>why would or should ideological motivation be relevant to whether or not any given act is legal or how it should be punished?
When libertarians, for whatever reason, choose to start businesses in CA, they are explicitly consenting to our government & to obeying our democratically enacted laws. Ideology is not a shield for consequences--and, for both Travis & Ross, using Ayn Rand to justify their behavior only makes them less sympathetic to judges, prosecutors & juries.
I didnt work for the Justice Department, but this appears to not be consistently logical. If ideology doesnt matter, why does valuing liberty negatively influence a judge's or prosecuter's actions towards you? That doesn't seem right.
Also, if ideological motivation should not play a role in prosecuting crimes, then why does our justice system sometimes do the opposite (consider hate crimes, or other cases where motivation is considered when prosecuting crimes, i.e. different versions of murder charges.)
I did not say that ideology does not matter. I asked why it should be relevant to the definition of a crime or whether or not it ought to be punished. (my words could've been tighter here: ideology, like civil disobedience, may be relevant to mitigation--or it may increase liability & punishment.)
I also did not say that "valuing liberty" has a negative influence. That is not how I was using the word "libertarian"
Nor did I say ideological motivation should not or does not play a role in prosecuting crimes. Whether it should or not is probably not important--because ideology does play a role prosecution, particularly in jurisdictions where they're elected.
As you know, motive (mens rea) is an element of some criminal charges, including murder. Motivation matters basically for public policy reasons--for example, we punish hate crimes more harshly because we, as a society, decided crimes motivated by hate are more damaging to society & harsher punishment is a deterant. Similarly, sometimes "crimes of passion" are punished less harshly, because society has decided that harsher punishment would not be a deterrant or effective.
What I said was: ideology is not a defense. And, in Travis's & Ross's cases, such ideology is more likely to increase, rather than mitigate, liability.
And, what I meant was: neither Uber nor the Silk Road would, could or should attempt to assert a defense based on not consenting to CA law, democracy, and/or denying the legitimacy of federal courts. Not only will it irritate the humans whose legitimacy is being questioned, but such a defense is not procedurally permissible in any court that I am aware of. Basically, it won't help either of them--its more likely to increase liability than anything else.
My sense is that we define words like libertarian quite differently, so I'm going to leave it here.
I understand you. We do disagree on some matters--Libertarianism really is just about liberty. Though much public misunderstanding exists regarding it.
Really neatly said. Sometimes it's worth noting the value in anlytical thinking that the user base at HN is able to produce. This (in my humble opinion) produces more valuable insights than what I'd find on cable news, or even sometimes in respectable publications.
Protectionism has proven to work well in some cases in history.
You are also misunderstanding by conflating globalism with free trade. The two are related, but not the same. You can be for free trade of goods and services, but not for unelected central powers (i.e. an EU, a central bank).
Mainstream academic economists are typically free trade, but we have no science to test this theory so just br careful about drinking too much of the kool aid. LarGe corps, banks, and US gov generally want globalism. Keep in mind why they want that (profit and power). We still have a lot of people suffering in 2017 and no longer a good excuse for it (i.e. resources scarcity cant explain malnutrition anymore).
Many would consider that unelected. I'm sure you draw the line somewhere too: I doubt you consider every government employee elected just because you can draw a chain of responsibility back to some elected official.
Please don't backpedal by going into the definition of the word. The rhetorical value of "unelected" was to paint the EU and Federal Reserve as unrepresentative.
Hell, by your logic, the U.S. Senate before the 20th Century wasn't elected because they were elected by state legislatures instead of popular elections.
You are simply and flatly factually wrong about this, sorry. I encourage you to check out the textbook definition of the Fed as well as technocracy. You can also Google 'differences b/w a technocracy and democracy.' The Fed is widely accepted by every piece of academic literature Ive ever come across to be a technocracy, and that is the word we use to describe it. Also, the EU can and should be thought of at least being largely technocratic as well.
When you were arguing about how the EU and Fed are,
in your opinion, elected, I thought you would be able to make the connection. They aren't considered elected officials in the standard sense we think about it--in a democratic sense--and no one thinks that. They are unelected by any plain interpretation of democracy. That's the reason the word technocracy is used to describe them.
You can easily have dehydrated meals for under 50cents that don't have the nutritional criticisms of soylent.
It does require you to go to the supermarket, quickly buy some ingredients, and mix them together.
Here is an example: You can just buy oats, skim milk powder, peanuts (a bit better if you buy them crushed, or crush them), raisens, and dehydrated fruit & berries. I also add almonds, walnuts, chocolate, coconut. It works out to b/w 25-50cents a meal if you buy at Costco, and is very healthy. You can add sugar if you want (I add a little, and a very small amount of salt).
You can also customize to your heart's desire. Replace milk powder with whey powder. Peanuts with almonds, flax for omega 3s, etc.
There you have it - The wisdom to outcompete soylent on price, nutrition, and taste, and all by a lot.
Realistically, I need to go to Costco anyways, and I can buy these products in bulk as they have long shelf lives. Perhaps I spend 5-10mins extra at the store every 2 months, and another 5mins pouring everything in a large container together, once a month. So perhaps 10 minutes a month to save, say, 3$ a day, or 90$ a mo, works out to $360/hr tax free value creation rate without including the value of eating healthier, better tasting food. Where I waste my time is on reddit, HN, and video games.
Gorp is not a new idea. In fact you can get it for free in every single hiker box on the AT. I know someone who claims he didn't buy a single meal on the trail.
The disadvantages to soylent are taste, chewing difficulty/calories, preparation, it stops up your digestive tract, and takes much longer to become usable energy.
Trail mix (never heard the word gorp before) is nothing new, neither is muesli. My version above, however, is low sugar and a complete protein with much more varied nutrition sources. Thought it doesnt taste quite as good to your sweet tooth as a bag of m&ms and nuts.
I've been living in Australia the past year (which has a lot of Germans) and twice I helped someone change a flat tyre. Both times a German also came to assist, and both times it was an American who didnt know how to change a flat (there arent that many of them in Aus).
As an American with some German ancestry, I find this to be very embarrassing. (The Swedes in my family can all change a tire as well, including my sister, but the German side is embarrassed.)
Americans have become complacent and lazy, with no sense of "know how" or "make do." Hell, kids don't even know how to clean and cook a rabbit, let alone how to catch one with a snare. If the zombie apocalypse ever happened for real, The Walking Dead wouldn't last a full season. Everyone would starve to death.
You're saying that there are only 8 Germans alive who can do it.
and 6 of them have a 99.9% chance of dying within 10 years, given that they are 82+ years old. :)
On a serious note: A lot of immigrants make a lot of money (relatively speaking) right away since they are jack of all trades and are willing /have to learn. Things that a locksmith would charge you $150 and a plumber $200 and an electrician $xxx an immigrant can do all within an afternoon, all for living rent free as superintendent. Probably some rules and codes are bent but who's watching...
Germany might not have as much of a hunting culture as the US or Norway, but still a lot more so than Netherland. I would expect more Germans to know how to clean and cook a rabbit.
This certainly makes me think. I'm Dutch, and when I was a kid, I knew how to repair my bike. Today, I tend to hire others to fix everything. I wouldn't know how to replace a car tire (other than to try the obvious).
Saying Americans have become complacent and lazy because they don't know how to catch, clean, and cook a rabbit is like saying that Americans have become complacent and lazy because they don't know how to steer a covered wagon across the plains.
Yeah except being able to catch, clean and cook your food is still a valuable skill. However I would say there are more Americans who can do that than Germans... It's hard as hell to get a hunting license in Germany.
Is being able to catch, clean, and cook a wild animal really a valuable skill for most people in the western world? If you enjoy it, fine, but for most of us, the skills that earn us money are going to be much more valuable.
Not everything is about money. Hunting is a character-building expetience. I.E. I was taught to do it with certain respects paid to safety, the animal, and nature--so it teaches responsibility, respect, and other valuable qualities. It is also fun, stress-reducing, and especially if you like meat, very satisfying. Plus, you get good quality (free range, wild caught, organic I suppose) food.
Finally, if we experience some type of catastrophoc event: total war, nuclear winter, natural disaster, I will still be eating.
I suppose it's useful if you're really into wild camping. Realistically how often would the average person, even someone living in a rural state, need to catch, clean and cook their own food? How many decades has it been since a significant portion of the population has needed that skill? Probably several generations at least. I bet less than a fraction of a percent of the population lives in a situation such that they don't procure most of their food through purchases of the products of agriculture or animal husbandry. A town has to get very small and very remote before periodic trips to the grocery store become so onerous that it's actually more efficient to set snares or sit in a tree for days on end waiting for a deer to wander by.
I suspect that any scenario in which hunting/trapping becomes a valuable skill for a significant portion of the population is also a situation where knowing how to operate an animal drawn vehicle is also a useful skill.
Agreed. This whole "you might need it to survive" stuff is such a total fantasy, it's as realistic as "you might need to learn klingon to survive on a bird of prey some day".
This fiction about civilization collapsing, but then surviving on your wits and hunting skill, is the stuff of YA novels.
Coming back to this late. I guess my point about rabbits is that when I was a kid in the 60s in a rural place, it was a very common skill that kids were taught -- along with a bunch of other practical stuff. My generation generally did a poor job of passing along those skills. (My daughter can clean a fish, not a rabbit, but she's a vegan now haha.)
Everyone knowing how to skin a rabbit doesn't help if there aren't enough rabbits. A population of 320m Americans catching rabbits? A billion rabbits a week?
(The US currently consumes 8 billion chickens a year)
People go too far with generalizations. I teach my kids not to judge people by nationality, gender or race. My German wife doesn't know how to change tire. These are nice anecdotes though.
I'm a German, I spend a lot of time in the US. My US friends here seem to analyze what I do often based on my nationality ('Oh you cook, must be a German thing'). Analyzing/Interpreting people's behavior based on nationality must be an American thing.
Most cars (from my experience) in Germany have separate tyres for winter, so changing them is something you need to do twice a year. Back in New Zealand I drove for about 12 years and never had to change a tyre.
No need to change a tire in Germany (or elsewhere) either. There are plenty of shops that will happily do it for you. It's an easy thing to plan for.
Besides, the northern US has more extreme winter weather than Germany, so based on this, Americans should be better at changing their tires than Germans.
This is bizzarre headline to me. I find people in Austral-Asia smile the most, Eastern Europeans the least, and Americans somewhere in the middle. Just anectdotal, but Ive at least spent years abroad (but never to Africa or Middle East) .
From an engineering perspective only (removing social/psychological attitudes from your mind) this is an interesting comment. Honda Company for years has output some of the best engineering in the automotive world, while Rolex produces nothing compelling from an engineering perspective.
The Honda S2000 had the most impressive 4cyl engine ever produced (and easily one of the best--impressive, reliable, fun--consumer engines ever produced) ... available in a reasonably priced roadster. There is a popular engineer/gear head Youtuber, Engineering Explained, that gawks over his.
But Honda and Rolex are different animals.
Personally I would rather not network with someone who values my character on the basis of wearing a Rolex, especially not in software dev. We're supposed to be savvy intellects, not ostentatious egos.
Certainly nowhere on the scale or awe of what the large automakers like Toyota or Honda have done, but impressive nonetheless (to a layman like me, at least)
I also think that is impressive, but it is about manufacturing and build quality. I'm talking about engineering design. A Honda has a lot of original and impressive engineering work in it. A lot of very smart people worked very hard to produce that. It's not the same with a Rolex. At HN we are tech savvy so I think we should appreciate that.
That's a pretentious insult without any substance.
At least the Honda product has some compelling, original engineering know-how; the Rolex does not, and that's all I ever said. What you're saying is unsubstantiated troll-bait and insulting to me, and a lot of people. Good on ya' for that one.
Edit: you edited your own comment... To still another unsubstantiated yet pretentious and condescending comment.
I didn't see the original but I did not get the impression that the poster's aim was to insult you.
You mentioned being software development, and as a skilled craftsperson in that field naturally you prize function over display. But two professional investors might eye each others' Rolexes to to signal both a sufficiently high level of disposable income that they can afford not to care about purely utilitarian factors, and as a sign of willingness to comply with an unwritten social norm rather than insisting on the superiority of their own taste/judgment in every circumstance.
What's ostentatious to the outsider may be an expression of humility to the insider: 'I'm willing to pay the price for this entry ticket on my wrist, but did not come here this evening to try to one-up everyone else.' At the opposite end of the social scale, you might wear a black leather jacket to fit in at the local punk club, but if your leather jacket was of too obviously high quality the other punks would doubtless consider you a wanker.
Please consider the possibility that you are undervaluing the social engineering function of the expensive watch by focusing on the technical engineering criteria.
Sure, I think Rolex is a product of very capable social engineering, which is why it can command such a high price while knock offs that cannot be easily identified as such sell for a fraction.
Also, the above poster's assertion this is proce discrimination is plainly wrong and uninformed. This has nothing to do with price discrimination.
Trump is not that much worse than Obama, it's mostly the media, politicians, people in power that are able to convince you of that. Remember, Obama droppee 26,000 bombs on Muslims last year, but I bet you'd never heard about a single one.
Climate Change is mostly about politics, just like the War on Poverty and War on Drugs. Yes it's real, just like people have real problems with poverty and drugs, but people starve and suffer in 2017 because of greed, which leads to politics, not because of resources. Climate Change will likely worsen the resource situation, but it's not actually the real problem with humanity. We need to get over our little egos and figure out how to get off this earth and keep exploring.
Strange, for someone who received Nobel Peace Prize. To be fair, he received it just for being black, nothing else (it was just after he won his first term, he hadn't even had time to accomplish anything of significance).
I didnt work for the Justice Department, but this appears to not be consistently logical. If ideology doesnt matter, why does valuing liberty negatively influence a judge's or prosecuter's actions towards you? That doesn't seem right.
Also, if ideological motivation should not play a role in prosecuting crimes, then why does our justice system sometimes do the opposite (consider hate crimes, or other cases where motivation is considered when prosecuting crimes, i.e. different versions of murder charges.)