st_dux

I know what real wages are. My point is that prices for most goods, particularly staple goods, have fallen over time, and they've fallen at a rate that is significantly greater than the rate that real wages have fallen. This means that workers have more money to spend on luxury items despite the fact that they're making less money. It's a net gain. "Objective value" isn't science; it's scientism. Labor is but one of many factors that might lead to value for someone. Picking it out as special and tying the very definition of value to it is arbitrary. Something is as valuable as someone is willing to pay for it. This is logically consistent and always true. On the other hand, something that is labor- and time-intensive might turn out to be worth nothing at all, and something that is simply found, with no labor applied to it at all, might turn out to be very valuable. Value is a function of utility combined with scarcity, not a function of labor, and it is subjective by definition. Adam Smith was wrong about this, and so was Karl Marx. As long as resources are scarce (i.e., not practically unlimited) and society exists, the economy will exist also. Automatization is not enough to solve the problem of scarcity. ---------- Post added at 11:51 AM ---------- Previous post was at 10:43 AM ---------- You're talking about something completely different. Sure, if government didn't exist at all, corporations might band together and create a government. Some people would, anyway. But government using its power to prevent the violent overthrow of government by colluding corporations (kind of a ridiculous scenario to be honest) is not the same as government using its power to prevent collusion itself or break up cartels simply because they are cartels. Collusion is really just a dirty word for cooperation; it's not dangerous to consumers and shouldn't be prevented, and there is a strong incentive for each company in the agreement to break the agreement, anyway.

With simple conditions, I've never noticed any performance issues when using waitUntil sans sleep.

... again with the real wage argument. Real wages is not the same thing as purchasing power. Purchasing power also encompasses the relative costs of goods, especially staple goods like food. Ordinary people living in capitalist Western countries have more disposable income (i.e., money to spend after necessities have been paid for) today than ordinary people anywhere had in the past. Furthermore, the fact that productivity has increased doesn't mean that labor has increased. Your arguments are basically straight out of Das Kapital. You're saying exactly what Marx said, but Marx was wrong. Marx's entire prediction rests on the labor theory of value, which is a fallacious model. There is no such thing as objective value, ever, in any circumstance; value is always, in every circumstance, subjective. And that's why capitalism doesn't have to implode. Communism is a ridiculous fantasy. There will never be a point in history when everyone has "plenty." "Plenty," like value, is subjective and relative. People will always want to have more. If everything is forced to be even (and it must be forced, violently, because nature is never even), then someone will immediately want to make it uneven in his favor. You're never going to get a whole nation, much less the whole world, to voluntarily distribute all resources equally and hold hands with one another singing Kumbaya. This concept is fundamentally opposed not only to human nature but also the nature of life itself. Life is a power struggle. You don't stop that struggle without also stopping life; the struggle is the essence of what life is.

You make it sound like everyone is miserable and would love to start a revolution tomorrow if it weren't for the evil police. That's not really how it is. Ordinary people don't sit around thinking about abstract labor theory of value calculations. Not everyone believes or has a problem with the idea that they aren't getting the "fair value" out of their work. As long as they're making enough to live a fulfilling life, whatever that may mean to them, they're content. As purchasing power for the average person has been on an upward trend for the last century, there is no reason to believe that a revolution is just around the corner. I work for an "evil" capitalist company, yet I don't for one second think that my predicament is unfair or that the only thing holding me back from rebelling against the system is the police.

Utter nonsense. Without government forces of coercion, cartels never last and monopolies rarely last. The market is too dynamic.

See, this is the problem. People think that true free market capitalism is the system that we have now, so they blame the market. The fact is that we don't have free market capitalism right now. We have crony capitalism in which the government gets its hands into nearly every facet of the economy, distorting the market and mucking things up. Real free markets work.

Looking at that video again, yeah, it is VBS2. It looks like they've added some snazzy interface stuff via Fusion, though.

You don't need to use private for this; you just need to declare the variable somewhere. In this script, for example, "_objectives" has been defined in the main scope, so it will automatically be available in all sub-scopes.

I agree. I wasn't saying that we should get rid of government altogether, but if it were restricted to its proper function it wouldn't be able to meddle in seedy corporate affairs.

I don't think we could really do anything to stop the political contributions. Even if it were legally limited in some way (it usually is, technically), the corporations will find other ways to contribute ("back room" deals, etc.). The solution, then, is to take away government's ability to create corporate welfare. Disallow them the power to conduct bailouts and the like. Restrict the ability of government and corporations wouldn't have the incentive to spend vast amounts of cash to persuade them. Not so. In reality, monopolies that arise naturally from the market almost never last very long, and they can only come to exist through extreme efficiency. During the (usually short) period of time that it exists, a market-based monopoly is still kept in check constantly by the threat of potential competition. The only monopolies that are dangerous for the market are coercive monopolies, and those only exist with the help of the government. Wherever you find a monopoly, you will almost always find some law or regulation that is keeping competition out. That's true, but Minutemen wasn't suggesting we live in a state of nature. He maintains the non-violence principle, which is expressed through property rights and contract law. As long as those two things are in-tact (and truthfully contract law is subsumed under the concept of property rights), society will be free. In general, any law that strengthens property rights makes society more free, and any law that detracts from them (most laws) make society less free. @WeaponsFree: You make the assumption that people should be equal or that life should be fair. At no point in world history has either been true.

This is plainly false. Look at your own country. Gun crime has gone up dramatically since handguns were basically banned in 1997. I posted an article earlier in this thread that expounded on this. ... including Switzerland, where everyone owns an assault rifle. There is no simple correlation between gun availability and violent crime rate on a global scale. There are too many external factors. How was this "recent study" conducted? Were they comparing areas where home ownership of firearms is allowed compared to places where it is not? Or was it based on houses with firearms in them versus houses without, as I suspect? If it's the latter, then the results are obvious and meaningless. Of course you're going to find that houses in which people were murdered tend to be houses that contained weapons. Very few people commit murder with their bare fists. This in no way implies that the presence of a weapon caused murder. Murderers cause murder. It's the violent mindset, not access to a tool, that causes domestic violence. Take away the legal gun and they'll just find an illegal one or use a knife. Being a suicidal loser is a risk factor for completed suicide, and saying that gun accidents are most likely to occur in homes with guns is like saying that car accidents are most likely to occur on the road. The fact of the matter is that gun accidents make up an extremely small portion of all accidental deaths in the United States. Each one is tragic, yes, but it's not a very significant issue, and it's certainly not significant enough to justify disallowing people to protect themselves. Please look at the data I posted earlier about the number of violent crimes that private gun ownership is estimated to prevent. Also, take another look at your own country, whose violent crime rate has rose as gun restrictions have risen. Everything else being equal, a society that may legally arm itself is safer overall than one that cannot. Yes, accidental gun deaths and suicides will go up, but this is a small problem (in the case of suicides, I don't see it as a problem at all), and the amount of accidental deaths is far less than the amount of lives that will be saved through violent crime deterrence.

Without government interference, the corporations' only source of power is their own market efficiency. A corporation that gains power in that way is good for the worker and the consumer alike. Of course, this is purely hypothetical as the government seems to be always entwined with corporate affairs. As for the oligarchs, well, they are the government. Declaring war on China is a ridiculously terrible idea. We should instead remove roughly three fourths of all business regulations, get rid of the Department of Labor altogether, eliminate all minimum wage laws, and give employers the same rights as employees (no more being sued for "unjustified termination" bullshit). With such an ease in restrictions, the United States could once again regain its status as the most efficient manufacturing country in the world. We could have a new Gilded Age (only this time perhaps we'd properly call it a "Golden Age").

That 90% is a percentage of murders that occur with gun laws being as they are, which in most part of the United States is fairly liberal (as in free). The point of the statistic is that legal gun owners commit very little of the crime. It does not account for the potential murders that would have occurred were legal gun ownership and concealed carry not allowed, which as I mentioned in an earlier post, has been estimated to be as high as 1,100 per day. Of course, it's difficult to get an accurate figure on exactly how many murders gun availability prevents (because if it was prevented it probably wasn't recorded anywhere), but even if that figure is too high, two things are clear: 1. Legal gun owners commit very little of the gun crime that takes place in a given year. 2. Legal gun owners prevent a great deal of crime in a given year. The conclusion, then, is that gun control will do very little to prevent gun crime while taking away an important tool in the fight against all violent crime.

Doesn't that depend on whom you ask? I mean I know that it didn't resemble the stateless utopia that Marx envisioned ("communist state" seems to me to be a contradiction in terms, no?), but didn't the Soviets think they were creating communism? I agree that no one has succeeded in creating real Marxian communism, but that's precisely my point. Crony capitalism is failing. Fiat currency is failing. Free exchange, on the other hand, hasn't shown any signs of failure and is indeed the only viable solution in my eyes to contemporary economic problems. It's when free exchange is hindered by government that the market gets distorted and the economy suffers. You realize that Google, YouTube (part of Google) and Facebook aren't run for free as a general public service, right? They make money through advertising. Lots of money (just check out Google's stock price). Online services supported through advertising revenue are in no way analogous to a single-payer healthcare system paid for by taxpayers. Free health care for all is a swell idea and I believe it works fairly well in some European countries. A free market approach (which the United States doesn't really have, by the way) would be better, though (but that's for a different thread).

In that particular instance, perhaps. It's impossible to know exactly what would happen had the man not owned a legal firearm, but regardless, the point isn't that gun laws will never save any lives. The point is that legal gun availability saves far more lives through crime deterrence than it causes deaths that otherwise wouldn't have occurred; it's always a net positive for safety. This is backed up my countless studies from all over the world, some of which I've linked earlier in this thread.

In what parallel universe did the USSR defeat the United States and not collapse in 1992? You Marxist revolutionary types are going to have to face facts. Marx, although he was a keen observer and correct about a lot of things, ultimately guessed wrong. Capitalism has not destroyed itself as he predicted, and it doesn't look like it's going to anytime soon. Every single attempt at communism in the history of the world has led to either A. collapse (e.g., USSR) or B. market reform (e.g., China).

So no one pays for it? It just spontaneously arises? That's remarkable. The myth isn't that free stuff benefits somebody; obviously, it does. The myth is that no one pays for it. As long as it involves scarce resources of some kind, someone has to pay for it. How could it be any other way? Milton Friedman's point is that, knowing that the resources must come from somewhere, it is better to leave it up to the market than try and centrally plan things. His position has been vindicated several times throughout history, but I know you choose to close your eyes to these sorts of facts and just pretend that central planning can work if we just try hard enough. There is loads of wealth, and all of it was created through capitalism. I know you're going to come back and say "no, it was created through work that was then stolen by parasites," but the fact of the matter is that people have always worked while capitalism is relatively new, and it is with the rise of capitalism that we began to see the rapid economic development that accounts for most of our wealth today. The most prosperous time in all of American history is what's been mislabeled "The Gilded Age," and the reason we were so successful during this time is that capitalism was almost completely unfettered by government intervention; trade was freer than it ever had been or ever would be again. "Milton supporters," aka reasonable people, have noticed this correlation and have concluded that maybe -- just maybe -- capitalism works pretty well when it comes to the generation of wealth. Please stop throwing the real wages argument around. It's technically true, but it's misleading. The standard of living in Western nations -- which is the only reason people care about wages in the first place -- has been continuously going up for the last 50 years and beyond. Ordinary people in these nations live better today than they ever have in the past. See also: http://reason.com/archives/2002/08/01/off-the-books/1 As for the distribution of wealth argument, I agree that it's getting a little ridiculous but the reason it's doing so is crony capitalism (i.e., the government helping out corporations it favors in return for political support; i.e., corporate welfare), not free capitalism. Again, the government is the root of the problem. Yes, that would be good. Destroy all of the people who have figured out how to organize land, labor and capital in such a way that the creation of wealth is maximized and hand over control to a political board that has no concept of the principles of business and could never have accomplished anything on a free market. Or better yet, democratize the process so it's controlled by the mob. You live in a fantasy world. I know you just want life to be fair everyone to be happy, but that's not how the world really works. Life is never fair and if we try to force it to be fair the only thing we'll accomplish is a shift in power from the people with money to the people with guns. Capitalism isn't fair and I will agree with you that it is a system based upon exploitation. Where I differ is that I understand the fact that life is essentially based upon exploitation anyway, so I admire (free, not crony) capitalism for its directing of this exploitation toward the generation of wealth.

Considering that none of it is based on facts or reason (still waiting for someone to show me some data that indicates that a rise in gun availability/control anywhere has led to a decrease in violent crime), I must assume that all of it is based on phobias and misconceptions.

You don't like stuff being on FB; I get that part already. My question, which you don't seem to want to answer, is: Why? What is the reason? If it's a principle thing, could you explain why you hold such a principle? I was assuming it wasn't just an arbitrary choice, but it's starting to sound more and more like that's exactly what it is. That's a silly example, but I'll play along. You could take any picture of me that exists somewhere on the internet, and there are hundreds of them, and do just that. I think you'd end up with a lot of confused looks and practically no interest in the photos, but it wouldn't bother me if a bunch of random people saw some random pictures of me. It wouldn't make any difference to me at all. Why should it? Am I supposed to not want people to know who I am or what I look like? Q1184 echoed similar sentiments, but I don't understand why it's worrying. The internet allows us to share our lives with other people more efficiently than ever before. How is this a bad thing? Humans are by nature a social species, after all. And please don't come back with some "looks like you've been conditioned" nonsense. I just don't see the negative when it comes to people sharing information about themselves freely and easily. Why should we want to live in secrecy? If you've got a valid reason that explains how group photos from last night's outing being distributed on the internet causes harm, I'd love to hear it. So far all I'm reading is "it's worrying because it's never been that way before," and that's not a very good reason.

Wall Street is indeed partially to blame, but had the government not intervened with bailouts and assistance, many of the firms that were dealing in such highly-leveraged bad debt would have gone belly-up. The government is the real problem. It promotes bad business practices and props up firms that should fail in the free market, which makes it difficult for more competent (but smaller) firms to expand.

Well things like that I can understand, but I was under the impression that mrcash was talking about typical group photos and the like with nothing incriminating going on. In this case, I don't see the problem.

@gammadust: To be clear, I'm talking about pure democracy where literally every issue comes down to a vote and whatever 51% or more decide is the course of action that is taken. I am not opposed to a democratic republic where the majority can choose the law makers but the law is still the supreme rule (even when the majority disagrees with its implications).

OK, you're not afraid. So why do you care? What difference does it make if someone you don't know sees a picture of you on the internet?

Well that's probably because you are paranoid. In all seriousness, what are you afraid of happening if someone finds a picture of you hanging out with some friends on the internet? Really, what worries you about that? I am honestly curious.

Doesn't look like it.