shirgall

Defense is not the initiation of force.

Not entirely correct. If your invention is good enough, it increases the perceived value of cars to people and as a result more should get made. Thus, the number of tires needed might actually increase.

i think the trouble is that we're talking about helping people defend themselves, but not in carrying war to others. Is it really "intervention" to help someone defend themselves? Not really.

Systems where the rich get richer are typically government working in tandem with special interests to erect barriers to entry that end up benefitting the lobbyist already in a market. They are the beneficiaries of structural protectionism. The clue is "structural". Free markets do not have a governing body to structure them, only fictitious "market economies" do because of the broken definition of "market economies" (as I pointed out earlier in the thread).

Hrm, off the cuff response: Question 1: Given the "market economy" requires consumption in order to maintain demand for human employment and further economic growth as needed, is there a structural incentive to reduce resource use, biodiversity loss, the global pollution footprint, and hence assist the ever-increasing need for improved ecological sustainability in the world today? My answer: No, economic development has come from people exchanging their effort for their needs, either by working the land directly (hunting, farming, or resource gathering) or exchanging labor for what they need. Your definition of market economy had people ONLY exchanging labor for income, and that's not how it works. People exchange their efforts for income, other gains (improvements to resources), diversion, or whatever. It's their effort to allocate. If there was a structural incentive to reduce resource use, people never should have made the effort to improve health as more babies survived to become productive, and people lived longer so they could make more and more impressive achievements. As a result, this question fails on its assumptions long before you get to your own answer. I'm not sure I have the willingness to continue...

Congratulations on your new direction! It sounds like a definite improvement.

Indeed, this is very difficult. I'm sorry to hear you've had to go through it, especially multiple times. PTSD is real, and there are other psychological and physiological effects of such traumatic events.

Difficult to get to a "should" but if individuals think they know enough about the situation they are free to do so. That's entirely different than a state stealing money from you, mortgaging your children, and throwing its weight around casually murdering people (and droning is definitely casual murder) to earn enmity for you and the people that live in your part of the world.

Provably fair solutions for splitting rent, goods, credit... http://www.spliddit.org/

I'm sorry if this seems over the top, but here goes. Making credible threats and taking steps to act on them is a crime. A violent crime. People succomb to strong-arm robberies because of fear of confrontation. Instead they give ground to placate the attacker. It's perfectly all right to not want a confrontation, but you have to find some way to limit this person's influence and proximity. This is an emotional vampire and you have fresh blood. One way that might might things better is to completely avoid being alone when confronted by this person. Bullies often shy away from their behavior when there are witnesses. When someone acts like a douche in front of a crowd, people are often braver about calling them out on it as well. You might find support. Frankly, given the legal environment around college campuses and college age groups, never never never be alone with this person. This is the kind of person that "starts something" and then claims to be the victim. In man versus woman conflicts, the women is often perceived as the victim due to cultural conditioning and physical differences in size. This is never a good thing for the man, even with a reasonable jury. I am not a lawyer, and it's been decades since I played one on TV. This does not constitute legal advice. This is merely defensive advice.

Nah, so long as you can put in a mutually satisfactory process to amend the agreement you can pretty much roll with changes. Claiming that there must always be a situation that make the amendment process ineffective is pretty similar to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Sure, it's a weakness, but you don't run into it very often. When I write contracts, I discuss how to either change or end the agreement, and that's usually enough.

A couple of uninformed folks over on Reddit have started a thread saying that Ayn Rand would have liked a camp of cannibals in The Walking Dead. https://www.reddit.com/r/thewalkingdead/comments/2lic1v/no_spoilers_the_walking_dead_and_ayn_rand/ I've added my two cents.

Defending someone else does not require that you own them, therefore your conclusions that arise from this are not valid. It is totally appropriate to help people defend themselves from someone else's initiated force. If ISIS rolled into town announcing that all the women in town would be converted to Islam and married to their fighters would it really be inappropriate for me to defend the town and even my daughter?

Stock is merely a claim on the assets of an entity that is paid after all liabilities senior to the claim are paid. It is a form of shared ownership based on the agreement that formed the entity. Contractually, a person might give money to an entity in return for this claim on the assets and other powers over than entity. Those powers may include voting rights to select a board of directors or to vote on certain decisions. That entity does not have to be a corporation, which is a particular legal fiction supported by government and law to limit liability. People use corporations because of the mechanisms that exist for limiting liability, handling disagreements, and dealing with tax implications. Imagine a group of rural neighbors that pool their savings to jointly buy some farm equipment to rent to themselves and others in the area. They can set up a stock contract in order to give each contributor of capital a stake in the sell-off value of the farm equipment if the agreement needs to come to a close (after any loans and other liabilities are settled). They can use the starting capital and rent proceeds to pay for purchasing, storing, renewing, and maintaining the equipment. They can choose to pay excess proceeds to themselves as dividends in proportion to the shares of the initial capital investment. Is there anything inherently wrong with such a joint ownership scheme? I think your claim is that because the contract has the potential to be misused and for you to be outvoted that it's not a valid scheme. But you can choose not to participate, too. Or you can choose to write a thoughtful agreement. And, especially, you can keep your entity small to keep the visible ownership stake of each participant obvious to all concerned.

It's okay to use force to defend oneself or the innocent from death or grave bodily harm. Someone who is being held as a slave seems pretty innocent to me. If they are threatened with death or grave bodily harm for trying to end their slavery you are justified in defending them with force.

Good discussion of it here: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/2484/was-socrates-a-fictional-character-invented-by-plato

One should never engage in an argument unless all participants are capable of changing their mind.

http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/11/05/Poll-Finds-Athiests-Thought-of-as-More-Moral-as-Britain-Drifts-Away-From-Religious-Values POLL FINDS ATHIESTS [sic] THOUGHT OF AS MORE MORAL, AS BRITAIN DRIFTS AWAY FROM RELIGIOUS VALUES More than half of British people believe that religion does more harm than good a recent poll has found. Twenty percent of people describing themselves as “very religious” also agreed with that statement. Less than a quarter of those surveyed believe that faith is a force for good. The poll, by Survation for the Huffington Post, found that just eight percent of Britons describe themselves as very religious, whereas more than 60 percent said they were not at all religious. The results suggest that millions of people in the UK who describe themselves as belonging to a faith do not practice it. The last census of England and Wales, taken in 2011, found that 59.3 percent of the population described themselves as Christian, 4.8 percent Muslim, and 0.5 percent Jewish. One quarter reported to the census that they were of no religion, up from 14.8 percent in 2001; conversely the number of self-proclaimed Christians dropped over the decade from 71.7 percent in 2001. The results support the well documented secularisation of British society. What is perhaps less expected is the tendency to think of atheists as more moral than theists. One in eight people thought that atheists tend to be more moral, compared with less half that number who thought that atheists were less moral. Fifty-five percent said that atheists are just as likely as theists to be moral people. “This confirms something I’ve found in my own surveys and which leads me to conclude that religion has become a ‘toxic brand’ in the UK,” said Linda Woodhead, professor of the sociology of religion at Lancaster University. “What we are seeing is not a complete rejection of faith, belief in the divine, or spirituality, though there is some to that, but of institutional religion in the historic forms which are familiar to people.” She also ascertained a pattern of religion failing to reflect the liberal society, based on tenets of "equality and diversity", which Britain has become. Whilst placing some of the blame with sex scandals involving religious figures and religious conflict in the middle east, “I’d add religious leaderships’ drift away from the liberal values, equality, tolerance, diversity,” she said, which are “embraced by many of their own followers and often championed by non-religious and atheist people more forcefully.” In this light, the polls findings can be seen as further evidence of the increasing entrenchment of left wing thought in the minds of the British public and the concurrent abandonment of conservative values. Edmund Burke, the great 18th Century British statesman commonly thought of as the father of conservatism, was staunch in his belief in religion as a moral force for good. William F. Byrne, Associate Professor of Government and Politics at St. John’s University (NY) has written of Burke “For Burke, religion was the “first prejudice.” That is, religious presumptions are foundational to virtue, morality, and a good society. Most notably, he emerged as a defender of England’s church establishment, believing that this discouraged “fraud and violence and injustice and tyranny” in government. “Burke had a deep sense of the sacred, and he understood that it is vital that we recognize that our whims—experienced either singly or collectively—do not set the standards of right and wrong.” However, the trend may not be set to continue indefinitely. Younger people were more likely to say that they were very religious, with 14.9 percent of those aged 25-34 identifying with that description, against just 3.9 percent of those aged 55-64. And just over half of those aged 25-34 counted themselves as not religious, compared to more than two thirds of 55-64 year olds. Opinions were more split amongst younger people on whether religion was a force for good or not, with 29.1 percent of 18-24 year olds saying it was, whilst 33.8 percent said it did more harm. 37.1 percent were not sure. The data was collected between 31st October and 1st November, with a sample size of 2,004 people.

" A fool and his money are some party." If people are willing to wait for hours to glimpse a rock band, obviously there is value that can be traded for access. Why not? People want to hang with the rockers because some of that success might rub off onto them, or to impress EGGS!

As quoted by the EFF in 1986 ( https://w2.eff.org/Misc/EFF/quotes.eff.txt ): "As a free society matures it becomes more permissive, because the converse is too horrible to contemplate." - Joshua R. Poulson, 1986

Aye. The Harvard "Principled Negotiation" Project (Ury, Fisher, et. al., see the seminal Getting To Yes) uses the more neutral "interests" rather than get caught in the semantic trap of "needs", "wants", "desires", and "wishes".

With one exception: If you are a victim of a crime, tell the cops that you were a victim and point out the evidence of that crime.

It just gets worse: http://althouse.blogspot.com/2014/11/when-im-bad-my-father-sticks-fork-in-my.html November 4, 2014 "When I’m bad... my father sticks a fork in my vagina." "This is hard to share without alarm bells sounding. We’re taught to listen to little girls, particularly when they say things about being sodomized with cutlery. Also my father makes sexually explicit artwork so he’s probably already on the FBI’s fork-in-vagina radar. It’s a testament to his good nature that, after the British lady repeated my 'hilarious' story to a group of adults, he simply scooped me up and said, 'I think it’s someone’s bedtime.' It’s hard to grasp what my intent was here— we’re talking about a child who was fond of pretending a ghost was touching her nonbreasts against her will— but I guess the moral of this story is that my dad’s really nice, yet I’ve always had an imagination that could grasp, maybe even appreciate, the punitive." Yes, I bought the Kindle version of Lena Dunham's "Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's 'Learned'" and did a search on "vagina." I mainly wanted to do a search on "vulva," for reasons stated here. The answer to that question is: 0. Posted by Ann Althouse at 5:07 PM Tags: books, genitalia, Lena Dunham

She has claimed that part of her book was fiction or written by others for her, but did not deny this part of it. She sent a C&D letter to Breitbart to pull down the allegation of sexual abuse, but their defense was that they were only quoting the book. Now she has supposedly canceled her book tour. She's equating it to normal "playing doctor" kind of growing up, so it's all going to hinge on whether a curious 7-year-old intended it as sexual or not. Total drama.

Most of the existing bonds are less than 30 years old because they stop earning interest... and a significant portion of most people's long-term savings has some exposure to bonds. It is simply acknowledging reality to hope that real people get some of the proceeds of selling off a country's assets, whether that's a legitimate entity or not. After all, what sort of money are you using to sell off those assets anyway, if we're going to pick nits.