Literally, one with as few rules as possible. A market scenario in which whatever happens in the market must be good, because the "invisible guiding hand" ensures that the market always makes the best decision.
Nobody ever said that everything that happens in free market must be good. There are no perfect options available, the point is that the free market has always produced better results than central control. The combined decisions of millions of participants in the free market are far more fair, and fine tuned when it comes to efficiency than the decisions of a few planners can ever be.
And, when the greedy bastards manipulate the system to get as much money for themselves and screw everybody else over, you get to see all sorts of reasons why the free market isn't such a good system. The entire banking fiasco of the last few years is what happens when the financial industry has as close to a free market as they can get.
And what system does not involve greed? Politicians are not greedy for money, for power? Businessmen have to earn money from they customers, government can obtain it by force. That is a crucial difference that people like you underestimate. And btw, the financial markets and especially housing, are some of the most regulated industries there are. It is the government that effectively provided unsound housing loans through Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae that caused most of the problem.
According to strict, laissez fair capitalism, the BP spill happened because that was the optimal market outcome, and in the long term if it is good business to prevent such things, and if not, it will keep happening. I would argue letting oil companies self regulate gives them no incentive to actually fix things if it might impact their bottom line.
It is painful to see this kind of ignorance. Causing environmental disaster and being sued for billions of dollars is NOT the optimum outcome as far as BP is concerned. Laissez-Faire capitalism != anarchy. Tort laws still apply.
In short, it's something people hold up as in ideal, which never actually produces the results and good things that people like to ascribe to it.
Are you kidding? Can you deny that historically, the closer a society was to having a free market, the more prosperous it has been? How many examples do you need? Compare likes with like and in almost every single case economic freedom is very closely tied with economic prosperity. If you have liberty, you will have inequality, you cannot avoid that. But, you will also have more prosperity at the top and at the bottom, than if you have a planned economy.
I think you guys should calm your enthusiasm down a bit and consider the possibility that you are being misled here. Ask yourself why is there such a mad rush to have FCC regulate the ISPs when there is really no problem with them discriminating between content providers in reality, only in theory. Here is a crazy conspiracy theory for you: how about if net neutrality is being used as a first step towards the FCC regulating content on the Internet. It's the same way we lose most of our liberties - you start with regulation about a valid concern that everybody can get behind (think of the children!, terrorists are coming!, evil ISPs! etc) and after that its much easier to modify and expand that regulation that it is to get it in in the first place.
There are some thing that should not be left up to the states to decide as far as curriculum is concerned.
Why not? What makes the federal government immune to pressure from creationist groups? Isn't that a case of putting all your eggs in one basket?
If you want to teach religious doctrine to your children, then by all means, send them to a private school.
This is not really a fair option. Religious people's taxes pay for the public schools as well. They have every right to fight for what they think should be thought to their children in public schools, rather than paying for their education twice (once through taxes, and again through private school fees).
Umm, this Is government involvement in schools, it's just local government. Presumably what you mean when you say you want more government involvement is more federal government involvement. If you can do one single thing to make it easier for the fundies to take over, this is it. What happens then when the federal "school board" gets staffed with creationists. After all, where will you find these "experts" that you want to decide things for us? They will get elected by the population (that you have so much contempt for) or appointed by politicians who are elected by that same population. Suddenly, instead of some middle-of-nowhere town in Louisiana, the entire gets intelligent design in the school curriculum.
A war implies two sides fighting, not one waltzing in with vastly superior technomagic, while the other one is hiding, showing their heads, getting beat to a pulp, running for cover and getting shot in the back, until the next round of civilians gets fed up with sights like that and picks up their weapons to meet a similar fate.
I only wish that that was the case because the side you are talking about (taliban, al-qaeda and other jihadist forces) are representing a savage medieval ideology that, if not challenged with force, presents the greatest single threat to the survival of human civilization. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be going as well as you say.
Just out of curiosity, what would you do about Afghanistan? Leave and let Taliban take over again and provide a safe country and a home base for jihadist forces everywhere? Let them grow in strength and over time destabilize the nuclear Pakistan next door and other (more or less) friendly governments in strategically the most important region in the world? It's no fun to be involved in a messy and uncertain war but sometimes there are no good alternatives.
Chinese don't pay for porn though. I don't know if it's a cultural thing about buying stuff online or just the lack of means to pay. Credit cards are not as widely available, and many US credit card processors will deny transactions from certain countries due to high risk of fraud. Most webmasters, porn or not, consider traffic from China to be a waste of bandwidth. Hopefully it will change because it indeed is a huge untapped marked.
Hate to spoil your rant but this has nothing to do with any monopolies but with incomplete disclosure to investors by Dell. It goes something like this: Intel essentially gives Dell a discount on its products - nothing wrong there. Dell puts the discount amount into a reserve fund. It later draws money from that reserve fund as needed to make the numbers in a given quarter. The problem was that it didn't disclose this information to the investors, making them believe that its quarterly earnings were higher than they actually were. At least that's how I'm reading TFA, please correct me if I'm wrong.
I have an iPhone and where I live voice and data coverage is great, much better than Verizon. I go to LA a lot and I usually have a lot of problems with reception there for some reason. As for the device itself, I can compare iPhone with Droid directly since my girlfriend has one and I can tell you I wouldn't swap the phones or the providers. She would though. They both do more or less the same things but iPhone UI is much nicer. Btw I can't make the antenna problem happen at all. The best I can do is get one bar to drop and that's with holding it in a completely unnatural way.
That's a pretty ridiculous thing to say. Is you point that we should pay for farmers mail, otherwise they won't sell us food? How about I pay a true market price for food and they pay true market price for mail delivery.
Why should city dwellers have to pay more for their mail delivery in order to subsidize the rural dwellers? By the same token should those of us who live near a major hub airport pay more for flights so that those who need to take a connecting flight don't need to pay any more for their travel than we do? How about this: regulate private mail delivery companies so they have to deliver to everybody and to charge different rates according to the true cost, but have them charge the difference to the government. That way at least the subsidy will be clear, not obfuscated like it is now.
That at least will hopefully improve the efficiency though it won't fix the underlying problem which is that the snail mail is dying.
Btw, a question. did anybody else notice the service quality dropping recently. I've had more of my mail not delivered (when I know it was sent) and other people's mail mistakenly delivered to my mailbox in the last year than in my entire life. Could be just my mailman I guess.
The only reason for a government to be involved in financing development of computers is where it is not profitable for private businesses to do so, i.e it's just another subsidy and probably another national pride project. They might get a better bang for the rupee by spending the same money on subsidizing purchases of existing cheap netbooks and such which are much more powerful than this device could possibly be at that price.
the source is easy, just look at the number of drugs that are claimed to save thousands of lives per year and multiply by several years they spent waiting for approval
That's not really what the summary says when it complains that "[FDA] is unlikely to scrutinize the software operating on devices during any phase of the regulatory process unless a model that has already been surgically implanted repeatedly malfunctions or is recalled". But even so, where do you draw the line. What is the principle involved here: that you should be able to examine the software (and presumably hardware?) design of any device that has impact on your survival? If so, that opensources a huge number of products which may be the point, seeing that this comes from something called "Software Freedom Law Center".
Does a government agency examine the source code which keeps airliners in the air, cars on the road, nuclear plants from blowing up etc etc? If the government is going to evaluate and approve every important piece of code line by line we will pretty soon run out of programmers. But then, chip designs will have to be evaluated too because they can fail as well. Next, mechanical designs, engines, turbines, reactors, better make sure that the government is stocked with experts in all those fields too.
After all, nothing can possibly be safe until it is certified as such by the government. Just ask hundreds of thousands of people who died while the drugs that could have saved them were waiting for the FDA approval. They are pretty safe now.
Who cares. By the time this technology goes commercial, optical discs will be dead as far as selling movies, music and such goes. Maybe they'll have some other more limited uses.
It is. Obama was elected because people were tired of Bush, not because of anything specific that he stands for. He is already more unpopular than Bush was at the same point, in fact almost any president.
As far as whose message is "basically right", well, isn't that a little arrogant?
I should have said because more people think it's right and therefore watch it. My point was that the Fox news success is about the underlying philosophy, not about the presentation.
I did watch the whole video and it is still unacceptable that a government official in that position was so blatantly racist, even if she did "see the light" in the end. As I said, the main story is the nodding heads and overall approval from the NAACP audience before they knew what the ending of the story will be.
Fox News beats other cable news channels is because their message is basically right and people recognize this. MSNBC is trying to adopt the same methods and it is failing spectacularly because it is not about the methods but about the underlying philosophy.
Dream on. Fox News is by far the largest AND fastest growing news network in the US. By contrast, CNN and MSNBC ratings are plummeting. The reason for this is that while its presentation is over the top (just like MSNBCs) and as a "news" channel it is certainly biased (just like MSNBC), its message is basically right (very much unlike MSNBC) and people recognize this.
Regulating how content has to be treated by the ISPs IS in a way regulating the content and it is being done by the same agency that most definitely DOES regulate the content in other media. BTW, what if there is a legitimate reason to treat some packets differently, for example in case of DoS attacks. Some applications are more latency sensitive than others and it might also make sense for the ISPs to treat them differently. Making all discrimination between packets illegal could, like most regulation does, impede innovation as Internet evolves. The biggest question for me is why exactly is this necessary? Where is this huge problem of ISPs treating packets from Google differently from those from Bing? It simply doesn't happen, it's mostly a hypothetical problem.
First of all, who are you to decide what is fair and balanced and what is not and who should be given a lease of "our spectrum" and who shouldn't. People vote with their feet (or in this case their remote controllers) and in this case they are overwhelmingly voting in favor of the Fox News (look at the ratings - Fox has more viewers than all other cable news networks put together).
As for the "butchered" video, I think you are the one being misled here by presumably your favorite channel MSNBC (just as biased as Fox and far more vitriolic - just listen to that jerk Olbermann). The story is about the racism within NAACP (the same organization that disingenuously accuses the Tea Party of having racist elements) and the nodding heads and the laughter in the audience as she tells a despicable story of blatant racism. Btw, take the story she told and imagine a white government official in charge of over a $billion of the taxpayers money telling the exact same story with a black farmer in place of the white farmer, with white audience nodding approvingly, and then tell me you wouldn't consider that to be an outrageous and newsworthy story. Why was she even paying so much attention to the farmer's race in the first place?
Have you ever considered the possibility that you might be the one who has "swallowed the propaganda hook, line, and sinker". I am somewhat conflicted on the whole issue, but to me giving a government agency ANY authority over the content on the internet is a huge flashing red light and and potential slippery slope, and it would take some major abuses by the telcos to justify, not some speculation about what they might do.
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Literally, one with as few rules as possible. A market scenario in which whatever happens in the market must be good, because the "invisible guiding hand" ensures that the market always makes the best decision.
Nobody ever said that everything that happens in free market must be good. There are no perfect options available, the point is that the free market has always produced better results than central control. The combined decisions of millions of participants in the free market are far more fair, and fine tuned when it comes to efficiency than the decisions of a few planners can ever be.
And, when the greedy bastards manipulate the system to get as much money for themselves and screw everybody else over, you get to see all sorts of reasons why the free market isn't such a good system. The entire banking fiasco of the last few years is what happens when the financial industry has as close to a free market as they can get.
And what system does not involve greed? Politicians are not greedy for money, for power? Businessmen have to earn money from they customers, government can obtain it by force. That is a crucial difference that people like you underestimate. And btw, the financial markets and especially housing, are some of the most regulated industries there are. It is the government that effectively provided unsound housing loans through Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae that caused most of the problem.
According to strict, laissez fair capitalism, the BP spill happened because that was the optimal market outcome, and in the long term if it is good business to prevent such things, and if not, it will keep happening. I would argue letting oil companies self regulate gives them no incentive to actually fix things if it might impact their bottom line.
It is painful to see this kind of ignorance. Causing environmental disaster and being sued for billions of dollars is NOT the optimum outcome as far as BP is concerned. Laissez-Faire capitalism != anarchy. Tort laws still apply.
In short, it's something people hold up as in ideal, which never actually produces the results and good things that people like to ascribe to it.
Are you kidding? Can you deny that historically, the closer a society was to having a free market, the more prosperous it has been? How many examples do you need? Compare likes with like and in almost every single case economic freedom is very closely tied with economic prosperity. If you have liberty, you will have inequality, you cannot avoid that. But, you will also have more prosperity at the top and at the bottom, than if you have a planned economy.
I think you guys should calm your enthusiasm down a bit and consider the possibility that you are being misled here. Ask yourself why is there such a mad rush to have FCC regulate the ISPs when there is really no problem with them discriminating between content providers in reality, only in theory. Here is a crazy conspiracy theory for you: how about if net neutrality is being used as a first step towards the FCC regulating content on the Internet. It's the same way we lose most of our liberties - you start with regulation about a valid concern that everybody can get behind (think of the children!, terrorists are coming!, evil ISPs! etc) and after that its much easier to modify and expand that regulation that it is to get it in in the first place.
There are some thing that should not be left up to the states to decide as far as curriculum is concerned.
Why not? What makes the federal government immune to pressure from creationist groups? Isn't that a case of putting all your eggs in one basket?
If you want to teach religious doctrine to your children, then by all means, send them to a private school.
This is not really a fair option. Religious people's taxes pay for the public schools as well. They have every right to fight for what they think should be thought to their children in public schools, rather than paying for their education twice (once through taxes, and again through private school fees).
Umm, this Is government involvement in schools, it's just local government. Presumably what you mean when you say you want more government involvement is more federal government involvement. If you can do one single thing to make it easier for the fundies to take over, this is it. What happens then when the federal "school board" gets staffed with creationists. After all, where will you find these "experts" that you want to decide things for us? They will get elected by the population (that you have so much contempt for) or appointed by politicians who are elected by that same population. Suddenly, instead of some middle-of-nowhere town in Louisiana, the entire gets intelligent design in the school curriculum.
As
A war implies two sides fighting, not one waltzing in with vastly superior technomagic, while the other one is hiding, showing their heads, getting beat to a pulp, running for cover and getting shot in the back, until the next round of civilians gets fed up with sights like that and picks up their weapons to meet a similar fate.
I only wish that that was the case because the side you are talking about (taliban, al-qaeda and other jihadist forces) are representing a savage medieval ideology that, if not challenged with force, presents the greatest single threat to the survival of human civilization. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be going as well as you say.
Just out of curiosity, what would you do about Afghanistan? Leave and let Taliban take over again and provide a safe country and a home base for jihadist forces everywhere? Let them grow in strength and over time destabilize the nuclear Pakistan next door and other (more or less) friendly governments in strategically the most important region in the world? It's no fun to be involved in a messy and uncertain war but sometimes there are no good alternatives.
Chinese don't pay for porn though. I don't know if it's a cultural thing about buying stuff online or just the lack of means to pay. Credit cards are not as widely available, and many US credit card processors will deny transactions from certain countries due to high risk of fraud. Most webmasters, porn or not, consider traffic from China to be a waste of bandwidth. Hopefully it will change because it indeed is a huge untapped marked.
Hate to spoil your rant but this has nothing to do with any monopolies but with incomplete disclosure to investors by Dell. It goes something like this: Intel essentially gives Dell a discount on its products - nothing wrong there. Dell puts the discount amount into a reserve fund. It later draws money from that reserve fund as needed to make the numbers in a given quarter. The problem was that it didn't disclose this information to the investors, making them believe that its quarterly earnings were higher than they actually were. At least that's how I'm reading TFA, please correct me if I'm wrong.
I have an iPhone and where I live voice and data coverage is great, much better than Verizon. I go to LA a lot and I usually have a lot of problems with reception there for some reason. As for the device itself, I can compare iPhone with Droid directly since my girlfriend has one and I can tell you I wouldn't swap the phones or the providers. She would though. They both do more or less the same things but iPhone UI is much nicer. Btw I can't make the antenna problem happen at all. The best I can do is get one bar to drop and that's with holding it in a completely unnatural way.
That's a pretty ridiculous thing to say. Is you point that we should pay for farmers mail, otherwise they won't sell us food? How about I pay a true market price for food and they pay true market price for mail delivery.
Not one cent? Are you joking or what? Most of us pay almost 50% of our income to benefit others.
Why should city dwellers have to pay more for their mail delivery in order to subsidize the rural dwellers? By the same token should those of us who live near a major hub airport pay more for flights so that those who need to take a connecting flight don't need to pay any more for their travel than we do? How about this: regulate private mail delivery companies so they have to deliver to everybody and to charge different rates according to the true cost, but have them charge the difference to the government. That way at least the subsidy will be clear, not obfuscated like it is now.
That at least will hopefully improve the efficiency though it won't fix the underlying problem which is that the snail mail is dying. Btw, a question. did anybody else notice the service quality dropping recently. I've had more of my mail not delivered (when I know it was sent) and other people's mail mistakenly delivered to my mailbox in the last year than in my entire life. Could be just my mailman I guess.
The only reason for a government to be involved in financing development of computers is where it is not profitable for private businesses to do so, i.e it's just another subsidy and probably another national pride project. They might get a better bang for the rupee by spending the same money on subsidizing purchases of existing cheap netbooks and such which are much more powerful than this device could possibly be at that price.
the source is easy, just look at the number of drugs that are claimed to save thousands of lives per year and multiply by several years they spent waiting for approval
That's not really what the summary says when it complains that "[FDA] is unlikely to scrutinize the software operating on devices during any phase of the regulatory process unless a model that has already been surgically implanted repeatedly malfunctions or is recalled". But even so, where do you draw the line. What is the principle involved here: that you should be able to examine the software (and presumably hardware?) design of any device that has impact on your survival? If so, that opensources a huge number of products which may be the point, seeing that this comes from something called "Software Freedom Law Center".
Does a government agency examine the source code which keeps airliners in the air, cars on the road, nuclear plants from blowing up etc etc? If the government is going to evaluate and approve every important piece of code line by line we will pretty soon run out of programmers. But then, chip designs will have to be evaluated too because they can fail as well. Next, mechanical designs, engines, turbines, reactors, better make sure that the government is stocked with experts in all those fields too.
After all, nothing can possibly be safe until it is certified as such by the government. Just ask hundreds of thousands of people who died while the drugs that could have saved them were waiting for the FDA approval. They are pretty safe now.
Who cares. By the time this technology goes commercial, optical discs will be dead as far as selling movies, music and such goes. Maybe they'll have some other more limited uses.
It is. Obama was elected because people were tired of Bush, not because of anything specific that he stands for. He is already more unpopular than Bush was at the same point, in fact almost any president.
As far as whose message is "basically right", well, isn't that a little arrogant?
I should have said because more people think it's right and therefore watch it. My point was that the Fox news success is about the underlying philosophy, not about the presentation.
I did watch the whole video and it is still unacceptable that a government official in that position was so blatantly racist, even if she did "see the light" in the end. As I said, the main story is the nodding heads and overall approval from the NAACP audience before they knew what the ending of the story will be.
Fox News beats other cable news channels is because their message is basically right and people recognize this. MSNBC is trying to adopt the same methods and it is failing spectacularly because it is not about the methods but about the underlying philosophy.
Dream on. Fox News is by far the largest AND fastest growing news network in the US. By contrast, CNN and MSNBC ratings are plummeting. The reason for this is that while its presentation is over the top (just like MSNBCs) and as a "news" channel it is certainly biased (just like MSNBC), its message is basically right (very much unlike MSNBC) and people recognize this.
Regulating how content has to be treated by the ISPs IS in a way regulating the content and it is being done by the same agency that most definitely DOES regulate the content in other media. BTW, what if there is a legitimate reason to treat some packets differently, for example in case of DoS attacks. Some applications are more latency sensitive than others and it might also make sense for the ISPs to treat them differently. Making all discrimination between packets illegal could, like most regulation does, impede innovation as Internet evolves. The biggest question for me is why exactly is this necessary? Where is this huge problem of ISPs treating packets from Google differently from those from Bing? It simply doesn't happen, it's mostly a hypothetical problem.
First of all, who are you to decide what is fair and balanced and what is not and who should be given a lease of "our spectrum" and who shouldn't. People vote with their feet (or in this case their remote controllers) and in this case they are overwhelmingly voting in favor of the Fox News (look at the ratings - Fox has more viewers than all other cable news networks put together).
As for the "butchered" video, I think you are the one being misled here by presumably your favorite channel MSNBC (just as biased as Fox and far more vitriolic - just listen to that jerk Olbermann). The story is about the racism within NAACP (the same organization that disingenuously accuses the Tea Party of having racist elements) and the nodding heads and the laughter in the audience as she tells a despicable story of blatant racism. Btw, take the story she told and imagine a white government official in charge of over a $billion of the taxpayers money telling the exact same story with a black farmer in place of the white farmer, with white audience nodding approvingly, and then tell me you wouldn't consider that to be an outrageous and newsworthy story. Why was she even paying so much attention to the farmer's race in the first place?
Have you ever considered the possibility that you might be the one who has "swallowed the propaganda hook, line, and sinker". I am somewhat conflicted on the whole issue, but to me giving a government agency ANY authority over the content on the internet is a huge flashing red light and and potential slippery slope, and it would take some major abuses by the telcos to justify, not some speculation about what they might do.