I don't think you're a troll but you are close because your entire post amounts to a simple statement that Europe is "better" than USA in some undefined way. Can you please provide some examples? I can give you top ten reasons why USA is better than Europe:
1. USA has a constitutional system that did not produce a dictatorship in the last 234 years since it was introduced. Europe has had dozens including some of the world's worst ones since then and still has some.
2. Inherent individual liberty (not by government grant) is still heavily on the agenda in the USA even though it is being gradually eroded. In Europe it is a completely forgotten concept.
3. USA leads the world in innovation by far in virtually all technical fields. Take Nobel prize in physics: USA: 73, next highest country Germany: 21 (most of which looong time ago). Take computer technology. Take medical science, biotechnology, you name it.
4. USA leads the world by far in arts and culture. New York is the world capital of arts, not Paris or London any more. Hollywood is the world capital of popular culture. Europe for the most part copies the USA.
5. USA has a military that protects both USA and Europe and then some. Europe does not have a military that can protect itself.
6. According to the most reputable (UK based) university ranking system the USA has 13 of the world's top 20 universities: http://topuniversities.com/world-university-rankings Europe has 4 and all of them are in UK. Germany has 0. France has 0.
7. According to the most UN indices that measure human and economic development, USA is actually ahead of large European countries like UK, Germany and France. There are smaller countries like Norway or Sweden that are ahead but those can hardly be compared to the USA in size and diversity.
8. Bankrupt European welfare countries like Greece are as we speak begging the World Bank for a bailout, with the rest of the PIIGS to follow. USA has bankrupt welfare states too, like California, but it is still by far the largest contributor to the World Bank and the IMF.
9. European heads of state come to the USA to plead for special relationships and get patted on the head like pets. Not the other way around.
10. According to polls Europeans are far more eager to move to the USA than Americans are to move to Europe
Nothing is perfect and USA does need reforms but in the opposite direction of Europe i.e towards less statism, not more.
By making your hardware more accessible, you are increasing your product's value for your users.
Sure you do (especially for Bill_the_Engineer, not so much for Bill_the_Average_person_clueless_about_technology) but the question is will you bring more return in for your investors than with closed hardware. More to the point, can you convince your investors to pony up for R&D up front, while knowing that as soon as your product is out, $LARGE_CORP can copy it and sell it for less because it doesn't have to recoup the R&D costs like you do?
The problem is we need oil and we need those companies to drill for it. Given that there are about 4000 oil rigs in the gulf, it is unrealistic to expect 0 accidents forever. When you say the government needs to step in and make industry take actions you are almost always on a very slippery surface. The devil is in the details. Can the accidents still happen even if those regulations are followed exactly? Unless those regulations require miracles then the answer is probably, and they just allow the industry to say "Hew, it's not our fault, we followed the government's safety rules exactly". Much better to require as we do now for the companies that own that oil to pay for the cleanup. What is needed is full enforcement of that, but my prediction is that after years of wrangling and lawsuits, BP will really only pay a fraction of the true cost.
People have been wringing their hands over the looming demise of Social Security since before you were born.
2010 was the first year that the payouts for social security exceeded the amount that was taken in by social security taxes (contributions is a silly word for it). So yes, the demise was looming, and now its getting closer: http://economistmom.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/nytimes-social-security-deficit-032510.jpg With the ratio of working population v. retirees getting more and more heavily skewed in favor of retirees you will get a situation where either the taxes will have to increase or the benefits will have to decrease. As somebody who doesn't expect to retire for another 30 years I would MUCH prefer paying the 7% (plus employer's 7%) into a retirement fund than into Social Security if I had that option.
How about you sell your ass for $.50-$.75 DRM free? You know how much it costs to make an hour long show? What makes you think that a studio would be willing to sell you something at your arbitrarily set prices even if it means they make a loss. If your answer is then I'll do without watching their show, fine. If your answer is, then I'll download it for free, then you are, as the summary says, an unprincipled thief.
Maybe you should invest in a new brain. The market dropped due to the possibility of a default by Greece which might trigger similar crisis in other PIGSand possibly Europe wide credit market collapse. The typo story seems unlikely but when the market is that jittery it doesn't matter what trigger the sell off. If it wasn't a typo it would have been something else but it would have happened anyway.
In market in which any one player can have undue influence on the market is no longer a free market. Therefore, you are technically correct: free markets cannot produce monopolies, because they cease being free long before any monopoly is created.
I didn't say that the free market cannot create monopolies but that that is a mostly theoretical problem since it does not tend to happen in practice. If you think it does please name some monopolies that have formed without direct role of the government in creating them (such as with utility companies). The scenario that people have in mind is a company getting so big and powerful that it drives all its competitors out of business and then does whatever it wants has never happened in reality.
Yes, I'm against letting the government pick the winners and losers in any market (that is inherently corrupting), but to pretend that in today's world a true free market would exist without any government regulation is the epitome of intentional ignorance. Adam's Smith's "Invisible Hand" was a good model for the agricultural market of 235 years ago, with family farms selling food to families, every player in the market was infinitesimally small, and no one player has undue influence. It is NOT a good model for the modern international corporate economy.
You see, that is not an argument. It's not enough to just state something while capitalizing certain words and using terms like intentional ignorance. Btw, completely unregulated market is mostly a straw man. Nobody is really for it, certainly not most libertarians, apart from anarcho-capitalist fringe.
Do you really believe Walmart participates in a "free market"? Their ability to drive supply costs down much lower than their competitors suggests that they do not.
Of course they do, what on earth makes you think that they don't. What special position was magically granted to them and by whom so that they are immune to the same competitive pressures as any other company, other than they were very good at what they do. People don't have to shop there, but they do because they provide lower prices than tehir competitors. They drive supply costs down because they have over time put themselves in a strong position v. their suppliers since they all want to sell their stuff at Walmart.
I think the idea that if we had more competition it wouldn't matter because they would all be doing the same thing doesn't pass the reality test. When you have companies competing, the greater incentive is to grab the market share from your competitors and if possible drive them out of business by providing what the customer wants, rather than to collude in providing inferior service and open the door for new competitors to enter the market.
But, we don't really have a choice so that's a moot point when it comes to broadband. I think you are right though. The issue is who will pay for the increased capacity necessary mainly for video, the video providers or the consumers. Net neutrality means that if you have petabytes of video on your site (such as youtube) you are no different than another service that is text only. The consumer pays for what they use. That's fair enough but be careful what you wish for because you will end up with higher prices overall for broadband, and perhaps metered usage like with all the other utility companies. That also leads to inequality since richer people will be able to afford access to more of the internet.
The government ensures there is enough competition so that customers actually have a choice
Why do you trust the government to do that when historically almost all monopolies have arisen either as a direct grant by the government or as unintended consequences of government regulation? The free market does not tend to produce monopolies in practice even though to a layperson it may seem logical that it would.
Just what we need, the government to spy on our phone, email, medical and financial records. Just what we need, the government to wage war on medical marijuana users. Just what we need, the government to receive money from countless lobby groups to stealthily enact laws which benefit the said groups while harming the American people. Just what we need, the government waste, corruption and incompetence that operates the postal service at an annual loss of $70B, overpays military contractors by orders of magnitude, and bails out failed banks and car companies with taxpayers money.
Is your point that because some things are appropriate for the government to do it follows that everything is?
Btw, while the government certainly had a large role in building the infrastructure of the Internet, the Internet is what it is today due to private initiative (whether for profit or not) which gets stifled every time the government gets involved.
That is your opinion and fair enough unless you try to impose it on others through laws or other forms of force. I am just curious why people like you consider sex to be degrading to women but not to men, or at least more degrading to women than to men. Could you please explain it to me? It seems that you assume that women gain no pleasure from sex and are only enduring it in order to please men which makes me think that you don't understand women at all and shouldn't be in the business of "protecting" them from themselves.
Times/QS Methodology is explained on the site topuniversities.com where they publish their annual rankings (btw QS which compiles the rankings is British). ARWU is a Chinese organization and their methodology is also clearly posted.
Care to share the research you have done that leads you to the conclusion those universities you mention are better than the University of Michigan?
What the hell are you people looking at? I think somebody was vandalizing that wikipedia article to be funny. There are 13 US universities in top 20, 5 from UK, 1 each from Australia, Canada and Switzerland. (yes there are really 21 cause 20th place is shared by Edinburgh and Zurich)
Ahhh I see. I was wondering where the hell you were seeing Southeast Missouri but looking at the edit history on wikipedia I see some joker (you?) put it in there in place of Harvard.
Well from your previous post regarding Fox bias, I assume that by Fox you mean Fox News which is a cable channel? The Fox itself that I get broadcasts some news programs that are almost entirely local and don't have particularly pronounced bias like Fox News has. In any case, we don't know the market value of spectrum allocations because they are controlled by the FCC. If you want to put them out on the market I am fine with that. But government collecting fees from viewers to fund one particular government approved channel seems very wrong and dangerous however "fair" (according to whom) it may be. Not even to mention the fact that they have to pay for it even if they don't watch it, as long as they own a TV set.
Apart from the fact that Fox is not funded by the government imposed license fees like BBC is, that's a poor analogy. You don't like Fox, push a button on your remote. If it was that easy to change your ISP there wouldn't be a problem.
What we are discussing here is that ISPs are about to get the right to act like Fox.
ISPs already have that right and they generally didn't abuse it so far. What we are discussing here is whether it should be taken away from them.
I agree with the first half of your comment but your approach has a slight problem that everybody uses public land. Say if you have a business would you like the government to control who you can sell your products to because you deliver them using public roads? At least cables are underground.
I was tempted to respond in a similar way to the GP's trollish comment, but yours went too far in the other direction.
the discoveries made there could free the minds of millions of people and entice some of the brightest people on the planet to focus their talents on space sciences
Come on, Opportunity has been on Mars for 6 years now and at this point they are just playing with a VERY cool RC car in the (Martian) dirt. It is not that expensive to run at this point and it is certainly worth keeping until it dies on the off chance of finding something interesting, but what discoveries that will excite millions have the rovers made in the last few years? None.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you're a troll but you are close because your entire post amounts to a simple statement that Europe is "better" than USA in some undefined way. Can you please provide some examples? I can give you top ten reasons why USA is better than Europe:
1. USA has a constitutional system that did not produce a dictatorship in the last 234 years since it was introduced. Europe has had dozens including some of the world's worst ones since then and still has some.
2. Inherent individual liberty (not by government grant) is still heavily on the agenda in the USA even though it is being gradually eroded. In Europe it is a completely forgotten concept.
3. USA leads the world in innovation by far in virtually all technical fields. Take Nobel prize in physics: USA: 73, next highest country Germany: 21 (most of which looong time ago). Take computer technology. Take medical science, biotechnology, you name it.
4. USA leads the world by far in arts and culture. New York is the world capital of arts, not Paris or London any more. Hollywood is the world capital of popular culture. Europe for the most part copies the USA.
5. USA has a military that protects both USA and Europe and then some. Europe does not have a military that can protect itself.
6. According to the most reputable (UK based) university ranking system the USA has 13 of the world's top 20 universities: http://topuniversities.com/world-university-rankings Europe has 4 and all of them are in UK. Germany has 0. France has 0.
7. According to the most UN indices that measure human and economic development, USA is actually ahead of large European countries like UK, Germany and France. There are smaller countries like Norway or Sweden that are ahead but those can hardly be compared to the USA in size and diversity.
8. Bankrupt European welfare countries like Greece are as we speak begging the World Bank for a bailout, with the rest of the PIIGS to follow. USA has bankrupt welfare states too, like California, but it is still by far the largest contributor to the World Bank and the IMF.
9. European heads of state come to the USA to plead for special relationships and get patted on the head like pets. Not the other way around.
10. According to polls Europeans are far more eager to move to the USA than Americans are to move to Europe
Nothing is perfect and USA does need reforms but in the opposite direction of Europe i.e towards less statism, not more.
By making your hardware more accessible, you are increasing your product's value for your users.
Sure you do (especially for Bill_the_Engineer, not so much for Bill_the_Average_person_clueless_about_technology) but the question is will you bring more return in for your investors than with closed hardware. More to the point, can you convince your investors to pony up for R&D up front, while knowing that as soon as your product is out, $LARGE_CORP can copy it and sell it for less because it doesn't have to recoup the R&D costs like you do?
$50 million today => $1 billion in 5 years! You'd have to be crazy not to invest EVERY PENNY YOU OWN in these companies!
The problem is we need oil and we need those companies to drill for it. Given that there are about 4000 oil rigs in the gulf, it is unrealistic to expect 0 accidents forever. When you say the government needs to step in and make industry take actions you are almost always on a very slippery surface. The devil is in the details. Can the accidents still happen even if those regulations are followed exactly? Unless those regulations require miracles then the answer is probably, and they just allow the industry to say "Hew, it's not our fault, we followed the government's safety rules exactly". Much better to require as we do now for the companies that own that oil to pay for the cleanup. What is needed is full enforcement of that, but my prediction is that after years of wrangling and lawsuits, BP will really only pay a fraction of the true cost.
Enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCdgv7n9xCY
People have been wringing their hands over the looming demise of Social Security since before you were born.
2010 was the first year that the payouts for social security exceeded the amount that was taken in by social security taxes (contributions is a silly word for it). So yes, the demise was looming, and now its getting closer: http://economistmom.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/nytimes-social-security-deficit-032510.jpg With the ratio of working population v. retirees getting more and more heavily skewed in favor of retirees you will get a situation where either the taxes will have to increase or the benefits will have to decrease. As somebody who doesn't expect to retire for another 30 years I would MUCH prefer paying the 7% (plus employer's 7%) into a retirement fund than into Social Security if I had that option.
How about you sell your ass for $.50-$.75 DRM free? You know how much it costs to make an hour long show? What makes you think that a studio would be willing to sell you something at your arbitrarily set prices even if it means they make a loss. If your answer is then I'll do without watching their show, fine. If your answer is, then I'll download it for free, then you are, as the summary says, an unprincipled thief.
Maybe you should invest in a new brain. The market dropped due to the possibility of a default by Greece which might trigger similar crisis in other PIGSand possibly Europe wide credit market collapse. The typo story seems unlikely but when the market is that jittery it doesn't matter what trigger the sell off. If it wasn't a typo it would have been something else but it would have happened anyway.
In market in which any one player can have undue influence on the market is no longer a free market. Therefore, you are technically correct: free markets cannot produce monopolies, because they cease being free long before any monopoly is created.
I didn't say that the free market cannot create monopolies but that that is a mostly theoretical problem since it does not tend to happen in practice. If you think it does please name some monopolies that have formed without direct role of the government in creating them (such as with utility companies). The scenario that people have in mind is a company getting so big and powerful that it drives all its competitors out of business and then does whatever it wants has never happened in reality.
Yes, I'm against letting the government pick the winners and losers in any market (that is inherently corrupting), but to pretend that in today's world a true free market would exist without any government regulation is the epitome of intentional ignorance. Adam's Smith's "Invisible Hand" was a good model for the agricultural market of 235 years ago, with family farms selling food to families, every player in the market was infinitesimally small, and no one player has undue influence. It is NOT a good model for the modern international corporate economy.
You see, that is not an argument. It's not enough to just state something while capitalizing certain words and using terms like intentional ignorance. Btw, completely unregulated market is mostly a straw man. Nobody is really for it, certainly not most libertarians, apart from anarcho-capitalist fringe.
Do you really believe Walmart participates in a "free market"? Their ability to drive supply costs down much lower than their competitors suggests that they do not.
Of course they do, what on earth makes you think that they don't. What special position was magically granted to them and by whom so that they are immune to the same competitive pressures as any other company, other than they were very good at what they do. People don't have to shop there, but they do because they provide lower prices than tehir competitors. They drive supply costs down because they have over time put themselves in a strong position v. their suppliers since they all want to sell their stuff at Walmart.
I think the idea that if we had more competition it wouldn't matter because they would all be doing the same thing doesn't pass the reality test. When you have companies competing, the greater incentive is to grab the market share from your competitors and if possible drive them out of business by providing what the customer wants, rather than to collude in providing inferior service and open the door for new competitors to enter the market.
But, we don't really have a choice so that's a moot point when it comes to broadband. I think you are right though. The issue is who will pay for the increased capacity necessary mainly for video, the video providers or the consumers. Net neutrality means that if you have petabytes of video on your site (such as youtube) you are no different than another service that is text only. The consumer pays for what they use. That's fair enough but be careful what you wish for because you will end up with higher prices overall for broadband, and perhaps metered usage like with all the other utility companies. That also leads to inequality since richer people will be able to afford access to more of the internet.
The government ensures there is enough competition so that customers actually have a choice
Why do you trust the government to do that when historically almost all monopolies have arisen either as a direct grant by the government or as unintended consequences of government regulation? The free market does not tend to produce monopolies in practice even though to a layperson it may seem logical that it would.
They are doing ok without it
What whoosh? "Teabaggers" is a sexual slur http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_bag_(sexual_act) which makes it particularly inappropriate for the president to use.
Just what we need, the government to spy on our phone, email, medical and financial records. Just what we need, the government to wage war on medical marijuana users. Just what we need, the government to receive money from countless lobby groups to stealthily enact laws which benefit the said groups while harming the American people. Just what we need, the government waste, corruption and incompetence that operates the postal service at an annual loss of $70B, overpays military contractors by orders of magnitude, and bails out failed banks and car companies with taxpayers money.
Is your point that because some things are appropriate for the government to do it follows that everything is?
Btw, while the government certainly had a large role in building the infrastructure of the Internet, the Internet is what it is today due to private initiative (whether for profit or not) which gets stifled every time the government gets involved.
There are problems with the free market. There are far bigger problems with government control. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-o0kD9f6wo
That is your opinion and fair enough unless you try to impose it on others through laws or other forms of force. I am just curious why people like you consider sex to be degrading to women but not to men, or at least more degrading to women than to men. Could you please explain it to me? It seems that you assume that women gain no pleasure from sex and are only enduring it in order to please men which makes me think that you don't understand women at all and shouldn't be in the business of "protecting" them from themselves.
Times/QS Methodology is explained on the site topuniversities.com where they publish their annual rankings (btw QS which compiles the rankings is British). ARWU is a Chinese organization and their methodology is also clearly posted.
Care to share the research you have done that leads you to the conclusion those universities you mention are better than the University of Michigan?
What the hell are you people looking at? I think somebody was vandalizing that wikipedia article to be funny. There are 13 US universities in top 20, 5 from UK, 1 each from Australia, Canada and Switzerland. (yes there are really 21 cause 20th place is shared by Edinburgh and Zurich)
Ahhh I see. I was wondering where the hell you were seeing Southeast Missouri but looking at the edit history on wikipedia I see some joker (you?) put it in there in place of Harvard.
And in case you don't like the the world's most reputable university rankings above, here is (according to Wikipedia) the second one:
http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2009.jsp
Could it be that the US has 54 out of the world's best 100 universities because they are more like businesses?
American universities aren't exactly places of learning, like they are in Europe and elsewhere.
QS World University Rankings (Top 20) Therefore, you are a terrorist.
Well from your previous post regarding Fox bias, I assume that by Fox you mean Fox News which is a cable channel? The Fox itself that I get broadcasts some news programs that are almost entirely local and don't have particularly pronounced bias like Fox News has. In any case, we don't know the market value of spectrum allocations because they are controlled by the FCC. If you want to put them out on the market I am fine with that. But government collecting fees from viewers to fund one particular government approved channel seems very wrong and dangerous however "fair" (according to whom) it may be. Not even to mention the fact that they have to pay for it even if they don't watch it, as long as they own a TV set.
Apart from the fact that Fox is not funded by the government imposed license fees like BBC is, that's a poor analogy. You don't like Fox, push a button on your remote. If it was that easy to change your ISP there wouldn't be a problem.
What we are discussing here is that ISPs are about to get the right to act like Fox.
ISPs already have that right and they generally didn't abuse it so far. What we are discussing here is whether it should be taken away from them.
I agree with the first half of your comment but your approach has a slight problem that everybody uses public land. Say if you have a business would you like the government to control who you can sell your products to because you deliver them using public roads? At least cables are underground.
I was tempted to respond in a similar way to the GP's trollish comment, but yours went too far in the other direction.
the discoveries made there could free the minds of millions of people and entice some of the brightest people on the planet to focus their talents on space sciences
Come on, Opportunity has been on Mars for 6 years now and at this point they are just playing with a VERY cool RC car in the (Martian) dirt. It is not that expensive to run at this point and it is certainly worth keeping until it dies on the off chance of finding something interesting, but what discoveries that will excite millions have the rovers made in the last few years? None.