Re: [Vo]:RE: OT: How government institutions tax citizens under a Virtual Currency system - (2 of 2)
Craig Haynie wrote: With regard to babies and seniles, I might agree, but if someone refuses to join a group that builds sewers and provides public health programs, then you cannot say that these systems would help him. Of course they help him! They keep him from getting sick, or living in a city that stinks of sewage. (Many Japanese cities lack sewers, and believe me, the stench makes you miserable in summer.) For that matter, people did countless things before you were born that help you now, such as discovering the cure for smallpox. You cannot possibly acquiesce to every beneficial act in public health or public education or research done on your behalf because there are so many you could not learn about them all if you did that full time. For if HE thought these types of public services would benefit him, then he would voluntarily join the program. Not necessarily. Many people prefer to reap the benefits of programs such as building sewers without paying for them. That is why we must have taxes. But no group provides services of any kind without extracting a cost, and the cost/benefit calculation must be available for everyone to use when deciding whether the benefit outweighs the cost. It is impossible to measure the cost benefit of things like research because you never know if it will work or not. What has been the benefit of cold fusion research up to now? Zero! Not one penny saved, not one person helped. What was the benefit of discovering penicillin for the first several years, before they figured out how to manufacture it? None, and there was no guarantee they would figure out how to make it. It is impossible to measure the benefit of sewers because you cannot run a counter-factual history and see how many people die from disease with the sewer, and you cannot put a quantitative number on the misery of living with the stench of sewage. Countless programs help you even though you do not even they exist. If I don't know the program exists, then I don't know the cost. No one knows the cost, and no one knows the benefit of most things. As I said, you would have to run a counter-factual history. If you want to know the benefit of sewers, try living in Japan in August. Then tell me what exactly it is worth to you -- in dollars and cents per day -- not to have to smell sewage. If I offered to pay you to undergo that for one day, for $100, you would probably say yes. Would you be willing to do it for a lifetime in return for a very minor reduction in your taxes -- the amount you would save in sewer construction? I doubt it. Your model of the world assumes that it is easy to put a dollar value on things, or do a precise cost-benefit analysis. Suppose, by some magical future time-viewing machine, you learned that your child would die from an accident at road crossing, which might have easily been prevented with a stop light. Would you be willing to pay the tax for that stoplight? Of course you would!!! The problem is, we cannot know the outcome of any action, or which stoplight will save which life, so you cannot possibly know if the benefit will accrue to you, or to someone else, or to no one. You would have to be omniscient to know such things. Many people can find one or two political programs that they like, but also find many, many more which they detest. This is what happens when thousands of people each vie for political power, each with a different 'program' that they want to impose on everyone . . . Most government programs are entirely beneficial and uncontroversial, for things like food safety, or Social Security. You cannot run a high tech society without standardization and a huge investment in commonly owned and publicly owned facilities, such as the Internet. In 1700 most of the buildings and other things you saw in a town were owned by individuals. Today, just about all of the dollar value of the things you see around you are owned by the government or corporations. One hospital, for example, cost as much as several hundred houses, whereas in 1700 a hospital was just another building, costing little more than a barn. We cannot have modern medical care without hundreds of millions of dollars in buildings and equipment. We must have expensive infrastructure, which is mostly hidden from view, but still costs a lot of money. No one likes to pay for this stuff, but I promise you, if you could go back in time or live in a third world country for a week, or even in Japan, you would see the wisdom of paying a much larger fraction of your income for things outside your house and outside your immediate control, such as hospitals and the Internet and the sewage treatment plants. There's no way for you to know if any program will benefit me because you don't know my values. There is no way YOU can know if any program will benefit you because you cannot live in a parallel universe where that stop light, or
Re: [Vo]:RE: OT: How government institutions tax citizens under a Virtual Currency system - (2 of 2)
Craig Haynie wrote: . . . then let's change it together, through voluntary cooperation without threats of violence being imposed on those who disagree. Let me make it clear that I do not belittle the inherent threats of violence. They are real, but I think they are necessary in a civilized society. We cannot let people do whatever they please. The libertarian ideal cannot be achieved in real life, although in fact we now have more personal freedom than at any time in the history of any country. For example, we can educate children at home, something that was never allowed in Colonial or modern America. But authorities must have recourse to force. For example, a person who speeds or drives drunk must be stopped, by force if necessary. Furthermore, it seems to me you are focused too much on the use of brute force with guns, while you disregard other injustices, such as forcing people to cross dangerous streets with no stoplights, or forcing people to live with the stench of sewage. You may call that a negative; i.e. not doing something is not the same actively doing something, but an ordinary person has no means to erect a traffic light, and cannot build a sewer system, so as a practical matter that distinction is meaningless. You are also ignoring large numbers of people who are actually killed by the government and by industry, with gross injustice. We force people living in rural areas near coal fired generators to breathe filthy air. This kills roughly 20,000 of them per year. The power companies and the government pay nothing to the survivors. We all benefit from the electricity. The problem can be fixed easily with existing technology, but collectively we refuse to pay a penny or two extra per kilowatt hour, which is what it would cost. It seems to me that is the unfair use of brute force, every bit as much as coming to your door to arrest you for not paying taxes. Pouring smoke and soot into your lungs is just as bad as shooting you. This is not the threat of violence that you fear -- it is actual, on-the-ground violence, for all intents and purposes. There are two huge differences: 1. You CAN pay taxes if you want to. The government never demands tax money from people who did not earn the money in the first place. Whereas the people killed by coal smoke usually have no means to move elsewhere. If they could move, they would. They can complain, but the the power companies locate coal plants near disenfranchised poverty-stricken people knowing that the politicians will ignore the suffering. When the power company builds a plant near a rich neighborhood, they make it gas fired. 2. If you think we pay too much taxes, or you think government regulators should let the power companies slaughter 20,000 people a year, you have recourse to vote for a party that will borrow the money from the Chinese instead of taxing you. At present there is no parties in favor of cutting expenses or bringing the wars to a rapid conclusion. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:RE: OT: How government institutions tax citizens under a Virtual Currency system - (2 of 2)
I wrote: Today, just about all of the dollar value of the things you see around you are owned by the government or corporations. One hospital, for example, cost as much as several hundred houses . . . The point being, that hospital is largely paid for by taxes -- Medicare -- even if it is private. Craig Haynie is paying for it, whether he wants to or not. I think we all agree this is unfair in many ways. But I cannot imagine how you could run a high-tech civilization such as ours on any other basis. Imagine you were to go around asking people: do you feel it is part of your value system to install X or Y where X or Y represent fiber optic cables, the latest hospital gadget, the GPS system, the metal detector under the street that triggers the turn signal, or some other piece of the modern infrastructure. Most people would probably have no idea what what you are talking about. They would say I guess so . . . what is it for? Our technology is so complicated and so inter-connected, no one really has a complete grasp of how big it is or who pays for it, and it is not possible for you to completely opt out of the parts you do not like, or need. It is physically inter-dependent and interconnected in ways that cannot be untangled, literally, figuratively, financially and every other way. If you do not have cable TV, you may think that you contribute nothing to the cable infrastructure outside your house. Ah, but the wires are run on the same polls used for electric power lines. The power company comes by periodically to trim the trees. That benefits the cable company too. If you pay for electricity, you are helping to pay for your neighbor's cable TV. I do not have cable TV; I have satellite TV. I pay the bills for it, but so do you, because NASA and others developed the technology to put the satellite up there. So do the Japanese taxpayers, since I watch the NHK national news broadcast from Japan. Modern capitalism is far removed from the days when Henry Ford built self-sufficient, stand-alone factory complexes that processed all the raw materials and output cars. As I mentioned, the total value of buildings, roads, bridges, hospitals and whatnot outside your house far exceeds the value of your house, and this is not the way things were decades ago, or centuries ago. Most people are not aware of this, because the change happened gradually. We have much more public property and corporate property than our ancestors did. A pipeline is mainly paid for by people who buy gas, but a substantial portion of it ends up being for from taxes. For example, someone has to inspect and regulate the pipelines, refineries and drilling platforms, and when there is an accident such as the drilling disaster this summer, it costs everyone. That makes it hard for someone to withdraw from society, and I think it makes it impossible for taxes to go back to what they were before the 1930s and the growth of the modern infrastructure. We may fancy ourselves self-sufficient rugged individualists in the old-fashioned American sense, but we are nothing like that anymore. We would not survive one month in that world. I used to know farmers in the U.S. and Japan who were self-sufficient, with a lifestyle and hand-tool technology essentially stuck in the 19th century. They were admirable people. I can report that practically no one alive today would know how to live like that. There is no going back to a simple life. There is no way Craig Haynie can decide which part of our complex society he wishes to pay for, and which parts he does not want to pay for because they are contrary to his values. I wish that were not so. Many things such as highways and the war in Iraq are contrary to my values, but I cannot opt out of paying for them. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:The fundamental Principle of the Conversion of Zero-point-energy of the Vacuum
On 12/26/2010 08:32 PM, francis wrote: The fundamental Principle of the Conversion of Zero-point-energy of the Vacuum Claus W. Turtur (Fachbereich Elektrotechnik, University of Applied Sciences Braunschweig-Wolfenbuettel) Published in physic.philica.com http://www.philica.com/display_article.php?article_id=206 Francis, this is a good introduction to ZPE issues. Thank you for posting it. Philica.com has a lot of other interesting articles too. As you said in the past, it seems a convergence or coincidence is developing between ether, ZPE, and higher dimensional models and ideas. It's also refreshing to see that many conventional answers, or in some cases, non-answers, are being put on the table and reconsidered. It was also a surprise for me to discover that there's an alternative to Quantum mechanics, called Stochastic Electrodynamics, with proponents at Caltech. http://www.calphysics.org/index.html Thanks again, Mauro
[Vo]:Energy and the Value Society
I scanned and uploaded this document to scribd.com It was written in the late seventies so the statistics are dated but the subject matter is still relevant given the current discussion about values, economics and the endless discussions about energy on vortex ;-) Energy and the Value Society By John G. Melvin, a nuclear engineer with AECL.(He died in 2007) http://www.scribd.com/full/46090006?access_key=key-gsc2g9c2bkbszd52bum Harry
[Vo]:Entanglement and non-locality
A well written article on the attempts to reconcile Quantum mechanics with Special relativity, with a clear explanation of non-locality, entanglement and Bell's theorem. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=was-einstein-wrong-about-relativity Some days ago I was able to read the whole article (five pages), but now it says, subscribe or buy the issue.
Re: [Vo]:RE: OT: How government institutions tax citizens under a Virtual Currency system - (2 of 2)
On Thu, 2010-12-30 at 13:18 -0500, Jed Rothwell wrote: Craig Haynie wrote: . . . then let's change it together, through voluntary cooperation without threats of violence being imposed on those who disagree. Let me make it clear that I do not belittle the inherent threats of violence. They are real, but I think they are necessary in a civilized society. We cannot let people do whatever they please. The libertarian ideal cannot be achieved in real life, although in fact we now have more personal freedom than at any time in the history of any country. For example, we can educate children at home, something that was never allowed in Colonial or modern America. But authorities must have recourse to force. For example, a person who speeds or drives drunk must be stopped, by force if necessary. The libertarian ideal is not a utopia. It's simply a recognition that force should not be used to solve complex social problems. This doesn't mean that you should never use force against anyone; rather you should only use it in defense from those who do first use it as a counter to aggression. If someone is using force against you; speeding on your roads, or trespassing on your property, then force may be necessary. What we now presently have is institutionalized violence, and threats of violence, to solve social problems. This implies that man is the only organism that requires threats of violence to live naturally. You would never think or proscribe such a life to the animals you love. Furthermore, it seems to me you are focused too much on the use of brute force with guns, while you disregard other injustices, such as forcing people to cross dangerous streets with no stoplights, or forcing people to live with the stench of sewage. You may call that a negative; i.e. not doing something is not the same actively doing something, but an ordinary person has no means to erect a traffic light, and cannot build a sewer system, so as a practical matter that distinction is meaningless. You are also ignoring large numbers of people who are actually killed by the government and by industry, with gross injustice. Humans need to use the natural resources of the Earth to live. We need food, clothing, shelter... roads. There's nothing special about roads or sewage. People need them. They don't desire to live in squaller. They will buy the services they value. They will give to those in need. I think the point that's being missed here, is that few people are trying to envision a life without threats of violence. If we first desire to live voluntarily, then maybe we can find solutions to these problems which don't require such threats. It's as if people are saying, well, maybe we can't live without threats of violence, so let's just ignore that we do use threats, and seek a better world without considering the threats. But, if we start looking for solutions which don't require such threats, then maybe we'll find them. We force people living in rural areas near coal fired generators to breathe filthy air. This kills roughly 20,000 of them per year. The power companies and the government pay nothing to the survivors. We all benefit from the electricity. The problem can be fixed easily with existing technology, but collectively we refuse to pay a penny or two extra per kilowatt hour, which is what it would cost. It seems to me that is the unfair use of brute force, every bit as much as coming to your door to arrest you for not paying taxes. Pouring smoke and soot into your lungs is just as bad as shooting you. This is not the threat of violence that you fear -- it is actual, on-the-ground violence, for all intents and purposes. There are two huge differences: I agree. With freedom comes responsibility, and with responsibility comes property. The air is unowned, and pollution is therefore an attack on us all. A world without aggression does not mean that we live with pollution. We stop those who are polluting for the same reasons that we stop those who are committing aggression. It's the same thing. 1. You CAN pay taxes if you want to. The government never demands tax money from people who did not earn the money in the first place. Whereas the people killed by coal smoke usually have no means to move elsewhere. If they could move, they would. They can complain, but the the power companies locate coal plants near disenfranchised poverty-stricken people knowing that the politicians will ignore the suffering. When the power company builds a plant near a rich neighborhood, they make it gas fired. I think I agree. Pollution is aggression. Taxation is theft, but contributions are desirable. If we simply stopped enforcing taxation with threats of violence, and instead, reported those who didn't pay to the credit bureaus, then there would be no violence associated with taxation. 2. If you think we pay too much taxes, or you think government regulators
