My first job was as a messenger in Liverpool's shipping and forwarding business. Bills of Lading, Letters of Credit, quotes on seafreight and bulking up the sailor's wage run (five large chaps in a Jaguar delivering £50k in cash, half Sterling, half DMs, to the ship's bursar to pay the crew of the charter cargo ship).
I used to walk past the Liverpool Echo building with printing works in the basement (you could blag an early edition if you asked nicely at the back entrance, and the ink would still be drying).
All gone. Shame as those jobs gave entry to the world of business with little in the way of credentialism.
Sea-freight charges are a time sensitive market. There was a geezer with a tiny office high in a big old seafront office building who had 5 phones on his desk and who would buy empty space on ships then sell it on. No intellectual, tonnes of knowledge of the ships, routes and the people who needed to shift stuff.
Right, people have been scamming each other face-to-face since history has been recorded (uh, slavery?). The claim that email makes scamming, on the level we've historically seen, easier is laughable. It's text on an LCD screen. Most spam doesn't even get to my eyes and on the rare occasion that it does, it goes straight to the trash bin.
Scamming face to face is a slow, risky process. Email allows me to try to scam millions or even billions in a moment. For essentially no incremental cost. So even if I get a hundredth of a percent conversion on the scam, I win. It also allows me to scam for vastly lower stakes. I'm not going to risk a face to face scam for a penny, or even a dollar. But via email, there's no real floor on how high the stakes are before it becomes unattractive. Said another way, if I send 100 million scam emails, and I convert 1/10th of 1% for a dime, that's $10,000 for little effort, investment or risk (because, really, who's going to hunt you down over a dime).
> The claim that email makes scamming, on the level we've historically seen, easier is laughable.
Right or wrong, the assertion seems to be not that email makes the scam itself easier, but that it lessens the social impact on the scammer (making it easier to decide to be a scammer, and ignore the impact you are having on the other person).
I am cool with the content of your messages in this thread, but you should be aware that many of us come from linguistic backgrounds with more complicated nomnitive reference sets than (he || she).
> What's the connection between scamming and slavery?
...asked the taxpayer.
Slaves didn't get paid. I'll rephrase that. They were taxed 100%.
How much percent are you taxed? Does that make you a slave? You probably think it doesn't.
But if someone that is taxed 100% is a slave, then if we tax people 99% can we say they're not slaves any longer? What about 98%? What about 39.1%? What's the cutoff?
Indeed it gets to a point where we can't say with a straight face that people are "slaves" because they're getting most of their money back.
The difference between scam and slavery is a matter of degree. If you dial this scam up to 100% it becomes slavery. If you dial it down enough that people believe you're stealing their money for their own good, that's when it's a scam.
You might want to take a couple seconds to think about all the ways that taxation is different from actual slavery, and how clueless and asinine your comments look in light of that.
Taxation doesn't control who you can marry. Taxation doesn't confiscate your children. Taxation doesn't prevent you from practicing your religion. Taxation doesn't require you to take the name of the person who owns you. Taxation doesn't deliberately keep you ignorant and uneducated. Taxation doesn't beat you to death if you try to escape (it is trivially easy to renounce your US citizenship). Taxation doesn't tell you are less than a human because of your national origin. Taxation doesn't make you owned by one person, a thing that can be sold to another person.
I hope your use of adjectives has calmed down your nerves.
> You might want to take a couple seconds to think about all the ways that taxation is different from actual slavery
I've thought and read about this for more than a couple of seconds, but if it makes you feel edgy to make unfounded statements about how much research your interlocutor has put into what he has said, then whatever floats your boat.
> Taxation doesn't control who you can marry.
Tell that to gay people in the US.
> Taxation doesn't confiscate your children.
Tell that to those whose children have been unfairly taken away by CPS (there was a terrifying experience related on HN not long ago).
> Taxation doesn't prevent you from practicing your religion.
Religion is bigotry justified and made immune to criticism via holy books. I'm against them so I don't care about this point.
> Taxation doesn't require you to take the name of the person who owns you.
It does require you to get official papers, documents, and IDs registered with the oppressor, plus a passport and all your fingerprints to go from one tax farm to another.
> Taxation doesn't deliberately keep you ignorant and uneducated.
It sure does with the Prussian education model we use in the US, and you're anecdotal proof of that.
> Taxation doesn't beat you to death if you try to escape (it is trivially easy to renounce your US citizenship)
From Wikipedia:
Renunciation of U.S. citizenship was free until July 2010, at which time a fee of $450 was established.[29] An increase to $2,350, effective September 12, 2014, was justified as "reflective of the true cost" of processing.[30]
So it's only "trivially easy" for those that have $2,350 in the bank which if you look at the statistics for the US isn't that many people.
> Taxation doesn't tell you are less than a human because of your national origin.
Tell that to the Palestinians.
> Taxation doesn't make you owned by one person, a thing that can be sold to another person.
Tell that to the Greeks whose work and life savings are being negotiated to be sold to international banksters as we speak.
Good try though. Try again. This time try doing doing it better.
You have to tell them what your name is. This is not the same as them telling you what your name is.
>education
Taxes pay for that but it's optional.
>Renunciation of U.S. citizenship
If you're poor then you pretty much don't pay taxes anyway.
>Tell that to the Palestinians.
Sorry, let me clear my throat. TAXes, not TANks.
>Tell that to the Greeks
This is a complicated situation, but it's mostly repercussions of government spending without enough taxes to back it up. If anything it shows a way to screw up not taxing.
When you say "not taxes" you're overlooking that it is through paying taxes that you acknowledge that you will abide by your State's laws.
That is why I say that it is taxes that, for instance, disallow a woman to marry another woman. Marriage (through the State) is a tax-discount. People only want to get married for the tax discount. When the State doesn't let gay people marry, it doesn't let them get a tax discount. If there were no taxes, there would be no difference between married and unmarried, and this point would be moot. I understand this is a long-shot argument but I do honestly see it this way - to me marrying without the State is just moving in together and anyone, gay or not, can do that. What gays want is the tax discount that the State is unfairly allocating only to straight couples. Through taxation, therefore, the State can encourage and discourage behavior. So yes, it is taxes that are keeping gay people from getting a tax discount. I hope this is now clear.
Paying taxes for public schooling is not optional. I don't understand why you would say that when you know you're lying. Maybe you mean it's optional to go to a public school? That is irrelevant. It is not optional to pay taxes for public education.
Regarding name, your parent tell the State what your name is, and from this point on it is the State that tells you what your name is according to your parents. You don't get to pick it. You don't tell the State, your parents do. They do because they are forced to. They are forced to because the State wants to collect taxes from the parents' newborn. If the State did not want to collect taxes from people it would not force parents to name their children with the State.
Also a bigger points I should have made earlier: maybe you should look up what slavery is. Because it has nothing to do with controlling who you marry, confiscating children, not allowing to practice religion, requiring one to change one's name, keeping one ignorant and uneducated nor discriminating against place of birth.
Slavery: the state of being a slave.
Slave: a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them.
Are you forced to pay taxes? Yes.
Remember, I never argued taxes = slavery. I argue taxes = scam and if you dial taxes up to 100% that scam becomes slavery. So slavery is the end of the tax scam spectrum.
This is just not the case. Slavery is much worse, because it extends beyond money. For instance, as a slave, your children can be sold away from you. There is a big difference between high tax rates and being outright owned.
You mean how the government can take your children away from you through Child Protection Services?
But that's a detail. Governments do sell our children away quite literally, which is why young people entering the market now pay for health benefits for the elderly - because the State is too incompetent to properly manage the money those elders put in themselves when they were working.
You are saying that governments "literally" sell our children. The reason you give is that young people are paying taxes that support Medicare, i.e., health care for senior citizens?
I think your argument is that these taxes (1.45%, currently) are "literally" the equivalent of slavery?
Thanks for asking for clarification. I did not phrase that well.
I'm arguing that when we (taxpayers in the US) go in debt ($18 trillion + $100 trillion in unfunded liabilities) that means we are borrowing from future generations which will then be forced to pay for something they never voted for.
I see you like numbers. The numbers I point out above are a little scarier than your "1.45%" but nice try.
