Jun 28, 2007
“The difference between networks is all in the profile questions. Do you want to know religion or do you want to know job title?
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Jun 28, 2007
“The name Christopher Columbus is the anglicization of the Latin Christophorus Columbus. Also well known are his name’s rendering in modern Italian as Cristoforo Colombo and in Castilian Spanish as Cristóbal Colón.
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Jun 28, 2007
“The government always uses cases of child porn/rape to grab new judicial powers for itself, since no one is ever willing to speak up for the accused. It’s a nasty trick that’s been going on for a long time.
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Jun 28, 2007
“Somehow the web development universe got turned upside down. Ruby got a Pythonic framework, and Python has a TIMTOWDI smorgasbord of frameworks.
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Jun 28, 2007
“In the short run, the market is a voting machine and sometimes people vote very unintelligently. In the long run, it is a weighing machine and the weight of how business does is what affects values over time.
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Jun 28, 2007
“In a nation of debtors, inflation is the politically most palatable form of monetary policy. After all, everybody is focused on the short term: politicians and bureaucrats on their terms of office, consumers on their debt and their desire to buy more things they don’t need with money they don’t have, and so forth. In the long run this policy means ruin. Over time, the middle and lower classes will see their real incomes and living standards shrink, while the true beneficiaries of inflation – those who get first dibs on every dollop of newly created fiat money – amass more and more of the wealth that is stolen from its producers by inflation.
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Jun 28, 2007
“The shameful secret of the welfare state is that it makes irresponsible slaves out of previously free and responsible people.
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Jun 28, 2007
Fiat currencies in the 20th century: monetary catastrophes unfolding at varying speed since the birth of the Federal Reserve.
The currency system is based on coercion: directly via the legal tender laws (which decree that fiat currency must be used/accepted for all payments of debt) and indirectly via the value imputed to government debt which rests on the faith in the government’s ability to extort enough future tax revenue to be able to repay its debt.
Government bonds are the tally sticks of our age, and serve as the main ‘backing’ of bank notes and their digital counterparts in circulation. They are what is tying the government and the banking system together, via the central bank. The central bank has the power to ‘monetize’ such debt by creating money out of thin air. This roundabout way of going about it is an essential part of the confidence game, the creation of the illusion of value.
Inflation is nothing but a cleverly disguised tax. If the government had to actually raise taxes instead of borrowing the staggering sums of money it uses, it would have to raise taxes by so much that it would face a rebellion.
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Jun 28, 2007
“The State has sought to engage in theft from the citizenry via monetary debasement from the very dawn of Western civilization. How did worthless objects come into widespread acceptance as money? Demand for fiat money was created by its acceptance for payment of taxes.
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Jun 28, 2007
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