The apology is not enough. The thing is, now it's up to you to press charges on the cop, and that's raw because you have a life to live that you don't want to mess with all of this.
Just because it's a government agent breaking the law doesn't make it right. That's the exact same issue with Ortiz prosecuting Aaron. "Oh he broke the law so he deserves..." NO! He did NOT break the law. Ortiz did, and she and these security guards and the police who unlawfully held this man and trumped up charges against them all belong in jail.
And there needs to be a law against anyone ever convicted of such crimes ever serving as a security guard or law enforcement officer as well.
This is so ridiculous. How does this keep getting worse?
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: land of the free home of the brave
I'm bemused, if not entirely surprised, at your lack of response to the model I put forward. Direct barter leads to the evolution of honest money, at which point, obviously, yes, you are not talking about strict direct barter anymore. This honest process has been undercut by centralized systems. As for your account of the benefits of central banking, the failures of the centralized system are obvious and pervasive. Centralized systems lead to undemocratic control and abuse.
Sure, independent banks don't work. Banking doesn't work. Free silver failed because even silver turned out to be too easy to dig up. Is the book keeping necessary for an open market really more complex than that needed for a centralized fiat currency system? I would say that the development of supply chain management software speaks volumes about the shortcomings of a system where all you know is how much money you have and how much what you want costs strictly in terms of that artificial commodity. People in the know already seek to find out the relative relationships from the ground up. The rest of us are told not to worry about it when in fact it is precisely what we need to worry about.
I don't see a whole lot of new info coming from this conversation, and I hate to keep bugging you, so I'll drop it. I'll keep poking around. I do thank you for the time you have taken though.
People in Western Europe, Canada and Australasia constantly whine about their government over reach while refusing to acknowledge the lessons of history concerning how your government is able to ignore you if you allow it to maintain standing armed forces while disarming the public.
Again, the Constitution's combined statements concerning the requirement of congress to maintain a well ordered militia coupled with the second amendment prohibition of ever infringing the right of the people to keep and bear their own arms is intended to avoid situations such as exist in Syria right at this moment, where the army is the means of control of the nation. Only when part of the army split off was there a revolution. Indeed, that is the heart and soul of the entire so called "Arab Spring". It took massive social pressure, but FINALLY the armies in charge of these places began to splinter, with factions supporting interests besides the existing power structure.
By keeping people armed and intimately involved with the national defense, such issues cannot evolve.
When you act as if these ideas are somehow backwards, anyone who has studied the history behind it all and observes how it is relevant to this very day then sees how out of touch with reality you are.
It doesn't even occur to you that the powers you list are the very powers we rebelled against, and that interference from outside forces was the primary motive for uniting the states to begin with.
You're not being intellectual. You're utterly, painfully, and seemingly stubbornly and willfully uninformed.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: land of the free home of the brave
I understand and agree on almost every point except your last, which you seem to assert without anything like the historical founding you used for the rest of your post.
Direct barter, in and of itself, is not restrictive. What it is is uncentralizable, if I may be allowed to coin a phrase. Direct barter done in a market style would result in a sort of "money" based on credits whose values would be formulated on the comparative value of goods and services, and this is in fact what exists any time some central authority is forbidden from centralizing control over a required medium of exchange.
We are constantly told direct barter is bad, or clunky. The truth is artificially mandated money is what is bad and clunky. It is simplicity itself to have market places with brokers who help people arrange beneficial trades of goods and services for other goods and services, but that sort of decentralization does not serve the ends of those who desire power. People use money because they are threatened with force if they do not.
Money is not power. Power is power. Money is what you get when power wants to control the market place.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: land of the free home of the brave
I want to start off by saying that, despite having studied this fairly thoroughly, I am not trying to assert I am 100% right, and you are 100% wrong. Nevertheless.....
I'm sorry, but this part at least is not true. Gold has a value for several reasons that led to its use as money. It is highly valued for its appearance and for the fact that it does not oxidize. It's value as a commodity is high enough that a relatively small amount of it can be used in trade for much bulkier goods, so it is useful as money in that it is relatively easy to transport in relation to its perceived value.
Moving on to the less well documented and more just my opinion and that of many others who have studied the issue, modern paper money's value lies strictly in the government's threat of sanctions if you do not use it in the prescribed manner.
This is an important distinction. If we did not have to pay taxes in money - if we could pay them in kind or through labor for example - the entire dynamic of money being the central focus of the economy would change.
Gold became relatively fake only when fractional reserve lending became commonplace. It is not really, literally, "creating money form nothing," but it operates in a way that is difficult to distinguish and is really just as fraught with problems.
Fractional reserve lending is re-lending the same money over and over again in a sort of chain. It compounds the interest rate basically, so that what appears on its face to be reasonable interest is in fact usurious in every sense of the word. That is to say, it is not just "usury" in the sense that any interest is "usury", it is "usury" in the sense of being abusively high.
At a 10% reserve rate, a 2.5% interest rate becomes an effective 25% interest rate.
Additionally, by relending the money, the chances get higher and higher that someone is not going to be able or willing to meet their obligation. Since there is no literal chain, everyone is equally affected, but it still magnifies the risk to the system as a whole that a substantial portion of money lent out will not find its way back.
Bottom line, you do not appear to me to understand the topic you're discussing, and the proliferation of this continued ignorance in our society repeatedly has put us in danger over the years. I sincerely hope you will re-evaluate the situation.
I may be wrong, obviously. If I am, please feel free to try to set me right. But what you said just seems about a thousand miles off from my present understanding of the topic.
Well, and people also look for ways to prevent the tragedy, which I think is noble. But they overlook the obvious - be diligent in the physical defense of the innocent.
People are scared of guns, so they refuse to learn about them and carry them even though the only thing really that will ever stop a mass murderer in the act is someone as well armed or more so opposing them in the moment.
It is our cowardice ultimately that lends itself to these tragedies. It is not the cause, but it is what leads to the circumstance that allows it to happen more easily.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: I'm not sure why this is relevant.
"Something" is the internet. People put stuff on it for free because they anticipate it remaining there. Google in particular profits by making it supposedly easier to find things you want, though increasingly I don't really believe they are doing that. Facebook is not truly "the internet" so much as a site on it, and their business model is based on making it easier for people to have a sort of "home page". Those of us who have been on the net a while tend to have a blog or web page of some sort. People not interested in putting that much effort into get a Facebook page. Then the rest of us get one so we can talk to them. It's not really all that diabolical.
Capitalism is not a definable thing. If what you mean by "Capitalism" is a free market, and people being allowed to trade what they want when they want to, then there is absolutely nothing wrong with it at all. If by "Capitalism" you mean a market controlled by capital, which itself is centrally controlled, what you have is something not so very different from socialism, and indeed most economies in the west these days are "mixed" in whatever sense contrasting capitalism with socialism makes any sense at all. Ultimately most everything you say about economics makes no sense.
Magna Carta is about limiting the power of the privileged, and the history of this earth is really nothing but the back and forth between privilege and common life. I frankly don'y see a whole lot of difference between life today and life 2000 years ago. Our current system is almost indistinguishable from fuedalism. Fiefdoms are not corporations. The larger corporations represent more powerful fiefdoms, smaller ones more akin to knights. There are a handful of professionals that operate like free artisans and merchants and the like, and the vast bulk of people work for wages in a way not at all unlike peons of old. If anything, there seems to be growing evidence peasants in medieval times actually had more self determination, seeing as the gap between the well to do and the poor was narrower. Court rolls document peasants being able to rise and fall economically, live outside of town (and hence outside of their lord's direct monitoring) for a small fee. Travel was far from unheard of.
Technical know how has made the average person's life much better, but the limit on the number of people allowed into such fields makes demigods of those people, which is just one more reason I despise IP laws. A modern Magna Carta would limit the ability of corporations and governments to dictate who can and cannot compete, and under what circumstances. Research would either be a community driven thing, or it would not happen. Doing research to find out how to save a man's life only to then use that knowledge to leverage work out of him is just plain, old fashioned, unadulterated greed, and there's nothing about it to suggest it drives progress.
What, do the money fairies come and steal all the money you try to pay them, so you have to have like a jillion dollars to hire anyone?
Oh wait. Wait, everyone knows exactly how it works, and it's been a long standing complaint among many people throughout our culture that entertainers are overpaid...
Your inability to present your own beliefs and reputation as someone who resorts to personal attacks is once again secured.
I have no idea how Hollywood works... Like you're a big time film producer when you're not arguing cases before the Supreme Court in your primary role as a lawyer. If indeed you are even one of those...
I remember that. I forget now who but not too long ago there was a guy STILL in jail, and the governor of his state was STILL refusing to set him free....
It's disheartening to see what people will do, and I am not able to really understand why they do it... It's surreal.
And I again repeat, what is so special about creative work? Everyone else gets paid per product, or for showing up to work. This is a model that is easily applied to artists as well.
How we got here is the systematic creation of laws to allow central control over what we see mass produced, starting with the earliest copyright manifesting itself as a way to control what is printed by the newly developed printing press.
Back in the 70's it was enough that there was a tax attached to all blank media that went straight to the media companies. Now even THAT sort of blanket largesse is not enough. Now they need to be able to control the entire planet's access even to the point of creating artificial scarcities for stuff that's decades old and that no one is even using. The link I showed you for the college kid downloading is tens of thousands of dollars per song. That's ludicrous.
That's how we got here. The system has always been questionable, and now the media people and the artists who have attached themselves to them are abusing the privilege. Time to take the privilege back, or at least reduce it substantially.
No one's mooching off these people. They need to either get wage paying jobs, sell their services per hour, or per product, or accept that the pay for singing, dancing, playing pretend and making playpretties is a competitive one that may not pay like they want it to. Most people do this kind of thing as a hobby. There's no reason to have such draconian laws to make it all this expensive and full of hassle.
Mike has publicized a lot of people who openly would like to do away with or drastically reduce copyright, but he has also given voice to people who have less extreme solutions. I believe I read about the book Copyfraud by Jason Mazzone here, and it certainly comes far short of promoting the end of IP.
I think frankly it is highly unlikely Mike wants IP done away with completely. I do... I don't think he does though. But if he does, really, so what?
You seem to be pretending Mike has some unique take on this that is weak. The argument is actually pretty straight forward, and if there are weaknesses in it, you have yet to demonstrate them.
The law in question was written decades ago to deal with wire fraud and the like, not high speed downloading of already free documents. The use of this law, and especially the extent to which they piled on, is more and more being seen as an abuse Ortiz in fact appears to have a history of abusing her position.
So yeah, I think you trying to paint Mike as somehow misleading is really more misleading than anything he might be doing.
I did notice him sort of dodge an issue concerning the six month offer from Ortiz a few days back, but the belligerence of the person calling him to the carpet over it made his refusal to come back and acknowledge his mistake more than understandable to me, and he of course has since posted multiple articles that cite the 6 month plea offer, so...
Most the people trying to paint Mike in a bad light here seem to paint themselves into a corner in the effort.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: land of the free home of the brave
That's not really a trick unique to Nixon though. In fact I am not seeing it in Executive Order 11615 at all, but I am not as familiar as perhaps I should be with that whole issue. Roosevelt did limit personal gold ownership though, and I had read something about Obama attempting to regulate the sale of gold, though that might just be a rumor.
To my mind, the unique thing Nixon did was in response to European countries simultaneously leaving Bretton Wood, but then still demanding gold for their dollars at a pegged price. That's just silly. International currency exchanges playing games with fixed exchange rates for gold go way back though. The whole thing is nothing but nonsense in my view, so I have little sympathy for those who feel Nixon somehow short changed them.
But you apparently are familiar enough with it all, and I think in general terms we agree anyhow. So you win. LOL!
On the post: Carlos Miller Arrested (Again) For Perfectly Legal Photography
Re:
But this is how it perpetuates.
On the post: Carlos Miller Arrested (Again) For Perfectly Legal Photography
Re: Re:
On the post: Carlos Miller Arrested (Again) For Perfectly Legal Photography
Re: Re:
Just because it's a government agent breaking the law doesn't make it right. That's the exact same issue with Ortiz prosecuting Aaron. "Oh he broke the law so he deserves..." NO! He did NOT break the law. Ortiz did, and she and these security guards and the police who unlawfully held this man and trumped up charges against them all belong in jail.
And there needs to be a law against anyone ever convicted of such crimes ever serving as a security guard or law enforcement officer as well.
This is so ridiculous. How does this keep getting worse?
On the post: Carlos Miller Arrested (Again) For Perfectly Legal Photography
Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Aaron Swartz Unlikely To Face Jail Or Conviction... Until Feds Decided To 'Send A Message'
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: land of the free home of the brave
Sure, independent banks don't work. Banking doesn't work. Free silver failed because even silver turned out to be too easy to dig up. Is the book keeping necessary for an open market really more complex than that needed for a centralized fiat currency system? I would say that the development of supply chain management software speaks volumes about the shortcomings of a system where all you know is how much money you have and how much what you want costs strictly in terms of that artificial commodity. People in the know already seek to find out the relative relationships from the ground up. The rest of us are told not to worry about it when in fact it is precisely what we need to worry about.
I don't see a whole lot of new info coming from this conversation, and I hate to keep bugging you, so I'll drop it. I'll keep poking around. I do thank you for the time you have taken though.
On the post: California Senator Leland Yee Tells Gamers To Shut Up And Let The Grown Ups Talk
ROFL
Hubris.
On the post: California Senator Leland Yee Tells Gamers To Shut Up And Let The Grown Ups Talk
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Scapegoats and fun with words
Again, the Constitution's combined statements concerning the requirement of congress to maintain a well ordered militia coupled with the second amendment prohibition of ever infringing the right of the people to keep and bear their own arms is intended to avoid situations such as exist in Syria right at this moment, where the army is the means of control of the nation. Only when part of the army split off was there a revolution. Indeed, that is the heart and soul of the entire so called "Arab Spring". It took massive social pressure, but FINALLY the armies in charge of these places began to splinter, with factions supporting interests besides the existing power structure.
By keeping people armed and intimately involved with the national defense, such issues cannot evolve.
When you act as if these ideas are somehow backwards, anyone who has studied the history behind it all and observes how it is relevant to this very day then sees how out of touch with reality you are.
It doesn't even occur to you that the powers you list are the very powers we rebelled against, and that interference from outside forces was the primary motive for uniting the states to begin with.
You're not being intellectual. You're utterly, painfully, and seemingly stubbornly and willfully uninformed.
On the post: Aaron Swartz Unlikely To Face Jail Or Conviction... Until Feds Decided To 'Send A Message'
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: land of the free home of the brave
Direct barter, in and of itself, is not restrictive. What it is is uncentralizable, if I may be allowed to coin a phrase. Direct barter done in a market style would result in a sort of "money" based on credits whose values would be formulated on the comparative value of goods and services, and this is in fact what exists any time some central authority is forbidden from centralizing control over a required medium of exchange.
We are constantly told direct barter is bad, or clunky. The truth is artificially mandated money is what is bad and clunky. It is simplicity itself to have market places with brokers who help people arrange beneficial trades of goods and services for other goods and services, but that sort of decentralization does not serve the ends of those who desire power. People use money because they are threatened with force if they do not.
Money is not power. Power is power. Money is what you get when power wants to control the market place.
On the post: Aaron Swartz Unlikely To Face Jail Or Conviction... Until Feds Decided To 'Send A Message'
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: land of the free home of the brave
I'm sorry, but this part at least is not true. Gold has a value for several reasons that led to its use as money. It is highly valued for its appearance and for the fact that it does not oxidize. It's value as a commodity is high enough that a relatively small amount of it can be used in trade for much bulkier goods, so it is useful as money in that it is relatively easy to transport in relation to its perceived value.
Moving on to the less well documented and more just my opinion and that of many others who have studied the issue, modern paper money's value lies strictly in the government's threat of sanctions if you do not use it in the prescribed manner.
This is an important distinction. If we did not have to pay taxes in money - if we could pay them in kind or through labor for example - the entire dynamic of money being the central focus of the economy would change.
Gold became relatively fake only when fractional reserve lending became commonplace. It is not really, literally, "creating money form nothing," but it operates in a way that is difficult to distinguish and is really just as fraught with problems.
Fractional reserve lending is re-lending the same money over and over again in a sort of chain. It compounds the interest rate basically, so that what appears on its face to be reasonable interest is in fact usurious in every sense of the word. That is to say, it is not just "usury" in the sense that any interest is "usury", it is "usury" in the sense of being abusively high.
At a 10% reserve rate, a 2.5% interest rate becomes an effective 25% interest rate.
Additionally, by relending the money, the chances get higher and higher that someone is not going to be able or willing to meet their obligation. Since there is no literal chain, everyone is equally affected, but it still magnifies the risk to the system as a whole that a substantial portion of money lent out will not find its way back.
Bottom line, you do not appear to me to understand the topic you're discussing, and the proliferation of this continued ignorance in our society repeatedly has put us in danger over the years. I sincerely hope you will re-evaluate the situation.
I may be wrong, obviously. If I am, please feel free to try to set me right. But what you said just seems about a thousand miles off from my present understanding of the topic.
On the post: Cable Industry Finally Admits That Data Caps Have Nothing To Do With Congestion
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I didn't know this until you posted it.
On the post: Ralph Nader Makes First Serious Bid For 'Crazy Old Man' Position; Refers To Video Games As 'Electronic Child Molestors'
Re: Scapegoats are great aren't they
People are scared of guns, so they refuse to learn about them and carry them even though the only thing really that will ever stop a mass murderer in the act is someone as well armed or more so opposing them in the moment.
It is our cowardice ultimately that lends itself to these tragedies. It is not the cause, but it is what leads to the circumstance that allows it to happen more easily.
On the post: Aaron Swartz Unlikely To Face Jail Or Conviction... Until Feds Decided To 'Send A Message'
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: I'm not sure why this is relevant.
Capitalism is not a definable thing. If what you mean by "Capitalism" is a free market, and people being allowed to trade what they want when they want to, then there is absolutely nothing wrong with it at all. If by "Capitalism" you mean a market controlled by capital, which itself is centrally controlled, what you have is something not so very different from socialism, and indeed most economies in the west these days are "mixed" in whatever sense contrasting capitalism with socialism makes any sense at all. Ultimately most everything you say about economics makes no sense.
Magna Carta is about limiting the power of the privileged, and the history of this earth is really nothing but the back and forth between privilege and common life. I frankly don'y see a whole lot of difference between life today and life 2000 years ago. Our current system is almost indistinguishable from fuedalism. Fiefdoms are not corporations. The larger corporations represent more powerful fiefdoms, smaller ones more akin to knights. There are a handful of professionals that operate like free artisans and merchants and the like, and the vast bulk of people work for wages in a way not at all unlike peons of old. If anything, there seems to be growing evidence peasants in medieval times actually had more self determination, seeing as the gap between the well to do and the poor was narrower. Court rolls document peasants being able to rise and fall economically, live outside of town (and hence outside of their lord's direct monitoring) for a small fee. Travel was far from unheard of.
Technical know how has made the average person's life much better, but the limit on the number of people allowed into such fields makes demigods of those people, which is just one more reason I despise IP laws. A modern Magna Carta would limit the ability of corporations and governments to dictate who can and cannot compete, and under what circumstances. Research would either be a community driven thing, or it would not happen. Doing research to find out how to save a man's life only to then use that knowledge to leverage work out of him is just plain, old fashioned, unadulterated greed, and there's nothing about it to suggest it drives progress.
On the post: Copyright Is Becoming Guilt By Accusation
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
What, do the money fairies come and steal all the money you try to pay them, so you have to have like a jillion dollars to hire anyone?
Oh wait. Wait, everyone knows exactly how it works, and it's been a long standing complaint among many people throughout our culture that entertainers are overpaid...
Your inability to present your own beliefs and reputation as someone who resorts to personal attacks is once again secured.
I have no idea how Hollywood works... Like you're a big time film producer when you're not arguing cases before the Supreme Court in your primary role as a lawyer. If indeed you are even one of those...
On the post: Aaron Swartz Unlikely To Face Jail Or Conviction... Until Feds Decided To 'Send A Message'
Re: Re: I'm not sure why this is relevant.
We all know how dangerous it is to let the general populace see the kind of information the government uses to make policy.
On the post: Aaron Swartz Unlikely To Face Jail Or Conviction... Until Feds Decided To 'Send A Message'
Re: Re:
It's disheartening to see what people will do, and I am not able to really understand why they do it... It's surreal.
On the post: California Senator Leland Yee Tells Gamers To Shut Up And Let The Grown Ups Talk
Re: Re: D'oh
Hehe, yeah that's how I finally figured out I had screwed up...
Thanks. Take it easy.
On the post: Copyright Is Becoming Guilt By Accusation
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
How we got here is the systematic creation of laws to allow central control over what we see mass produced, starting with the earliest copyright manifesting itself as a way to control what is printed by the newly developed printing press.
Back in the 70's it was enough that there was a tax attached to all blank media that went straight to the media companies. Now even THAT sort of blanket largesse is not enough. Now they need to be able to control the entire planet's access even to the point of creating artificial scarcities for stuff that's decades old and that no one is even using. The link I showed you for the college kid downloading is tens of thousands of dollars per song. That's ludicrous.
That's how we got here. The system has always been questionable, and now the media people and the artists who have attached themselves to them are abusing the privilege. Time to take the privilege back, or at least reduce it substantially.
No one's mooching off these people. They need to either get wage paying jobs, sell their services per hour, or per product, or accept that the pay for singing, dancing, playing pretend and making playpretties is a competitive one that may not pay like they want it to. Most people do this kind of thing as a hobby. There's no reason to have such draconian laws to make it all this expensive and full of hassle.
On the post: Aaron Swartz Unlikely To Face Jail Or Conviction... Until Feds Decided To 'Send A Message'
Re: Re: Re:
I think frankly it is highly unlikely Mike wants IP done away with completely. I do... I don't think he does though. But if he does, really, so what?
On the post: Aaron Swartz Unlikely To Face Jail Or Conviction... Until Feds Decided To 'Send A Message'
Re: Re: Re: I'm not sure why this is relevant.
The law in question was written decades ago to deal with wire fraud and the like, not high speed downloading of already free documents. The use of this law, and especially the extent to which they piled on, is more and more being seen as an abuse Ortiz in fact appears to have a history of abusing her position.
http://bostonherald.com/comments/1062280931?page=8
So yeah, I think you trying to paint Mike as somehow misleading is really more misleading than anything he might be doing.
I did notice him sort of dodge an issue concerning the six month offer from Ortiz a few days back, but the belligerence of the person calling him to the carpet over it made his refusal to come back and acknowledge his mistake more than understandable to me, and he of course has since posted multiple articles that cite the 6 month plea offer, so...
Most the people trying to paint Mike in a bad light here seem to paint themselves into a corner in the effort.
On the post: Aaron Swartz Unlikely To Face Jail Or Conviction... Until Feds Decided To 'Send A Message'
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: land of the free home of the brave
To my mind, the unique thing Nixon did was in response to European countries simultaneously leaving Bretton Wood, but then still demanding gold for their dollars at a pegged price. That's just silly. International currency exchanges playing games with fixed exchange rates for gold go way back though. The whole thing is nothing but nonsense in my view, so I have little sympathy for those who feel Nixon somehow short changed them.
But you apparently are familiar enough with it all, and I think in general terms we agree anyhow. So you win. LOL!
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