You're oversimplifying the matter by assuming that one vote made the difference. One senator can influence more than just his or her own vote - that is what the debate process is for. However, when no liberal senators are left who are given any credibility in senate debate, that opportunity is lost.
A true liberal - or even a true non-conservative - senator may have been able to influence others to voting against the patriot extension. Instead that voice was not heard.
But to the spammer, it doesn't matter - they got paid ahead of time with no guarantee of results. And if the customer doesn't come back, no big deal - there's a lineup of other businesses needing "marketing services".
You made an error yourself in that statement. The vast majority of spam is not for existing domains, but rather for new ones. You can verify this yourself by looking through old spam; if you look at a spam message from a month ago and look at the spamvertised domain you will find it is not the same spamvertised domain that was listed in today's spam, even though they are selling the same products and using all the same web graphics, code, and template.
Furthermore if you run a WHOIS on domain that was spamvertised this morning you will likely find that domain was registered in the last week or so. While indeed the two domains are likely owned by the same group, moving their operation from one web host to another as they get discovered and shut down, the old spam is of no value, nor are returning customers important.
Which is why the spammers services are important to the owner of the spamvertised website, and why the spammer is getting paid nicely in the process. The only way that people find their way to these sites is via spam, because the sites aren't around long enough to be found in a search engine.
How do we know this? Because we can observe (and we have observed) that they continue spamming even when there's obviously no profit in it, nor any realistic hope of any profit in the future.
That is simply not true. There is plenty of money to be made in spam, and it is the motivating force behind it. The spammers that make the news when they get caught (almost always on other offenses) are especially wealthy relative to their home countries. Furthermore, the total investment for a spammer is minimal; they really just need to be able to talk a good game and get some time on a botnet to be able to make money fast. As we've seen, each time a spammer is thrown in jail or murdered , the spam volume at best remains the same (more often, it increases) because it is profitable.
Your very notion of spammers being inherent sociopaths simply makes no sense. If they just want to aggravate people electronically, they could do it by trolling discussion forums and not have to worry about what side of the law they are on. They are not all mentally ill, they are all just looking to make a buck. And many of them - have you ever looked at the lists on spamhaus? I'm guessing no - are from former second-world or current first-world countries where economic opportunities are scarce.
At present the ones who REALLY pay for spam are gullible boobs who let their computers get hijacked.
Correction - the boobs pay for about half the costs of spam. You are correct that spammers themselves pay a negligible portion.
However, the rest is paid by every person who accesses the internet, in any way, shape or form. Spam is consuming bandwidth, which costs users money even if their own machines are not propagating it. Spam is also consuming storage space on email servers, even if users never read it. Spam is consuming CPU time when filters are running, and spam is consuming human time to adjust those filters.
Spam is, in a very real way, driving up the cost of using the internet. And those costs are faced by everyone. To make matters worse, no amount of filtering will ever end the problem, or even reduce those costs that I just mentioned because the filters do nothing whatsoever to prevent spam from being sent out.
The only way to stop spam from being sent out is to remove the incentive for sending it out from the spammers. As we all know, spammers send our spam because it is profitable, so interrupting the flow of money to the spammer will remove that incentive, which will result in lower spam volumes. This has already been demonstrated as an effective technique.
When you have something that is 0.000001% effective and you can still make millions, there is no free market way of stopping it.
You're wrong on that. There is a free market way to do it. You can stop spam on the market by getting the businesses who currently do business with spammers to stop. Some of them aren't even aware they are working with spammers because they are working in large volumes and the spammers are small fry. Some of them are two or more degrees away from the spammer and might never make direct contact with them. Nonetheless, if you can interrupt the money flow, you can stop spam.
Sure, I learned BASIC just like millions of others back in the day. But I can't recall the last time I actually did something with it. There are plenty of great programming languages out now that are great introductions to programming that would make more sense to have on a phone. I have my favorite that I do 90% of my coding in, but I won't start a flamewar by naming it or suggesting it to be better than other choices.
The economic side has been tackled as well, and it turns out that it is not easier than the technological side.
In a way, though, it is. There are actually fewer actions that need to be taken from the economic side than from the technological side; indeed economic actions can have very measurable and lasting effects in a short amount of time while technological actions are generally worthless.
More importantly: It involves politics, and politics move slowly on all problems of the commons
You may have misread me on that matter. Economic solutions are not inherently political, even though politics is inherently tied to economics. However, the companies who are on the financial take in the matter can be influenced without the necessity of legislative action.
Also, filtering is great for reducing the results of spam, including spammer revenue
Actually, it isn't, for at least two reasons:
The people who are willing to invest time and money in filtering aren't likely to click through and buy something based on spam any ways.
Total spam volume continues to increase in spite of filtering, which indicates it has not had any meaningful effect on the rewards for the spammer
There is no reason not to do both, educate users and filter spam.
Those are the two least useful tactics you can pursue. You would be better off praying to the flying spaghetti monster for a solution. My proposal is to actually get involved in the financial transactions that keep the spammer in operation; the people who are paying the spammer, the people the spammer is paying, and the other associates who are also getting a cut in on the action.
Unlike filtering, this has already been shown to be effective.
People are looking at the wrong end of the problem with much of their efforts - and this is just another example of that. You cannot solve spam with filtering, detection, or legislative actions. We've seen time and time again that those are just time and money-sucking stopgap measures that ignore the reality of the situation.
We won't see a real solution to the spam epidemic until people acknowledge the simple truth that spam is an economic problem. There is still a lot of money to be made by sending out spam, with very little expense for the spammer. The profit margin is high enough that it is well worth their while to find various ways around filters and any other silly mechanisms we throw at them.
If you want to make an actual difference in the fight against spam, you need to approach the economic motivations behind it. If you stop of the flow of money to the spammers, you will stop the spam as well. Because no matter how much some people may want to believe otherwise, spam isn't sent just to piss you off and ruin your day. Spam is sent out because spammers are paid to do so. If they don't get paid, they won't send spam, it is as simple as that. Any other kind of countermeasure only prolongs the fight and throws more money in the wrong direction.
I actually opted to RTFA and I'm not sure what the "5 technologies" are. I even looked at the printer friendly version so I wouldn't have to wade through tons of "next page" and didn't easily find the 5 technologies.
InfoWorld article quality is really declining when they put out stuff like this.
This is an attempt to keep the public misinformed by the opposition.
The domain is a redirect to various other sources (some call it "Newt Roulette") selected randomly from a set pool. I have tried it a few times and I haven't found anything that was truly misinforming, unless you consider news articles from recognized news sources to be misinforming.
I tend to underclock more often now, to reduce power consumption on my systems. Of course, I don't play any games on my systems, so I am almost never pushing the capabilities of the hardware.
They are probably just trying to employ fewer tech support people, by reducing the total number of products that need to be supported. Considering how awful their tech support already is, this isn't a surprise move at all.
First of all, do you realize who you just wrote a reply to? You just replied to me, damn_registrars, who you previously made a policy of not replying to. Why are you getting all wishy-washy and flip-floppy on us?
I would use that stock to take up all sorts of unsustainable debt
I don't know how stocks work in your imaginary world, but here in the US you have to sell your stocks to make money off of them - unless of course they are paying dividends. And as someone else pointed out, companies usually prohibit their employees from selling their stocks immediately after an IPO, so facebook employees likely won't have the freedom you just assumed they would have. But nice try anyways.
and then if the thing fails, I wouldn't pay anything back
I guess if that is what you believe, so be it. You would be in for a surprise when reality attacks you.
If you live in the society that allows people like Corzine to steal billions while taxing those who actually work for living, at least take advantage of it.
Just because you don't want to pay taxes doesn't mean that people who actually think about the matter share your opinion. If you don't want to pay taxes, just go talk to the accountants who do taxes for the richest people in this country, as they pay the lowest effective income tax rates of anyone (including, in many cases, a rate of zero).
But of course, that isn't what you're hear to bitch about, is it? You have some other axe to grind, it just isn't clear what it is.
Facebook might die out, but it needs a real competitor first
Not necessarily. Products have previously risen and fallen in terms of hype and excitement without being replaced.
Saying social netsorking will die out is like saying word processing applications will die out
Word processors are important business tools. Facebook is not.
I think a better comparison for facebook is the segway human transporter. Remember how much hype went to "IT" before we knew what "IT" was? Then we found it cost $5,000 and almost nobody was interested any more. It didn't need to be replaced by anything, because we realized it wasn't that important to begin with and it wasn't much better than options we already had.
Similarly, facebook isn't really that important, and not any better than options we already had.
Even Slashdot itself is a kind of social network
And slashdot is, undoubtedly, dying. It just didn't reach the large number of readers/victims that facebook had, so nobody really paid that much attention to it's demise.
People like to share news and ideas.
Which, strangely enough, we were able to do before facebook, and we can still do without facebook.
can put you in a very bad position if you start spending "your" money right after the IPO in anticipation of the future wealth, and then the stock tanks and you're now in debt.
That is an excellent point. We don't know how financially knowledgeable most of the employees who will receive stocks are. They may well be taking advice from fools and end up believing themselves filthy rich before they ever see any actual money from their stock.
Even worse would be if employees invest in it for their retirement accounts. Back when I worked at CompUSA (back when it was American-owned and publicly traded), I knew someone who invested heavily in company stock for his retirement. Thankfully I was not that person, although I was tempted. The company folded before he reached retirement, as I recall - I just don't know if he got anything back from the buyout.
Wouldn't all of them selling their stock make the price plummet?
Possibly. That depends on how much of the original stocks are distributed to the employees versus how much is sold to raise money, and how much is sold in the IPO. The total percent owned by employees could potentially be a small portion of the total volume.
If, for some reason, the employees actually held most of the total sock volume, then yes if they sold it off immediately that would be bad for the price.
Though frankly I'd be astonished if it was worth anything at all by 2016.
... will sell their stocks ASAP. Social networking is the next bubble and those who hold on to their stock as speculators will end up taking a bath. I would recommend the first ones who get their stock sell it within a month or less and then figure out what they want to do for a real job once the bubble bursts.
It is not rare for people to win these kind of lawsuit
Really? How many do you know of that haven't been featured in hollywood movies? For some reason do you think hollywood likes to put very common stories into film? If so, then why wasn't my last oil change made into a movie?
In fact it is so common that companies always try to settle out of court rather than bringing them to trial.
Wrong. They settle out of court because they don't want the bad publicity. But even that doesn't happen very often. There are far, far, far, more cases of polluters getting away with it than there are of them not.
Because if pollution they've caused is shown to have injured someone, there isn't a jury in the country that will let them off the hook.
Bull. Shit.
The companies know exactly what attorneys to hire to get out of this. The attorneys know exactly how to pick a jury that will lead to acquittal. And the lawyers representing the people in the case are comparatively underpaid to boot.
They're not worried about a couple million dollars in fines.
They should be worried about not hurting people. Instead they are worried about PR and their bottom line.
but it's pretty silly to think that potential polluters would just not worry about it
You're an idiot to think that they would worry about it if there were no regulations. They make much more money by cutting corners than they do by being careful.
The potential liability associated with pollution is enormous.
Only if they're caught, and proven liable. Which is already a big hurdle to clear even with existing regulations. They very case you used in your (barely even qualifying as flimsy) argument mentions that the actual pollution measurements weren't taken until many years after the plant had claimed to have stopped polluting. Which means that had nobody cared, they would have certainly maintained the high pollution levels they were previously at.
I'm amazed you haven't already been moderated up to (+5, informative) by all the Paullowers on slashdot; I guess they ran out of their moderation points.
Nonetheless, Erin Brockovich is not a realistic portrayal of how the country would be if all the environmental regulations were eliminated as most of the candidates want to see happen. While yes it is based on a true story, the fact is that the case was brought up by someone who had legal connections. Without her involvement in the matter it is hard to tell how long the company would have been able to continue polluting the water and what the outcome would have been.
And had she not been connected to an experienced legal team, she may well have been steamrolled by the lawyers that were hired by the company, and ended up with nothing.
In other words, no matter how much of an inconvenience the polluters might view regulations to be, they need to be in place.
It happens all the time, it's happening today.
Companies polluting? Yes, that does happen all the time. People winning legal cases against those companies to stop them from doing it? That is really quite rare. And on top of that, you are ignoring the fact that the Brockovich case was reactive, not proactive. The pollution already occurred, the damage has already been done. It cannot be undone by money. How many people can corporations be allowed to kill?
You could actually say that they are sparing a model from having to starve herself to meet their definition of "beauty". If we aren't perpetuating anorexia by paying models to starve themselves, this might not be all bad.
So Ron Paul's position is that by strengthening property rights, civil lawsuits would provide adequate disincentive to polluters. In reality, he want's to weaken protections for polluters. The opposite of what you've said.
Except that proposal doesn't actually work. It places the responsibility on the private citizen to make a case against a polluter. If, for example, a polluter is burning toxic waste and contaminating the air, the private citizens need to prove where the products that make them sick are coming from. That is an incredibly difficult task and takes a significant amount of time, such that many people could not afford to pursue that problem. It is more likely that the people living in the polluted are would - if they could afford it - sell their houses and move. At that point, of course, someone else would buy the polluted property (at a loss to the seller) and the cycle starts over. The polluter continues to make money, the victims continue to lose lives and money.
He has talked about streamlining and eliminating regulations to reduce their burden on industry
Which generally means a lot more of the latter and very little of the former. Nevermind the fallacy of "their burden on industry".
In other words, it is recognized that there is a very good reason to have the kinds of regulations that Ron Paul wants to throw out. This isn't a matter of "civil liberties", because reasonable people do not see slowly killing entire populations as a "civil liberty" that should be granted to companies.
He has proposed eliminating the departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Interior and Education.
Have you considered what the dept of the interior does? Or for that matter what elimination of the dept of education will do in the long term to the uneducated and underemployed people who end up buying the polluted properties because they can't afford to live anywhere else?
Ron Paul is the candidate with the most, erm, independently minded supporters you'll find, and I dare you to name any base that knows more about US history back to Woodrow Wilson or Thomas Jefferson, about monetary and fiscal policy, or about foreign policy. He's the one candidate who's actually changed the dialog of the country and sustained it for years, that says something about the issues he speaks on.
Clearly, you are trying for a (+1, informative) or (+1, insightful) mod there, although based on some of the rabid, uninformed Paullowers here the proper mod would actually be (+1, funny). Too much of anything, even the anointed Ron Paul, can make one into a raving lunatic over time.
Slashdot Mirror
You're oversimplifying the matter by assuming that one vote made the difference. One senator can influence more than just his or her own vote - that is what the debate process is for. However, when no liberal senators are left who are given any credibility in senate debate, that opportunity is lost.
A true liberal - or even a true non-conservative - senator may have been able to influence others to voting against the patriot extension. Instead that voice was not heard.
But to the spammer, it doesn't matter - they got paid ahead of time with no guarantee of results. And if the customer doesn't come back, no big deal - there's a lineup of other businesses needing "marketing services".
You made an error yourself in that statement. The vast majority of spam is not for existing domains, but rather for new ones. You can verify this yourself by looking through old spam; if you look at a spam message from a month ago and look at the spamvertised domain you will find it is not the same spamvertised domain that was listed in today's spam, even though they are selling the same products and using all the same web graphics, code, and template.
Furthermore if you run a WHOIS on domain that was spamvertised this morning you will likely find that domain was registered in the last week or so. While indeed the two domains are likely owned by the same group, moving their operation from one web host to another as they get discovered and shut down, the old spam is of no value, nor are returning customers important.
Which is why the spammers services are important to the owner of the spamvertised website, and why the spammer is getting paid nicely in the process. The only way that people find their way to these sites is via spam, because the sites aren't around long enough to be found in a search engine.
If it were that simple, someone would have done it by now, don't you think?
It has been done, it's even been discussed on slashdot before. And it is far more effective than filters can ever hope to be.
How do we know this? Because we can observe (and we have observed) that they continue spamming even when there's obviously no profit in it, nor any realistic hope of any profit in the future.
That is simply not true. There is plenty of money to be made in spam, and it is the motivating force behind it. The spammers that make the news when they get caught (almost always on other offenses) are especially wealthy relative to their home countries. Furthermore, the total investment for a spammer is minimal; they really just need to be able to talk a good game and get some time on a botnet to be able to make money fast. As we've seen, each time a spammer is thrown in jail or murdered , the spam volume at best remains the same (more often, it increases) because it is profitable.
Your very notion of spammers being inherent sociopaths simply makes no sense. If they just want to aggravate people electronically, they could do it by trolling discussion forums and not have to worry about what side of the law they are on. They are not all mentally ill, they are all just looking to make a buck. And many of them - have you ever looked at the lists on spamhaus? I'm guessing no - are from former second-world or current first-world countries where economic opportunities are scarce.
At present the ones who REALLY pay for spam are gullible boobs who let their computers get hijacked.
Correction - the boobs pay for about half the costs of spam. You are correct that spammers themselves pay a negligible portion.
However, the rest is paid by every person who accesses the internet, in any way, shape or form. Spam is consuming bandwidth, which costs users money even if their own machines are not propagating it. Spam is also consuming storage space on email servers, even if users never read it. Spam is consuming CPU time when filters are running, and spam is consuming human time to adjust those filters.
Spam is, in a very real way, driving up the cost of using the internet. And those costs are faced by everyone. To make matters worse, no amount of filtering will ever end the problem, or even reduce those costs that I just mentioned because the filters do nothing whatsoever to prevent spam from being sent out.
The only way to stop spam from being sent out is to remove the incentive for sending it out from the spammers. As we all know, spammers send our spam because it is profitable, so interrupting the flow of money to the spammer will remove that incentive, which will result in lower spam volumes. This has already been demonstrated as an effective technique.
When you have something that is 0.000001% effective and you can still make millions, there is no free market way of stopping it.
You're wrong on that. There is a free market way to do it. You can stop spam on the market by getting the businesses who currently do business with spammers to stop. Some of them aren't even aware they are working with spammers because they are working in large volumes and the spammers are small fry. Some of them are two or more degrees away from the spammer and might never make direct contact with them. Nonetheless, if you can interrupt the money flow, you can stop spam.
Sure, I learned BASIC just like millions of others back in the day. But I can't recall the last time I actually did something with it. There are plenty of great programming languages out now that are great introductions to programming that would make more sense to have on a phone. I have my favorite that I do 90% of my coding in, but I won't start a flamewar by naming it or suggesting it to be better than other choices.
The economic side has been tackled as well, and it turns out that it is not easier than the technological side.
In a way, though, it is. There are actually fewer actions that need to be taken from the economic side than from the technological side; indeed economic actions can have very measurable and lasting effects in a short amount of time while technological actions are generally worthless.
More importantly: It involves politics, and politics move slowly on all problems of the commons
You may have misread me on that matter. Economic solutions are not inherently political, even though politics is inherently tied to economics. However, the companies who are on the financial take in the matter can be influenced without the necessity of legislative action.
Also, filtering is great for reducing the results of spam, including spammer revenue
Actually, it isn't, for at least two reasons:
There is no reason not to do both, educate users and filter spam.
Those are the two least useful tactics you can pursue. You would be better off praying to the flying spaghetti monster for a solution. My proposal is to actually get involved in the financial transactions that keep the spammer in operation; the people who are paying the spammer, the people the spammer is paying, and the other associates who are also getting a cut in on the action.
Unlike filtering, this has already been shown to be effective.
People are looking at the wrong end of the problem with much of their efforts - and this is just another example of that. You cannot solve spam with filtering, detection, or legislative actions. We've seen time and time again that those are just time and money-sucking stopgap measures that ignore the reality of the situation.
We won't see a real solution to the spam epidemic until people acknowledge the simple truth that spam is an economic problem. There is still a lot of money to be made by sending out spam, with very little expense for the spammer. The profit margin is high enough that it is well worth their while to find various ways around filters and any other silly mechanisms we throw at them.
If you want to make an actual difference in the fight against spam, you need to approach the economic motivations behind it. If you stop of the flow of money to the spammers, you will stop the spam as well. Because no matter how much some people may want to believe otherwise, spam isn't sent just to piss you off and ruin your day. Spam is sent out because spammers are paid to do so. If they don't get paid, they won't send spam, it is as simple as that. Any other kind of countermeasure only prolongs the fight and throws more money in the wrong direction.
I actually opted to RTFA and I'm not sure what the "5 technologies" are. I even looked at the printer friendly version so I wouldn't have to wade through tons of "next page" and didn't easily find the 5 technologies.
InfoWorld article quality is really declining when they put out stuff like this.
If the mob is wrong, but their argument supports Ron Paul, we tell them to go post on slashdot.
This is an attempt to keep the public misinformed by the opposition.
The domain is a redirect to various other sources (some call it "Newt Roulette") selected randomly from a set pool. I have tried it a few times and I haven't found anything that was truly misinforming, unless you consider news articles from recognized news sources to be misinforming.
I tend to underclock more often now, to reduce power consumption on my systems. Of course, I don't play any games on my systems, so I am almost never pushing the capabilities of the hardware.
They are probably just trying to employ fewer tech support people, by reducing the total number of products that need to be supported. Considering how awful their tech support already is, this isn't a surprise move at all.
I would use that stock to take up all sorts of unsustainable debt
I don't know how stocks work in your imaginary world, but here in the US you have to sell your stocks to make money off of them - unless of course they are paying dividends. And as someone else pointed out, companies usually prohibit their employees from selling their stocks immediately after an IPO, so facebook employees likely won't have the freedom you just assumed they would have. But nice try anyways.
and then if the thing fails, I wouldn't pay anything back
I guess if that is what you believe, so be it. You would be in for a surprise when reality attacks you.
If you live in the society that allows people like Corzine to steal billions while taxing those who actually work for living, at least take advantage of it.
Just because you don't want to pay taxes doesn't mean that people who actually think about the matter share your opinion. If you don't want to pay taxes, just go talk to the accountants who do taxes for the richest people in this country, as they pay the lowest effective income tax rates of anyone (including, in many cases, a rate of zero).
But of course, that isn't what you're hear to bitch about, is it? You have some other axe to grind, it just isn't clear what it is.
Social networking itself is not the bubble
I beg to differ.
Facebook might die out, but it needs a real competitor first
Not necessarily. Products have previously risen and fallen in terms of hype and excitement without being replaced.
Saying social netsorking will die out is like saying word processing applications will die out
Word processors are important business tools. Facebook is not.
I think a better comparison for facebook is the segway human transporter. Remember how much hype went to "IT" before we knew what "IT" was? Then we found it cost $5,000 and almost nobody was interested any more. It didn't need to be replaced by anything, because we realized it wasn't that important to begin with and it wasn't much better than options we already had.
Similarly, facebook isn't really that important, and not any better than options we already had.
Even Slashdot itself is a kind of social network
And slashdot is, undoubtedly, dying. It just didn't reach the large number of readers/victims that facebook had, so nobody really paid that much attention to it's demise.
People like to share news and ideas.
Which, strangely enough, we were able to do before facebook, and we can still do without facebook.
can put you in a very bad position if you start spending "your" money right after the IPO in anticipation of the future wealth, and then the stock tanks and you're now in debt.
That is an excellent point. We don't know how financially knowledgeable most of the employees who will receive stocks are. They may well be taking advice from fools and end up believing themselves filthy rich before they ever see any actual money from their stock.
Even worse would be if employees invest in it for their retirement accounts. Back when I worked at CompUSA (back when it was American-owned and publicly traded), I knew someone who invested heavily in company stock for his retirement. Thankfully I was not that person, although I was tempted. The company folded before he reached retirement, as I recall - I just don't know if he got anything back from the buyout.
Wouldn't all of them selling their stock make the price plummet?
Possibly. That depends on how much of the original stocks are distributed to the employees versus how much is sold to raise money, and how much is sold in the IPO. The total percent owned by employees could potentially be a small portion of the total volume.
If, for some reason, the employees actually held most of the total sock volume, then yes if they sold it off immediately that would be bad for the price.
Though frankly I'd be astonished if it was worth anything at all by 2016.
... will sell their stocks ASAP. Social networking is the next bubble and those who hold on to their stock as speculators will end up taking a bath. I would recommend the first ones who get their stock sell it within a month or less and then figure out what they want to do for a real job once the bubble bursts.
It is not rare for people to win these kind of lawsuit
Really? How many do you know of that haven't been featured in hollywood movies? For some reason do you think hollywood likes to put very common stories into film? If so, then why wasn't my last oil change made into a movie?
In fact it is so common that companies always try to settle out of court rather than bringing them to trial.
Wrong. They settle out of court because they don't want the bad publicity. But even that doesn't happen very often. There are far, far, far, more cases of polluters getting away with it than there are of them not.
Because if pollution they've caused is shown to have injured someone, there isn't a jury in the country that will let them off the hook.
Bull. Shit.
The companies know exactly what attorneys to hire to get out of this. The attorneys know exactly how to pick a jury that will lead to acquittal. And the lawyers representing the people in the case are comparatively underpaid to boot.
They're not worried about a couple million dollars in fines.
They should be worried about not hurting people. Instead they are worried about PR and their bottom line.
but it's pretty silly to think that potential polluters would just not worry about it
You're an idiot to think that they would worry about it if there were no regulations. They make much more money by cutting corners than they do by being careful.
The potential liability associated with pollution is enormous.
Only if they're caught, and proven liable. Which is already a big hurdle to clear even with existing regulations. They very case you used in your (barely even qualifying as flimsy) argument mentions that the actual pollution measurements weren't taken until many years after the plant had claimed to have stopped polluting. Which means that had nobody cared, they would have certainly maintained the high pollution levels they were previously at.
Nonetheless, Erin Brockovich is not a realistic portrayal of how the country would be if all the environmental regulations were eliminated as most of the candidates want to see happen. While yes it is based on a true story, the fact is that the case was brought up by someone who had legal connections. Without her involvement in the matter it is hard to tell how long the company would have been able to continue polluting the water and what the outcome would have been.
And had she not been connected to an experienced legal team, she may well have been steamrolled by the lawyers that were hired by the company, and ended up with nothing.
In other words, no matter how much of an inconvenience the polluters might view regulations to be, they need to be in place.
It happens all the time, it's happening today.
Companies polluting? Yes, that does happen all the time. People winning legal cases against those companies to stop them from doing it? That is really quite rare. And on top of that, you are ignoring the fact that the Brockovich case was reactive, not proactive. The pollution already occurred, the damage has already been done. It cannot be undone by money. How many people can corporations be allowed to kill?
You could actually say that they are sparing a model from having to starve herself to meet their definition of "beauty". If we aren't perpetuating anorexia by paying models to starve themselves, this might not be all bad.
So Ron Paul's position is that by strengthening property rights, civil lawsuits would provide adequate disincentive to polluters. In reality, he want's to weaken protections for polluters. The opposite of what you've said.
Except that proposal doesn't actually work. It places the responsibility on the private citizen to make a case against a polluter. If, for example, a polluter is burning toxic waste and contaminating the air, the private citizens need to prove where the products that make them sick are coming from. That is an incredibly difficult task and takes a significant amount of time, such that many people could not afford to pursue that problem. It is more likely that the people living in the polluted are would - if they could afford it - sell their houses and move. At that point, of course, someone else would buy the polluted property (at a loss to the seller) and the cycle starts over. The polluter continues to make money, the victims continue to lose lives and money.
He has talked about streamlining and eliminating regulations to reduce their burden on industry
Which generally means a lot more of the latter and very little of the former. Nevermind the fallacy of "their burden on industry". In other words, it is recognized that there is a very good reason to have the kinds of regulations that Ron Paul wants to throw out. This isn't a matter of "civil liberties", because reasonable people do not see slowly killing entire populations as a "civil liberty" that should be granted to companies.
He has proposed eliminating the departments of Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Interior and Education.
Have you considered what the dept of the interior does? Or for that matter what elimination of the dept of education will do in the long term to the uneducated and underemployed people who end up buying the polluted properties because they can't afford to live anywhere else?
Ron Paul is the candidate with the most, erm, independently minded supporters you'll find, and I dare you to name any base that knows more about US history back to Woodrow Wilson or Thomas Jefferson, about monetary and fiscal policy, or about foreign policy. He's the one candidate who's actually changed the dialog of the country and sustained it for years, that says something about the issues he speaks on.
Clearly, you are trying for a (+1, informative) or (+1, insightful) mod there, although based on some of the rabid, uninformed Paullowers here the proper mod would actually be (+1, funny). Too much of anything, even the anointed Ron Paul, can make one into a raving lunatic over time.