You and a bunch of other ignant fools said "there is actually a disincentive to go out and look for work" here and all over the internet.

And to that, I say: CITATION NEEDED. Citation needed from some sort of authoritative source, not "the man in the pub" or "a radio talkshow host". You self-interested pieces of shit, show us the numbers that say people don't want to work, or that they're living high on the hog on unemployment, on their $400 a month. Show us the data. And not some Heritage Foundation fiction, show us something that isn't coming from a right-wing sewage tank.

We're waiting. We're waiting for all these mythical welfare queens--after decades of existing only in the lies and fictions of the hard right--to turn into reality at last. Only you look around and what do we have? People who want to work hard but the economy's been fucked so they're fucked too. Well, wait long enough and we're all fucked. The line between any two of us is much thinner than you realize, or maybe you're just scared to admit it.

And while we're waiting, let's talk about this "taxation is theft" crock of shit. Taxation is part of your obligation as SOMEONE LIVING IN SOCIETY. Taxation is a part of the social contract, the ethics of which go back much farther than that thoroughly-debunked pseudo-philosopher Rand you're cribbing this nonsense from.

You don't want taxes? Fine, let's take away all the societal support structures that make your money worth anything. Now you can hoard all the useless piles of metal you want, and your faith in its "intrinsic value" will sustain you until you starve to death.

I don't want to live in a world where other people's actions shape the decisions I make throughout the day, either.

Curiously enough, that's exactly why I'd love to see this sort of frivolous, deeply harmful shit stopped. These people are reckless, and the actions they take day after day make my life harder in a million tiny, indirect ways, along with your and virtually everyone else's life too.

(Note: you may not agree or see it that way, but the world doesn't need your consent or acknowledgement to be profoundly broken and in desperate need of structural repair. So if you're getting ready to type some sort of "no I'm cool everything's cool" reply, just spare us.)

It's just another one of those world-we-want vs world-we-have situations. I want a world where a bunch of shits in a room thousands of miles from me aren't chipping away the economy a billion tiny transactions a day.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say, that's the price you pay for living in society. You give up some freedom (can't wreck shit for millions), and in exchange you get police, fire, sanitation, the whole ball of wax.

Do I think I should be able to tell them not to do that, so long as we're all sharing this same society?

You'll get one guess as to the right answer here.

It's about the world we want to live in, which stands in ever-starker contrast to the world we do live in.

Do you want to live in a world where the best and brightest throw their efforts away with such mundane, trivial shit?

Again, not where-are-we-now, but where-do-we-want-to-be.

Do you want to live in a world where, thanks to some tricks of law and circumstance, a handful of people have such domination over billions?

Again, not where-are-we-now, but where-do-we-want-to-be.

You don't have to be a slaver (wtf??) to say, the world we live in is wrong, because a lot of people are suffering for what seem like really lousy reasons.

You do, however, have to be a decent human being.

Hey, so do socialists.

That's great. So we're all on the same page.

I guess the only thing we disagree on is what's "necessary" when it comes to regulations.

But at least we've got a starting point, right?

cheers,

There is no such thing as a "free market" because all markets are, by definition, based on sets of rules . That idea of the "market" is already "not free" by its nature. It implies a set of rules.

In other words, there's no such thing as a "natural market" that we can strive for. There is no such thing as an "ideal market" that we can point to as free from human invention. ALL MARKETS ARE A HUMAN INVENTION. Things like "buyer beware" - someone came up with that. Things like "the government should only enforce contracts" - someone came up with that. Things like "don't lie about the ingredients in your prepared food" - someone came up with that.

When people toss around words like "free market" these days, you have to pay very close attention to who's saying it, because some people use it to mean "just enough regulation to help my big business donors" while others use it to mean "just enough regulation to support my every-man-for-himself fantasy".

Nowhere in anyone's discussion is an acknowledgment that there's not really any such thing as a "free market", that it's all a matter of picking useful rules. But that's what it is - picking useful rules that serve the people involved.

This should be required reading for anyone interested in getting into internet debates with libertarians:

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html - Critiques of libertarianism.

(It should also be required reading for anyone who actually buys into that incoherent nonsense.)

Hiya. Since there's a lot of hate in the comments here, let me just say:

Thank you for Firefox 4. It's faster and even less crashy than before. You guys did a great job. A whole lot of us really love the work you've done, including the UI tweaks.

Cheers,
An FF4 fan.

First off, a lot of failure is people's fault. The left has to own up to this, and it is true, moral failures have a lot to do with it. Too much drinking, drugging, gambling, womanizing, entertaining oneself, the whole liberal idea that if it feels good do it, is just totally wrong. [Citation needed] (emphasis mine)

I had a Patriot 64gb SSD in a small, low-traffic Ubuntu server (several services were running but no specific tuning options were set) that died this weekend. Sunday afternoon, several Apache processes pegged the CPU at 100% between them (load average climbed steadily up to 40ish, and I was unable to start or kill anything else). Thinking that one of my users had written some bad PHP, I rebooted the machine. It wouldn't restart (Grub loading...please wait...). Booting into System Rescue CD, the partitions on the SSD were detected, but none could be mounted due to bad sectors all throughout. dd_rescue was able to retrieve the important data (that which hadn't been backed up..), but the time/money spent bringing the server back online seemed a totally unnecessary hassle. SSDs were supposed to be reliable (no moving parts, right??), but I'm definitely going to wait for a few years before buying another. The drive was less than a year old.