The problem is that normal is relative, in this case to our biology, generally. I we had evolved in another environment, that would be normal. We simply lack the information to know what environments life can start in.
Well, if the Dems were offering universal health care I'd be interested to see how it turns out, but they aren't. They are offering mandated insurance.
Have you thought about this one iota? How do you propose that a universal healthcare system would be any better? The money has to come from somewhere. If you are not paying it through insurance, you are paying it through taxes. The only difference is that one of those is forced upon you and violates your fundamental rights. If you claim that taxes violate your fundamental rights then I assume that you think that private property is sacrosanct. I assume that means you think we should give back all the land we promised to the American Indians in our treaties with them, because that was their property and we stole it. Or does theft become property after long enough?
If the public refused to visit such a doctor, the doctor would have to change his policies or risk going out of business. Remind me again how capitalism would fail? Which would work only if there weren't a cartel of doctors. Oh, there is one you say. Well, I suppose you would regulate them somehow into not overcharging or setting rules or guidelines that might be detrimental to the public. Or would that violate their rights?
The lack of access to healthcare is due only to the lack of competition among insurance companies and healthcare providers. I thought it was due to high prices due to lack of competition? Or did you just skip that step this time. Again, what's to stop industry collusion under your plan? How do we get perfect information, a necessary part of a functioning free market, to the consumer. Impossible, even theoretically.
If you believe those to be noble efforts, feel free to put your hours of labor toward those causes, and ask others to support it as well. Why do you feel the need to violate the rights of your neighbors and fellow citizens by telling them that, if they want to live in this country, they have to support your chosen cause. You realize that you directly benefit from the past government efforts to eradicate polio. You need worry not at all about contracting polio. It's amazing that you can sit here, the beneficiary of untold numbers of government projects and claim that you can stand on your own.
Every time I hear the absurd libertarian refrain I can do little but laugh. When will you stop pretending that you are the only person who does anything to help you. If you are in the U.S. you are the beneficiary of innumerable years of global hegemony funded by those very taxes you so hate. If the government weren't helping poor people this country would see termoil like you wouldn't believe. In fact, the whole reason we have social security and welfare and unemployment is because if we didn't we were going to get real socialism.
If the market were free to function of its own accord (as it can and always will despite the public's irrational fears), competition would lower costs. A functioning free market requires perfect information for all of its participants. Given that perfect information for everyone is impossible in even in theory, your precious free market will never work.
Obama is going to win the caucuses and close up some of the gap in Texas delegates. Maybe all of the gap. And he's still significantly ahead in delegates when you take out the super-delegates. In fact, if the Dems didn't have the super delegates He would have a fool-proof delegate count by now.
It was a bunch of bullshit. No one ever grilled Ron Paul on the support he gets from far right wing racist groups on air. The initial question was absurd and the line that Russert followed was the worst sort of twisted reasoning. Sort of "your brother's, former roommate's sister's boyfriend said such and such and he supports you." or "Do you reject support from all of those black people who have committed crimes?"
It means that she won the popular vote, which is translated by the media into a win these days. Obama is set to win the caucuses. What this is really is the media finally turning on Obama. From Russert's vile line of questioning about Farrakhan, "Why won't you say that you would stab him in the face, huh?" He would never have asked Kerry about the endorsement from LaRouche, yet he feels the need to act like Farrakhan actually matters.
I'm sure they could think of some creative ways to mess with eBay.
Mass false bidding on auctions or the like. Not to give suggestions or anything, but they could start sniping auction with fake accounts and never pay. Doing it on a large enough scale could affect eBay's bottom line. They could start spamming people with emails about how eBay is going broke. I'm sure there's plenty of other things I'm not even thinking about that they could do.
eBay explains here why they do it. I would guess that it's easier for them(read: costs less money) to simply let the companies do the work of deleting auctions, rather than have the company call or email eBay every time they want something taken down.
I especially love their section on how things won't be mistakenly removed:
How eBay helps to ensure that listings aren't mistakenly removed. A rights owner reporting through VeRO must be registered through VeRO before reporting items to us. Rights owners sign legally binding documents when reporting items to eBay. Ooooh! Legal binding documents, I feel so safe.
Yep. And, conversely, that software didn't need to get made either, because if it did then somebody would have been willing to pay for it! Unless the people who needed it didn't have any money. But poor people don't *really* count.
Sure. Of course, if the first person who buys your book is going to be allowed to do that, you have no economic incentive to write the book at all unless that first person is going to pay all your fixed economic costs (including the opportunity cost of whatever other labor you could have done instead of writing the book during the time it took you to write the book.) The vast majority of books that have been written have not been written because the author thought they would make more money than it cost them in time, I would wager that the same is true of the majority of music and the majority of most forms of art. Sure, most of those people would *like* to get paid for their art, but that isn't the reason most art is created. That fact in itself should say something about the creative process and its place in society.
No, not at all. No matter what system governs economic exchanges, every human action has a (positive or negative) net utility to the actor undertaking it. If it is a negative net utility, there is no incentive to take the action unless a countervailing positive utility is added to it. Cost is simply negative utility. If someone can't be compensated for whatever disutility they experience producing a work, they aren't going to produce it, even if there is no marginal disutility in distributing subsequent copies of the work. Yes, I'm aware of economics and your ability to spout economic theory does not make your point any more valid. You said "Even if marginal costs were zero, however, fixed costs wouldn't be zero, and if you charge nothing for subsequent copies, that means you have to (in order to break even) charge the entire fixed cost for the first copy." I noted that that is only true in certain economic systems. In some systems those costs are shared in ways other than the way they are shared in the U.S. economy. Of course, most people who descend so quickly into economic theory are really heavily invested, emotionally and/or intellectually not necessarily monetarily, in the current economic paradigm of scarcity. Which is exactly the problem, the sort of distribution of information we are talking about does not work under an economic model of scarcity.
"Digital methods of production" may make marginal costs increasingly close to zero, but they don't make them actually zero. If I write a book and someone else starts distributing copies of that book on thepiratebay in pdf format, then the marginal costs for distribution may not be zero, but my costs for distribution are zero.
Even if marginal costs were zero, however, fixed costs wouldn't be zero, and if you charge nothing for subsequent copies, that means you have to (in order to break even) charge the entire fixed cost for the first copy. Assuming the standard American capitalist economy. But, why should we assume that is the best model to follow? Isn't that they question at hand, whether or not the capitalist model is what we want to use.
If you are going to learn about mosquito control in more than a superficial manner -- beyond "drop these pills here" -- then you will need some of that "chloroform in print." A real understanding of mosquito control would require a knowledge of biology, ecology, field methods, statistics and probably some other things I'm not aware of. If this weren't the case one could just drop some pamphlets that say something like "slap the little suckers when they land on you," and be done with it.
Public sanitation has the same depth.
There is obviously a problem getting these books into languages that are useful, but I would say that often times college student can speak, or at least read, English well enough to comprehend a text book. That or we can look to the foreign language departments at universities.
To be fair, a lot of people don't care about embedded because no one sees the OS in embedded systems. It just isn't as Glamorous as desktops. Not that embedded systems aren't important mind you.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that normal is relative, in this case to our biology, generally. I we had evolved in another environment, that would be normal. We simply lack the information to know what environments life can start in.
No, there's methane on Mars that isn't necessarily organic in origin.
Just wait for him to say it a couple more times.
I only buy music from dolphin safe companies.
Well, if the Dems were offering universal health care I'd be interested to see how it turns out, but they aren't. They are offering mandated insurance.
Obama is going to win the caucuses and close up some of the gap in Texas delegates. Maybe all of the gap. And he's still significantly ahead in delegates when you take out the super-delegates. In fact, if the Dems didn't have the super delegates He would have a fool-proof delegate count by now.
It was a bunch of bullshit. No one ever grilled Ron Paul on the support he gets from far right wing racist groups on air. The initial question was absurd and the line that Russert followed was the worst sort of twisted reasoning. Sort of "your brother's, former roommate's sister's boyfriend said such and such and he supports you." or "Do you reject support from all of those black people who have committed crimes?"
It means that she won the popular vote, which is translated by the media into a win these days. Obama is set to win the caucuses. What this is really is the media finally turning on Obama. From Russert's vile line of questioning about Farrakhan, "Why won't you say that you would stab him in the face, huh?" He would never have asked Kerry about the endorsement from LaRouche, yet he feels the need to act like Farrakhan actually matters.
Like this perhaps?
Except for the great couch war of aught five. That sure was a doozy.
Other companies have come before SoC.
a Partial list
I'm sure they could think of some creative ways to mess with eBay.
Mass false bidding on auctions or the like. Not to give suggestions or anything, but they could start sniping auction with fake accounts and never pay. Doing it on a large enough scale could affect eBay's bottom line. They could start spamming people with emails about how eBay is going broke. I'm sure there's plenty of other things I'm not even thinking about that they could do.
I especially love their section on how things won't be mistakenly removed: How eBay helps to ensure that listings aren't mistakenly removed. A rights owner reporting through VeRO must be registered through VeRO before reporting items to us. Rights owners sign legally binding documents when reporting items to eBay. Ooooh! Legal binding documents, I feel so safe.
Given that the Church of Scientology isn't on the list of VeRO about me pages, the whole thing seems really, really iffy.
It isn't even favoritism, it's outright stupid given CoS' past abuses.
If you are going to learn about mosquito control in more than a superficial manner -- beyond "drop these pills here" -- then you will need some of that "chloroform in print." A real understanding of mosquito control would require a knowledge of biology, ecology, field methods, statistics and probably some other things I'm not aware of. If this weren't the case one could just drop some pamphlets that say something like "slap the little suckers when they land on you," and be done with it.
Public sanitation has the same depth.
There is obviously a problem getting these books into languages that are useful, but I would say that often times college student can speak, or at least read, English well enough to comprehend a text book. That or we can look to the foreign language departments at universities.
To be fair, a lot of people don't care about embedded because no one sees the OS in embedded systems. It just isn't as Glamorous as desktops. Not that embedded systems aren't important mind you.
Actually, race does not come down to those finer points, race isn't a real category. It is a made up class that people are assigned to.
i don't know. I think that being forced to use windows for y entire life would make me complain more, not less.
It's the only way to be sure.