OT: Brussels attacks

. Not very smart.

that I was richer than you. True you could have a net worth of 21 billion , but is is not likely. If I had a net worth of say %500,000. I would no t be very confident that I was richer than you.

This is a string of text designed to elict some kind of response that might indicate how much money I've got. It does suggests that Dan is too dim to realise quite how transparent his device is.

they can't know to be true and smart isn't any of them.

imagined superiority of his education, and the totally imaginary superiorit y of his intelligence marks him out as a superior man.

That would be foolish. Betting is an activity that makes bookmakers rich.

Still as deluded as ever,

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

I don't. Joerg and Phil Hobbs are definitely smarter, and probably Fred Bloggs and Phil Allison.

But I am rich - not as rich as my younger brother, who organised the Sydney Olympics in 2000, nor my father who had 25 patents to my three - but richer than average.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

are super good and others are just good. Companies can not afford to have poor HR departments. If the HR department is poor, the company will go ba nkrupt. Those that claim that HR departments are all poor are just upset t hat they did not get hired.

Perhaps. I doubt it. Dan isn't all that bright, which lets him believe some of the nonsense that has gotten embedded in your brain, but the fact that he endorses some of your favourite nonsense doesn't make him clever - quite the reverse.

bankrupt companies. Good people get hired by by-passing the HR department.

.

I frequently do.

rge.

You do keep confusing modern socialism, as practiced in Germany and Scandin avia, with the communism you saw practiced in East German back in the 1980' s. Granting your peculiarly extreme right-wing political indoctrination, an y thing to the left of Marco Rubio probably blends into a repulsive mush, b ut modern socialism is as wary of central planning and bureaucracy as any r ight-wing nitwit, and considerably more ingenious in setting up local distr ibution networks for centrally collected income streams.

There may be monsters lurking under the bed, but your are imagination is ta king it's images from a very old-fashioned set of fairy-tales.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

+1 GH

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g some of other peoples stuff and using it for the common good.

No, that's actually called 'stealing.' Or maybe it's a failed hippie commune from the '60's, well past its typical two-month viability.

Society is about each person trying to live a good life, and do the things they want to do, unmolested. People associate and pool resources to create governments, to better secure their individual safety.

The common good begins with the individual. It's not a single Borg-like demand to be placed on free people of different wants and needs. That's tyrananny. And, it's beyond arrogant to imagine you can manage their affairs better than they can. Yet that is exactly what socialists presume. Then they fail, over and over, and want more.

d the justice system, which prevents other individuals from taking more of your stuff for their private advantage.

Correct. It's for those things that free people create governments at all, and agree to pitch in our share of the expense. We create governments to

*protect* our own lives and property from those who would do us ill.

(Thomas Paine described this--the reason we found governments--in the first two pages of Common Sense, c. 1776. About 1/4 of Americans then had read it, IIRC.)

Creating a government that is itself the greatest threat to our lives or property defeats the whole purpose of having a government at all, nullifyin g all the advantages.

To wit, thieves don't break in and take 40% of my wages or force me do hundreds of hours of paperwork each year.

In fact, the main thing that deters thieves has nothing to do with the federal government at all. That's done by local law enforcement, very competently, and without trying to run my life.

won't admit it, since it doesn't allow your to produce the kind of idiot s ound-bites that make up the kind of right-wing rhetoric that you are used t o.

pay for defence, police and the justice system - there are no property righ ts or rule of law without the machanisms to enforce the rule of law.

oads and other infra-structure, which everybody uses.

ople

Universal means "centrally-planned," which is horrible. Put Athens in char ge of Europe's health care, let Athens allocate U.K. hospitals' money and such , and see how that works out.

Localities do those better.

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cal initiatives. Federal systems have a tendency to centralise tax collecti on, which means that a lot the revenue stream has to fed out to the compone nt states and sometimes split again tobe fed out to individual constituenci es.

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ll it raise my taxes".

Every time you whine that the U.S. federal gov't isn't big enough, you're arguing for central planning. Centralized revenue, centralized allocation.

Put one city in charge of Europe, and you've got what you're prescribing fo r the U.S.

n Europe, and are happy to leave the free market to regulate those bits of the economy where it works well, and farm out services - like education and health care, that don't work well as free market operations - to regional authorities.

es are spending the money sensibly and effectively, but that's a long way f rom Soviet-style central planning, as you'd be well aware if you thought ab out what your were writing, rather than churning out right-wing boiler-pla te text.

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alking about raising the tax rate to 100% - which is what your "seventy-fiv e seems to imply.

It's over forty percent because we pay state taxes too. I've mentioned tha t over and over, but your neural networks seem frozen.

xes, but not enough to make their societies look wildly different from the US.

d the German economy at least makes the US system look inept.

I get work outsourced from those countries, exactly because their systems are so burdensome that companies don't dare hire. (As you've experienced yourself, one might add.)

what

e, defined as those in the top 1% of the income distribution, pay 43% the i ncome tax collected, and get 17% of the total income.

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hey have got money that they can pay towards politicians election expenses (and politicians are allowed to spend as much as they can get on getting el ected, which isn't allowed in most democracies). The US scores high on cron yism - what are tax loop-holes, if not cronyism written into law?

to think about the implications of the nonsense you post, you could probabl y realise that it was nonsense. I haven't been intellectually crippled in t hat particular way, and can actually think thoughts that you won't permit y ourself to entertain - such as the free market not being the right means fo r distributing every social good.

utside your right-wing box.

e is the smartest one here.

ealth issues that can be devastating . Otherwise it is being willing to sa ve and invest.

smart, why aren't you rich ".

The most effective way to deal with Larkin might be to ignore him, but he i s the most prolific poster to this group, so it probably wouldn't work.

John Larkin didn't mention "well-informed" which is why he tends to find my posts repulsive - he doesn't like having it pointed out that he has posted nonsense again - usually derived from some Murdoch media web-site aimned a t the terminally gullible. He comforts himself with the idea that I'm wrong and delusional, but underlyingly he knows better.

Telling Larkin that he's posting nonsense is an obnoxious activity. He find s it deeply offensive to his sense of self-worth and posts more nonsense, m ost of it unpleasant, to comfort his bruised ego.

But if I didn't do it, people might take him seriously.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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how much money I've got) and thinks that he went to a better university (w hen he won't admit which one it was). His claim to smarter than I am seems to be even less well-founded, but he's too stupid to realise quite how stup id it is to make claims you can't (or won't) substantiate.

niversity than you. And also smarter than you. And am willing to put up a little money on it. You are not willing to put any money on this which te nds to bolster my outlook. I am willing to substantiate it, but not for no thing.

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Sadly, Dan isn't a genius. His simplifications are over-simplifications, an d he's prone to throw the baby out with the bath-water.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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w how much money I've got) and thinks that he went to a better university ( when he won't admit which one it was). His claim to smarter than I am seems to be even less well-founded, but he's too stupid to realise quite how stu pid it is to make claims you can't (or won't) substantiate.

university than you. And also smarter than you. And am willing to put up a little money on it. You are not willing to put any money on this which t ends to bolster my outlook. I am willing to substantiate it, but not for n othing.

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True, but what they think is obviously true isn't always correct.

The habit of cutting through layers of detailed argument with a couple of p erceptive simplifications often works, but it isn't entirely reliable.

Detailed knowledge isn't easy to transfer into even the most superior brain , and superior brains are less willing than most to devote enough time to g etting detailed insight.

At a lower level, John Larkin still doesn't know that anthropogenic climate change is real, and a real and present problem.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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ing some of other peoples stuff and using it for the common good.

You are happy to have society take other people stuff and use it to pay for defense, police and justice. By your logic that's "stealing" too.

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and the justice system, which prevents other individuals from taking more o f your stuff for their private advantage.

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Thomas Paine was a radical enlightenment thinker. The founding tax evaders sent him off to France as soon as the war had been won and they didn't good propagandists any more.

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True, But that not remotely what Bernie Sanders has in mind. He was the US government to look more like the governments of Germany and Scandinavia, wh ich incidentally deliver more freedom of opportunity than the current US so cial system.

True. Thieves aren't into paperwork. Governments want your contributions do cumented, so you pay neither too much nor too little.

But your taxes pay for it, and that paperwork is part of the system that pa ys local law enforcement.

ou won't admit it, since it doesn't allow your to produce the kind of idiot sound-bites that make up the kind of right-wing rhetoric that you are used to.

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o pay for defence, police and the justice system - there are no property ri ghts or rule of law without the machanisms to enforce the rule of law.

roads and other infra-structure, which everybody uses.

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Actually, it doesn't. It may mean centrally regulated, which usually means some monitoring office in the centre that makes sure that the local service s are performing up to a centrally established standard.

You use the phrase "centrally-planned" to hark back to the totalitarian com munist economies of Eastern Europe and Russia, which were a disaster, but f or precisely the reason that got the proto-communists thrown out of the soc ialist movement back 1870. To quote Bakunin, at the time

"If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, w ithin a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself."

Athens would not be a good choice. Berlin would be better. In fact the UK a nd Germany both do better for their national populations than the US does, at substantially less per head.

The Greeks go in for mindless tax avoidance with the same enthusiasm as rig ht-wing Americans, nd since they've got less money to start with the result s are even worse.

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local initiatives. Federal systems have a tendency to centralise tax collec tion, which means that a lot the revenue stream has to fed out to the compo nent states and sometimes split again t obe fed out to individual constitue ncies.

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will > > it raise my taxes?".

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ern Europe, and are happy to leave the free market to regulate those bits o f the economy where it works well, and farm out services - like education a nd health care, that don't work well as free market operations - to regiona l authorities.

ties are spending the money sensibly and effectively, but that's a long way from Soviet-style central planning, as you'd be well aware if you thought about what your were writing, rather than churning out right-wing boiler-p late text.

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talking about raising the tax rate to 100% - which is what your "seventy-f ive seems to imply.

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Piketty says 30%. He's a better economist than you are, and not quite so pr one to misinterpret data to suit his immediate rhetorical advantage.

taxes, but not enough to make their societies look wildly different from th e US.

and the German economy at least makes the US system look inept.

I was rejected because I was seen as too old. The bureaucratic system endor sed that prejudice, but the problem wasn't the bureaucracy, but the underly ing social attitude.

Out-sourcing to get specialised skills doesn't imply that it's impossible t o hire somebody to do the work - it's just a bit silly to have an in-house capacity that you won't use that often.

I was hired by Haffmans because they couldn't find a subcontractor who unde rstood measuring solution conductivity. Once I'd solved that problem (whcih took a while), they were happy to let their ageist attitudes get the bette r of them