Bah! "Thinking" is for college/university grads. We only need high school diploma types for things like fast food and assembly line work.

BTW, sounds like your "home schooling" is actually a distributed version of private schooling/tutoring. I'd even go so far as to say "my children are taught by private tutors we hire," since "homeschool" suggests the parents keep their kids at home, and tech them themselves in their own garages, from material they either picked themselves, or were provided by their church/political cult.
I'm all for private tutoring, if you can afford it, btw.

Maybe you guys should start a war over this. Help get the Eurozone economy going 

Education is hard work. If everything is voluntary, and everyone's basic needs are provided for, I'm not sure why the majority of the population would have an incentive to do this hard work. At which point, our biological, genetically ingrained,  instinct of competing to be the alpha male, whether through accumulating/hoarding wealth, or by being an ahole to other people around you (and maybe trying to subjugate them) would emerge, societal "conditioning" be damned.

This! ^^^  That right there is the part that keeps making me go "What?" What do you mean by "money making profit?" Money by itself doesn't make profit, and money lent makes profit that is equal to interest based on the borrowers risk rate and the supply of available money to be lent. Is the second part, the supply of available money, the part you are calling "money profit" that you are against?

Some people have to do this thing called "office work" and "financial work" and "play video games," and, sadly, Windows is pretty much still the only OS with sufficient application support for those

Aaaactually... we have plenty of salt water, so all we need is to drop some wires into it, hook it up to a power source (solar/wind/whatever), and we can get hydrogen and oxygen, which make up the main (non-booster) rocket fuel used in the space shuttle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_propellant#History_2
Did I mention Konstantin Tsiolkovsky is my gramps? (+3xGreat)

I think "standards of measurement" is a pretty dumb thing to argue about when teaching your kid. I grew up on metric, came to US, was all "wtf is this foot and inch stuff?" and now after many years forgot metric. But I can always look it up.

What would concern me most is that parents, not being aware of what new knowledge is out there (without research on multiple subjects being their full time job), could be stuck teaching their children only what they themselves know. Sure, basic math, basic science, old literature, and geography don't change much, but by choosing to "not subjugate your child by letting the state decide what to teach," a homeschooling parent can inadvertently subjugate their child to what a book publisher, who write their books for state use since they're their biggest client, decides the child should learn, without an experience teacher being able to comment on current events. i.e. school or state, the only difference is method of teaching, not information (plus maybe some personal political/religious bias).
And yes, home schooled children can beat the crap out of public school children in things like basic math, science, and english, but as I said, those things don't change.  (as example, my high school science/astronomy teacher tended to go on tangents about theories of warped/limited universe and basic string theory stuff, despite it not being covered in the book, and allowed students interested in the topic to stay and discuss after class)

The one GIGANTIC flaw in your premise is that you think the president has anything to do with the country's economy, which is what actually drives government debt.

Except in the real world, increasing taxation increases corporate borrowing/leverage, since interest paid on debt is tax deductible, and decreasing taxation decreases borrowing but also decreases leverage.
So, if government increases the tax rate, government's tax income is almost unaffected, but companies and corporations become more risky, and banks make higher profits, and if government decreases the tax rate, government's tax income is also almost unaffected, but the companies are less risky, and banks make fewer profits.
There are A LOT of external variables anti-tax people fail to take into account.

As for the "if I had more money, I'd hire more people" argument, that's not quite so clear cut either. Hiring and paying employees is a tax deductible business expense. If I make $1,000 a month in revenues, I can hire an employee for $300 a month, pay myself $400 a month, deduct that amount from $1,000 ($700 left), and then have my business either pay $300*70%=$210 under a high tax rate, or $300*25%= $75 under a low tax rate. That's also assuming the remaining $300 is pure profit, which in a competitive market is rarely the case. So, although high tax rate may affect my business growth (which is easily mitigated by borrowing and then deducting loan interest as described above), there really isn't much of an effect on employment, and a fairly small effect on the actual amount paid overall (relative to the revenue produced). Much larger effect is from the overall business revenue, which if I was a Keynesian, I would say is due to lack of buyers, and thus buyers should have their taxes lowered, not businesses, since buyer money translates into business revenue.
But I'm not one, so I'm not saying that's the case.

Oh, hey, how about IBC, for Internet currency BitCoin? If what people are saying about alternative currencies being an eventual possibility, having them classified as internet-based as opposed to country or local region based would help. Plus it'll give Bitcoin the "first to use I" status.

From another article I read recently, the addresses exchanged are encrypted with GPG public key stuff, so only the seller and the buyer can get them.

How far along is this project? I suspect doing a graphics mockup, although requiring skill, is the easy part on top of the actual code behind it.

Could always buy a decommissioned cruise ship. Big enough to be a city, plenty of tech on board, and can move around the water. Main problems would be initial cost, protection from pirates, and power generation (maybe buy a nuke reactor from Iran, too?)

Guys, the fact that he is 17 isn't nearly as important as the fact that he's from Texas. It's a totally different culture, even if it is technically within US territories. Don't get too weirded out by it.

I guess maybe I'm just worried that I don't have the guns or ammo to get through a massive economic catastrophe such as that.

But why does it matter who printed the money, if it's just a tool of exchange for work I produce, and I am the one who decides how to use it and what interest to charge on lending it?


Every time you say "free money" it makes me cringe. You mean specifically "free to borrow" money, right? I still don't know how that could work, since those who have will always charge rent to whose who don't...



And this is the part that I just don't get. Money itself yields nothing, unless it's put to work producing goods or services. Merchants take what they feel they deserve for providing services such as manufacture, storage, and transportation. Workers only sacrifice if they buy on credit, and only what their banks believe is their risk premium. If you take the gross interest, and subtract assumed inflation rate and the risk premium, the only thing left would be profit, which in our vastly large, liquid, and competitive currency market, is pretty much 0. That's profit on just currency lending alone. But most profit comes from either sale of services or goods. Paper itself doesn't give a profit other than through someone else's work, and that someone else is free to chose where they get their paper in an extremely competitive and saturated market. So I just can't wrap my head around this claim. Where is this hidden, and seemingly impossible, profit coming from? Is it a relic of when banks were few, information wasn't easily exchanged, and banks could get away with charging you way more for the loan than your risk called for?

Just realized that the main flaw with the OP statement is that it's tantamount to:

If the bank asked you to pay them your whole paycheck for your monthly mortgage payment amount, you would not have enough money to pay off your mortgage.

Yeah, that's now how debt works.

I think he has been saying that people will voluntarily abandon currency, property rights, and willingness to work for any personal reward, instead choosing to work in a communist-style system where everyone's basic needs are equally rewarded regardless of what they do, thanks to a few people and computers deciding on what's best for everyone, using robots to create those basic needs for everyone, and making sure to limit everyone to only what the earth can support. Those imposed limits being perfectly voluntary, of course. Oh, and this all being on a global scale...

I was asking you to explain why one causes the other. You gave me two historical occurences that happened at the same time, said, "See? Fact!" and claimed they are related. I'm not saying they are NOT related, but I want you to explain how one causes the change in the other. Specifically the part about lower tax rates making higher-income people participate in paying taxes more. That part doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Were they tax dodgers before? WHY does that happen?

I mean, I can say:
Cause - Inflaton
Effect - Hitler

and then claim "They are both historical facts. They both happened at about the same time." And even though all of those statements are perfectly true, including that Inflation did actually cause Hitler, someone who doesn't know why may balk and get really confused.

Oh, btw, the correct answer to Clinton was "He was president during an unprecedented technological revolution called the Internet, and the subsequent enabling of cheap globalization," so economy would've boomed and tax receipts increased regardless of what he may have done. Not "creative accounting." See? Explaining and supporting the claim.

By "believe" I meant as in, how do you understand this system works? What is your "informed opinion" of it? Since if all you have is historical examples, without understanding the cause-effect, then you really do only have "belief," instead of actual understanding of how the system works.