A few years ago, when I was in college, a telemarketer called me and rambled on about what a great deal I could get blah blah blah... After listening for a minute, and noticing his subtle lisp, I (a male) interrupted him:
"You have a really sexy voice."
"R-r-really? Uh..."
"Say something sexy to me"
(whispering) "I caaaaan't. My manager will hear me!"
"Oh, okay, well, have a nice day". [click]
disclaimer: please don't take the above as an indication of any tendancy to commit hate crimes of any sort.
If you are concerned about corporate power, take a look at the Equal Protection clause, from the US Supreme Court:
In the case in which it was first called upon to interpret [the Equal Protection] clause, the [U.S. Supreme] Court doubted whether "any action of a State not directed by way of discrimination against the [N]egroes as a class, or on account of their race, will ever be held to come within the purview of this provision." Nonetheless, in deciding the Granger Cases shortly thereafter [in 1877], the Justices seemingly entertained no doubt that the railroad corporations were entitled to invoke the protection of the clause. Nine years later [in 1886], Chief Justice Waite announced from the bench that the Court would not hear argument on the question whether the equal protection clause applied to corporations. "We are all of the opinion that it does."
What that means is that Corporations, originally entities created by citizens to better society, have been given the same legal rights as human beings. Why is this scary? Because they have far more power and far less accountability than a human, and a much greater desire to profit at any cost (if Darwin was a economist, he'd have realized that corporations are more likely to to survive if they develop "killer instincts").
It seems to me that the greatest oppresive force in the world today is the corporation. While the US is allowing corporations to gain power, the problem is global. It doesn't matter where you live, unless your home happens to be in a Nation that opposes things like the WTO. Corporations are attempting to rise above national boundaries and laws, so you are going to have a difficult time hiding from their effects. I suggest moving to a powerful country like the US, where you can vote. But where ever you are, make your voice heard, and take action. Action, as in boycotting corporations which act against the best interest of humankind, or (if you live in the US) supporting this proposed 28th Amendment to the Constitution, which is an attempt to reverse the 14th Amendment.
I doubt anybody on Slashdot is into astrology, but a few of you must have heard the Orb track "S.A.L.T.". It featured a Scottish fundamentalist preacher talking about the apocalypse, and said that the planets would be aligning on August 18th, 1999, which would signify TEOTWAWKI. That was exactly one day after the Cassini flyby. Way to add to my irrational fear.
Many of the new GE crops, such as Roundup Ready soybeans, are designed to allow farmers to spray heavier doses of pesticides on their land. These pesticides inevitably will find their way into our water and food supply, endangering humans and wildlife.
New Scientist magazine reports that many farmers that have converted to GE production use as many pesticides as their conventional counterparts, while some GE farmers now use more pesticides.
Luddites crawling out of the woodwork?
on
Golden Rice
·
· Score: 1
A lot of responses to this article are of the nature "GE foods are just fine, and anybody who disagrees is a luddite."
I have a lot of faith in science, but very little faith in human nature. We are prone to make mistakes. And when are dealing with something as powerful and potentially damaging as GE foods, I get a little concerned.
Not only do we have scientists running around altering genes when they can't possibly know all of the effects, we have greedy corporations pushing GE Foods through the FDA. We've got Monsanto trying to convince the Feds that in-house testing of their products was complete, and that their products are safe, the Feds listen because Monsanto has the cash to fund the lobbying (and campaign contributions).
The point is, how far are you going to trust someone who's main interest is pro fit ?
Potrykus' motives may be humanitarian, but, then again, who knows what biotech companies he holds stock in?
The speculator was suggesting that as India gets more and more people online, there will be a greater demand for his domain names. Sorry I didn't make that clear.
I don't think the general internet population would care too much, let alone vote. Mostly you are going to get Slashdotters and corporate lackeys running.
For the most part domain names are nothing more than a convenience. How ofter do you go to a site based on its domain name? 99.9% of the time, I end up finding out about a site because of a link somewhere, or from a search engine. Sure, a catchy name is nice, but it isn't that big of a deal.
I was at a cafe on Halloween sitting across from a fellow working on a laptop. He eventually made some conversation and informed me that he was a domain name speculator. He had a list of thousands of domain names he had for sale. Most of them were (East) Indian words for sex, and he was selling them for between $500-$5000. He figured that as soon as India joins the information age, all sorts of tycoons are going to want these domain names, and they will be willing to pay big bucks for them.
So this means that a search engine is now going to need to download every mp3 file it finds each time it crawls the net?
That might be true, but a more logical use of the tech would be to integrate it with Napster. That would allow Napster to only share "legal" songs, or songs that are owned by companies that made a deal with them.
Songs don't need to be re-encoded, in fact, the tech works on any song format. It looks for key elements of a sound and compares that data with a master database to ID a song. So it won't make things lossy, and it should be able to overcome attempts to bypass it by renaming or using a different song format. Encryption or zipping still might work, but Napster could stop files with certain headers from being sent. Of course there is no way to ever stop the illegal sharing of music, but this could make it more difficult for the common folk.
I could see that happening. Someone asks him to name his favorite book as a child, and he names the only children's book he can remember the title of, rather than just say he can't remember any books he read as a child. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose.
Some have suggested that Bush is borderline illiterate. When asked what his favorite book was as a child, he replied "The Giant Catapillar" (or something like that). Turns out the book he was referring to wasn't published until he was in his twenties.
4 What difference does an electoral system make where the difference between the candidates is almost zero. We would be better served with a random lottery. Who cares about if a candidate gets 10% of the pop vote but 0 electoral votes. Isn't it much more serious when a candidate wins with say 45% of the total vote and that vote represents 45% of the people who can vote. One could say that you no longer live in a Democracy with numbers like that.
An excellent alternative to the current system is preferential voting. Ranking candidates ensures "that whoever wins the election will have the support of the majority of the electorate". That way I don't have to be afraid that my vote for Nader is going to get Bush elected. Whether this would encourage apathetic voters to return to the polls is another question.
I think one of the most important things to realize, if you believe in democracy, is that you need to do a lot more than just vote. Getting involved on a local level helps you see that there are a lot of people with a lot of integrity who care about the future of our nation, people who aren't motivated by selfishness and greed.
The Federal Government is only a small piece of the pie.
Does anyone think in 200 years time we will still be living in a capitalist society (serious question)?
I think that if we don't put the brakes on capatilism, we (the members of capatilist society) won't be alive in 200 years time. Why? I'm no economist, but it seems to me that capitalism has one function: to make money. This is done by maximizing the use of available resources. If you aren't maximizing those resources, you aren't making as much money as you could be.
Now, since we only have a limited amount of resources on the planet, there will be a point where we will run out (probably a lot sooner than 200 years). What then?
What we need is an economy based on sustainability. You can't have sustainable capitalism, because that just isn't capitalism. I think this is a damn good reason to keep the government around. The main problem with Libertarians is they think the free market would work things out. But (can anybody answer this?), what interest does the free market have in decreased consumption of resources?
After reading The Physics of Consciousness, I've been theorizing (again!) on the nature of consciousness. I might be demonstrating my complete lack of understanding of quantum physics, here, so be gentle.
One of the presumptions I'm making is that life as we know it is the only viable vessel for consciousness in this universe (at least so far). And consciousness is the only thing that can collapse probability waves.
So, start with the big bang. Boom. The universe erupts into chaos. Since there is no one around to observe it (and collapse all probability waves floating around), it exists as a myriad of states. Imagine the multiple-universes hypothesis. Everything that can happen, does happen, up to a point. There is a point, amonst these overlapping universes, where, on a small planet in a medium-sized galaxy, where things have turned out just right to develop life. We get single celled organisms. Let's assume that they aren't complex enough to possess consciousness, so we wait a bit, look through the mess of probabilities, and see that a little fish has developed with a brain powerful enough to collapse probability waves.
I think a little thing called the Lorenz Invariance causes all the states leading up to the development of Mr. Fish to "solidify" all the way back to the beginning of the universe. Out of the 10^23^23 or possible states of the universe, this one is selected.
I'm not up on quantum physics enough to know whether this selection would effect the six variables discussed in the Discover article about Rees' theory. At what point in the creation of the universe did those variables decide to stick with a certain value? Perhaps not until the fish decided he liked 'em.
Hee hee. After one of those sleepless nights, my fellow ameteur philosophers and I concluded that we can never know all the answers. We'll always have more questions.
It's the curse of the human intellect. Hopefully, we'll always be able to laugh at ourselves.
It's actually hard to read all these comments and not think I sound whiny. But, I also think the middle class sounds whiny.
On the contrary, I think you are offering some very intellegent discussion. I, on the other hand...
Hillary Clinton has spent over a million taxpayer dollars flying around to campaign for her Senate seat
Slut.
We are definitely governed by the wealthy, but it wouldn't be any better if we were governed by the poor. Laws would be made out of envy, and that's not any good. A lot of support for the Greens and the like comes from envy. Whether or not people realize it, much of it is envy. There are, however, many who have money and yet believe in those ideals.
Like me. I'm pretty well off (not making $100K, yet), so I don't think my support for the Greens comes from envy. I believe that people are getting fucked by stupid and greedy politicians and the system they support.
Watching the debates makes me think that most of the people in this country have had the wool pulled over their eyes. We live in a world of corporate controlled media, and (I imagine) that most people don't keep that in mind when they subject themselves to its memes. The fact that most people seem to accept our limited choices (as most of the media presents) for president, one complete moron and one almost complete moron, neither of whom can get a point across clearly (do they do that on purpose?), shows that the inbred fuckfest going on between corporate media giants and politicians has suceeded in convincing people that they don't have any other choice. Even the polls are stupid: "Who are you going to vote for?" is asked a lot more frequently then "Who do you think should be the next president?"
Sorry if I sound whiny. I'm not complaining, I'm just worried. Worried that corporate dominance of the most powerful institutions on the planet is going to kill us all. I'm know there's a lot more to it than Internet censorship and fair taxes. There are tons of generally sane, intellegent citizens such as yourself that would probably disagree with me, but I see corporate greed as one of the most serious problems in the U.S.
Christ, I'm beginning to sound like an evangelist.
Gore actually used the word plutocrat? And he wasn't referring to himself?
He isn't the only one who tries to get the lower and middle class to rally against the rich. Nader and his ilk frequently remind us that over half of this nation's wealth is in the hands of 1% of the population.
If this were truely a democracy, could we vote to increase the taxes of a super-high tax bracket (like $50 million and above) to 75% or even 90%?
Unfortunately, the plutocrats are the ones making the laws...
Seriously, does anybody need that much money?
I understand that you might find 39% a bit high. That's a lot of money for the government to take. But how much are you making? What if we could double the value of ZZ, so you won't have to pay so much until you make a lot more? And in order to facilitate that, we could increase taxes for the super-rich?
Maybe $100K/year is barely enough for some families. But, Christ, nobody needs more than that (hello, affluenza). What if we established a dimishing point of returns? Rather than a maximum wage, we implement a tax program that taxes maybe 10% of your income if you make $100K/year or less. After $100K, parabolically increase the rate toward 90% or 100% (where 100% is like trying to reach warp factor 10: you never get there).
So, if you make $200K/year, you get taxed 15%, and you end up with $170K. If you make $500K, pay something like 25%, $1 million, maybe 40%, $100 million, 80% (and end up with $20 million, boo fucking hoo), and so on.
This way, you can still get a return for your "hard work", and Bill Gates and Ted Turner can still help us pay off the national debt.
Slashdot Mirror
A few years ago, when I was in college, a telemarketer called me and rambled on about what a great deal I could get blah blah blah... After listening for a minute, and noticing his subtle lisp, I (a male) interrupted him:
"You have a really sexy voice."
"R-r-really? Uh..."
"Say something sexy to me"
(whispering) "I caaaaan't. My manager will hear me!"
"Oh, okay, well, have a nice day". [click]
disclaimer: please don't take the above as an indication of any tendancy to commit hate crimes of any sort.
(taken from RTMark).
What that means is that Corporations, originally entities created by citizens to better society, have been given the same legal rights as human beings. Why is this scary? Because they have far more power and far less accountability than a human, and a much greater desire to profit at any cost (if Darwin was a economist, he'd have realized that corporations are more likely to to survive if they develop "killer instincts").
It seems to me that the greatest oppresive force in the world today is the corporation. While the US is allowing corporations to gain power, the problem is global. It doesn't matter where you live, unless your home happens to be in a Nation that opposes things like the WTO. Corporations are attempting to rise above national boundaries and laws, so you are going to have a difficult time hiding from their effects. I suggest moving to a powerful country like the US, where you can vote. But where ever you are, make your voice heard, and take action. Action, as in boycotting corporations which act against the best interest of humankind, or (if you live in the US) supporting this proposed 28th Amendment to the Constitution, which is an attempt to reverse the 14th Amendment.
Cool, thanks! I've always wondered where that come from.
I doubt anybody on Slashdot is into astrology, but a few of you must have heard the Orb track "S.A.L.T.". It featured a Scottish fundamentalist preacher talking about the apocalypse, and said that the planets would be aligning on August 18th, 1999, which would signify TEOTWAWKI. That was exactly one day after the Cassini flyby. Way to add to my irrational fear.
Scientists are already developing new monitors for tetrachromats.
Uh, I meant "pesticides".
A lot of responses to this article are of the nature "GE foods are just fine, and anybody who disagrees is a luddite."
I have a lot of faith in science, but very little faith in human nature. We are prone to make mistakes. And when are dealing with something as powerful and potentially damaging as GE foods, I get a little concerned.
Not only do we have scientists running around altering genes when they can't possibly know all of the effects, we have greedy corporations pushing GE Foods through the FDA. We've got Monsanto trying to convince the Feds that in-house testing of their products was complete, and that their products are safe, the Feds listen because Monsanto has the cash to fund the lobbying (and campaign contributions).
The point is, how far are you going to trust someone who's main interest is pro fit ? Potrykus' motives may be humanitarian, but, then again, who knows what biotech companies he holds stock in?
Unfortunately, I don't even remember his name. Sorry.
The speculator was suggesting that as India gets more and more people online, there will be a greater demand for his domain names. Sorry I didn't make that clear.
I don't think the general internet population would care too much, let alone vote. Mostly you are going to get Slashdotters and corporate lackeys running.
For the most part domain names are nothing more than a convenience. How ofter do you go to a site based on its domain name? 99.9% of the time, I end up finding out about a site because of a link somewhere, or from a search engine. Sure, a catchy name is nice, but it isn't that big of a deal.
I was at a cafe on Halloween sitting across from a fellow working on a laptop. He eventually made some conversation and informed me that he was a domain name speculator. He had a list of thousands of domain names he had for sale. Most of them were (East) Indian words for sex, and he was selling them for between $500-$5000. He figured that as soon as India joins the information age, all sorts of tycoons are going to want these domain names, and they will be willing to pay big bucks for them.
I had a hard time not laughing out loud at him.
That was the most annoying web ad I've ever seen. Especially because it was so damn loud relative to everything else on my system.
So this means that a search engine is now going to need to download every mp3 file it finds each time it crawls the net?
That might be true, but a more logical use of the tech would be to integrate it with Napster. That would allow Napster to only share "legal" songs, or songs that are owned by companies that made a deal with them.
Songs don't need to be re-encoded, in fact, the tech works on any song format. It looks for key elements of a sound and compares that data with a master database to ID a song. So it won't make things lossy, and it should be able to overcome attempts to bypass it by renaming or using a different song format. Encryption or zipping still might work, but Napster could stop files with certain headers from being sent. Of course there is no way to ever stop the illegal sharing of music, but this could make it more difficult for the common folk.
I could see that happening. Someone asks him to name his favorite book as a child, and he names the only children's book he can remember the title of, rather than just say he can't remember any books he read as a child. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose.
But ya gotta wonder...
Some have suggested that Bush is borderline illiterate. When asked what his favorite book was as a child, he replied "The Giant Catapillar" (or something like that). Turns out the book he was referring to wasn't published until he was in his twenties.
4 What difference does an electoral system make where the difference between the candidates is almost zero. We would be better served with a random lottery. Who cares about if a candidate gets 10% of the pop vote but 0 electoral votes. Isn't it much more serious when a candidate wins with say 45% of the total vote and that vote represents 45% of the people who can vote. One could say that you no longer live in a Democracy with numbers like that.
An excellent alternative to the current system is preferential voting. Ranking candidates ensures "that whoever wins the election will have the support of the majority of the electorate". That way I don't have to be afraid that my vote for Nader is going to get Bush elected. Whether this would encourage apathetic voters to return to the polls is another question.
Then there is porportional representation, but that doesn't work so well for single-position offices.
You know, it's really amazing how there has been NOT ONE positive post yet.
Is it that surprising? Maybe there isn't anything anybody can honestly say about either one that is positive.
Mod this guy up!
I think one of the most important things to realize, if you believe in democracy, is that you need to do a lot more than just vote. Getting involved on a local level helps you see that there are a lot of people with a lot of integrity who care about the future of our nation, people who aren't motivated by selfishness and greed.
The Federal Government is only a small piece of the pie.
Does anyone think in 200 years time we will still be living in a capitalist society (serious question)?
I think that if we don't put the brakes on capatilism, we (the members of capatilist society) won't be alive in 200 years time. Why? I'm no economist, but it seems to me that capitalism has one function: to make money. This is done by maximizing the use of available resources. If you aren't maximizing those resources, you aren't making as much money as you could be.
Now, since we only have a limited amount of resources on the planet, there will be a point where we will run out (probably a lot sooner than 200 years). What then?
What we need is an economy based on sustainability. You can't have sustainable capitalism, because that just isn't capitalism. I think this is a damn good reason to keep the government around. The main problem with Libertarians is they think the free market would work things out. But (can anybody answer this?), what interest does the free market have in decreased consumption of resources?
After reading The Physics of Consciousness , I've been theorizing (again!) on the nature of consciousness. I might be demonstrating my complete lack of understanding of quantum physics, here, so be gentle.
One of the presumptions I'm making is that life as we know it is the only viable vessel for consciousness in this universe (at least so far). And consciousness is the only thing that can collapse probability waves.
So, start with the big bang. Boom. The universe erupts into chaos. Since there is no one around to observe it (and collapse all probability waves floating around), it exists as a myriad of states. Imagine the multiple-universes hypothesis. Everything that can happen, does happen, up to a point. There is a point, amonst these overlapping universes, where, on a small planet in a medium-sized galaxy, where things have turned out just right to develop life. We get single celled organisms. Let's assume that they aren't complex enough to possess consciousness, so we wait a bit, look through the mess of probabilities, and see that a little fish has developed with a brain powerful enough to collapse probability waves.
I think a little thing called the Lorenz Invariance causes all the states leading up to the development of Mr. Fish to "solidify" all the way back to the beginning of the universe. Out of the 10^23^23 or possible states of the universe, this one is selected.
I'm not up on quantum physics enough to know whether this selection would effect the six variables discussed in the Discover article about Rees' theory. At what point in the creation of the universe did those variables decide to stick with a certain value? Perhaps not until the fish decided he liked 'em.
Hee hee. After one of those sleepless nights, my fellow ameteur philosophers and I concluded that we can never know all the answers. We'll always have more questions.
It's the curse of the human intellect. Hopefully, we'll always be able to laugh at ourselves.
It's actually hard to read all these comments and not think I sound whiny. But, I also think the middle class sounds whiny.
On the contrary, I think you are offering some very intellegent discussion. I, on the other hand...
Hillary Clinton has spent over a million taxpayer dollars flying around to campaign for her Senate seat
Slut.
We are definitely governed by the wealthy, but it wouldn't be any better if we were governed by the poor. Laws would be made out of envy, and that's not any good. A lot of support for the Greens and the like comes from envy. Whether or not people realize it, much of it is envy. There are, however, many who have money and yet believe in those ideals.
Like me. I'm pretty well off (not making $100K, yet), so I don't think my support for the Greens comes from envy. I believe that people are getting fucked by stupid and greedy politicians and the system they support.
Watching the debates makes me think that most of the people in this country have had the wool pulled over their eyes. We live in a world of corporate controlled media, and (I imagine) that most people don't keep that in mind when they subject themselves to its memes. The fact that most people seem to accept our limited choices (as most of the media presents) for president, one complete moron and one almost complete moron, neither of whom can get a point across clearly (do they do that on purpose?), shows that the inbred fuckfest going on between corporate media giants and politicians has suceeded in convincing people that they don't have any other choice. Even the polls are stupid: "Who are you going to vote for?" is asked a lot more frequently then "Who do you think should be the next president?"
Sorry if I sound whiny. I'm not complaining, I'm just worried. Worried that corporate dominance of the most powerful institutions on the planet is going to kill us all. I'm know there's a lot more to it than Internet censorship and fair taxes. There are tons of generally sane, intellegent citizens such as yourself that would probably disagree with me, but I see corporate greed as one of the most serious problems in the U.S.
Christ, I'm beginning to sound like an evangelist.
Nuke a gay communist baby seal for Christ
Gore actually used the word plutocrat? And he wasn't referring to himself?
He isn't the only one who tries to get the lower and middle class to rally against the rich. Nader and his ilk frequently remind us that over half of this nation's wealth is in the hands of 1% of the population.
If this were truely a democracy, could we vote to increase the taxes of a super-high tax bracket (like $50 million and above) to 75% or even 90%?
Unfortunately, the plutocrats are the ones making the laws...
Seriously, does anybody need that much money?
I understand that you might find 39% a bit high. That's a lot of money for the government to take. But how much are you making? What if we could double the value of ZZ, so you won't have to pay so much until you make a lot more? And in order to facilitate that, we could increase taxes for the super-rich?
Maybe $100K/year is barely enough for some families. But, Christ, nobody needs more than that (hello, affluenza). What if we established a dimishing point of returns? Rather than a maximum wage, we implement a tax program that taxes maybe 10% of your income if you make $100K/year or less. After $100K, parabolically increase the rate toward 90% or 100% (where 100% is like trying to reach warp factor 10: you never get there).
So, if you make $200K/year, you get taxed 15%, and you end up with $170K. If you make $500K, pay something like 25%, $1 million, maybe 40%, $100 million, 80% (and end up with $20 million, boo fucking hoo), and so on.
This way, you can still get a return for your "hard work", and Bill Gates and Ted Turner can still help us pay off the national debt.