. You can make deadly weapons from stuff around your house. They have them because they want them. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fSrRjNstCg |
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I didn't propose anything to you. I did ask you a question, and it appears I haven't received an answer. Let me rephrase it. Do you condone the current case in the U.S. where criminals are regularly supplied with guns by gun buyers, gun owners, and gun sellers either through their ineptitude or deliberate intent?
We have enough laws that all adult citizens are criminals. Maybe you want to rephrase again? I don't need to rephrase again. Your statement here has no merit, since you're implying the concept of matter of degree has no relevance. The matter of degree does have relevance, both in the current law and in the current facts. Criminals who are in prison are not sold guns by any of the folks you complain about. I am OK with that. Criminals who committed trespassing for cutting across someone's lawn without permission or non-violently protested a war and was arrested might be sold one. Both are criminals. So if you do not want to rephrase, then yes if Walmart "regularly" sells a gun to the lawn cutter through their ineptitude, I am OK with that ineptitude too. |
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I didn't propose anything to you. I did ask you a question, and it appears I haven't received an answer. Let me rephrase it. Do you condone the current case in the U.S. where criminals are regularly supplied with guns by gun buyers, gun owners, and gun sellers either through their ineptitude or deliberate intent?
We have enough laws that all adult citizens are criminals. Maybe you want to rephrase again? |
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