EXCISE — A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by the common judges of property, but wretches hired by those to whom excise is paid.
Samuel Johnson
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No statesman e'er will find it worth his pains
To tax our labours and excise our brains.Charles Churchill
But if we run away, we are still going to be there. Sooner or later, we’ll have the same problem all over again; runaway intelligence augmentation, self-expression, engineered intelligences, whatever. Possibly that’s what happened out past the Böotes void—not a galactic-scale civilization, but a race of pathological cowards fleeing their own exponential transcendence. We carry the seeds of a singularity with us wherever we go, and if we try to excise those seeds, we cease to be human, don’t we?
Charles Stross
The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.Alexander Pope
When I was a young man working 14 hour days, I traded using outrageous and terrifying leverage. I was either very lucky, very smart or very dumb. That’s what terrifies people about commodities. Commodities themselves are no riskier than stocks. A stock on margin has more risk than a commodity fully paid for. It’s all about the degree of leverage.
Jim Rogers
A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now. Like Stallman's arguments for free software, an argument for free culture stumbles on a confusion that is hard to avoid, and even harder to understand. A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don't get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can't get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here. Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control. A free culture, like a free market, is filled with property. It is filled with rules of property and contract that get enforced by the state. But just as a free market is perverted if its property becomes feudal, so too can a free culture be queered by extremism in the property rights that define it. That is what I fear about our culture today. It is against that extremism that this book is written.
Lawrence Lessig
Johnson, Samuel
Johnson, Susan (Australian)
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