Okay, 3, 2, 1 let's jam.

He should check his other trousers.

That's fine. It will never happen, but it would be amazing if you could pay your income taxes with bitcoin. That's how the banks getcha. You have to use their dollars to pay your taxes, and you can't get around that, which means you always have to deal with the bankers, and they always get their taste. If you could remove them from the equation, that would free mankind.

What would actually happen, though, is you'd still have to pay taxes on bitcoins you received as income, just with the value converted to dollars. Still, nice to dream...

New since, umm, the 1960's? 1980's, anyway. The US has tested several different ASATs over the years, and has long had countermeasures. I assume other countries have countermeasures as well.

I've read A People's History. I never claimed the founders were saints. All I'm saying is that, for the time, the constitution and the bill of rights were pretty damn enlightened. We could do better, but we could certainly do much, much worse.

Yes, yes, we all know, they established an aristocracy and rights were only really for first-class citizens like themselves and not women, the poor and blacks. However, the government has since been modified to include supposedly everyone in the first-class citizen pool.

The founders had a remarkably good set of rules deciding what the government could and could not do to first-class citizens, and that's what we respect them for.

I'm presupposing it's eventually possible to create a machine that thinks like a man. Is conscious, is self-aware. I doubt we'd get it right first try. Before we got Mr. Data we'd probably get insane intelligences, trapped inside boxes, suffering, and completely at the whim of the man holding the plug.

What are your thoughts on the ethics of doing so, particularly given the iterative steps we'd have to take to get there?

For those of us old enough to remember The USS Vincennes.

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Exactly. I think libertarians do not understand evil. They think there is no such thing as evil, just ignorance, and that people are rational, and can be reasoned with. Many can be. But there is such a thing as evil. There are evil, evil people in this world whose capacity for destruction, manipulation and exploitation is held at bay only by the collective power of government by the people. If libertarians want to see what their fantasy wonderland looks like, it was called the gilded age. And hint, libertarians, in a world of masters and slaves, there are few masters, many slaves, and you will likely be one of them.

I think by "warlords" he means robber barons with their private police forces.

You seem to think that without government authority, power will not be exerted against you, and not against those least able to fend for themselves. This is not the case. Those who have wealth and power will always seek to gain more at the expense of anyone else, and through whatever means they have available. This extends to backroom deals, monopoly power, insider trading, unsafe working conditions and violence. Private police forces and strike breakers.

Government, restrained by a separation of powers with checks and balances over each other, should serve as the check against the power of the wealthy over those who have no wealth and therefore no individual power.

Unfortunately currently the power of government has been bought by the wealthy. What's needed is a restructuring to reduce the influence of money in politics. But the answer is not to remove the power of government. That power vacuum will simply be filled by the power of the wealthy, and the poor and middle class will have no defense against their rapaciousness.

This is the perpetual blind spot that libertarians just don't seem to understand. Without government restraining wealthy sociopaths, they will kill or enslave you, through "legitimate" means or otherwise. You have this fantasy that either you will be in charge or that everybody will just get along, but they won't, because there are evil people in this world who are only restrained by the collective action of government by the people.

The problem isn't necessarily the decisions that are made. Those are just a symptom. The problem is with the method by which decisions are made.

That's basically it. I was a libertarian when I was younger, then I grew the fuck up and realized the philosophy is unworkable in the real world. James Madison knew better. "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." But men are definitely, definitely not angels. Libertarians think that if everybody else would just "wake up, sheeple!" they would be enlightened like them and of course would adhere to rules of common decency and fair play. But that's bullshit, because there are sociopaths who will absolutely grind them into dust and enslave their children if it would make an extra dollar.

Quick, someone call Kickstarter and get iFind up and running again.