icebraining hit the nail on the head in the sibling post. You have put forth an argument for no taxation. And you know what, it's not completely without merit. On the other hand, I think you are confusing "taxes" with "contributions to society".

There are some examples in history of societies which worked without an explicit taxation system (I'm thinking tribal societies like Native Americans; there may be other examples of more infrastructure-heavy societies that worked without any taxation, but I can't think of any. Do you have some examples?).

However, even in those tribal societies, there was an implicit taxation system. Everyone was obligated to participate and "give back" to the society. When you went out to hunt, you didn't keep all of the kill to yourself - you shared it with your family and tribe. This is a simplification of the social structure of thousands of different cultures, but the point is just because there isn't a bureaucracy forcing you to contribute at threat of physical detention doesn't mean that there isn't a cultural more forcing you to contribute at threat of banishment. By living in a modern society you are entering into an implicit agreement: you will benefit from the physical infrastructure, the police and fire protection, the national defense, the national parks, etc. In return, you agree to pay your taxes, and you agree to elect representatives who will shape tax and spending policies in ways you agree with.

Ummm... no.
Here's an example: A flat consumption tax would be regressive, because people with lower incomes spend a greater percentage of their income each year. The richer you are, the more you save (i.e. the less you consume, as a percentage of your income). One can make objective arguments for such a tax by making the case that it is easier to collect, will raise the same amount of revenue as an income tax, etc.

I don't necessarily disagree. However, what you're missing is that there are some goods and services that require society working together as a whole. It doesn't make sense for individuals to voluntarily contribute to, for example, national defense. People, by their nature, will free-ride. Even when the volunteer payment for a free service model looks like it works (see: public radio), a closer examination shows that it is subsidized by advertising and taxes.

Can you give some examples of public goods which succeed with an all volunteer funding model?

Yes. Watching graphic violence on video affects people. If it is a real event (as opposed to fiction), it will affect them even more. Watching such an event in real life is undoubtedly even more traumatic. You don't seriously believe that a normal person could watch a video of a man sodomizing a toddler, then slicing the kid open with a butcher knife and not be affected by it, do you?

A regressive tax system is so bad for so many obvious reasons that it is unnecessary to refute the argument. But I honestly couldn't tell if he was seriously putting it forward or simply being trollish.

If you think you have a good argument for a regressive tax system, I'm all ears.

I generally agree with what you're saying. The point I'm trying to make is that you can hold the executive management responsible for the actions of middle managers when they create incentives for those middle managers to prioritize, for example, bottom line profit of that manager's division above all else. This could incentivize the manager to cut corners and costs by dumping waste illegally, or by hiring contractors and not giving them proper psychological support.

Now, to your point, if a company has a more holistic incentive structure designed to reward middle managers who don't do these "bad" things, the bad things might still happen because people are flawed. And in that case I would be less inclined to place blame on upper management. However, I believe the former scenario is much more common, even at companies like Google.

Hmm... Carbonite is $60 per year per computer. That's $5 per month, so if your HDD is over 500 GB, Carbonite is cheaper. Additionally, it automatically encrypts before sending to their servers, restore is immediate (or nearly so). The only drawback is you have to manually add video files to the backup.

What are you paying for -5 and -4? We pay $50 for -5. Not sure about -4 but it's probably around $20-$30. They are about the same per GB.

At $50 for an LTO-5, that's about 3.3 cents per GB native. If the tape has a life of 3 years, that's .09 cents (9 hundreths of a penny) per month per GB for material. But as another person said, the bulk of your costs are going to be infrastructure: the robots to move those tapes around, the actors and drives, the supporting networking infrastructure, bandwidth to move it from the DC to your operational area, environmentals, etc. Not to mention redundancy.

This price is very market competitive, and is cheaper than what we do in house with our tape robot (though to be fair ours is much smaller and has faster SLAs).

What's the SLA on data retrieval? Can you get at your data in 5 hours or less, or are those tape sitting in a box on a shelf, and have to be manually pulled and loaded into the robot? Regardless, who is your vendor? I might be interested in using them. Those rates seem too good to be true unless they are completely offline (i.e. not mounting the tape when you request it, but rather returning it to you physically).

Oh sure... think of the programmer. What about the AI? What about it's emotional well being? You humanist.

So all those snuff videos of decapitations, stonings, etc., and all that hardcore CP (where the kid is getting raped, not just nudie shots), all those gore videos of traffic accidents, none of that is real? What a relief.

If the corporation creates an environment where that manager is judge solely (or mostly) on the bottom line of his P&L, then they are engendering evil. Even a large corporation can put into place metrics and evaluation criteria which reward managers for making decisions that are profit neutral or profit negative in the short term, but that have other benefits, tangible and intangible, to the company outside of that manager's division.

I wonder who at Google is spending their 20% time trying to program the AI that can do this job.

/b/ is just the tip of the iceberg.

That assumes other botnets send the same number of spam emails per bot as Grum. Given it is the largest, and probably has the largest address list, it probably sends more spam per bot than other botnets. TFA says it had the capability of sending 18b spam message per day, which is about 90k messages per bot. Other botnets might be only sending 50k or 10k per bot per day.

Obviously way oversimplified, but at least you own up to such in the next paragraph. However, I would point out that this:

is quite obviously wrong. Perhaps you are talking about the abortion debate in general, but TFA and recent social discussion specifically relates to cases of rape.

It's not really magic, and it does have something to do with physical development, though I agree it is arbitrary to a certain extent. Different people have different opinions about how late in a pregnancy an abortion is permissible. One is: "if the fetus can survive outside the womb then it shouldn't be aborted." There are numerous other, more objective measures, you could use. For example: detectable heartbeat; brainwaves that match a certain level of activity; X grams of mass. Each of these is somewhat arbitrary, but they are not "magic". They attempt to determine a point in time when the physical development is such that we should confer individual rights upon the fetus. Somewhere between the state of "separate egg and sperm" and "live-born baby" is a point at which that organism should be granted certain rights. To me, that line's definition should be all about "development," though the question of what level of development is a thorny one.

For the majority of Pro-Life people, this earlier time is conception. To me, this position is just as (maybe slightly) more arbitrary than the other position. I'm not sure there is any "magic" to it, other than the magic of cellular mitosis. It too has something to do with physical development - the organism is growing, it has crossed a critical threshold to multi-celled.

There is very little difference, physically speaking, between a fetus minutes or hours before birth and a baby minutes or hours after birth. One difference is that the baby is breathing air in it's lungs, rather than receiving oxygen and other resources through the umbilical cord. That's a pretty dramatic change in life process. I think being unconnected from the mother is a pretty significant step. Without any conscious support, a baby will die. Without any conscious support, a fetus will (most likely) live. A baby can communicate it's needs in a rudimentary way, but one that is sophisticated compared to a fetus.

Are you arguing for a regressive tax system?

Can't tell if young, naive pseudo-libertarian or just trolling.