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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (109166)	7/31/2003 9:37:35 PM
From: epicure	Respond to of 281500

"...and you will have no recourse except to threaten me with the nuke you bought for $19.99 on Ebay (shipping and gift-wrapping free)." ROFL that's a wonderful, wonderful line thank you

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (109166)	8/1/2003 1:45:33 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<Yes, a world community is forming. It speaks English; it wants sovereignty (first national, then individual); it wants to be rich enough to own a cellphone and recieve dividends from their Qualcomm stock (when are they going to start giving dividends?).> Thanks for asking Jacob. QUALCOMM has been paying dividends for years now. Firstly, they issued Leap Wireless International shares which were a taxable [in New Zealand] dividend according to the people handling my tax affairs and according to the USA tax authorities. This year, they paid the first cash dividend of 5c a share. They are increasing that since they are getting a mountain of cash in the bank. They have also been paying dividends to customers in the form of $$billions in consumer surplus. There are 160 million CDMA subscribers now and at a guess, I'd say there is a $50 per year per subscriber consumer surplus. That's about $5 bn in excess value to subscribers being delivered now, with a rapid growth rate in the number of subscribers. Then, there are the tax dividends to the USA government. That's heading for the $billion a year range very rapidly. With $4 billion per year revenue and current net income of $800m per year, I guess it'll only be two or three years before Uncle Sam is raking in $1billion a year. He already gets that much if tax on salaries are included, not to mention the tax on the spending of QUALCOMM employees and shareholders. Yes, there are very big dividends. Then, there are dividends gained by Samsung and all the other CDMA-based businesses, which run to the umpty $billion now and growing. With 100 million cyberphone chips a year now being sold and those become phones, with a wholesale price of something like $100 minimum, that's another $10bn a year. Then, those phones are used with umpty $billion being paid to service providers each month. Huge dividends!! These are increasingly cyberphones. With hot-stuff encryption, even the creepy Poindexter, with his Total Big Brother Awareness and Terrorism and Middle East Futures Trading, won't be able to control what subscribers do, who they pay or what they are thinking and planning. Especially now that he has been booted as an electoral liability by the Big Brother proponents. The new nation state is going to be cyberspace. Rather than individuals being unable to defend themselves against nation-states, it might be that nation-states are unable to defend themselves against hordes of swarming individuals acting like a diffuse bee swarm. We click our mice and move our money, purchasing and loyalties. Our sting will be felt. I don't think it's utopian or anarchic. It seems to me it's a law of nature, much like our mitochondria and other cells got together for sychronicitous mutual benefit. Just as our antecedents selected DNA from our chimpoid roots [ahem] and any guys dragging their knuckles excessively or with too hairy a back, or too stupid a stare were eliminated in the mating and conflict rituals. The tails were dropped even before we moved on from the chimpoid times. As usual, everyone's wanting to fight the last war. So they get bigger guns and shoot 'em up at the OK Corral. But the real action is looming elsewhere. Sure, some government is needed, but the need is infinitesimal compared with the monstrosities lumbering over the landscape at present. It's far better to run the rules by having ethical behaviour and sound philosophical foundations than an extensive rule book for gaoling the bandits. It's easier to have people who prefer to use ethics as their modus operandi than a pedantic and reluctant following of an absurdly complex and confiscatory rule book. Compared with the government monsters we now confront, I'd say it's not too much of a stretch to call me an anarchist. Though I'd say that's stretching the meaning more than is reasonable. I'm all for government. Heck, I regularly rant that we need a real United Nations. With those amazing CDMA2000 pixelated phragmented photons suffusing the world with fast and cheap cyberspace we'll soon have peace, light, harmony, happiness, health, prosperity, longevity, fun and love busting out everywhere in a fantastic new Enlightenment, Renaissance and Second Coming all rolled into one. Mqurice