Ben No.3

„Trump 2020!“ Said the person largely unaffected by the consequences.

I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.

The following is, mathematically, simply true: 1+2+3+4+...=-(1/12) That doesn’t make sense. At all. Why a specific number? Why a small one? Most importantly, why a negative one??? But it is true https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_%2B_2_%2B_3_%2B_4_%2B_%E2%8B%AF Think about the philosophical implications. Seriously. Descartes once claimed that an evil demon could make me believe that 1+1=3. I always thought that was a bit of a stretch. Apparently not. Turns out we actually can’t know, or at least understand, anything.

So here’s a story about how cities let Amazon keep the taxes paid by their employees. That doesn’t seem right. https://m.chicagoreader.com/chicago/chicagos-amazon-hq2-bid-money-for-nothing-tifs-for-free/Content?oid=33535992

Note to self: Never, ever agree to truth or dare when there is Sauerkraut juice around.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239 Thoughts?

Walked through the city marvelling at, yet enjoying, late stage capitalism. There’s this one shop literally called “buy yourself happy” (“Kauf dich glücklich“) around here.

Not really, an unbiased strong international body is a good idea, what we have now is an abject joke. Mladic is a maggot to be sure, but selectively applied justice is not necessarily better than no justice at all as it ends up justifying and making precedents for all sorts of things based on current convenience. Ethnic cleansing being OK because Operation Storm was done by a now NATO and EU member and them being convicted would be embarrassing or Kosovo's secession (without even a vote, in contrast Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine twice prior to 2014 they just got gazumped by the USSR breaking up then crushed by 70k Ukrainian soldiers) being legal set precedents if you have international laws yet were done for pure convenience. You're also not going to see Bush, Blair, Sarkozy, Muhammed bin Salman who's busy starving Yemen (or the Mays, Trudeaus, Merkels, Trumps, Macrons etc who are arming and supporting him); or Putin or even Assad so long as he has Putin's backing in The Hague. You'll just see ossified current irrelevancies like Mladic and those like Gbagbo who pissed the French off but didn't have Russian or Chinese protection instead. the problem you are pointing out is that of an international institution not strong enough to act effectively against strong nations. I’m all for making them stronger, which will go hand in hand with an increasing number of nations submitting an increasing amount of their power.

International its early

http://m.dw.com/en/ratko-mladic-found-guilty-at-bosnian-war-crimes-trial/a-41475978#fromDesktop This is why a strong international official body is something good. Seriously, every nation should submit to the internal court of justice already.

That's pretty cool! Why wouldn't everyone, that needs it, do it? And unrelated to above, has the conversation now shifted to; "most people aren't living as well at the top earners are"? We've now established that its totally "doable" to live on single or dual incomes and have most of life's "luxuries". BUT! Dude over there has a nicer house and that's not fair! Well, not all people are equal. That's the plain unvarnished truth. Not all people have the same mental acuity or intelligence. Not all people have the same physical capabilities. So is the discussion really that all people should have the same success? Of course there are going to be haves and have not's. I cant even really understand how that's not a basic understanding of life. normative fallacy! what is: people have different set of skills which are useful to society in varying degrees. Your ought: therefore, those who contribute should be richer.Yet you do not give any reason why this should be the consequence of the circumstances you described.

Privatinsolvenz is not an option? It sucks for a while and is humiliating but certainly better than having no perspective, no? edit: yeah, I’m terrible at reading law. AnywY, privat Insolvenz only applies to those out of a job

I have a friend who is definitely one of the if not the most brilliant person I’ve ever met. She’s the daughter of two immigrants, who both work long hours every day for years on years. Mother works at a hospital, father helps out at a theater. Not that they are dumb or lazy.... they both studied and got a diploma. They still can barley afford anything. Their extended family either can’t support them, or they refuse to, as they are deeply religious and the parents chose to study in the Soviet Union of all places. As of now, they are unsustainably in debt. They had to take up a loan to enable their first daughter to go to uni, and now they had to take up a second loan to pay off that first loan. The second loan, they still can’t afford to pay off, so the debt just grows and grows. Heck, they can’t even get every school book she needs. They can’t afford citizenship, for God’s sake. Again, this is perhaps the most brilliant person I have met. She reads fluent Latin and Ancient Greek, I mean just imagine the effort that must have gone into that. I’ve had the same amount of years of Latin, and I barley understand the damned language. To anyone who speaks with her, it is clear that she is, in terms of intellectual capacity, capable of great things. But she’s also one of three daughters who have to be supported through school and uni. Being fully aware of the disadvantages she, as a poor, underclass, female immigrant drowned in debt, is at, she has a rather pessimistic outlook on her future. And before I forget: She also has a particularly weak constitution; which results in her having two surgeries within less than 12 months, as well as often needing simply meds. Those aren’t exactly free either. Now how the **** am I gonna explain to her how the free market is gonna save her?

I said you won the race, not that you were first to the "egg", also, I did not think that you were supporting caste system, once a drone always a drone, without freedom to chose what you want to do in life. 1. How is „winning a race“ different from „being first in that very race“? 2. I gave you an example of a reality, your might say, which dealt with recourse allocation without competition. I did not judge this reality morally however, and I couldn’t.... as pointed out, i don’t know two things about bees or ants, but rather used them as lazy examples. So how am I supposed to judge wether they are even aware that they live in a cast system? Anyway, I never expressed support for one, did I?

I corrected my original statement accordingly

The fight between competing tribes of ants I was aware of, however, that’s two tribes of ants, i.e. two competing systems; so a bit of a different story. Didn’t know about the ant civil wars. If I’m getting it correctly, it has nothing to do with recourse allocation, but with reproduction. Same with the bees. It is very interesting, and I will admit that i was wrong, but it does seem besides the point?

“We are living in a reality, where competition is embedded in its functioning. There are limited number of resources, so various entities compete for them.” See, here’s the thing. What you just did is called a normative fallacy, also known as Humes law or the is-ought problem. You observed something - that resources are limited - and derived a rule from it - that we should compete for these recourses. You didn’t have any reason to draw this conclusion from your observation though. The IS, so what is (limited recourse), says nothing about the OUGHT, what should be done (which is, you say, without giving any actual evidence for this, competing). This exact fallacy in this exact context has often been used by Social Darwinists to justify imperial conquest as an evolutionary necessity and therefore justified. However, as I pointed out, this is a false line of reasoning. And if you actually look at nature, you will find that “survival of the fittest” doesn’t mean “survival of the strongest individual”, but rather “survival of the system which has best adapted to its surroundings”. Take honey bees or certain types of ants, which have constructed systems, or societies, if you will, which work almost perfectly, yet devoid of any significant competition amongst each other. Mind you, that is within one respective system/society/tribe. And even most human tribes have not developed the concept of property, let alone wage labour. In conclusio: Your line of reasoning is false and your thesis not only unproven, but also contradictory to observable fact. You’re wrong.

We haven’t had snow for several years now... I’m telling you, if elections were in winter, the greens wouldn’t need to bother campaigning.

“It might be a shocker for you, but you live because you won a race to your mommys inside from among millions of losers...” Actually, it usually takes the effort of several sperms to break the ovums outer wall, which means that the first sperm is very unlikely to actually be the one to fertilise. You live because you’re a lazy, credit stealing bastard living off other people’s efforts.

Says the guy who just proposed 85% tax... A straw man if there ever was one. Since you seem to need everything laid out to you: Assuming GD counts capital gains as income in his model, which of course is an assumption, but for the sake of rhetoric I’ll assume it, literally every! single! one! (unless I’m missing something) for whom his income tax would be too great to afford would not be affected by my inheritance tax model; in which, let me remind you, the 85% only affect every dollar after! the first million. So all of those people mentioned would actually pay no inheritance tax whatsoever under my model. Edit: Ah well. Not exactly the first one, am I.

15% is ridiculously high for a lot of ppl

Wow. I just found this pearl. You do realize that diabetes is among the top ten causes of death globally, right? So yeah, you really need "diabetes medicine" if you are diabetic. The skill with which you defeat your own points is... uncanny. It's uncanny how you can miss the point by this much. This is the data from 4.000 workers from 3 cities (NYC, LA, Chicago) extrapolated to the entire nation.Not the most accurate method. Also note: 40% of the sample are illegal immigrants, so the notion that a company who hires illegals will pay them legally is kind of wishful thinking. Full report here: http://www.nelp.org/content/uploads/2015/03/BrokenLawsReport2009.pdf?nocdn=1 An awful piece if I'm being honest. then what was the point what did the report get wrong?

“Es war, als hätt' der Himmel Die Erde still geküßt, Daß sie im Blütenschimmer Von ihm nun träumen müßt'. [...] Und meine Seele spannte Weit ihre Flügel aus, Flog durch die stillen Lande, Als flöge sie nach Haus.“ Been contemplating the whole day about this masterpiece of German poetry. Rough translation „It was as if the sky Had silently kissed the earth So that she, in the gleam of flowers, Must now dream of him. And my soul spread Wide out it’s wings Flew through the silent lands As if flying home.“

Capitalist: How dare you think you’re entitled to the wealth someone else produced? Also capitalist: How dare you think kids aren’t entitled to what their parents produced?

stealing implies ownership So we don't own what we earn? Not exactly an incentive to work hard is it? Why be an engineer and deal with that stress when I can just pick apples. After all if the pay is the same why work harder? A dead! person doesn’t own anything