The problem with your joke (if it is a joke) is that there are actually people who think there is something racist about using the word "black" in the term "black hole".
There are also people who believe in unicorns. In other words, it's only a problem if you believe it's important to cater to idiots and quibbling malcontents and government officials.
The story I am thinking of involved a city councilman. And of course there was the city official who was forced to resign for using that well-known racist word "niggardly".
If said monopoly prices their goods above what people think is reasonable, an alternative will arise, unless the government intervenes.
Actually, monopolies almost always are a result of government regulation. Historically, I am only aware of one "monopoly" that arose without help from government regulation (and even there there may be government regulation assisting that I am unaware of): Microsoft.
There are people who think you are joking, and that is my best guess. The problem with your joke (if it is a joke) is that there are actually people who think there is something racist about using the word "black" in the term "black hole". I believe that there was a story on here about that one to two years ago (no, I'm not going to go search for it). Even if it wasn't on here, there was such a story in that time frame.
Actually, it's capitalism that takes people's money away, and hands it over to the owners of the means of production. Like most right-wingers, you have no idea what socialism actually is.
No, in capitalism, people give their money to the owners of the means of production in order to get what is produced. If people do not value what is produced more than the money, they keep the money. If those who own the means of production charge more than a reasonable amount for a good (based on cost of production and availabilty of raw materials), someone else will produce a good that meets the same need or desire at a lower price. The only time this doesn't happen is when the government intervenes to prevent the second party from producing a competing product. When that happens, you no longer have capitalism (what you have depends on the nature of the government intervention, but whether it is socialism, fascism, or full-blown communism, it is still a restriction on the freedom of the individual to make his or her own decisions about what is best).
That's not true. You could lose a lot of money shipping food to starving people in Africa.
And current evidence suggests that by doing so you would make the problem worse. By shipping food to starving people in Africa, you make it so that those in Africa who were farming can no longer generate enough captial to be able to continue to farm. Which means that there will be even less food available locally.
You would better serve the starving people of Africa by finding something they can do to generate capital so that they can buy and/or grow food. This does not mean that charity is bad, it means that it is much harder to actually do good with charity than most people think.
In a post further down you say that Capitalism is describes as "greed is good". It may be true that some people describe Capitalism that way, but that isn't true. Capitalism says, "greed is." Socialism does not "resist the greed impulse", it ignores it. Socialism pretends that people will take on the undesirable roles in society just because someone has to do it. If everyone has their needs met on an equal basis, how are you going to get enough garbage collectors or sewage treatment workers? Do you really think that any society has enough people who want to be garbage collectors or sewage treatment workers just for the job satisfaction to meet the need for those types of workers?
How about the "Healthcare Reform Bill"?
Nancy Pelosi, "...we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it..." I can't find the reference to the Senator or Congressman who said he would need two lawyers in order to understand the bills he voted for, but one of them said it when asked to promise to read every bill before voting on it.
That would be neat if he could do that for 10 years without anything ever bringing it to my attention, and arrange to have mail delivered to me in his fake name, not always with my address on it.
I'm not sure how him having a completely different name would result in his creditors calling me looking for him by the name he gave me.
My favorite are the automated messages that give you an opportunity to leave your name and number if you are interested. I always leave a fake name that is just plausible enough not to catch their attention, but strange enough for me to remember it when I hear it. Then when they call back and ask for that name, I say, "Oh you just missed him. He stepped out and should be back in 15 minutes." The second time I use some excuse as to why he won't be available for about half an hour. If they call a third time, I give some reason why he won't be able to talk to them until the following day. I've never gotten a fourth call, but if I did I would probably start overat number one.
If they are going to take up my time by autocalling me, I'm going to take up their time as much as I can.
I get those all of the time, for the same guy and his wife. The problem is I live in a very large apartment complex where all of the apartments have the same street address and then are distinguished by apt #. This guy and his wife (whp have the same surname as I) live in the same complex (or at least used to, I met him shortly after I moved in, he was accidentally delivered my mail, which had my apt # on it and he brought it over). The problem is that there are at least two online databases that list me as being related to the guy. The funniestpart is that if you look me up in those databases they list three people as being related to me, him, his wife and my father, who has been dead for over 20 years. They don't list my wife, my mother, my three brothers or either of my sisters (let alone my numerous cousins). Oh yeah, when you look up this guy, they do list my wife as being related to him.
I have a very common name. If you google my name, you do not find anything about me for over 25 pages (that's all the further I ever looked), even if you include the state. However, if you google my wife's name, you come up with three people in the USA(including my wife). This surprised me since our surname is one of the most common in the U.S.
When non-lawyers write the law, they frequently do a lousy job. Laws are written in a very formalized, precise way on purpose.
Yes, so that the average person doesn't understand what the legislature actually passed (reducing the odds that they will vote the bums out of office). It has gotten so bad that one of the reasons laws are written the way they are is so that the legislators won't truly understand what they are voting for.
I think that sums it up pretty well. It is the same reason that most adaptations of novels are a failure (especially Science Fiction). As a general rule, Hollywood misses the most important element of a story (even the story of a video game) and builds the script on things that are secondary.
"I'm sorry to hear that the Star Wars kid decided to be a blood sucking lawyer."
Yep, they're all evil until YOU need one to help you navigate the law, or until the EFF uses them to fight for your rights.
Lawyers don't sue, PLAINTIFFS sue.
Except that the reason you need a lawyer to navigate the law is because the law is written by and for lawyers. If it wasn't for evil lawyers, you wouldn't need lawyers to navigate the law or to fight for your rights.
This is not to say that lawyers are not a necessary part of society. Unfortunately, we have allowed lawyers to write our laws, interpret our laws and determine who is allowed to make money from assisting others in navigating the law.
Anyway, quit complaining that regulation is bad for small business because I don't think history will agree with you.
Please name one regulated industry that has a lot of small businesses and/or start up companies. Every regulated industry I am aware of underwent accelerated consolidation after every major new regulation was implemented. If you can name an industry where the rate of consolidation was reduced when new regulations were introduced, I would like to hear about it.
Actually, the creation of easily reproducable art (I agree with your loose definition for this discussion) will eventually end up in one of two forms. The first you have already mentioned, non-profit. However, there will be a second form, sponsored. The sponsored form will be both like and unlike that of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It will be like in that some of it will be produced on commission from a single wealthy patron (or small select group of wealthy patrons). Actually most "art" (movies, music, books) is currently produced this way, except that the patrons generally expect to gain a profit from distributing the art they produced.
The way that sponsored art will be different from the Middle Ages/Renaissance model is that some of it will be sponsored by large groups of people with just a moderate amount of wealth (such as that possessed by the overwhelming majority of residents of industiralized countries). In this method most of the money raised will be as a result of people seeing the art in question and giving the artist money to encourage the artist to create more like it.
That isn't a "regulation", that is a law. I suspect it would be unConstitutional. Certainly it would lead to companies gaming their earnings even more than they do now.
I would go more towards a policy of, if a company is in danger of failing and Congress is going to bail it out, a condition of receiving the government money is that the company is split up into two or more companies. Each of the new companies must be composed of divisions that had gross revenues of less than %n of GDP. If in order to reach that goal the company has to be split into more than two companies, so be it. Oh yeah, the daughter companies could not re-merge until the government bailout money had been repaid with interest.
Lobbyists are not legally allowed to offer money, or some other form of compensation.
There is another word for what you are talking about, it is called bribery. It is explicitly illegal in the U.S., Congressman and Senators have gone to jail for accepting bribes. While lobbyists frequently bribe politicians, they usually do so in ways that are hard to prove actual quid pro quo. In theory, all lobbyists do is petition (A solemn supplication or request to a superior authority; an entreaty.) politicians on behalf of citizens. There are no ways to get rid of lobbyists that do not make it essentially impossible for a group of citizens to band together to present their wishes to politicians as a group.
Most of the bill is, "don't bilk your customers." (to which auto dealers respond... "but we wanna".)
They needed over 1300 pages to say "don't bilk your customers"? For crying out loud, Senator Dodd is the primary sponsor of this bill. He's been in the back pocket of the major financial firms for over 20 years.
You make a good point, but you overlook one even more important thing that Enron, Worldcom and Tyco had in common. They did not issue dividends. I do not know the details on the other two, but Enron in particular would never have been able to pull the accounting tricks they did if they had been issuing dividends.
...if a single company failing could put us into a recession, then that company should be regulated to prevent that from happening
How exactly do you think that anybody can regulate a company to keep it from failing? What generally happens is that the government regulates an economically critical industry, this leads to new companies from being able to enter the field. One or more of the big players screw up (or sometimes do it on purpose). This leads to demands for greater government regulation. The result of the greater regulation is that the smaller companies can no longer afford to compete. Rinse and repeat.
As an example look at the financial regulation bills that Congress is considering. They will require massive increases on the paperwork that banks have to file. The cost of these new regulations will be more than small banks will be able to afford, so they will get bought out by the banks that were the ones that everyone is saying were the cause of the problem. Making those banks even bigger.
If a company is "too big to fail" and the government needs to bail it out, as soon as things stabilize (and maybe before) it should be split into smaller companies.
You did a very good job of summing up most of what I was going to post, but you missed one very important point. China has an even worse problem with an aging population than the US or Europe. It is 10-20 years younger than in Western countries but it is bigger due to the one child policy. The US and Western Europe have a population bubble of Baby Boomers that is just now reaching retirement age. There is significant question as to whether or not there are enough workers to sustain their economies once the Baby Boomers leave the work force (personally I think their economies are resilient enough to deal with that problem, but some of the other issues may combine to overwhelm them). China has an even larger population bubble of Baby Boomers, but their Baby Boom started later than that of the US and Europe because of the Communist revolution.
I came here to post this question: What could possibly go wrong?
And discovered that just about everybody else had exactly the same reaction. There were two or three responses that at first glance seemed to think this was a good idea, then I read them closer and realized they were being sarcastic.
What's the solution, you ask? Honestly, I agree with another reply to you: The solution is to accept that there is a risk in flying and move on. The reality is that there is more risk of you dying in a plane crash than a terrorist activity aboard your plane, and obviously far less risk of dying related to air travel than there is simply driving to work in the mornings. And really, the best this airport security can ever hope to accomplish is to force a terrorist to detonate their bombs in crowded security lines instead of crowded airplanes.
The problem with not having any security is that security theater is more effective at reducing attacks than doing nothing. If there was no security screening of any kind, the number of attacks against air travel would steadily increase. While security theater (which is what most of what we have now is) is primarily aimed at the general population, it also impacts the perceptions of potential terrorists. Potential terrorists spend a fair bit of time trying to figure out how to get around airport security. This results in them developing complicated schemes with a significantly higher chance of failure than if there was no security screening at all (rather than the screening that we have which is mostly security theater).
The biggest problem I have with current security theater is that every time something gets past existing screening they add a new step to the process rather than get rid of some existing step and replacing it with a new one. Personally, I would like to see the airport screening turned back over to the airlines with the TSA being tasked with setting the guidelines and testing airline security.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with your joke (if it is a joke) is that there are actually people who think there is something racist about using the word "black" in the term "black hole".
There are also people who believe in unicorns. In other words, it's only a problem if you believe it's important to cater to idiots and quibbling malcontents and government officials .
The story I am thinking of involved a city councilman. And of course there was the city official who was forced to resign for using that well-known racist word "niggardly".
If said monopoly prices their goods above what people think is reasonable, an alternative will arise, unless the government intervenes.
Actually, monopolies almost always are a result of government regulation. Historically, I am only aware of one "monopoly" that arose without help from government regulation (and even there there may be government regulation assisting that I am unaware of): Microsoft.
There are people who think you are joking, and that is my best guess. The problem with your joke (if it is a joke) is that there are actually people who think there is something racist about using the word "black" in the term "black hole". I believe that there was a story on here about that one to two years ago (no, I'm not going to go search for it). Even if it wasn't on here, there was such a story in that time frame.
Can you name one billion dollar company that is exclusively a software company?
Actually, it's capitalism that takes people's money away, and hands it over to the owners of the means of production. Like most right-wingers, you have no idea what socialism actually is.
No, in capitalism, people give their money to the owners of the means of production in order to get what is produced. If people do not value what is produced more than the money, they keep the money. If those who own the means of production charge more than a reasonable amount for a good (based on cost of production and availabilty of raw materials), someone else will produce a good that meets the same need or desire at a lower price. The only time this doesn't happen is when the government intervenes to prevent the second party from producing a competing product. When that happens, you no longer have capitalism (what you have depends on the nature of the government intervention, but whether it is socialism, fascism, or full-blown communism, it is still a restriction on the freedom of the individual to make his or her own decisions about what is best).
That's not true. You could lose a lot of money shipping food to starving people in Africa.
And current evidence suggests that by doing so you would make the problem worse. By shipping food to starving people in Africa, you make it so that those in Africa who were farming can no longer generate enough captial to be able to continue to farm. Which means that there will be even less food available locally.
You would better serve the starving people of Africa by finding something they can do to generate capital so that they can buy and/or grow food. This does not mean that charity is bad, it means that it is much harder to actually do good with charity than most people think.
In a post further down you say that Capitalism is describes as "greed is good". It may be true that some people describe Capitalism that way, but that isn't true. Capitalism says, "greed is." Socialism does not "resist the greed impulse", it ignores it. Socialism pretends that people will take on the undesirable roles in society just because someone has to do it. If everyone has their needs met on an equal basis, how are you going to get enough garbage collectors or sewage treatment workers? Do you really think that any society has enough people who want to be garbage collectors or sewage treatment workers just for the job satisfaction to meet the need for those types of workers?
How about the "Healthcare Reform Bill"?
Nancy Pelosi, "...we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it..." I can't find the reference to the Senator or Congressman who said he would need two lawyers in order to understand the bills he voted for, but one of them said it when asked to promise to read every bill before voting on it.
That would be neat if he could do that for 10 years without anything ever bringing it to my attention, and arrange to have mail delivered to me in his fake name, not always with my address on it.
I'm not sure how him having a completely different name would result in his creditors calling me looking for him by the name he gave me.
My favorite are the automated messages that give you an opportunity to leave your name and number if you are interested. I always leave a fake name that is just plausible enough not to catch their attention, but strange enough for me to remember it when I hear it. Then when they call back and ask for that name, I say, "Oh you just missed him. He stepped out and should be back in 15 minutes." The second time I use some excuse as to why he won't be available for about half an hour. If they call a third time, I give some reason why he won't be able to talk to them until the following day. I've never gotten a fourth call, but if I did I would probably start overat number one.
If they are going to take up my time by autocalling me, I'm going to take up their time as much as I can.
I get those all of the time, for the same guy and his wife. The problem is I live in a very large apartment complex where all of the apartments have the same street address and then are distinguished by apt #. This guy and his wife (whp have the same surname as I) live in the same complex (or at least used to, I met him shortly after I moved in, he was accidentally delivered my mail, which had my apt # on it and he brought it over). The problem is that there are at least two online databases that list me as being related to the guy. The funniestpart is that if you look me up in those databases they list three people as being related to me, him, his wife and my father, who has been dead for over 20 years. They don't list my wife, my mother, my three brothers or either of my sisters (let alone my numerous cousins). Oh yeah, when you look up this guy, they do list my wife as being related to him.
I have a very common name. If you google my name, you do not find anything about me for over 25 pages (that's all the further I ever looked), even if you include the state. However, if you google my wife's name, you come up with three people in the USA(including my wife). This surprised me since our surname is one of the most common in the U.S.
When non-lawyers write the law, they frequently do a lousy job. Laws are written in a very formalized, precise way on purpose.
Yes, so that the average person doesn't understand what the legislature actually passed (reducing the odds that they will vote the bums out of office). It has gotten so bad that one of the reasons laws are written the way they are is so that the legislators won't truly understand what they are voting for.
I think that sums it up pretty well. It is the same reason that most adaptations of novels are a failure (especially Science Fiction). As a general rule, Hollywood misses the most important element of a story (even the story of a video game) and builds the script on things that are secondary.
"I'm sorry to hear that the Star Wars kid decided to be a blood sucking lawyer."
Yep, they're all evil until YOU need one to help you navigate the law, or until the EFF uses them to fight for your rights. Lawyers don't sue, PLAINTIFFS sue.
Except that the reason you need a lawyer to navigate the law is because the law is written by and for lawyers. If it wasn't for evil lawyers, you wouldn't need lawyers to navigate the law or to fight for your rights.
This is not to say that lawyers are not a necessary part of society. Unfortunately, we have allowed lawyers to write our laws, interpret our laws and determine who is allowed to make money from assisting others in navigating the law.
Anyway, quit complaining that regulation is bad for small business because I don't think history will agree with you.
Please name one regulated industry that has a lot of small businesses and/or start up companies. Every regulated industry I am aware of underwent accelerated consolidation after every major new regulation was implemented. If you can name an industry where the rate of consolidation was reduced when new regulations were introduced, I would like to hear about it.
Actually, the creation of easily reproducable art (I agree with your loose definition for this discussion) will eventually end up in one of two forms. The first you have already mentioned, non-profit. However, there will be a second form, sponsored. The sponsored form will be both like and unlike that of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. It will be like in that some of it will be produced on commission from a single wealthy patron (or small select group of wealthy patrons). Actually most "art" (movies, music, books) is currently produced this way, except that the patrons generally expect to gain a profit from distributing the art they produced.
The way that sponsored art will be different from the Middle Ages/Renaissance model is that some of it will be sponsored by large groups of people with just a moderate amount of wealth (such as that possessed by the overwhelming majority of residents of industiralized countries). In this method most of the money raised will be as a result of people seeing the art in question and giving the artist money to encourage the artist to create more like it.
That isn't a "regulation", that is a law. I suspect it would be unConstitutional. Certainly it would lead to companies gaming their earnings even more than they do now.
I would go more towards a policy of, if a company is in danger of failing and Congress is going to bail it out, a condition of receiving the government money is that the company is split up into two or more companies. Each of the new companies must be composed of divisions that had gross revenues of less than %n of GDP. If in order to reach that goal the company has to be split into more than two companies, so be it. Oh yeah, the daughter companies could not re-merge until the government bailout money had been repaid with interest.
Lobbyists are not legally allowed to offer money, or some other form of compensation.
There is another word for what you are talking about, it is called bribery. It is explicitly illegal in the U.S., Congressman and Senators have gone to jail for accepting bribes. While lobbyists frequently bribe politicians, they usually do so in ways that are hard to prove actual quid pro quo. In theory, all lobbyists do is petition (A solemn supplication or request to a superior authority; an entreaty.) politicians on behalf of citizens. There are no ways to get rid of lobbyists that do not make it essentially impossible for a group of citizens to band together to present their wishes to politicians as a group.
Most of the bill is, "don't bilk your customers." (to which auto dealers respond ... "but we wanna".)
They needed over 1300 pages to say "don't bilk your customers"? For crying out loud, Senator Dodd is the primary sponsor of this bill. He's been in the back pocket of the major financial firms for over 20 years.
You make a good point, but you overlook one even more important thing that Enron, Worldcom and Tyco had in common. They did not issue dividends. I do not know the details on the other two, but Enron in particular would never have been able to pull the accounting tricks they did if they had been issuing dividends.
...if a single company failing could put us into a recession, then that company should be regulated to prevent that from happening
How exactly do you think that anybody can regulate a company to keep it from failing? What generally happens is that the government regulates an economically critical industry, this leads to new companies from being able to enter the field. One or more of the big players screw up (or sometimes do it on purpose). This leads to demands for greater government regulation. The result of the greater regulation is that the smaller companies can no longer afford to compete. Rinse and repeat.
As an example look at the financial regulation bills that Congress is considering. They will require massive increases on the paperwork that banks have to file. The cost of these new regulations will be more than small banks will be able to afford, so they will get bought out by the banks that were the ones that everyone is saying were the cause of the problem. Making those banks even bigger.
If a company is "too big to fail" and the government needs to bail it out, as soon as things stabilize (and maybe before) it should be split into smaller companies.
am no fan of Michael Moore (well, i liked TV Nation)...but these dudes could learn a lot from his style of instigation-based film-making.
So, your saying they should make things up and edit the video to make it look like the other side says things they've never said?
You did a very good job of summing up most of what I was going to post, but you missed one very important point. China has an even worse problem with an aging population than the US or Europe. It is 10-20 years younger than in Western countries but it is bigger due to the one child policy. The US and Western Europe have a population bubble of Baby Boomers that is just now reaching retirement age. There is significant question as to whether or not there are enough workers to sustain their economies once the Baby Boomers leave the work force (personally I think their economies are resilient enough to deal with that problem, but some of the other issues may combine to overwhelm them). China has an even larger population bubble of Baby Boomers, but their Baby Boom started later than that of the US and Europe because of the Communist revolution.
Chicago is run more honestly (and WAY more efficiently) than many big US cities.
Yeah, Chicago politicians are much more honest than most bug city politicians. They don't pretend to not be corrupt.
I came here to post this question: What could possibly go wrong?
And discovered that just about everybody else had exactly the same reaction. There were two or three responses that at first glance seemed to think this was a good idea, then I read them closer and realized they were being sarcastic.
What's the solution, you ask? Honestly, I agree with another reply to you: The solution is to accept that there is a risk in flying and move on. The reality is that there is more risk of you dying in a plane crash than a terrorist activity aboard your plane, and obviously far less risk of dying related to air travel than there is simply driving to work in the mornings. And really, the best this airport security can ever hope to accomplish is to force a terrorist to detonate their bombs in crowded security lines instead of crowded airplanes.
The problem with not having any security is that security theater is more effective at reducing attacks than doing nothing. If there was no security screening of any kind, the number of attacks against air travel would steadily increase. While security theater (which is what most of what we have now is) is primarily aimed at the general population, it also impacts the perceptions of potential terrorists. Potential terrorists spend a fair bit of time trying to figure out how to get around airport security. This results in them developing complicated schemes with a significantly higher chance of failure than if there was no security screening at all (rather than the screening that we have which is mostly security theater).
The biggest problem I have with current security theater is that every time something gets past existing screening they add a new step to the process rather than get rid of some existing step and replacing it with a new one. Personally, I would like to see the airport screening turned back over to the airlines with the TSA being tasked with setting the guidelines and testing airline security.