ataggart

The problem with option 3 is people don't really want to pay for what they consume, and the state is happy to oblige by placing itself as the middle-man between concentrated benefits and dispersed costs.

The rule of law does boil down to men with guns.

http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm

Pardon my ignorance, but why is San Marino in that list?

If the point is to perform dead code elimination, why would you declare it as an extern? It seems reasonable to me to just treat it as another of your javascript files to be included in the compilation run.

Isn't this a tooling issue, namely using something like Google's Closure Compiler to perform dead-code elimination?

https://developers.google.com/closure/compiler/docs/api-tuto...

>Which is funny because most people in power are not libertarians.

A profound understatement.

>That's exactly what AOL provided when you accessed the 'internet' through an AOL dialup account.

And where is AOL now?

Why is this a good thing?

>Some of us consider privacy a fundamental value that must be defended

The severity of a punishment can be tuned separately from the form of punishment. Imprisonment is not appropriate merely by dint of your emotional reaction to the crime itself.

>Which is more of a danger to me...

Sufficient to warrant throwing them in a cage, being brutalized by actually violent criminals, imposing a direct cost burden on society, and also indirectly by depriving society of that individual's productivity?

Probably neither.

Taking a sentient human being and throwing them in a cage is a profoundly violent act. I find it troubling that you guys so casually reach for it as a punitive tool, particularly when the subject has neither committed physical violence nor poses such a threat to others. Surely you clever people can think of forms of punishment/deterrence less destructive to both the individual and society as a whole.

Strange how articles like this aren't taken as an argument against the utility of "inequality". Does anyone think that the poor of today would be better off in Czarist Russia? [1]

I also find it interesting that "inequality" is based solely on "share of national income", as if there is just this big pile of ex nihilo money being apportioned out unfairly.

[1] http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/~/media/Annual%20Let...

>I don't understand the trend from these last years of trying to copy successful model by importing just the emergent part and ignoring all which is hidden.

It's not a recent trend. Frédéric Bastiat wrote about it in 1850 [1].

Humans have an easy time understanding that something is of human action and of human design (e.g., flipping a light switch turns the lights on), and at recognizing that something is neither of human action nor of human design (e.g., today's weather). We are particularly poor at recognizing things which are of human action but not of human design (e.g., the market).

Recognizing emergent phenomena (i.e., spontaneous order) takes training/practice (and our language, which emerged within the context of humans' poor grasp of emergent phenomena, isn't great at expressing it). Further, politicians are incentivized to treat every problem as if it is in the first category, to treat symptoms as causal knobs to turn (e.g., price controls), thus placing themselves in the role of designer. To admit otherwise is to admit the inefficacy of politics (or more accurately, the state) to "solve" the problem. And with negligible exception, people of every political stripe refuse to accept that truth.

[1] http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basEss1.html

Curious that every insurance firm would rather not have you as a customer at all than simply offer to charge a higher premium or offer to exempt the consequences of a food allergy.

If this[1] is what "increasing inequality" looks like, I welcome it.

[1] http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/~/media/Annual%20Let...

>In the event that you're covered by any sort of public health insurance ... then the effects on your own health become a problem for everyone else.

A vile argument. The idea that the state is empowered to curtail people's personal activities simply because the state chose to subsidize the personal health care costs of those activities should be anathema in a free and civilized society.

I think it's important to distinguish frameworks from libraries. With libraries, your code is the caller; you can compose things as you like, including with your own code for cases not covered by the library. But with frameworks, your code tends to be the callee; you must conform to (and are thus limited by) the assumptions the calling code has baked-in by the framework authors. My sense is that the pain from this inverted directionality is what drives these bespoke frameworks.

And his talk on the subject of larger scale clojure programs:

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Clojure-Large-scale-patte...

Side-by-side diffs would be superior.

Whatever the economic effect, I have a hard time imagining the political class giving up the power that comes from being the middle men between dispersed costs and concentrated benefits.

There's a "Download MP3" link directly under the video.

From the context, I gathered that the missing slide is just the subsequent slide[1] without the blue oval.

[1] http://www.infoq.com/resource/presentations/clojure-core-asy...

Because this is just mathematical cargo-cult scientism. If the basis for deciding "the model itself may require tweaking or redesign" is that "you still think the results look wrong", you're not doing science.

That wouldn't help either. If something as explicit as the Seventh Amendment's "twenty dollars" requirement can be argued away, anything can.

http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm

>We [sic] should just make it flat out illegal to...

>We [sic] should also fine doctors for...

Why is violence an appropriate response to these non-violent issues?

Compare this:

>The government shouldn't have the right...

to this:

>The US Government absolutely has the right...

You can't refute a normative claim with a positive claim.

----

>Are you really suggesting that our laws should be based on public opinion?

I think he's suggesting that violence (which ultimately backs state compulsion) is not an appropriate response to a non-violent act (declining to hand over keys).

Many people, from Thomas Aquinas to Martin Luther King, would disagree with that principle.

Further, I disagree with the notion that a violent response to a non-violent act is justified simply because you can't think of a non-violent way to get people to do what you want.

Of course it uses violence; try declining the "non-violent" penalties. Even criminals don't immediately resort to physical violence, but you still know precisely why you should hand over your wallet.

What do you imagine the state uses to compel obedience to its laws, if not threats of violence? Sometimes that violence might be appropriate, but some firm sending you an unwanted email falls short of the mark.

Violence is not an appropriate response. The first two are sufficient.

The US Constitution doesn't "protect" anyone except insofar as it mandates/prohibits actions of the Federal and State governments, and those mandates/prohibitions apply wherever agents of the state act under constitutional authority.