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As long as the servers are out of the US, I don't see anything happening anytime soon. As I have said, I think exchanges are in the most murky grey area for awhile. Predictions markets are legal in much of the world, the only problem would be with offering "gambling" to US residents. Even there, it is a grey area, since it is unknown whether the Wire Act or UIGEA apply to bitcoin. Even there it is an easy work around since there is no way to seize money exchanges and to seize actual servers belonging to actual businesses doing actual legal trade in other parts of the world is a big deal.
No need for a Tor hidden service.
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that's not really true and greatly depends on how you define government.
Try reading David Graeber's Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology if you are interested.
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Gattaca and Truman Show were both worth watching. same director. we'll see.
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I should amend. I'm not one of those "hope the shit hits the fan so people realize how much it stinks" kinda people. But, if there's gonna be a crackdown, I think it will result in more resilient and private networks. Right now the internet essentially routes through google, the NSA, zuckerberg and the Chinese government
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I would welcome a crackdown on the internet because it would spur on activist techies to get even more creative with privacy, routing, domain name resolution, etc. P2P darknets already function quite well, what is needed is further reason for more people to traverse them.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/24/mobile-phones-africa-microfinance-farmingIt may seem unlikely, given its track record in technological development, but Africa is at the centre of a mobile revolution. In the west, we have been adapting mobile phones to be more like our computers: the smartphone could be described as a PC for your pocket. In Africa, where a billion people use only 4% of the world's electricity, many cannot afford to charge a computer, let alone buy one. This has led phone users and developers to be more resourceful, and African mobiles are being used to do things that the developed world is only now beginning to pick up on. The most dramatic example of this is mobile banking. Four years ago, in neighbouring Kenya, the mobile network Safaricom introduced a service called M-Pesa which allows users to store money on their mobiles. If you want to pay a utilities bill or send money to a friend, you simply dispatch the amount by text and the recipient converts it into cash at their local M-Pesa office. It is cheap, easy to use and, for millions of Africans unable to access a bank account or afford the hefty charges of using one, nothing short of revolutionary.
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Size is becoming less and less relevant as warfare become more and more asymmetric.
That being said, I'm banking on moving towards are world where there are no standing armies, not 2,000 separate ones.
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uhhh, you do realize China is not a good example here since they are literally building empty skyscrapers and maintaining gigantic empty malls right? It is like a simulacrum of progress. Besides the fact that China in many ways represents the worst aspects of centralized authoritarian tendencies now tied to the most destructive aspects of capitalism.
China is essentially in the middle of a wild speculative bubble financed with unpayable US debt and collapsing all phases of corporate capitalism - from the wild west, to industrialization and robber barons, to financial ponzi schemes in one strange pyrotechnic orgy of unsustainable growth - though not so unsustainable that they won't be able to knock the US out of its economic supremacy role rather soon
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Sometimes events in the real world make points far more sadly and eloquently than words on a forum ever could.
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I guess I'm more Mises than Rothbard,then... I'd be in favor of drawing a strict line between public and private, and then letting the workers have the public stuff, and let the market sort the private.
As to culpability for things like Agent Orange, and Napalm, and the MOAB, I'm not much one for punishing old wrongs. It's better to move on, I think. Especially with wounds as old as slavery.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt as I give von Mises in this situation because I think that you both tend to believe that giant and evil corporations are so much only emergent in state-corporate (dare I say fascist) socioeconomic systems that a true free market would make mincemeat of them very quickly. I'm obviously much more circumspect in that regard and think that the argument kinda stinks of saying well, first we'll steal all the land and capital and THEN we'll say okay, from here on out, this will be a free market. (ie; I think you are arguing it because you honestly believe such a market, would, regardless of starting point quickly improve the wellbeing of a lot of people. I think that such a market, in absence of redsitribution, has the potential to become an even more unshakable oligarchy thna we have now) Regardless, I've said before and I'll say again that it would give me more confidence if anarcho-capitalists knew their OWN theorists and knew that many of them advocated things like turning companies over to their workers, slave reparations, etc. -- I wonder though, if a free market will reach optimal outcomes so quickly in a true free market, why not just turn all companies over to their workers, turn all land over to its users (as much as such a thing is possible - ie; make that the default attitude, rather than a leave things as they are attitude unless some egregious recent breach of property can be irrefutably demonstated) -- ie; make it so new property claims have the burden of proof since we call all agree nearly everything is inextricably bound up in a violent and coercive socioeconomic system at the moment. |
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Lots of people don't tend to browse the "Newbie" forum, thought you might want in the regular general forum or under the "Currency Exchange" forum
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That's actually what I based my opinion of 'public property should go to those who use it' on. For the most part, when I say subsidized industries, I mean those like the railways, which can't support themselves. For industries like Lockheed-martin, Yes, they did supply weapons to the Gov't. But when you like to make jet planes, who's going to pay you the most to make jet planes?
Are you sure? Yours sounds a lot more like a Van Mises - "just privatize and let the market sort it out since it's such a mess and we can't possibly sort it out any better than that" On the contrary - Rothbard in that article: What of the myriad of corporations which are integral parts of the military-industrial complex, which not only get over half or sometimes virtually all their revenue from the government but also participate in mass murder? What are their credentials to “private” property? Surely less than zero. As eager lobbyists for these contracts and subsidies, as co-founders of the garrison state, they deserve confiscation and reversion of their property to the genuine private sector as rapidly as possible. To say that their “private” property must be respected is to say that the property stolen by the horse thief and the murdered must be “respected”. (seems directly counter to your oh well, who else where they going to sell to argument) The percentage of its sales coming from napalm is undoubtedly small, so that on a percentage basis the company may not seem very guilty; but napalm is and can only be an instrument of mass murder, and therefore Dow Chemical is heavily up to its neck in being an accessory and hence a co-partner in the mass murder in Vietnam. No percentage of sales, however small, can absolve its guilt. (seems to argue that companies that are even doing tiny business in things like chemical weapons should be wholly forfeit or subject to massive sanctions under a libertarian property scheme) One of the tragic aspects of the emancipation of the serfs in Russia in 1861 was that while the serfs gained their personal freedom, the land–their means of production and of life, their land was retained under the ownership of their feudal masters. The land should have gone to the serfs themselves, for under the homestead principle they had tilled the land and deserved its title. Furthermore, the serfs were entitled to a host of reparations from their masters for the centuries of oppression and exploitation. (then he goes on to argue for *shock* reparations to be paid to all descendents of slaves (He also argues for an intermediate step of, right now, nationalizing all companies that get over 50% of their revenue from the public) |
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Who has more decision making power? 1 man with 5 billion dollars, or 6 billion people, each with 1 dollar?
Really? |
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See above for resources. Also, customers vote with their dollars. If you're an ass and are legally untrustworthy, those involved with you from a business sense, those being both the end-customers buying your products products and your suppliers selling you materials, will both start to dump you. Oh yes, this always works. Except how are people even going to know what evil shit these companies are up to when a different division of the same company owns the newspapers and never prints anything bad about them? You don't even need your little AnCapistan to see the results of this right now. Coca-cola has outright murdered union organizers in Latin America and their products still fly off the shelves. Hershey's and other chocolate companies use cocoa grown by modern-day slaves on the Ivory Coast, and most people don't even learn about that, let alone have a chance to get angry about it. With the kind of corporate consolidation we see these days, you also run into the problem of trying to boycott companies that make thousands of products of every different description, and you know most people aren't going to bother with that. This I very much agree with. Capitalism encourages externalizing costs as much as possible and obscuring those costs. (Now yes, I realize government generally increases this, rather than decreases). And it very much incentivizes anti-social behavior (in terms of putting it out of your mind the conditions the product you are about to buy were made under - which is easy in a large and faceless and highly complex market where maybe even the ingredients for your sandwich came from 20 different countries) Now the one good argument that I've heard from AnCaps about this is that eliminating limited liability will take care of a lot of this. But then they don't explain how that doesn't keep the market from losing a lot of its dynamism. If I have to be worried that the shares I own in chemical company Y are going to make me criminally liable for an accident, I'm going to be a hell of a lot less likely to invest my money in companies that I don't know a ton about and aren't engaging in any risky practices. But, it would certainly make it more interesting for CEOs if they could spend the rest of their life in a cage, be shunned from a community, stripped of all their wwealth, or shot in the head (or whatever forms of restitution are used in the jurisdiction they are operating in) for, say, spilling a bunch of toxic sludge in a town and causing a bunch of kids to die. [of course, this does not deal with the short term gains/long term problems whereby actions can be taken and hands can be washed long before negative effects come to light] |
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dear angry mob:
This thread started with the words: "Want to get rid of some rat that has robbed you, cheated you or that you just dislike and hate?"
Followed by an offer to get you in contact with a contract killer.
I LOLed. Especially when I went back and read formerly opaque sentences like "creatures no one needs in their neighborhood" WP OP |
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shit, meant to buy some of those before earnings report came out. we all knew that would happen.
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Despite having literally zero substantive expertise to back this up I'm going to assume this is bullshit. I'd love to be wrong, though, as this would drive the "peak oil" people insane.
You mean the people that recognize little concepts like thermodynamics, ecology, EROI, etc? |
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The issue is the redistribution of wealth that has been acquired through force, without this a Canarchist society would rather quickly evolve into feudalism.
Yes, that is why asking how existing wealth should be dealt with is one of my litmus tests for whether or not I think that an anarcho-capitalist is serious about building a better world, or whether they are just arguing for an intensification of the status quo. The only wealth that has been truly acquired by force is government property (one could argue that any business subsidized by government funds was too, but that's not important, as I'll show later). Any government property is immediately up for grabs upon the dissolution of the government, and most likely, immediately homesteaded by those who use it (That should make you happy, lemon). Any property which was subsidised by the government is likewise now wholly owned by those who use it. Businesses which required government subsidies would quickly fail, giving those resources back to the ones who are best able to use them. (or at least better) So you essentially don't believe that the current shape of the playing field or how it got there matters at all? Even Rothbard argues that quite a few corporations should be turned over to their workers and universities to their students. For example, a variety of military-industrial complex corporations (let's say lockheed martin) could no doubt be retooled to make civilian stuff rather than military warplanes, but what of the fact that shareholders and management have made their capital supplying the State with weapons? Now they get rewarded with the ownership of tons of useful capital and they get to keep all their ill-gotten gains? -- I would argue that if current wealth imbalances are left like they are any attempt at anarcho-capitalism will quickly devolve into a sort of hyper-feudalism. You can't essentially admit that all land/capital was taken illegitimately (by defining current markets as unfree). If the market is to serve as the only/ultimate decision making tool for aggregating choices and preferences, then it makes a huge difference if some people have a lot more of that decision making power. -- Also,this article is a good examination of different libertarian attitudes towards redistribution http://mutualist.org/id45.html |
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