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Google.org to Spend an Initial $1.1 Billion
conq writes "Google.org, the charitable branch of Google, has hired on Dr. Larry Brilliant to create a strategy for making a 'social impact.' According to the article: 'The network will focus its charitable endeavors on global poverty, energy, and the environment.' Brilliant outlines his goal: 'In 10 years, I'd like people to say Google changed the world less for its search engine than for the way in which it changed philanthropy to make the world a better place.'"
...not caving into the repressive, authoritarian Chinese government.
If you want to make the world better,
....
Make the check out to
ME!!
Oh wait..
= Grow a brain...
Dr. Evil, meet Dr. Brilliant! Mwahahahahaha!
Ok, so this can be the designated thread for you to file all your BRILLIANT jokes under.
Yes, yes... I know - I made a pun! I'm just too much for myself sometimes. *insert seal yelps here*.
A community-oriented lyrics site
What a great idea, that guy must be a real genius to have the name "Brilliant"
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Brilliant!
And this is why I'm going back to college so Google will consider me a viable employee. I *want* to work for this company.
For those of you who don't know who Brilliant is, he has just the eclectic background that makes him a natural fit for Google's philanthropic thrust. He is a physican and epidemiologist who has also been heralded as a tech visionary. He spent a decade studying religion in at a Himalayan monastery in India, followed by a stint as a diplomat with the U.N. He helped lead a World Health Organization program to eradicate smallpox and later founded the Berkeley (Calif.)-based Seva Foundation, an international health nonprofit group credited with restoring sight to more than 2 million blind people.
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So is google.org going to start by shutting down or opening up google.cn?
Its about time google started working on world peace, as a lot of people had already speculated.
But seriously, the cynical part of me knows that this is partially a PR move, albeit beneficial to more than just themselves.
I don't get it.
- Earn a heck of a lot of money.
- Set up a charitable foundation.
- ???????????
- World peace and mutual understanding! (And, um, some profit for the execs).
. How could it be more simple?Brilliant!!
$1 million to distribute laptops and Wikipedia-on-DVD to rural areas of Africa. If they go with the $100 laptops the guys at MIT are working on, they could distribute 10,000 of them. That would make a big difference in areas where people aren't starving, but textbooks aren't affordable either. (We can neglect the price of producing DVDs -- it would cost perhaps a dollar for the media and maybe another few cents to have them stamped in bulk; negligible compared to the laptops)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I really hope they spend money on physical infrastructure such as roads, adequate drainage (open drains and garbage in urban areas seriously affect health), and localized electricity. Having gone to a few dev. countries recently .. I can tell you that should be the number one priority. It's a requirement to prevent a fallback to abject poverty.
.. the main problem is distribution, health, and education.
As for food, there is plenty of it
No shit! I once got a call from his office (long story) and when I heard "This is Dr. Ill's office." I just laughed my ass off, thinking that it was someone fucking with me. Appearantly, they hear this a lot and the receptionist was quite patient with me.
Let me be the first to say... where do I apply for the money?
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
The singularity institute recently completed a $100k challenge drive (for $200k total). If transhumanism/singularity research could get the kind of funding malaria gets from these philanthropists, the world would be a far better place.
Why is it that they're increasingly acting like Netscape these days? They're still a small company compared to Microsoft and they seem oblivious to the fact that Microsoft caught up to Netscape once Netscape started to lose focus. Become as big as Microsoft, then you can do things like this. $1.1B, even over ten years, is a lot of money that could be reinvested in the company to provide more jobs and grow the company. Again, Netscape seemed unbeatable but now is on the trash heap of history.
If they want to make a difference, how about investing money into good civics lessons in the countries wracked by violence. Teach them peaceful resolution of differences, undermine their tribal identities to create a unified national identity and teach them the value of working together in a way respectful of basic civil rights. That's why they get in this mess. Almost every time an African country manages a decent election, the opposition goes onto the warpath to try and take power. If they want to really shake things up, teach them the values that made America be able to unify and work together to become an industrial power. Until then, it's all a bunch of shiny things.
I would rather hire Joe Modest.
Now I am sad.
http://www.google.com/grants/
Google Grants BETA
Didn't see that comming!
I'm not sure how you managed to get that from "Ultimately, Google.org will spend a sum that equals about 1% of the number of shares Google had when it went public. Based on the current stock price, that implies spending of more than $1.1 billion."
The fund has a $90M endowment, and "ultimately" I wouldn't base anything on the current stock price.
Personally, I'd rather have seen them run their business ethically than make money from providing censorship to China and give it back with some nebulous charitable scheme, but...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Strangely, trying to wipe them out doesn't work either.
Google plans to aid the world through financial support?
Brilliant!
Amazing how being a lackey of a totalitarian police state gets the philanthropic juices flowing.
The problem for companies with ambitions of charity, even if they are global forces is that if
they want to help out people they must fight the enemies of ordinary people, governments.
It's never been clearer that the forces of superstition, darkness, oppression and control are pitched against the
forces of reason, freedom and expression as here at the start of the 21st Century. In many places in the world weak, spiteful, arrogant governments are very obviously picking their side.
I think if Google wishes to be recognised for humanist achievements one step along that road is going to
be relocating their headquarters outside the USA. Unless the USA returns to a civilised country at some point.
"Google (GOOG) founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have promised shareholders they will make a social impact that will eventually 'eclipse Google itself' by tackling the world's problems" I, for one, welcome our earth-saving, superhero, corporate overlords!
Set up a factory in a third world country to build:
Wheelbarrows
Handcarts
Bicycles
Water pumps (well and irrigation)
Ploughs
Seed drills
Hand tools
Evaporative refrigeration Jars
And better yet, also help set up a marketing/distribution co-op of just-above-subsistence farmers, and seed banks that also submit to some journal as "prior art" to prevent patents on indigenous varieties.
And set up education programs for urban gardening in the developing world and low-income areas of the developed world.
Sounds like someone out of a comic book.
Marvel Presents: Dr. Brilliant and the Giving Googler!
Thats a very close minded view of China. The chinese government has a questionable human right record to be sure, but to me it simultaneously feels benevolent. The chinese government is a much better one than our own. Democracy truly is overrated.
Fascism is the greatest political ideology ever conceived. Sorry.
Google will be charitable in the same way as George Soros- ie. only when the political outcome is in their selfish interest.
I suggest you read Slashdot
However, this is not to say that such endeavors are not worth doing. I'm all for big companies striving to make the world a better place.
/dev/random
This is phase two.
We're already accustomed to Google tracking everything we do online through their servers.
Now we're seeing what's really going on behind the scenes - they're staging a replacement for the UN, and will eventually be a forced to be reckoned with.
Naturally, PeopleSearch (beta) will go online shortly after Google gets diplomatic immunity, and cameras will appear at every intersection, tracking people wherever they go.
All this within the next 15 years, AND I STILL DON'T FUCKING HAVE MY FLYING CAR.
Google.org? Brilliant! [Yes, it needs a clip]
I love Google :)
A good read: http://www.namebase.org/roelofs.html "Those who wish to promote change should look closely at what sustains the present system."
How does philanthropy improve shareholder value?
No, I'm not a staunch capitalist. I don't really even invest much. But, if you play by the rules of capitalism, you die by those same rules. Unless this is being funded directly by the shareholder founders, then it's not clear this adds shareholder value, and therefore puts Google at risk.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
1. Earn a heck of a lot of money 2. Support censorship in China, piss everyone off 3. Spend $1.1bn on charity 4. ??? 5. Google is the good guy again
If being poor is having less wealth than the average, then in all likelihood poverty will always exist.
Now what can be tried is to increase the quality of life in the low end of the wealth spectrum.
To a degree that has been achieved in the last 100/150 years.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
im dead serious.
Fascism is the greatest political ideology ever conceived. Sorry.
I would love google even more if they hired Dr. Brilliant just because of his name. I can totally picture google execs in a meeting one day, "Dude, we gotta hire this guy! His names Dr. Brilliant!"
What benevolent society starves it's people, limits free speech, has no civil rights, and has a history of mass murders? Saying that democracy is overrated is just crazy. Perhaps you should go overthere and live for a while, on rice and beetles, and see what freedom really is like. MOD the parent down!
The chinese government is a much better one than our own. Democracy truly is overrated.
Either I missed the joke or you are fucking ignorant.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
They ship the products in big containers and we buy them at LL Bean or Wal-Mart...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
That's because people try to help them in the wrong ways....help educate them, help get them jobs, help them to be selfsustainable, and if not leave them to Darwin. Current wellfare systems don't work, I'm not saying don't help people...but don't baby them for the rest of their life. If we help the cause rather than the effect we'll do much greater good.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Hot composting latrines. The village well is no good if it gets contaminated by the neighbour's open sewer.
fair play to them hope that they live up to their promises tho
./ hates and im probably gonna get bad karma for mentioning his name)
also remember that Bill Gates (yes that dude that everyone on
donated billions $$ along with his wife for causes in Africa
so moral of story is just because someone is rich doesnt mean they evil
+5 Brilliant !
So is this money from the company stockholders or the founders cash? How can a publicly traded company provision such a large amount of money as charity and not incur the wrath of the almighty dollar-watchers?
I could start a lot of profitable initiatives with a billion dollars.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
I, for one, welcome our new Brilliant overlord.
oh thats right! mod me down because you disagree. read my journal you zombies. Democracy is a fucking lie. China is on a greater path.
Fascism is the greatest political ideology ever conceived. Sorry.
There's only one thing that's going to reduce poverty and suffering in third-world countries: classical liberalism.
If Google (or any philanthropist) wants to really help a poor country, persuading them to depose their theocratic / despotic / fascist / socialist / puppet Governments and replace them with a constitutionally-bound Republic would be a good start.
Of course, that'd involve many people, a deep understanding of the culture of said country, and a long, tiresome struggle to educate the people - not to mention the high likelihood of violent opposition from the existing powermongers.
So most people don't bother, they don't choose to analyse the causes of poverty, and instead buy the people of those countries millions of dollars worth of rice and medicine, thereby adding welfare dependency to their list of problems, and propping up the aforementioned evil Governments.
Sigh.
by german author "andreas eschbach" (original title: eine billion dollar) (one trillion in the us equals "eine billion" in german)
i llion_dollar
check the storyline at
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/reference/eine_b
interesting plot about what would happen if you had a fortune of one trillion dollar in cash and what good you would do for mankind and your planet.
Nice. I'll sleep better tonight for once
Normally I'm the no.1 Google Skeptic (just check my record and You'll see that I'm on google like a tick on a dog)
But for once I have to take my hat off for them.
So many rich people, Michael Jackson, Bill Gates, Donald Thrump - No one got it right - no one understood that our planet is in grave danger of planetary loss of vegetation.
Who better to understand this than the Global search engine?
Interesting... I'll keep my eyes peeled on this, wont you?
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Cheap advertising.
It's cheaper to donate $100,000 to a group and get covered on multiple national media outlets than to buy advertising on all those said outlets.
It's also better for PR value.
I think big companies like Microsoft (Melinda Gates Foundation) and Google have started to think that charity may be a means of marketing and would in a long term help to make some bucks out of it. I guess that works by
1) Constantly staying in headlines, by those charitable activities
2) The countries which these companies will impact, are the places who potentially have a large consumer market which is still not tapped.
3) They will work hand in hand with policy makers, etc. in those countries - and would be in a better position to influence them in their favor.
Is not that google can change their government anyway
I mean, it's wrong to help that government, but it's not that google can or should do. Chinese people need to awake.
Redmond, WA - In response to Google's hiring of Dr. Brilliant to lead its charitable branch, Microsoft has hired Dr. Fucking-Kill to head up its own good will organization, Microsoft.Screw.The.Consumer.
"I feel I'll be a real asset to the company." said Dr. Fucking-Kill as he ate several fetuses. "Since I discovered that Steve Ballmer and I are long-lost brothers from the union of a steel-wombed birthing machine and a half-dead Irish alcoholic, I've wanted to make a contribution."
Dr. Fucking-Kill's first order of business is to wipe out every human being that doesn't bow down to Bill Gates and worship the Microsoft founder as a god. "I think my preferred method of death will be to hack off their genitals and gouge out their eyes."
When asked what his charitable pursuits will be, Dr. Fucking-Kill said "Fine then, if you want to be a kill-joy, I'll dole out free copies of badly written Microsoft software to third world farmers."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So I'm just curious...will Google try to lump in their summer of code efforts with this philanthropy or will they keep that as more of business expense since they benifit from these projects themselves moneterily?
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Stuck in my head. "Brilliant!"
Here's one for them to start on. Google Levee's. They could design a better levee system for the rebuild after Katrina & Rita. Hate to say it but I would think Google couldn't do any worse than the Army Corps of Engineers.
For some reason I refuse to use either spell check or the spacebar properly.
Oh yeah ... and don't forget to lobby for genuine free trade - i.e. two-way trade without constraint or tariffs, so third-world countries can actually export agricultural products to first-world countries like the U.S.A.
How aboud spending a billion dollars on providing a hydrogen based vehicle and support infrastructure? Provide the vehicle designs to the auto makers and the cracking facility designs to the oil companies and have them build the things. They could get this rolling and in 10 to 15 years start phasing out gasoline based vehicles. Would need to start building nuclear plants to provide energy to the cracking facilities.
Now that would have a tremendous impact on the world.
Either that or spend the billion on dolphins with fricken lasers on their heads.
The values that made America be able to unify came out of centuries of darkness in Europe, followed by something called the Enlightenment. Without that movement, the ideas of natural law, the rule of law, and limited government could not have taken root. That's not quite putting it right, but it's close enough.
We are unified, to the extent that we are, by a cultural viewpoint drawn from that historical context. Africans, by and large, see themselves not as displaced Europeans but as the indigenous people working to undo the wrongs done by European colonialism. At any rate, they mostly don't have that historical and cultural context.
Personally, I hope the world never gets along. It would take about six minutes for someone to take the over the whole thing, without so much as a [air quote] giant laser [/air quote].
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Why does this remind me of the monologues you get before videogame boss battles? Almost spent a moment there looking for my rocket launcher....
Feel free to give some o' that to me!
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
Yahoo beat them to it by turning in Chinese journalists to the authorities. Tends to help with global overpopulation concerns.
So, um, you applied for a job you knew you wouldn't want, just so you could reject them? Or have they taken to calling people randomly from the phone book to give out free jobs as a kind of promotional thing?
If it was the former, I'm sure it'll make google reconsider it's whole "be evil by complying with the law" thing. About as much as getting snubbed by google would have made China reconsider it's whole "being a Communist dictatorship" thing.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
After school programming classes
In more poverished school districts, help to set up after-school classes for those interested in programming. Donate money for the computer hardware if needed. And don't talk about stuff like database queries or setting up submission forms (leave that for actual classes); talk about stuff like making a square move from one side of the screen to the other while rotating, or creating 2d games.
These kinds of things will interest kids a hell of a lot more than getting a tax form, and those with a real interest in programming will gain some core knowledge. Use things like Flash or Visual Basic, since those would be the easiest things to introduce kids to.
As an added bonus, the calculations necessary if they want to make more complex versions of what is listed above will spur their interest in math, which will let them branch out to other industries (physics, accounting, etc.).
Support Web sites of other charities
Many charities, especially smaller ones, often have lackluster sites, usually a result of asking your kid cousin to make the site for you or having to hire the cheapest web designer you could find who "always uses Frontpage".
Use the funds to help these sites get work from professional web designers; with the increase in net spending, giving profits to the internet is also on the rise, and a static site with bad navigation and little information will send a potential donation to another charity.
Video directing, editing, and compilation
Google is in a good place to set up extra-curriculur lessons for interested parties on filming, editing video, and creating a finished project. With Google Video, Google can spur more interest by putting "final products" on a special page to showcase them; maybe even have a small contest for the best video made by a student of the class
Invest in the Phantom Console
I just heard today that they need more venture capital. Althought, I guess "pity pay" doesn't equate charity. Maybe give money to those who invested in it?
Destroy MySpace
I don't think I have to say anything here.
I wonder who would win....
oh thats right! mod me down because you disagree.
;)
You're obviously new around here
Matt
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178241&cid=147 80115
So much for that attempt. *sigh*
A community-oriented lyrics site
The guys name is "Larry Brilliant". If I marry his daughter, we're keeping her name.
Google's first goal should be to invade sweden and stop the spread of strangely named furniture. All Hail the GoogleArmy Beta! Invitation Only!
Charity is legal under pure capitalism. Just a heads up.
Also, under capitalism, you're allowed to do hybrid charity/profit-making companies. It's really neat. You should get a dictionary sometime.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
Sunnyvale, CA - In response to Google and Microsoft hiring Doctors to run their charitable tax-writeoff wings, Yahoo has announced it has hired brain damaged athlete Dr. Werner T. Gimpertard
In a recent interview, Dr. Gimpertard was asked what his doctorate was in. When he had finished molesting the interviewer's shoes he replied "Sticking potato chips and small appliances up my nose."
Pressed over what his plans to do with the money Yahoo is giving him, Dr. Gimpertard replied "Change my diapers and help earthworms land lucrative IT jobs in Desmoine."
As of press time, it's still not clear if Yahoo headquarters are under attack by rogue elements of the IRA or outraged investors, angry about a pamphlet from Dr. Gimpertard assuring them that he only peeked up old lady's dresses, and that he didn't know anything about the twenty cross-dressing ninjas that had attempted to take over Mexico.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I read the intro to your journal (or whatever that was), and I have to say, I'm glad you are reading about other things than Democracy, but Facism is definitely not the answer.
:)
I, too, disagree with democracy, but not freedom. Democracy is basically allowing the strong/rich to bully around the weak/poor, which is absolutely ridiculous.
If you want to expand your horizons a bit more, and look to the polar opposite of what you are thinking about (if you truly have an open mind you would have no problem reading opposing viewpoints), you should read about Libertarianism. At the bare minimum, you might disagree with it and form even more opinions about your beliefs
Basically, Facism, Socialism, Communism, etc, to me, is nearly the same thing as democracy. A few people in power try to bully around the population as if they were playing some sort of RTS or something, trying to force each little spoke of the wheel turn the same way.
With true freedom everyone can think how they want, believe what they want, not have opinions/beliefs forced upon them, etc. You could state stuff about your thoughts about Facism without getting your door kicked down by the government, form a (willing) group of people to try to create a facist utopia if you wanted, or whatever you wanted to, just as long as you didn't harm anyone else.
The main premise of Libertarianism is absolutely no force unless defending yourself. With Facism, unless under a freedom based society with willing participants, everyone is FORCED to follow their beliefs, which severely limits people's ability to think openly and form their own opinions on matters.
Anyway, your original post probably looked like a troll solely because it seemed like you were provoking people, which is hard to gauge correctly over the Internet. I've been a mod before, and I don't read everyone's journal of posts I moderate!
Isn't this too early?
Bill Gates was much richer when he started to play Jesus for the poor.
Someone (not I) would say, "That's just fucking brilliant!"
Infuriate left and right
I'd rather them not cave into another Government that fits that description.
Excuses Are Like Assholes - Everybody's Got One
Why don't you go rent an apartment in Shanghai for a few months before passing judgment on Chinese law and culture? There are plenty of foreign-exchange employment programmes; you could go teach English, say, or immerse yourself in Chinese studies at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University. Maybe then you'd realize that the vast majority of Chinese citizens: (a) already know about their government's ongoing censorship, and (b) support it. That's right: they support it. This despite your Anglo-Saxonized opinion about the value of unrestricted speech.
I can't wait for Google Pharmaceuticals (sp?), Google Nation Air Defense, Google Studios, Google Power Inc., Google Steel, Google Oil, Google Nanotech, Google Computers, United States of Google, The Google Stock Market, and maybe Google Motors.
Wouldn't the most obvious solution be to just hire people? Wouldn't that be a much more efficient means of getting money directly in the hands of the impoverished?
I mean, the only way a company can legally reconcile charitable work with their responsibility to shareholders in the first place is to label it as marketing. If spun correctly, hiring (and training) people in poverty could be handled the same way, but with more lasting and substantial results.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against charities by any means. But charitable work is usually done by persons who have no other means of helping. The Red Cross isn't staffed or run by people who have the resources to engage in mass training and/or hiring. When you think of charity workers, you don't think of corporate giants, you think of little old ladies who donate their time because it's the only thing they have to give. And that's what makes the most sense.
I just think the whole thing smacks of PR and corporate rivalry. After all, how can Google claim the "Do no evil" motto while Bill (or actually, his wife, who I tend to believe was actually sincerely motivated) is the largest charitable contributor in the world?
I suppose that in the big picture, if disadvantaged people can benefit from corporate rivalry then it's a net gain, even if there are better solutions. I might be jaded, but I don't really think Google deserves a High Five and a Hug for being a responsible world citizen. Maybe if/when they surpass what should be basic expectations, I'll change my opinion. But the way I see it, Google.org is just a creation to give a more public face to what would otherwise be a 2nd page news story about corporate donations to charity. As far as I'm concerned, it's still a 2nd page story.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
outsource your job to them ;)
I don't understand how you can proclaim that China is on a "greater path," while at the same time professing what you seem to think is Providence's gift to the world, fascism.
Oh, wait, yes I do. You're probably thirteen years old.
I especially love where you call open-minded a society model based around single-minded pursuit of the advancement of the nation as a homogenous unit. Despite that, you just can't wait to proclaim how "...hispanics [sic]...[make] up a significant fraction of the party's membership."
Next time, read the books before deciding.
IMHO global poverty will not be addressed with one billion dollars from Google. Many companies and governments in the EU and US are doing the same thing for decades, without success. Google may be only interested in a tax shelter. The problem is that companies and governments in the rich countries are causing the problems in the poor countries. Of course, we, the people in rich countries are not completely innocent either. What can make a difference is fair trade. And that is where we have a chance to make a difference with a few cents every day. In return we get better products and a safer world. Read about it, think about it.
http://www.transfair.org/ (Germany)
http://www.equo.it/ (Italy)
http://www.transfair.ca/ (Canada)
http://www.fairtrade.at/ (Austria)
http://www.maxhavelaarfrance.org/ (France)
http://www.fairtrade-jp.org/ (Japan)
http://www.fairtrade.org.uk/ (UK)
http://www.transfairusa.org/ (USA)
etc.
eliminate corruption, push for the rule of law. If there was a way to invest in these things, it would go a long way toward helping the third world.
I struggle between frustration (why do they take up arms instead of working politically) and pity (how can we expect political solutions, when the daily necessities are lacking). Africa is in a world of hurt, with AIDS, civil wars, famine, tyranny, and a seemingly endless list of ills, none of which is easily solvable. I have a friend who is involved in a project rescuing street children in Zimbabwe, and I can tell you that the situation is heart-wrenching if you think of it on a personal level (rather than just relegating the whole contentent to the category of "screwed-up Africa"). Sometimes it feels like the little we can do (or give) is a drop in the bucket against everything that's happening.
My take is that investing in entrepreneurial projects (micro loans and other local-level projects to encourage business ownership) is a good start. The rise of the middle class in Europe (and eventually in America) is one basis for our focus on things like the rule of law and property ownership that have helped foster a higher standard of living and a more stable society. However, it took us several hundred years to go from serfdom to democracy (and longer than that to get from the Magna Carta to the Constitution)... I'm afraid the "dark continent" is in for a long, painful slog.
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All they have to do is start a venture capital company, then go to a poor continent like Africa, or even South America, and simply invest.
I don't think charity will change anything because ultimately charity is a waste of money. If Google wants to change the world, they need to start a venture capital company, one for Africa, one for South America, and then simply invest. It is not difficult to solve these problems. There are countries in Africa and South America with stable governments. Giving food and water to the sick countries is not going to help because all the smart people will simply come to up to North America or to the richer parts of Africa. Ultimately the solution is investment.
I didn't see 'human rights' or 'free speech' listed as one of their goals...
The only name that can top Dr. Brilliant is Prof. Awesome.
What the shareholder would think of it ? Are they that philantrop ?
In a TV-show just a few weeks ago here in Sweden they tried to figure out what a socialist was. So they went out and asked people of various kinds, including Göran Persson (our current head of state and of the party Socialdemokraterna), what it was, and in Görans case if he was one.
But Göran didn't considered himself as a socialist, instead he considered himself to be a Socialdemokrat.
Scratch that - Google should just ship $1 billion in fish-aid to the 3rd world.
Power to the Peaceful
The singularity will equalize both Third World and First World to something far better.
I'm with you for the most part, but it's not quite as simple as you suggest. For instance, you bring up the issue of "rice and medicine" donations contributing to "welfare dependency." This effect is real, but it's usually outweighed by the fact that a regime of private property rights in a smoothly functioning market economy--the conceptualized ideal, I'm assuming, for both you and me--is hampered somewhat by conditions in a famine-ravaged village where nobody bothers to learn useful (and peaceful) skills because chances are they'll be dead of malaria, TB, or AIDS in a couple years anyway.
In such a situation, it certainly can happen that donations of food, medicine, and free education go a long way towards accelerating the development of a peaceful, stable market economy.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
As much as I like the goal, I think the means of changing the world as I see currently on their website, is just a complete waste of time. What good is giving food and water if you don't bring high paying jobs? What good are farmers when no one in America wants to buy African food? If Google wants to change the world, Google would bring a Google office to Africa. Google would start a venture capital company, and invest in small software development firms from the third world, and then buy them out when they become profitable. Google could EASILY help.
The problem is, charity dedicated to food and water will not help much. Africa and South America has better and more food than we do, the climate is better there, they have less pollution there. I don't think food is the problem. The problem is no one wants to actually trade with people in these countries, maybe due to bias, maybe due to the fact that it is a chicken and egg situation where if there are no businesses there which make millions of dollars there can be no consumers there.
Google, if you actually care, start up an investment company. Invest in businesses which actually have a chance at being million or billion dollar companies, and for christ sake invest in something other than food and water. If you are just going to invest in a welfare system then you will not have my support, because this is no different from slavery.
If Google wants to make an impact they need to give people jobs, and in order to give jobs you have to give money to people who want to create them. Africa has more labor than jobs, and more ideas than money. The solution should be simply, give money to businesses, give grants, give loans, or just train people to run Google style businesses and give connections. The one thing you should not give is just the basics. This would be like going to the poorest communities in America and building prisons, or giving out free food to the homeless, its good on the surface but its just welfare, and it won't solve anything long term.
5 million dollars in Africa would go a LONG LONG way considering the economy there, this amount of money would be enough to start a software development company of thousands of workers, hundreds of programmers, etc which can then make millions back. They should just expand their business into the third world, offer Google, and Google jobs, train people through this process, and then through the same process that works in America, let the people with the best ideas start businesses from within Google or from outside of Google through investment. Otherwise this is no different than the Gates foundation, it looks nice, but its not going to solve poverty.
Right, I'm sure that their support is in no way related to what would happen if they vocally disagreed with it...
"This is considered plagiarism."
I'm pretty impressed with some of the work that his foundation funds. Fifty years from now, he will probably be remembered more for the organizations he funded than for how he made his money. Just think of Carnegie or Rockefeller.
You can democratically elect the rich and popular to tell you what you want to hear and systematically sell your ass into slavery or you can have a dictatorship of elite, generations old, who make no secret about the fact that, unless you belong to their social clique, you will be a corporate-state slave for the rest of your life.
You can have the blue pill or the red pill. America is currently a blue pill allowing you to live in blissful and supported ignorance. China would be a red pill where you only survive if you accept how crappy the system is and choose to work around it from the inside.
Democracy is truly overrated... unless you enjoy being a lemming.
What is the point of Google even bothering with "micro"finance when they have billions and billions of dollars to just start the first venture capital company to do it properly? Not to mention they can give huge grants. Sure microfinance is good, but do we need a giant company like Google doing what you and I could be doing? Google would be doing more if they invested in businesses in the united states, we have plenty of people living in poverty here, not to mention we have plenty of people living in poverty in south america. The last thing we need is to see them waste money on projects which ultimately will accomplish what? more useless garbage that no one wants to buy and that there is no market for? commodities? There must be something more profitable than this. And I don't think it is wise to give the food industry to Africa where labor standards arent even established, or to South America. To me this just seems pointless, because the most profitable jobs are actually the intellectual programming jobs, or the high tech jobs, and Google is a high tech company, so why play games? Why not just bring Google? Or pay people to write open source software?
I disagree - if it's not accompanied by a corresponding political change, simple material aid actually worsens the plight of the country receiving it, because it empowers the existing regime and reduces incentives for the replacement of that regime.
What's best is a combination: political education and change, accompanied by gradually-reduced material relief.
But if you have to have one without the other (sub-optimal but possible), choose education over material relief - because on its own, material relief makes things worse, not better.
"Democracy is basically allowing the strong/rich to bully around the weak/poor, which is absolutely ridiculous."
no, it is not. A democracy is where the majority 'poor' can remove an official, or change a law.
Pretty simple, and it works.
Now a republic can be the same way;hoever awith a republic people have a tendency to forget that they can change things. I believe this tendency comes from the fact that most people don't ahve to do with the day to day operation of the government like they would in a democracy.
"With true freedom everyone can think how they want, believe what they want, not have opinions/beliefs forced upon them, etc. "
unfortunatly, in reality many people beliefs are to force belief on others.
What is neede is to end corporate power.
"The main premise of Libertarianism is absolutely no force unless defending yourself."
That's a great way for a species to find a niche, then die.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...Google actually knows how to do good business and keep their customers happy?
help people over all. Something that empowers and is right up Google's alley.
Seriously. If you want to know, have someone at google contact me.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'd love to see Google continue and expand its Summer of Code program, which last summer funded 400 students worldwide to work on the Free and Open Source projects of their choice. Each student was rewarded $4,500 and the project they were improving received $500 to cover the mentors' time and expenses.
By enabling students to contribute to Free Software at an early age, Google would not only be doing society a favor, but it would also introduce those students to the concept of working with a large group of talented, motivated contributors coming from vastly different backgrounds.
Or caving in to repressive, authoritarian IP law. Different methods, same results.
It's been 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
You people really suck
Don't make me laugh. This country is hardly an example of stablism. We've been around for barely over 200 years, and it amuses me everytime someone thinks we should go "convert" another country to our preferred governmental system.
Historically, both Greek democracies and Roman republics were short-lived. These are just about our only other only other historic examples of such ruling systems. The longest-lived systems are more along the lines of emperial monarchies, whose lines can stretch for millenia.
If you believe that a "constitutionally-bound Republican government" will end suffering and poverty, I recommend you descend from your ivory tower and walk among the ghettos and homeless shelters of your local city sometime. That you visit some truly poor and struggling families. The belief that education and democracy will end the world's problems is stereotypically naive American thinking.
A stable monarchy would be a better choice. You will still end up with different social strata (ruling class, middle class, poor class---you are fooling yourself if you believe these do not exist in a republic), but the poorest will be in general better off. (Note: a monarchy does not imply a dictatorship.)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
move there.
not caving into the repressive, authoritarian United States government.
What work are they supposed to do on these laptops if you don't invest in their software development businesses? Laptops are useless when people don't have jobs. Also, the cheap laptops are useless if people have no work to do on them. So please tell me again why it is a good idea to just throw money at a problem?
The solution is for Google to create an operating system based on Linux, hire programmers in Africa, give away free laptops and kits, and open up an office where programmers can connect to the net through wifi and actually upload their code. This way when Google wants to update their software, or donate new code as they claim to be doing, they can actually do so cheaply. You could hire 1000 African programmers for the price of 100 American programmers. Google could literally pay African programmers to write open source code. Google could also pay African programmers to write and create PC games for Linux, we all have a shortage of PC games, mainly because it takes a lot of programmer labor to create them, but if Japan can create a video game industry I don't think it would be too difficult to start one in Africa. Second, it is a myth that everyone in Africa is living in a village, or that people in Africa all want to be farmers. It's mainly a situation of chicken and egg, no one wants to invest any money in African software businesses, even Google wont invest.
Laptops are a good idea, AFTER people recieve training and investment, otherwise these people in Africa can use donated computers. Ultimately the hardware isnt the problem, and the labor isnt the problem, its the fact that no one wants to trade.
...not caving into the repressive, authoritarian Chinese government.
You know, the funny thing is that by "caving" as you say, Google will actually do more for the Chinese people than by not "caving".
How so?
Google has powerful search technology -Duh- but, when the Chinese search on google, and something is banned, instead of it not appearing, they will recieve a message that a page was blocked. This way, the Chinese people will know that the information is out there, but the government is blocking it.
If, as you suggest, Google does not move into China, and boycotts China, then some other search service will arise that blocks content as the government orders, and probably not even display that the contents were blocked, therefore, the 1984 style repressionism will be more effective because the people won't know that there is more information out there.
Boycotting China will not help the Chinese people in any way. Freedom has to come from within, and as more and more Chinese people get on the net, and as more and more learn that there is alternative information out there, they will begin to demand change. That is how democracy works, from within, not from some entity trying to force it from without.
If google did boycott China, then the Chinese would eventually try to go to google.com and see "Google.com Blocked by Governement" and have no available information at all. At least this way, they get SOMETHING.
I think that the Chinese people deserve to get SOMETHING in their searches as opposed to nothing.
However, if you would remove Google and help to opress the Chinese people even more, that is your choice.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
It's called "capitalism."
assuming you can apply your education in some way to improve ones life. Not always the case. If you increase your knowledge, but live under a warlord that will maim, torture or kill anyone who does something 'different' it's hard to change.
Of course you could overthrown the warlords...if only the warlords didn't have all the guns.
No, it is not simple. How many people under 13 can find a away to change the life they were born into?
"political education and change"
you forget, that a mojority of the poor have no means to effect political change, regardless of how much they know of it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Would be for google.org to provide standardized wind turbines and solar cell arrays to poor areas to be able to actually use computers with, and drop the production and delivery costs BELOW standard pricing.
This would kickstart supplies of component materials and give economies of scale so the whole world could generate power without harming the environment as much, and drop costs for more developed areas due to the economies of scale, while preventing people from escaping to the cities to get power, internet, and other things, because they'd have it where they are.
But that would take guts.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
What's really awesome is how we can't talk about technology at Slashdot anymore. All anybody on Slashdot seems to want to do is get on their soapbox about Chinese and American policy, and, insist that Google is evil.
Is there a new site about technology, since we don't talk about that here anymore?
That's why I say it's difficult, expensive, dangerous and time-consuming ... which is why most people settle for not thinking about it, and just giving some money to the latest in an unending series of famine-relief programmes, never asking *why* such famines happen.
Personally, I'd concentrate more on option B. Most of the Net isn't in English, it's in Chinese, information is more easily provided by the Net, and people to create information pop up when you have access to the Net. No need to waste money on a,c,d when you'd be better off cranking out standardized battery-charging solar cell arrays and wind turbines in mass quantities, which would drop the pollution from using diesel generators or non-rechargeable batteries for power as most of the world does (third world). Then let others do the providing cheaper computers, because without power it's meaningless, and maybe set up a wireless basestation with each power complex, that uses the ability of the Net to post/email/cache data/email/requests and send it in bursts via satellite or whatever is locally available.
Now if only those poor little brown people a) could read English, or whatever language Wikipedia is in b) had a handy source of electricity to recharge those laptops c) had another source of reliable information for the times when Wikipedia is totally wrong d) had someone writing information that was specific to their climate and culture, not Southern California.
The problems faced the people in many developing nations are significantly more complex and profound than anything that a free laptop will solve.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It may surprise a number of folks in this thread that there's a rather large community of people who spend their whole lives trying to figure out how to turn money into sustainable development. So all the "what we really need to do is teach the poor civics/give them farm tools/train them to fish" comments are a little late, by maybe forty years.
Where Google has a chance to make a serious difference is not simply by pumping money into development programs, and their hiring choice shows they know it. Google has something no major NGO has: a vast supply of world-class tech resources. IMHO, they should leverage what they've already built to make powerful tools for humanitarian use: adapting Google Earth or Google Maps to make a rapid assessment tool for emergencies, for example. As someone who's worked for several big NGOs and watched them struggle with their tech needs, it seems to me that the best way for Google to change the world might be to help existing organizations who do successful development work (and yes, you cynics, they do exist) by doing what Google.com does best - setting up incredibly stable, well-thought-out, easy-to-use tools to improve some of the key humanitarian challenges, such as assessing need, identifying and fixing problems in a distribution chain, or measuring the impact of development work on a large scale in real time. In addition to making a significant philanthropic impact, such a move would also promote the Google brand, thus adding (you guessed it) shareholder value.
Sigh...another liberal drowning in the Kool-Aid of the welfare state.
/. liberals who don't understand the meaning of the words "perspective" and "pragmatic".
Stabilism != stability
emperial != imperial
I've been meaning to take a walk through the ghettos of my city, but, alas, we don't have any. Our two homeless shelters do an extraordinary job of helping people get on their feet and out of the welfare system - I have visited them, volunteered and donated.
Perhaps the reason is that I live in a very, very red state. Or I guess that it could be that it gets cold in the winter. Who knows? One thing is for sure, though - you are a grade-A dumbass. If I had to guess, I'd say still in high school or possibly a freshman in college. Not to worry, though, you'll grow out of it sooner or later. It's amazing what you learn in the Real World. Ivory tower, indeed!
Posted anonymously primarily because I don't really care to hear from the whining masses of
Someone's been playing a lot of Civ4
Go read this, then refute the points he makes:
http://www.mises.org/liberal.asp
If you want to get your panties in a knot about censorship in China. Attack China, not Google.
Straight from the horse's mouth (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/02/testimony
After all, Larry and Sergey would have googled their new man before hiring. Thank goodness there's no connection here with anyone associated with the fastest (and possibly biggest) investor money dump in the history of the Vancouver Stock Exchange.
I dont know - the USA is not exactly a paragon of libery and prosperity for all, and may not be the best model, which you are obviously suggesting here.
We don't ask lawn mowers to wash the dishes. We don't ask televisions to cook the meals. We shouldn't ask companies to carry out charitable works - that should be the domain and the prerogative of the private citizen.
When you see the CEO seemingly spending more time supporting good causes than running the company, it's time to cash out.
What makes you think that the USA is a good model of a Constitutionally-limited Republic?
...
Granted, it's the best at the moment, but a few little things like federal income tax, welfarism, draft, insane copyright laws, FDA, FCC, FAA, trade protectionism, legally-enforced two-party system etc. etc. leave a lot to be desired.
Of course, you'd hope that third-world countries would learn from America's mistakes when writing their own Constitutions
We SHOULD NOT ship THOSE jobs to Mexico. We should not buy FOOD from Mexico when we can buy food from America. We should not buy cars from Mexico when we can buy cars from America. But when it comes to hiring programmers, we already are outsourcing these jobs to India, so why not Mexico?
I'm not saying I am for outsourcing, if that is what you think, but if we are going to create jobs, we should buy products from Mexico, products we actually need, that we cannot buy in America for a reasonable price. An example of this could be clothing. If we buy our clothing from Mexico and Africa instead of China we'd actually get even cheaper clothes. Sorry but food is not something you'd want to buy from Mexico right now during the war on terror now is it?
I think if Google wishes to be recognised for humanist achievements one step along that road is going to
... Quite far from a police state, where we all have the abilities to voice our opinions. Peoples from all walks of live interact, using voices instead of violence. I only have to point you at the the Iraq shrine attack today to show how the world is much more disparate than here.
be relocating their headquarters outside the USA
I think they are making good headways into getting into China lately...
You were doing so well until your last paragraph, then you fell into the "bash the USA" mode... If you bothered to take a real look around the world, you'd see the USA is still the best there is
Africa DOES have food. Africa DOES have water. You will not decrease the PRICE of water simply by generating more of it, or by making it cleaner. You will NOT reduce the price of food simply by generating more of it. You WILL however allow Africans to buy more food if they have the money to go to the McDonalds that is right in the middle of their jobless city. You will be able to get a drink if you go to the store and buy a Coke, or a bottled water. If people are starving and dying of thirst maybe its because people don't have jobs and can't afford not to starve?
The infastructure can only be developed AFTER you bring jobs. You cannot bring infastructure before you bring jobs, because building infastructure IS a job. If Google decides to offer wifi internet access, just opening an office there brings jobs.
>...and a long, tiresome struggle to educate the people Sounds like Google's marching right down that path.
A few months ago, Google announced they would hire a few programmers to work on OpenOffice.org. What happened?
I think your idea is the best yet. If Google wants to help they should use the summer of code, and contribute in areas they actually know something about. I think it would help MANY MANY people in MANY countries if Google actually decided to give $4500 for code. Also, $4500 means a lot to someone in the third world.
I don't think 1 billion should be spent on code, but if $100 million were spent on code, with a specific focus on the third world, I think this would do more for society, creating jobs, and creating talent than would just bringing charity.
Name some of these now highly profitable businesses which were funded or aided by Google. Show me some businesses that actually have a chance at making a profit and I'll take it seriously.
Ok, old joke "those who can't, teach", but still, personally, I think you can only teach what you know first hand yourself.
And show me one country that is really "liberal". Oh, sure, a lot of countries are revamping their economy for more liberal economy (read: more power to the money), but true liberalism starts with personal liberty. And that's on the decline, if you look around you carefully.
We, as the often quoted "people" are losing liberties towards a more "liberal" market. Which is essentially also not liberal, but rather more and more in the stranglehold of a few corporations.
That's the liberty you want to teach? I'm not sure if they're so much worse off with their dictatorships.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Restoring sight to blind people? So the man is basically jesus?
We've been around for barely over 200 years...
Which is far far longer than any third world nation. Their cultures may have been around longer, but its rare to find a stable government of theirs older than one generation.
If you believe that a "constitutionally-bound Republican government" will end suffering and poverty, I recommend you descend from your ivory tower and walk among the ghettos and homeless shelters of your local city sometime. That you visit some truly poor and struggling families.
I have looked around. I have lived in those neighborhoods in fact. There is indeed poverty here. *BUT* it is nothing like the destitution that exists in most third world nations. Compare the poor nieghborhoods of San Diego to the poor neighborhoods of Tijuana a mere ten miles to the south in Mexico. There is no comparison! The poor in the US, Canada and western Europe are wealthy compared to the poor elsewhere.
When you look at those countries with the highest mean standard of living, they all have something in common: western style political and economic liberalism. Even the so-called "socialist" nations of Scandanavia are really liberal capitalist beneath the surface. Even though the west is far from perfect, it's a much better place to be poor than the third world.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
well done, you're doing *really* well, google, as you sit on tens of billions, why not unload some of your spare change to make it seem like you're not so bad after all.
:) I'm in a bad mood today. Don't take anything I say as a serious reflection of my personal views. really.)
reminds of the parable of the rich man in the temple (paraphrased awful, christians: i apologise); he gives 5 huge gold coins to the collection plate, whereas some other dude just gives a penny. The Big J asks 'who gave more', and everyone says t'was the flashy guy with the rolex who gave 5 huge gold coins.
But no! t'was in fact the scrawny dude, because all he had was that penny.
google is not the scrawny dude any more. sure, it's good that they're giving something, but if they really cared, if it wasn't just a publicity stunt, they could stand to give more.
(let the karma eating begin
I recall one poor chap from India, standing in line outside an embassy trying to emigrate to the U.S.A. A reporter asked him "why do you want to move to the U.S.A.?" Looking at her as though she was on drugs, he replied "I want to live in a country where the poor people are fat."
Do you really think that we live under a "constitutionally-bound Republican government"? That's uncomfortably naive.
Those poor and downtrodden are there because we have abandoned classical liberalism. We have abandoned the Constitution. Nowhere in the Constitution is there a provision for welfare. Nowhere in the Constitution is there any allowance for unbacked currency, social security, medicare, income tax, minimum wage, government housing, sales tax, public schools, or any of the other blights that soil our nation. Not only that, any power not explicitly granted to the federal government is reserved for the people. Period, no exceptions.
(By "We", I speak as an American. There are a few of us left.)
Our founding fathers were neither blind nor stupid. Almost everything I listed above was well-known in their time, albeit under different names. They understood that including such social programs could only result in disaster, as it has today.
So, if you want to see what anything OTHER than classical liberalism does to a country, I recommend you descend from your ivory tower and walk among the ghettos and homeless shelters of your local city sometime. Watch in awe as the sheer evil cruelty of our government is written in anguish across the faces of our poor.
Land of the feet and home of the slave, indeed.
C
Geez... there's like a half a dozen different modded-up posts saying "If Google really wants to make the world a better place, they should be doing [whatever I think is most important]." Well they can't exactly put all their money into every one of those different ideas at once... Not that all of them are bad ideas, but come on, just because they aren't starting with your particular pet charity doesn't mean they aren't making a difference. There is more than one legitimate way to do good in the world.
I am the man with no sig!
And not only the poor. The FDA, for example, kills tens of thousands of people every year by preventing companies from marketing drugs without its approval - those people die from conditions that could have been cured or treated by drugs currently 'awaiting approval'.
a) could read English, or whatever language Wikipedia is in
Wikipedia is in plenty of languages. Definitely the popular ones; although Hindi, for instance, is severely underrepresented, it still has over a thousand articles. English, Spanish, Russian and Chinese all have over fifty thousand articles, and that does cover a significant proportion of the world population.
And in response to
d) had someone writing information that was specific to their climate and culture, not Southern California.
Yes, WikiProject Countering Systemic Bias agrees with you. (I would also point out that people working on the non-English Wikipedias are not, in fact, from Southern California, and not from the United States in general.)
But you do make some very good points. I think they'd be interested in what you have to add at WP:CSB.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Agreed.
And I didn't think of grain and farm subsidies when I wrote my previous email. Lots of things.
Actually, pretty much everything our government does outside of chasing down and prosecuting murdurers, rapists, and thieves.
It's intimidating to think how far ahead our nation would be if that were all our government did...
C
You obviously haven't played Civilization. Democracies invariably have the most productive economies, fastest scientific advances and happiest citizens!
Yep. From memory there is only a gap of a couple of % difference in economic growth between the U.S.A. and Mexico over the past century, and look where they are now. Now, imagine the U.S.A. having grown a few percent faster than it did ...
A stable monarchy would be a better choice. You will still end up with different social strata (ruling class, middle class, poor class---you are fooling yourself if you believe these do not exist in a republic), but the poorest will be in general better off. (Note: a monarchy does not imply a dictatorship.)
No offense, but you obviously don't know what you're talking about. You knock down a variety of strawmen to make a point that's wrong anyway.
Monarchies are inherently dictatorships because everyone must follow the rule of a single person. A monarchy does not just imply a dictatorship -- it requires one. The problem with them is that, while their may be a benevelent dictator or monarch for a generation or two, inevitably someone seizes or inherits power and then wields it for his own benefit and to the detriment of his citizens. Historically, free government and free speech lead to material wealth and improved living standards. There is no way to "end suffering and poverty" but there are ways to alleviate it for the vast majority of the population.
Your examples are terrible. Although homeless shelters do exist and not all people are equal in America (or other western countries), the poor of this country are considerably better off than even the rich of many third-world countries. Most American poor have TVs and cars; the poor of many other countries wonder where their next meal will come from.
Education and democracy will not end all the world's problems, but they will improve the overall well-being of the people. Of course, you elitist view has been argued throughout history. Those who impose it only cause greater suffering to their people. No one argues that different social classes develop in republics, but that doesn't mean that a republic isn't a superior form of government.
As much as I admire the American system, and feel it is the best on paper, I must say what we have over here in Britain is pretty good.
In theory Britian is a Christian Constitutional Monarch. In practice it is a Modern Democratic Liberal Secular State. In theory the United States is a Federal Constitutionally-Limited Democratic Republic. In practice it is a Centralised Christian Constrained Corporate Republic.
You only have to look at the difference between how Tony Blair answers a question on religion entering politics and how George Bush Jr answers one to realise that Britain is the more secular.
In some sense I feel it is precisely because the US Constitution is so good on paper that it is now failing so badly. You cant help but marvel at how perfect the US Constitution is, and that really is the problem. In Britain we know the foundings of our state are crap. We know it is run by pompous arses, and we know that the state religion has it's claws everywhere. But they are all answerable to the people because those rights implicitly retained by the people are in actuality retained by the people.
In the US those rights which are not granted to the legislature by the constitution are either supposed to go to the states, or to the people. But they don't because the 'limited' rights that the central government has are used continually to justify greater and greater expansion of centralised power. And of course, since peoples rights are protected by the constitution people feel safer.
I think one of the reasons Britian does better in practice at maintaining a Liberal Democracy is that our system is so inherently badly designed that the implicit powers automatically overide the constitutional ones, because the constitutional ones are just tradition. Sadly in recent times our current administration seems detirmined to proove my hypothesis wrong.
America needs to redistribute the power back to the people, and stop thier central government from taking over every aspect of thier life.
I think the lesson third world countries need to learn is that once you have a liberal democracy, writing on a piece of paper does not guarentee you rights, even if that piece of paper should be the most sacred in the land...
As to who are the best. I like the French system. That's a real modern secular state. Even if the French themselves can be pompous arses.
You've obviously never been to Camden, NJ.
The worst case of a democratic government is about as good as the average case of all other forms of government.
That you visit some truly poor and struggling families.
Poor is relative. And struggling is the normal human condtion.
Can anyone on Slashdot say that they knew anyone in the US who starved to death? Have you ever heard anyone say they knew someone who starved to death in the USA? Have you ever seen it in the news? I haven't.
> I think the lesson third world countries need to learn is that once you have a liberal democracy,
> writing on a piece of paper does not guarentee you rights, even if that piece of paper should be
> the most sacred in the land...
Seconded. What people forgot, IMO, is that the Constitution is designed to protect the people from those who would erode their rights with the best of intentions, not just the psychotic despots.
So you're going to help the poor by cutting welfare and eliminating the public schools that give their children the basic skills necessary to get a job?
Yes, there are some people who abuse welfare, and many private schools offer a better education than private schools. But there are also people who don't abuse welfare, and actively try to get a good job and get off welfare. And given how dumb so many of the people I meet are, I can't imagine what will happen to those that can't afford private schools when we eliminate them. If helping the poor and the sick, and educating our citizens is a "blight" that's "sheer evil cruelty," I can't even find words for the elimination of these programs.
Don't get me wrong. There's incredible amounts of room for improvement in our nation. But I don't understand how any of your ideas will help anything. (Except for your taxes.)
________________________________________________
suwain_2
And now, as Paul Harvey says, for the rest of the story - the part you won't tell because it's inconvient to your thesis. The groups you list are a minority of the US population, and they have a chance to break themselves of that state if they so choose.
They have a chance but it's not that big. People from a poor background tend to have worse education than those better off, which in turn means that they have problems getting well-paid jobs.
There is not one single historical monarchy where the poor were better off than the poor in the US today. Not one. (One feature of a 'classed' society, unlike the classless one of the US, is that the poor have virtually no rights and no oppurtunities.)
Note that while in today's society the poor do have rights (although they are more often ignored than those of people better off) they usually have rather limited opportunities. Today there are classes - they're no longer defined by birth but they are there. The poor tend to stay poor and the rich tend to stay rich. The time of "from rags to riches" is gone, today it's "from $5.000 IT upstart to multinational corporation" and the people getting rich don't start as dishwashers but as well-educated people with an IT background. Which in turn requires, yes, at least a certain amount of money.
What we have is better than in most periods before, but it's certainly not classless or fair. Then again, it never has been.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
But remember, Democracy on its own is just as bad as any other form of tyranny - it's legalised mob rule. The only free system of politics is democracy *within the context of a binding Constitution*, that puts human rights beyond the vote. That way, people can't vote to, say, force people to join the military in times of war, censor free speech, or force some people to pay for the services used by others.
:-(
In theory
There's no draft
I dont know - the USA is not exactly a paragon of libery and prosperity for all, and may not be the best model, which you are obviously suggesting here.
There's not fantastic prosperity for all, but there a modest level of prosperity for people who work and are even the slightest bit responsible. Avoiding poverty is as simple as graduating from high school, staying married, staying sober, and not having children until you're in your 20s. Check out the poverty rates for that group of people in the US -- they're infantesimal.
Yeah, but who are you (or they) to say who is evil and who is good? The dilemma isn't as clear cut as you might make it to be...
It's pretty naive of you to think that humans won't get any sort of education without the benevolent hand of government to guide them.
If I ever have a kid, I'm going to name him "Dr. Larry Brilliant." That sounds awesome.
"Most of the Net isn't in English, it's in Chinese" - Would you care to cite a source on this? I find this claim to be rather outlandish.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I am a huge fan of companies becoming involved in charity. The practice is mostly dubbed "corporate social responsibility" nowadays - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_social_resp onsibility
I also honestly believe that a company with a real long-term vision will understand what CSR means and will therefore act accordingly to it. Most Japan-based companies realise that there are 120 million Japanese on a small island, and that it doesn't take too much to upset the local eco-system. Factories and plants are almost by rule CO2-neutral. Couple this with the long-term vision that is inherent to the Japanese and you understand why Toyota was the first company to shoot for the "green car". It's not just caring about the environment - it's business. I have even been at seminars where consultants calculate the price of media coverage gained from "philantrophic" activities. Yes, these activities definately CAN have a good ROI.
However, I do think we have to realise that 98% of companies are active in CSR because it is a short-term economic response. Individuals are becoming slightly more moral, and they expect the same from the companies they are doing business with. Nike can't exploit little kids in far-off countries anymore, and
since Brent Spar, Shell can't sink end-of-life drill platforms anymore (nevermind that the Shell scientists were actually right in this case...). Other companies have to follow until in ten years, CSR is a requirement and not a differentiator.
So, we therefore have to ask ourselves. Is Google buying $1.1b of brand equity - hoping to reclaim the "coolness" they lost over google.cn? Or does the $1.1b really spring from their true desire not to do evil? Yes, the effect will be the same. Their motives, however, are what determine if they would still act like this if there's no shareholder-driven imperative anymore.
I am a data point that goes against what you said. I grew up poor - my family was below the poverty line. However, now I'm making around $160K-170K a year and I'm only 30. And believe it or not, I did in fact start as a dishwasher. That was my job in high school, and I used it to save money for college. I had to work my way through college, but the huge upside there was that when I graduated I had a ton of experience in my field (computer science). I was making $150K within two years of graduation. Class mobility certainly exists in the US, I am proof of it, and I do believe that the free market is the best way for the motivated poor to better their situation.
I'm just basing my comment on most of the Net being in Chinese on the spam I get.
Now, if you want to talk web sites, that's another thing. Most Chinese scientists publish in English, for example.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Benevolent hand my arse. The public education system we have today was invented in Prussia as a system of indoctrination, and adopted by the Communist movement for the same purpose. Don't believe me? Go read the Communist Manifesto ...
It's based on science. And doesn't involve faith or prayer. Religion pales.
Become as big as Microsoft, then you can do things like this. $1.1B, even over ten years, is a lot of money that could be reinvested in the company to provide more jobs and grow the company.
Yes, oh what an odd thing to do, to give some of your riches to a charity, when you could use these monies to amass yet more capital! Truly, these are fools!
Almost every time an African country manages a decent election, the opposition goes onto the warpath to try and take power. If they want to really shake things up, teach them the values that made America be able to unify and work together to become an industrial power.
Those values would be... being a colony of the empire that comes up with the industrial revolution, using superior armament and biological weapons to nearly wipe out the indeginous population and then using a well thought-out propaganda machine to make sure your citizens never think about all that stuff and see their own history through a rose-tinted glass?
Not, obviously, to use disposable income to give back to those let fortunate. That's not a value you want.
Sigh. I'm sorry about the sarcasm, but I find your attitude appaling.
Someone says they want to help other people with their fortune, and you say "No! Be more like Microsoft!". I think I'm actually offended.
Hell, I'm surprised you can get modded up around here, making statements like that... I guess the nati-Gates brigade was distracted by a shiny new distro or something.
You can't take the sky from me...
Is the up modding it received, (currently at 5 insightful) and the lack of upmodding to the responses. Have you ever lived under a proper monarchy? Have you any idea besides what the legends of king arthur tell you what that entails? Speaking as someone from Ireland, not so long ago my country was the orginator of such terms as "scorched earth policy", "coffin ships", and "lynching". All because whatever inbred monkey that happened to be sitting on the metal chair took a fit and decided that was a good way to go this season.
You want to wake up, son. Monarchies are never meritocracies, the best does not rise to the top. The wealthy have their status codified and secured by law, enforced by the willing peons that were beggared by the noble classes themselves, but are too ill educated to see it, again due to the noble classes.
The longest-lived systems are more along the lines of emperial monarchies, whose lines can stretch for millenia
Good lord. You say this like its a good thing. The advances in science and living conditions made in primarily western nations that gave us what we have today were made when..? Thats right, in the last 200 years. Seeing the connection yet? Just because some thugs can settle into hereditary positions and bully the rest of the population for a few millenia with hired heavies doesn't make it smart or right. Still with me? Good lad. The longest lived systems are only stable from the top. And even then not very stable.
As I was saying, the scariest thing about this post is the agreement I see with it. Its like you americans have forgotten what it was like. Does anyone doubt that a lot of people in the US today would mind living under a monarchy? Yeesh.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
+5, Brilliant!
...his wife if fucking Brilliant, too.
Sorry.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
Let anyone submit an open source program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora as output.
S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize:
Previous record ratio: R0
New record ratio: R1=R0+X
Fund contains: $Z at noon GMT on day of new record
Winner receives: $Z * (X/(R0+X))
Compression program and decompression program are made open source.
Explanation For an idea of why the C-Prize can solve the AI problem, if it is solvable, see Matthew Mahoney's comment [tinyurl.com] on it:
Matt Mahoney is the author of Text Compression as a Test for Artificial Intelligence which states: (Mahoney is also a competitor who has some winnings from The Calgary Corpus Compression Challenge.)Now, who might fund something like the C-Prize?
Seastead this.
Google, you want to change the world?
Then buy out SCO Group Inc. (market cap: 90.27M), drop all of SCO's lawsuits, and release all UNIX source code under the open source MIT License, with a clause that forbids Microsoft and all it's subsidiaries from making derivative products from said code.
Hear! Hear! We should be putting our money into libraries and academies, not our crappy-assed public grade-schools.
Oh, yeah? Well, you should go read everything ever written by Ayn Rand, Karl Marx, and Terry Pratchett, and then come back and refute their points.
It's really, really, really bad form to jump into an Internet discussion (with a shelf life of days or even hours), demanding that your opponent read an entire book before he is qualified to respond to you. If you're too lazy to find a relatively short, well-written article that summarizes the position you want your opponent to engage, why should your opponent invest the energy of reading an entire frakking book?
Just answer me that one, simple question.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Leftists make such great capitalists! I haven't seen so many almost communist, bleeding-heart liberal rich people congregated in one place than in the bay area. They act like they are for the poor (you know the people they fly over on the way to New York and call trailer park) and they act like they are for civil liberties (unless you are an eye-sore in their neighborhood), but the truth is that they are just people who want to feel like they are above everyone else. It is not an accident that Lenin and Jerry Garcia were both from "well to do" families. It is no accident that leftist like their pets more than people and are often times vegetarian.
With companies like Google, who needs forced redistribution of wealth by the government?
Note to all those people working for Google in the bay area [Rant warning]:
If you are really for civil liberties, then get rid of the intrusive income tax. Quit allowing companies to farm our personal information. Push for 'anonymous' forms of security and payment. Make mass mail marketers subsidize our landfill (most of it goes straight to the trash), and telemarketers our phone bill (I seem to only get calls from them), and spammers our e-mail. Why am I paying for cable, when every channel has commercials? Why do I pay almost a quarter of my phone bill and cable bill to the government? Get rid of the evil eminent domain. Get rid of property taxes, which tell everyone that they are really leasing their land from the government.
It isn't evil corporations that are the problem, it is the government not doing its job that is the problem. The government has the power to pass laws to limit the power of corporations, etc. Capitalism is great when the rules by which we play are great.
Make congress only meet for a few months out of the year and base their pay on the national average, that way they aren't sitting around trying to find new ways to tax us. The problem with D.C. is that we send people there to live among snobs and pay them well so that they too turn into snobs.
Get rid of entitlements and make government small, unintrusive, and work for the people.
Imagine you're in some gang-infested urban area and someone brings a 5-year old into the O.R. who's been hit by a stray bullet during a driveby shooting. What should you do?
I mean, you can make the argument that the only thing that's going to solve this kind of thing is long term solutions, which might include: better policing, looking at changing gun legislation, addressing the underlying causes of social inequality and poverty, change of U.S. approach towards fighting drug use- everything that contributes to urban violence. Since these are the only things that will solve gang violence in the long term, we shouldn't bother to operate on the poor kid and sew him back up. Basically that's the argument you're making: don't bother to save lives now because that doesn't address the root causes.
It's the same deal with the developing world. In the long term, we need to have security, political freedom, free presses, market reforms, less corruption, the rule of law. But all of those things take years to accomplish even if you're not dealing with fundamentally different cultures which may not share many of your values and beliefs; creating stable governments is not the type of thing that can be done overnight as Iraq demonstrates (a better example would be Kosovo, because we didn't cock that up completely after we went in and it's *still* a long-term project). In the meantime, people are suffering from diseases, dying and starving now. Telling them that we're creating a liberal government is going to be little comfort.
The answer is that we need to do both: we've got to engage in both a long-term effort to address the root causes of this poverty, and we've got to address its short-term effects and symptoms. Going back to the analogy with the kid, sew him up and then try to deal with the underlying causes of the violence. That being said, we do need to reexamine how charity and aid are distributed. Is our aid money getting where it's needed? Are our short-term efforts to reduce suffering hurting long-term efforts to reduce poverty? I wonder to what extent foreign aid may create dependency and foster the view that Africa needs to look outward for help and solutions, instead of inward.
One final note... anyone who has a solid handle on how to cure poverty in places like Africa has either spent less than ten weeks there... or more than ten years.
I think it's pretty naive to think otherwise.
Think about it: unfettered capitalism is a system ideally suited to fulfilling the needs of people who have money. If you don't have money, capitalism doesn't give a crap about you, except insofar as it needs to protect itself from people who would try to steal its stuff.
So imagine you're a poor person, who doesn't have good prospects for changing that fact, but does have a kid. That kid needs to be educated to make him useful to society. Because he's your kid, you naturally have a desire to see him educated, so he lives a more prosperous life than you did. But you're ill-equipped to provide a good education yourself, and you don't have the money to convince anyone else to provide him with a good education. So you and the kid are both SOL, destined to toil in the sugar mines until you give out.
But in a democracy, you and the millions of people like you can elect people who will try to fulfill your basic needs. Even if you've got nothing else in the world, you've got a vote, and that means you still have a say.
My analysis is sophomoric, I know. But explain to me how, in the absence of a public school system, millions of poverty-stricken children would be educated? And don't come back with some touching story about some poor coal-miner dad using his last buck to buy science books for his freckle-faced kid, then reading them together by candlelight. The reason they call it "beating the odds" is because for every person who makes it, ninety-nine fail. I want something systematic, that will reach every child who has a remote chance of benefitting from an education. Or come back with a diatribe about home-schooling, "unschooling", or how public education is an ineffective warehouse for children. But for God's sake, no freckle-faced kids.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I'm such a complete ass. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
Yes, Microsoft drove them out of business. But that doesn't mean it was done out of spite. And, beyond that, let's face it: Netscape sucked. Anyone that claims it was more web-compliant than IE was at the time is smoking crack. And, to top it off, its interface was even worse than IE's. Why anyone gets nostalgic over Netscape is beyond me.
/dev/random
How about civic lessons for those countries wreaking havoc in other countries?
Only 2 years to go....
Most people believe in culturism, racism, socialism, and protectionism. They are ignorant, the same way that people who believe in creationism are.
It is natural to want to be culturist, racist, socialist, and protectionist because it is how humans survived in our original evolutionary niche of small clans of related families working and dying together, and battling other clans for lands and resources in a zero-sum game. Creationism is natural as well, because we evolved religion to achieve social cohesion within these clan groups.
However the reality is that global, self-organizing markets allow for non-zero-sum games, ones where everyone benefits from trade, specialization, and enhancements in scientific and technological knowledge. It is hard to realize that our trade with other clans helps us all, and that today our inborn tendancy to be socialist and charitable and to redistribute wealth actually causes poverty instead of reducing it because it removes the very competition that drives ever more efficient production.
IMHO, this is a large portion of the problem these days. Evolution did a great job for, you know, a couple of billion years. Now Human beings are not only ignoring, but even reversing the thing that put us at the top of the food chain: it used to be that the smartest people would do well; these days the smart people are lumped with looking after the stupid.
And because the stupid are being hand-held and mollycoddled, they're able to breed like rabbits, at the expense of the smart, who now can't afford to breed themselves!
Now - I'm all for welfare - I beleive it's an absolute necessity in a civil society - but i object to hand-outs and bludger-promoting systems that in no way promote the betterment of the species.
See what I mean? No? Flamebait? Fair enough...
There's the Chinese imperial government which lasted around 2000 years from the 3rd century BC to 1911 when the last emperor was overthrown and replaced by a republic. In a sense, it did not matter who was emperor or which dynasty was ruling, even invaders such as the Mongolians or Manchurians were possible. Quote from "Chronicle of the Chinese Emperors" by Ann Paludan ISBN 0500050902: "Weak or strong, young or old, all these emperors played an essential role. They were the hub of a vast administrative system and the all-powerful mediator between heaven and earth. This connection provided a moral base: if things went badly, the emperor had clearly lost heaven's trust and revolution was justified. With such a safety valve, the imperial system remained unchallenged until the 20th century."
Everyone here should know that the parent poster's comments (and mine) are undeniably correct and infallible because our user IDs are below 1,000.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
That's Brilliant!! Yep, that's Larry.
Thanks for the laugh. I needed that ....
Nowhere in the Constitution is there a provision for welfare. Nowhere in the Constitution is there any allowance for unbacked currency, social security, medicare, income tax, minimum wage, government housing, sales tax, public schools, or any of the other blights that soil our nation.
I have a really, really hard time believing you considered public schools a blight on our nation. They may not all do a good job at it, but leaving people (with money!) to fend for themselves in terms of education is certainly a worse alternative. But I digress.
Whether there are provisions for these things really depend on your interpretation of the Constitution. Nowhere (in the original text) are you going to find "Congress has the power to create an income tax." Of course not. What you will find, for example, is that Congress has the ability to collect taxes. And when income taxes were challenged? The 16th Amendment was passed to permit them. As it stands today, there is an extremely clear authority to collect them. Similar deal with sales tax; Congress is given the specific ability to lay and collect taxes. Why SHOULDN'T that include, if they so desired, a sales tax?
Is there an allowance for unbacked currency? Nope, not specifically. But Congress can coin money and regulate the value thereof; nowhere does it say it has to be backed by anything at all. In fact, by saying Congress can regulate money the implication seems to be that it doesn't have to be backed by anything at all. It doesn't say, after all, that "Congress can regulate the value of money as long as they have enough gold to back it up." Just that they can regulate it. All of these issues you have raised are very easily dismissed by really just reading the document. None of them seem to require any particular stretching of the mind.
Welfare, social security, medicare, government housing and public schools do, I concede, require more of a stretch. Where authority for these sorts of programs are derrived from is less clear, but I still think valid arguments can be raised for them.
The line about collecting taxes, for example, states they may collect them to "pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States." It seems to me that it can be very well argued that educating our citizens and providing them with means to survive if they have trouble doing so on their own easily contributes to the general welfare. The only one in that list that I have trouble justifying Constitutionally is social security.
You will note that I have not commented on whether or not there are BETTER ways to contribute to the general welfare; I have not, as an example, stated that our public school system is the penultimate thing the government can be doing. Nor that their doing so would be better than if they did NOT do so (which I do believe, but am not arguing); rather, that they do contribute and Congress is thus authorized to enact such legislation. If our Congressmen are doing a poor job of selecting programs best suited for the nation, the fault does not lie with the Constitution -- it lies with the electorate.
The big-picture bottom-line here is that the Constitution is a living document. I love the founding fathers, but it doesn't matter what they intended. They set up a system whereby their intents could be overridden in the future--by amendments and more importantly, by re-interpretation. They set up an entire branch of government with no purpose other than to interpret laws, and I have yet to see anybody argue that judicial review, while not stated in the Constitution, should be revoked or is a bad idea.
I can't sit here and cite case law for these things, but I can pretty well guarantee you that every issue you raised has faced legal challenges and, eventually, come out on top. Just because the founding fathers did not intend something does not mean it is somehow not part of constitutional law. Not only is thinking so particularly naive, it is twice as
Yes, Microsoft drove them out of business. But that doesn't mean it was done out of spite.
It was done illegally.
Here is my proposal of what could Google.org and other philantropic orgs think of realizing:
... problem, please send it to ..., and you may win a prize from 100000$ . More details on the website http://www....com/ . The ID of the this broadcast is: 1221" ID
Proposal of the idea
Idea name: "Think and win" TV show TV
Name's explanation : The TV show for changing the way we watch other television broadcasts, read newspapers and journals.
Audience
This idea could be of interest to governmental organizations , companies, funds and organizations that are concerned about solving the social and environmental problems , as well as any other companies want to benefit from publishing their problems for the society and paying for the best ideas people come up with about the problems.
Problems
There are the following persistent problems in the society, that are related with the idea I want to present:
* People waste time exposing to mass media. People spend a lot of precious time reading newspapers, watching TV, reading online, but produce little products while doing this.
* Mass media information is impractical. Little people really find this mass media information practical or useful in their activities.
* There are many improtant problems to be solved. There are global problems like poverty, environmental problems and other, on which depends the welfare of all of us, and we have to think of how to solve them.
* People don't think of these problems. Media provides some information about these problems, but many people are not interested to think of them.
* People watch TV passively.
We might not feel it directly, but these problems causes pain in a way that we waste time and many problems are left unsolved even though they could be.
If a million people watch TV for 5 minutes, they actually spend 10 years! 10 years of living, working, thinking just in 5 minutes, and they produce near to nothing! Nothing worthy, just seeing it.1005101051010
The real problem is that many people don't notice the problems shown in the mass media, nor they really think of how to solve them. There is no incentive to do that, as they don't get anything for it.
The articles and media broadcasts are also adapted to this thinking that consumers don't solve the problems, and that they are only passive listeners or viewers, so authors of media don't really care to explain the working mechanisms of something, or explain something profoundly enough to make the information practical, or to make people able to think of possible solutions.
Idea
1) Create a reward system. (Attraction!)
A) Pay money for ideas for those who come up with good ideas while watching TV, reading newspapers, journals and so on.A.
B) Contact the parties interested in problem solving. There are parties interested in solving the problems that are discussed in mass media. For example, governmental organisations , some companies and funds might be interested in solving environmental problems. So, they could offer the prizes for people who come up with good ideas about these problems.
C) Add messages the to media about it.
These parties could be interested in cooperation with the media and add messages to TV broadcasts and articles about these problems. Something like this:
"If you have an idea, how to solve this
2) Create a TV show. (Fun system!) TV
It would be just like a lottery. As the summary of all the thinking, the best ideas would be published or broadcasted as an "idea competition show" on weekends. The authors of the brightest ideas would get prizes.
3) Cooperate with the authors of the media content. (Interested parties)
Entities interested in solving the problems (companies, government, funds, scientists and engineers) would be interested not only in paying people for ideas, but also in properly presenting the problems. Make journalists work closely in cooperat
That's pretty much the same as I think: teach them how to fish, but don't fish for them
Ayn Rand was a shut-in alcoholic.
Karl Marx like to fondel little boys
Terry Pratchett?? who cares.. The parent was talking about Classical Liberalism.
That's pretty much the same as I think: teach them how to fish, but don't fish for them
"Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
Actually this isn't the case. In a monarchy, you have a king or queen, but you also have quite a bit of nobility with their own military. If the people at some level aren't kept happy, there's the problem of rebellion, and in the case of a monarchy, it paints a much bigger target on a single person who can be overthrown.
Dictatorship happens when corruption becomes rampant. This can be seen a long way off, and can be both prevented and restored. This is unlike a republic or democracy, where corruption exists but isn't evident, and everyone suffers but no one can put a finger on why.
There is a major difference between a "benevolent dictator" who rules with an iron fist and cows everyone (but at least appaers to retain a shred of humanity and doesn't oppress the people too much), and a simple monarch. A monarchy can exist without the absolute rule of the monarch. That's how it works. You may not be able to go scream and rant in the face of the king (try that with your local country's President and see how far you get), but that doesn't preclude free speech and the ability to decry injustice. I think you may look back in history and find a few people who did such in various forms.
Unrest among the citizens is felt by the lesser nobles, who pressure the higher ones. This is more or less how it works for our representative democracy, but with the latter, it's a lot easier for political corruption to go unnoticed. Politicians are no longer responsible to the people, but large greedy corporations that fund their campaigns and whose best interests are not the same as that of individuals.
The popular vote and elections promise change... but these things have many inherent flaws. Voting systems break. The majority is easily swayed. This sort of corruption is not only difficult to fix, but difficult to detect.
What is this "free government" of which you speak? "Historically?" Care to point to some grand historic examples (>500 years ago) of "free speech" and this "free government" of which you speak? I have noted Greek democracies, which on a small scale allowed any citizen to have an effect on the governance of the land. I also pointed out that these were historically short-lived and often lead to dictatorships or oligarchies.
So, you're happy if some people suffer more, as long as most people are "happy"? Would you be willing to be dirt poor or homeless, in the minority of the populous?
Our society is "greedy", and by that I mean that people can increase their "slice of the pie", to the exclusion of others. It allows some people to be very rich, and others to be very poor. Unfortunately, no one wants to be poor, or even give up a little of their slice. (And I'm not talking about communism here; this is a higher-level discussion.) So they're happy as long as they can ignore those who suffer. You might find the number of people living at poverty level in this country staggering... but it's easy to ignore. So it seems OK.
A more equitable solution allows some people to be wealthy, but guarantees even the poorest aren't so poor they have nothing. This is not our society. We do
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Damn, that's some deep seeded tension, right theaugh. Somebody might just want to keep an eye on him. Yeah... that would be great.
A community-oriented lyrics site
First is to get the money managed properly. It is stupid to say 1 billion will be spent over ten years. Put it in a fund and spend 100 million or whatever the interest is, every year forever.
Google already has technical, philosophical and business tools that can work.
I have some experience with NGO activities. Mainly spearheaded by a famous journalist and supported on the web by me over maybe 10 years, with many other people accreting around the personality of this journalist. Granted one website I made attracted a quarter million dollars in donations, with nothing but our sweat. But to tell you the truth it was mostly his. That site, and projects of his own for example building in Cambodia their best hospital, a free newspaper, 200 schools, an orphanage, and so on are mainly I think successes due to his extraordinary 1) stubbornness, 2) unstinting generosity, 3) going to where the problem is, and 4) pulling in a lifetime of favors, sponsors, supporters, donors, etc. Maybe #1 is the biggest.
Always I have been limited in what I could offer due to a need to support myself elsewhere, and not going to the problem area myself. Conversely, he didn't always come out of it in one piece, he had a stroke once somewhere you really don't want that to happen.
Anyway, Google needs an army of people like that maybe based of small teams, each for a certain area, and Google is going to have an ops center like the U.S. army in Florida which however is going to be far away from the real problem not even in the same time zone. They need to assemble go-getter teams to identify and solve problems and give them real support.
There are long term Google-like things they can do of course like supporting open source, compiling educational and how-to manuals, printing and distributing that info, etc. But most of the areas are going to need people on the ground with solid support, and a committment to learning what works and multiplying it. Maybe it will be good to spread info through the Internet and hook people in the 3rd world into it, and maybe not. A big problem in many of my own suggestions were that these countries have nothing but a massive amount of pride and a horrible history. Often there is an obvious fix that would require help from the country next door.. like an Internet line, or phone service via an existing satellite. Massive political problems. Maybe the army wants to take over that nice net connection you are bringing in, or maybe radio signals will be bad for your health. (One project in Cambodia used steel shipping containers for schoolrooms since they were impervious to bullets.) Maybe there are no phones. Villages may be too far away from each other for easy communication. There may be deadly diseases and unhealthy water which are the biggest problems (so we have a malaria nets campaign). Maybe jealousies, misunderstandings, criminals will be a problem (I know we had a guard killed once, who was guarding Macintoshes for the newspaper).
I was a coordinator for the Science and Technology in Society Forum in Japan (stsforum.org). According to a guest from Nigeria, before solving with IT the problems were lack of firewood and even bigger, a brain drain to the cities. And there was a major problem in him just getting visa and travel to Japan where the forum was held. We took a poll, who thought such problems would be solved by politicians and who thought by engineers.
Well, both I and a very nice VP from Intel said engineers and everyone else said politicians. I think the real answer is: On the ground people with an engineering, problem solving mindset, with political and technical support. I lean toward the "engineers" choice still but it is clear that we are not talking about armchair geeks (though they have a very important role in executing solutions once specifications are determined), we are talking about Solution Engineers, people who understand technologies (including but not just Internet) and communication. Google funding travel expenses so it is easy for people to get t
I am going to have to support that sentiment.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
OS/2
CPM-DOS
and that is only for starters.
The far more Maquiavelian dealings in which they forbid their clients to do things are far more malign.
Oh yeah, they are convicted of abusing their monopoly also. In two different jurisdictions (US, EU). In the EU the bundled media player is what got them slapped.
MS is a company that pushes its luck to get as much as they can until they ar atopped. It is a bloody behavioural pattern, ignore it if you wish but to deny it is frankly disingenious.
They did it when they started (Gates used computing university time that wasn't his to use to start MS), and they keep doing it.
That they get sensible people to praise and defend them is the lasting monument to their wickedness.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Google it.
If that is not evil, thend I don't know what is.
And if you think the MS tax is not evil, then I want to know your definition of evil.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I'd volunteer, but I have neither money, organizational skills, nor workshop skills of any kind...
Watch in awe as the sheer evil cruelty of our government is written in anguish across the faces of our poor.
I've never understood this. Why would an evil cruel Government provide welfare? If you had said stupid, I would have just assumed that I'm too ignorant and maybe you're right, but you said evil.
P.S: I live in India. I have met evil capitalists. I've never met an evil socialist. It's kind of like an oxymoron to me.
Historically, you can't find many nations that had the same government system 200 years ago that they have today. That *includes* the monarchies, most of which fell or ceded their power. Even the British - their Parliament's structure today is fundamentally different from that of 200, 100, or even 50 years ago.
There were monarchies that lasted longer, but in an entirely different era, their citizens having few or none of the rights you claim.
Public education goes as far back to the Greeks.
Plato, Aristotle? Do they ring any bells?
No? They should.
Prussia? Yeah sure man, and the black choppers are out to get us.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Google.org would do our world a great favor by expending its first efforts on deposing the DMCA.
Removing that obstruction placed in the corrodid artery of the tech sector would result in a tremendous boom in economies worldwide. People would gain greater employment, there would be *gasp* NEW categories of consumer electronics invented for the first time in about 9 years, and that wealth would cause gains worldwide.
I'm not a preacher of voodoo economics, but in this case such wealth would spill over from developed into undeveloped nations, and people would be more likely to donate their money if the economy was doing better.
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Monarchies are inherently dictatorships because everyone must follow the rule of a single person. A monarchy does not just imply a dictatorship -- it requires one. The problem with them is that, while their may be a benevelent dictator or monarch for a generation or two, inevitably someone seizes or inherits power and then wields it for his own benefit and to the detriment of his citizens.
What is the difference between a single person grabbing and abusing power and a group taking advantage of a democratic system to impose their own "one and true" way? in the end, they both do it for the sake of their own benefit. And you are naive if you think that when a monarch is not backed up by a group of similar-thinking individuals.
It is hypocricy for our society to pretend that our way is the one and true way, and at the same time blaming others about fascism and monarchy. I never understood why are we so obsessed in bringing our way of life to others. Do they want theocracy? that's fine by me. It is their problem, not ours. Which leads me to believe that the real reasons for wanting to impose our belief system on others is that there is a set of economical, political, industrial and military interests behind this that do not really care about the government system, as long as they can succeed in what they want.
Cool. Then he might be interested in fighting malaria. Providing people with mosquito nets impregnated with mozzie repellant is cheap compared to having nations on malaria. Same goes for dengue.
-- Intelligence is soluble in alcohol
...Google's acquiescence to China's civil rights-crushing requirements for entry to the Chinese market was merely a ploy? If your ultimate objective was global philanthropy you might have to make a few concessions in the shorter term in order to ensure that your business was as successful as possible. After all, you can pretty much guarantee that the success of MSN Search isn't a precursor to Microsoft going on a $1.1bn charitable spending spree (Gates Foundation aside).
It isn't. Please educate yourself. My friends and I, at university just a couple years ago, used to run down the streets of Beijing in the dead of night yelling clichéd anti-Party slogans--"Free Tibet!," e.g.--simply to make asses of ourselves, as college-age kids will do around the globe (well, maybe not North Korea or Zimbabwe). If the cops had stopped us, and they didn't, it would have been for being a public nuisance, not for expressing indoctrinaire viewpoints.
More relevantly to this topic, no one's going to bother to lie to a pollster about their opinion on state control of media because they think they'll be thrown in a dungeon for answering incorrectly. That's entirely your uninformed imagination, which betrays your profound ignorance regarding everyday life in China.
China is no bastion of free speech by Western standards, but neither by a long shot is it some kind of police state where everyone lives in constant fear of committing thoughtcrime. You're probably thinking of North Korea. Seriously, I recommend traveling to mainland China and steeping yourself in the local culture--drivel-spewing dimwits who buy into the xenophobia-driven conception of Chinese Communist Party = Big Brother from 1984, such as yourself, could really stand learn a thing or two.
Lets see now...millions of Katrina survivors desperately in need of help. Google wants to help...apparently almost anyone else but them.
If Google really wanted to do something, they could set up projects to develop businesses for those folks to work in...perhaps American distributed call centers? Google already has expertise in that.
Or they could set up training facilities and job programs. I mean, they are indexing entire college libraries onto the net; Why not just buy the IP rights to key texts and help everyone? Yeesh, look at how much WIkipedia could do on a shoestring, think what some real money behind them might achieve? How about setting up an Online University for retraining Katrina folks?
I could go on and on, but the fact of the matter is that there are thousands of projects that Google could finance that could both be very philanthropic, increase shareholder value, and give something back to the country that allowed them to suceed and so desperately could use their help now. Most of these projects could then be exported to the rest of the world a la the Peace Corps approach. I just hope the American based institutional investors start getting a bit more activist about keeping Google focused on whats important.
So I can move into your house, and everything's cool as long as I don't attack you? Sounds good. What's your address again?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
You realize that if a Chinese corporation wants to do business in the United States they are required to abide by the laws of the United States government right? So isn't it logical that an American corporation doing business in China also abide by the laws of the Chinese government?
If not, please explain, I really want to hear this.
You also realize that changing the policy of foreign governments is not Google's job right? You seem to have confused Google with the United Nations. If anything, censored Google results is a good thing as it should anger the people of China, perhaps taking them one step closer to a revolution.
Gulp, good points.
I just thought I'd clarify that one statement; I do indeed consider public schools to be a blight. Their past history, especially in other nations, makes them suspect. In current use, they seem to be the principle cause in the declining literacy rate and 'blind patriotism' that seems to pervade everywhere.
Now, what about parents? Parents are the ones who are supposed to be teaching their children to think independently, and question authority, and so on. But they don't, and as long as the tax and greenback situation is such that often both parents must work to eat, then I truely can't blame them.
And television? I'll concede a point on that one, but I don't know how to deal with that.
C
I know lots of folks have names (first or last) that seem quite funny in some contexts, but Larry Brilliant? Makes me want a Guinness.
antipaucity
And what is all this attention to the third world? Haven't we dumped enough money into that losing cause? How about dumping some of it back into America (if they have excess money to dump)? The US sends massive amounts of aid to these third world shitholes, Boner of U2 can't seem to get enough time on TV, Bill Gates wants to keep people alive long enough to buy a new copy of Vista (with Aqua), $100 windup laptops for people who can't even feed themselves, let alone have the strength to turn the crank... when will this madness end?
Will all of you be happy when the toughest science course offered in the US is "The Economics of Outsourcing and Wealth Redistribution?"
- El "Bad Karma" Bob
You mean, like the US?
But protecting the place you live in could be considered part of defending yourself. Not everyone will see it the same way, but that is my view.
Google for President?!
Get over it - Netscape practically dared them to do it.
/dev/random
Monarchies are inherently dictatorships because everyone must follow the rule of a single person. A monarchy does not just imply a dictatorship -- it requires one.
Really? We're a monarchy, and I can assure you we're very much a democracy (in fact it's my opinion we have one of the best functioning democracies anywhere to be found). The Queen has very little real power, and has to do what the prime minister tells her, not the other way around. The same goes for almost every monarchy left in the world.
Your ears are closed to what I say, but I'll try anyway.
The magical part about humans is that we are all (well, most of us) born with the ability to work, and a certain level of intelligence.
I understand that without education, that intelligence is wasted.
However, your story is flawed. You give me a rigged problem, and tell me to "fix it now and prove you're right." Well, let me ask you, why is our man stuck in the sugar mine? Is he stuck because he can't own property? Is he stuck because income tax takes away any savings he might be able to accumulate? Is he stuck because the job doesn't pay enough to make ends meet?
Let's assume that last; the sugar mines are owned by greedy corporate bastards, and the miners are paid barely enough to live. Even if they are technically "free," the reality is that they are wage slaves.
Funny thing, people moved to America to escape that bullshit. Because in a free, low-regulation society, the type of scenario you describe does not exist, or if it does, never lasts long. Disagree? Prove me wrong. Every time a situation like you describe exists, the whole structure is held up from the top through the use of authoritarian force.
American slaves? They were forced. Do not try to tell me how their plight disproves my thesis, because their society was most certainly not free.
The poor in America are rich not because of government welfare, but because our grandfathers and their fathers lived in a freer society; a society where anyone could work and enjoy the fruits of their labor. A society where you could keep and spend your profit as you saw fit, and never see it siphoned off to feed some maniac's war in Random Dirtbowl, Middle East. They created so much wealth that we have been able to ride on their shirt-tails for decades and still be the wealthiest nation on the planet.
It sounds utopian, but that's why so many millions of people voluntarily moved here in the past.
In a classically liberal society, the only people without money are the ones who spend it all on booze and drugs. Anybody can work, and there's enough money changing hands to support the few who can't out of church and family coffers.
Education is a non-issue.
Yes, I see things through rose-colored glasses. But, that was the American dream. It still is my dream. And right now, it is only a dream, but don't blame the dream for not being reality. Blame yourself for not seeing the truth of how these things work.
C
but I think slashdot has finally gotten *worse* than digg.
You can't get rid of taxes and keep the programs.
If you want welfare, you need the taxes to pay for it. That is absolute.
I hold that without taxes and economic restrictions (minimum wage, sales tax, currency inflation, and so on), those people now on welfare will find it startlingly easy to support themselves.
I can describe the general effects of true deregulation on housing, banking, food, and so on, but it has all been described by others. I will simply say that true deregulation leads directly to higher quality for those able to pay, and more availability for those who can't.
Briefly, let me describe housing. In my current home state of Rhode Island, we have strict housing controls. When you go and rent an apartment, you are pretty much guaranteed a baseline quality, and so on. Unfortunately, single-room apartments start at $600/month in Providence. In North Attleboro, and outlying city 30 minutes away, apartments start at $400. How in the world can a minimum wager earning $270/week (before taxes) support that? But without housing controls, housing would be available at much cheaper rates.
Would it be as safe? Would it have the same quality? NO! But at least it would be *available*. And *that* is why housing controls, food regulations, minimum wages, and all the other programs to 'help the disadvantaged' are so incredibly destructive; they price basic needs and services completely out of the reach of marginal earners. Without this basic foothold, they can't start the climb.
So, no welfare + no taxes = teh monies!
Of course, almost the entire population has been taught the (false) reasoning behind a mammoth welfare state. People believe in their education implicitly, and have an instant, negative gut reaction to anything that challenges this false belief.
Thus I don asbestos underwear!
C
where they encourage the killing of female infants, the execution of dissidents (not POW's, or even SUSPECTED POW's, just people the government doesn't like) and the squelching of free expression and religious freedom?
You didn't get modded down because people disagree, you got modded down cause you're a delusional apologist who's too stupid to do any fact checking.
And as an aside, no one gives a shit what you think.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
Liar
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
You did exactly what I assumed you would do. Your basic message is, "having lost access to public education, the poor would pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and find ways to educate their children. Anyone who doesn't, well, it's due to their own poor choices, so somehow that's okay." It really isn't. If a child cannot get an education because of her parents' irresponsible and self-destructive choices, then she is being punished for something entirely beyond her control. That is wrong, and it's bad for society.
Right now, there are millions of people out there trying to support families on minimum wage or near-minimum wage jobs. By the time they budget for the absolute necessities of life, there is nothing left. Asking them to cough up an additional four or five thousand dollars to get three kids educated at the local "Learnin' R Us" is unrealistic. Your belief that no Americans are really "wage slaves" is also unrealistic. It happens all the time, in every city.
The fact is, educating millions of poor children costs a lot of money. Right now, the money for even our current, underfunded education system comes from property taxes. If the government got out of the business of providing that service, what do you think the businesses who receive the tax break will do?
A) Give the money to educational charities.
B) Pass the money on to their workers, allowing them to make up the shortfall and fund their kids' educations.
C) Send their own kid to Stanford instead of an in-state college?
Now, which of the three is best for society? Having a well-funded educational system for the poor is far, far more valuable than giving a few people an exceptional education rather than a merely excellent one. As far as I'm concerned, a government has three responsibilities: to protect the lives and rights of its people, to "promote the general welfare" by providing assistance to the poor, and to act on behalf of its citizens in providing services that will benefit everyone, when those services would not be sufficiently provided by a free market. Public education is one of those things that simply will not be sufficiently funded without government support. If you don't have children, you won't fund education (despite the obvious long-term benefits). If you do have children, you'll spend whatever you can on their education. So rich children get outstanding educations. Middle-class kids get decent educations. Poor kids get crappy-to-none. That is a crappy system for those who believe all children should have equal access to education, as well as for those who believe that educational resources ought to be spent based on a child's demonstrated ability to benefit.
Education is a societal good. An educated citizenry benefits all of society. Therefore, everyone in society ought to cough up. If the rich or deeply religious want to opt out and give their children an education more to their tastes, they can pay for private school, but they shouldn't be able to siphon money away from the public system to do it. We don't subsidize people who opt out of the public water system by buying bottled water, do we?
I wish you'd stop calling it a "classically liberal" society, because as ingratiating as the label may be to liberals, it's really just a codeword for "dog-eat-dog libertarian hellhole." A modern liberal society is as superior to a libertarian society as a libertarian society is to an authoritarian monarchy or a dictatorship.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Then why does the final settlement say this
"FINAL JUDGMENT
(November 12, 2002)
WHEREAS, plaintiffs United States of America ("United States") and the States of New York, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina and Wisconsin and defendant Microsoft Corporation ("Microsoft"), by their respective attorneys, have consented to the entry of this Final Judgment;
AND WHEREAS, this Final Judgment does not constitute any admission by any party regarding any issue of fact or law; "
http://www.usdoj.gov/atr/cases/f200400/200457.htm
Read, be enlightened, then stop spreading your opinion as though it were fact.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
"Those poor and downtrodden are there because..."
they choose to be.
The poor (with precious few exceptions) behave in ways that extend their poverty. They learned bad habits, and those habits keep them poor.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
You need to look into the different types of shares. Some have voting priveleges, some do not.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
The government should govern and make sure that everyone plays a fair game and is protected from each other and foreign entities. Providing for the general welfare does not imply that it should 'provide welfare'.
Schools for poor uneducated children can be setup by private/charitable organizations, and the government can provide tax incentives to companies that give donations to the schools. Since we will have much lower taxes when the government is smaller, we will have more money to give to charitable organizations. Let's face it, the government stinks at providing services. Competition is what brings prices down and increases the quality of service.
Curiously, Larry Brilliant was also co-founder of The Well, "the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link" in 1985, which for those of you old enough to have a sense of Internet History, was one of the first online communities whose members "have gone into business together, fallen in and out of love, cultivated feuds, taken kickass vacations together and enriched lives."
So nothing like Slashdot then.
http//www.well.com/
If Google (or any philanthropist) wants to really help a poor country, persuading them to depose their theocratic / despotic / fascist / socialist / puppet Governments and replace them with a constitutionally-bound Republic would be a good start.
...etc.)
...etc.
I am not disputing that classical liberalism is a good thing (tm), and that getting rid of bad governments is, in general, a good thing.
However, having a republic and democracy in place is no cure in and of its own to poverty.
The proof is that there are democratic countries where the majority of the population is poor (Philippines, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, some in Central and Latin America, others in Africa,
These countries are mired by other ills, such as corruption, mismanagement,
Democracy is merely a nice thing to have. It is not enough on its own. It also has to come from within, not be imposed externally, otherwise it does not take root, and fails quickly.
As for republic or not, this is immaterial to economic well being in and of itself.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
3) Threatened the OEM contracts of those PC makers that bundled Netscape on their boxes
4) Paid bounties to prominent web sites with "Best Viewed with IE" tags
- Pay to distribute free privacy software translated into Chinese
- Pay to improve free operating systems and applications for the poor
- Pay to install internet access libraries for the poor
Just because you're required to make profitable business decisions doesn't mean you have to give up your values. Besides, a lot of the things certain groups of people value actually are altruistic.
the poor of this country are considerably better off than even the rich of many third-world countries.
An excellent point. It's also true that the poor of the 21st century are considerably better off than the rich of the 18th century. I'd rather be a poor person today -- having the benefit of running water, central heating, and electric lights in my low-income housing; driving a beater car for which I paid $500, and reading Slashdot on a used PC for which I paid $40 -- than a rich person in the 1700s, with no hope of aquiring any of these things.
The poor would be pretty appreciative of how good they have it, if they had a little historical perspective.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
England has had a parliament for hundreds of years, in fact it was long established by the time of the american revolution.
In addition, objective historians still believe that had we actually received parliamentary representation at the time we could have been more free than we are currently, because of how their system was set up at the time.
When you break it down it wasn't about parliamentary representation, the revolution was about dollars, plain and simple. Americans at the time didnt want to be taxed, so they revolted.
If i remember correctly before the revolt there was an offer for american representation in the parliament which was refused because people just didnt want to take responsibility by paying taxes, but I could be mistaken in that one.
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All of a sudden, that hard line is a quite a bit softer and harder to define...
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Historically, both Greek democracies and Roman republics were short-lived. These are just about our only other only other historic examples of such ruling systems.
OTOH, a few years ago Iceland celebrated the 1000th annual gathering of their parliament ("Ting" in Icelandic). This was, of course, firmly ignored by people in some other countries who like to think that they invented democracy, yadda, yadda. And Iceland isn't the only place with a democratic tradition older than the US.
The longest-lived systems are more along the lines of emperial monarchies, whose lines can stretch for millenia.
Well, maybe, but you won't find too many of them that have really lasted that long, without violent overthrow or more subtle assassinations by their relatives. Generally this took out a good part of the commoner population in the process. It's not easy to find a country with a ruling line that actually goes back even a single millennium. The main one seems to be Japan.
Human government seems to be inherently unstable. If you take a good look at the US government right now, you'd be hard put to declare it especially stable.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
You missed the sarcasm of my "benevolent" comment. I agree with you.
It's not naive to think otherwise: It's to simply look at the state of public education in America today and think "ye, gods!" If our public education system is so grand, why are we getting our asses handed to us from the east AND west? Why can parochial schools spending a tenth of the budget (there's some of your private education working, by the way) turn out kids that do just as well or better on any standardized test?
You want to bring this whole thing into a big old debate about libertarianism, have fun talking to yourself (and don't give me your absolute trash about modern liberalism being so much better - the corruption is abhorrent; I can't believe you don't see it).
Then you go into something about how a democracy lets you vote yourself some "free" stuff. Yeah, fantastic.
Private education CAN take up the slack. You bullshit line about capitalism is wrong, plain and simple. Private education will work because whether or not people have money at the time, businesses in America NEED BRAINS. How stupid would it be for a company in our info-tech economy to just assume it'll find brains somewhere?
People are using public education as a baby-sitter for their kids now, and it's NOT WORKING. How much money do we have to waste on the current system before we try something different? Before you're satisfied that it's a waste?
Funny, sure reminds you of Bill Gates, except that they skipped the im-a-bad-rich-guy-who-wants-the-monopoly-and-with- a-dozen-anti-trust-cases-on-the-back step and went directly to please-remember-me-for-my-good-actions step.
Can't blame them for that!
You just got troll'd!
It is interesting to argue with a modern liberal, who is reasonably well-grounded in his (her? sorry) arguments.
All of what you say is true, especially that part about "public education is one of those things that simply will not be sufficiently funded without government support."
I cannot in good conscience argue with your positions, as the logic is clean, and properly backed with both history and scientific studies.
There are a couple minor nitpicks I have, most especially with you interpretation of my comments on wage slavery. I am a wage slave, and I see wage slaves by the thousands all around me. America is plagued with wage slavery. Moving on...
The principle problem with your argument is that is based on a faulty premise. You believe that government will do a good job educating our children.
I hold firmly that they have not, do not, and will not. History supports my position. Almost every government on our planet eventually ends up with the likes of Nero, Stalin, Hitler, or Pol Pot at the head. This happens for a variety of different reasons. However, a general, long-term ignorance in the base population concerning simple economic and political theory is the usual root cause. Hitler didn't suddenly appear on the political scene. The machinations that put him in power started years before he was born. Our Hitler isn't in power yet, but the machinations have certainly started.
I know I cannot trust my government to provide an education to my children that will give my children the mental tools to radically improve our government when it starts going out of control.
Once that argument is made, the only possible item on the agenda is how to make it possible for private and home education to function and freely, openly, and popularly as possible.
You trust your government with your children's minds. I also trust my government, but only to betray my life and my children's lives for Caesar's best interests.
C
You make it sound like I'm just a poor sap who read the preamble to the Constitution and misunderstood horribly. Quite the contrary, I sincerely believe that sometimes the best way for the government to "promote the general welfare" is to actually provide welfare.
I already answered your claim that private charity will make up any shortfall. Sure, if a person has more money, they're likely to drop some small fraction of their increase on schooling for the poor. But what fraction? 5%? 10%? You don't really think that the person who just had his property taxes slashed by $1200 a year is going to turn around and give most of that to schooling for the poor, do you? Or do you believe that the public education system wastes 95% of its money, so the 5% will be sufficient? Either way, you sound like you're living deep in some fantasy land.
Nor do I believe your blanket statement, "The government stinks at providing services." The free market is generally more efficient, I'll agree, but it's only good at filling the needs of those who have the money to make it worth the free market's time. Public education isn't that sort of situation, not for the poor.
You come back with a specific proposal for making the public education system leaner, more responsive, and more effective (there are plenty out there), I'm all ears. But enough of this hand-waving "the free market will take care of everything" mentality. It's just uninformed demagoguery.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Your faith in your corporate overlords is disturbing. Why would they care about educating the youth of America, when they can get educated Indian and Chinese without paying a cent towards educating them? Perhaps, their consciences will make them care? Or are you putting your hope in their loyalty towards the American Worker?
You're absolutely right: businesses in America need brains. But given the choice between growing them locally and bribing Congress to raise the number of H1B visas, which do you think they'll decide is cheaper?
No, don't expect more than a pittance in voluntary education funding from the private sector.
We're not getting our asses handed to us by free-market private schools in other countries, but by their public education systems (name me a counterexample, please). Therefore, claiming that it's our inability to properly embrace free-market education that is leaving us at a competitive disadvantage is dishonest. Parochial schools (besides being a breeding ground for right-wing nutjobs) are doubtless less efficient than you claim. First, they have no obligation to educate every child that comes to them, and there is no obvious way to compare test scores when the school has the right to expel all the dumb kids. Second, you're claiming they can do the same job on 1/10th the budget, which is absurd. Utah spends about $5000/student, and I've never seen any private school anywhere advertise a tuition of $500/year. Again, feel free to show me a counterexample.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I'm not going to argue that the current education system doesn't need a major overhaul. It's expensive, it does a terrible job of teaching critical thinking skills, and the kids are bored out of their minds. The whole thing needs a major overhaul, starting with a major scaling back of administration costs, better salaries to attract more competent teachers, and a much more modern system for testing children's competencies. All those days filling out bubble sheets. Ick.
I don't know how to answer your distrust of government. Sometimes I'm not even able to answer my own. Any public institution becomes dangerous when a dictator comes to power. However, I believe a widely educated population does act as a check on that sort of abuse, and I'm still not convinced that there is a pure free-market solution for making that happen.
The government I'm often defending around here isn't the government we actually have. It's some mythical creature of my own fantasies, that tries to be fair, efficient, responsible, and accountable. I believe it's possible to have such institutions, in both the public and private sector. But I'm dangerous when I lose sight of the fact that they are uncommon if they exist at all (which I'm prone to do when I hear people shouting about how the only good government is a dead government).
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
One could tackle the problem threefold:
1. Offer tax incentives to free market schools to take on low income students.
2. Offer tax incentives to those who give to a "free market school grant charity." These charities then attach the money to the student rather than the free market school so that the schools must compete for the student.
3. For any shortfall in "free market school grant charity" money, the government can offer grants to make up the difference up to a certain amount. The student should feel a moral obligation to give to a "free market school grant charity" if they get a good paying job later in life.
It isn't impossible to do, you just have to think outside the socialist box.
I see. And I understand.
:) I've had a continual low-level dream of that sort of thing, but haven't seen how it could work in reality on anything larger than a casual family level (and only barely there!).
I also completely agree, as I have much the same problem with my own beliefs.
From a purely personal point of view, a proper benevolent dictatorship run by honest, dedicated, good people would be ideal. A program for the arts, a program to help struggling people get a foot up, a program to educate the poor, a flat and low tax, and so on. A delicate balance between providing nourishment for the beautiful and weak, while not collecting so much as to create weakness.
I am fortunate enough to have a good family, and we are pretty close. My father pays, I chip in as needed/wanted, my brothers and I help with running the business, and they earn a little here and there to help support things. In my opinion, that's how an ideal government would function.
Or is that the socialist ideal?
Thank you.
C
Ah... Now, you see, we're adding rules. He'd also object if, say, I tried to run off with his car or TV. Now we're protecting property through threat of force. He'd probably also object if I put up signs accusing him of pedophelia. Now we're protecting reputation through threat of force.
All of a sudden, that hard line is a quite a bit softer and harder to define...
Walking onto my property IS force, you are being there without permission.
Putting up signs accusing me of pedophelia? Go right on ahead. I don't care.
What, did I scare you off? Aren't you going to grace my reply by spewing out more of your misinformed rubbish?
Well aren't you quite fond of yourself?
I didn't reply because I don't seem to get email alerts when my posts are replied to by ACs. But anyway, it's good to hear that you were allowed to make a fool of yourself. Sounds like you had a blast. I'd direct somebody from my workplace here just to see his rebuttal but it really doesn't matter to me. You think China's amazing, awesome. Hell, everybody in China's happy. Great. I obviously don't care as much about this as you do and only made a speculative comment. You seem a bit to thrilled to come to China's defense but that's just an observation. Feel free to try to "scare [me] off" again.
"This is considered plagiarism."
And you seem just a little too eager to open your mouth to speak for about a billion people whom you incorrectly believe to be living in stifling oppression, an error that would be solved simply by paying attention to a greater diversity of news sources. Heck, even the Economist or the New York Times would be sufficient. Cultural ignorance as extreme as yours, unfortunately, seems to be becoming more and more commonplace as Americans cultivate their xenophobia to match Western Europeans' fever pitch.
Extreme? When did I say anybody would be lynched in the town square? You seriously need to remove the stick from your ass, you were able to go somewhere, good for you. Again, I made a simple passing comment and you attributed previous statements made by others to me. Now I'm glad you found a cause that makes you feel all tingly inside but there are more serious offenders to your cause.
Hell, I was only thinking that the extent of retaliation to vocal protest of national policies went as far as some extra harassment and maybe a less than favorable effect to one's reputation. If you'd get the fuck off your soap box you might notice that you're overreacting like a jackass.
"This is considered plagiarism."