Re:What can be done about terrorism?
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I think that the term "globalization" is a very confusing one. As commonly used, it includes some things which I think are very good. It also includes some things I think are harmful and dangerous. For the most part, these good and bad trends are not inherently tied together, and using the same word simply obscures the reality.
Increased trade, travel, cultural contacts, and working together to solve common problems seem like wonderful things to me. Something like the Internet offers many opportunities to improve the lot of humanity. I think, however, that communities should be able to choose to opt out of some or all of these changes. It's a simple matter of the right to self-determination and the right of people to exercise control over their own destinies.
What specifically bothers me? The structure of international institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, WTO, etc., is a big thing. The people who created our (the U.S.) democratic system thought that government should be open and transparent to the governed. They chose to have most of the important offices in government chosen by direct election. They chose to make meetings and actions of the congress and executive agencies available for all to see. Change the channel to C-SPAN or browse the Congressional Record at your local library for an example.
I think that they designed our system this way for very good reasons. Why are the institutions described above structured so differently, so opaquely? Why are the treaties that create these institutions kept from the public until just before they are agreed to? This isn't even how most international meetings work. Witness the huge debate over the text of the U.N. racism conference declaration long before the conference even began. Why wasn't there vigorous debate over something as major as NAFTA? All we got was this farce between Gore and Perot on Larry King.
As to my definition of "globalization," my main point is that I think it is a confusing term and not very useful in the debate. As commonly used, I can't say whether I'm for it or against it. I could propose alternative terms, but it's not likely that people would start using them anyway. Just be aware that it is a term which doesn't always mean the same thing.
You're right. The essential links are democracy and capitalism. What two democratic, capitalist countries have fought a major war against each other?
O.K. The closest I can think of is the U.S. versus Serbia. By the standards of Europe, the Serbia of 1999 seemed to be pretty capitalist to me. Milosevic was also democratically elected, enjoyed a great deal of popular support, and was removed by an election. Granted, he tried to fudge the election, but then the Nixon administration discussed using the military to resist impeachment. Does the fact that Milosevic tried to tamper with an election after the war make Serbia before the war less of a democracy? Probably... One of the wars between India and Pakistan may qualify, but it probably depends on your definitions. Heck, Britain was certainly capitalist in 1812. Was it a democracy? In important ways it certainly was. The U.S. and Britain fought a war 1812-1814. Were the United States of America and the Confederate States of America two seperate countries 1861-1865? In most important ways they were. They were both capitalist democracies, and their war was "major" by any standard.
Anyway, I would offer a counter challenge: What two fascist countries have fought any war against each other?
Look, the argument that democratic, capitalist
countries won't fight wars against each other usually goes something like: democracies never attack first since people don't like wars, and they control the government. War is bad for trade, and thus business, so capitalist countries have even less reason to go to war. Basically, the argument is that these countries don't start wars. (Perhaps this is a strawman. Is there a better argument?) The problem with this argument is that such countries routinely attack other countries which have not attacked them first. That is precisely how wars start.
Perhaps the argument is that such countries have such similar beliefs and values that they will not have major disagreements which would lead to war. If common beliefs and values were enough, why are there so many civil wars?
Anyhow, it is very easy to swing sticks at strawmen. Globalization is an especially easy one because the "bad guys" are corporations. What are you proposing as an alternative? Cessation of trade? Outlawing of multinationals? Tobin tax?
Outlawing of multinationals or any such quick-fix would be incredibly counter-productive. The answer is to try to control the worst effects of the current system while trying to preserve what is useful about it. As I understand the Tobin tax, it sounds like a good idea. Any market, such as the current international currency market, where speculative trading vastly exceeds productive trading is dangerous. The speculators cause massive swings in prices, greatly increasing the risk for those who are trading because they actually need more or less of the underling commodity. Just ask the Bank of England about that one. (George Soros made a lot of money at the expense of British taxpayers through a currency trading scheme in the early 1990's.)
Democratic capitalism has solved more problems than it has caused and that is much more than can be said for competing systems. If you want to tweak the system, by all means, let's do so. But if you're going to argue against the whole thing you'll have to demonstrate that there is a deep problem and present an alternative that solves it.
I largely agree with you. I wouldn't presume to throw everything out and start fresh. We don't understand the way societies work well enough to design a better one without a great deal of experimentation. Incremental changes seem like the way to go. As to whether there is a deep problem, I see unnecessary human suffering all around me. I think that our economic system has a great deal to do with that. To present a detailed alternative in this forum would be a waste of time. True democracy and openness in the new international institutions would be a good start.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
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Not to protect the American civilians in the foreign country but to protect American interests in a geopolitical sense. Those bases were all over the world even before we had globalization as we know it. And before there were American bases all over the world there were European bases all over the world.
This is an important point. Globalization is certainly not new. The amount of trade in material goods has not changed very significantly in the last century. It went down a lot during the wars, but otherwise has not changed that much. You doubt me? The effects of trade have been tremendous for centuries--slaves, weapons, gold, luxury items... For evidence that trade has been tremendously important for a long time, you need look no further than 1929 and the depression which spread through almost the entire world.
What has changed, is the greatly increased importance of multinational corporations.
Countries like Japan, Germany, Saudia Arabia and Taiwan have essentially no native army. The US protects those countries because they are allies. They are allies because the share US values. Even socialist-ic (not socialist!) countries like Sweden can share US values.
Pardon me for being blunt, but your first sentence here is terribly ignorant. World defense budgets(1997, in USD billions):
1. U.S. - 267.1
2. Russia - 71.0
3. France - 47.2
4. Japan - 44.5
5. Germany - 39.2
6. China - 38.0
7. United Kingdom - 33.5
8. Italy - 23.8
9. South Korea - 15.5
10. Taiwan - 13.6
13. Israel - 9.6
World active troop strengths (1997, thousands)
1. China - 2840
2. U.S. - 1448
3. Russia - 1240
4. India - 1145
16. France - 381
17. Taiwan - 376
18. Germany - 347
24. Japan - 236
26. United Kingdom - 214
29. Israel - 175
Source: World Almanac and Book of Facts 1999. These figures do not tell the whole story, but the overall picture is pretty clear. What would you say if I told you "Countries like the United Kingdom and Israel have essentially no native army."
The geopolitical relationship is typically more important than the fiscal one. Japan and Germany were not great trading partners when the US set up bases there. The US would kick the asses of anyone who invaded Finland -- not because of Nokia but because they have the same values as America.
All of these countries are also trading partners because the two tend to go hand in hand. And guess what: that's a good thing! People don't tend to go to war with their trading partners. Globalization prevents wars.
This is a common claim, but it demonstrably false. Large-scale international trade did not stop two world wars. In fact, one could argue that the second world war in the pacific was largely caused by trade relationships. It was after the U.S. (then the largest oil producer) cut off exports to Japan that the Japanese decided they needed to take the oil fields of Malaya and Indonesia and that conflict with the U.S. was inevitable.
Your argument reminds me of one from the New York Times Editorial writer Thomas Friedman--I think he called it the "Big Mac effect" or something. He pointed out that no two countries with McDonald's have ever gone to war. He then had to come up some way to explain away the McDonald's in Belgrade...
However, that does not mean that the black hole is incapable of "swallowing" the galaxy. The fact that the Milky Way is a spiral demonstrates that the orbit is degrading. As more objects are drawn in to the black hole, it can only serve to increase the size and mass and make an even more powerful gravity well.
Actually, it is impossible to for a black hole to ever swallow all of the matter orbiting it, unless some outside force (not gravity) starts literally pushing it in. This is a simple consequence of the conservation of energy.
For any object in a bound orbit in a gravitation field with a 1/r^2 force (true for a black hole except when you get extremely close), the average kinetic energy of the orbit <T> and the average potential energy <U> obey <U> = -2 <T>. This is due to the famous Virial Theorem. As a result, the average total energy is always negative and equal to half of the average potential energy.
Now, as the average radius of an orbit decreases, the potential energy will become more negative, and so will the total energy. If this were to happen to all of the matter orbiting the black hole, the total energy of the system would decrease--impossible!
What actually happens is that the particles in orbit constantly bounce off each other, some gaining energy and some losing. Those that lose enough, fall into the black hole. Those that gain enough, escape never to be seen again.
This is exactly what is observed to happen with the clouds of dust that collect to form stars. It all bounces around, and some of it ends up in the star while the rest of it flies off into the great beyond. Of course, some of the extra energy in the black hole case is lost from the X-rays originating from the extremely hot region just outside the horizon. That, however, can't explain how something the size of a galaxy could all end up that close to the horizon of the black hole to begin with. A very large fraction of the matter must escape long before then.
I assume that you are referring to Hawking radiation. This, if it exists, would cause the black hole to dissipate. However, its typical wavelength is of the order of the radius of the black hole. A one million solar mass black hole has a radius of around one light-year, so the radiation is of extremely long wavelength and thus low energy. It is definitely not gamma or X-ray radiation.
The famous X-ray radiation believed to come from black holes actually comes from material outside the black hole, as it reaches incredibly high temperatures just outside the horizon.
Incidentally, the life-time of a black hole losing mass to Hawking radiation goes as the mass of the black hole cubed. A one million solar mass black hole is extremely long lived. That said, they may actually live forever, since no one has ever observed Hawking radiation (how could one observe such low energy radiation?), and I tend to doubt it actually exists. The reasons have to do with arcane details of Hawking's "proof."
Regarding the link to www.superstringtheory.com, I would like to point out that the standard string theory models include gravity with exactly the same behavior as in general relativity. (at least until you go up to absurdly high energies) While you have many choices for the matter content of the theory and the nature of the gauge forces (like electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces), general relativity pops out whether you want it or not.
This property is generally seen as a desirable property of the theory. In fact the only really good argument in favor of string theory is that it is the only known quantum mechanical theory which produces the observed behavior of gravity and is not known to have internal inconsistencies.
Personally I will take big corporations over big government any day of the week.
Some of us would prefer the entity that we at least have some control over (through the ballot box) and that, at least theoretically, exists to ensure our freedoms and chance for prosperity, to the one whose sole legal reason for existence is to extract as much profit from us and people like us as possible. As a U.S. citizen, I suppose that holding this viewpoint pretty much puts me at the far extreme end of acceptable politics...
We all have to pay taxes. Imagine there's a fixed amount each year that the government requires to provide and maintain facilities, the more corporations pay the less individuals are required to pay.
I know that this is slightly off-topic here, but in our economic system, the amount of tax that taxpayers as a group must pay is only weakly connected to what is required "to provide and maintain facilities." What determines the level of "facilities" that the government can provide is not how much tax the government collects but rather how much in the way of goods and services people/corporations are willing to provide it (and those it provides payments to) in exchange for the money it puts into the economy.
Now why should people be willing to provide the government these services in exchange for the government's money? After all, in almost every country in the world, this money is "fiat money." It is not backed by anything of tangible value. There is no legal requirement to conduct business in the government's money. At least in the U.S., you and I can transact business using any medium of exchange we wish. There is also no legal requirement to conduct business with the government.
So we have this puzzle: people voluntarily use the government's money even though there seems to be no good reason for them to do so... Well, the thing is that most economic transactions, regardless of the medium of exchange, are taxed. Legally, the only way that these taxes can be paid is using the government's money. Thus, everyone needs the government money, and it becomes the universal medium of exchange.
Thus, you see, the only real reason that a nation with a sovereign fiat currency must tax is to create a demand for its money. Otherwise, it would be worthless, and the government could not buy anything with it! It is not always necessary to tax as much as it spends in order to maintain this demand. (The fact that the most successful economies in the world also have governments which are massively in debt seems to support this.) On the other hand, taxing more than it spends is, over the long run, disasterous--eventually there is not enough money present in the economy for everyone who owes taxes to pay them. Then what do you do?
With proper monetary policy and appropriate overall levels of government spending, long term deficits are perfectly sustainable. In certain circumstances they may well be desirable. Note that the level of debt is actually unrelated to interest rates. Short term interest rates and thus long term interest rates depend primarily on the supply of money. (how much money do banks have in their accounts at the Federal Reserve--this is all U.S.-specific, but other countries have similar systems) The Federal Reserve controls this at will through its "open market operations." When the Fed decides on a new short term interest rate today, short term interest rates in the U.S. immediately change. Why should that fact change anytime soon? (Here, Al Gore's claim that his conservative fiscal policy will lower interest rates is deeply fraudulent. I only hope that he knows that he's lying. I may well vote for him anyway...)
Anyway, this whole issue of how much the government taxes vs. how much it goes into debt is more or less orthogonal to the more important questions of how much the government spends and how the tax burden is distributed. This is all quite counterintuitive to those who assume (like many politicians claim to) that the federal budget is just like a household budget. Unlike a household or even a state government, the U.S. federal government creates its own currency! Furthermore, while a household buys all of its goods from outside the household, the U.S. Government buys almost everything from within the U.S. If I win the lottery and suddenly have 100 times as much money, I can buy 100 times as much. The same thing is simply not true of the U.S. Government.
Fiat money, as it exists in the U.S., is really quite an elegant system, once you realize what is really going on. In practice it works very well. The problem is that almost no one in American politics knows what is really going on. (or if they do, they don't bother to share their knowledge with the rest of us)
Well, I have really managed to go on... If you would like a far better explanation of all of this, try this paper.
If the system in Norway is even remotely like that in the U.S., U.K., France, etc., an indictment merely indicates that some minimum standard has been met regarding the likelihood that the accused is guilty. There will surely be a series of preliminary motions and hearings, and if the charges are not thrown out, a trial.
As far as lumping together economic and environmental crimes, it seems that what they both have in common is that they are non-violent crimes with a potentially wide-ranging impact. That's just a guess on my part. Why, in the U.S., are NASA and Veteran's Affairs funded by the same appropriations bill? Just an accident of history...
I'm aware of the continuous creep of copyright duration. To me, a century hardly seems "limited." Perhaps someday the Supreme Court could be convinced of the same...
Would the existence of a single work on DVD, protected by CSS, but not under copyright, render DeCSS legal? Surely something in the Public Domain must have ended-up on a CSS-protected DVD. If not, this could certainly be arranged!
It still seems to me that along with the very strong First Amendment arguments, that the argument that Congress has overstepped its Article 1 powers should be explored further. I have no idea how sympathetic the current Court would be, though.
It seems to me that the U.S. Constitution requires a broad reading of the exemptions in the DMCA.
Why?
If it was Congress's intent to ban software like the LiViD project, then they would be effectively granting the members of the DVD CCA a permanent copyright on the material on the DVD. That is, Congress would be making it permanently illegal to copy the contents of the DVD in any manner not approved by the DVD CCA, simply by virtue of the fact that technical means had been used in an attempt to prevent such copying.
Congress does not have the power to grant permanent copyright! Article I, section 7, grants it the power
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for
limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
(emphasis mine) Thus, if Congress had intended to make a program like the LiViD project illegal dispite its legitimate uses, the DMCA would be unconstitutional!
I'm sure that the requirement is that the end of the message be sent before the beginning could arrive traveling at the speed of light.
This is easy to achieve when communicating between planets, for example, but 100 Mps Ethernet between adjacent buildings would only manage messages a few bits long.
As posted in one of the other comments here, the bottom of the Red Hat e-mail states:
A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This communication shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the securities laws of such jurisdiction.
This seems to make it pretty clear that selling the shares before the registration becomes effective would be illegal. The reason these rules exist is to make sure that anyone buying shares has access to the information needed in order to determine its likely value.
Imagine what would happen if it were legal to buy and sell stock in companies before the information in SEC filings was widely available. People would be making purchases on the basis of wild speculation and prices would be insanely volatile. (as if things aren't bad enough the way things are) Even worse, the possibilities for fraud on the part of the owners of the company would be enormous. At least this way, people buying a stock have the right to know how much the company makes, etc.
Now, I suppose that it would be legal to sell the shares between the time that the registration became effective and the time it actually started trading on the exchange, but presumably this time would be very short. Once the stock is trading on the exchange, any transaction done at the IPO price would involve one party being very stupid.
The forces acting on diffrent parts of your body would be diffrent. this is why planets rotate (I think).
I'm afraid not. This fact does cause things like the Earth's ocean tides, but it does not account for planetary rotation. The forces from the sun, say, that would cause a perfectly rigid planet to rotate in one direction are exactly cancelled by the forces that would cause it to rotate in the other. Since no body is perfectly rigid, these tidal forces actually do slowly change to rate of rotation to bring it closer to once an orbit.
In fact though, most planets and moons rotate much faster than this, and the reason is that the dust and gas that they formed out of happened to have a non-zero angular momentum. Of course this angular momentum will also change over time as the result of collisions with other bodies.
Actually, a very small number of cosmic rays have been observed above 10^8 TeV (10^20 eV). A total of about 9 events have been observed, by several different experiments, with energies above the so-called GKZ cutoff of 2.5*10^7 TeV. This number of events corresponds to a few cosmic rays above that energy per square kilometer of the Earth's atmosphere per century, or roughly 10^16 of these events in the history of the Earth, if my math is correct.
The question of exactly where all of these insanely high energy particle come from is a deep mystery. Proposed answers include: Gamma Ray Bursts, Active Galactic Nuclei, interactions involving Magnetic Monopoles or Cosmic Strings, the decays of super-massive relics from the big bang, etc. For more info on these rare events, see the Pierre Auger Observatory website at www.auger.org.
Now 2.5*10^7 TeV sounds like an incredible ammount of energy compared to the.1 TeV/nucleon of RHIC, but since the cosmic rays are hitting essentially stationary nuclei in the Earth's atmosphere as opposed to the head-on collisions of RHIC, most of the energy just goes into the kinetic energy of the collision debris rather than into producing interesting physics. The relevant figure is the center of mass energy of the cosmic ray and target nucleus system. It turns out that this is equal to sqrt(2*m*E), where m is the mass of the target and E is the mass of the cosmic ray. Supposing that the target is a Nitrogen nucleus, we get sqrt(2*.014 TeV*2.5*10^7 TeV) or roughly 10^6 TeV. The corresponding figure for RHIC 2*(200 nucleons)*(100 GeV/nucleon)=4*10^4 TeV. The cosmic ray events win, but only by a bit more than an order of magnitude. (Note that this is all very much "back of the napkin" calculation, and may not be exactly right, but it's close.)
That was fun, but what does it all mean? Well, from the RHIC documentation, I figure that RHIC will have roughly 10^15 bunch crossings in each full year of collision running. Assuming that there is less than one collision per beam crossing (it makes it much easier to figure out what's going on in each collision), RHIC will produce an order of magnitude fewer collisions, with an order of magnitude lower energy density than these cosmic rays that bombard the Earth naturally. While a more careful analysis may change some of these numbers by a bit, it seems pretty unlikely that RHIC will destroy the Earth, when all of these cosmic ray collisions obviously haven't.
I didn't perform the moderation you mention, but I suspect that it was done because the poster had made the exact same post twice. (by accident, I'm sure) You can't get much more redundant than that! The other post was (as of the time I write this) moderated up to a score of 2. That looks like quite appropriate moderation to me.
Yeah, yeah, I know--that's the America Declaration-but it seemed appropriate.
Sorry to nitpick, Jeff (Hemos), but the words "We the People" appear in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, not the Declaration of Independence. Of course the Constitution is the right document to cite, because it is its amendments which did the most to establish the rights of Americans.
I thought the article was about Oz the tv show on HBO. heh. is it generally known that "Oz" means australia? anyway...
Well, I'm an American studying in England, and I know a lot of Australians here. In my experience, the Australians are the only ones who call the place Oz.
If you want to see where it comes from, try saying "Aus" and "Oz" or "Aussies" and "Ozzies" and I think it will be pretty clear.
Anti-trust laws aim to help competition on the theory that this will help the consumer. As I understand history, the sole reason these laws were created was to help the would be monopolist's customers.
For what it's worth, I believe that Fermilab (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is the full name) was renamed that shortly after Fermi's death. Its original name was simply the National Accelerator Laboratory.
Incidentally, it is very much open to the public with a nice vistor's center. It's worth a trip if you happen to find yourself in the western suburbs of Chicago.
Well, if a functional patch exists, then ISDN users or their distribution maintainers can apply it themselves. If no functional patch exists, even now, then it probably isn't worth holding up the release of 2.2.0 for it. Annoying, but...
In either case, it is on Alan Cox's todo list, and I'm sure that it will be fixed early in the 2.2.x series.
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Increased trade, travel, cultural contacts, and working together to solve common problems seem like wonderful things to me. Something like the Internet offers many opportunities to improve the lot of humanity. I think, however, that communities should be able to choose to opt out of some or all of these changes. It's a simple matter of the right to self-determination and the right of people to exercise control over their own destinies.
What specifically bothers me? The structure of international institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, WTO, etc., is a big thing. The people who created our (the U.S.) democratic system thought that government should be open and transparent to the governed. They chose to have most of the important offices in government chosen by direct election. They chose to make meetings and actions of the congress and executive agencies available for all to see. Change the channel to C-SPAN or browse the Congressional Record at your local library for an example.
I think that they designed our system this way for very good reasons. Why are the institutions described above structured so differently, so opaquely? Why are the treaties that create these institutions kept from the public until just before they are agreed to? This isn't even how most international meetings work. Witness the huge debate over the text of the U.N. racism conference declaration long before the conference even began. Why wasn't there vigorous debate over something as major as NAFTA? All we got was this farce between Gore and Perot on Larry King.
As to my definition of "globalization," my main point is that I think it is a confusing term and not very useful in the debate. As commonly used, I can't say whether I'm for it or against it. I could propose alternative terms, but it's not likely that people would start using them anyway. Just be aware that it is a term which doesn't always mean the same thing.
You're right. The essential links are democracy and capitalism. What two democratic, capitalist countries have fought a major war against each other?
O.K. The closest I can think of is the U.S. versus Serbia. By the standards of Europe, the Serbia of 1999 seemed to be pretty capitalist to me. Milosevic was also democratically elected, enjoyed a great deal of popular support, and was removed by an election. Granted, he tried to fudge the election, but then the Nixon administration discussed using the military to resist impeachment. Does the fact that Milosevic tried to tamper with an election after the war make Serbia before the war less of a democracy? Probably... One of the wars between India and Pakistan may qualify, but it probably depends on your definitions. Heck, Britain was certainly capitalist in 1812. Was it a democracy? In important ways it certainly was. The U.S. and Britain fought a war 1812-1814. Were the United States of America and the Confederate States of America two seperate countries 1861-1865? In most important ways they were. They were both capitalist democracies, and their war was "major" by any standard.
Anyway, I would offer a counter challenge: What two fascist countries have fought any war against each other?
Look, the argument that democratic, capitalist countries won't fight wars against each other usually goes something like: democracies never attack first since people don't like wars, and they control the government. War is bad for trade, and thus business, so capitalist countries have even less reason to go to war. Basically, the argument is that these countries don't start wars. (Perhaps this is a strawman. Is there a better argument?) The problem with this argument is that such countries routinely attack other countries which have not attacked them first. That is precisely how wars start.
Perhaps the argument is that such countries have such similar beliefs and values that they will not have major disagreements which would lead to war. If common beliefs and values were enough, why are there so many civil wars?
Anyhow, it is very easy to swing sticks at strawmen. Globalization is an especially easy one because the "bad guys" are corporations. What are you proposing as an alternative? Cessation of trade? Outlawing of multinationals? Tobin tax?
Outlawing of multinationals or any such quick-fix would be incredibly counter-productive. The answer is to try to control the worst effects of the current system while trying to preserve what is useful about it. As I understand the Tobin tax, it sounds like a good idea. Any market, such as the current international currency market, where speculative trading vastly exceeds productive trading is dangerous. The speculators cause massive swings in prices, greatly increasing the risk for those who are trading because they actually need more or less of the underling commodity. Just ask the Bank of England about that one. (George Soros made a lot of money at the expense of British taxpayers through a currency trading scheme in the early 1990's.)
Democratic capitalism has solved more problems than it has caused and that is much more than can be said for competing systems. If you want to tweak the system, by all means, let's do so. But if you're going to argue against the whole thing you'll have to demonstrate that there is a deep problem and present an alternative that solves it.
I largely agree with you. I wouldn't presume to throw everything out and start fresh. We don't understand the way societies work well enough to design a better one without a great deal of experimentation. Incremental changes seem like the way to go. As to whether there is a deep problem, I see unnecessary human suffering all around me. I think that our economic system has a great deal to do with that. To present a detailed alternative in this forum would be a waste of time. True democracy and openness in the new international institutions would be a good start.
This is an important point. Globalization is certainly not new. The amount of trade in material goods has not changed very significantly in the last century. It went down a lot during the wars, but otherwise has not changed that much. You doubt me? The effects of trade have been tremendous for centuries--slaves, weapons, gold, luxury items... For evidence that trade has been tremendously important for a long time, you need look no further than 1929 and the depression which spread through almost the entire world.
What has changed, is the greatly increased importance of multinational corporations.
Countries like Japan, Germany, Saudia Arabia and Taiwan have essentially no native army. The US protects those countries because they are allies. They are allies because the share US values. Even socialist-ic (not socialist!) countries like Sweden can share US values.
Pardon me for being blunt, but your first sentence here is terribly ignorant. World defense budgets(1997, in USD billions):
- 1. U.S. - 267.1
- 2. Russia - 71.0
- 3. France - 47.2
- 4. Japan - 44.5
- 5. Germany - 39.2
- 6. China - 38.0
- 7. United Kingdom - 33.5
- 8. Italy - 23.8
- 9. South Korea - 15.5
- 10. Taiwan - 13.6
- 13. Israel - 9.6
World active troop strengths (1997, thousands)Source: World Almanac and Book of Facts 1999. These figures do not tell the whole story, but the overall picture is pretty clear. What would you say if I told you "Countries like the United Kingdom and Israel have essentially no native army."
The geopolitical relationship is typically more important than the fiscal one. Japan and Germany were not great trading partners when the US set up bases there. The US would kick the asses of anyone who invaded Finland -- not because of Nokia but because they have the same values as America.
All of these countries are also trading partners because the two tend to go hand in hand. And guess what: that's a good thing! People don't tend to go to war with their trading partners. Globalization prevents wars.
This is a common claim, but it demonstrably false. Large-scale international trade did not stop two world wars. In fact, one could argue that the second world war in the pacific was largely caused by trade relationships. It was after the U.S. (then the largest oil producer) cut off exports to Japan that the Japanese decided they needed to take the oil fields of Malaya and Indonesia and that conflict with the U.S. was inevitable.
Your argument reminds me of one from the New York Times Editorial writer Thomas Friedman--I think he called it the "Big Mac effect" or something. He pointed out that no two countries with McDonald's have ever gone to war. He then had to come up some way to explain away the McDonald's in Belgrade...
Actually, it is impossible to for a black hole to ever swallow all of the matter orbiting it, unless some outside force (not gravity) starts literally pushing it in. This is a simple consequence of the conservation of energy.
For any object in a bound orbit in a gravitation field with a 1/r^2 force (true for a black hole except when you get extremely close), the average kinetic energy of the orbit <T> and the average potential energy <U> obey <U> = -2 <T>. This is due to the famous Virial Theorem. As a result, the average total energy is always negative and equal to half of the average potential energy.
Now, as the average radius of an orbit decreases, the potential energy will become more negative, and so will the total energy. If this were to happen to all of the matter orbiting the black hole, the total energy of the system would decrease--impossible!
What actually happens is that the particles in orbit constantly bounce off each other, some gaining energy and some losing. Those that lose enough, fall into the black hole. Those that gain enough, escape never to be seen again.
This is exactly what is observed to happen with the clouds of dust that collect to form stars. It all bounces around, and some of it ends up in the star while the rest of it flies off into the great beyond. Of course, some of the extra energy in the black hole case is lost from the X-rays originating from the extremely hot region just outside the horizon. That, however, can't explain how something the size of a galaxy could all end up that close to the horizon of the black hole to begin with. A very large fraction of the matter must escape long before then.
The famous X-ray radiation believed to come from black holes actually comes from material outside the black hole, as it reaches incredibly high temperatures just outside the horizon.
Incidentally, the life-time of a black hole losing mass to Hawking radiation goes as the mass of the black hole cubed. A one million solar mass black hole is extremely long lived. That said, they may actually live forever, since no one has ever observed Hawking radiation (how could one observe such low energy radiation?), and I tend to doubt it actually exists. The reasons have to do with arcane details of Hawking's "proof."
This property is generally seen as a desirable property of the theory. In fact the only really good argument in favor of string theory is that it is the only known quantum mechanical theory which produces the observed behavior of gravity and is not known to have internal inconsistencies.
Some of us would prefer the entity that we at least have some control over (through the ballot box) and that, at least theoretically, exists to ensure our freedoms and chance for prosperity, to the one whose sole legal reason for existence is to extract as much profit from us and people like us as possible. As a U.S. citizen, I suppose that holding this viewpoint pretty much puts me at the far extreme end of acceptable politics...
I know that this is slightly off-topic here, but in our economic system, the amount of tax that taxpayers as a group must pay is only weakly connected to what is required "to provide and maintain facilities." What determines the level of "facilities" that the government can provide is not how much tax the government collects but rather how much in the way of goods and services people/corporations are willing to provide it (and those it provides payments to) in exchange for the money it puts into the economy.
Now why should people be willing to provide the government these services in exchange for the government's money? After all, in almost every country in the world, this money is "fiat money." It is not backed by anything of tangible value. There is no legal requirement to conduct business in the government's money. At least in the U.S., you and I can transact business using any medium of exchange we wish. There is also no legal requirement to conduct business with the government.
So we have this puzzle: people voluntarily use the government's money even though there seems to be no good reason for them to do so... Well, the thing is that most economic transactions, regardless of the medium of exchange, are taxed. Legally, the only way that these taxes can be paid is using the government's money. Thus, everyone needs the government money, and it becomes the universal medium of exchange.
Thus, you see, the only real reason that a nation with a sovereign fiat currency must tax is to create a demand for its money. Otherwise, it would be worthless, and the government could not buy anything with it! It is not always necessary to tax as much as it spends in order to maintain this demand. (The fact that the most successful economies in the world also have governments which are massively in debt seems to support this.) On the other hand, taxing more than it spends is, over the long run, disasterous--eventually there is not enough money present in the economy for everyone who owes taxes to pay them. Then what do you do?
With proper monetary policy and appropriate overall levels of government spending, long term deficits are perfectly sustainable. In certain circumstances they may well be desirable. Note that the level of debt is actually unrelated to interest rates. Short term interest rates and thus long term interest rates depend primarily on the supply of money. (how much money do banks have in their accounts at the Federal Reserve--this is all U.S.-specific, but other countries have similar systems) The Federal Reserve controls this at will through its "open market operations." When the Fed decides on a new short term interest rate today, short term interest rates in the U.S. immediately change. Why should that fact change anytime soon? (Here, Al Gore's claim that his conservative fiscal policy will lower interest rates is deeply fraudulent. I only hope that he knows that he's lying. I may well vote for him anyway...)
Anyway, this whole issue of how much the government taxes vs. how much it goes into debt is more or less orthogonal to the more important questions of how much the government spends and how the tax burden is distributed. This is all quite counterintuitive to those who assume (like many politicians claim to) that the federal budget is just like a household budget. Unlike a household or even a state government, the U.S. federal government creates its own currency! Furthermore, while a household buys all of its goods from outside the household, the U.S. Government buys almost everything from within the U.S. If I win the lottery and suddenly have 100 times as much money, I can buy 100 times as much. The same thing is simply not true of the U.S. Government.
Fiat money, as it exists in the U.S., is really quite an elegant system, once you realize what is really going on. In practice it works very well. The problem is that almost no one in American politics knows what is really going on. (or if they do, they don't bother to share their knowledge with the rest of us)
Well, I have really managed to go on... If you would like a far better explanation of all of this, try this paper.
As far as lumping together economic and environmental crimes, it seems that what they both have in common is that they are non-violent crimes with a potentially wide-ranging impact. That's just a guess on my part. Why, in the U.S., are NASA and Veteran's Affairs funded by the same appropriations bill? Just an accident of history...
Would the existence of a single work on DVD, protected by CSS, but not under copyright, render DeCSS legal? Surely something in the Public Domain must have ended-up on a CSS-protected DVD. If not, this could certainly be arranged!
It still seems to me that along with the very strong First Amendment arguments, that the argument that Congress has overstepped its Article 1 powers should be explored further. I have no idea how sympathetic the current Court would be, though.
Why?
If it was Congress's intent to ban software like the LiViD project, then they would be effectively granting the members of the DVD CCA a permanent copyright on the material on the DVD. That is, Congress would be making it permanently illegal to copy the contents of the DVD in any manner not approved by the DVD CCA, simply by virtue of the fact that technical means had been used in an attempt to prevent such copying.
Congress does not have the power to grant permanent copyright! Article I, section 7, grants it the power
(emphasis mine) Thus, if Congress had intended to make a program like the LiViD project illegal dispite its legitimate uses, the DMCA would be unconstitutional!What do you all think of this argument?
This is easy to achieve when communicating between planets, for example, but 100 Mps Ethernet between adjacent buildings would only manage messages a few bits long.
A registration statement relating to these securities has been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission but has not yet become effective. These securities may not be sold nor may offers to buy be accepted prior to the time the registration statement becomes effective. This communication shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the securities laws of such jurisdiction.
This seems to make it pretty clear that selling the shares before the registration becomes effective would be illegal. The reason these rules exist is to make sure that anyone buying shares has access to the information needed in order to determine its likely value.
Imagine what would happen if it were legal to buy and sell stock in companies before the information in SEC filings was widely available. People would be making purchases on the basis of wild speculation and prices would be insanely volatile. (as if things aren't bad enough the way things are) Even worse, the possibilities for fraud on the part of the owners of the company would be enormous. At least this way, people buying a stock have the right to know how much the company makes, etc.
Now, I suppose that it would be legal to sell the shares between the time that the registration became effective and the time it actually started trading on the exchange, but presumably this time would be very short. Once the stock is trading on the exchange, any transaction done at the IPO price would involve one party being very stupid.
I'm afraid not. This fact does cause things like the Earth's ocean tides, but it does not account for planetary rotation. The forces from the sun, say, that would cause a perfectly rigid planet to rotate in one direction are exactly cancelled by the forces that would cause it to rotate in the other. Since no body is perfectly rigid, these tidal forces actually do slowly change to rate of rotation to bring it closer to once an orbit.
In fact though, most planets and moons rotate much faster than this, and the reason is that the dust and gas that they formed out of happened to have a non-zero angular momentum. Of course this angular momentum will also change over time as the result of collisions with other bodies.
The question of exactly where all of these insanely high energy particle come from is a deep mystery. Proposed answers include: Gamma Ray Bursts, Active Galactic Nuclei, interactions involving Magnetic Monopoles or Cosmic Strings, the decays of super-massive relics from the big bang, etc. For more info on these rare events, see the Pierre Auger Observatory website at www.auger.org.
Now 2.5*10^7 TeV sounds like an incredible ammount of energy compared to the .1 TeV/nucleon of RHIC, but since the cosmic rays are hitting essentially stationary nuclei in the Earth's atmosphere as opposed to the head-on collisions of RHIC, most of the energy just goes into the kinetic energy of the collision debris rather than into producing interesting physics. The relevant figure is the center of mass energy of the cosmic ray and target nucleus system. It turns out that this is equal to sqrt(2*m*E), where m is the mass of the target and E is the mass of the cosmic ray. Supposing that the target is a Nitrogen nucleus, we get sqrt(2*.014 TeV*2.5*10^7 TeV) or roughly 10^6 TeV. The corresponding figure for RHIC 2*(200 nucleons)*(100 GeV/nucleon)=4*10^4 TeV. The cosmic ray events win, but only by a bit more than an order of magnitude. (Note that this is all very much "back of the napkin" calculation, and may not be exactly right, but it's close.)
That was fun, but what does it all mean? Well, from the RHIC documentation, I figure that RHIC will have roughly 10^15 bunch crossings in each full year of collision running. Assuming that there is less than one collision per beam crossing (it makes it much easier to figure out what's going on in each collision), RHIC will produce an order of magnitude fewer collisions, with an order of magnitude lower energy density than these cosmic rays that bombard the Earth naturally. While a more careful analysis may change some of these numbers by a bit, it seems pretty unlikely that RHIC will destroy the Earth, when all of these cosmic ray collisions obviously haven't.
I didn't perform the moderation you mention, but I suspect that it was done because the poster had made the exact same post twice. (by accident, I'm sure) You can't get much more redundant than that! The other post was (as of the time I write this) moderated up to a score of 2. That looks like quite appropriate moderation to me.
Sorry to nitpick, Jeff (Hemos), but the words "We the People" appear in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, not the Declaration of Independence. Of course the Constitution is the right document to cite, because it is its amendments which did the most to establish the rights of Americans.
Well, I'm an American studying in England, and I know a lot of Australians here. In my experience, the Australians are the only ones who call the place Oz.
If you want to see where it comes from, try saying "Aus" and "Oz" or "Aussies" and "Ozzies" and I think it will be pretty clear.
Anti-trust laws aim to help competition on the theory that this will help the consumer. As I understand history, the sole reason these laws were created was to help the would be monopolist's customers.
Incidentally, it is very much open to the public with a nice vistor's center. It's worth a trip if you happen to find yourself in the western suburbs of Chicago.
In either case, it is on Alan Cox's todo list, and I'm sure that it will be fixed early in the 2.2.x series.