shirgall

As mentioned before, INTJ, "The Architect", but I'm able to skew it to INFP when I want to even though I'm picking answers in front of people that know me and agree with my choices. Maybe no one really knows me. Of more interest is my 3-repeat warrior variant of MAOA(-L). Passive right up until Hulk Smash, as they say.

The most serious attack on the middle class is inflation, the printing of money by the Fed and the multiplication of money by large-scale institutional lending. The really rich can convert cash into investments in other items that are protected from inflation. The middle class, however, is driven primarily by salary cash flow and cash savings, both of which are undermined by inflation. They are strongly encouraged to protect themselves with 401Ks and similar instruments that put aside cash for decades and few take the time to seriously manage them to avoid inflation. Instead these 401Ks support the same organizations that willfully play along with the inflation game... a game where they can continually shows growth that, when inflation-adjusted, is illusory. IMHO, the middle class should be investing in local ventures that they can see and evaluate for themselves (and therefore make informed decisions about), but those sorts of efforts are not protected from taxes like 401Ks.

Incredibly stupid because hiring managers do check on things. What we want to see: long swaths of employment, not necessarily the same role, but not jumping ship to another place; title, responsibilities, and accomplishments, with an emphasis of measurable accomplishments; obviously tailoring of a much larger resume to one page that's focused on the role being sought. However, since there's plenty of debate on whether lying is immoral, it falls into the same category. I lean on another concept besides the NAP called "informed consent". Do not make deals that are intentionally misrepresented. It will come back to bite you.

Indeed, paying your taxes only reinforces their belief they are justified in charging them, and encourages them to charge more. "They didn't revolt yet!"

The more local an election gets the less illusory the choice gets. I've done the sign-waving protests in the past and, yeah, with a hostile media they aren't very effective either. Really effective protests don't have a good history either as they somehow turn into riots and then get suppressed. I wonder if a debacle like the Bonus March could happen again in this country.

There are always constraints on action, some imposed by others, some imposed by nature. If Freedom was bichromatic then the only way to be free is to manifest the will to power. So, instead, we deal with our constraints, individually, and we develop preferences for what latitudes of action we seek and which constraints on them we detest... and which we ignore. Voting, for me, is driven by attempting to address constraints without incurring more of them, and hoping to not impose them upon anyone else. Once again I have to balance freedoms (my own, my families, my neighbors, and so on) when I do so. When my neighborhood is free to raise my taxes why am I not free to oppose them? They've given me an avenue, and could care less about the virtue of non-involvement.

That's a horrible thought, since there's no rational basis to choose among mutually exclusive alternative gods.

Our system is unusual because more than half of stars are binary (or more) where for us Jupiter is 1/80th the mass needed to make our system a binary, and that contributes a great deal to stability. Most stars (90%) are actually smaller than the sun, but our star is hardly amazing in size compared to supergiants. Our sun is a middle-aged, third generation star with a cache of heavier elements ticked away, kinda keeping to himself in a less dense part of the galaxy, free to work on hobbies and tend to the farm. I have no expertise to speculate on the video, which is kinda why is fascinated me.

The money quote is this: http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/08/politics/hillary-clinton-joe-biden/ http://www.ontheissues.org/2016/Hillary_Clinton_Crime.htmway down the page she talks about the COPS program and heer efforts to reinstate it when she was Senator. It is likely to be a model she would follow again and it was definitely a pork project more than an effective one. USA Today has a decent summary of criticisms here: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-04-10-cops-cover_x.htm https://shadowproof.com/2016/04/14/clinton-wrong-mass-incarceration-known-problem-just-decade/has more recent comments and criticisms. Remember it was Bill that started the sale of military vehicles and equipment to police forces, buoyed by $10B from the COPS program.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/terrorist-attack-muslims-mentally-ill-japan-france-germany-men-its-toxic-masculinity-a7158156.html

You know that $1B will go to the Police Unions, somehow, since they are modern equivalent of guilds, and those same unions will support the Democrats.

The argument "the perfect is the enemy of the good" is that it is often better to make a good enough decision now than it is to analyze and engineer things to make a perfect decision later, because a threat may be imminent, or you may be too late to engage in an opportunity, or because someone else may act before you and seize the moment. Agility and adaptability favor decisive action.

Seems unlikely: https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/operating/agreement Subscribe and save generates new orders for subsequent deliveries, and that order is not generated during the associated "session".

But, contrarily, fighting taxes on my property by voting against a bond measure whose passage relies on simple majority of those who voted and does not account for those who do not is fighting FOR my property rights. The effort I expend by sending in my ballot to avoid $20/mo in taxes on my house is not unbalanced. It's bad that I can be forced to pay rents on property I supposedly own, but there is no mechanism short of rebellion to prevent it. Voting seems a safer alternative.

I never claimed it was an argument, I claimed it was empirical data. I could be mistaken, sure, but I don't see what difference it makes. You accepted that my actions were being pragmatic, not moral. If I use a mechanism of the government to prevent injury to another, am I being immoral by using force? Sure, but I'm being pragmatic by following the Doctrine of Competing Harms. I am not trying to antagonize you, that was never my intention. My intention is to point out that this debate is akin to dancing angels on the head of the pin. There are far greater evils afoot than a particular individual voting or not just to save himself some taxes and maybe (doubtfully) sway things to a judge that prefers to hear cases with victims over cases about "because I said so" laws.

I expect the Press to be just as annoying to Trump as they have been to Bush (either one), Reagan, Ford, and Nixon as far as I've seen in my own life. I've read they were far worse to "conservatives" in past. "I've tried to be polite" is poisoning the well too, by the way, but I'll avoid getting hung up on trivialities. I don't own anyone, I'm not responsible for anything anyone else does, but no one that oppresses either you or me does anything differently if I vote or I do not. When I step into the voting booth (well, when I sit at my desk with a pen and a stamp) I have the power to do so delegated to me (and the state even claims I have a right to vote that they are not permitted to interfere with) to make a mark on a piece of paper that supposedly will change something. I have never seen it have any effect positive or negative. I got people to vote for me as a Ron Paul delegate. Were those people oppressing everyone by leveraging the system? Was I? I got people to vote for me when I ran as a Libertarian in Southwest Portland. Were they oppressing everyone? Was I? Those people voted for freedom, and the Democrat that won never said anything about the race except that she won and I was the devil incarnate. I have never had anyone tell me besides you that my voting legitimizes anything that matters (the Ron Paul thing didn't end up mattering), including the "we all signed a social contract" advocates. To most the fact I don't just leave is endorsement of the way things are where I live. It may be the wrong view of things when considered deeply, but that is what most people think. I have the faintest glimmer of hope that some percentage of people voting against a bond measure means that government can't just do anything and spend everyone else's money. Little else seems to matter. Free in my own mind? I carve out as much freedom as a I can without getting shot, ostracized, or unemployed. Maybe sometimes I'm a cagey bastard. Maybe sometimes I'm in somebody's face that's trying to give me shit. But I'm alive and kicking and that's more effective than isolated, ignored, or dead.

Where I live the Mormons used to have canning days and other group activities where people could easily get into disaster preparation, but they've started doing it less frequently. I think there's a stigma associated with "prepper" activities, partially because of the TV series on the more extreme folks. It used to be kinda cool to go in on a group buy of chicken and be able to can it in a single day. A lot cheaper than getting it at the store, and it lasts on the shelf for a long time.

Look at it this way, if Trump wins the press will suddenly be anti-corruption and anti-war again, perhaps in greater vigor than ever. Trump said it today in his AMA on Reddit. You can't fixed a rigged system by rehiring the ones who rigged it. Or, maybe, we should look to Peter Baelish:

I don't think the average person cares about turnout numbers (consciously or subconsciously) even if they think winning the election means that someone was right. In my mind most people accept that "things are what they are" with a growing fatalism that reminds me of the propaganda about Soviet life. Czar Nicholas I said that Russians were ruled by orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality (in that order). With most media constantly reinforcing progressive "correct thinking" this sounds awfully familiar, does it not?

Unified groups better protect offspring and grow. Tribe, pack, village, whatever... it's a model that works well enough to grow a population. Whatever mechanism unifies a tribe works well enough to drive this, whether or not they make sense or are moral. With verbal communication, the written word, the Internet and large databases we have constantly extended our ability to compare mechanisms and be more selective, which is combating gullibility. Took a long time to get there.

At the risk of making this a western-focused (if not US-focused) diatribe, the basic idea is that rights belong to individuals, not to groups, therefore rights are a negative against governments, societies, and communities. The principles go back to Locke about how rights are not granted but inherent in an individual's existence (natural rights). There is a construction where states have "rights" in the sense that the ninth and tenth amendments (explicitly in the tenth) state that rights not specifically enumerated in the United States Constitution are protected, but that the States have more leeway in determining them. The picture is muddied somewhat by the fourteenth amendment, as this phrase does not say rights but uses a different construction: "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." This has, nonetheless, been interpreted as all enumerated rights under the Constitution are also applied to state governments, with variations on a really annoying legal concept of "scrutiny". Powers are specifically granted (delegated) to governments and organizations (and their members) by charter and laws. They positive in that they are explicitly given to the state. What is special about these abilities is that while they are delegated they do not actually have any validity or protection for individuals. Try coining money or enforcing a bench warrant on your own some time. It won't be fun. In between the positives and negatives (government may do x, government may no infringe y) is a vast landscape of areas where governments and people do stuff that neither carries the force of law nor the explicit protection of a right. Such activities can be "unlawful" (not explicitly permitted by law) but not "illegal". One should always been on the lookout for legislation or policies that only protect "lawful" activities, for example, like Net Neutrality (because it only protects lawful Internet traffic). John Locke, Ayn Rand, Frederic Bastiat, and many more are good sources for this kind of discussion. In general, the principle is that inoffensive speech does not need protection, but that completely disruptive or injurious speech can be regulated. When it comes to yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, you are free to do so, but if substantial disruption or injury results, you are liable for it if there was no fire. This is not a infringement of free speech. When it comes to "slander" you can say anything you want about someone else, but if you damage their reputation, you are on the hook for making what's known as a "positive defense": that yes you said something that hurt someone but it was the truth. The burden of proof shifts to you, but this is not still not an infringement of free speech. The difference between these and other forms of speech is injury. There have been efforts to extend this (PC stuff) but in the past the big infringements were things like the Sedition Acts, What gets more interesting is stuff like Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District where the Supreme Court ruled that students have the right to express themselves but it must be balanced with the school's need to "maintain order" to meet its duty to educate. And, of course, there's been some bitter fights over prayer in school because the alleged injury of peer pressure to practice a religion on individuals too young to consent to such practices. I should add that I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, and it's been a long time since I played a lawyer on TV.

I could easily be wrong, but it makes absolutely no difference on any issues that are not local when it comes to voting. I already pointed out where in local voting it might make a difference where I am voting directly against use of force against me: tax measures and bonds. I don't see how voting against those is a violation of the NAP or any other principle that I hold.

I never see politicians claiming the total percentage of people that voted as endorsement for their policies. Instead, they tout the idea that "they won" therefore opposing partisans should comply with their requests.

Because on the same ballot there is an opportunity to vote against tax measures, and to write in someone's name for those running unopposed (happens a lot when it comes to judges here). It ain't perfect, and I still lose, but I feel like those votes mean more than the ones I do in partisan races.

I hear politicians saying "do it because I won" but not touting absolute turnout as a mandate. I'm not accepting subjugation by voting because my vote makes no difference in my subjugation. It's a whim. A caprice. If it could change something they'd make it illegal because I don't agree with them. Who knows, in four years I could be executed, I could escape, or maybe the pig could learn to sing.