That is serious abuse of power, that unfortunately happens every day. I often wonder how many are enticed by "sting" operators into committing crimes they never would have had the police not solicited it?
In fairness, this is called entrapment, and if you can successfully argue that you wouldn't have done the crime without the officer's inducement, then you can usually get off, though it's certainly not always the case.
The details have come out, and apparently it was unrelated to the Wolverine leak, which one might have thought was obvious. It deals with a case of massive fraud against AT&T and Verizon, potentially costing millions of dollars. I guess this is what happens when stories with rampant speculation hit/. .
Oh, certainly. I suppose I phrased my argument incorrectly, but I was thinking more from the point of view of the currently winning allied leaders. From their perspective, they wanted to eliminate every trace of having this sort of thing happen again, which not only included things like the Marshall Plan, but also the insistence on total surrender. While it may have been counterproductive in the end, it's certainly an understandable point of view to take without the benefit of 60 years of hindsight.
There's no denying that the Treaty of Versailles was extremely punishing to Germany, and that was obviously a factor. However, a huge point of Hitler's propaganda was that the Jews (among others) had sabotaged the war effort and thus caused Germany to lose. One thing that helped this was the fact that enemy troops never touched their soil, and so he was able to make the impression that Germany was strong enough to repel the invaders and continue the war had they been given the chance.
Obviously the Treaty of Versailles was a huge part of the rise of Nazism. However, considering only it to the point of ignoring all others is just silly; Hitler needed a scapegoat, and this mentality helped him to make one.
Regardless of the truth of this statement (I can't argue convincingly either way), there's a fundamental problem with being OK with those negotiations: it's exactly the mentality that allowed WWII to happen from WWI. The allies stopped just before the Rhine in WWI and allowed the Germans to surrender before they were properly invaded. This just helped fuel Hitler's rise to power, as he blamed people sabotaging the war effort on them losing, thus allowing for great scapegoating. Japanese culture is obviously different from German, but it seems like this very mentality could easily happen again in Japan. In this case, allowing them to say that they "hadn't really been totally defeated" may have been the worst option in the world, or at least seemed that way to the world leaders at the time.
But, taxes should NOT be used to manipulate behavior....that's a bastardization of what a tax is for.
This is not the case for Pigovian taxes, which is exactly what a gas tax is. If you're trying to disincentivize a behavior but not outright ban it, then taxes can be an excellent way of doing that. They make people see the true cost of whatever it is they're doing. In this case, people have to pay for the carbon dioxide they put in the air, the wear on the road, and all sorts of other good stuff. So, there are some cases where taxes can and should be used to manipulate behavior.
You say that like there's something inherently wrong with a weaker dollar. First of all, bear in mind that the dollar still beats many other currencies in other countries. But beyond this, if the dollar weakens, then travel to the US and the purchase of US goods suddenly become more appealing to foreigners. Think about it if you're a European; your Euro now goes further than it ever did before. Maybe now would be a good time to travel to the US and use that money while it's good, and maybe buy an iPod or a laptop, or something else that, even with duty fees, is way cheaper now than it would be back in Europe (I know several people who have done this just this summer). Meanwhile, people in the US are less likely to buy imported goods, since they're more expensive. This increases the amount of money in the US economy, which is usually considered a good thing (since it comes from real value, and not just printing money).
Also, I'm fairly confident that there was fairly massive deflation during the Great Depression. So, that argument doesn't really hold up either (unless I'm misunderstanding it).
I'm not arguing the point that Bush has been a horrible President. But let's keep ourselves to important criticisms, and not get caught up in inflation arguments.
Really excellent stuff. My only complaint is the lack of posting as AC; not enough devotion to the cause to truly be a paranoid lunatic talking about the Steve Jobs-conspiracy connection. Still, bravo sir. I think I see the plot of Indigo Prophecy 2 brewing here.
That's an oversimplification, really. Every year, governments set aside plenty of money (as do aid organizations) to give free food to people all over the world. However, as the other person to reply said, this doesn't do us much good if the food is then immediately taken by the corrupt government, so they can feed their own troops and use the food as a means of controlling the populace.
But there's more to it than that. Even in places where there isn't unrest but hunger, we do them a disservice in the long run by dumping free food on them. After all, consider a farmer in such a country. He works hard, probably has to take out a loan for seeds and farming materials, and tries to bring his food to market. Then the USA comes in and dumps a few tons of free grain on the people. Who is going to buy the farmer's food if they can just get it for free? By feeding them, we do a lot to keep them in a cycle of poverty and dependence. I'm not saying that we shouldn't help them, but we should also make sure we aren't stifling them and making them dependent upon us. They're only going to really stop being hungry when they can support themselves, and so we're stuck in a really awkward situation where helping them too much would make them worse off in the end.
Oh I see. That must be why there is absolutely no european company. They simply cannot survive under that harsh climate. Damn those european unions, with their minimum wage, their 35 hour work weeks, their paid overtime, their 30 day paid vacations, their Christmas bonus and paid leaves, their national health services and their unemployment benefits. They simply destroyed their lives and reverted back to the stoneage! No small company can possibly survive that, let alone a multinational. Poor bastards.
That's all well and good....but it also leads to things like the really high unemployment rate in Europe, and the fact that there's an entire young generation who's having a really hard time getting a job, and that's causing all sorts of fun civil unrest.
The GP may have made horrible points trying to attack unions, but that doesn't make them paragons of virtue and light. A friend told me an excellent story about his firm. He works at a financial company, and they were doing some major renovation on their building. They went out and asked for bids, and the union of carpenters in the area refused to submit a bid. So, they went with non-union work, and now the union is picketing them for not hiring union labor. Now, it isn't the actual workers, or union leaders who are picketing: they hired homeless people to picket for them (probably for well below minimum wage, too). Meanwhile, their representatives aren't getting the paid work (the company would have been willing to pay more for union work), but the union leaders are still collecting their union dues. Nice how that works, isn't it?
Unions serve a very important purpose, but we need to make sure we don't defend them for using the same sort of jerk tactics their employers used to. You hear a lot about how unions make employers less likely to hire people, because of all the crap they have to put up with (like tons of red tape about firing people, wages higher than the worth of the work, etc), and we should remember this sort of thing before praising them unilaterally. There should be a balance of power between unions and employers for things to be good.
You may lower the barriers to entry in one market (replacement batteries), but you raise them in another (laptops, for instance) by doing so. This sounds like the government trying to force the market to go in a way it wants, or at least a solution in need of a problem. As someone else astutely pointed out, if you force the batteries to be a certain way, then your hands may be tied by that design in the future. It would hinder innovation if, say, you wanted to optimize your internal components such that you need a smaller battery, or you want to provide a battery 1.5 times as large as normal, for long business travelers. In either case, you would be unable to do so because of government solution. While you could get the standard changed, it would be a huge investment to petition a government that may well not care, and your attempt at innovation could be suddenly not at all worth it. Perhaps the fact that there isn't a standard for batteries indicates that the market is better off without it; standards can be made without the government insisting, and they frequently are.
Didn't Germany recently pass a law banning most "hacking" tools, and by extension, most tools that can be used to detect and defeat hacking? And if so, could these be related? I sincerely hope not, since if so, someone (or multiple persons) in the German government is outclassing the Bush administration in asshole terrorism laws. Suspected of terrorism? Get a trojan. Try to detect/remove the trojan? Break the law and get sent to jail anyway!
Yes, I know that it can be a stretch to say that no hacking tools means you can't still defeat this trojan, but maybe they could either create a trojan that could only be defeated that way, or just expand the law in later years to make it illegal to use anti-virus software "in a way that interferes with a government investigation" or something. Either way, it could lead to some scary stuff if properly abused. Even if you don't start the cycle of getting sent to prison, a trojan can dig up some nice information about enemies of yours.
There are plenty of people that would argue that not only did government intervention slow the US's rise out of the Great Depression, but that it was the main cause in the first place, or at least well up there on the list. Now, whether it was worth it for morale (or other) reasons is a completely different issue, but don't just assume that the government intervening was good for the economy as a whole.
By the same token, unless you're a Nielson household (which I believe requires them getting your permission and installing hardware), does it matter at all if you pirate a show as opposed to watching it on TV? I mean, you miss the advertising, but who is in a position to know that? I could be missing something about the process, but it just strikes me that unless they're watching your box to get statistics, it doesn't affect their ad revenue if you watch or if you don't. Could someone tell me if I'm missing something, or if my assessment is accurate?
You say that like the missiles even matter in a war with China. China owns a majority of our debt, and buys more of it every day, which helps fuel our government's debt spending. If we decided to go to war with China, they could just stop buying our debt, and we would be royally screwed. If you couple that with a complete halt on exports to the US, China could easily cripple our economy, leaving us in no position to do much of anything. And while our military would still be entirely too strong for them to invade us (our Navy could crush them before they made it halfway here), it would certainly put them in the position of power for any peace negotiations (which the American people would probably be clamoring for). There's a reason the US still looks on China favorably, and it isn't because they have a good human rights record.
Assassination weapon? Cancer tends to take years to kill you. Sure, while this might speed the process up to several months or something, that still gives the person in question plenty of time to spill everything that they know, or otherwise cause serious damage to the cause that the assassins are trying to protect.
No, there are much better and more clever ways to do these things. Like how they iced Georgi Markov (always a classic).
Well, those games are doing things the wrong way around. After all, in those games, you're trying to kill blood-sucking vampires and other such monsters. You would need a game that involved being a vampire, hunting down civilians and sucking them dry of their money^W blood for your sustenance.
Nah, that isn't going to happen. The government will just prop up the airlines at all costs, even if they continue to go against customer's wishes. I refer you here for a more scholarly reference on the subject;) (South Park is consistently more accurate about most political issues than almost anything else I've ever seen).
I think using emotion as part of the balance is something that's gaining more and more acceptance, but it's the way that I was always taught, and it makes a great deal more sense to me that way.
And you're perfectly right, of course. The main advantage here is that there is at least an incentive system in place under which the trees stay protected, which there is not without private property. However, as you said, stupidity can always win out in the end.
A complete dream. You're assuming that people are rational creatures. Economic researchers have finally discovered that they aren't, and that most economic decisions are based on irrational factors (happy, sad, vengeful, I like him, I don't like her, etc.). Why do you think all booth babes are hot? Not only that, but people place a very strong emphasis on the now rather than the later. To many people, a dollar now is worth a LOT more than 2 dollars later....
Trees might not have private property on Easter Island, but it is sheer utopia to say that private property would have saved easter island. I think you misunderstand what "rational" means in the context of economics. People will make rational decisions based on all the data they have, but that data can be easily tainted based on emotion and other such things. They may make decisions that will hurt them in the future, but based on the data they have, they still think it's worth it. To say otherwise is sheer nonsense. It's equivalent to saying, "well, it's really not worth it for me to cut down this tree, but I'll do it anyway." They might think something like "well, chopping down this tree is probably really bad in the long run, but I really really want another statue, so I'll chop it down anyway, because it's worth it to me." Economics says that rational people won't cut trees down by the first line of logic, but they will by the second. Most of the time, people screw up in this way because they make an inaccurate cost/benefit analysis, usually putting too much weight on the present, and not enough on the future. One way in which this can happen is if the incentive system is screwed up, such as by lack of private property on Easter Island. If there had been private property, then the islanders would have felt the cost of cutting down the trees as the owners made them pay for the trees. By extension, those owners would have wanted to make sure there were always plenty of trees on their property, to make sure that they could continue making a tidy profit off of them. Or because they like looking at them.
The fact of the matter is that private property eliminates the Tragedy of the Commons that caused the deforestation of Easter Island. There are times where it's completely impractical (such as someone owning the air and then using that to curb global warming), but when it does work, it can make the incentives work out nicely such that you don't run out, particularly with renewable resources like trees.
The idea behind a jury trial is that you are tried by a jury of your peers. The problem with the current implementation of the system is that you are actually tried by a load of random, often uninformed, people. In cases hinged on domain-specific information, there should be an understanding that your peers must be people who understand the subject matter. A good jury for the SCO vs. IBM case would have been selected from kernel developers for QNX, BSD, etc (no System V or Linux developers, to prevent a conflict of interest). In the case of a copyright infringement case between two songwriters, a jury of other composers would have been able to make an informed decision.
The difficulty with implementing this kind of system is that if you do it in a way that allows people to volunteer for jury service in a specific case then you undermine the system even more.
Which is always amusing, considering that most trial lawyers will get anyone knowledgeable on the subject of the trial tossed out as a juror.
Nah, both forces will be opposing gravity. Remember, we're using the scientific first principles of
* Cats always land on their feet
* Toast lands butter-side down.
Thus, in order to satisfy these principles, the cat can't hit the ground. As such, the "cat-feet" and "yucky-butter" vectors will be pointing in opposite directions on the x-axis (the one running through the cat's stomach/back while it's suspended), but they will both be opposing gravity on the y-axis, effectively canceling gravity while the other two forces attempt to make the cat or the toast line up properly.
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That is serious abuse of power, that unfortunately happens every day. I often wonder how many are enticed by "sting" operators into committing crimes they never would have had the police not solicited it?
In fairness, this is called entrapment, and if you can successfully argue that you wouldn't have done the crime without the officer's inducement, then you can usually get off, though it's certainly not always the case.
The details have come out, and apparently it was unrelated to the Wolverine leak, which one might have thought was obvious. It deals with a case of massive fraud against AT&T and Verizon, potentially costing millions of dollars. I guess this is what happens when stories with rampant speculation hit /. .
Oh, certainly. I suppose I phrased my argument incorrectly, but I was thinking more from the point of view of the currently winning allied leaders. From their perspective, they wanted to eliminate every trace of having this sort of thing happen again, which not only included things like the Marshall Plan, but also the insistence on total surrender. While it may have been counterproductive in the end, it's certainly an understandable point of view to take without the benefit of 60 years of hindsight.
There's no denying that the Treaty of Versailles was extremely punishing to Germany, and that was obviously a factor. However, a huge point of Hitler's propaganda was that the Jews (among others) had sabotaged the war effort and thus caused Germany to lose. One thing that helped this was the fact that enemy troops never touched their soil, and so he was able to make the impression that Germany was strong enough to repel the invaders and continue the war had they been given the chance.
Obviously the Treaty of Versailles was a huge part of the rise of Nazism. However, considering only it to the point of ignoring all others is just silly; Hitler needed a scapegoat, and this mentality helped him to make one.
Regardless of the truth of this statement (I can't argue convincingly either way), there's a fundamental problem with being OK with those negotiations: it's exactly the mentality that allowed WWII to happen from WWI. The allies stopped just before the Rhine in WWI and allowed the Germans to surrender before they were properly invaded. This just helped fuel Hitler's rise to power, as he blamed people sabotaging the war effort on them losing, thus allowing for great scapegoating. Japanese culture is obviously different from German, but it seems like this very mentality could easily happen again in Japan. In this case, allowing them to say that they "hadn't really been totally defeated" may have been the worst option in the world, or at least seemed that way to the world leaders at the time.
But, taxes should NOT be used to manipulate behavior....that's a bastardization of what a tax is for.
This is not the case for Pigovian taxes, which is exactly what a gas tax is. If you're trying to disincentivize a behavior but not outright ban it, then taxes can be an excellent way of doing that. They make people see the true cost of whatever it is they're doing. In this case, people have to pay for the carbon dioxide they put in the air, the wear on the road, and all sorts of other good stuff. So, there are some cases where taxes can and should be used to manipulate behavior.
You say that like there's something inherently wrong with a weaker dollar. First of all, bear in mind that the dollar still beats many other currencies in other countries. But beyond this, if the dollar weakens, then travel to the US and the purchase of US goods suddenly become more appealing to foreigners. Think about it if you're a European; your Euro now goes further than it ever did before. Maybe now would be a good time to travel to the US and use that money while it's good, and maybe buy an iPod or a laptop, or something else that, even with duty fees, is way cheaper now than it would be back in Europe (I know several people who have done this just this summer). Meanwhile, people in the US are less likely to buy imported goods, since they're more expensive. This increases the amount of money in the US economy, which is usually considered a good thing (since it comes from real value, and not just printing money).
Also, I'm fairly confident that there was fairly massive deflation during the Great Depression. So, that argument doesn't really hold up either (unless I'm misunderstanding it).
I'm not arguing the point that Bush has been a horrible President. But let's keep ourselves to important criticisms, and not get caught up in inflation arguments.
Eggs must always be cracked at the big end! Anyone who attempts to do otherwise is a godless heathen and can go back to Lilliput!
Er, wait, what were we talking about?
Really excellent stuff. My only complaint is the lack of posting as AC; not enough devotion to the cause to truly be a paranoid lunatic talking about the Steve Jobs-conspiracy connection. Still, bravo sir. I think I see the plot of Indigo Prophecy 2 brewing here.
That's an oversimplification, really. Every year, governments set aside plenty of money (as do aid organizations) to give free food to people all over the world. However, as the other person to reply said, this doesn't do us much good if the food is then immediately taken by the corrupt government, so they can feed their own troops and use the food as a means of controlling the populace.
But there's more to it than that. Even in places where there isn't unrest but hunger, we do them a disservice in the long run by dumping free food on them. After all, consider a farmer in such a country. He works hard, probably has to take out a loan for seeds and farming materials, and tries to bring his food to market. Then the USA comes in and dumps a few tons of free grain on the people. Who is going to buy the farmer's food if they can just get it for free? By feeding them, we do a lot to keep them in a cycle of poverty and dependence. I'm not saying that we shouldn't help them, but we should also make sure we aren't stifling them and making them dependent upon us. They're only going to really stop being hungry when they can support themselves, and so we're stuck in a really awkward situation where helping them too much would make them worse off in the end.
Is this where your post is modded offtopic to really complete the list?
The GP may have made horrible points trying to attack unions, but that doesn't make them paragons of virtue and light. A friend told me an excellent story about his firm. He works at a financial company, and they were doing some major renovation on their building. They went out and asked for bids, and the union of carpenters in the area refused to submit a bid. So, they went with non-union work, and now the union is picketing them for not hiring union labor. Now, it isn't the actual workers, or union leaders who are picketing: they hired homeless people to picket for them (probably for well below minimum wage, too). Meanwhile, their representatives aren't getting the paid work (the company would have been willing to pay more for union work), but the union leaders are still collecting their union dues. Nice how that works, isn't it?
Unions serve a very important purpose, but we need to make sure we don't defend them for using the same sort of jerk tactics their employers used to. You hear a lot about how unions make employers less likely to hire people, because of all the crap they have to put up with (like tons of red tape about firing people, wages higher than the worth of the work, etc), and we should remember this sort of thing before praising them unilaterally. There should be a balance of power between unions and employers for things to be good.
You may lower the barriers to entry in one market (replacement batteries), but you raise them in another (laptops, for instance) by doing so. This sounds like the government trying to force the market to go in a way it wants, or at least a solution in need of a problem. As someone else astutely pointed out, if you force the batteries to be a certain way, then your hands may be tied by that design in the future. It would hinder innovation if, say, you wanted to optimize your internal components such that you need a smaller battery, or you want to provide a battery 1.5 times as large as normal, for long business travelers. In either case, you would be unable to do so because of government solution. While you could get the standard changed, it would be a huge investment to petition a government that may well not care, and your attempt at innovation could be suddenly not at all worth it. Perhaps the fact that there isn't a standard for batteries indicates that the market is better off without it; standards can be made without the government insisting, and they frequently are.
Didn't Germany recently pass a law banning most "hacking" tools, and by extension, most tools that can be used to detect and defeat hacking? And if so, could these be related? I sincerely hope not, since if so, someone (or multiple persons) in the German government is outclassing the Bush administration in asshole terrorism laws. Suspected of terrorism? Get a trojan. Try to detect/remove the trojan? Break the law and get sent to jail anyway!
Yes, I know that it can be a stretch to say that no hacking tools means you can't still defeat this trojan, but maybe they could either create a trojan that could only be defeated that way, or just expand the law in later years to make it illegal to use anti-virus software "in a way that interferes with a government investigation" or something. Either way, it could lead to some scary stuff if properly abused. Even if you don't start the cycle of getting sent to prison, a trojan can dig up some nice information about enemies of yours.
There are plenty of people that would argue that not only did government intervention slow the US's rise out of the Great Depression, but that it was the main cause in the first place, or at least well up there on the list. Now, whether it was worth it for morale (or other) reasons is a completely different issue, but don't just assume that the government intervening was good for the economy as a whole.
By the same token, unless you're a Nielson household (which I believe requires them getting your permission and installing hardware), does it matter at all if you pirate a show as opposed to watching it on TV? I mean, you miss the advertising, but who is in a position to know that? I could be missing something about the process, but it just strikes me that unless they're watching your box to get statistics, it doesn't affect their ad revenue if you watch or if you don't. Could someone tell me if I'm missing something, or if my assessment is accurate?
You say that like the missiles even matter in a war with China. China owns a majority of our debt, and buys more of it every day, which helps fuel our government's debt spending. If we decided to go to war with China, they could just stop buying our debt, and we would be royally screwed. If you couple that with a complete halt on exports to the US, China could easily cripple our economy, leaving us in no position to do much of anything. And while our military would still be entirely too strong for them to invade us (our Navy could crush them before they made it halfway here), it would certainly put them in the position of power for any peace negotiations (which the American people would probably be clamoring for). There's a reason the US still looks on China favorably, and it isn't because they have a good human rights record.
Assassination weapon? Cancer tends to take years to kill you. Sure, while this might speed the process up to several months or something, that still gives the person in question plenty of time to spill everything that they know, or otherwise cause serious damage to the cause that the assassins are trying to protect.
No, there are much better and more clever ways to do these things. Like how they iced Georgi Markov (always a classic).
Well, those games are doing things the wrong way around. After all, in those games, you're trying to kill blood-sucking vampires and other such monsters. You would need a game that involved being a vampire, hunting down civilians and sucking them dry of their money^W blood for your sustenance.
Couldn't you give it in units the rest of us can understand? Like 359.67 to 759.67 Rankine.
Nah, that isn't going to happen. The government will just prop up the airlines at all costs, even if they continue to go against customer's wishes. I refer you here for a more scholarly reference on the subject ;) (South Park is consistently more accurate about most political issues than almost anything else I've ever seen).
I think using emotion as part of the balance is something that's gaining more and more acceptance, but it's the way that I was always taught, and it makes a great deal more sense to me that way.
And you're perfectly right, of course. The main advantage here is that there is at least an incentive system in place under which the trees stay protected, which there is not without private property. However, as you said, stupidity can always win out in the end.
Trees might not have private property on Easter Island, but it is sheer utopia to say that private property would have saved easter island. I think you misunderstand what "rational" means in the context of economics. People will make rational decisions based on all the data they have, but that data can be easily tainted based on emotion and other such things. They may make decisions that will hurt them in the future, but based on the data they have, they still think it's worth it. To say otherwise is sheer nonsense. It's equivalent to saying, "well, it's really not worth it for me to cut down this tree, but I'll do it anyway." They might think something like "well, chopping down this tree is probably really bad in the long run, but I really really want another statue, so I'll chop it down anyway, because it's worth it to me." Economics says that rational people won't cut trees down by the first line of logic, but they will by the second. Most of the time, people screw up in this way because they make an inaccurate cost/benefit analysis, usually putting too much weight on the present, and not enough on the future. One way in which this can happen is if the incentive system is screwed up, such as by lack of private property on Easter Island. If there had been private property, then the islanders would have felt the cost of cutting down the trees as the owners made them pay for the trees. By extension, those owners would have wanted to make sure there were always plenty of trees on their property, to make sure that they could continue making a tidy profit off of them. Or because they like looking at them.
The fact of the matter is that private property eliminates the Tragedy of the Commons that caused the deforestation of Easter Island. There are times where it's completely impractical (such as someone owning the air and then using that to curb global warming), but when it does work, it can make the incentives work out nicely such that you don't run out, particularly with renewable resources like trees.
The idea behind a jury trial is that you are tried by a jury of your peers. The problem with the current implementation of the system is that you are actually tried by a load of random, often uninformed, people. In cases hinged on domain-specific information, there should be an understanding that your peers must be people who understand the subject matter. A good jury for the SCO vs. IBM case would have been selected from kernel developers for QNX, BSD, etc (no System V or Linux developers, to prevent a conflict of interest). In the case of a copyright infringement case between two songwriters, a jury of other composers would have been able to make an informed decision.
The difficulty with implementing this kind of system is that if you do it in a way that allows people to volunteer for jury service in a specific case then you undermine the system even more.
Which is always amusing, considering that most trial lawyers will get anyone knowledgeable on the subject of the trial tossed out as a juror.Nah, both forces will be opposing gravity. Remember, we're using the scientific first principles of
* Cats always land on their feet
* Toast lands butter-side down.
Thus, in order to satisfy these principles, the cat can't hit the ground. As such, the "cat-feet" and "yucky-butter" vectors will be pointing in opposite directions on the x-axis (the one running through the cat's stomach/back while it's suspended), but they will both be opposing gravity on the y-axis, effectively canceling gravity while the other two forces attempt to make the cat or the toast line up properly.