Wayne W Walls

I took an Intro to Philosophy class in college and one of the biggest assignments was a final paper. In the paper, we were supposed to follow the philosophical method of argument to answer one of several question prompts. This post is just the paper I submitted. “Is Democratic Government Necessary to Achieve an Ideal Society?” Definitions The terms used in this question have the potential to be quite nebulous. Before I attempt to provide and support an answer to the question, I will present my own definitions and distinctions to ensure that you, the reader, and I, the author, are seeing in our minds the same things as we move through this work. An “ Ideal Society ” is that community of people who can provide for all its members the highest possible standard of living. Absolute economic equality is not necessary to have this ideal society, but it is required that some reasonable or even generous standard be made for what poverty is, and no person can exist below that standard.  ...

I am a fan of the podcast Planet Money . As the title would suggest, the podcast discusses issues related to money and economics . And sometimes they take listener questions and turn the answers into entire episodes. And at the end of the episodes, they ask for listeners to send in their questions. A few years ago I sent them an email with a question I had. They did not reply. A little while later I replied to that email just to basically try to get them to see it and respond. They did not ever reply. But I thought my question was pretty good, so I am posting it here for anyone to read. My Question About Investing It is common good advice that to plan for your future and work towards a happy retirement you should save some portion of your income and invest that money. When you invest your money, the plan is that the money works for you, so that even when you are not working, you are still making money.  If the rate of return of your chosen investments is sufficient, and you are ab...

I bought the CDs for Age of Empires 2: Age of Kings and the expansion Age of Empires 2: Conqueror's Expansion many years ago. I installed them on the desktop PC my family had at the time, and the games installed and worked just fine. No issues. Those games were a couple of my favorites. But life gets busy and I kind of forgot about them. Many years later, I remembered them again, and so installed them on the computer I had at the time. The games still installed and played problem-free. This year, I again remembered I owned these games, and in order to play them again I would need to install them on my current computer. I figured since it went well in the past, it should go well this time. I also thought that as technology advances, computers just naturally get better, so if my very old computer from over 10 years ago could handle playing these games, surely my newish computer should do just fine. I loaded up the discs and clicked "install" on the installation wizard tha...

I love the internet. I love the possibilities the internet offers to allow people to share things with the world. No matter who you are or what you are passionate about, you can put something out there, and other people in the world can find it. That is so extremely exciting to me!  I have heard lots of people (mostly on podcasts ) talk about how there used to be gatekeepers which would control what the public was allowed to see , hear , and read. Lots of people might have interesting, uncommon ideas to share, but the gatekeepers (such as publishing company executives or broadcast television managers) would choose what would be published, and therefore what was available to the public. It wouldn't matter the value or merit of an idea, if the small number of gatekeepers didn't want it out in the world, it would not get out there. But now, thanks to the internet, the gatekeepers have lost much of their power, and anyone can share what they want with the world. Information is now ...