DavidV
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Posts posted by DavidV
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Don't let the bastards win.
That certainly wasn't Roark's sentiment. He was not motivated by the desire to bring anyone down, only to be productive as an end in itself.
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I agree with you insofar as various ISP's have engaged in bad behavior, and critics of net neutrality have not acknowledged that - in part because the campaigns are funded by short-sighted ISPs.
However, I'm not aware of a contract that I signed which prohibits my ISP from discriminating packets amongst my internet service. I certainly did not get a Quality of Service guarantee from them. To do that, I would have to pay significantly more.
Furthermore, there are many desirable (from a customer perspective) actions which net neutrality would ban. I like the idea of prioritizing my internet phone calls over someone else's bittorrent downloads. There are many things would would be impossible with net neutrality, such as remote surgery over the public internet. With net neutrality, you have to have a dedicated line between any points where a minimum level of service is mission-critical.
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The Eolas patent rears its ugly head again: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/20...pple-google.ars
This single patent is so devastating to the entire IT industry that the Supreme Court may soon invalidate software patents altogether.
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Re: crime vs tort
So you have a problem with the parents of OJ Simpson's victims filing civil suit?
Why do you think that?
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But she was thirteen at the time it happened. If her parents pressed charges at the time of the incident what ever she thinks now is irrelevant.
I wasn't aware of the civil suit.
Yes, I'm not sure how to resolve the wishes of her parents at the time versus that of the adult now. But nevertheless, she, not her parents, is the victim. Polanski should face the consequences of trying to evade justice, but I don't think he should be punished for a crime he has paid sufficiently (in the victim's eyes) for.
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We either have a society where people respect rights or be punished, or we have one that only exists to solve conflicts, when they occur.
I agree that a judicial process can either provide restitution or punishment. However, I don't think that anything other than restitution can be objective, if we are speaking of "equal harm for harm." An eye-for-an-eye policy is inherently arbitrary and emotionalistic. Furthermore, punishing criminals is triply unjust, as it forces unrelated third parties (taxpayers) to pay for incarceration, does not provide any restitution to the victim, and punishes the criminal for the (unknowable) desired social outcomes rather than his own actions.
if it leaves it up to victims to decide whether a crime goes punished or not, and somone could buy their way out of respecting rights.It is entirely proper for an offender to repay his victim for a crime. This in no way absolves them of the need to respect rights. Such an assumption is based on the premise that wealth is distributed arbitrarily to people, rather than being a reward for virtue.
(which would imply that someone could sell their own rights, and even become a slave, to be traded in a slave market).I don't know what premises led you to this conclusion. To "sell rights" is a contradiction in terms.
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One thing that should be taken into consideration here is that his victim was compensated in a civil suit and now wants the case to be dropped. I think when a rational adult victim of a crime does not wish to press charges, no one else has any right to do so.
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I collected them. See http://quotes.rationalmind.net/
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By David from Truth, Justice, and the American Way,cross-posted by MetaBlog
Faced with an “obesity epidemic“, that has dramatic consequences for medical costs, pundits have proposed different solutions, ranging from excluding obesity from health insurance, government-run prevention campaigns, higher taxes on junk food, or higher premiums for fat people.
The possibility of greater government involvement in medicine with the passing of ObamaCare puts this debate in a new light. If the government decides who gets money for medical treatment, the question of whether fat people deserve medical treatment will become a political issue.
The question of who “deserves” treatment is only conceivable in a welfare state. In a free, capitalist society, people are able to allocate their wealth according to their judgment of the merit of their own and other’s health, including the degree to which they are culpable for their condition. However, there is no rational way to allocate property taken by force.
Does Jake, who became paralyzed because he liked extreme sports, or Kate, who has lung cancer because she is a smoker, or Mary, who has problems because has a tendency towards obesity which she does not try to control with diet or exercise, or Sue, who is dying from old age, and whose life might be slightly extended at tremendous cost deserve my money?
Once the idea that theft is justified because others need something is accepted, there is no objective way to decide which group is more “deserving” or which values are most “needed.” There is no way to make moral evaluations when “need” trumps justice and morality.
Justice and merit are moral concepts. To “deserve” someone’s property, is to have a moral claim to it. We create a claim to someone’s property when we engage in voluntary transactions – such as labor for wages, or goods for services, child care by choosing to bear children, or paying for injury if it is due to our neglect. But to claim that someone “deserves” our wealth merely by the fact of them being alive implies that some human beings have a moral claim on the life and values of others. That is a form of slavery. A modern, democratic and egalitarian form of slavery, but still slavery.
For someone to receive medical treatment, someone else must first create the wealth to pay for it. In a free society, people produce values voluntarily, and exchange them to mutual benefit. But the premise that someone has “a right to healthcare” means “a right to” seize values by force from those who produce them and give them to those who didn’t earn them. In such a slave society, people exist and produce values by permission, to the degree that those in power find them useful. Whether their values are seized directly, such as in socialism, or nominally theirs, but controlled by the state, such as in the fascist state our healthcare system is in, is irrelevant.
Some “moderates” argue that sick people “deserve” medical care when their misfortune is not their fault. But why should it matter whether they are responsible for their condition? People desire all kinds of values, whether cars, iPhones, shoes, friends, plastic surgery, or a long life. Sometimes they succeed in gaining those values, and sometimes they fail – whether it is due to a character flaw, ignorance, or just bad luck. But whatever the reason for their trouble, why does their misfortune give them a right to steal those values from an innocent third party?
If it is impossible to allocate socialized medicine objectively, how is it allocated? It’s simple – the group that ends up getting the loot is the one which has the most guns. In a democracy, where ballots are the bullets, the biggest, most corrupt, and politically-connected group wins. The implied message of their “awareness” campaigns is “my gang has more guns than yours.” The monstrosity of the welfare state is that the more virtuous and productive a person is, the more of his life and values he is forced to sacrifice, and the more unproductive and needy he is, the more he is rewarded for it. Like all forms of statism, medical socialism punishes virtue and rewards vice.
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Conceptualizing is certainly something that no current software program can do.
Two years later, things are not so certain: http://hplusmagazine.com/articles/multimed...-asimo-learning
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Is there a logical "starting point" or should i just read them in any order i see fit?
Yes, start with the essays here: http://mises.org/misesuniv.asp
Don't start with his longer treatises unless you are (or training to be) a professional economist.
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Before you can argue for anything, you need to define "freedom." It's impossible to advocate socialism while holding a correct definition of that word.
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Excellent returns. How did you pick your stocks? Mine have tanked so much it's not even worth keeping my account open
I didn't really pick stocks. I just decided which sectors of the market would do well, which sectors would counter-balance those sectors if I guessed wrong, and then invested in index funds (ETF's) for those sectors. Just so I wouldn't have everything in ETF's, I went to E-trade's "hot picks" section, and picked a stock and a fund (CHNR, FCNTX) which matched my objectives.
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I promised to provided details of my strategy, so here is a quick mid-year summary:
(Green is me, blue is S&P 500)
Details:
I also have GDX in my other account, which is 13.78% up.
As you can see, the only dissapointment is gold.
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Sorry, when I said "space travel" I meant "human spaceflight."
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It should be added that the NASA engineers who built the moon rockets retired, the blueprints were thrown away, the spare parts recycled, and the moon tapes erased. The key technologies behind space travel are still classified (lest the Chinese get it), and will likely remain so until they are lost or useless. The trillions of dollars spent on space travel have accomplished just about nothing for the average person.
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I was in Costco yesterday and lo and behold there was Atlas Shrugged amongst the Dean Koontz and Daniel Steele. I wonder if I could by it by the pallet?
At my Costco, there was a big stack of them with "best-seller" stickers next to the John Adams biography.
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Is there a better counterargument?
Yes, to put it in simpler terms, all this argument proves is that there is a cause for the universe.* It does not prove that that cause is sentient, or that it was not a one-time event, and the cause is long gone.
*Though this is wrong too, only entities have causes, and the universe is the set of all entities.
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I think that now, with sales of Atlas Shrugged setting new records every quarter and every year, would be the very worst time to buy the rights.
Markets price goods according to the their total future earning power. Even though sales are high right now, the publisher probably believes that the current spike is just a fad, and prices it accordingly.
If I had $10 million to invest, I would consider the following two posibilities:
1: Objectivism takes off and my future earning potential is higher than the publisher's estimate.
2: Objectivism doesn't take off, and my fortune will be useless anyway.
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Thanks! I sent Dr Peikoff a letter - if you share my interest, you might want to as well:
Dear Dr Peikoff,You've probably heard of Google Books, which makes millions of books searchable online. Without the rights-holder's permission, they only make short snippets searchable. However, with the author's permission, they will upgrade the status to a "limited preview" which shows the table of contents, a few of the pages, and allows more complete searches. They also link to the Amazon purchase page with your referrer code, so you can profit from people who buy it.
Now that the Objectivist CD-ROM is not longer available, and this is the only way to search the book digitally, I would greatly appreciate it if you considered granting Google the "limited preview" permission.
Google's listing of the book is at http://books.google.com/books?id=lt_WAAAAMAAJ
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They don't have to buy everything at once, of course. Atlas Shrugged might be pricey, but ITOE might be had for a few thousand. There are people who specialize in researching and negotiating rights to old books.
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Do you think that all of Ayn Rand's books should be bought by ARI and possibly placed in the public domain? I am speaking of both the publishing rights and the royalty rights. Let's presume that ARI could purchase and release the rights for a significant, but affordable sum.
Some observations:
If the rights are abandoned or cheap, more people will be able to afford the books.
While the cost of buying the rights will be high, there will be a long-term savings if ARI owned the rights, since they currently buy them from the publisher. If they owned the rights, they could get them directly from the printer, and license them to others to distribute them.
Presumably, ARI is more optimistic about the long-term success of Objectivism than the current owner of the rights (the publisher). This suggests a profitable opportunity for speculation on the future value of the rights.
Even though Leonard Peikoff owns the royalty rights for the books, he only gets a very tiny percentage of their sales. Presumably, ARI could buy out his rights, or continue paying him royalties (in which case, the books would still be copyrighted, but could be sold for less.)
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Are there any digital versions of OPAR? If not, I wish to lobby the powers that be to produce one. Any leads?
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I'll be leading the second of several hikes to practice and test equipment for our trip to Colorado in August. We'll be taking a 5-8 mile hike through the scenic and rugged trails around Grapevine lake that is expected to last approximately 2 to 3 hours. (We'll decide on the particular trail depending on who shows up.)
If you wish to train for our wedding hiking trip, test your equipment, or just get some exercise, you're welcome to join us. Wear clothing made of wicking fabric, synthetic material will do a much better job of wicking the sweat from your body, leaving you much cooler through the hike. Bring plenty of water to keep you hydrated throughout the experience.
RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/Objectivist-Society/calendar/10880014/
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