Ah... Is this a semantic game with the "injury actually received" thing? It sounds like it may also be a variation of "tort reform will actually make it easier to get satisfaction by making it more efficient" argument. Specious, imho.
Seriously though, the view I think that you're espousing is the one that I suggested was fading from Libertarian thinking. I don't want to debate from the position of the Libertarians, but I think they arrived at this conclusion after considering questions about what could check corporate power over the individual.
I see where you're coming from, and I'm not against tax incentives. However, we can differentiate between "incentive" and "loophole" in most cases. You've got an awfully broad brush to be painting with; that there exist abuses of the system and exemptions that don't make sense is not controversial. Also non-controversial is that there are beneficial tax incentives.
Working with Obama and Congress would actually make things better for business. The statutory rate can be lowered while collecting the same revenue, and there can be savings in not having to pay an army of tax specialists. Unless, of course, they're just plain cheating.
Keep hope alive. Many people in the relevant committees on health care have a grasp of the issue. For example, Ted Kennedy is still the chair of Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Baucus, while it's easy to be mad at him, may just be playing his part as a Senate leader. The sad reality is that the industry owns too many people for it to get out of committee, so the real solution (a single-payer system) will have to be a trojan horse to even get to the floor. If the public option is included, it will work better than and eventually mostly replace the private alternatives. If the public option is dropped, then I agree; it's worthless and we have lost.
As for the opposition... One man's economic drain is another's thriving industry. It's stunning that the obscene inefficiency of the private health care system can be spun into a virtue (it is a 2 trillion dollar industry), while they're bashing alleged government inefficiency.
Anyway, about the President and tax reform... He's going to do everything politically possible and more. He's a very clever guy. Conservative-state democrats are just scared of Grover Norquist-style talking points. However, I see hope in that people are catching on to the artifice; they are asking themselves what is in those heavy books that Grover, Newt, et al. wave around at rallies (clue for conservatives: They're full of paid-for exemptions and exceptions).
That the President dared speak the truth about the issue should make you feel better. It's more than anyone at the federal level has done in 30 years.
Please, please, won't people on Slashdot please stop repeating this tripe?
Man, I've been trying forever. Unfortunately, the people with rolled-up sleeves on CNBC tell them that they're right, several times a day.
It's not likely to stop, either. It's a very convenient idea for officers who would like to act badly, for one thing. Second, nearly all of the people on Slashdot who talk about financial news get it from places like CNBC, which is not only run by officers who enjoy this misapprehension of the law, but whose programming consists of mostly brown-nosing officers who were, or are currently, running companies in this way.
On the bright side, I have seen a new meme rise up; Free marketeers are starting to realize that their purer market will require strong tort... They're starting to accept the reality that "tort reform" and an efficient market are incompatible. It's not worth accepting the rest of dogma, but at least the drive to disable lawsuits has been weakened.
Back on topic: As Obama said at the outset, corporate tax reform is on the table, but only if every closed loophole is not portrayed as a tax increase. For one thing, reform is impossible without knowing what the current tax burden is precisely (i.e. figures for the top corporate rate are a lie). It's a subtle thing with what Ballmer and others are saying; they're not protesting a statutory tax increase, they're protesting increased difficulty in being a scofflaw.
Neat! Sorry about the misunderstanding, it was my fault.
I agree about different programming languages having different strengths in different domains. Of course, the issue gets more complicated when considering languages like LISP and metaprogramming. As an aside, I also think that good programmers should not only know several languages, but several paradigms (at least two: one descendant of Algol, and one descendant of LISP).
All that said, I thought TFA's analysis was pretty close to my experience; the "narrow" stars were for the languages I expected. My only problem with TFA was that unlike all the other languages examined, only the Javascript analysis was not broken down by implementation (unless I just didn't see it). As long as the misfeatures are avoided, Javascript is really expressive and powerful; I can't wait until someone builds an implementation with tail recursion optimization.
I find this long-lived and pervasive myth totally fascinating... It's a nexus of so many cultural issues; like BEV, native-only laws, exoticism, Esperanto, and the very notion of "improving" human language.
Hmm... This discussion will be locked soon, but feel free to comment on my journal or whatever.
Housing bubble was part of a larger story, the financial crisis. There is blame to spread around; but the Travelers' merger in the 90s, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and 8 years of non-enforcement from the SEC are my faves. All of those were symptoms of a sector becoming too powerful in goverment: The so-called "financial services" sector.
Blaming Fannie and Freddie isn't really justifiable, either. They were late-comers to the sub-prime game, and still have a better-than-average default rate. Also, the two don't originate loans... A fine point which a lot of people miss. (Fun fact: The term "sub-prime" comes from Fannie and Freddie. It used to mean "b-paper", or loans which they could not back). Over their history (and despite LBJ-era privatization, imho), they were a success. We had the most consumer-friendly and stable mortgage market in the world. All that is kind of beside the point, though. The money which inflated the bubble came from private institutions (unregulated), which promptly sold the debt into a secretive and unregulated market.
More generally, the problem was with institutions who were banks in everything but name, and with banks branching out into new territory. The result was a group of companies which defied categorization, and therefore regulation.
This is another thing the Romans encountered and eventually figured out. There is one sector of an economy that is not like the others; the banks have the power to sink a whole economy around them.
I see what you're saying about coming from opposite sides with our states. But anything that's doctrinaire is likely to be flawed. To borrow from the opposite side of the ideological spectrum (H.L. Mencken), "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
Sorry to drag this out, but I've got to say something about two points.
First, congressional committees might work differently than you think. Every legislator you've heard of is a member of at least one committee. Rosters are compiled by party leaders, and approved by a full vote. Of the committees you mentioned, here is the leadership:
Ron Paul is not particularly influential in any of them. Not that he's a slouch, he's just a normal member of the House. He isn't uniquely qualified (of all legislators) to do anything.
Second, the Community Reinvestment Act didn't have anything to do with the housing bubble. Really. I can see how it is a really attractive narrative to conservatives, but it just happens to not be true. You probably don't want another long comment on the details, but they're available. And it isn't in any way ambiguous. Just untrue. This is one of many things that causes me to have no respect at all for the Mises Institute.
Btw, and you're probably going to disagree with this, I happen to follow California politics and I have a different take on your problems. Biggest problem: Initiatives that people don't have time or energy to understand. Second biggest (and related to the previous): Totally impossible budget rules. And it is always a conservative that holds the budget hostage.:)
Sure, no problem. It's plenty worthy. I guess I'll just answer the questions first, make a couple of clarifications, and then express how I feel about the whole thing.
The book I was talking about was The Jungle, which this conversation has inspired me read again: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/140/140-h/140-h.htm. The "leader" thing was me being snarky about Ron Paul (sorry if that was a rhetorical question).
The government-funded research comment was actually in response to your statement about government's role in science. I have personally been affected by private interests trying to shut off data from citizens, for the privilege of selling it back to us. Btw, getting government out of research would have some pretty dramatic consequences. They don't just provide a lot of dollars for research in general, they do the type of research that business can't: research without short-term reward.
Regarding media ownership: Yes. I was actually alluding to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which killed off ownership rules for good (they had been slowly eroding since the 1980s anyway). The reasoning from proponents of the "Regulatory Relief" (Title IV) was that there would be more competition (and with it more diversity of opinion), better local coverage, and better prices in a freer marketplace. Of course, the opposite happened; there was massive consolidation. The ownership rules had served our country really well, and it's hard to look back and say we did the right thing with the deregulation.
I think my first response to you was to demonstrate that fears about the free market can be rational. Each item was either an example of people resisting a free market doctrinaire force to positive effect, or an example of a free market initiative turning out badly. Historically, arguments from business have sometimes been eerily similar.
That I disagree with your premise may not tell the whole story. What I was really saying was that the premise was too broad to be strictly true.
My feelings about the role of government are pretty moderate from a global perspective. All it requires is a step back from the belief that the free market solution is always preferable to a governmental one, or that smaller-scale solutions (Federalism) are always better than central government solutions.
This is where I get to the most heretical of my opinions. Ron Paul and Antonin Scalia are probably technically correct about the commerce clause. But to me, that doesn't make a difference because I do not believe that the Fathers were magic. They were, however, wise enough to establish amending the Constitution; and they were wise enough to set up the judicial branch of government to interpret the Constitution through changes in history, culture, and language.
(Btw, they're probably right about the 2nd Amendment, too. But consider that the rifled barrel was cutting-edge technology at the time.)
Federal agencies such as the EPA, CDC, FDA, NIH, FEMA, while technically not described by the commerce clause, are no longer optional. Technology's changed, understanding of disease has changed, the scale of manufacturing has changed. NOAA (DOC), DOE, SEC, DOT and FTC, though they actually deal in commerce, probably also have activities that the Founders didn't intend.
So, summary about the Constitutionalism: The process of amending the Constitution has been problematic. As a nation, we deviated from the doctrine only because we had to. At several points in history, it was either do that or let people die. This pragmatism extends to our central bank...er, I mean Federal Reserve:). Strict Constitutionalism takes us back to at least 1860, which wasn't a particularly fun time to be alive (especially if you were black).
Regarding the special role of government, I believe it is much less of an issue than some claim. As long as we remain a
Justifying your arguments with a quote from the Alabama School of Economics is known as an "appeal to authority." Limiting yourself to philosophy from the CampaignForLiberty isn't going to serve you well. Ron Paul is part of my state's delegation, and no one is more surprised than me that he has a following; down here, he's just an average religious fundamentalist. I've seen him seduce so many newcomers to our little blue island with promises of free pot. Personally, I'd hold out for a lot more than that if I was going to swallow the rest of his philosophy (i.e. more than he could possibly deliver). I know this is a sacred cow, but he is an opportunist and proto-fascist.
You are misinformed about the history of media ownership rules, and you missed the point. Caps on the size and reach of media companies were a very good thing. The danger now (related to oligopolies) is that 99% of news consumed in the U.S. is now produced by a half dozen companies who collude. Therefore, no "wisdom" for your perfect market.
Oligopolies have nothing to do with government intervention, and flourish in the absence of it. You should read the article again.
It's not true that government bureaucracies are necessarily less efficient than corporate bureaucracies. In fact, in the particular cases of health care and pensions, our government agencies are unambiguously more efficient than their private counterparts. You won't believe me, but look it up.
The problem with your view of occupational safety (and you should just read the book), is that poor people became "private property". Goverment did protect the "private property" of the factory owners, which protected your freedom to unwittingly eat immigrant sausages.
What is stopping workers from organizing? Free marketeers. You won't find any friends of unions at the Mises Institute. You should watch the debates and votes around EFCA later this year on CSPAN.
And regarding occupational safety generally: Your utopia was our reality for the first century of Industry in our country. It was awful.
It's nice that you'll allow the NIH to live, but you should know that your leader's intention is to tear it down, along with any other federal involvement in areas not very strictly related to interstate commerce.
You missed the history of firefighting. The problem was that people had "subscriptions" from FireCo or Firefighters R Us. If you were a subscriber of FireCo, and your next-door neighbor was a customer of Firefighters R Us, FireCo would do nothing to put out your neighbor's fire, even if they were parked in front of your house. This is all perfectly free-market, and horribly inefficient, dangerous and stupid.
And I'd like to keep my data from government-funded research, thank you very much.
Seriously, I like weed as much as anybody. But Ron Paul is a fool, and his appeal for legalization is completely cynical. The "Austrian" school is in Alabama, and these people do not have your best interests at heart. Just underneath the surface of the "Libertarian" movement is all sorts of nasty stuff like nativism, white supremacy, and religious fundamentalism. I would gladly trade Ron Paul for Barney Frank (lots of representatives support legalization).
I feel ya. I have, of course, met genuinely stupid people. But they were missing one or more of the pieces I enumerated. I am very, very lucky in that I have a lot of time to study on my own; however, the majority of the working poor don't have five minutes to read the Greek classics, or the extra money for health care and nutrition. I suspect that some of them were affected by environmental toxins like lead, as well.
Without having the logic and rhetoric introduced in their youth, many were actually educated by ad-supported television and K Street messaging, to which they had no defense. There but for the grace of God, goes daemonburrito.
For those who don't have poverty as an excuse, I'd point to the sorry state of our education system. The only encouragement I ever hear to get an institutional education is money, not knowledge or love of our society. Ignorance is probably an asset for many members of the professional class.
Some people have religion... I have humanism. I'm going to hang on to my belief that people's potential is usually underestimated.
Btw, I think the Stanford-Binet is measuring a phantom. Its only use is what Binet intended; i.e., identifying students which require special education.
Occupational Safety (OSHA is still constantly under assault, despite the previous item)
Public health (Not having a centralized (and publicly-owned) NIH and CDC would be playing with fire)
Public safety: Firefighting and EMS (It took the Great Chicago Fire to kill off the private fire subscription services, something the Romans figured out 1900 years earlier).
Not an exhaustive list, obviously. The resistance to regulation of investment banking caused problems that we're living with currently, and I haven't even got to environmental degradation, over-consumption's effect on foreign policy, etc.
I'm not expecting to change your beliefs, but hopefully now you at least understand that the concerns about pure free markets are definitely not irrational.
Funny you should say that. The evidence seems to suggest that you are wrong. Mere access to health services for women seems to go a long way towards stabilizing population (and reduces horrible deaths from witch-doctor abortions). No draconian, gender-balance-altering, infanticide-encouraging policy needed.
And as for any sort of "selection" regarding humanity: That horse left the barn 12,000 years ago. We're all human, and astonishingly similar. The "weakest" of us have made huge contributions to our civilization. We tend to see the difference between a 130 IQ and a 90 IQ as vast, but it's a matter of perspective. An alien new to our planet probably wouldn't immediately make such a distinction.
My original point stands, I think. Rapid population growth is largely an artifact of ethnic and religious conflict, and responds well to public policy. In context, "being fruitful" isn't even dumb; up until this last century, it was perfectly rational for a group to multiply as much as possible (with some exceptions, for local resource constraints).
Personally, I think the raw intelligence of any given human being is indistinguishable from others, barring a condition like cretinism or Down's Syndrome. And even with such a condition, our decision to take care of members of our groups who couldn't survive on their own has paid off in a huge way; it may be one of the most successful adaptations in our planet's history.
Take any human being, give them nutrition and access to health care, a little math and logic, some history; add a dash of rhetoric to give them immunity to marketing, PR, propaganda (which was the real culprit in Idiocracy, not genetics). Et voila, another "genius".
There was plenty to chew on in my comment besides the ad hom protest. You've got a point, though. I did totally fail the putting it aside part.
It's just got such a nice ring to it... "En-vi-ro Wack-o"... It's so evocative. The derisive sneer in the "en", the aggro plosive in the "ck". I can almost see it: The overweight American pounding his fists on the steering wheel of his SUV, whipped into a frothy rage by Glenn Beck's Two Hours Hate. "CO2's what we exhale!" he screams, as he swerves across the highway to try out his new Eddie Bauer brushguard on a whitetail fawn. Enviro-WACKOS!
(Now that's an ad hominem...)
Since you pointed out that particular flaw in my comment, I'll just assume that you agree with the rest of it. Welcome to the fold, enviro-wacko.
Can anyone guess why overpopulation is never mentioned by American politicians? Could the concept of overpopulation be too closely tied to illegal immigration?
Way, way off. And scary that you think that way... You should read about the waves of xenophobia throughout the United States' history. This one is not significantly different than the others (Irish, Asians, Germans, etc).
It was Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority people that decided that population policy was off the table ("A billion more consumers for American products"!). In addition, the nativist wing of the Republicans frequently encourages Anglos and other white-skinned people to "out-breed" the "aliens" to preserve America (QuiverFull, anyone?). Most of the evangelical movement subscribes to "dominion theology", which takes the Genesis 1 literally (especially the "be fruitful" bit). That worldview pretty much forbids thinking about environment conservation generally.
Not that it's novel... Breeding wars are common in history, and there's several going on right now.
The primary opposition to population control is religious/nativist, followed by Cold Warriors.
The ad hom aside, I've never met an "enviro wacko" who supported corn ethanol.
In fact, anyone who's given any thought to it at all, and subscribes to the wacko idea that our civilization can't handle environmental upheaval of the scale predicted by real scientists... is against the idea of using our topsoil to power our craptacular personal transport. No "enviro wacko" supports an energy infrastructure that damages topsoil that is already in trouble (guess what black gooey stuff is the raw material for organics re-introduced to soil overworked to sterility?) and probably makes the GHG problem worse. And what functional human being wants to use food resources to power Cadillac Escalades?
In other words, you can't blame those of us who think the biosphere of our planet is required for our continued survival (wacky, right?). However, feel free to blame jingoists who marketed this monstrosity as "energy security".
This may get easier if HTML5 catches on. I've been playing with it, and the new <time> and <article> tags are extremely useful.
I used to be sympathetic to the "limited view of html" argument, but after writing a couple of tools that need to search the dom, I'm convinced that the semantic tags work a lot better than abusing css classes. The consistency is going to help search engines, too.
They wrote about it in Beautiful Code, too (great book). MapReduce isn't complex, in fact the name comes from a feature that a lot of functional languages provide (yeah, I know, it's not exactly the same thing).
There are many implementations of it. The wikipedia article is pretty informative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce. I didn't know about "BashReduce"... Heh.
WTF is wrong with these people? How do these astroturfers live with themselves? Is there nothing more important than the size of your paycheck or your corporate rank?
Everyone's surely seen through this and it goes without saying, but yes, this is pure anti-nn astroturf, and it's being shoveled out now because of TWC's recent actions.
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
Yeah, you're right. After reading the overview, it appears that this is totally different than Mozilla's idea (who are also contributing to the Khronos initiative).
Ugh... I think I might suck cocks on this one. I had assumed that since Google is part of the Khronos initiative, they were closer to the approach of Mozilla's canvas:3d, where the philosophy was to expose a significant subset of opengl so opengl programmers could jump right in. After reading this, I've come around to thinking O3D actually is kind of like VRML, unfortunately.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah... Is this a semantic game with the "injury actually received" thing? It sounds like it may also be a variation of "tort reform will actually make it easier to get satisfaction by making it more efficient" argument. Specious, imho.
Seriously though, the view I think that you're espousing is the one that I suggested was fading from Libertarian thinking. I don't want to debate from the position of the Libertarians, but I think they arrived at this conclusion after considering questions about what could check corporate power over the individual.
I see where you're coming from, and I'm not against tax incentives. However, we can differentiate between "incentive" and "loophole" in most cases. You've got an awfully broad brush to be painting with; that there exist abuses of the system and exemptions that don't make sense is not controversial. Also non-controversial is that there are beneficial tax incentives.
Working with Obama and Congress would actually make things better for business. The statutory rate can be lowered while collecting the same revenue, and there can be savings in not having to pay an army of tax specialists. Unless, of course, they're just plain cheating.
And no, Slashdot is forever ;)
Sorry to rant. I just read the news.
That'll do that.
Keep hope alive. Many people in the relevant committees on health care have a grasp of the issue. For example, Ted Kennedy is still the chair of Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Baucus, while it's easy to be mad at him, may just be playing his part as a Senate leader. The sad reality is that the industry owns too many people for it to get out of committee, so the real solution (a single-payer system) will have to be a trojan horse to even get to the floor. If the public option is included, it will work better than and eventually mostly replace the private alternatives. If the public option is dropped, then I agree; it's worthless and we have lost.
As for the opposition... One man's economic drain is another's thriving industry. It's stunning that the obscene inefficiency of the private health care system can be spun into a virtue (it is a 2 trillion dollar industry), while they're bashing alleged government inefficiency.
Anyway, about the President and tax reform... He's going to do everything politically possible and more. He's a very clever guy. Conservative-state democrats are just scared of Grover Norquist-style talking points. However, I see hope in that people are catching on to the artifice; they are asking themselves what is in those heavy books that Grover, Newt, et al. wave around at rallies (clue for conservatives: They're full of paid-for exemptions and exceptions).
That the President dared speak the truth about the issue should make you feel better. It's more than anyone at the federal level has done in 30 years.
Please, please, won't people on Slashdot please stop repeating this tripe?
Man, I've been trying forever. Unfortunately, the people with rolled-up sleeves on CNBC tell them that they're right, several times a day.
It's not likely to stop, either. It's a very convenient idea for officers who would like to act badly, for one thing. Second, nearly all of the people on Slashdot who talk about financial news get it from places like CNBC, which is not only run by officers who enjoy this misapprehension of the law, but whose programming consists of mostly brown-nosing officers who were, or are currently, running companies in this way.
On the bright side, I have seen a new meme rise up; Free marketeers are starting to realize that their purer market will require strong tort... They're starting to accept the reality that "tort reform" and an efficient market are incompatible. It's not worth accepting the rest of dogma, but at least the drive to disable lawsuits has been weakened.
Back on topic: As Obama said at the outset, corporate tax reform is on the table, but only if every closed loophole is not portrayed as a tax increase. For one thing, reform is impossible without knowing what the current tax burden is precisely (i.e. figures for the top corporate rate are a lie). It's a subtle thing with what Ballmer and others are saying; they're not protesting a statutory tax increase, they're protesting increased difficulty in being a scofflaw.
Neat! Sorry about the misunderstanding, it was my fault.
I agree about different programming languages having different strengths in different domains. Of course, the issue gets more complicated when considering languages like LISP and metaprogramming. As an aside, I also think that good programmers should not only know several languages, but several paradigms (at least two: one descendant of Algol, and one descendant of LISP).
All that said, I thought TFA's analysis was pretty close to my experience; the "narrow" stars were for the languages I expected. My only problem with TFA was that unlike all the other languages examined, only the Javascript analysis was not broken down by implementation (unless I just didn't see it). As long as the misfeatures are avoided, Javascript is really expressive and powerful; I can't wait until someone builds an implementation with tail recursion optimization.
So the argument seems sound although the example is wrong.
It is a very interesting point. Depending on what you mean by "the argument", it's not sound. Popular culture is way behind the science on this.
Check out Pinker's "The Language Instinct": http://www.amazon.com/Language-Instinct-Steven-Pinker/dp/0060976519. Whether or not you accept his whole thesis, it's undeniable that the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" is dead and has been for 75 years.
I find this long-lived and pervasive myth totally fascinating... It's a nexus of so many cultural issues; like BEV, native-only laws, exoticism, Esperanto, and the very notion of "improving" human language.
Hmm... This discussion will be locked soon, but feel free to comment on my journal or whatever.
Housing bubble was part of a larger story, the financial crisis. There is blame to spread around; but the Travelers' merger in the 90s, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and 8 years of non-enforcement from the SEC are my faves. All of those were symptoms of a sector becoming too powerful in goverment: The so-called "financial services" sector.
Blaming Fannie and Freddie isn't really justifiable, either. They were late-comers to the sub-prime game, and still have a better-than-average default rate. Also, the two don't originate loans... A fine point which a lot of people miss. (Fun fact: The term "sub-prime" comes from Fannie and Freddie. It used to mean "b-paper", or loans which they could not back). Over their history (and despite LBJ-era privatization, imho), they were a success. We had the most consumer-friendly and stable mortgage market in the world. All that is kind of beside the point, though. The money which inflated the bubble came from private institutions (unregulated), which promptly sold the debt into a secretive and unregulated market.
More generally, the problem was with institutions who were banks in everything but name, and with banks branching out into new territory. The result was a group of companies which defied categorization, and therefore regulation.
This is another thing the Romans encountered and eventually figured out. There is one sector of an economy that is not like the others; the banks have the power to sink a whole economy around them.
I see what you're saying about coming from opposite sides with our states. But anything that's doctrinaire is likely to be flawed. To borrow from the opposite side of the ideological spectrum (H.L. Mencken), "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
Sorry to drag this out, but I've got to say something about two points.
First, congressional committees might work differently than you think. Every legislator you've heard of is a member of at least one committee. Rosters are compiled by party leaders, and approved by a full vote. Of the committees you mentioned, here is the leadership:
Ron Paul is not particularly influential in any of them. Not that he's a slouch, he's just a normal member of the House. He isn't uniquely qualified (of all legislators) to do anything.
Second, the Community Reinvestment Act didn't have anything to do with the housing bubble. Really. I can see how it is a really attractive narrative to conservatives, but it just happens to not be true. You probably don't want another long comment on the details, but they're available. And it isn't in any way ambiguous. Just untrue. This is one of many things that causes me to have no respect at all for the Mises Institute.
Btw, and you're probably going to disagree with this, I happen to follow California politics and I have a different take on your problems. Biggest problem: Initiatives that people don't have time or energy to understand. Second biggest (and related to the previous): Totally impossible budget rules. And it is always a conservative that holds the budget hostage. :)
Sure, no problem. It's plenty worthy. I guess I'll just answer the questions first, make a couple of clarifications, and then express how I feel about the whole thing.
The book I was talking about was The Jungle, which this conversation has inspired me read again: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/140/140-h/140-h.htm. The "leader" thing was me being snarky about Ron Paul (sorry if that was a rhetorical question).
The government-funded research comment was actually in response to your statement about government's role in science. I have personally been affected by private interests trying to shut off data from citizens, for the privilege of selling it back to us. Btw, getting government out of research would have some pretty dramatic consequences. They don't just provide a lot of dollars for research in general, they do the type of research that business can't: research without short-term reward.
Regarding media ownership: Yes. I was actually alluding to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which killed off ownership rules for good (they had been slowly eroding since the 1980s anyway). The reasoning from proponents of the "Regulatory Relief" (Title IV) was that there would be more competition (and with it more diversity of opinion), better local coverage, and better prices in a freer marketplace. Of course, the opposite happened; there was massive consolidation. The ownership rules had served our country really well, and it's hard to look back and say we did the right thing with the deregulation.
I think my first response to you was to demonstrate that fears about the free market can be rational. Each item was either an example of people resisting a free market doctrinaire force to positive effect, or an example of a free market initiative turning out badly. Historically, arguments from business have sometimes been eerily similar.
That I disagree with your premise may not tell the whole story. What I was really saying was that the premise was too broad to be strictly true.
My feelings about the role of government are pretty moderate from a global perspective. All it requires is a step back from the belief that the free market solution is always preferable to a governmental one, or that smaller-scale solutions (Federalism) are always better than central government solutions.
This is where I get to the most heretical of my opinions. Ron Paul and Antonin Scalia are probably technically correct about the commerce clause. But to me, that doesn't make a difference because I do not believe that the Fathers were magic. They were, however, wise enough to establish amending the Constitution; and they were wise enough to set up the judicial branch of government to interpret the Constitution through changes in history, culture, and language.
(Btw, they're probably right about the 2nd Amendment, too. But consider that the rifled barrel was cutting-edge technology at the time.)
Federal agencies such as the EPA, CDC, FDA, NIH, FEMA, while technically not described by the commerce clause, are no longer optional. Technology's changed, understanding of disease has changed, the scale of manufacturing has changed. NOAA (DOC), DOE, SEC, DOT and FTC, though they actually deal in commerce, probably also have activities that the Founders didn't intend.
So, summary about the Constitutionalism: The process of amending the Constitution has been problematic. As a nation, we deviated from the doctrine only because we had to. At several points in history, it was either do that or let people die. This pragmatism extends to our central bank...er, I mean Federal Reserve :). Strict Constitutionalism takes us back to at least 1860, which wasn't a particularly fun time to be alive (especially if you were black).
Regarding the special role of government, I believe it is much less of an issue than some claim. As long as we remain a
Hmm. Moderate your views you will.
Justifying your arguments with a quote from the Alabama School of Economics is known as an "appeal to authority." Limiting yourself to philosophy from the CampaignForLiberty isn't going to serve you well. Ron Paul is part of my state's delegation, and no one is more surprised than me that he has a following; down here, he's just an average religious fundamentalist. I've seen him seduce so many newcomers to our little blue island with promises of free pot. Personally, I'd hold out for a lot more than that if I was going to swallow the rest of his philosophy (i.e. more than he could possibly deliver). I know this is a sacred cow, but he is an opportunist and proto-fascist.
You are misinformed about the history of media ownership rules, and you missed the point. Caps on the size and reach of media companies were a very good thing. The danger now (related to oligopolies) is that 99% of news consumed in the U.S. is now produced by a half dozen companies who collude. Therefore, no "wisdom" for your perfect market.
Oligopolies have nothing to do with government intervention, and flourish in the absence of it. You should read the article again.
It's not true that government bureaucracies are necessarily less efficient than corporate bureaucracies. In fact, in the particular cases of health care and pensions, our government agencies are unambiguously more efficient than their private counterparts. You won't believe me, but look it up.
The problem with your view of occupational safety (and you should just read the book), is that poor people became "private property". Goverment did protect the "private property" of the factory owners, which protected your freedom to unwittingly eat immigrant sausages.
What is stopping workers from organizing? Free marketeers. You won't find any friends of unions at the Mises Institute. You should watch the debates and votes around EFCA later this year on CSPAN.
And regarding occupational safety generally: Your utopia was our reality for the first century of Industry in our country. It was awful.
It's nice that you'll allow the NIH to live, but you should know that your leader's intention is to tear it down, along with any other federal involvement in areas not very strictly related to interstate commerce.
You missed the history of firefighting. The problem was that people had "subscriptions" from FireCo or Firefighters R Us. If you were a subscriber of FireCo, and your next-door neighbor was a customer of Firefighters R Us, FireCo would do nothing to put out your neighbor's fire, even if they were parked in front of your house. This is all perfectly free-market, and horribly inefficient, dangerous and stupid.
And I'd like to keep my data from government-funded research, thank you very much.
Seriously, I like weed as much as anybody. But Ron Paul is a fool, and his appeal for legalization is completely cynical. The "Austrian" school is in Alabama, and these people do not have your best interests at heart. Just underneath the surface of the "Libertarian" movement is all sorts of nasty stuff like nativism, white supremacy, and religious fundamentalism. I would gladly trade Ron Paul for Barney Frank (lots of representatives support legalization).
I feel ya. I have, of course, met genuinely stupid people. But they were missing one or more of the pieces I enumerated. I am very, very lucky in that I have a lot of time to study on my own; however, the majority of the working poor don't have five minutes to read the Greek classics, or the extra money for health care and nutrition. I suspect that some of them were affected by environmental toxins like lead, as well.
Without having the logic and rhetoric introduced in their youth, many were actually educated by ad-supported television and K Street messaging, to which they had no defense. There but for the grace of God, goes daemonburrito.
For those who don't have poverty as an excuse, I'd point to the sorry state of our education system. The only encouragement I ever hear to get an institutional education is money, not knowledge or love of our society. Ignorance is probably an asset for many members of the professional class.
Some people have religion... I have humanism. I'm going to hang on to my belief that people's potential is usually underestimated.
Btw, I think the Stanford-Binet is measuring a phantom. Its only use is what Binet intended; i.e., identifying students which require special education.
I guess I just don't understand any rational fear of [strict] free market economics.
Not an exhaustive list, obviously. The resistance to regulation of investment banking caused problems that we're living with currently, and I haven't even got to environmental degradation, over-consumption's effect on foreign policy, etc.
I'm not expecting to change your beliefs, but hopefully now you at least understand that the concerns about pure free markets are definitely not irrational.
Funny you should say that. The evidence seems to suggest that you are wrong. Mere access to health services for women seems to go a long way towards stabilizing population (and reduces horrible deaths from witch-doctor abortions). No draconian, gender-balance-altering, infanticide-encouraging policy needed.
And as for any sort of "selection" regarding humanity: That horse left the barn 12,000 years ago. We're all human, and astonishingly similar. The "weakest" of us have made huge contributions to our civilization. We tend to see the difference between a 130 IQ and a 90 IQ as vast, but it's a matter of perspective. An alien new to our planet probably wouldn't immediately make such a distinction.
My original point stands, I think. Rapid population growth is largely an artifact of ethnic and religious conflict, and responds well to public policy. In context, "being fruitful" isn't even dumb; up until this last century, it was perfectly rational for a group to multiply as much as possible (with some exceptions, for local resource constraints).
Personally, I think the raw intelligence of any given human being is indistinguishable from others, barring a condition like cretinism or Down's Syndrome. And even with such a condition, our decision to take care of members of our groups who couldn't survive on their own has paid off in a huge way; it may be one of the most successful adaptations in our planet's history.
Take any human being, give them nutrition and access to health care, a little math and logic, some history; add a dash of rhetoric to give them immunity to marketing, PR, propaganda (which was the real culprit in Idiocracy, not genetics). Et voila, another "genius".
There was plenty to chew on in my comment besides the ad hom protest. You've got a point, though. I did totally fail the putting it aside part.
It's just got such a nice ring to it... "En-vi-ro Wack-o"... It's so evocative. The derisive sneer in the "en", the aggro plosive in the "ck". I can almost see it: The overweight American pounding his fists on the steering wheel of his SUV, whipped into a frothy rage by Glenn Beck's Two Hours Hate. "CO2's what we exhale!" he screams, as he swerves across the highway to try out his new Eddie Bauer brushguard on a whitetail fawn. Enviro-WACKOS!
(Now that's an ad hominem...)
Since you pointed out that particular flaw in my comment, I'll just assume that you agree with the rest of it. Welcome to the fold, enviro-wacko.
Can anyone guess why overpopulation is never mentioned by American politicians? Could the concept of overpopulation be too closely tied to illegal immigration?
Way, way off. And scary that you think that way... You should read about the waves of xenophobia throughout the United States' history. This one is not significantly different than the others (Irish, Asians, Germans, etc).
Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_Policy.
It was Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority people that decided that population policy was off the table ("A billion more consumers for American products"!). In addition, the nativist wing of the Republicans frequently encourages Anglos and other white-skinned people to "out-breed" the "aliens" to preserve America (QuiverFull, anyone?). Most of the evangelical movement subscribes to "dominion theology", which takes the Genesis 1 literally (especially the "be fruitful" bit). That worldview pretty much forbids thinking about environment conservation generally.
Not that it's novel... Breeding wars are common in history, and there's several going on right now.
The primary opposition to population control is religious/nativist, followed by Cold Warriors.
The ad hom aside, I've never met an "enviro wacko" who supported corn ethanol.
In fact, anyone who's given any thought to it at all, and subscribes to the wacko idea that our civilization can't handle environmental upheaval of the scale predicted by real scientists... is against the idea of using our topsoil to power our craptacular personal transport. No "enviro wacko" supports an energy infrastructure that damages topsoil that is already in trouble (guess what black gooey stuff is the raw material for organics re-introduced to soil overworked to sterility?) and probably makes the GHG problem worse. And what functional human being wants to use food resources to power Cadillac Escalades?
In other words, you can't blame those of us who think the biosphere of our planet is required for our continued survival (wacky, right?). However, feel free to blame jingoists who marketed this monstrosity as "energy security".
This may get easier if HTML5 catches on. I've been playing with it, and the new <time> and <article> tags are extremely useful.
I used to be sympathetic to the "limited view of html" argument, but after writing a couple of tools that need to search the dom, I'm convinced that the semantic tags work a lot better than abusing css classes. The consistency is going to help search engines, too.
"MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters." Jeffrey Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, OSDI '04.
They wrote about it in Beautiful Code, too (great book). MapReduce isn't complex, in fact the name comes from a feature that a lot of functional languages provide (yeah, I know, it's not exactly the same thing).
There are many implementations of it. The wikipedia article is pretty informative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MapReduce. I didn't know about "BashReduce"... Heh.
You can read even more about Nemertes here:
http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/The-Exaflood-Myth-Just-Wont-Die-102202
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-karr/suckered-by-astroturf_b_73483.html
Gross.
It's even worse than that (worse than just an ISP).
http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/2007/11/20/suckered-by-astroturf/
WTF is wrong with these people? How do these astroturfers live with themselves? Is there nothing more important than the size of your paycheck or your corporate rank?
Everyone's surely seen through this and it goes without saying, but yes, this is pure anti-nn astroturf, and it's being shoveled out now because of TWC's recent actions.
http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/The-Exaflood-Myth-Just-Wont-Die-102202
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id=12673221
http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/2007/11/20/suckered-by-astroturf/
Dirtbags. "Research", my ass.
Whoa, that was wrong.
Yes, but...
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words Don't Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
Don't mod me up! I was wrong, wrong, wrong!
Yeah, you're right. After reading the overview, it appears that this is totally different than Mozilla's idea (who are also contributing to the Khronos initiative).
Mozilla's approach is a much better idea...
Ugh... I think I might suck cocks on this one. I had assumed that since Google is part of the Khronos initiative, they were closer to the approach of Mozilla's canvas:3d, where the philosophy was to expose a significant subset of opengl so opengl programmers could jump right in. After reading this, I've come around to thinking O3D actually is kind of like VRML, unfortunately.