Hey, moron, people do not solve world problems until they have solved their own problems. Like having a job. Specifically, having a job that gives them enough time and money for leisure activities.
You know what makes jobs? Having people attempt to purchase things from a company. At which point the company hires 'employees' to make those things and pays them money. This will cause those people to have the time and money to care about world problems.
In times of economic distress, you have to fix the economy first before individuals will worry about other problems, and investing in projects that then need to be built (As opposed to 'investing' via rent-seeking behavior, which is how the majority of 'investments' work.) is an excellent way to help fix the economy. Every dollar that isn't sitting unused in someone's bank account but is instead put into Kickstart is a dollar that someone else is paid via a job.
It doesn't mean that it won't provide a way for niche genres to get funding.
What I am hoping Kickstart does, at least for adventure gaming, is to 'unkill it'.
The death and subsequent fear of the US gaming industry to touch adventure games with a 10-foot pole was due entirely to chance, as one studio collapsed while the other changing direction, added on top of absurd over-expectations, largely thanks to Myst, which is still the most popular game in terms of 'copies sold per installed computer'. Which meant everyone cloned it and then became baffled that showing people computer-rendered pictures that you can click on things and make them move does not really count as 'a game', and Myst sold not as an 'adventure game' but as a 'novelty'.
So the market nonsensical ran away from adventure games.Leaving quite a few games in development hell for years as they lacked funding or the studio wouldn't release them, and then this inexplicably became part of the evidence that 'adventure games don't work'.
There is no actual reason to not make adventure games. They will never be Skyrim and sell for that much, but they could easily sell for half that, and be made in 1/10th the time and effort.
Especially considering that European adventure games have been doing it for the last decade and a half, from super-long and expensive to short and cheap. And then Telltale got into it...
At this point, I have no idea what's required to make EA look around and say 'Hey, let's spent $10 million and make an adventure game this year'. I don't expect Kickstart to actually fund the games, I expect it to produce some nice games that make money, and get the studios interested.
OTOH, nothing else seemed to do that, so who knows.
Or really, a single good game has been released from somebody who doesn't already have a large fanbase and nostalgia helping him get attention.
Anyone who thinks Kickstart is a reasonable development model is crazy.
I donate money to Kickstart adventure games, to show that adventure games actually do sell and have a large audience. (You'd think that the dozens of Europeans adventure games that have sold well in the US over the last decade would prove this, but apparently no.) I consider this a donation, in much the same way that I often purchase books I've already read and enjoyed. I hope a game comes out of it, but the purpose of the game is not for me (Although I will play it), it is for other companies to look at and say 'Hey, those games apparently sell, and are not that costly to make. Let's make one.'.
Perhaps that will also work for the sort of turn-based RPGs like Wasteland, like others are saying. (Although as that genre just moved on into more and more realism, instead of just vanishing for no real reason because the major studios folding for unrelated reasons and everyone else assumed they'd have another Myst and leaving when they didn't, I'm not sure it will work. But I will be happy to be wrong.)
As some sort of insane method to pre-purchase games that aren't even made? No. Kickstart should not be used for that.
I rather suspect you're having a problem with SMB, not XBMC.
I've never seen XBMC refuse to catalog anything with even close to the correct name. Ever. (In fact my biggest problem is sometimes it ends up cataloging stuff that isn't even shows, like the 'lost+found' or 'Transfer' directories.)
So if XBMC isn't seeing things, I suspect that's because XBMC isn't seeing things. XBMC uses different SMB networking code than Windows does. It has built-in cross-platform code.
However, I think you can force XBMC to use the Windows code if, instead of selecting an smb://computer/share/ path, which is what you get if you browse, you instead manually type the path as \\computer\share\. Alternately, you can mount it to a drive letter and browse to it that way.
(I am assuming you are using Windows. If your XBMC is on Linux, then you can obviously do the same by mounting the smb share somewhere and pointing to that path.)
As for Dr. Who, I have mine in a Doctor Who (2005) and it works fine.
When I upgraded from AGP to PCI-E, I had a spare motherboard and CPU and video card, so I just bought another case, another drive, threw Ubunto+XBMC on it, and hooked it to my TV. Tada.
Granted, that's currently running SD, but I get very confused as to people who think it's expensive, CPU and GPU-wise, to output HDMI, yet don't notice that any video card can do that...with rendered graphics in real time (aka, computer games) instead of just compressed stuff. HD output is just 1920 x 1080. You really can't even buy a x86 computer that cannot play videos at HD resolution. It is not 1999, we do not have computers that have trouble decoding Real Video or whatever, and it being on TV instead of a computer monitor is not magically making it harder to do.
You can literally walk into a computer store, pick the cheapest computer with a HDML or DVI out, buy an MCE remote thingy, install XMCMbuntu, make sure Samba is working to put files on there, and you're done. Or you can spend a little bit more and get it into a quiet 'entertainment center' case. But regardless, it's not rocket science, and half the people here already have at least half a computer laying around unused anyway. Spent $100-$200 to make it a real computer, and hook it to the TV.
It really does seem like people here some sort of odd irrational bet going on, or some irrational fear of computers, or like they literally have never heard of a 10-foot interface, and think 'computer' means 'Opening up Explorer and double-clicking things to open them in VLC.', and they want something that looks 'professional'.
Well, here's a fun fact: That computer I was talking about? I was living with my mother when I built it and put it in the living room, and I set it to automatically download TV shows off Usenet...and I left it when I moved out. And random guests of hers have no problem using it, and many seem baffled as to the idea it's just a computer and think it's some sort of Tivo thingy, and no one seems to notice there's a black computer box sitting sideways under the DVD player. (The only real annoyance is it's hard to find XBMC themes that work well on SD.)
Except that it is. Just as the American populace is subsidizing all those rich billionaires that are avoiding paying their fair share of taxes by exploiting tax loopholes.
As an aside, I hate it when those are called 'loopholes', like they're something that just accidentally happened that billionaires found, some obscure law that no one realized they could use that way.
When in reality most of them use the absurd 'We're going to tax money people made from various investments less than actual earned income' rule, which isn't any accident at all.
The mortgage subsidy is a significant subsidy towards homebuying. Anyone who has bought a house will easily contest to that. You can afford way more than you normally would be able to with that subsidy (like ~20-25% "more house").
I'm sure you can buy more house. Just like I can buy more food because I'm not paying 80% sales tax on it.
Subsidies are in comparison to some hypothetical 'norm'. Whether or not something is subsidized is compared to other options for that thing.
So the lack of tax on interest payment seems like it should be compared to other interest payments, like on credit cards...but purchasing housing with credit cards is not really an option anyway (It's not like you charge 10 years rent on a credit card and then have to pay it off.), so that's the wrong thing to compare to.
Now, purchasing a house vs. renting a house is supposedly subsidied...but not really as much as people think. For example, the interest issue is almost entirely moot, as rented properties are often owned outright. So while there's no property tax exemption passed along when renting, there's also no interest payment passed along.
Purchasing a house, monetarily, has always been more expensive than renting. The total amount of money that people pay will always be more, and the total amount paid in taxes will also be more, too. (On the plus side, you have a house at the end.) The reason renting costs what it does is entirely due to the fact that it's competing with purchasing houses, and thus can raise it's prices to be close to that.
Now, recently, pre-crash, owning a house appeared to be cheaper than renting a house, but that is completely due to banks and their insane loans.
A tax refund which refunds part of an explicit tax on something is not a subsidy, no.
I don't know why this is hard to understand. If I charge people $100 to cross a bridge, and then refund $60 at the other side, I am not subsiding bridge travel.
Refunds of general taxes for specific things are subsidizing those specific things. If it cost $100 to operate a car, and I gave $60 to everyone who crossed that bridge, yes, that would be a subsidy of bridge travel (compared to other driving paths).
But setting up a specific tax on the bridge, and then refunding part of it? Or setting up a specific tax on owning a house, and then refunding part of it? No, that's not a subsidy.
And as I pointed out, we've never taxed mortgage interest payments, so I'm a little baffled as to how they are supposedly 'subsidized'. What we started doing was, in the 1980s, started disallowing deductions of other types of interest payments.
You can stand there can call that a subsidy if you want, but the amount we tax mortgage tax payments has not changed in the entire history of the country, so pardon me if I don't quite see how it leads to a bubble.
Yes, I know what you mean....if we were talking about general taxes. I.e., if sales tax is, in general, 10%, but ice cream has a tax of only 5%, ice cream is subsidized, even while taxed.
But home-ownership has a specific tax, the property tax, on it. Nothing else has that tax. Slightly reducing that tax, via whatever means, is not a subsidy.
If ice cream (And nothing else) has an added ice cream tax of 20% on top of all other taxes, but you could get a tax rebate so it might only add 15%, ice cream would still not be subsidized.
People who purchase a house pay more in taxes than people who purchase a bunch of diamonds of equal value. (The diamond people just pay sales tax.) And people who own a house pay more in taxes than people who own a bunch of diamonds of equal value.(The diamond people aren't even taxed for ownership!)
You know, it's astonishing how the government subsidizes medical care so much via those things that many doctors are refusing to accept them because they pay so poorly.
It's like a government subsidy, but with a negative charge! They're subsidizing things with anti-money!
tax deductions for employers but not employees
*sigh*
Subsidizing the health insurance is not subsidizing health care.
If you want to make the case that health insurance costs going up is due to government subsidizes of them, feel free. (I, OTOH, think it's going up because of the monopolizing of the market, but don't feel like arguing, and it's essentially unprovable.)
The rest of us will be talking about what, as the original poster said, what made health care costs rise.
I guess you could be making the care that subsidizing health insurance is indirectly causing more demand in the health care market, which is causing prices to go up. But that doesn't really work, as health insurance rates are going down, and yet cost is still going up.
Tax rebates for mortgage interest rates and property taxes which renters don't get.
I love the idea that a tax rebate for property tax is a subsidy. I assure you, the tax rebate is less than the property tax is, unless you're paying a 105% tax rate or something. The government has put a specific, unique, extra tax on something, and then slightly refunded some of it. That is not a subsidy. That is an anti-subsidy. (Yes, yes, it's different levels of government, and if someone wants to point out that the Federal government is subsiding local governments, yes, it is. But no one is subsidizing houses.)
As for the mortgage interest, no one used to have to pay any tax on interest payments, and mortgage interest was carved out as an exception when other interest payments started being taxed in 1986. I understand what you are saying, but continuing to refrain from taxing something is not really 'subsidizing' it. Does the government subsidy candy by taxing cigarettes?
However, even if you count that as a subsidy, it's been around since 1986, so didn't have much to do with the recent bubble.
The cause of the recent bubble is not actually under dispute except by rather silly people. The bubble was indeed caused by too much money in the market, but that money was supplied by insane bankers who had (thought they had) figured out how to make loans that it didn't matter if people could pay off. The money was not supplied by government subsidies.
Anyone arguing otherwise is going to have to explain why the fuck the thing crashed...subsidies may cause long-term price increases, but can't cause exploding bubbles. (Unless they get removed suddenly, I guess, but that didn't happen.)
I did not say that health care was not price controlled. I said it wasn't government subsidized.
The motive for declining insurance and MM? MM did not pay the expenses and were costing him a great deal of money and aggravation.
You realize you just described essentially the opposite of a subsidy, right? Where the government pays less than the actual market price? (I actually was going to mention the 'inverse subsidy' of Medicare in my original post, but was in a hurry and couldn't phrase it right.)
I'm starting to think no one here has the slightly idea of what qualifies as a subsidy and what doesn't.
A direct subsidy is when a 'buyer' something from a seller for $100, and a third party also hand the seller a check for $50 at the same time. An equivalent indirect subsidy is when the the buyer buys something from a seller for $150, and a third party later hands the buyer a check for $50. And in 'government subsides, the third party is 'the government', and this is usually done via taxes refunds, or via special loans.
What I described is what the phrase 'government subsidy' means. Nothing else whatsoever is a government subsidy.
'Price controls' and 'subsidies' are not the same thing. There are indeed price controls in the health care industry, not just from government insurance but from all insurance companies, and they are, in fact, making prices go higher for people not covered under those price controls. This is causing the cost of care for uninsured people to skyrocket, which I know as I am one of them.
I completely agree with that, and it's entirely possible that such a thing is what is causing high medical prices in general, although I suspect that's just part of it. However, most importantly for my point, those are not subsidies in any sense.
Those are third parties (Insurance companies, be it the government or otherwise) using external pressure (Threat of not sending any business that way) to force sellers to accept less money from buyers.
Yes, the fact it's insurance and the third party ends up eventually covering the cost and reimbursing the buyer is confusing, but that doesn't make it as subsidy, anymore than giving someone some money to go to the machine and buy you a soda is them subsidizing your soda. (And giving them 75 cents and having their bulk purchasing power demand they can buy them for 30 cents each is the opposite of them 'subsidizing the cost of soda'.)
To think of it this way, if subsidizing things was a crime, it would be bribery of buyers and/or sellers: If you sell this to him I'll give you or him some money.
What insurance companies do with medical prices, OTOH, is more akin to extortion of sellers: If you don't give him a good deal, I'll take him, and all the rest of my people, elsewhere. (And, indeed, some doctor have responded to 'If I'm going to lose money, fine, you go ahead and leave.' In fact, some doctors have done that for all insurance.)
Dd you just assert that the reduction of taxes that the government explicitly placed on something is a subsidy? That if the government lowers the cigarette tax from $3 to $2 a pack, it has subsidized cigarettes?
Before people respond, let me point out that I know the government can subsidy things via tax rebates.
However, there's a difference between 'We will give you an income tax rebate of $X for every kilowatt of solar power you install' (Which is a subsidy) and 'We have put an additional tax on a specific thing (In addition to all other taxes), but we are going alter that amount to be slightly lower'.
Property taxes, in general, reduce the amount of money that home-owners have to purchase houses. They are the exact inverse of a subsidy! Reducing that inverse is not a subsidy, it's just less of an anti-subsidy.
If there were no taxes (Other than general sales tax, I guess) on a house, and the government gave homeowners a tax rebate of $10,000 a year, that would be a subsidy.
However, in the real world, I suspect that at no point does owning a home cause money flow to in a positive direction from government to homeowner...it just sometimes flows slightly less the other way.
Have you ever heard of Medicare, Medicaid, State health plans (Oregon Health Plan where I live), Social Security Disability,
Wow, you stand there and list insurance as if it's a subsidy. How idiotic.
Fanny Mae, Freddy Mac
Do you even have the slightest idea what those companies do? (Or that, in fact, they are not government?) Hint: They do not interact with property owners.
the mortgage tax write off, property tax tax write off
Dd you just assert that the reduction of taxes that the government explicitly placed on something is a subsidy? That if the government lowers the cigarette tax from $3 to $2 a pack, it has subsidized cigarettes?
That is perhaps the dumbest definition of a subsidy I have ever heard.
FHA loans
...and now I think you've forgotten the original discussion. Yes, the FHA is a subsidy of housing, you are correct.
However, what we were actually talking about was whether subsidies caused the absurd housing prices recently.
You know, the houses that were so expensive they weren't eligible for FHA loans?
That was one of the stupidest posts I've ever read.
Firstly, I will start by saying your point about subsidies raising the cost of colleges is probably entirely right. It does, indeed, work that way, and part of the high cost is due to government subsidies. (Which is a problem that is very solvable.) Another part is, for quite some time, employment has been a 'buyers market', with businesses thinking of increasingly idiotic ways to filter applicants, and college was the first filter added. Thus adding (pointless) demand, and thus raising prices. (Which is something I'm not sure how to solve.)
However, the rest of your post is extremely stupid, because the government subsides neither health care nor housing.
There is no government entity paying part of the cost of housing to any large amount, and in the very few circumstances such a system existed, it exists to cover rent, and had nothing to do with purchase of housing.
If you want to blame government subsidies of low-income apartments for raising the rents of such apartments, feel free, but that had fuck-all to do with the bubble, which happened because banks were (pretending to) subsides the housing market via loans. (Which they were doing because they were playing a complicated game by trading the loans.)
I.e, the increase in price in the housing market was, indeed, completely due to the fact that people were not paying full price for their house, or rather that banks no longer cared if people could pay for their house in the long term. That free money or rather the perceived free money, did indeed make housing prices go up...but didn't have anything whatsoever to do with the government.
Saying 'The government covering a few hundred dollars rent for the crappy apartments of a hundred poor people caused $400,000 a house subdivision houses to be built nearby.' is completely nonsensical. I'm pretty sure this is some of the 'The government caused it all by the CRA' bullshit that idiots cite, except you appear to have failed to notice the CRA didn't subside anything at all.
As for health care, I can't even figure out what you mean. The government is selling insurance, just like the private market.What's more, it's insurance for people who the insurance companies are not competing over in the first place. (The poor cannot afford private insurance anyway, and the insurance companies sure as hell don't want to insure people over 60, which was the entire reason Medicare was created in the first place.) The government is, in no way, subsidizing anyone's insurance. There is no insurance out there that costs $500 a month and the government chipping in another $400. Such a thing does not exist in any manner.
Now, under the new law, poor people will, indeed, have their required insurance subsided...but unless there have been some recent developments in time travel I'm unaware of, this seems unlike to have caused problems before it starts.
why is it that those that can afford the very best fly across the world to get their care in the U.S.
Because the US is rigged to give 20% of its health care to the top 1%.
You know, like it does with income distribution.
If you can pay the rate of the top 1%, you can get great health care here.
And if you can get good group insurance, you can get moderately good health care.
It's everyone else who can't get health care: 1) The people with shitty group policies 2) The people without a group policy, who are then allowed to buy 'individual' insurance exactly as long as they make the insurance company money, and will be dropped via whatever excuse as soon as they stop being profitable 3) The people who could get individual insurance in theory but cannot actually afford a plan 4) The people who would be in group #2 but are not even allowed to buy insurance to start with because they started their adult life with a pre-existing condition, aka, the uninsurable
Yes, there are many cases of U.S. citizens going elsewhere for care, but these are for treatments that are not available or banned in the U.S.
This would be because other countries are not operating charities for Americans who cannot afford health care here, and if they did they would be quickly overrun. Hence other countries require you to be a citizen, or at least a legal resident, to get insurance there.
I.e., if you need a heart transplant, you can't just fly to France, buy 'insurance' and get the transplant at the amount it would cost a French person.
However, you have clearly failed to watch Sicko, which had exactly that sort of thing going on: People sneaking into Canada and, with the collusion of Canadian citizens, pretending to be Canadians themselves to get health care they couldn't afford in the US. The reason you don't hear much about this is it is, in fact, fraud and thus illegal, so people are unlikely to wander around proclaiming they do it.
And it also had people buying prescription drugs in Cuba. Which is not, I think, illegal in Cuba per se, but it would be illegal under US law as trade with Cuba, and it's tricky bringing prescriptions into the US.
The one circumstance where it is mostly legal, ordering grey market prescriptions from out of the country, you hear about all the time.
Yes, the dealership shave the power to magically decide the direction of GM's business, but somehow don't have the clout to keep thousands of them from being shut down because GM cannot afford them.
I'm pretty sure that GM killed the EV-1 because it would never produce service revenues. Dealerships make a lot of money on service and can't exist without it.
And why the fuck would GM care about the dealership's profits?
I think some people don't understand how the auto industry works. GM is not there to make the dealers money. GM, in fact, often squeezes dealers' profits.
GM is not going to refrain from doing something that would let it sell more cars because it will hurt the dealer's feelings.
And I am baffled as to what you think would happen to dealerships without them having to do repairs. Of course they would still exist, although there would probably be less of them as they would be less profitable. Hell, dealerships cost GM money (Because they get free cars until they sell them.), and they just ran around shutting a bunch of them down.
California wanted to have stricter standards before now; we actually voted for them! But the federal government told us (on behalf of the automakers) that it would shit in our cheerios if we didn't give that up. A cartel of automakers with sufficient government influence successfully prevented us from exercising our rights as a state to control what is sold within our borders
Yes, and that is an example of automakers doing something that benefits them. Specifically, emission controls cost money, and do not sell cars, so they don't want to do it, and fight laws that require it. (And, for even more fun, other countries already have those rules, resulting in cars from other countries sold here having tighter emission controls than they need, which costs money, or being built differently, which also costs money.)
You'll notice when car makers are colluding to influence what sort of cars we get, it's rather noticeable. And presents a hilariously odd question: Why are they hiding their anti-electric and anti-water-car and whatever conspiracies so well, but somehow have utterly failed to hide their manipulation of the emissions law?
Is it so implausible that a cartel of automakers with ties to oil companies are exerting their government influence to prevent other automakers from competing them out of existence?
And it's somehow doing this in other countries, also, as you will notice the lack of Germans driving around in German automobiles that get 100 MPG. The long arm of GM has no limits.
And let's not even try to figure out how the laws are stopping this. There is nothing in the law that requires any specific sort of engine. There are safety standards for a car, and emission standards, and of course it has to have the right lights and steering wheels and whatnot, but there's not anywhere in the law that would stop VW from showing up and getting an electric Bug certified.
Someone's about to rant about patents, which is indeed a law that could stop it. But guess what? People have been claiming that 'patents' have been stopping 'miracle cars' for decades. I have personally been hearing that 'patents' stop people from having those cars for long enough for all patents to expire.
Pretty much every patent out there is patented and used, and most of them are just on battery tech, and we're talking maybe 10% difference with those patents.
while their reason for arrest was invalid, it most certainly was not "clearly bogus".
Are you an idiot?
The police are allowed to arrest people who they suspect have broken the law.
The 'this person is the one who broke the law' is debatable, and no one suggest police officers should be sued over that. (All the police can do is hold someone for a day or two anyway, anything past that, it's the DA fucking up, not the police.)
Likewise, 'What this person is doing is in violation of the law' is also debatable. It can look like someone is breaking into a house, but it turns out it's their house. No one suggests lawsuits belong there.
What is not debatable is the actual law. When the police arrest people for things that are not crimes, you fucktard, of course they should be held liable. The police are only allowed to arrest people for violating an actual law.
They arrested him on three completely nonsensical charges. Assisting in the escape of a prisoner (Which was so bogus the DA refused to prosecute), disturbing the peace (Which he was not doing, and they dropped.) and violating the wiretapping law, which requires secretly recording people, while he was doing in clear sight of everyone.
None of his actions were ever in dispute. This is not 'We suspected that he was doing X, a crime, but he was not'. This was 'We all admit, from the start, he was doing X, which is not a crime, but we arrested him anyway.'
It's worth noting that it took several different levels of police investigation and a court of law to finally find it bogus. Which strongly suggests that a police officer on the street was indeed acting in good faith.
Hey, look, in this fucktard's universe the fact the police's own investigation repeatedly upheld a clearly bogus arrest somehow means that arrest was justified, instead of demonstrate, as has been repeatedly pointed out, that the police are utterly unaccountable to anyone.
There is a difference between arresting someone because the police wrongly think the person is guilty of an actual crime, and arresting someone they think is 'guilty' of something that is not, in fact, illegal.
Especially when the reason they do that is because the person is documenting their misbehavior.
No one says the police should be charged with anything if, while investigating a real crime, they arrest the wrong person. The police have a much lower standard than the courts, and do not have to prove people are guilty before arresting them. That is for the court system to prove.
But that's not the same thing as seeing someone and arresting them for no reason, or just making up a clearly bogus reason.
Conspiracy theories about automobiles are incredibly stupid. Car makers do not care about gasoline usage. The idea that car companies would stand with a carburetor that gets 100 MPG in one hand that they could sell to make everyone buy their car, vs. the oil companies objection that...what? Why does the auto maker care about oil companies? (And they act it's asserted this was patented in the 70s shows two things.a) Idiots don't know how patents work, and b) idiots don't know how long patents are.)
Claiming they care about car repairs, is, admittedly, novel, but also doesn't stand up to logic. Car companies do not really make money off aftermarket parts, their suppliers do. In fact, they'd much rather not have to do anything, at least until their warranty runs out.
...although the idea that electric cars somehow 'do not need maintenance' is near nonsensical. Electric cars have AC, brakes, windows, etc, all the stuff that normal cars have minus the gasoline engine, and the idea that electric engines are so much easier to repair than gasoline engines is not supported by any evidence at all.
Nor, as I said, does repair matter for car makers. They aren't running repair shops. (Sometimes dealers are, but a good portion of that is warranty, which cost car makers money, and the rest is negligible to the car maker.)
Basically, to accept any sort of conspiracy about auto makers, you have to assume that, for some reason they aren't doing something that would make them a boatload of money, because...uh...it would reduce profits of some different people completely unconnected with the auto industry. And you must assert that all auto makers are refraining from doing this, even ones in Japan and Germany and whatnot.
Of course, considering how doing this is orders of magnitude harder in effort spent than just fooling the operator into letting the software run, it will continue to mostly be done for industrial espionage/targeted reasons, not for adding home users to an uberbotnet.
The interesting fact about software is that it only needs to be written once.
For another, there'd still be tons of "politics and bureaucracy" in figuring out the premium that applies to each driver-vehicle pair.
That's only because everyone has inexplicably decided to do it as 'insurance'.
Everyone should pay the same amount in 'insurance premiums', aka, car taxes. If people cause car accidents, the government should fine them. They shouldn't be 'punished' by having some third party, or even the government, raise insurance premiums. Cause a car accident, pay a fine of X, and everyone else get some money to fix their car. (Comprehensive insurance, of course, would still exist, and possibly even a system where fines could be paid off over a few years.)
Almost nothing the government does should be 'insurance', and absolutely nothing mandatory should be presented that way. Insurance is a voluntary, private industry idea to spread around risk, and makes no sense in the context of a government or any sort of regulation.
If we've decided that people who do certain things, (Or all people in all circumstances, like health care under the PPACA.) should have certain costs covered, then the government should just pay the fucking costs and stop trying to make it involve the 'insurance' industry, or even the insurance paradigm, which provides absolutely no benefit at all. If they need to also tax that activity, or tax people who delibrately do high-risk things,whatever, but that's rather unrelated to anything else.
My personal favorite is how publishers talk about advertising budgets and then authors end up having to arrange all of the book signings themselves as well pick up the travel expenses. The big publishers are fast on their way out and it can't come soon enough.
At some point the industry is going to flip around and authors will start hiring people (editors, packagers, etc) to do that stuff for them for a fixed cost up front, and then take all the profits. (Or do it for a percent of the profit for a more long-term relationship that includes book tours, but the point is, authors should be hiring publishers, not publishers hiring authors.)
Stopping 'bullying' is reasonable, as in, stopping actual assault and battery which happens all the time at schools. (Remember, just _threatening_ other people is assault.) It's entirely reasonable to say 'They are children, they should not be sent to jail for assault', but it's not reasonable to let it _continue_.
Sadly, schools have latched onto cyber-bullying as if it's an actual thing. Uh, no. All reported cases of 'cyber-bullying' that I can see were actually cyber-harassment and have fuck all to do with 'bullying'. (It would be possible to bully, aka, threaten, someone via electronic means, but really really stupid.)
So, basically, there are four things. Bullying inside and outside the school, and general harassment inside and outside the school that does not actually rise to the level of bullying.
Stuff inside the school should be dealt with at school, and is, frankly, the most important thing. Because outside of school children can just _stay away_ from each other. (And please note that 'inside the school' also includes after school activities and the ride home.)
If students harass and bully others outside of school, the school should inform the parents, and if it doesn't stop, invite both kids, their parents, and a judge to a meeting, and explain how they're going to help the victim's parents gets a 'restraining order', which will prohibit the asshat being within X yards of them, which means they won't be able to physically attend school due to their own stupidity. (And if there is 'bullying', aka, physically threatening behavior, they are also risking time in juvie.)
Schools cannot punish students for stuff outside of school, period. But we live in a nation of laws that doesn't let random people run around harassing other people, regardless of their age or school or whatever. It is, however, not the job of school administrators to enforce that law. But if school administrators notice violations of the law happening off school ground to a student, they should simply inform everyone and perhaps help parents a little with legal proceedings to stop it.
But all that assumes that schools actually care about 'bullying'. Someone informing their friends that they hate someone is not bullying. Or even harassment.(Something like following that person around repeating 'I hate you' would be harassment.) Someone talking about sex is not bullying. Students holding up a banner saying 'Bong hits for Jesus' is not bullying.
Schools are suffering the same problem as the police: They have been infested with control freaks who think they are literally allowed to control other people's actions in any way, instead of understanding they have been giving that 'control' for the sole purpose of maintaining order, and unless they are stopping some serious disorder, they are not supposed to be using it. These 'control powers' are supposed to be the last resort, and instead they have become the first resort.
So if you're sitting there after having pounded down several plates of food, they're perfectly within their rights to ask you to leave since they satisfied their end of the bargain.
Almost all 'all you can eat' buffets offers have 'limited to single visit' printed underneath. As does all signs saying 'free refills of drinks'. (1) People just don't notice that text, because it's what they assumed anyway.
Hence, if you sit there after eating, they will not throw you out.
I get a little confused at people who think they will. Seriously, everyone's talking about it, but has anyone ever tried eating two meals for one? I once ate at an all you can eat buffet, sat there and read a book for four hours, got a tiny bit more food, and left. They don't care, because people already gorge themselves at all you can eat, and can't functionally gain the ability to eat more after sitting there for a bit! (Granted, that was exactly one location, one time, so I have no idea how other places act, but assuming they all go 'You've eaten lunch, and you're clearly trying to stick around for dinner, so leave!' is probably wrong.)
They will, however, throw you (And all their customers) out when they close, at which point you are not longer on your original 'visit', so you must purchase another buffet the next day.
1) This is not the same thing as cell phone companies with random restrictions they claim they can change at any time and don't actually tell you before signing a contract. It's one restriction, that generally is identical everywhere that most people already understand, that they usually put on the sign itself so people can see it before purchase.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, moron, people do not solve world problems until they have solved their own problems. Like having a job. Specifically, having a job that gives them enough time and money for leisure activities.
You know what makes jobs? Having people attempt to purchase things from a company. At which point the company hires 'employees' to make those things and pays them money. This will cause those people to have the time and money to care about world problems.
In times of economic distress, you have to fix the economy first before individuals will worry about other problems, and investing in projects that then need to be built (As opposed to 'investing' via rent-seeking behavior, which is how the majority of 'investments' work.) is an excellent way to help fix the economy. Every dollar that isn't sitting unused in someone's bank account but is instead put into Kickstart is a dollar that someone else is paid via a job.
You are a complete idiot.
It doesn't mean that it won't provide a way for niche genres to get funding.
What I am hoping Kickstart does, at least for adventure gaming, is to 'unkill it'.
The death and subsequent fear of the US gaming industry to touch adventure games with a 10-foot pole was due entirely to chance, as one studio collapsed while the other changing direction, added on top of absurd over-expectations, largely thanks to Myst, which is still the most popular game in terms of 'copies sold per installed computer'. Which meant everyone cloned it and then became baffled that showing people computer-rendered pictures that you can click on things and make them move does not really count as 'a game', and Myst sold not as an 'adventure game' but as a 'novelty'.
So the market nonsensical ran away from adventure games .Leaving quite a few games in development hell for years as they lacked funding or the studio wouldn't release them, and then this inexplicably became part of the evidence that 'adventure games don't work'.
There is no actual reason to not make adventure games. They will never be Skyrim and sell for that much, but they could easily sell for half that, and be made in 1/10th the time and effort.
Especially considering that European adventure games have been doing it for the last decade and a half, from super-long and expensive to short and cheap. And then Telltale got into it...
At this point, I have no idea what's required to make EA look around and say 'Hey, let's spent $10 million and make an adventure game this year'. I don't expect Kickstart to actually fund the games, I expect it to produce some nice games that make money, and get the studios interested.
OTOH, nothing else seemed to do that, so who knows.
Or really, a single good game has been released from somebody who doesn't already have a large fanbase and nostalgia helping him get attention.
Anyone who thinks Kickstart is a reasonable development model is crazy.
I donate money to Kickstart adventure games, to show that adventure games actually do sell and have a large audience. (You'd think that the dozens of Europeans adventure games that have sold well in the US over the last decade would prove this, but apparently no.) I consider this a donation, in much the same way that I often purchase books I've already read and enjoyed. I hope a game comes out of it, but the purpose of the game is not for me (Although I will play it), it is for other companies to look at and say 'Hey, those games apparently sell, and are not that costly to make. Let's make one.'.
Perhaps that will also work for the sort of turn-based RPGs like Wasteland, like others are saying. (Although as that genre just moved on into more and more realism, instead of just vanishing for no real reason because the major studios folding for unrelated reasons and everyone else assumed they'd have another Myst and leaving when they didn't, I'm not sure it will work. But I will be happy to be wrong.)
As some sort of insane method to pre-purchase games that aren't even made? No. Kickstart should not be used for that.
I rather suspect you're having a problem with SMB, not XBMC.
I've never seen XBMC refuse to catalog anything with even close to the correct name. Ever. (In fact my biggest problem is sometimes it ends up cataloging stuff that isn't even shows, like the 'lost+found' or 'Transfer' directories.)
So if XBMC isn't seeing things, I suspect that's because XBMC isn't seeing things. XBMC uses different SMB networking code than Windows does. It has built-in cross-platform code.
However, I think you can force XBMC to use the Windows code if, instead of selecting an smb://computer/share/ path, which is what you get if you browse, you instead manually type the path as \\computer\share\. Alternately, you can mount it to a drive letter and browse to it that way.
(I am assuming you are using Windows. If your XBMC is on Linux, then you can obviously do the same by mounting the smb share somewhere and pointing to that path.)
As for Dr. Who, I have mine in a Doctor Who (2005) and it works fine.
$800 is actually very high.
When I upgraded from AGP to PCI-E, I had a spare motherboard and CPU and video card, so I just bought another case, another drive, threw Ubunto+XBMC on it, and hooked it to my TV. Tada.
Granted, that's currently running SD, but I get very confused as to people who think it's expensive, CPU and GPU-wise, to output HDMI, yet don't notice that any video card can do that...with rendered graphics in real time (aka, computer games) instead of just compressed stuff. HD output is just 1920 x 1080. You really can't even buy a x86 computer that cannot play videos at HD resolution. It is not 1999, we do not have computers that have trouble decoding Real Video or whatever, and it being on TV instead of a computer monitor is not magically making it harder to do.
You can literally walk into a computer store, pick the cheapest computer with a HDML or DVI out, buy an MCE remote thingy, install XMCMbuntu, make sure Samba is working to put files on there, and you're done. Or you can spend a little bit more and get it into a quiet 'entertainment center' case. But regardless, it's not rocket science, and half the people here already have at least half a computer laying around unused anyway. Spent $100-$200 to make it a real computer, and hook it to the TV.
It really does seem like people here some sort of odd irrational bet going on, or some irrational fear of computers, or like they literally have never heard of a 10-foot interface, and think 'computer' means 'Opening up Explorer and double-clicking things to open them in VLC.', and they want something that looks 'professional'.
Well, here's a fun fact: That computer I was talking about? I was living with my mother when I built it and put it in the living room, and I set it to automatically download TV shows off Usenet...and I left it when I moved out. And random guests of hers have no problem using it, and many seem baffled as to the idea it's just a computer and think it's some sort of Tivo thingy, and no one seems to notice there's a black computer box sitting sideways under the DVD player. (The only real annoyance is it's hard to find XBMC themes that work well on SD.)
Except that it is. Just as the American populace is subsidizing all those rich billionaires that are avoiding paying their fair share of taxes by exploiting tax loopholes.
As an aside, I hate it when those are called 'loopholes', like they're something that just accidentally happened that billionaires found, some obscure law that no one realized they could use that way.
When in reality most of them use the absurd 'We're going to tax money people made from various investments less than actual earned income' rule, which isn't any accident at all.
The mortgage subsidy is a significant subsidy towards homebuying. Anyone who has bought a house will easily contest to that. You can afford way more than you normally would be able to with that subsidy (like ~20-25% "more house").
I'm sure you can buy more house. Just like I can buy more food because I'm not paying 80% sales tax on it.
Subsidies are in comparison to some hypothetical 'norm'. Whether or not something is subsidized is compared to other options for that thing.
So the lack of tax on interest payment seems like it should be compared to other interest payments, like on credit cards...but purchasing housing with credit cards is not really an option anyway (It's not like you charge 10 years rent on a credit card and then have to pay it off.), so that's the wrong thing to compare to.
Now, purchasing a house vs. renting a house is supposedly subsidied...but not really as much as people think. For example, the interest issue is almost entirely moot, as rented properties are often owned outright. So while there's no property tax exemption passed along when renting, there's also no interest payment passed along.
Purchasing a house, monetarily, has always been more expensive than renting. The total amount of money that people pay will always be more, and the total amount paid in taxes will also be more, too. (On the plus side, you have a house at the end.) The reason renting costs what it does is entirely due to the fact that it's competing with purchasing houses, and thus can raise it's prices to be close to that.
Now, recently, pre-crash, owning a house appeared to be cheaper than renting a house, but that is completely due to banks and their insane loans.
A tax refund which refunds part of an explicit tax on something is not a subsidy, no.
I don't know why this is hard to understand. If I charge people $100 to cross a bridge, and then refund $60 at the other side, I am not subsiding bridge travel.
Refunds of general taxes for specific things are subsidizing those specific things. If it cost $100 to operate a car, and I gave $60 to everyone who crossed that bridge, yes, that would be a subsidy of bridge travel (compared to other driving paths).
But setting up a specific tax on the bridge, and then refunding part of it? Or setting up a specific tax on owning a house, and then refunding part of it? No, that's not a subsidy.
And as I pointed out, we've never taxed mortgage interest payments, so I'm a little baffled as to how they are supposedly 'subsidized'. What we started doing was, in the 1980s, started disallowing deductions of other types of interest payments.
You can stand there can call that a subsidy if you want, but the amount we tax mortgage tax payments has not changed in the entire history of the country, so pardon me if I don't quite see how it leads to a bubble.
Yes, I know what you mean....if we were talking about general taxes. I.e., if sales tax is, in general, 10%, but ice cream has a tax of only 5%, ice cream is subsidized, even while taxed.
But home-ownership has a specific tax, the property tax, on it. Nothing else has that tax. Slightly reducing that tax, via whatever means, is not a subsidy.
If ice cream (And nothing else) has an added ice cream tax of 20% on top of all other taxes, but you could get a tax rebate so it might only add 15%, ice cream would still not be subsidized.
People who purchase a house pay more in taxes than people who purchase a bunch of diamonds of equal value. (The diamond people just pay sales tax.) And people who own a house pay more in taxes than people who own a bunch of diamonds of equal value.(The diamond people aren't even taxed for ownership!)
That is not a subsidy.
Medicare, Medicaid
You know, it's astonishing how the government subsidizes medical care so much via those things that many doctors are refusing to accept them because they pay so poorly.
It's like a government subsidy, but with a negative charge! They're subsidizing things with anti-money!
tax deductions for employers but not employees
*sigh*
Subsidizing the health insurance is not subsidizing health care.
If you want to make the case that health insurance costs going up is due to government subsidizes of them, feel free. (I, OTOH, think it's going up because of the monopolizing of the market, but don't feel like arguing, and it's essentially unprovable.)
The rest of us will be talking about what, as the original poster said, what made health care costs rise.
I guess you could be making the care that subsidizing health insurance is indirectly causing more demand in the health care market, which is causing prices to go up. But that doesn't really work, as health insurance rates are going down, and yet cost is still going up.
Tax rebates for mortgage interest rates and property taxes which renters don't get.
I love the idea that a tax rebate for property tax is a subsidy. I assure you, the tax rebate is less than the property tax is, unless you're paying a 105% tax rate or something. The government has put a specific, unique, extra tax on something, and then slightly refunded some of it. That is not a subsidy. That is an anti-subsidy. (Yes, yes, it's different levels of government, and if someone wants to point out that the Federal government is subsiding local governments, yes, it is. But no one is subsidizing houses.)
As for the mortgage interest, no one used to have to pay any tax on interest payments, and mortgage interest was carved out as an exception when other interest payments started being taxed in 1986. I understand what you are saying, but continuing to refrain from taxing something is not really 'subsidizing' it. Does the government subsidy candy by taxing cigarettes?
However, even if you count that as a subsidy, it's been around since 1986, so didn't have much to do with the recent bubble.
The cause of the recent bubble is not actually under dispute except by rather silly people. The bubble was indeed caused by too much money in the market, but that money was supplied by insane bankers who had (thought they had) figured out how to make loans that it didn't matter if people could pay off. The money was not supplied by government subsidies.
Anyone arguing otherwise is going to have to explain why the fuck the thing crashed...subsidies may cause long-term price increases, but can't cause exploding bubbles. (Unless they get removed suddenly, I guess, but that didn't happen.)
I did not say that health care was not price controlled. I said it wasn't government subsidized.
The motive for declining insurance and MM? MM did not pay the expenses and were costing him a great deal of money and aggravation.
You realize you just described essentially the opposite of a subsidy, right? Where the government pays less than the actual market price? (I actually was going to mention the 'inverse subsidy' of Medicare in my original post, but was in a hurry and couldn't phrase it right.)
I'm starting to think no one here has the slightly idea of what qualifies as a subsidy and what doesn't.
A direct subsidy is when a 'buyer' something from a seller for $100, and a third party also hand the seller a check for $50 at the same time. An equivalent indirect subsidy is when the the buyer buys something from a seller for $150, and a third party later hands the buyer a check for $50. And in 'government subsides, the third party is 'the government', and this is usually done via taxes refunds, or via special loans.
What I described is what the phrase 'government subsidy' means. Nothing else whatsoever is a government subsidy.
'Price controls' and 'subsidies' are not the same thing. There are indeed price controls in the health care industry, not just from government insurance but from all insurance companies, and they are, in fact, making prices go higher for people not covered under those price controls. This is causing the cost of care for uninsured people to skyrocket, which I know as I am one of them.
I completely agree with that, and it's entirely possible that such a thing is what is causing high medical prices in general, although I suspect that's just part of it. However, most importantly for my point, those are not subsidies in any sense.
Those are third parties (Insurance companies, be it the government or otherwise) using external pressure (Threat of not sending any business that way) to force sellers to accept less money from buyers.
Yes, the fact it's insurance and the third party ends up eventually covering the cost and reimbursing the buyer is confusing, but that doesn't make it as subsidy, anymore than giving someone some money to go to the machine and buy you a soda is them subsidizing your soda. (And giving them 75 cents and having their bulk purchasing power demand they can buy them for 30 cents each is the opposite of them 'subsidizing the cost of soda'.)
To think of it this way, if subsidizing things was a crime, it would be bribery of buyers and/or sellers: If you sell this to him I'll give you or him some money.
What insurance companies do with medical prices, OTOH, is more akin to extortion of sellers: If you don't give him a good deal, I'll take him, and all the rest of my people, elsewhere. (And, indeed, some doctor have responded to 'If I'm going to lose money, fine, you go ahead and leave.' In fact, some doctors have done that for all insurance.)
Dd you just assert that the reduction of taxes that the government explicitly placed on something is a subsidy? That if the government lowers the cigarette tax from $3 to $2 a pack, it has subsidized cigarettes?
Before people respond, let me point out that I know the government can subsidy things via tax rebates.
However, there's a difference between 'We will give you an income tax rebate of $X for every kilowatt of solar power you install' (Which is a subsidy) and 'We have put an additional tax on a specific thing (In addition to all other taxes), but we are going alter that amount to be slightly lower'.
Property taxes, in general, reduce the amount of money that home-owners have to purchase houses. They are the exact inverse of a subsidy! Reducing that inverse is not a subsidy, it's just less of an anti-subsidy.
If there were no taxes (Other than general sales tax, I guess) on a house, and the government gave homeowners a tax rebate of $10,000 a year, that would be a subsidy.
However, in the real world, I suspect that at no point does owning a home cause money flow to in a positive direction from government to homeowner...it just sometimes flows slightly less the other way.
Have you ever heard of Medicare, Medicaid, State health plans (Oregon Health Plan where I live), Social Security Disability,
Wow, you stand there and list insurance as if it's a subsidy. How idiotic.
Fanny Mae, Freddy Mac
Do you even have the slightest idea what those companies do? (Or that, in fact, they are not government?) Hint: They do not interact with property owners.
the mortgage tax write off, property tax tax write off
Dd you just assert that the reduction of taxes that the government explicitly placed on something is a subsidy? That if the government lowers the cigarette tax from $3 to $2 a pack, it has subsidized cigarettes?
That is perhaps the dumbest definition of a subsidy I have ever heard.
FHA loans
However, what we were actually talking about was whether subsidies caused the absurd housing prices recently.
You know, the houses that were so expensive they weren't eligible for FHA loans?
That was one of the stupidest posts I've ever read.
Firstly, I will start by saying your point about subsidies raising the cost of colleges is probably entirely right. It does, indeed, work that way, and part of the high cost is due to government subsidies. (Which is a problem that is very solvable.) Another part is, for quite some time, employment has been a 'buyers market', with businesses thinking of increasingly idiotic ways to filter applicants, and college was the first filter added. Thus adding (pointless) demand, and thus raising prices. (Which is something I'm not sure how to solve.)
However, the rest of your post is extremely stupid, because the government subsides neither health care nor housing.
There is no government entity paying part of the cost of housing to any large amount, and in the very few circumstances such a system existed, it exists to cover rent, and had nothing to do with purchase of housing.
If you want to blame government subsidies of low-income apartments for raising the rents of such apartments, feel free, but that had fuck-all to do with the bubble, which happened because banks were (pretending to) subsides the housing market via loans. (Which they were doing because they were playing a complicated game by trading the loans.)
I.e, the increase in price in the housing market was, indeed, completely due to the fact that people were not paying full price for their house, or rather that banks no longer cared if people could pay for their house in the long term. That free money or rather the perceived free money, did indeed make housing prices go up...but didn't have anything whatsoever to do with the government.
Saying 'The government covering a few hundred dollars rent for the crappy apartments of a hundred poor people caused $400,000 a house subdivision houses to be built nearby.' is completely nonsensical. I'm pretty sure this is some of the 'The government caused it all by the CRA' bullshit that idiots cite, except you appear to have failed to notice the CRA didn't subside anything at all.
As for health care, I can't even figure out what you mean. The government is selling insurance, just like the private market .What's more, it's insurance for people who the insurance companies are not competing over in the first place. (The poor cannot afford private insurance anyway, and the insurance companies sure as hell don't want to insure people over 60, which was the entire reason Medicare was created in the first place.) The government is, in no way, subsidizing anyone's insurance. There is no insurance out there that costs $500 a month and the government chipping in another $400. Such a thing does not exist in any manner.
Now, under the new law, poor people will, indeed, have their required insurance subsided...but unless there have been some recent developments in time travel I'm unaware of, this seems unlike to have caused problems before it starts.
why is it that those that can afford the very best fly across the world to get their care in the U.S.
Because the US is rigged to give 20% of its health care to the top 1%.
You know, like it does with income distribution.
If you can pay the rate of the top 1%, you can get great health care here.
And if you can get good group insurance, you can get moderately good health care.
It's everyone else who can't get health care:
1) The people with shitty group policies
2) The people without a group policy, who are then allowed to buy 'individual' insurance exactly as long as they make the insurance company money, and will be dropped via whatever excuse as soon as they stop being profitable
3) The people who could get individual insurance in theory but cannot actually afford a plan
4) The people who would be in group #2 but are not even allowed to buy insurance to start with because they started their adult life with a pre-existing condition, aka, the uninsurable
Yes, there are many cases of U.S. citizens going elsewhere for care, but these are for treatments that are not available or banned in the U.S.
This would be because other countries are not operating charities for Americans who cannot afford health care here, and if they did they would be quickly overrun. Hence other countries require you to be a citizen, or at least a legal resident, to get insurance there.
I.e., if you need a heart transplant, you can't just fly to France, buy 'insurance' and get the transplant at the amount it would cost a French person.
However, you have clearly failed to watch Sicko, which had exactly that sort of thing going on: People sneaking into Canada and, with the collusion of Canadian citizens, pretending to be Canadians themselves to get health care they couldn't afford in the US. The reason you don't hear much about this is it is, in fact, fraud and thus illegal, so people are unlikely to wander around proclaiming they do it.
And it also had people buying prescription drugs in Cuba. Which is not, I think, illegal in Cuba per se, but it would be illegal under US law as trade with Cuba, and it's tricky bringing prescriptions into the US.
The one circumstance where it is mostly legal, ordering grey market prescriptions from out of the country, you hear about all the time.
Yes, the dealership shave the power to magically decide the direction of GM's business, but somehow don't have the clout to keep thousands of them from being shut down because GM cannot afford them.
I'm sure that makes sense in your head.
I'm pretty sure that GM killed the EV-1 because it would never produce service revenues. Dealerships make a lot of money on service and can't exist without it.
And why the fuck would GM care about the dealership's profits?
I think some people don't understand how the auto industry works. GM is not there to make the dealers money. GM, in fact, often squeezes dealers' profits.
GM is not going to refrain from doing something that would let it sell more cars because it will hurt the dealer's feelings.
And I am baffled as to what you think would happen to dealerships without them having to do repairs. Of course they would still exist, although there would probably be less of them as they would be less profitable. Hell, dealerships cost GM money (Because they get free cars until they sell them.), and they just ran around shutting a bunch of them down.
California wanted to have stricter standards before now; we actually voted for them! But the federal government told us (on behalf of the automakers) that it would shit in our cheerios if we didn't give that up. A cartel of automakers with sufficient government influence successfully prevented us from exercising our rights as a state to control what is sold within our borders
Yes, and that is an example of automakers doing something that benefits them. Specifically, emission controls cost money, and do not sell cars, so they don't want to do it, and fight laws that require it. (And, for even more fun, other countries already have those rules, resulting in cars from other countries sold here having tighter emission controls than they need, which costs money, or being built differently, which also costs money.)
You'll notice when car makers are colluding to influence what sort of cars we get, it's rather noticeable. And presents a hilariously odd question: Why are they hiding their anti-electric and anti-water-car and whatever conspiracies so well, but somehow have utterly failed to hide their manipulation of the emissions law?
Is it so implausible that a cartel of automakers with ties to oil companies are exerting their government influence to prevent other automakers from competing them out of existence?
And it's somehow doing this in other countries, also, as you will notice the lack of Germans driving around in German automobiles that get 100 MPG. The long arm of GM has no limits.
And let's not even try to figure out how the laws are stopping this. There is nothing in the law that requires any specific sort of engine. There are safety standards for a car, and emission standards, and of course it has to have the right lights and steering wheels and whatnot, but there's not anywhere in the law that would stop VW from showing up and getting an electric Bug certified.
Someone's about to rant about patents, which is indeed a law that could stop it. But guess what? People have been claiming that 'patents' have been stopping 'miracle cars' for decades. I have personally been hearing that 'patents' stop people from having those cars for long enough for all patents to expire.
Pretty much every patent out there is patented and used, and most of them are just on battery tech, and we're talking maybe 10% difference with those patents.
while their reason for arrest was invalid, it most certainly was not "clearly bogus".
Are you an idiot?
The police are allowed to arrest people who they suspect have broken the law.
The 'this person is the one who broke the law' is debatable, and no one suggest police officers should be sued over that. (All the police can do is hold someone for a day or two anyway, anything past that, it's the DA fucking up, not the police.)
Likewise, 'What this person is doing is in violation of the law' is also debatable. It can look like someone is breaking into a house, but it turns out it's their house. No one suggests lawsuits belong there.
What is not debatable is the actual law. When the police arrest people for things that are not crimes, you fucktard, of course they should be held liable. The police are only allowed to arrest people for violating an actual law.
They arrested him on three completely nonsensical charges. Assisting in the escape of a prisoner (Which was so bogus the DA refused to prosecute), disturbing the peace (Which he was not doing, and they dropped.) and violating the wiretapping law, which requires secretly recording people, while he was doing in clear sight of everyone.
None of his actions were ever in dispute. This is not 'We suspected that he was doing X, a crime, but he was not'. This was 'We all admit, from the start, he was doing X, which is not a crime, but we arrested him anyway.'
It's worth noting that it took several different levels of police investigation and a court of law to finally find it bogus. Which strongly suggests that a police officer on the street was indeed acting in good faith.
Hey, look, in this fucktard's universe the fact the police's own investigation repeatedly upheld a clearly bogus arrest somehow means that arrest was justified, instead of demonstrate, as has been repeatedly pointed out, that the police are utterly unaccountable to anyone.
There is a difference between arresting someone because the police wrongly think the person is guilty of an actual crime, and arresting someone they think is 'guilty' of something that is not, in fact, illegal.
Especially when the reason they do that is because the person is documenting their misbehavior.
No one says the police should be charged with anything if, while investigating a real crime, they arrest the wrong person. The police have a much lower standard than the courts, and do not have to prove people are guilty before arresting them. That is for the court system to prove.
But that's not the same thing as seeing someone and arresting them for no reason, or just making up a clearly bogus reason.
Indeed.
Conspiracy theories about automobiles are incredibly stupid. Car makers do not care about gasoline usage. The idea that car companies would stand with a carburetor that gets 100 MPG in one hand that they could sell to make everyone buy their car, vs. the oil companies objection that...what? Why does the auto maker care about oil companies? (And they act it's asserted this was patented in the 70s shows two things.a) Idiots don't know how patents work, and b) idiots don't know how long patents are.)
Claiming they care about car repairs, is, admittedly, novel, but also doesn't stand up to logic. Car companies do not really make money off aftermarket parts, their suppliers do. In fact, they'd much rather not have to do anything, at least until their warranty runs out.
Nor, as I said, does repair matter for car makers. They aren't running repair shops. (Sometimes dealers are, but a good portion of that is warranty, which cost car makers money, and the rest is negligible to the car maker.)
Basically, to accept any sort of conspiracy about auto makers, you have to assume that, for some reason they aren't doing something that would make them a boatload of money, because...uh...it would reduce profits of some different people completely unconnected with the auto industry. And you must assert that all auto makers are refraining from doing this, even ones in Japan and Germany and whatnot.
Of course, considering how doing this is orders of magnitude harder in effort spent than just fooling the operator into letting the software run, it will continue to mostly be done for industrial espionage/targeted reasons, not for adding home users to an uberbotnet.
The interesting fact about software is that it only needs to be written once.
For another, there'd still be tons of "politics and bureaucracy" in figuring out the premium that applies to each driver-vehicle pair.
That's only because everyone has inexplicably decided to do it as 'insurance'.
Everyone should pay the same amount in 'insurance premiums', aka, car taxes. If people cause car accidents, the government should fine them. They shouldn't be 'punished' by having some third party, or even the government, raise insurance premiums. Cause a car accident, pay a fine of X, and everyone else get some money to fix their car. (Comprehensive insurance, of course, would still exist, and possibly even a system where fines could be paid off over a few years.)
Almost nothing the government does should be 'insurance', and absolutely nothing mandatory should be presented that way. Insurance is a voluntary, private industry idea to spread around risk, and makes no sense in the context of a government or any sort of regulation.
If we've decided that people who do certain things, (Or all people in all circumstances, like health care under the PPACA.) should have certain costs covered, then the government should just pay the fucking costs and stop trying to make it involve the 'insurance' industry, or even the insurance paradigm, which provides absolutely no benefit at all. If they need to also tax that activity, or tax people who delibrately do high-risk things,whatever, but that's rather unrelated to anything else.
http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/joe-konrath-needs-to-shut-the-fuck-up/
My personal favorite is how publishers talk about advertising budgets and then authors end up having to arrange all of the book signings themselves as well pick up the travel expenses. The big publishers are fast on their way out and it can't come soon enough.
At some point the industry is going to flip around and authors will start hiring people (editors, packagers, etc) to do that stuff for them for a fixed cost up front, and then take all the profits. (Or do it for a percent of the profit for a more long-term relationship that includes book tours, but the point is, authors should be hiring publishers, not publishers hiring authors.)
Stopping 'bullying' is reasonable, as in, stopping actual assault and battery which happens all the time at schools. (Remember, just _threatening_ other people is assault.) It's entirely reasonable to say 'They are children, they should not be sent to jail for assault', but it's not reasonable to let it _continue_.
Sadly, schools have latched onto cyber-bullying as if it's an actual thing. Uh, no. All reported cases of 'cyber-bullying' that I can see were actually cyber-harassment and have fuck all to do with 'bullying'. (It would be possible to bully, aka, threaten, someone via electronic means, but really really stupid.)
So, basically, there are four things. Bullying inside and outside the school, and general harassment inside and outside the school that does not actually rise to the level of bullying.
Stuff inside the school should be dealt with at school, and is, frankly, the most important thing. Because outside of school children can just _stay away_ from each other. (And please note that 'inside the school' also includes after school activities and the ride home.)
If students harass and bully others outside of school, the school should inform the parents, and if it doesn't stop, invite both kids, their parents, and a judge to a meeting, and explain how they're going to help the victim's parents gets a 'restraining order', which will prohibit the asshat being within X yards of them, which means they won't be able to physically attend school due to their own stupidity. (And if there is 'bullying', aka, physically threatening behavior, they are also risking time in juvie.)
Schools cannot punish students for stuff outside of school, period. But we live in a nation of laws that doesn't let random people run around harassing other people, regardless of their age or school or whatever. It is, however, not the job of school administrators to enforce that law. But if school administrators notice violations of the law happening off school ground to a student, they should simply inform everyone and perhaps help parents a little with legal proceedings to stop it.
But all that assumes that schools actually care about 'bullying'. Someone informing their friends that they hate someone is not bullying. Or even harassment.(Something like following that person around repeating 'I hate you' would be harassment.) Someone talking about sex is not bullying. Students holding up a banner saying 'Bong hits for Jesus' is not bullying.
Schools are suffering the same problem as the police: They have been infested with control freaks who think they are literally allowed to control other people's actions in any way, instead of understanding they have been giving that 'control' for the sole purpose of maintaining order, and unless they are stopping some serious disorder, they are not supposed to be using it. These 'control powers' are supposed to be the last resort, and instead they have become the first resort.
So if you're sitting there after having pounded down several plates of food, they're perfectly within their rights to ask you to leave since they satisfied their end of the bargain.
Almost all 'all you can eat' buffets offers have 'limited to single visit' printed underneath. As does all signs saying 'free refills of drinks'. (1) People just don't notice that text, because it's what they assumed anyway.
Hence, if you sit there after eating, they will not throw you out.
I get a little confused at people who think they will. Seriously, everyone's talking about it, but has anyone ever tried eating two meals for one? I once ate at an all you can eat buffet, sat there and read a book for four hours, got a tiny bit more food, and left. They don't care, because people already gorge themselves at all you can eat, and can't functionally gain the ability to eat more after sitting there for a bit! (Granted, that was exactly one location, one time, so I have no idea how other places act, but assuming they all go 'You've eaten lunch, and you're clearly trying to stick around for dinner, so leave!' is probably wrong.)
They will, however, throw you (And all their customers) out when they close, at which point you are not longer on your original 'visit', so you must purchase another buffet the next day.
1) This is not the same thing as cell phone companies with random restrictions they claim they can change at any time and don't actually tell you before signing a contract. It's one restriction, that generally is identical everywhere that most people already understand, that they usually put on the sign itself so people can see it before purchase.