Casascius physical Bitcoins, Bitbills, bzw. Mt.Gox redeemable codes fallen mir noch ein, wobei letzteres natürlich keine echten Bitcoins sind!
nichts davon sind "echte bitcoins". ansonsten kann ich jemandem auch einfach einen private key auf ein stück papier kritzeln. |
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best news ever! (except for the famous september annoucement of course....  ) a bit weird to hide this in a sub-sub-forum though |
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We have that same risk with physical bitcoins.
there are no physical bitcoins. |
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nice improvements  runs smothly so far, great job devs! |
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So what happens when you are unable to do work that pays enough to survive?
you become a burglar and rob people until someone puts you out of your misery with his hunting rifle. ancap takes care of its own  |
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why should i delete that?
some guy tells me to try and read a book and i tell him he can go fuck himself. seems to be a pretty coherent continuation of the "discussion".
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It's called science fiction, you should think about maybe reading some.
maybe that attitude flies at your local gun owners and pig wrestlers meetings. i however dont need to read your bs. goodbye. |
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...no.
While yes, if you own a swimming pool, you get to decide who can swim there, you don't get to decide who can swim in the other pools in town, and owning a supermarket doesn't mean you get to decide what people eat. For one thing, as with the pools, competition means there are other supermarkets to choose from, and if there's a demand for a particular food item, someone is going to provide it. You can only choose what people can buy from you, not from the other supermarkets. For another, if you sell things nobody wants, nobody will buy it. Since nobody buys it, you lose money. Lose enough money, and someone else is in control of that supermarket.
So, since you can't influence the way society works by owning something, where is this extra freedom you speak of?
- maybe there is only one supermarket in the vincinity - you could own all supermarkets - maybe all supermarkets belong to people of the same group, religion or whatever all those cases are possible and pretty common actually. rich people shape society right now. what makes you think that gets any less in a society with even less restrictions to what you are allowed to do with your property? |
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Here's the thing: If you take 20% of $1000, you're left with $800. If you take 20% from $1 000 000, you're left with $800 000. $200 is a lot more to a poor man than $200 000 is to a rich one. The disproportion comes in not in the tax itself, but in the relative value of what you're taking.
you are making it a theoretical problem. there is no way to exactly determine how much money is worth for a specific person. the practical problem is that people with $1 000 000 income usually don't pay taxes at all. the ones paying the bills for everyone are usually those with $50 000 - $150 000 per year, enough to be be paying significant taxes but still so little that you don't have real flexibility in investments. someone with say $800 000 to spare each year has way way more options, plus he can afford to pay $10 000 to someone evaluating those options. Tsk, tsk.... What makes you think an anarchist would be in favor of caging people? Do you think it is possible that I know more about what you propose than you know of what I propose?
of course. thats because you don't propose much of anything. you just claim the market will take care of everything. Wait, you have both doctors who get paid a small, set amount per patient, and doctors who can charge more? You have free healthcare and market healthcare? What doctor would work in the free healthcare system? Clearly, only those who would not be able to compete in the market. In other words, not mediocre, but poor. So the free healthcare is not basic, it's the worst available.
there are no two systems. most doctors will do both basic treatments and those requiring extra payment. simply because it's not that easy to find so many wealthy customers. plus sometimes there isn't a better treatment then the basic one, recommending anything else will just be ripping of your patients. Clearly, you have an end goal, yes? A society that you would consider "done"? If it's not my Fornitland, then what is it? What would your Fornitland look like?
why would i have a society in mind i consider "done"? you might have noticed we live in a time of rapid technological advancement. any society i propose based on current technology would be outdated by the time 10% of what i proposed could be realized. in fact, proposing any static utopia in a time in which several decades or centuries of rapid technological changes are ahead of us is a purely theoretical excercise. and its not just technology. the fact that we will run into resource shortages pretty soon will make the situation even more unstable and unpredictable. in my opinion, right now you can only realistically think about mitigating the growth pains. i have no idea how a society could look like in a century. we might have fought over resources most of the century and all live in poverty or found a way to digitalize consciousness and live in clones adapted to life on mars just think about some guy fantasizing in 1912 about an ideal society for today. they had radios and horses ffs  . and that doesn't even account for the fact that technological advancement is still accelerating. a lot more happened from 1962-2012 than from 1912-1962. |
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looks very coherent to me and your analogy is totally off.
owned land directly translates into land you can do wantever you want on. size obsiously matters.
owned functional entities translate into stuff that goes the way you want it to. say for example when you own the local swimming pool, you are free to ban whatever customers you don't want. so you are swimming with exactly the people you want to swim with, while everybody else only has the freedom to swim with the people YOU like or don't swim at all. and if you want to slide, it has a slide. you own the supermarket and choose what people eat. unless you get so absolutely weird that they boycott you. but within reasonable boundaries, you can influence the way the society works while people owning less can not. obviously you have more freedom.
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I assumed you would prefer to tax the rich more, rather than taxing the poor disproportionately with a flat tax.
a flat tax is flat. there is nothing disporportionate about it. you already get your free income and above that, for every dollar you earn you are left with, say, 0.80$. when you look at how many exceptions and loopholes current progressive taxes have, this is a far better system. you always and instantly know much money the state will take from you. you don't have to take into account the progression, varying exempt amounts, write-offs etc. and you know all the exceptions always work for the people who have the time, money and expertise to work the system. they never work for the poor. Indeed... because here's where the armed part comes in. Not the poor, but those they would steal from. Read the article on page 1 of this thread for info on what happens when someone decides to steal instead of working for a living. And no, the bright and productive do not stop working when they get a basic sustenance. Instead, they get upset about paying for those who did stop working. And no, the stupid and lazy don't turn into ambitious, inventive people just because you starve them. Those that don't, however, will starve. And I apologize if I offend your European sensibilities with what I am about to say, but those who are not willing to output the energy to keep themselves alive are a drain, not a resource. When they starve, it will be their own doing.
its not about sensibilities. you create a convoluted, expensive and potentially live-endangering solution to avoid a simple and actually not that expensive solution because you consider it unjust. you rather buy guns, build prisons and accept whatever collateral damage crimes cause just to avoid giving some morons the free food and shelter they will eventually get in prison anyway. Except he is paid by the state, is he not? That's what "free healthcare" means, you know. State-run hospitals. There are two options for state-run healthcare, from the doctor's point of view: Either he gets paid a set salary, or he gets paid per patient. If he gets paid a set salary, then he has no incentive to hurry, and can take his time with each patient. Of course, he also has no real incentive to do well, since even if his patients leave him, he still gets paid the same amount. If he gets paid per patient, he now has incentive to get as many patients through as possible. As you point out, he doesn't have to be a great doctor, just a fast, mediocre one. And since all the doctors have the same incentives, all will be fast, and mediocre.
yay, you get it. fast and mediocre, exactly. thats why its called basic healthcare. if you want better service, go to the best doctors, they will charge you extra on top. thats how those systems work. the doctor gets the fixed amount for the service and if he thinks he is so good he can charge extra, he is free to do so. Again, I suggest that if I have mischaracterized your ideal society, why don't you correct me, and run through your interpretation of the incentives in those societies. I'd honestly like to see how you predict your society unfolding. In short, I am asking you to state your case. You may even be able to convince me.
i am not proposing an entirely new state. i just propose improvements on existing ones. while i believe having a vision what a society should be like is important, in the end, you can never start from scratch. pretending you could won't result in anything that could ever be applied to any real world situation. for the united states, i wouldn't dare to claim i could propose an allround solution to all its problems. i believe the united states are already past the point of no return, surviving because other nations still buy dollars. so i would focus on infrastrucure and education. because that is stuff no one can just buy and carry away from you when the shit finally hits the fan. |
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fornitland is depicted in the novel faith of the fallen, pretty much by the letter. i guess ayn rand disciples just aren't that original.
its no surprise fornitland has a progressive tax even though i explicitly promoted a flat tax. overall you twist whatever i stated to fit your distopia of a state, where you get little to nothing for your work. i never promoted any of that. that happens when you don't listen but just expect things to fit into your dogma.
regarding your prognosis for both countries: you might want to try and watch actual human behavior. the bright and productive don't just suddenly stop working because they got bread and water for free. and the stupid and lazy don't just turn into ambitious, inventive people because you starve them.
when people get desperate, they resort to crime. in the end, that will prove to be way more expensive than a little food and a place to sleep.
your prognosis on economics is equally flawed. when you you have several doctors, each getting the exact same amount for a service, all patients will flock to those doctors that provide the best service for that price. the bad doctor doesnt earn anything because nobody is forced to go to him. except when there are too few doctors, in which case there is a high incentive to become a doctor, because its easy to outperform the bad doctors and get a lot of patients without being excellent. you just have to be better than the worst doctors that are still good enough to have enough patients.
you somehow always get this mixed up with a planned economy, with a fixed amount of doctors and other restrictions. you really need to step out of your black/white capitalism/communism template.
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i hope you don't expect me to respond in detail to that paraphrase of a terry goodkind propaganda novel.
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Let me explain you that what you describe is not much different than the current way capitalism works. A robot is a mean of production, just as is a share of a company/firm/factory (I don't know exactlly how you call that in english). And those means of production have to belong to someone.
From the point of view of the owner (i.e. the capitalist), it does not matter much if the worker is made of flesh or steel. What matters is that it behaves as such: it accepts to work, to give away its production and to receive a predetermined money amount in exchange. The robot does not demand much wage, basically it only requires maintenance costs which is equivalent. But otherwise, to the capitalist the robot and the human are not much different. One is just much cheaper than the other.
So the situation you describe is just a fancy, science-fiction way to describe what currently exists already. I do own shares of companies and most of my income come from that. I don't care much about what kind of workers work in these companies. Hell, I guess there is a fair amount of robots already.
so you really wrote that long a text trying to tell me that, after all those changes, the company owner is still good? lol yeah, thanks for the info Is that your plan?
no, its not. |
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- in the end, people have to vote with their feet
indeed. And your proposed system will drive out the rich, the intelligent, and the ambitious. Leaving only the poor, stupid, and lazy. drive them out to where exactly? the country where all the poor people are armed and starving? not likely a country that takes care of its poor people is massively favorable for the rich. unless you like to live in said castle with a moat. in my sports club like we got a guy that is the owner of his own insurance company and one with a software company. both are likely filthy rich. i think they like to be part of a prospering society instead of a protected enclave inside an ocean of misery. Really? Are you that blind? Maybe it's just because you're in Germany, and not, say, Greece. The top of the food chain always feels the drought last.
greece failed because the EU managed to create a financial system along with the euro that basically encouraged and rewarded taking more debts than you need. they lived at a level way above what their own economy could sustain. basically they were the top of the food chain, consuming products produced by others. it's not a problem of social market economy as a whole. we could sustain those punks forever. we just don't want to plus, when greece, italy and spain go broke, holidays at the sea are cheap again ... You're... you're actually serious about that, aren't you? You really think that robots will do everything, including build, program, maintain and repair the other robots. Well, if that's true, then we don't need to worry at all, since all our needs will be met by the robots. Until they overthrow us anyway. Automation doesn't reduce employment - not long-term, anyway - it just changes the industry. And it's especially funny considering the industry I used as an example is one not subject to automation... Unless you'd trust Robo-nanny 9000? not everything. child and health care, education and most creative jobs are pretty safe. but you dont need 100% unemployment rate for civil unrest. just look at ATMs and online banking. i still remember a time when you actually had to talk to people to transfer money. shops selling media like books or dvds are already on death row. fully automated supermarkets are likely a thing for this decade. for a practical example, take a look at this: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HHLA_Container_Terminal_Altenwerder_(CTA)_in_Hamburg_-_Winter_2010_-_04.jpgwhat you see there is the container terminal altenwerder. look at the full size picture too. all vehicles, the storage cranes and the whole storage organization are fully automated. wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_Terminal_Altenwerderand a boring video without sound: http://hhla.de/de/foto-film/filme/der-weg-der-box.html |
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Communism, in other words. That's been tried, and every time, it kills people, or reduces them to poverty. I'll explain why:
Your funding(note that these are corresponding, ie the first response is for the first statement, and so on):
- either taxes the poor disproportionately (flat tax) or encourages the rich to leave (scaling tax). And this ignores the fact that taxation is theft, even slavery if looked at from the right perspective.
- removes the incentive to save, since your family will not benefit.
- encourages a black market to avoid the tax.
- right now the taxation system favors the rich because it is so complex that only those benefit that have the money to pay advisors and don't have to spend most of their money on necessities so. - i don't need anyone to save millions and millions. leave your family one house instead of ten. - drugs are way way overpriced and low quality right now. illegal production and transportation is costly. just make the taxes high enough so that you end up with comparable prices and a regularly controlled, quality product. in the end you have extra tax income, less criminalized drug users, less rich drug lords and police officers that can focus on actual crimes Your social programs:
- removes the incentive to work, since even if you do nothing, you'll still be fine.
- denies the fact that education is not free, someone has to pay the teachers. And if it's not the students, the teachers have no incentive to perform well.
- Second verse, same as the first, just replace teacher with doctor.
- I actually don't disagree with this one - in principle. One catch: Who pays for the space and equipment? It's likely to be the poorest quality available, if it's on the state budget.
- i am not talking thousands of dollars here. just enough to buy food and shared living space. thats 300-600$ in most western countries. in nothern europe we spent that money for welfare anyway. except right now we spent half of it on the needy and half it on the bureaucrats determining need. rather give that money away equally. not only do you save lots of bureaucracy, the low, flat amount also encourages to look for work and spend your money more efficiently. - of course education costs money. for a society though, uneducated workers are practically useless nowadays. giving people no chance to realize their potential because their parents are poor places a huge burden on a high tech society. putting money into education always pays off. - in the end, people have to vote with their feed. you dont have to go to a bad doctor. or school. - regarding sport you might want to take a look at the german model. for membership in a sports club you pay roughly 100-300$ per year. those are charitable clubs with a lot of volunteers. the state usually supports those with the open slots in school sports halls and others existing facilities and sometimes help for bigger investments. - I have a suggestion for this one: Kickstarter. And that's only one option. Lots of people are doing pretty good by giving the product away and asking for donations, or selling the item cheap directly to the fans. Piracy is less likely when you're stealing from the artist instead of some company. There's also the option of giving away the music and selling merchandise and, of course, the experience of a live concert. (Can you tell I've thought about this one?) i also think that kickstarter is, in the current system, a very welcome innovation. its a huge improvement over conventional funding methods. i am not sure it is enough to challenge the status quo though. When you combine the bad ideas in the first list, with the bad ideas in the second list, you get a listless, barely subsistent populace with crappy clothes, crappy food, and no hope for the future. I would have thought a German would know better than to think socialist plans would work... Maybe you're simply too young to remember, but it wasn't that long ago that East Germany collapsed.
i am not at all in favor of communism. its more of an improvement upon social market economy. you might have noticed i did not propose any kind of planned economy. unlike communism, social market economy is working pretty well. you might want to travel to europe and take a look at that barely subsistent populance. free income is not a degeneration into an already tried and failed experiment. it is an adjustment to get rid of bureaucracy and unjust distribution of funds we spent anyway. Now, lest I be accused of tearing you down without offering any better suggestions, let me provide a counterpoint:
To reduce poverty, I suggest we remove the minimum wage and reduce or remove the licensing requirements for many industries. That allows people to work for whatever they can get, rather than being excluded by low skills from the workforce. Open up the market, allowing, say, a poor mother to apply the skills that she's gained raising her children to care for the children of others. Now she can feed herself, and her children, by offering those skills to her friends and neighbors.
once you have free income you can easily remove minimum wage . seriously, the problem with your proposal is that it's a solution for yesterday. automation is an ongoing process and full employment is a dead concept. for example, in the next few decades, jobs like truck driver, pilot, ship captain, pizza delivery or mail man won't exist anymore. the whole transportation system and many other things will be automatic. most machines will be built and maintained by other machines. poperty will produce property. work as a mechanism to distribute wealth will cease to function and we better get rid of the dependency on that mechanism before it fails completely. |
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You would be wrong. I would also like to build a society where crime is prevented by reducing poverty, social isolation and lack of access to education and culture. What we disagree on is how that should be achieved.
I have an idea. Why don't you suggest a few things? Like, say, specifically how you intend to reduce poverty? Or increase access to education?
ok, a few things. get the money from: - flat, low, simple, unavoidable taxation. no write-offs, exceptions, subsidies, total economic isolation from all governments supporting tax evasion - high inheritance tax for big inheritances and reduction of possibilities to avoid that tax - decriminalization of drug usage and instead high taxation similar to alcohol or tobacco - massive decrease in military spending (thats mostly for the us) - massive decrease in financial support for the state churches (thats germany...) spend it on: - flat basic free income for everybody, zero requirements attached. on the other hand, no special treatment or extras for anyone - all education including university is free - basic healthcare is free - access to the first sports club or similar institution known to improve health and social integration is free - find a way to make all digital products available to everybody without depriving artists, programmers etc of their income (culture flat rate?) Oh, and any time you feel like, feel free to answer these questions: If you seek to prevent someone's death by gunfire, perhaps they should have the tools to defend themselves? And if you say you judge actions, why then are you judging failure to act? If a paralyzed man does not jump into the river to pull the drowning man out, does that make his lack of action evil?
obviously not. he has no chance to act without harming himself. i assumed that goes without question. regarding the first question: if those tools were not equally suited for aggression than for defense, i would agree with you. but overall fire arms just do more harm than good. i know you disagree, but i won't change my opinion on that. |
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There's plenty of common ground. You don't like getting murdered, raped, or robbed, I assume? Neither do I. We both agree that that's wrong behavior. Now we just need to discuss what to do about it.
i think we are already pretty clear on that. i like to build a society where crime is prevented by reducing poverty, social isolation and lack of access to education and culture. you like to build a castle and outfit it with a moat and catapults. |
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i dont think we will ever agree on anything. at some point when talking to a moral absolutist, you just have to recognize there is not enough common ground for a discussion to take place.
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lol, what a moron.
if china wanted to destroy the usa, they would drop all their dollars, not a nuke.
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