Slashdot Mirror

https://www.researchgate.net/p...

Note from effectively ground zero in 1905, horses dropped steeply after peaking in 1915. Cars had replaced 2/3 of them in 10 years, and virtually all of them by 1930. Robots could replace most human workers over a 10 year period, and virtually all in 15 years. Change can happen very quickly.

https://eh.net/encyclopedia/ec...
I agree with your point on tractors. While the decline was relentless, horses held on longer on farms to about 1960 as you indicated. I had read text to the effect that the tractor was responsible for more horse replacements but not the time frame (45 instead of 15 years). Most horses today are pets.

http://www.imh.org/exhibits/on...

And walked uphill both ways? Your estimate is way high: https://eh.net/encyclopedia/ho...

Before the Civil War they said freeing the slaves would ruin the economy

Emphasised that for you.

But yeah, there's little doubt that the value of slaves as assets and production & fears of economic catastrophe were a major factor in the Civil War, though the war itself was an even bigger economic disaster.

The primary byproducts are carbon dioxide and water, neither of which is a poison at the concentrations at which they are currently generated.

CO2 isn't a poison - but CO is, as are SO2, NOx, formaldehyde, benzene, mercury etc, all of which are produced by burning fossil fuels. Of course our economy isn't "based on" these poison gases, but it is based on the burning of fossil fuels, and the resulting toxic byproducts from fossil fuel electricity alone in the US is estimated at "$361.7–886.5 billion annually, representing 2.5–6.0% of the national GDP."

Let the businesses pay them what they are worth.

See, "monopsony"

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/mon...

I'm sure you know about Westinghouse and Edison setting up parallel electricity networks in New York, but it was even more extreme for the telegraph. In 1850 there were 75 telegraph companies, ten of which served New York; in 1866 there was only one. ... The government mostly stepped in *after* these natural monopolies formed, to keep them from abusing their power,

False. Since you specifically mentioned New York, here's an article about how that technology developed. Specifically, it states that "To encourage growth in this new electricity infrastructure, New York, like all of the other states, protected the utilities’ investment by granting them an exclusive right to serve customers." (Emphasis mine.) Believe what you want about the importance of monopoly busting, but the sad truth is that for every common example people give of "natural" monopolies, the government had a hand in why the service in question is a monopoly market.

All domestic utility networks except water and sanitation were originally unregulated competitive markets which condensed into natural monopolies without government help: the value of a network increases dramatically with its size, so the biggest ones swallowed all the smallest ones. I'm sure you know about Westinghouse and Edison setting up parallel electricity networks in New York, but it was even more extreme for the telegraph. In 1850 there were 75 telegraph companies, ten of which served New York; in 1866 there was only one. Railroads are another example of a natural monopoly driven by network scaling.

The government mostly stepped in *after* these natural monopolies formed, to keep them from abusing their power, and its most prominent actions since have been to break them up (Ma Bell) and to prevent new ones from forming (blocking cell phone and cable mergers).

Of course I can't say that government *never* touched these networks as they were aggregating: government has touched everything humans have ever done since there were three of us, one to beat another with a stick and the third to say "stop that."

But you can still get monetary shocks even if you don't depend on fiat currency: read up on the inflationary consequences of the gold rush of 1849 on the (gold-backed) money supply: "Soaring gold output from the California and Australia gold rushes is linked with a thirty percent increase in wholesale prices between 1850 and 1855."

The fucking standard of living is not increasing for both the wealthy and the poor, asshole.

Oh, sure it is.

So you say stop playing politics, but then in the same argument you propose changing the law. Wait, what is the career title of somebody who changes the law? Somebody help me here, I don't recall...

Anyways: No, you're dead wrong on the 100 hours figure. Technology has actually permitted longer working hours than we used to do naturally, both in terms of time of day (artificial lighting) and seasons (most people used to be farmers). The period of the industrial revolution is probably the most we worked, because that is about the time when technology permitted the most work, and simultaneously required the most manual labor for extended periods. Yet during that time, we only worked about 60 hours a week:

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.work.hours.us

Pre-industrial times saw shorter work weeks than now:

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html

In-coincidentally, this is about the same time of the rise of communism. I think that mainly came about because people didn't like working as much as they did for as little as they got, which was unprecedented. Technology remedied that problem; not politicians. Communism only made things worse.

(And yes, I know that isn't a word, I just like the feel of it though.)

History has shown us repeatedly that legislating a reduction in working hours only makes the unemployment problem worse. France is the best recent example of that. People like you assume that the demand for labor is inelastic. You couldn't be more wrong, and history has demonstrated that quite decisively.

The worst that could happen is that the demand for labor goes low enough that people find their own way of acquiring the resources that they want, which would include things like starting smaller businesses. People like you don't realize this and make knee-jerk votes towards politicians who claim to have answers, and that results in situations like the one France is in now.

Here's some additional reading on the topic including reference to some studies examining specific fields (e.g. baseball players with subject to a reserve clause, where the rate may be 100-600%).

How many GM cars are sold in China? What is the number 1 selling car in China, and what does it look like?

The top selling car right now is the Buick Excelle manufactured by GM Daewoo and assembled in China by Shanghai General Motors Company Limited. This is a legitimate arrangement.

This is why you won't see a Chinese manufacturer open a plant in America.

Suntech Opens New U.S. Manufacturing Plant
China offshores manufacturing to the U.S.
Chinese Open First Car Plant in Europe

IP created in China belongs to the people

The United States successfully ignored international copyright and patent claims for over a century; it is hardly surprising that other nations that do not have a developed IP industry would follow the same route: An Economic History of Copyright in Europe and the United States

The U.S. was long a net importer of literary and artistic works, especially from England, which implied that recognition of foreign copyrights would have led to a net deficit in international royalty payments. The Copyright Act recognized this when it specified that "nothing in this act shall be construed to extend to prohibit the importation or vending, reprinting or publishing within the United States, of any map, chart, book or books ... by any person not a citizen of the United States." Thus, the statutes explicitly authorized Americans to take free advantage of the cultural output of other countries. As a result, it was alleged that American publishers "indiscriminately reprinted books by foreign authors without even the pretence of acknowledgement." The tendency to reprint foreign works was encouraged by the existence of tariffs on imported books that ranged as high as 25 percent.

The United States stood out in contrast to countries such as France, where Louis Napoleon's Decree of 1852 prohibited counterfeiting of both foreign and domestic works. Other countries which were affected by American piracy retaliated by refusing to recognize American copyrights. Despite the lobbying of numerous authors and celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic, the American copyright statutes did not allow for copyright protection of foreign works for fully one century. As a result, American publishers and producers freely pirated foreign literature, art, and drama.

If they are so familiar with the topic, then why do they side with crazy so frequently?

This appears to have been a case of luck--not experience--that ended Eolas' current tirade through the industry. It's only a matter of time before they appeal the decision, and before the next stupid patent result coming out of East Texas.

Exactly my thoughts.

This is bound to be an unpopular post, but if Eolas's patent was invalid due to prior art, THAT ALONE should have been the deciding factor.

On the other hand, TBL arguing that the patent, if valid, would be a problem for the web, amounts to further evidence that the patent was unique, inventive, non-obvious, non-trivial, and fully patent worthy. He essentially made an impassioned plea for something akin to Jury Nullification.

  He set the grounds for appeal.

There is nothing in patent law that allows invalidating a patent simply because it has become essential.

A patent may be commandeered by government for national security reasons, as was done by the US Government when the US entered both world wars. The government seized funds and patents held by German firms, completely ignoring the 5th Amendment: (“nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”).

But baring that, simply because a patent has become essential seems insufficient reason to invalidate it.

The first google hit was this site. I didn't read the whole thing, but they used rates of chirrosis to determine alcohol consumption. They do mention statistical irregularities, but failed to note that chirrosis doesn't give an indication of alcohol use, only alcohol abuse.

The fact that cirrhosis was substantially lower on average during Prohibition than before or after might suggest that Prohibition played a substantial role in reducing cirrhosis, but further examination suggests this conclusion is premature. First, there have been substantial fluctuations in cirrhosis outside the Prohibition period, indicating that other factors are important determinants and must be accounted for in analyzing whether Prohibition caused the low level of cirrhosis during Prohibition. Second, there is no obvious jump in cirrhosis upon repeal. This fact does not prove that Prohibition had no effect, since the lags between consumption and cirrhosis mean the effect of increased consumption might not have shown up immediately. Nevertheless, the behavior of cirrhosis after repeal fails to suggest a large effect of Prohibition. Third, cirrhosis began declining from its pre-1920 peak by as early as 1908, and it had already attained its lowest level over the sample in 1920, the year in which constitutional prohibition took effect.

My wikipedia editing days were over years ago when I tried to add new (three year old "new"!) information about cataract surgery after I had my implant -- the one I got was FDA-approved in 2003, a high tech gadget that sits on struts and actually lets you focus, unlike previous IOLs. The day after I added it, it was gone. Added again, gone again. It didn't show up until a couple of years later when I mentioned it in one of the many slashdot artices about editing wikipedia and got a +5, after which someone successfully added it.

So someone else will have to edit, I'm not going to waste my time trying.

Also, let me put an end to you never hearing someone say they would try heroin if it was legal. I wouldn't now, but I suffered from some pretty serious depression when I was in my late teens and early twenties and I may well have done so then. At that time I couldn't see any way for life to ever improve, so rational thought about the consequences wouldn't have kept me from it. The future was going to be awful (or short) anyway, so why not try to get whatever short term comfort is available?

That actually parallells drug abusers, including alcoholics I know. What I don't understand is, if you weren't thinking rationally, how did the law keep you from using it? Simply the luck of it not being available? Since you were a teenager it wouldn't have been any more available since it would still be illegal for minors, and actually could be less available; teenagers tell me it's easier for them to get pot than it is to get beer.

That article on Cocaethylene was interesting, thank you for the education.

That's the other problem. A government can get away with killing its employees one time in sixty, but a private company can't.

*ahem* http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/aldrich.safety.workplace.us

US private railroad fatalities in the late 1800s: 7 in 1000 per year, before the dead hand of state interference throttled the life out of etc etc. I imagine most of those employees weren't on one-time one-year contracts.

I'm sure private space will care a lot more about the safety of its employees.

1933, Ger. 4% /GDP, Eng. 2.5% (approx.), both rising sharply the entire decade.

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/eloranta.military

http://eh.net/files/graphics/encyclopedia/eloantra004.gif

http://eh.net/files/graphics/encyclopedia/eloantra005.gif

1933, Ger. 4% /GDP, Eng. 2.5% (approx.), both rising sharply the entire decade.

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/eloranta.military

http://eh.net/files/graphics/encyclopedia/eloantra004.gif

http://eh.net/files/graphics/encyclopedia/eloantra005.gif

1933, Ger. 4% /GDP, Eng. 2.5% (approx.), both rising sharply the entire decade.

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/eloranta.military

http://eh.net/files/graphics/encyclopedia/eloantra004.gif

http://eh.net/files/graphics/encyclopedia/eloantra005.gif

"No, you completely missed the point. The financial corporations get it before it has been inflated; at full value."

No, they don't.

"By the time the principle and interest on the loan are paid back, the money has been significantly inflated."

It's "principal", not "principle".

"But the original loaner doesn't care much, because they got those dollars for "free", anyway. Somewhat inflated interest is still profit to them. When money is inflated, it isn't a loss, it's just lower profits. "

Sure. But banks would get their interest in any case. So how do they benefit from the inflation?

"But whoever made the purchase with that loan is now looking at goods that are worth significantly less than what they originally paid, and I am not just talking about depreciation, but depreciation PLUS inflation. Their money wasn't "free", in the beginning, as it was to the financiers who get it from the Fed. Every bit of it cost them, all the more as time went on. To the loan-takers, inflation actually represents a monetary loss."

Uhm. WRONG! Goods would cost get more and more 'expensive' (in dollar value), so it's depreciation MINUS inflation. Of course, pure dollar value is irrelevant anyway.

"Which sounds pretty good, except that nothing of the sort occurred. The economy was actually extremely robust (which was one of the things that CAUSED the Revolutionary War in the first place), and it was steadily growing. "

That's simply a lie, there were lots of recessions. Like grinding recession of 1873 and depression of 1893 ( http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whitten.panic.1893 ).
  And 19-th century economic growth was about annualized 0.5%, which now would be called stagnation.

I can only say that your economic knowledge is about on the level with first-grader's knowledge of calculus.

back in 19 century economy moved from agricultural to urban/manufacturing, and mid-19 century was the time when first health insurance (critical illness insurance actually) was created at costs that were extremely competitive. Up to 1965 in US the cost of private health insurance and medical treatments were actually extremely affordable, people were paying for most of it out of pocket.

I left a comment with data long ago on this. To reiterate:

Here is a good primer on this, the article comes to erroneous conclusions about the reasons for low medical and insurance costs (they see the reasons being that state of medical technology was rudimentary, which is nonsense, as it was state of the art for the time and prices were falling, just like prices on all and any electronics constantly drop in current market), but regardless, they can't do anything about the facts, they are as always stubborn.

A 1918 Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of 211 families living in Columbus, Ohio found that only 7.6 of their average annual medical expenditures paid for hospital care (Ohio Report, p. 116). In fact, the chief cost associated with illness was not the cost of medical care, but rather the fact that sick people couldn't work and didn't get paid. A 1919 State of Illinois study reported that lost wages due to sickness were four times larger than the medical expenditures associated with treating the illness (State of Illinois, pp. 15-17). As a result, most people felt they didn't need health insurance. Instead, households purchased "sickness" insurance -- similar to today's "disability" insurance -- to provide income replacement in the event of illness.

... then they had more erroneous conclustions that it was insurance companies unwilling to provide health insurance. This is an erroneous conclusion because they contradict it immediately with this:

popular support for the legislation was low because of the low demand for health insurance in general

- well OBVIOUSLY if there is no demand, nobody would be providing the product. It makes perfect sense, but the authors miss it due to their preconcieved notions and ideology. But they have good data.

According to one CCMC study, the average American family had medical expenses totaling $108 in 1929, with hospital expenditures comprising 14 percent of the total bill (Falk, Rorem, and Ring 1933, p. 89). In 1929, medical charges for urban families with incomes between $2,000 and $3,000 per year averaged $67 if there were no hospitalizations, but averaged $261 if there were any illnesses that required hospitalization (see Falk, Rorem, and Ring). By 1934, Michael M. Davis, a leading advocate of reform, noted that hospital costs had risen to nearly 40 percent of a family's medical bill (Davis 1934, p. 211). By the end of the 1920s, families began to demand greater amounts of medical care, and the costs of medical care began to increase.

So they understand that costs increase due to more demand, as health care is a normal good, it's not magical in any way. As the incomes of people grew, so did demand for health care. Of-course they fail to understand that incomes grew due to government inflation, more than anything else.

As the demand for hospital care increased in the 1920s, a new payment innovation developed at the end of the decade that would revolutionize the market for health insurance. The precursor to Blue Cross was founded in 1929 by a group of Dallas teachers who contracted with Baylor University Hospital to provide 21 days of hospitalization for a fixed $6.00 payment. The Baylor plan developed as a way to ensure that people paid their bills.

- $6/year insurance for 21 days in hospital. Done privately.

THEN the DISASTER struck:

The AHA

And because of that we can achieve what a man 100 years ago could only dream of.

A small proportion of us can achieve it. And much of what we can achieve does not reduce the suffering of man.

We work fewer hours than the average man 100 years back could imagine.

No, we don't. The organised labour movement which actually reduced working hours is older than you seem to think. Pay attention. Just before WW1, people were working around 50 hours per week, depending on area of employment. Now I don't know a soul today who works less than 40-45 hours a week. Add to that the fact that ongoing education is effectively compulsory to get and maintain any sort of steady job today, whereas back then it was a luxury for the privileged few, and you'll find that we're spending more hours per week toward the practice of wage slavery than one hundred years.

Women are no longer slaves of the household thanks to devices that shave hours off of household tasks.

Obvious sexist thinking. Women are no longer "slaves of the household" because war killed lots of men, not because they no longer had to wash the dishes. Compare improved worker conditions following the Black Death.

Our standard of health would make a person from the early 1900s weep in joy, especially if they have a toothache.

It's true that universal healthcare services have provided analgesics to more people. The progress of adult medicine is consistently overrated, though - life expectancy improvements have mostly been about reducing infant mortality.

We live in much greater comfort

Define "comfort".

and can travel around.

So what?

The mentally ill aren't locked in dark asylums

Well, not always. Today we have "care in the community", a euphemism for making them walk the streets until they commit some crime and can be locked up. I know it's difficult for people who have swallowed the fallacy of the rational human mind to believe it, but some people are a danger to themselves or others and need residential care, sometimes involuntarily.

But thanks to privatisation of certain residential care facilities, we witness precisely the abuse of a hundred years ago.

and the poor can even get government funding (rather than the historical option of starving to death or begging a rich person for help).

Sometimes. Laws since the 1980s across the Western world have severely restricted support for the poor.

The average person can learn more than they could ever before

If they have the time, and are not distracted.

practical access to education is less restricted than ever before.

What is "access to education"? Do you mean availability of books? It's far harder to get a good university education in the UK than, say, 30 years ago, when university access was granted on merit rather than requiring loans etc.

If capitalism were a success, we'd all be working fewer hours and adults would be living significantly longer. We are not and they are not.

Downward path of working hours in US history (2 pages down)
[PDF warning]Upward path of life expectancy in US history (page 11)

inb4 more excuses

The fatal flaw to your arguments in the other thread is that medical care was mostly cheap in 1920 because there wasn't a hell of a lot they could do. It was effectively all elective. Your chances were nearly as good if you stayed at home with traditional remedies.

- wrong. Doctors in many places, including the one in the link, have improved the outcomes for patients significantly over the 19th century by using scientific approach. The innovations came in various forms, from sharing medical cases data to find better treatments, to using ethers, cocaine and other opioids for anesthesia, to understanding what role simple procedures, such as washing hands and sterilization of instruments have on medical outcomes.

The very story we are in here, is displaying the fatal flaw in YOUR reasoning, which is unaffected it seems by the data, that is showing that competition leads to lowering of prices quickly, regardless of the complexity of the matter.

How much did microprocessors cost during their first inception? How much are they today? What's the difference between them? It is competition that allowed people to progress so quickly in all aspects of creating microprocessors, and those are probably some of the most complex technologies people are involved in.

Yours is based on a theoretical free market that has never been seen in the wild.

- wrong.

A 1918 Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of 211 families living in Columbus, Ohio found that only 7.6 of their average annual medical expenditures paid for hospital care (Ohio Report, p. 116). In fact, the chief cost associated with illness was not the cost of medical care, but rather the fact that sick people couldn't work and didn't get paid. A 1919 State of Illinois study reported that lost wages due to sickness were four times larger than the medical expenditures associated with treating the illness (State of Illinois, pp. 15-17). As a result, most people felt they didn't need health insurance. Instead, households purchased "sickness" insurance -- similar to today's "disability" insurance -- to provide income replacement in the event of illness.

... then they had more erroneous conclustions that it was insurance companies unwilling to provide health insurance. This is an erroneous conclusion because they contradict it immediately with this:

popular support for the legislation was low because of the low demand for health insurance in general

- well OBVIOUSLY if there is no demand, nobody would be providing the product. It makes perfect sense, but the authors miss it due to their preconcieved notions and ideology. But they have good data.

According to one CCMC study, the average American family had medical expenses totaling $108 in 1929, with hospital expenditures comprising 14 percent of the total bill (Falk, Rorem, and Ring 1933, p. 89). In 1929, medical charges for urban families with incomes between $2,000 and $3,000 per year averaged $67 if there were no hospitalizations, but averaged $261 if there were any illnesses that required hospitalization (see Falk, Rorem, and Ring). By 1934, Michael M. Davis, a leading advocate of reform, noted that hospital costs had risen to nearly 40 percent of a family's medical bill (Davis 1934, p. 211). By the end of the 1920s, families began to demand greater amounts of medical care, and the costs of medical care began to increase.

So they understand that costs increase due to more demand, as health care is a normal good, it's not magical in any way. As the incomes of people grew, so did demand for health care. Of-course they fail to understand that incomes grew due to government inflation, more than anything

Unsurprisingly, unencumbered by restrictive laws, it grew fast in the intellectual works arena, at which point people (the ones who'd made a profit this way) wanted to keep things as they were, and so lobbied for ever more restrictive legislation to ensure nobody could get a slice of their pie

The US remained predominately rural and agricultural until 1860.

That is 250 years out from the Jamestown Settlement.

In 1790 the U.S. produced 3,000 bales of cotton.

In 1860, 3.8 million.

In 1860 six manufactuers controlled 50% of the total cotton gin market.

The cotton gin had become big business, a factory made, not craftsman product.

In 1820, Eli Whitney's patents, newly minted and with the industrial tech needed to back them up would have been a license to print money. Cotton Gin

The American railroad was financed in London.

The American railroad could be a marvel of improvisation. But the Amercan railroad was notoriously slow in adopting new tech.

THE GREAT RAIL WRECK AT REVERE, "ST. GEORGE" WESTINGHOUSE

The by then wholly constipated and inadequate American railroad system was nationalized in World War One - an $18 billion dollar industry re-organized and modernized by government fiat. USRA Light Mikado

Not everyone regarded trafficking in patent rights with equanimity. The scientist Joseph Henry, for example, refused as a matter of principle to patent any of his inventions, proclaiming that they had been "freely given" to the world, and sought, instead of pecuniary reward, the pleasure of discovering new truths, the satisfaction of advancing science, and the enjoyment of the "scientific reputation" to which his discoveries entitled him.

In contrast, the telegraph business evolved through patents, of which the most important were the patents that Morse had obtained in 1840 (the use of electricity to transmit signals over long distances) and 1846 (an electromagnetic relay).

Beginning in 1836, the patent office began once again to examine each filing to determine not only whether the submission had merit but also whether it infringed on any other patent already issued--thus establishing a filter between the inventor and the legal system and enhancing the value of applications that made it through the mesh by defining the rights of the patent holder. Once certification was required, patent rights became tradable assets that, like land assets or government securities, could be bought or sold. To capitalize on their value, promoters bundled together patents for related inventions into cartels known as "pools." The leading telegraph patents were pooled in 1859; telephone patents were pooled in 1879; radio patents in 1919.

No other government in the world had imposed a comparable requirement up to this time, imparting to Morse's patents a moral authority that set them apart not only from the patents issued to Americans before 1836, but also from those issued by Great Britain and France. The transformation of the U.S. Patent Office reinforced the seductive yet still controversial notion that self-interest could spur the technical advances that would foster moral progress. This syllogism received a classic formulation in 1859 when, in a popular lecture on "discoveries and inventions," the Illinois lawyer, patent holder, and politician Abraham Lincoln praised the country's patent laws for ensuring that the "fuel of interest" would stoke the "fire of genius."

The significance of Morse's invention was not only practical but also symbolic. Morse had been born and educated in the United States, a country not then known for scientific attainment, especially in a highly technical field such

In 1960 they weren't getting paid extraordinary sums. Well, but no extraordinary. In 2002 dollars, it would be equivalent to $100,000 a year on average, with a team franchise value of a bit under $34 million, again, in 2002 adjusted dollars.

In 2001, the average was over $2 million, and the average franchise value was about $289 million.

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/haupert.mlb

>>No, even back then 19 kids was not normal. More like 6-12 at the most.

I've got a family tree from the 1800s framed up in my guest room. Yeah, 6-12 was the average, but some had more. The average woman had 5 to 7 kids in the 1800s. A family of 19 wouldn't have been called "disgusting" - as the GGP did - back in the day.

>>Even so, back then, half the kids died before they reached 1 year of age.

A 50% infant mortality rate? I don't think so.

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/haines.demography

really? I certainly don't work the same then any person in the world did 100 years ago.
I also have more time.

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.work.hours.us

http://www4.hrsdc.gc.ca/.3ndic.1t.4r@-eng.jsp?iid=19

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/thomasson.insurance.health.us the question isnt healthcare do this or that, question is, does it come from the federal gov't? yes, than we dont need it. its a simple study in liberty, gov't kills liberty.

anyone remember back when a movie could be 2 or 3 hours long and didn't require explosions every few seconds to keep an audience interested

In actuality, movies have been gradually increasing in average length since the inception of the motion picture industry. The earliest films were really short -- The Great Train Robbery, released in 1903, was 12 minutes long. In this decade, 90 minutes is considered a bit on the short side, and anything under 90 minutes (many animated films fall into this category) is "really friggin' short, suitable for children and anyone else with a short attention span."

I had at least one film history site blocked at work, but I found a couple other pages that have interesting stats. This page shows the trend line for film length -- the graph is given in meters of film, which correlates linearly with run time (duration). This page gives a bar graph of run time broken down by decade, although this WikiAnswers article does critique the methodology used by the author of that study (e.g., the choice of the top 50 rated films in those decades, which may skew results).

Precious few movies approached the 3-hour mark "back in the day" -- I think Gandhi, released in 1984, is the only one I can remember seeing as a child, and it was a rare experience for me in that it was the first time I remember going to a movie that had an intermission. A more recent example would be Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Hamlet.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, people tend to remember the past selectively, and usually with rose-tinted glasses.

It's true that your typical summer blockbuster relies more heavily on shock value and SFX/VFX to keep the audience's attention, but I would argue that the vast majority of dramas that we see today easily exceed 2 hours yet don't rely on explosions and other VFX to carry the audience; just off the top of my head, I can think of We Own the Night and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

So... I see hope for the future, not despair. :-)

but they're also going to get used the idea of screwing players over without any real negative feedback?

This, I fear, is going to bite Sony in the ass in the long-term, but they are going to flirt with this model anyway because it frankly goes with the kind of corporate culture they've developed. It's a bit like having the much-storied "arrogance" of Apple, without as much good taste or sense. (Not trying to start a flame war, considering how much Apple hardware I own, but the perception is out there, and not entirely unjustified.) The control freaks in Sony like the idea of being able to make unilateral changes to their products without getting beaten up by whiners, and as long as revenues don't take a hit, they're likely to win the day. That entire model is predicated upon gamers either (a) not noticing, or (b) not caring that the game is being nerfed or otherwise mangled in an undesirable way. As soon as Sony crosses some threshold where someone in the gaming community notices and gets vocal about it, social network effects take hold and even people not directly affected by the changes will complain or quit playing.

If an established company keeps starting MMOs that are designed like this, the MMOs will start to appear to be nothing more than get-rich-quick schemes. But since these lite MMOs are mainly designed to tweak the reward circuits of the brains of the players, there will always be a small core of players who will play such games; these are the same kinds of people who'd play slot machines in Vegas. So this is a lot like gambling, without the requirement that sometimes the house has to pay out. The money is real, but the rewar

Ok, jerk. I said it was as single link out of many, here is some more reading for your hand-waving ass.

7th paragraph
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/troy/4399/

5th paragraph
http://www.123helpme.com/view.asp?id=23254

1st paragraph
http://cocktails.about.com/od/history/a/prohibition_3.htm

4th paragraph
http://www.jstor.org/pss/2006862

7th paragraph (along with a chart)
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/miron.prohibition.alcohol

I can do this all day. There is that much proof that you are incorrect. If you would like to continue to look like an absolute fool, feel free.

While I agree that anything that appears socialist is automatically deemed bad by a significant portion of our population..

I just wanted to point out that we actually have a decent chunk of what you said on the list - and have for a while.
1) Minimum wage has been planned to make an increase for at least the last year, if not two or more. Personally I do not agree with it but whatever, off topic.
2) Unemployment benefits are out there, and they are nowhere near what your job was - but they are there. If things get really bad there's welfare.
3) Unions are popular, just depends on the industry and the area. IT isn't one of those - but things like elevator repair are.
4) Public Health - while there is currently no such thing as a Public healthcare system like Canada and Europe have, You won't be denied treatment because you can't pay for it. You might, however, have to quit your job if you don't make enough or the employment benefits are woefully inadequate ...
5) There are plenty of grants and loans out there that most people qualify for. I don't think financing an education is really a problem.

By way of comparison with Australia, where I live:

1. As I understand minimum wage in the US, it is woefully inadequate and not generally enough for a single person to live on working a single full time job. This completely defeats the purpose of the thing. In Australia, with a few notable exceptions, minimum wage is at least sufficient to pay rent and food. Low income earners also pay virtually no tax.

2. We receive unemployment benefits for as long as we are looking for work. They are not exactly a huge amount, but are sufficient for people to live on frugally.

3. In the 1990s the US had around half the rate of unionisation of the rest of the industrialised world (see table 7 here).

4. In Australia, if you don't have private health cover you will receive free, unlimited public health. It is slower and can be of a lower standard, but on the whole it is readily accessible and reasonably efficient. Only about 50% of Australians have private health, and those who do not are by no means exclusively poorer or less well educated - many choose not to have it on principle.

5. Our Federal Government provides public loans to any Australian citizen who qualifies on academic merit for a university course. Free K12 schooling is universally available at the state level. There are also extensive trade-based tertiary education courses funded by the government.

It's not just that. Money has three purposes: a medium of exchange, the obvious one, but also a unit of account and a store of value. With a fiat currency, if the government is reasonably responsible with it (insert cynical snickering here) then you can have a fairly stable store of value: decaying by 2-6% a year due to inflation, maybe, but that's reasonably predictable.

If you tie your money supply to something like a commodity, you tie it to the volatility in that commodity. Here's a random site with a graph of the real price of gold for 1975-2007. Do you really want to tie your currency to that? Even if you assume that some of that volatility would be limited because of gold taking a more central role in the economy, it's still ridiculous. Even if you won't have another big gold rush to shock your economy, there are probably better ideas....

(Think that's bad? Some people who think our currency should be tied to oil.)

I had always given Microsoft the benefit of the doubt. That they weren't really all that bad, just unusually incompetent and maybe a bit greedy with a touch of power-hungry. Now I'm fully convinced that there is some kind of rotten fucking evil permeating that organization.

I went through this transition, now comes the powerlessness associated with knowing there is little you can do stop them, none of your friends will even understand this - of course, where you can you try to fight the man, the man will eventually bludgeon you into submission.

The sad reality is that the market will slowly be corralled into accepting Vista and all the requisite DRM baggage that it carries. The key here is that the frog is heated very slowly in the pot and the market will accept, like sheep, what is fed to them. Of course the ardent Microsoft supporters will say Vista ain't so bad, and sure their products are nice to work with, but they are also a nightmare of interoperability when you try and work with anything else.

I don't want to encourage purchase of their products because when you dig deeper into the behavior of Microsoft the 'evil' conclusion is consistently reinforced. A corporation has the same legal rights as an individual in society it begs the question "What sort of individual is Microsoft", I found this and made the comparison.

HOW TO SPOT A PSYCHOPATH - 5 WAYS TO AVOID HIRING PSYCHOPATHS COPYRIGHT 2008 MICHAEL MERCER, PH.D.

1. Pre-Employment Tests - especially certain test scores

From my research on pre-employment tests, there are specific test scores that may indicate a job applicant is a psychopath. Specifically, psychopaths may get low or high scores on certain measures/scales in pre-employment tests:

* low scores on two measures - (a) Truthfulness and (b) Following Rules

Check , Check

* high scores on two measures - (a) Aggressiveness and (b) Power Motivation

Check, Check

Lesson: Be cautious with job applicants who get such scores on pre-employment tests.

2. Job Interviews

If you suspect a job applicant may be a psychopath, then you can ask questions to elicit answers revealing if the applicant threatens or intimidates people. Reason: Psychopaths get a huge thrill from intimidating through (a) real or implied threats, (b) verbal hostility, and (c) manipulation.

threats, hostility, manipulation, manipulation, manipulation.

3. Reference Checks

Call the job applicant's ex-bosses at home, and ask for a "personal reference." Obtain specific examples of how the applicant "handled difficulties and friction with other employees." Listen for warning signs of threats, intimidation, anger, or ridicule.

intimidation, anger,

they are *extremely* similar, but from my pespective, insolvency can be a simple cashflow problem. Intestingly, that's the exact tack the Fed has chosen - rather than see it as a bankruptcy, it's just a cash problem. So, what the Fed is doing is basically buying all the bad debt. They don't want to SAY that, but essentially, that's what is happening. They're dumping $200 billion in Treasury securities to keep the banks liquid and able to meet their payments. The deficit is caused by the bad debts the banks had the stupidity to loan. So, that's why even though the non-borrowed assets of the country's entire banking system has collapsed to around -$90 billion, the banks are still afloat.

Basically, by seeing insolvency as a cashflow problem, rather than a bankruptcy problem, they're keeping the Titanic afloat. It's kind of like there's a huge leak, so make the boat bigger to counter-balance the loss of bouyancy, so it sinks more evenly...

And that's EXACTLY what you see happening. Rather than a crash, a la 1893, it is drifting into an inflationary heat death, a la the 1970s.

The problem is, this is to b expected, basically, forever, until we replace our economic engine with one based on extraction of resources to one of sustainability. Sustainability has some use for space exploration, specifically in terms of data satellites. But has Zero Use for putting people up there.

RS

Nope. The data I got was from these two sources:
http://eh.net/hmit/gdp/

You used the nominal GDP rate and not the real GDP rate - that is bad economic analysis. If you analyze the numbers again using the real GDP, you'll find the average annual growth rate from 1790 to 1912 was 4.21%, while from the period 1913 to 2006, the rate was 3.48%. The numbers are questionable for several reasons, most notably is the extensive presence of barter during the former period and related imprecision of estimates. Another simple measure of GDP growth should be the level of capital investment. As I said, an entire vast country was created during the former period, while the latter period has produced comparatively little that is lasting.

Perfect. You have constructed another argument where the facts don't matter. How about instead of blindly labeling any contrarian data as "bullshit", suggest some alternate means of measuring the economy, or better yet, explain exactly what aspect of the GDP measurements you find inaccurate.

That wasn't an argument, it was a statement. I don't have time to qualify every statement. But I'll give it a shot because you seem like a smart fellow and at least tried to back up your statements. Cheers to that. I'm an aesthete at heart and don't believe it is possible nor desirable to measure the success or failure of civilization in the materialistic terms of an bean counter. That alone should reason enough to dismiss any GDP measurements in relation to this discussion, but if we are to play your numbers game, I refer you to the wikipedia article which is amazingly a good place to start.

A simple modern-day correlation would be the value of the DOW. Many people believe the stock market has recovered from the 2001 crash. In nominal terms it has, but in real terms - even using the government's dubious inflation statistics - it has still has a good 1,000 points to go before that happens. Another absolutely pressing matter is debt and tax load. What percentage of the per capita GDP in 1890 was sucked up by the banksters and their government minions? What about today? In 1890, Americans probably spent less than 10% of their income on taxes and/or interest. Today, it is more like 50%. This necessarily has to factor into this analysis somehow, but check out the wikipedia article for more.

Where on earth did you get that idea? Even that propaganda video that you are pimping every chance you get talks about some periods of heavy unemployment in the 1800s that led to civil unrest. You know- when those evil illuminati were executing their nefarious plans for world domination.

Sheesh, even the Haymarket Riot (May Day to commies) wasn't about unemployment. Unemployment wasn't a problem because anyone could at the very least become a homesteader on the frontier. I will admit that unemployment is more of a problem today because there is nowhere for surplus population to go. In the 19th century, people were concerned with poor people living in cramped tenements that rent for $2K a month today. They weren't concerned with hordes of people without any means to take care of themselves. I think we're talking about a different video, by the way. I really don't know much about the Illuminati, and that video doesn't discuss it.

That said, take a look at this graph comparing GDP growth and inflation rates from 1790-1913. The correlation between deflation and economic contractions is almost perfect. To claim that the economy thrived when the currency deflated is misleading, to say the least.

If the GDP decreases by 25% but the prices of goods drops 50%, a rational person would call that a period of prosperity. Use the real GDP rate.

Its been a while since I watched the video. I remember such sound arguments as:

Do you just pull facts out of your ass and hope no one will notice?

Lot's of people don't hold much faith in the GDP measurements. In terms of actual industrial and agricultural output, those numbers are bullshit.

Also, there was virtually no unemployment in the United States in the 19th century. More bullshit.

And this of course, is the most comical piece of bullshit in your post. You can find the exact opposite information regarding the value of money in the government's own publications! Read Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970. Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census; U.S. G.P.O., 1975. I even found a nice online calculator for you to show how prices declined by 50% during the 19th century.

I'd love to know what "conclusion" was reached that is not supported by fact.

• The Rothschilds were the richest and most powerful family in the world during the 19th century, and we have "no evidence" that this has changed, so they are still the richest and most powerful family in the world.
  
• The evil bankers did not like President Lincoln's plans for the national currency, so John Wilkes Booth was obviously a mercenary hired by them to assassinate the President.

Despite the increase in productivity (1000%?) since the 1930's- for some reason it always requires that we work at least 40 hours a week to make enough to live. We have less free time than they did in the 30's.

Do you have numbers to back this up?
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.work.ho urs.us

Studies have pegged our leisure time available during the day as having gone from 1.8 hours in 1850 to 5.8 hours in 1995. Not only that, but the modern world has given us an enormous amount of variety in the things we can do during our leisure time. Books, televison, the internet, incredible hobby specialization, etc. And this doesn't even speak to the quality of work we do: percentages of hard labor (heavy muscle use) jobs have gone down, and less than 1% of the US population are farmers. We may have to work the same 8 hours as before, but what we end up doing is much more cerebral than physical. Ask anyone who busts their back for 8 hours doing manual labor. Office work is much more desirable.

And think about this, speaking of colonial work ethic:

In Virginia, authorities also transplanted the Statue of Artificers, which obliged all Englishmen (except the gentry) to engage in productive activity from sunrise to sunset. Likewise, a 1670 Massachusetts law demanded a minimum ten-hour workday

We've got it good, and it turns out, there's actually no giant corporate conspiracy to keep us in bondage! Fancy that.

The US is a nation of immigrants, and it's insanely hypocritical to keep the immigration caps as low as they are, especially with the costs of domestic labor skyrocketing through the roof.

it's pretty clear that there are a TON of people who WANT to be part of our society. Denying them that right is nothing short of inhumane.

Considering that most illegals are already able to find employment that pays enough for them to subsist, it's not exactly like the US is going to turn into a refugee camp

The current immigration restrictions are more likely than not a result of this sort of person.

Those GDP figures do not take into account inflation. In 2003 pounds, the 1975 GDP was 577,489 million pounds and the 1990 GDP was 814,956 million pounds. That's an annual increase of approximately 2.3%. Or 2.2% if you look at per capita GDP growth.

According to http://eh.net/hmit/exchangerates/pound.php, the last time you could buy more than two dollars for a pound was 1975. Maybe try waiting until the viagra has worn out before spouting off drivel.

Actually, the person you're replying to is correct. Try daily exchange rates rather than yearly averages.

The dollar traded for more than two pounds for a few days in September 1992.

This was a very famous economic event. I'm disappointed that you don't know about it, and chose to insult and harangue instead.

What we have to realize is that there is no one model of global warming. Rather there are dozens of teams of climatologists, physicists, physical oceanographers, and atmospheric scientists working on their own versions of Global Climate Models (GCM), Thermospheric/Ionospheric... Global Coupling Models (TIGCMs for all you space weather types out there), etc... All of the ones I am aware of show that Global Warming will be an issue in the next 50 to 100 years in that sea level will rise, climate zones will shift, and possibly, the ocean conveyer (thermohaline circulation) will be affected. Temperature anomalies from model to model differ as indicated here. And this is one of the inputs into other aspects of the models such as "how much ice from Greenland do we think will melt". Scientists are at great pains to only include known data into their models and as such, most models tend to be conservative. In fact most of these models are being tweaked and modified on a daily or weekly basis as new information becomes available. As an example of this, see this on how methane emissions may have been seriously mis-estimated both in source and amount.

Complaining about the lack of accuracy in these models is like complaining about the fact that modern weather forecasting can't tell you exactly what hour a storm that is two weeks off will hit, and how much rain will fall. Weather forecasting is exponentially better than it was 30 years ago and has saved the lives of seamen, mountaineers, and others. (In fact much of the goal of weather forecasting was specifically to save lives.). These models will continue to improve as we learn more, and if we actually act on their predictions, we can stand to benefit.

"Where do people get this stuff?

Oh, you know, no where in particular. It's not like Milton Friedman won a nobel prize for it or anything. It's not like that's how they teach Economic History at, say, MIT and the University of Chicago. It's not like your own response refuting this also advances the same claim:

"It is interesting to note that during the Depression real wage rates generally increased due to the fact that prices of goods fell more quickly than monetary wages; this seems to be a general trend for deflationary economies. The widespread unemployment of the era was due to attempts by the government and government-supported unions to prohibit any decrease in monetary wage-rages. It should be obvious that if real wage rates (the price of labor) are increasing due to fixed monetary wages and falling prices the result will be a decrease in the demand for labor, and thus unemployment. If the real wage rates had remained at market levels (with roughly the same "purchasing power" as before the Depression) unemployment would not have been nearly so much of an issue; it would have been limited to "frictional" unemployment as people transitioned from the industries swollen by the inflationary malinvestments of the boom period into more productive lines of work."

Or, in other words, the massive deflation, in conjunction with price controls that would not allow prices (most particularly wages) to adjust to the new conditions they had created, stopped us from pulling out of a recession and instead sunk into a depression. It's interesting that half of your entire text following your thesis "Neither deflation nor the gold standard caused the Great Depression" is about how deflation contributed to The Depression.

This is just the summary; for the full analysis of the events leading up to and contributing to the Great Depression see A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz. America's Great Depression by Murray N. Rothbard is pretty thoroughly discredited by modern economists. I understand why you feel the way you do believing in that book, because like Ron Paul, it advocates a gold standard. Note that, in my post, I didn't say that the gold standard caused the depression, I said deflation caused it, which, together with price controls, is the predominant view among today's economists, be they Monetarists, Keynsenians, Neo-keynsians, or even Austrian School (Rothbard excepted.) And there's no doubt, looking at the price of gold, that we would have suffered severe deflation over the past five years if we'd been on a gold standard, as over the past five years, US dollar monetary inflation has been about 1%, while the relative value of gold with respect to the dollar has increased 50%.

Still, I it's surprising that you imagine where people get looney ideas about deflation and the gold standard being involved with the depression even when they read discredit books like Rothbard's, which says on pages 14-15:

"The depression phase begins with the end of inflation, and can proceed without any further changes from the side of money. Deflation has almost always set in, however. In the first place, the inflation took place as an expansion of bank credit; now, the financial difficulties and bankruptcies among borrowers cause banks to pull in their horns and contract credit. Under the gold standard, banks have another reason for contracting credit--if they had ended inflation because of a gold drain to foreign countries. The threat of this drain forces them to contract their outstanding loans. Furthermore the rash of business failures may cause questions to be raised about the banks; and banks, being inherently bankrupt anyway, can ill afford such questions.11 Hence, the money supply will contract because of actual bank runs, and because banks will tighten their position in fear of such runs." This

I wasn't able to easily find historical US GNP data on the web, but here is a table of historical GDP values for the United States, which is closely related to GNP. In inflation adjusted 2002 dollars, our GDP in 2005 was just over 11 trillion. In 1984, it was 5.8 trillion dollars, or roughly half of our GDP in 2005. Similary, in 1962 it was 2.7 trillion, roughly a quarter of our GDP in 2005. These figures are all in 2002 dollars and account for inflationary differences. In 1940, it was only about a trillion 2002 dollars, or a tenth of our output in 2005. In 1915, around 500 billion, or a twentieth. You get the idea. Someone made a nice graph from this data for Wikipedia.

Your response sounded skeptical. The parent obviously looked at the data while he authored his post. Of course, all of this could very well be misleading. The GDP is the best measure of economic performance we have, but it has a number of known flaws. It also fails to take economic shock into account -- but what the parent says is true on the face of it: if some catastrophe halved our economic output, we would be reduced to 1984 levels. Many of us lived through 1984. It wasn't bad.

So what's the problem with this logic? Let's look at the data. In 1929, the US's GDP was 865 billion dollars. In 1933, at the height of the great depression, it had fallen to 635 billion (you can see the blip on the Wikipedia graph linked above.) During the great depression, roughly 1 in 4 Americans was unemployed, people were starving and life is generally held to have been the hardest it has ever been in this country. And yet, in 1922 the GDP was 628 billion, even lower than the GDP of 1933 -- does this mean that in 1922, 1 in 4 people were unemployed, people were starving, and that quality of life was the same as in 1933? Of course not.

Between 1929 and 1933, in just 4 years, the GDP of the United States fell 26.6 percent and we barely recovered. Had it not been for the massive government spending required by World War II, who knows how we would have fared. Now just imagine for a moment that some catastrophe happened and the GDP of the United States fell 50% overnight to 1984 levels. Could we expect the same quality of life as 1984? No more than people in 1933 experienced the same quality of life as they had in 1922. And we're looking at a proportional decrease far greater and in far shorter a time than the 1929 to 1933 decrease.

I thought the grandparent's figures were interesting, but I have to say, I'm also a bit skeptical about how meaningful they are.

Actually, it was even worse than that....

The earliest radios (like the one on the Titanic) were "spark" radios... they did not use an AM carrier to send the morse code - they merely arced an RF signal over a gap in the transmitter...

http://titanic.marconigraph.com/mgy_wireless.html

The radio service was done by employees of the Marconi Company. In an ironic twist, Marconi was not able to operate his service on land in Europe, as it was fought by government owned postal services which controlled message delivery (not that governments would look inside the envelopes or log who got messages from what sender or anything like that - it is GW Bush who invented spying, you know)...

Having said that, I don't think there is any information to back up the original claim. The Marconi invention had a range of about 250 miles under normal conditions... the sets were operated by Marconi employees, so I think it very unlikely there was "interference" - the problem was more likely that their were not very many receivers capable of picking up the signals and doing anything about it.

Here is one interpretation of how the laws came into effect:
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/scott.radio.ind ustry.history

Government regulation of radio began in 1904 when President Theodore Roosevelt organized the Interdepartmental Board of Wireless Telegraphy. In 1910 the Wireless Ship Act was passed. That radio was to be a regulated industry was decided in 1912, when Congress passed a Radio Act that required people to obtain a license from the government in order to operate a radio transmitter. In 1924, Herbert Hoover, who was secretary of the Commerce Department, said that the radio industry was probably the only industry in the nation that was unanimously in favor of having itself regulated. Presumably, this was due both to the industry's desire to put a stop to stations interfering with each others' broadcasts and to limit the number of stations to a small enough number to lock in a profit. The Radio Act of 1927 solved the problem of broadcasting stations using the same frequency and the more powerful ones drowning out less powerful ones. This Act also established that radio waves are public property; therefore, radio stations must be licensed by the government. It was decided, however, not to charge stations for the use of this property.

First, 'double-didgit' inflation was initiated under Nixon, partially to pay for Vietnam, but mostly a result of Nixon's choice to make the dollar fiat, as opposed to redeemable for gold. Inflation stayed in double-digits under Ford, whose idea to beat inflation consisted of wearing buttons with "Whip Inflation Now" printed on them. Inflation was tamed under Carter thanks to Volker jacking up the interest rate. An unpopular solution, but sometimes its necessary to take the punch bowl away. Reagan took the credit, and dumped Volker for Greenspan when he had the chance to restart the 'play now pay later' budget monkeyshines.

Ah, revisionist history at it's finest. I highly recommend that you look up what inflation rates really were during the 1970's. They spiked in 1974 at 11.1%, but had dropped over 50% by the time Carter was elected, only to spike back up into the double digits for the remainder of his presidency. Carter's disastrous appointment of William Miller to the FED made a bad situation much worse, and his "solution" to that problem was to fire his Treasury Secretary and appoint Miller in his stead. He was then basically forced to appoint Volcker, but he kept a very tight reign on the FED's interest rate policies. It wasn't until the results of the 1980 election were apparent that Volcker's hand was freed, and he then worked with Reagan to orchestrate a recession in 1981 and 1982 to eliminate the stagnation and spark growth.

Speaking of Greenspan, its funny how Carter gets pegged as raising taxes when payroll 'deductions' were doubled by Reagan under Greenspan's insistence that the additional money would make SS fiscally sound. Reagan ended up wasting the additional money for the Star Wars boondoggle.

It's true that Carter didn't actually raise taxes very much. Thanks to rate creep, the nationwide tax burden was already at near historic levels. Reagan pushed through one of the largest tax cuts in history, and the Democratic legislature only managed to chip away or delay the phasing in of those tax cuts. The 1983 Social Security "solution" was the only significant tax increase during the Reagan years, but the cut in income taxes more than offset this increase.

Another thing Reagan gets credit for is strengthening the US military. It was infact Carter who brought back the use of Special Forces after the cuts in the programs under Ford led to the failed Desert Eagle mission.

You have GOT to be kidding, right? The US Military was a pathetic joke during the Carter years. Carter's failed "support" of the Shah during the Iranian Revolution was sickening. He kept promising full support but only figured out how to send a carrier to float around in circles in the Indian ocean before ordering it back. His pathetic response to the hostage situation gave rise to modern Islamic terrorism. An overwhelming, Operation Enduring Freedom-type response to the Islamic theocracy and hostage crisis would have changed the dynamic of the region for good. Instead, we couldn't even land a helicopter without killing our own men. Khomeini himself even said that this emboldened his movement and allowed him to expand his rhetoric. The rest of Carter's military "strengthenging" was in reality complete incompetence and indecisiveness, such as proposing and then scrapping a program to land airplanes inside a stadium. This problem was certainly not fixed until Reagan took office.

Carter's mistakes - maybe funding the Afghanistan resistance, which gave us Bin Ladin. The Carter Doctrine, which did nothing to discourage America's dependence on the Middle East's oil, and possibly not looking 'Presidential' enough to win another four years.

Carter's real problem was that he stuttered and stammered in the face of real and serious problems. You simply can't put an a sweater for TV and

According to a calculator I found online (grain of salt, but it passes my smell test and I can't be arsed to really research this just now), $200 in 1985 translates to $363 in 2005.

The numbers since 1913 use the CPI compiled by the United States' Bureau of Labor Statistics and released by that agency every month.

Let's assume that, properly invested, your wealth accumulation doubles every 7 years (avg 10% per year gain, which is about right).

Let's say I'm 55, and I have $1 million dollars in "excess wealth". If I donate everything to charity after I die and that is at age 80, that is $32 million. Based on the 35 years from 1970 - 2005, inflation only makes the original $1 million worth somewhere between $4 and $12 million, depending on how you look at it (see http://eh.net/hmit/compare/result.php?use%5B%5D=DO LLAR&use%5B%5D=GDPDEFLATION&use%5B%5D=UNSKILLED&us e%5B%5D=NOMGDPCP&use%5B%5D=NOMINALGDP&amount2=1&ye ar2=1970&year_result=&amount=&year_source=/.

It's just like how investing works in general. You can have the instant gratification of that $1 million, or if you wait 35 years, you can have anywhere from 3-8x that amount in the current day's dollars. People like yourself would probably pick the $1 million now for the good it will do, without looking at the big picture. Most people think like you, and that's why a lot of the middle class will be just as dependant as the poor on Social Security and other such governmental programs when they retire, because they're spending their excess cash on plasma TV's and SUV's instead of investing it for their retirement like the rich (or those who will turn out to be rich who might not be at the present moment).

Fortunately for the unfortunate, Warren Buffet does NOT think like you. He was not worth $40+ billion 35 years ago. There are always unfortunate people to help, and he has done the greater deed by holding out so that he could provide the largest contribution he possibly could in the scope of his years on this earth.

In 1986, I got a job after graduating from Berkeley with a BS in EECS for $29,500/year. The last hire I made that I'd consider comparable was an Indian student from a state university with a masters. We hired him for $60K/year. I checked out this site for inflation rates:

http://eh.net/hmit/compare/

In short, a smart engineer with a college degree makes the same today as he did 20 years ago. Even back then, half engineers I graduated with were Indian or Chinese. It's no different today.

Sure, we engineers have to compete globally, which makes us poorer on average than doctors and lawyers. I's still rather be an engineer.

The first month after taking that first job, I was approached by communist picketers outside my workplace. They were pushing for unions, and higher wages. These Programmers Guild people are no different. It was a bad idea then, just as it is now.

How long did it take for the US per capita alcohol consumption to match that in 1910? (I know that Prohibition was enacted in 1920, but the movement was reacting to pre-1920 behaviors).

How about an article?
Or maybe a chart?

So, 1970?

I'm not arguing that the law didn't have other repercussions, but it seems to me that Prohibition did work in reducing the per capita consumption of alcohol.

The marketing forces (there were MANY business interests involved) that championed the repeal were effective enough to sway even future generations (us).