It's a pretty cool location, really. Back when I was an air cadet, we'd occasionally end up staying in this particular bunker for a weekend, as the Debert airfield right next door was pretty much ideal for glider pilot training. (3 runways in a triangle, so you never had much of a crosswind to worry about, good grass strips on both sides of the runways, so we'd stack gliders on the runways waiting to take off, land towplanes on the left strip and land gliders on the right strip)
Interesting thing about sleeping in a bunker like this - waking up in the morning is one of the most disorienting things you'll ever experience. Everything about the environment, temperature, atmospheric pressure, lighting, humidity, etc, are all controlled at constant values, so your body's internal clock has zero reference points to go on. You wake up and you can't tell if you've been asleep for one hour or for ten.
Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but it was a wiretap program contrary to law, isn't that pretty clear cut?
I mean, I guess if you wanna get technical, it's for a court of law to determine that a given act on the part of the administration was illegal or not. So is he supposed to keep quiet 'til then?
"Dude commits a felony and they go after him for it and that is "chilling"? Howso?"
Uh, not to 'godwin up' the discussion, (and I'm not actually comparing anything to the holocaust, keep in mind) but don't we all basically agree since the Nuremberg Trials that an agent of the government has a duty to their own conscience, to disobey an unjust law?
Well, the real trick is, to employ a couple of million (not actually sure about that number, feel free to correct me) people AKA 'voters', at pretty good wages.
Then there's a vested interest in bailouts.
And, as much as I have free-market leanings, I'm not sure it's _not_ in the national interest to keep people employed. Not sure it is, either, of course. But I am sure that all the people who would be jobless if the big 3 fail _do_ constitute a problem.
I've often wondered if this is the problem with airlines. After 9/11, there was what, a 10% drop in business, and that required a federal bailout.
Keep in mind that the number of passenger-miles flown since deregulation has gone up something like 1000 or 10,000 fold.
There's gotta be something fundamentally wrong when you have 1000 times as much demand for your product of 25 years or so but almost every player in the industry teeters on the brink of bankruptcy.
Meh, the only country I can think of off the top of my head that has zero, or near zero, "government intervention in an otherwise free market" is um, Afghanistan? Maybe Sudan?
Besides, I don't have a lot of use for the whole "taxes are theft" argument. If taxes are theft, well, then so is rent, right?
"He points to what he calls, tongue-in-cheek, the Dell Theory of Conflict Management. As global supply chains grow and interlock, it'll grow harder and harder to engage in conflicts, either socially, politically, or militarily, for fear of twisting up your economic "place" in those supply chains"
Uh, weren't there a lot of people between about 1900 and 1913 or so making a very similar argument? How'd that work out for them?
It's not saying that a lie at a cocktail party is the same as a lie in court.
But if I lie to you, at a cocktail party, for the purposes of some sort of fraud (convincing you to invest in some sort of fraudulent investment for example) well, that _is_ a criminal act, isn't it?
I'm not sure what exactly it was that she should be charged with, but it seems clear to me that she had criminal intent.
She lied, for the purposes of causing harm to someone, and then her actions did in fact lead to harm suffered by that person.
Seems fine to me.
And, IANAL, YMMV, etc, but I don't see that her being convicted means that violating the TOS of a website is a criminal act.
To me, it seems like the precedent set if she's convicted would be more like 'if you violate the TOS of a website in the service of a larger criminal intent to cause harm' then that's a crime.
Uh, OK, but maybe if there wasn't an embargo, there'd be more MRI machines?
Also, um, you can do a lot of really good health care without MRIs and other new toys. Most doctors will tell you that, with the exception of a very short list of conditions, an MRI machine is in the "nice to have" category, not in the "absolutely necessary to make a differential diagnosis".
And, again, barring an embargo, Cuba could buy more of those, right?
"Because the metaphor of property was allowed to run rampant, unquestioned."
While I think you're absolutely right about this, as was RMS, it reminds me of something I just read by James K. Galbraith (Yes, John K.'s son...)
"Today, the signature of modern American capitalism is neither benign competition, nor class struggle, nor an inclusive middle-class utopia. Instead, predation has become the dominant featureâ"a system wherein the rich have come to feast on decaying systems built for the middle class. The predatory class is not the whole of the wealthy; it may be opposed by many others of similar wealth. But it is the defining feature, the leading force. And its agents are in full control of the government under which we live."
Lord, only on Slashdot, home to thousands of libertarians in the sense of "libertarians are nothing more than slave-owners who want police protection against slave uprisings", does this get modded insightful.
Yeah, free markets are a great idea, come what may. 'Cause the US pre-New Deal was a paradise compared to the period from WWII to 1973.
How long is the memory of a market? Somewhere between that of a dog and a cat. Now, that's a good thing. Otherwise, after one real estate crash, nobody would ever invest in real estate again. But the point is, that a purely free market setup cannot consider long-term interests in the face of the overwhelming attractiveness of snort-term profits.
Ever since Nixon killed Bretton-Woods, it's been really easy to make decent or better rates of returns on basically paper profits on something not much more sophisticated than a roulette wheel writ large.
That's why ever since the mid-70s, the US economy has been dominated by FIRE economics - Finance, Insurance, Real Estate. From bubble to bubble to bubble, and with every cycle of burst bubbles, fundamentals like a manufacturing sector get replaced by service sector jobs. How's that working out for everybody?
Canadian author J.R. Saul puts a lot of this on Nixon and pulling out of the Bretton-Woods system in the 70s. That created a huge market for basically purely speculative paper profits in things like money markets.
This created a huge flood of 'impatient' capital. Where in previous decades, you'd invest in some 'thing' (factory that makes widgets, whatever...) spend a few years in the red or in revenue neutral, then eventually you'd make your money back in the long-term.
Now, given that you can instantly make an excellent rate of return just by investing in what amounts to a giant roulette wheel, why bother with that initial investment period?
Henry Mintzberg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Mintzberg) said something about how "the more American MBA schools succeed at getting their grads into top boardrooms, the more American Business fails."
Uh, just to address one point, regressive taxes - Warren Buffet pointed out recently that under current tax laws, his secretary pays a higher % of her income as tax than he does.
What. The. Fuck.?
That's what people mean when they say 'concentration of wealth'.
"The problem with unions is that they're out for their own interests "
Uh, and management is only out for the good of the country or the company? What, union members are supposed to be out for the good of their employer?
Unions are a reactive organization. If a union is militant, it's because the employer has either played hardball with them in the past, or engaged in outright union busting tactics in the past.
Uh, correct me if I'm wrong, but the Japanese treat their employees far better than US workers, right? Cradle to grave, right?
So the cost to the company per worker in Japan is higher than it is in the USA, GM is on the verge of bankruptcy and Toyota is doing fine, but somehow this is the fault of the expensive worker benefits in the USA? This doesn't make sense to me.
I wonder if part of it is mismanagement, but part of it has to be healthcare costs. They've gone through the roof in the US since 2000 or so. Wish I could find a source for this, but I remember reading somewhere that GM spends more on health care costs than on steel.
Um, don't SWAT teams or whatever they're called (tactical teams in my jurisdiction, IIRC), don't they do simulated hostage rescues and simulations of busting into a house, etc?
Muggings isn't a good example, but I could see useful information being gained in studying the various ways that arsonists set fires would be useful to arson investigators?
Either way, you can make a strong case that the last 2 presidential elections indicate that it seems a great deal of people don't see either candidate making any difference to their lives.
Yeah, I basically think you're right on this. Not a given, not a guarantee that it wouldn't have happened, but yeah, lot of at best incompetence under current administration.
All I meant was, if it did happen, I think the patriot act would've been equally likely.
Actually, it's even worse than 'no spark'. It's much worse than the idea that the majority of people supported Bush.
Both in 2004 and 2000, you had almost (within a couple of percentage points of, anyway) a 50-50 split. Which as some have pointed out, that's the sorta results you'd expect if a lot of people didn't really think that either outcome would make any difference. Like, if you had an "election" of "do you want person A or person B to be president of mars?" you'd probably see a similar result.
Rightly or wrongly, it suggests that people don't think that it'd make much difference if Bush or Gore had been elected. I got no love for Bush at all, but I don't think that given 9/11 events, that the patriot act would've been vetoed by Gore or something.
Seriously, it's not just math. The "best" serial killers and mass murders have been men. Same with the 'best' totalitarian dictators. The tallest (and, IIRC, shortest) individuals have been men.
The standard deviation on virtually any trait you measure for men will be larger than it is for women.
There's a lot of theories why this is, but I don't think much of evolutionary psychology, so I'm not getting into that, but yeah, this is why it's ridiculous to point to the fact that almost all winners of the fields medal have been men as evidence for an innate math superiority on the part of men.
And far more girls than boys _write_ the SATs every year.
So, what they suspect is, that the smaller sample of boys-writing-the-SATs is composed of a 'better class' of male students, say, (for the sake of the argument, numbers I just pulled out of my ass here) maybe the top 5-10% of boys.
Where, if you have say, the top 20% of girls (again, numbers I just made up to illustrate) writing the SATs, you can see how it would appear that "boys do better than girls", right?
OK, sure, it seems quite reasonable that people of lower intelligence have more kids.
But it's probably been that way for a very long time. I'd imagine that some illiterate peasant bog-farmer had more kids than, say, Sir Isaac Newton, for example. (don't know if that's actually true, but you see where I'm going, right?)
What keeps us from already being in the grips of an Idiocracy type situation is that there's minimal link between your IQ and that of your parents. Yes, there is a link, but there's a lot of environmental factors that matter much more.
And there's lots of evidence that there's a whole lot of brain development that happens in the first 5 years of life or so. The difference between living in poverty and not, living in a stable household and not in those initial years has been shown to have a dramatic effect on success (however you wanna define it,) in later life.
Given a chance to flourish, good nutrition, a stable emotional environment, intellectual stimulation, decent schooling, etc., a kid born to below-average IQ parents might not be another Einstein or Gauss, but they'll do just fine.
I wonder how traffic affects those relative MPG ratings? If I had to guess, I'd say that if your say, 20 mile commute to work in the morning takes you 45-60 minutes, then the difference between a prius and a civic gets even more dramatic. I suspect that in stop and go traffic, the hybrid is running on battery a lot of the time, where the regular ICE is idling and burning a non-zero amount of gas?
Also, those numbers of 75,000 miles or 15,000 miles per year (24,000 km) seem a bit on the low end to me. I'm lucky enough to be able to walk to work at my current job, but last time I had a car for commuting (3 or 4 years back) I was putting more like 20K-25K miles per year on my car.
Oh, and, I'm in Canada, where the price of gas is just shy of six bucks a gallon. Most of europe is pushing 8 bucks a gallon. So, y'know, it depends.
Now, to be fair, I've never actually worked for the public sector at any level, (although my wife does, as do several of my friends) but whenever I hear somebody suggest that any given problem in the government doesn't exist, or would be less of a problem if it were handled by private sector, I think to myself, "what private companies have you been working for?". My wife works for the feds, and I can match her for any story of bureaucracy or waste or mismanagement or inefficiency with a similar, or worse, case, in the private sector.
I see that as a company grows larger, it takes on more and more of the stereotypical traits of "big bad government bureaucracies".
Makes me wonder often if there's a natural size to any organization, regardless of it's funding or revenue source. Once you get over a given size (maybe 100-500 employees) then the "overhead" of maintaining organizational structures messes everything up.
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It's a pretty cool location, really. Back when I was an air cadet, we'd occasionally end up staying in this particular bunker for a weekend, as the Debert airfield right next door was pretty much ideal for glider pilot training. (3 runways in a triangle, so you never had much of a crosswind to worry about, good grass strips on both sides of the runways, so we'd stack gliders on the runways waiting to take off, land towplanes on the left strip and land gliders on the right strip)
Interesting thing about sleeping in a bunker like this - waking up in the morning is one of the most disorienting things you'll ever experience. Everything about the environment, temperature, atmospheric pressure, lighting, humidity, etc, are all controlled at constant values, so your body's internal clock has zero reference points to go on. You wake up and you can't tell if you've been asleep for one hour or for ten.
Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but it was a wiretap program contrary to law, isn't that pretty clear cut?
I mean, I guess if you wanna get technical, it's for a court of law to determine that a given act on the part of the administration was illegal or not. So is he supposed to keep quiet 'til then?
"Dude commits a felony and they go after him for it and that is "chilling"? Howso?"
Uh, not to 'godwin up' the discussion, (and I'm not actually comparing anything to the holocaust, keep in mind) but don't we all basically agree since the Nuremberg Trials that an agent of the government has a duty to their own conscience, to disobey an unjust law?
Well, the real trick is, to employ a couple of million (not actually sure about that number, feel free to correct me) people AKA 'voters', at pretty good wages.
Then there's a vested interest in bailouts.
And, as much as I have free-market leanings, I'm not sure it's _not_ in the national interest to keep people employed. Not sure it is, either, of course. But I am sure that all the people who would be jobless if the big 3 fail _do_ constitute a problem.
"Perhaps there actually is too much competition"
I've often wondered if this is the problem with airlines. After 9/11, there was what, a 10% drop in business, and that required a federal bailout.
Keep in mind that the number of passenger-miles flown since deregulation has gone up something like 1000 or 10,000 fold.
There's gotta be something fundamentally wrong when you have 1000 times as much demand for your product of 25 years or so but almost every player in the industry teeters on the brink of bankruptcy.
Meh, the only country I can think of off the top of my head that has zero, or near zero, "government intervention in an otherwise free market" is um, Afghanistan? Maybe Sudan?
Besides, I don't have a lot of use for the whole "taxes are theft" argument. If taxes are theft, well, then so is rent, right?
"He points to what he calls, tongue-in-cheek, the Dell Theory of Conflict Management. As global supply chains grow and interlock, it'll grow harder and harder to engage in conflicts, either socially, politically, or militarily, for fear of twisting up your economic "place" in those supply chains"
Uh, weren't there a lot of people between about 1900 and 1913 or so making a very similar argument? How'd that work out for them?
It's not saying that a lie at a cocktail party is the same as a lie in court.
But if I lie to you, at a cocktail party, for the purposes of some sort of fraud (convincing you to invest in some sort of fraudulent investment for example) well, that _is_ a criminal act, isn't it?
I'm not sure what exactly it was that she should be charged with, but it seems clear to me that she had criminal intent.
She lied, for the purposes of causing harm to someone, and then her actions did in fact lead to harm suffered by that person.
Seems fine to me.
And, IANAL, YMMV, etc, but I don't see that her being convicted means that violating the TOS of a website is a criminal act.
To me, it seems like the precedent set if she's convicted would be more like 'if you violate the TOS of a website in the service of a larger criminal intent to cause harm' then that's a crime.
Uh, OK, but maybe if there wasn't an embargo, there'd be more MRI machines?
Also, um, you can do a lot of really good health care without MRIs and other new toys. Most doctors will tell you that, with the exception of a very short list of conditions, an MRI machine is in the "nice to have" category, not in the "absolutely necessary to make a differential diagnosis".
And, again, barring an embargo, Cuba could buy more of those, right?
"Because the metaphor of property was allowed to run rampant, unquestioned."
While I think you're absolutely right about this, as was RMS, it reminds me of something I just read by James K. Galbraith (Yes, John K.'s son...)
Full article:
http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/05/predator_state.html
Lord, only on Slashdot, home to thousands of libertarians in the sense of "libertarians are nothing more than slave-owners who want police protection against slave uprisings", does this get modded insightful.
Yeah, free markets are a great idea, come what may. 'Cause the US pre-New Deal was a paradise compared to the period from WWII to 1973.
How long is the memory of a market? Somewhere between that of a dog and a cat. Now, that's a good thing. Otherwise, after one real estate crash, nobody would ever invest in real estate again. But the point is, that a purely free market setup cannot consider long-term interests in the face of the overwhelming attractiveness of snort-term profits.
Ever since Nixon killed Bretton-Woods, it's been really easy to make decent or better rates of returns on basically paper profits on something not much more sophisticated than a roulette wheel writ large.
That's why ever since the mid-70s, the US economy has been dominated by FIRE economics - Finance, Insurance, Real Estate. From bubble to bubble to bubble, and with every cycle of burst bubbles, fundamentals like a manufacturing sector get replaced by service sector jobs. How's that working out for everybody?
Canadian author J.R. Saul puts a lot of this on Nixon and pulling out of the Bretton-Woods system in the 70s. That created a huge market for basically purely speculative paper profits in things like money markets.
This created a huge flood of 'impatient' capital. Where in previous decades, you'd invest in some 'thing' (factory that makes widgets, whatever...) spend a few years in the red or in revenue neutral, then eventually you'd make your money back in the long-term.
Now, given that you can instantly make an excellent rate of return just by investing in what amounts to a giant roulette wheel, why bother with that initial investment period?
Henry Mintzberg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Mintzberg) said something about how "the more American MBA schools succeed at getting their grads into top boardrooms, the more American Business fails."
Uh, just to address one point, regressive taxes - Warren Buffet pointed out recently that under current tax laws, his secretary pays a higher % of her income as tax than he does.
What. The. Fuck.?
That's what people mean when they say 'concentration of wealth'.
"The problem with unions is that they're out for their own interests "
Uh, and management is only out for the good of the country or the company? What, union members are supposed to be out for the good of their employer?
Unions are a reactive organization. If a union is militant, it's because the employer has either played hardball with them in the past, or engaged in outright union busting tactics in the past.
Employers get the unions they deserve.
Uh, correct me if I'm wrong, but the Japanese treat their employees far better than US workers, right? Cradle to grave, right?
So the cost to the company per worker in Japan is higher than it is in the USA, GM is on the verge of bankruptcy and Toyota is doing fine, but somehow this is the fault of the expensive worker benefits in the USA? This doesn't make sense to me.
I wonder if part of it is mismanagement, but part of it has to be healthcare costs. They've gone through the roof in the US since 2000 or so. Wish I could find a source for this, but I remember reading somewhere that GM spends more on health care costs than on steel.
Um, don't SWAT teams or whatever they're called (tactical teams in my jurisdiction, IIRC), don't they do simulated hostage rescues and simulations of busting into a house, etc?
Muggings isn't a good example, but I could see useful information being gained in studying the various ways that arsonists set fires would be useful to arson investigators?
Either way, you can make a strong case that the last 2 presidential elections indicate that it seems a great deal of people don't see either candidate making any difference to their lives.
Remember the "Gush vs Bore" jokes?
Yeah, I basically think you're right on this. Not a given, not a guarantee that it wouldn't have happened, but yeah, lot of at best incompetence under current administration.
All I meant was, if it did happen, I think the patriot act would've been equally likely.
Actually, it's even worse than 'no spark'. It's much worse than the idea that the majority of people supported Bush.
Both in 2004 and 2000, you had almost (within a couple of percentage points of, anyway) a 50-50 split. Which as some have pointed out, that's the sorta results you'd expect if a lot of people didn't really think that either outcome would make any difference. Like, if you had an "election" of "do you want person A or person B to be president of mars?" you'd probably see a similar result.
Rightly or wrongly, it suggests that people don't think that it'd make much difference if Bush or Gore had been elected. I got no love for Bush at all, but I don't think that given 9/11 events, that the patriot act would've been vetoed by Gore or something.
Seriously, it's not just math. The "best" serial killers and mass murders have been men. Same with the 'best' totalitarian dictators. The tallest (and, IIRC, shortest) individuals have been men.
The standard deviation on virtually any trait you measure for men will be larger than it is for women.
There's a lot of theories why this is, but I don't think much of evolutionary psychology, so I'm not getting into that, but yeah, this is why it's ridiculous to point to the fact that almost all winners of the fields medal have been men as evidence for an innate math superiority on the part of men.
Uh, it actually explains why it does that.
The 7% difference is on the SATs.
And far more girls than boys _write_ the SATs every year.
So, what they suspect is, that the smaller sample of boys-writing-the-SATs is composed of a 'better class' of male students, say, (for the sake of the argument, numbers I just pulled out of my ass here) maybe the top 5-10% of boys.
Where, if you have say, the top 20% of girls (again, numbers I just made up to illustrate) writing the SATs, you can see how it would appear that "boys do better than girls", right?
OK, sure, it seems quite reasonable that people of lower intelligence have more kids.
But it's probably been that way for a very long time. I'd imagine that some illiterate peasant bog-farmer had more kids than, say, Sir Isaac Newton, for example. (don't know if that's actually true, but you see where I'm going, right?)
What keeps us from already being in the grips of an Idiocracy type situation is that there's minimal link between your IQ and that of your parents. Yes, there is a link, but there's a lot of environmental factors that matter much more.
And there's lots of evidence that there's a whole lot of brain development that happens in the first 5 years of life or so. The difference between living in poverty and not, living in a stable household and not in those initial years has been shown to have a dramatic effect on success (however you wanna define it,) in later life.
Given a chance to flourish, good nutrition, a stable emotional environment, intellectual stimulation, decent schooling, etc., a kid born to below-average IQ parents might not be another Einstein or Gauss, but they'll do just fine.
I wonder how traffic affects those relative MPG ratings? If I had to guess, I'd say that if your say, 20 mile commute to work in the morning takes you 45-60 minutes, then the difference between a prius and a civic gets even more dramatic. I suspect that in stop and go traffic, the hybrid is running on battery a lot of the time, where the regular ICE is idling and burning a non-zero amount of gas?
Also, those numbers of 75,000 miles or 15,000 miles per year (24,000 km) seem a bit on the low end to me. I'm lucky enough to be able to walk to work at my current job, but last time I had a car for commuting (3 or 4 years back) I was putting more like 20K-25K miles per year on my car.
Oh, and, I'm in Canada, where the price of gas is just shy of six bucks a gallon. Most of europe is pushing 8 bucks a gallon. So, y'know, it depends.
Here, here.
Now, to be fair, I've never actually worked for the public sector at any level, (although my wife does, as do several of my friends) but whenever I hear somebody suggest that any given problem in the government doesn't exist, or would be less of a problem if it were handled by private sector, I think to myself, "what private companies have you been working for?". My wife works for the feds, and I can match her for any story of bureaucracy or waste or mismanagement or inefficiency with a similar, or worse, case, in the private sector.
I see that as a company grows larger, it takes on more and more of the stereotypical traits of "big bad government bureaucracies".
Makes me wonder often if there's a natural size to any organization, regardless of it's funding or revenue source. Once you get over a given size (maybe 100-500 employees) then the "overhead" of maintaining organizational structures messes everything up.
There's lots of examples of privatized water and other similar services, generally in the 3rd world.
Can you cite an example of privatizing water or other "natural monopolies" that wasn't an unmitigated disaster for the citizens of that jurisdiction?
I don't know about the US postal service, but up here in Canada, it's fine.
How about schools? you privatize schools, and then only the wealthy go to school. Goodbye even the pretense of social mobility in that case.