Nooo, we don't want the wider public to see how naive nerds are when it comes to politics, as evidenced daily by most posts here. Let's stay quiet and pretend we are smart.
Well in all disasters you mention there already were regulations in place that you claim "prevent" disasters and yet they didn't. The question can equally well be asked the other way, how does the government regulation solve that problem?
To effectively prevent those disasters laws have to be written regulating just about every aspect of every industry. Even with enough environmental regulation to fill a large building that we have now, I can easily find a dozen ways to pollute that are perfectly legal and another dozen ways that are not but nobody would know that since nobody can really understand the enormous maze of complex regulations that are nevertheless very far from complete.
Like I said in another thread, what exactly is the fine for a company that dumps blood into a river? If there is such a thing, then is there one for coffee? How about soda? Is the fine more for dumping a hundred tons of Coke into a river than a hundred tons of blood, or a hundred liters of sulfuric acid?
In addition to enormous complexity, regulating every industry introduces a whole bunch of other problems:
Since the legislators cannot possibly understand all these issues, typical procedure is that industry groups themselves write anti-pollution legislation which then they lobby to pass into law. Industry writes legislation specifically to reduce potential tort liability which otherwise might give them greater incentive to behave than the regulation itself. The regulation gets written by the large players with the most lobbying power in order to increase costs to their smaller competitors (for example 2 bathrooms being mandatory for any food production, unnecessarily introducing 1000s of dollars extra costs for any say small marmalade maker in a normal small warehouse with one bathroom). Also, the regulation incentivizes companies to just barely meet the minimum standards, which they themselves set. Also, it impedes innovation, often goes too far and introduces unnecessary extra costs to business which reduces competitiveness internationally (in China they don't give a shit about pollution), harms job creation etc etc.
It is a difficult problem and it is not at all clear that your solution is any better than mine and yet you act as it obviously is.
What are you talking about? A government that raises funds by providing a service wouldn't be any more or less privatized than a government that raises money by force. It would be less immoral though.
The only way in which to prevent damaging pollution is to make that pollution illegal and provide a reasonable means by which to monitor for violators.
And what on earth makes you think that this is simple? There are infinite ways to pollute infinite variety of things, and in many cases it is not even clear how or if at all harmful that pollution is. So how much should a fine be for a company that dumps blood into a river? What if they didn't dump blood but coffee? Should it be more or less? Should a company be fined more if an accident at a factory releases 100 cu.ft. of Hydrocyanic Acid than if it releases a million cu.ft of methane? Can you imagine the magnitude of all that regulation and all the potential for mistakes, injustice and corruption?
Or by charging for a service such as contract enforcement through courts. Given that every transaction involves a contract that could be a fair amount of money, enough to finance a government as our constitution envisioned it, and it would not involve force - you would be free not to pay it, but your contract would not be enforceable in court. There are many other ways too.
Ideally people who cause pollution would pay up compensation based on the amount of harm caused to each individual. That is just a fair guiding principle. It is true, as you say, that sometimes it is impractical to work out the exact amount of damages. Like with just about everything in law, some pragmatism is required.
The problem you mention comes up in tort law all the time. If you drop fireworks which then explode and startle an old lady a block away who stumbles into a ladder causing a worker to drop a can of paint onto somebody's head causing them a large hospital bill. Who should pay it? It is almost always complicated but the only answer is to figure out the general principles and do the best we can in each case. Libertarianism doesn't provide a clear cut answer to every question, but then neither does anything else.
Since tort law doesn't handle pollution problem perfectly, why do you think that a better answer is to pass regulation? Working out the details of that regulation will be just as complicated, and quite often can cause more harm than good. Who will write up the rules regulating each industry? Your elected representatives don't understand every industry and every type of pollution in every situation, not even one percent of it. In practice it is only the industry itself that has the knowledge to do so and what tends to happen is that regulation is written by the biggest players with most lobbying power in order to benefit themselves against competition, increase cost of entry etc.
Sweden is a capitalist country with privately owned companies and mostly free market economy (although an extensive welfare state, that btw it increasingly cannot afford, makes many uneducated people call it socialist). It is also relatively clean.
China, for the last 50 years or so has been a socialist country (as in public ownership of industry - the definition of socialism) and it is extremely polluted. Recently it is becoming somewhat more free market oriented although still almost all of the biggest companies and the the biggest polluters are publicly owned. So what is your point?
Since we are talking about environment, compare the amount of pollution (and for that matter individual liberty) in capitalist countries and in socialist countries. So yes, if land is privately owned there is more liberty than if the land is owned by the state.
If the property in question is privately owned (as all property should be) then there is no problem. The owner will sue the meat packing company. If the owner is everybody (i.e nobody) then people will treat it carelessly like almost all property was treated in former communist countries.
To the extent that dumping blood into a river is harmful to others they are entitled to compensation. If you think libertarians are in favor of "liberty" to harm others, then your understanding of libertarianism is as bad as your spelling.
They didn't have Jobs. When he came back Apple was almost bankrupt and had to be rescued by Microsoft. It took great vision to take a nearly broke computer company and take on the most contested markets like consumer electronics and music and win through quality and design of the products alone. And I'm not even an Apple fanboy.
And: Isn't it hypocritical to be advocating for complete openness and then go ahead and selectively release leaks that fit your particular political agenda while spicing them up with biased and false editorial comments? Wouldn't it be better to shut up and let the leaks speak for themselves?
Am I the only one who wants to search for the words I type in and nothing else. Google is already giving some kind of preference for the results in my area whether I want it or not, and now apparently it is going to pollute them with more random junk. When I searched for a solution to a particular known problem with my car, it mixed in a bunch of completely irrelevant results just because they are to do with cars in my city. I guess no software company is immune to suicide by features phenomenon.
That's ridiculous. The liveliest time in the world by far is the modern age. Today there are about 300,000 new books published per year, just in the USA. You are telling me there were more published in the years before copyright? Same for inventions. It used to be few rich people who would dabble with new technology in their spare time which is a joke compared to the huge business that it is today.
The reason/.ers are opposed to your "ideas" is that there is apparently some common sense left in the world. Abolishing patents would mean there is zero incentive to invest into innovation and all incentive in the world to copy. A smart investor will look around for idiots willing to put time and money into research and development, buy one sample and send it to China for mass production under another label.
If you want a bill to pass you write is with a few outrageous things added that people can get all upset about. Then you remove those additions and get it passed in the form you originally wanted anyway. Its a standard procedure.
They are not targeting those sites for storing but for distributing, so storage facility analogy doesn't work. A store that distributes stolen goods would be a better one.
There are lots of supporters of SOPA. If you are going to declare war on them why don't you start with Teamsters and other unions (especially entertainment industry related ones) who openly supported it. Perhaps you trust them to know what's good for American jobs?
Megaupload was the very blatant in it's disregard for copyright. I wonder why pirates don't post their stolen movies on youtube? Perhaps because Google is extremely diligent in removing copyrighted material and banning users who post it. If Megaupload did the same it would still be up.
It doesn't actually matter if other groups agree with them or not, it is still wrong to try to silence them. In how many countries can you see someone show up at soldiers funerals with signs "thank God for dead soldiers" (or whatever) and have the police there, not to take them away, but to defend their right to free speech, however disgusting it may be (and it hardly gets more disgusting them them). This is actually a sign of strength of our society, trying to silence them is a sign of weakness. The Phelps family are like a living test of how strong America's commitment to free speech really is, and so far , in this case at least, America is passing with flying colors. If Anonymous want to fight those who would really undermine free speech they need to look at Washington, not at what is basically a freak show.
There is more to it than achieving a balanced budget, although that would be very nice.
The Dems are crying that union busting is going on here and that is exactly right and it is a good thing.
Public sector unions don't make any sense when you think about it for a second. How can they represent employees in bargaining with employers, when employers are the taxpayers (which includes those same union members). They are the employees and employers at the same time! The pay negotiation for public sector workers is done in an election, full stop. They get to vote too. Then when they don't like the result, they try to renegotiate it through the union. The rest of us don't get to renegotiate an election result when we don't like it either.
Slashdot Mirror
Nooo, we don't want the wider public to see how naive nerds are when it comes to politics, as evidenced daily by most posts here. Let's stay quiet and pretend we are smart.
Well, as far as I understand the article, shutting off the analog TV opened up the frequencies to be used for "Super Wi-Fi", so it's not that crazy.
SOPA is about piracy. I don't know of any data compression method that will let you put a feature length movie into 140 characters.
Well in all disasters you mention there already were regulations in place that you claim "prevent" disasters and yet they didn't. The question can equally well be asked the other way, how does the government regulation solve that problem?
To effectively prevent those disasters laws have to be written regulating just about every aspect of every industry. Even with enough environmental regulation to fill a large building that we have now, I can easily find a dozen ways to pollute that are perfectly legal and another dozen ways that are not but nobody would know that since nobody can really understand the enormous maze of complex regulations that are nevertheless very far from complete.
Like I said in another thread, what exactly is the fine for a company that dumps blood into a river? If there is such a thing, then is there one for coffee? How about soda? Is the fine more for dumping a hundred tons of Coke into a river than a hundred tons of blood, or a hundred liters of sulfuric acid?
In addition to enormous complexity, regulating every industry introduces a whole bunch of other problems:
Since the legislators cannot possibly understand all these issues, typical procedure is that industry groups themselves write anti-pollution legislation which then they lobby to pass into law. Industry writes legislation specifically to reduce potential tort liability which otherwise might give them greater incentive to behave than the regulation itself. The regulation gets written by the large players with the most lobbying power in order to increase costs to their smaller competitors (for example 2 bathrooms being mandatory for any food production, unnecessarily introducing 1000s of dollars extra costs for any say small marmalade maker in a normal small warehouse with one bathroom). Also, the regulation incentivizes companies to just barely meet the minimum standards, which they themselves set. Also, it impedes innovation, often goes too far and introduces unnecessary extra costs to business which reduces competitiveness internationally (in China they don't give a shit about pollution), harms job creation etc etc.
It is a difficult problem and it is not at all clear that your solution is any better than mine and yet you act as it obviously is.
What are you talking about? A government that raises funds by providing a service wouldn't be any more or less privatized than a government that raises money by force. It would be less immoral though.
The only way in which to prevent damaging pollution is to make that pollution illegal and provide a reasonable means by which to monitor for violators.
And what on earth makes you think that this is simple? There are infinite ways to pollute infinite variety of things, and in many cases it is not even clear how or if at all harmful that pollution is. So how much should a fine be for a company that dumps blood into a river? What if they didn't dump blood but coffee? Should it be more or less? Should a company be fined more if an accident at a factory releases 100 cu.ft. of Hydrocyanic Acid than if it releases a million cu.ft of methane? Can you imagine the magnitude of all that regulation and all the potential for mistakes, injustice and corruption?
Or by charging for a service such as contract enforcement through courts. Given that every transaction involves a contract that could be a fair amount of money, enough to finance a government as our constitution envisioned it, and it would not involve force - you would be free not to pay it, but your contract would not be enforceable in court. There are many other ways too.
Ideally people who cause pollution would pay up compensation based on the amount of harm caused to each individual. That is just a fair guiding principle. It is true, as you say, that sometimes it is impractical to work out the exact amount of damages. Like with just about everything in law, some pragmatism is required.
The problem you mention comes up in tort law all the time. If you drop fireworks which then explode and startle an old lady a block away who stumbles into a ladder causing a worker to drop a can of paint onto somebody's head causing them a large hospital bill. Who should pay it? It is almost always complicated but the only answer is to figure out the general principles and do the best we can in each case. Libertarianism doesn't provide a clear cut answer to every question, but then neither does anything else.
Since tort law doesn't handle pollution problem perfectly, why do you think that a better answer is to pass regulation? Working out the details of that regulation will be just as complicated, and quite often can cause more harm than good. Who will write up the rules regulating each industry? Your elected representatives don't understand every industry and every type of pollution in every situation, not even one percent of it. In practice it is only the industry itself that has the knowledge to do so and what tends to happen is that regulation is written by the biggest players with most lobbying power in order to benefit themselves against competition, increase cost of entry etc.
Sweden is a capitalist country with privately owned companies and mostly free market economy (although an extensive welfare state, that btw it increasingly cannot afford, makes many uneducated people call it socialist). It is also relatively clean.
China, for the last 50 years or so has been a socialist country (as in public ownership of industry - the definition of socialism) and it is extremely polluted. Recently it is becoming somewhat more free market oriented although still almost all of the biggest companies and the the biggest polluters are publicly owned. So what is your point?
Since we are talking about environment, compare the amount of pollution (and for that matter individual liberty) in capitalist countries and in socialist countries. So yes, if land is privately owned there is more liberty than if the land is owned by the state.
If the property in question is privately owned (as all property should be) then there is no problem. The owner will sue the meat packing company. If the owner is everybody (i.e nobody) then people will treat it carelessly like almost all property was treated in former communist countries.
To the extent that dumping blood into a river is harmful to others they are entitled to compensation. If you think libertarians are in favor of "liberty" to harm others, then your understanding of libertarianism is as bad as your spelling.
They didn't have Jobs. When he came back Apple was almost bankrupt and had to be rescued by Microsoft. It took great vision to take a nearly broke computer company and take on the most contested markets like consumer electronics and music and win through quality and design of the products alone. And I'm not even an Apple fanboy.
And: Isn't it hypocritical to be advocating for complete openness and then go ahead and selectively release leaks that fit your particular political agenda while spicing them up with biased and false editorial comments? Wouldn't it be better to shut up and let the leaks speak for themselves?
Am I the only one who wants to search for the words I type in and nothing else. Google is already giving some kind of preference for the results in my area whether I want it or not, and now apparently it is going to pollute them with more random junk. When I searched for a solution to a particular known problem with my car, it mixed in a bunch of completely irrelevant results just because they are to do with cars in my city. I guess no software company is immune to suicide by features phenomenon.
They are not "consequences" of a healthy free market economy, they, along with other laws protecting private property, are a necessary precondition.
That's ridiculous. The liveliest time in the world by far is the modern age. Today there are about 300,000 new books published per year, just in the USA. You are telling me there were more published in the years before copyright? Same for inventions. It used to be few rich people who would dabble with new technology in their spare time which is a joke compared to the huge business that it is today.
The reason /.ers are opposed to your "ideas" is that there is apparently some common sense left in the world. Abolishing patents would mean there is zero incentive to invest into innovation and all incentive in the world to copy. A smart investor will look around for idiots willing to put time and money into research and development, buy one sample and send it to China for mass production under another label.
If you want a bill to pass you write is with a few outrageous things added that people can get all upset about. Then you remove those additions and get it passed in the form you originally wanted anyway. Its a standard procedure.
They are not targeting those sites for storing but for distributing, so storage facility analogy doesn't work. A store that distributes stolen goods would be a better one.
There are lots of supporters of SOPA. If you are going to declare war on them why don't you start with Teamsters and other unions (especially entertainment industry related ones) who openly supported it. Perhaps you trust them to know what's good for American jobs?
Megaupload was the very blatant in it's disregard for copyright. I wonder why pirates don't post their stolen movies on youtube? Perhaps because Google is extremely diligent in removing copyrighted material and banning users who post it. If Megaupload did the same it would still be up.
Therefore, corporate taxes should be abolished too, right? After all corporation is people and those people already pay their taxes.
It doesn't actually matter if other groups agree with them or not, it is still wrong to try to silence them. In how many countries can you see someone show up at soldiers funerals with signs "thank God for dead soldiers" (or whatever) and have the police there, not to take them away, but to defend their right to free speech, however disgusting it may be (and it hardly gets more disgusting them them). This is actually a sign of strength of our society, trying to silence them is a sign of weakness. The Phelps family are like a living test of how strong America's commitment to free speech really is, and so far , in this case at least, America is passing with flying colors. If Anonymous want to fight those who would really undermine free speech they need to look at Washington, not at what is basically a freak show.
There is more to it than achieving a balanced budget, although that would be very nice.
The Dems are crying that union busting is going on here and that is exactly right and it is a good thing.
Public sector unions don't make any sense when you think about it for a second. How can they represent employees in bargaining with employers, when employers are the taxpayers (which includes those same union members). They are the employees and employers at the same time! The pay negotiation for public sector workers is done in an election, full stop. They get to vote too. Then when they don't like the result, they try to renegotiate it through the union. The rest of us don't get to renegotiate an election result when we don't like it either.