And I'm anti-Obama, anti-Bush, and anti-Ron Paul. They are an RIAA shill, a military contractor shill, and a general-purpose corporate shill, respectively.
I won't be truly "pro" anyone until we get someone in office who isn't just a shill for big business.
You're assuming that the butterfly's wings do not create a ripple through time. All that entropy has to come from somewhere. It might as well be a butterfly.
I could tell you a tale of multiple very unlikely coincidences predicted weeks in advance, some of which involved a city I had never been to, all in the same dream, all of which proved true or very nearly true, accurate down to the day, the bomb threat while we were there (though the dream predicted an actual bomb), the general architecture of the hotel, and the precise number of days after the dream before the events of the preceding day would be undone through no action of my own, and even an omen (that I initially missed) about how things would end months later. You, of course, would not believe me even if I told you. That doesn't mean it didn't happen, and I have friends who probably still remember it. It was downright creepy how eerily accurate it was..
The problem is that the rules for the prize are constructed specifically to guarantee that no one will win it even if a sizable percentage of people regularly have premonitions of the future. And that's why you can't get rich that way. Here's why:
After the fact, there's no way to prove that a prediction happened unless you write to this person. Most people have never heard of this person, and thus won't do that. Most others won't bother to waste the stamp.
At least some percentage of predictions will be wrong simply because we don't live in a completely predictable Newtonian universe.
Getting a prediction right "more than random chance" is what I like to call "weasel words". Getting even one prediction right that predicts when an event will occur a week in advance that you could not possibly have known about and does not occur with regularity is likely better than random chance even if you made a bad prediction every second for your entire life and got only one right. I can pretty much guarantee they won't see it that way, though. They'll dismiss it as a lucky guess.
Most reports of premonitions involve the person having the premonition or someone close to that person, it's impossible to prove that the occurrence was not staged to win the prize. Therefore, essentially all reports of premonitions are basically disqualified from the start.
But just for grins, here's a prediction. Either California or Mexico will see a sizable (>6.0) earthquake within the next 6 months. Okay, that's mainly me looking at the tectonic plate maps and guessing where there will be stress, but what the heck. If any of you decide to mail it in, just send me a check for half.:-D
You're assuming that people to whom this occurs have control over what they see and when. This is generally not the case in any reports of this sort. It's generally a very specific vision of a very specific event, usually an event associated with a major change in that person's personal life or a trauma (or death or...). My current theory is that certain traumatic events propagate in a ripple through time, and that some people have the ability to sense ripples that personally affect their own futures or the futures of people close to them. That's just a hypothesis based on limited evidence, of course.
I, too, have experienced highly accurate dreams about future events that I could not possibly have known about (much less predicted down to the day weeks in advance). Time is definitely *not* linear. Anyone who says otherwise is either narrow-minded or hasn't ventured out very far into the real world. Or maybe most people don't experience these things and we're just weird. Hard to say.
No, that's not what's wrong. What's wrong is that laws that create new programs/spending are not automatically contingent upon passage of a bill to pay for them.... Having such a requirement would completely negate the problem caused by the inversion you're pointing out. Indeed, it would be a lot better than fixing the inversion itself, as it would mean that a smaller percentage of the government could come up with ideas and get them passed into "pending law" telling the way that things should be under ideal circumstances, so that as money becomes available, spending bills can allocate funding for pending programs with a clear view of all of those needs, thus making it easier to prioritize new spending. (Hey, why are you writing a spending bill for this pork barrel project when there are eighty things we already approved that are more important and have no funding yet?)
Also, we need a law that says that if revenue increases by more than... say 3% year-over-year, the entire remainder must be squirreled away for use during periods of budget shortfall and may not be borrowed against. This would, in effect, cap government growth at 3% per year, thus *forcing* prioritization instead of willy-nilly spending.
Good to see that with schools going down the toilet, a budget spirally out of control and more and more companies moving out of the area...the legislature is hard at work.
No, you're thinking too narrowly again. The "swear jar" in the state house is actually their solution to the school funding problems. Estimates are that it will bring in upwards of $2 million per day in added revenue.
No, but when they make the announcement that they are laying of people because of [X bill] being passed, the unions typically take the ball from there and draw up lists of representatives who voted for the bill. It's amazing how easy it is for corporations to manipulate the unions, who then direct a large voting block, all without anything that would fall under the legal definition of advertising....
-Spending 98% engineers and resources on making weapons instead of cars/washing machines.
Actually, I mentioned that. That was the core of my argument.
And say what you want about copying and not innovating, but that's true of any nascent economy. China is the same way right now to a large degree. Just a few decades back, Japan was that way. That doesn't mean the economy is going to fail. That means the economy is still in its infancy.
As for worker abuse, that's not a property of socialism. That's a property of a totalitarian regime. One can exist without the other, and it is likely that the U.S.S.R. would have moved away from that even without the "fall" of communism. I'm not saying that the U.S.S.R. would have remained completely closed to capitalism, nor that the totalitarian aspects of the regime would not have changed. I'm just saying that the state would likely still exist. Neither pure capitalism nor pure socialism is really all that palatable. Any successful society is inherently a blend of the two. The trick is finding a balance you can live with.
The reason for telecom (not talking about satcom, just wires and cellular type stuff) is that the infrastructure costs exceed the expected payout in many areas, so if you want anywhere near universal availability (at any price for the customer), the government is the only one that can feasibly provide it.
I like to use the words "basic needs" to cover these things. Without telephones or even the Internet, we as a country would be pretty screwed. Over time, the Internet is becoming more important to even such basics as education, much less being able to get and keep a job that doesn't involve asking whether the customer would like fries with that. At some point, it becomes just as basic a need as water or power. It's tricky determining when something crosses this line, mind you, but I think that for cellular phones and Internet service, it happened a while back. Even a lot of the homeless here in CA have PAYG cell phones.... I'd say that makes it a basic need.
Actually, deregulation ALONG WITH removal of all protectionism, bailouts, juicy government contracts, favorable (targeted) legislation, etc. would go a long way toward evening the scales between small companies and large companies.
Keep telling yourself that. There's no way a town of 8,000 people can support two cable companies that both have to pay for the wire infrastructure. The incumbent will always kill the newcomer because the cost of buildout is more than you can hope to get back in years of operation even if you steal more than half of the households from the incumbent.
In many industries, it is simply not possible to "even the scales" because the industry is basically unprofitable unless it limits who it serves. That's why we have cellular infrastructure that only covers a small percentage of the country versus the government-built wire infrastructure that covers the entire country. Granted, the wireless industry isn't completely deregulated, but in practice, limited spectrum means that deregulating the availability of frequencies would result in companies stomping all over each other, producing an unusable experience for everyone.
And spectrum availability doesn't explain why only one company provides service in many areas; in most of those areas, it simply would not be profitable for a second company to enter the market. Even in areas where it would cost almost nothing to buy or lease a plot of land for a tower, there are often simply not enough customers for it to ever pay for itself.
Say $150k to build the tower. If there are only 100 potential customers in the served area, even if you stole every one of them and made 100% profit (no power costs, no cost of routing the calls, etc.), it would take 50 months (over 4 years) to turn a profit. When you figure that only 40 of those people have a cell phone, only 20 will defect, and only a 60% profit margin (guessing here), you're making a profit after 35 years. There are simply areas that will never be served with these services unless they are government-provided (which you'd probably call socialism).
Thus making the position even more attractive to parasites.
Thus making the position more attractive to people who aren't wealthy---people who can't afford to go looking for a job every two years. As it stands now, the House of Representatives is perfectly designed to ensure that only people who can afford to be jobless can ever take the job.
So there's even less incentive to avoid doing evil, since it can't affect your chances of re-election.
There's also less ability to be pressured by corporate interests because they can't hold reelection over your head. Most sane people don't need an incentive to avoid doing evil. Most people are fundamentally good until the allure of power corrupts their thinking.
So the less wealthy are hampered even more by the need to hire a lawyer to ensure they're following these rules.
Nah. You just make the spending limit simple. Each campaign can spend no more than $X on advertising, $Y on travel, and a handful of other simple, easy-to-understand categories, period. Cut and dry, no lawyer needed. The only reason lawyers might be needed is that lawyers are likely to write the law to make it so....
So they'll hammer party loyalty home even harder.
Yes, but remember that in the U.S., all you have to do to run as a Democrat is to say that you're a Democrat. With these changes, more people will be able to run, so the parties won't be nearly as homogeneous as they are now. And with a reasonable fixed spending limit, the parties won't have nearly the advantage they have now over independents.
I mostly agree about the campaign funds for advertising except that I think the government should provide a fixed amount of funds for each campaign to use to buy advertising in the venue of its choice. Likewise, the government should pay a fixed budget for travel, etc. to any candidate who can get a certain number of signatures. If you don't have such a system, then only the independently wealthy can afford to run. The goal should be to eliminate the bias, not make it worse.
With regards to voting out the incumbents periodically rather than automatically voting in a replacement, that's an interesting idea. The problem is that it assumes the people are paying enough attention to their elected officials to vote out the duds. I'm not convinced that this is the case. Power attracts the corrupt and the corruptible, so after a few years, you're pretty much guaranteed that every legislator is in somebody's pocket.
It's not just about contributions and bribery. It's also about extortion. A big company will go to a Congress critter and say things like, "If this bill doesn't go my way, we'll be forced to pull X number of jobs from your district and you'll be blamed and recalled." Maybe this level of coercion takes time to build up to, but I'd think that a new person who has no chance of being reelected or recalled would still be in a better position to resist that sort of coercion. And you can survive pretty much anyone in an aggregated position like Congress for a few years.
I was under the impression that WinCE forked an old version of NT, but maybe not. Okay, then s/Mobile/XP Embedded/g. Or better yet, iPhone OS:Mac OS X::Android:Ubuntu.:-) Happier?
No, they are both OS X. They both use all the same frameworks all the way up to, but stopping at Cocoa.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. They don't always use the same frameworks. For example, both iPhone OS and Mac OS X have an AddressBnook framework, but they are completely different frameworks. And the audio frameworks are substantially different, too, IIRC. Both of those are well below what most people would consider the Cocoa level. The system calls are a subset of those available in Mac OS X, too (e.g. fork() is not allowed). There are also at least a couple of top-level frameworks in iPhone OS that are subframeworks in Mac OS X. And there are many, many frameworks that are only on Mac OS X, but not iPhone OS. There are 92 frameworks in Mac OS X. Assuming the list on developer.apple.com is complete, there are 24 frameworks in iPhone OS. So it has barely a fourth the frameworks of Mac OS X.
iPhone OS is OS X in much the same way that Windows Mobile is Windows. They have a lot of the same core bits, but one is a massively scaled down subset of the other.
That's because their primary job is not to make the country better. Their primary job is to get reelected. This is why we need A. slightly longer terms (say eight years), B. term limits (one term, period), C. campaign spending limits, and D. a total ban on third-party campaign ads that mention candidates by name. That's the only way we'll ever fix this problem.
The only reason the U.S.S.R. collapsed is that the U.S. had enough of an advantage in terms of their economic output and ability to incur debt to spend them under the table. The "Cold War" bankrupted the U.S.S.R., not socialism. Were it not for the isolation and the need to spend insane amounts of money on military spending due to fear that the U.S. would rule the world, they would still be around today, and they would probably be doing at least as well as China is.
Also, libertarians are *not* always socially liberal and fiscally conservative. They claim to be, but they almost universally favor corporate deregulation. That's anything but fiscally conservative; in many industries, every attempt at deregulation has consistently resulted in monopolies and higher costs in the long run. There are many industries where the most fiscally conservative position is actually socialism.... Health care, power production, telecommunications, and most other essential services fall squarely into that category.
What we need most are not people with ideologies like "socialism" or "libertarianism" or "liberal" or "conservative". What we need most are people who have brains and can think for themselves---people who look at each problem with fresh eyes, analyze the problem, analyze the possible solutions, and try to figure out the option that provides the best balance between improving the situation, causing the least overall harm, and causing the least discriminatory harm to any single group. Unfortunately, those people are too busy fixing what the politicians wreck to actually run for office.
So we put in Libertarians and they deregulate businesses massively. Now those same big businesses can abuse their monopoly powers to ensure small businesses have even less of a prayer than they do under the D&Rs. Hardly an improvement, IMHO. Even the third-parties like the Libertarians are very much pro-big-business. There are basically no political parties that aren't, with the possible exception of the Green party (and it's possible that I simply don't know enough about their platform to see the giant flaws in it, too).
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And I'm anti-Obama, anti-Bush, and anti-Ron Paul. They are an RIAA shill, a military contractor shill, and a general-purpose corporate shill, respectively.
I won't be truly "pro" anyone until we get someone in office who isn't just a shill for big business.
There haven't been 100 million Bu-Ray players sold yet because they aren't a few dollars more than DVD players.
You're assuming that the butterfly's wings do not create a ripple through time. All that entropy has to come from somewhere. It might as well be a butterfly.
I could tell you a tale of multiple very unlikely coincidences predicted weeks in advance, some of which involved a city I had never been to, all in the same dream, all of which proved true or very nearly true, accurate down to the day, the bomb threat while we were there (though the dream predicted an actual bomb), the general architecture of the hotel, and the precise number of days after the dream before the events of the preceding day would be undone through no action of my own, and even an omen (that I initially missed) about how things would end months later. You, of course, would not believe me even if I told you. That doesn't mean it didn't happen, and I have friends who probably still remember it. It was downright creepy how eerily accurate it was..
The problem is that the rules for the prize are constructed specifically to guarantee that no one will win it even if a sizable percentage of people regularly have premonitions of the future. And that's why you can't get rich that way. Here's why:
But just for grins, here's a prediction. Either California or Mexico will see a sizable (>6.0) earthquake within the next 6 months. Okay, that's mainly me looking at the tectonic plate maps and guessing where there will be stress, but what the heck. If any of you decide to mail it in, just send me a check for half. :-D
So does the iPhone if you have a .Mac account.
Eggsactly.
You're assuming that people to whom this occurs have control over what they see and when. This is generally not the case in any reports of this sort. It's generally a very specific vision of a very specific event, usually an event associated with a major change in that person's personal life or a trauma (or death or...). My current theory is that certain traumatic events propagate in a ripple through time, and that some people have the ability to sense ripples that personally affect their own futures or the futures of people close to them. That's just a hypothesis based on limited evidence, of course.
I, too, have experienced highly accurate dreams about future events that I could not possibly have known about (much less predicted down to the day weeks in advance). Time is definitely *not* linear. Anyone who says otherwise is either narrow-minded or hasn't ventured out very far into the real world. Or maybe most people don't experience these things and we're just weird. Hard to say.
No, that's not what's wrong. What's wrong is that laws that create new programs/spending are not automatically contingent upon passage of a bill to pay for them.... Having such a requirement would completely negate the problem caused by the inversion you're pointing out. Indeed, it would be a lot better than fixing the inversion itself, as it would mean that a smaller percentage of the government could come up with ideas and get them passed into "pending law" telling the way that things should be under ideal circumstances, so that as money becomes available, spending bills can allocate funding for pending programs with a clear view of all of those needs, thus making it easier to prioritize new spending. (Hey, why are you writing a spending bill for this pork barrel project when there are eighty things we already approved that are more important and have no funding yet?)
Also, we need a law that says that if revenue increases by more than... say 3% year-over-year, the entire remainder must be squirreled away for use during periods of budget shortfall and may not be borrowed against. This would, in effect, cap government growth at 3% per year, thus *forcing* prioritization instead of willy-nilly spending.
No, you're thinking too narrowly again. The "swear jar" in the state house is actually their solution to the school funding problems. Estimates are that it will bring in upwards of $2 million per day in added revenue.
No, but when they make the announcement that they are laying of people because of [X bill] being passed, the unions typically take the ball from there and draw up lists of representatives who voted for the bill. It's amazing how easy it is for corporations to manipulate the unions, who then direct a large voting block, all without anything that would fall under the legal definition of advertising....
I can't believe the first post didn't say, "This thread is useless without pics."
(It would have been equally funny if that had been the first reply to the actual first post, though far more disturbing.)
Election, erection... close enough for government work.
Actually, I mentioned that. That was the core of my argument.
And say what you want about copying and not innovating, but that's true of any nascent economy. China is the same way right now to a large degree. Just a few decades back, Japan was that way. That doesn't mean the economy is going to fail. That means the economy is still in its infancy.
As for worker abuse, that's not a property of socialism. That's a property of a totalitarian regime. One can exist without the other, and it is likely that the U.S.S.R. would have moved away from that even without the "fall" of communism. I'm not saying that the U.S.S.R. would have remained completely closed to capitalism, nor that the totalitarian aspects of the regime would not have changed. I'm just saying that the state would likely still exist. Neither pure capitalism nor pure socialism is really all that palatable. Any successful society is inherently a blend of the two. The trick is finding a balance you can live with.
The reason for telecom (not talking about satcom, just wires and cellular type stuff) is that the infrastructure costs exceed the expected payout in many areas, so if you want anywhere near universal availability (at any price for the customer), the government is the only one that can feasibly provide it.
I like to use the words "basic needs" to cover these things. Without telephones or even the Internet, we as a country would be pretty screwed. Over time, the Internet is becoming more important to even such basics as education, much less being able to get and keep a job that doesn't involve asking whether the customer would like fries with that. At some point, it becomes just as basic a need as water or power. It's tricky determining when something crosses this line, mind you, but I think that for cellular phones and Internet service, it happened a while back. Even a lot of the homeless here in CA have PAYG cell phones.... I'd say that makes it a basic need.
Keep telling yourself that. There's no way a town of 8,000 people can support two cable companies that both have to pay for the wire infrastructure. The incumbent will always kill the newcomer because the cost of buildout is more than you can hope to get back in years of operation even if you steal more than half of the households from the incumbent.
In many industries, it is simply not possible to "even the scales" because the industry is basically unprofitable unless it limits who it serves. That's why we have cellular infrastructure that only covers a small percentage of the country versus the government-built wire infrastructure that covers the entire country. Granted, the wireless industry isn't completely deregulated, but in practice, limited spectrum means that deregulating the availability of frequencies would result in companies stomping all over each other, producing an unusable experience for everyone.
And spectrum availability doesn't explain why only one company provides service in many areas; in most of those areas, it simply would not be profitable for a second company to enter the market. Even in areas where it would cost almost nothing to buy or lease a plot of land for a tower, there are often simply not enough customers for it to ever pay for itself.
Say $150k to build the tower. If there are only 100 potential customers in the served area, even if you stole every one of them and made 100% profit (no power costs, no cost of routing the calls, etc.), it would take 50 months (over 4 years) to turn a profit. When you figure that only 40 of those people have a cell phone, only 20 will defect, and only a 60% profit margin (guessing here), you're making a profit after 35 years. There are simply areas that will never be served with these services unless they are government-provided (which you'd probably call socialism).
Thus making the position more attractive to people who aren't wealthy---people who can't afford to go looking for a job every two years. As it stands now, the House of Representatives is perfectly designed to ensure that only people who can afford to be jobless can ever take the job.
There's also less ability to be pressured by corporate interests because they can't hold reelection over your head. Most sane people don't need an incentive to avoid doing evil. Most people are fundamentally good until the allure of power corrupts their thinking.
Nah. You just make the spending limit simple. Each campaign can spend no more than $X on advertising, $Y on travel, and a handful of other simple, easy-to-understand categories, period. Cut and dry, no lawyer needed. The only reason lawyers might be needed is that lawyers are likely to write the law to make it so....
Yes, but remember that in the U.S., all you have to do to run as a Democrat is to say that you're a Democrat. With these changes, more people will be able to run, so the parties won't be nearly as homogeneous as they are now. And with a reasonable fixed spending limit, the parties won't have nearly the advantage they have now over independents.
I mostly agree about the campaign funds for advertising except that I think the government should provide a fixed amount of funds for each campaign to use to buy advertising in the venue of its choice. Likewise, the government should pay a fixed budget for travel, etc. to any candidate who can get a certain number of signatures. If you don't have such a system, then only the independently wealthy can afford to run. The goal should be to eliminate the bias, not make it worse.
With regards to voting out the incumbents periodically rather than automatically voting in a replacement, that's an interesting idea. The problem is that it assumes the people are paying enough attention to their elected officials to vote out the duds. I'm not convinced that this is the case. Power attracts the corrupt and the corruptible, so after a few years, you're pretty much guaranteed that every legislator is in somebody's pocket.
It's not just about contributions and bribery. It's also about extortion. A big company will go to a Congress critter and say things like, "If this bill doesn't go my way, we'll be forced to pull X number of jobs from your district and you'll be blamed and recalled." Maybe this level of coercion takes time to build up to, but I'd think that a new person who has no chance of being reelected or recalled would still be in a better position to resist that sort of coercion. And you can survive pretty much anyone in an aggregated position like Congress for a few years.
I was under the impression that WinCE forked an old version of NT, but maybe not. Okay, then s/Mobile/XP Embedded/g. Or better yet, iPhone OS:Mac OS X::Android:Ubuntu. :-) Happier?
Err... AddressBook.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. They don't always use the same frameworks. For example, both iPhone OS and Mac OS X have an AddressBnook framework, but they are completely different frameworks. And the audio frameworks are substantially different, too, IIRC. Both of those are well below what most people would consider the Cocoa level. The system calls are a subset of those available in Mac OS X, too (e.g. fork() is not allowed). There are also at least a couple of top-level frameworks in iPhone OS that are subframeworks in Mac OS X. And there are many, many frameworks that are only on Mac OS X, but not iPhone OS. There are 92 frameworks in Mac OS X. Assuming the list on developer.apple.com is complete, there are 24 frameworks in iPhone OS. So it has barely a fourth the frameworks of Mac OS X.
iPhone OS is OS X in much the same way that Windows Mobile is Windows. They have a lot of the same core bits, but one is a massively scaled down subset of the other.
That's because their primary job is not to make the country better. Their primary job is to get reelected. This is why we need A. slightly longer terms (say eight years), B. term limits (one term, period), C. campaign spending limits, and D. a total ban on third-party campaign ads that mention candidates by name. That's the only way we'll ever fix this problem.
The only reason the U.S.S.R. collapsed is that the U.S. had enough of an advantage in terms of their economic output and ability to incur debt to spend them under the table. The "Cold War" bankrupted the U.S.S.R., not socialism. Were it not for the isolation and the need to spend insane amounts of money on military spending due to fear that the U.S. would rule the world, they would still be around today, and they would probably be doing at least as well as China is.
Also, libertarians are *not* always socially liberal and fiscally conservative. They claim to be, but they almost universally favor corporate deregulation. That's anything but fiscally conservative; in many industries, every attempt at deregulation has consistently resulted in monopolies and higher costs in the long run. There are many industries where the most fiscally conservative position is actually socialism.... Health care, power production, telecommunications, and most other essential services fall squarely into that category.
What we need most are not people with ideologies like "socialism" or "libertarianism" or "liberal" or "conservative". What we need most are people who have brains and can think for themselves---people who look at each problem with fresh eyes, analyze the problem, analyze the possible solutions, and try to figure out the option that provides the best balance between improving the situation, causing the least overall harm, and causing the least discriminatory harm to any single group. Unfortunately, those people are too busy fixing what the politicians wreck to actually run for office.
So we put in Libertarians and they deregulate businesses massively. Now those same big businesses can abuse their monopoly powers to ensure small businesses have even less of a prayer than they do under the D&Rs. Hardly an improvement, IMHO. Even the third-parties like the Libertarians are very much pro-big-business. There are basically no political parties that aren't, with the possible exception of the Green party (and it's possible that I simply don't know enough about their platform to see the giant flaws in it, too).
As the old saying goes, every time you make something idiot-proof, nature creates a better idiot.