Nevermind the fact that credit default swaps were made possible by the Clinton administration's passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Of course everything is Bush's fault.
I don't like most George W. Bush's policies much either, but he is not the grand scapegoat that so many people have made him out to be.
The Bush tax cuts increased tax revenue through increasing the volume of assets flowing through the economy as well, and they must have had some positive effect on domestic jobs to keep unemployment around 4-5% all those years.
Manufacturing isn't the only game in town, though it might be more profitable if unions didn't stand in the way of more automation. Thankfully a relatively free market has kept us from trying too desperately to remain in a market space where we are simply no longer competitive. Ironically, the first wave of Asian industrial manufacturing growth is now transitioning to the next wave of cheaper manufacturing in places like India. Of course they're whinging about it in an almost American fashion. Economies simply have to adapt. If you try to hold on to old modes artificially through things like protectionism, the tariffs simply make the cost of living for the whole population higher.
However I do agree that the US armed forces need to stop policing the world. If anything, foreign governments should be defraying the costs if we're to protect their shipping as well as ours. I would support closing most overseas bases and using carrier groups as the primary means of worldwide force projection. And we also need to stop dumping billions of dollars in 'aid' to nations all over the globe. My tax dollars shouldn't be flowing directly into corrupt dictators pockets.
The taxed always hate taxes if they're sane. You do realize that the American War of Independence was in many ways a tax revolt right? This country was born hating taxes. Thankfully it does too, or we'd probably be tossing even more of our product down the government toilet.
Apparently you're not aware that half-baked, emotionally-driven random people from the internet know better than panels of researchers and industry experts with years of experience.
This is true. I mean I look at the LP candidates for President every four years and think, man, what kind of guy puts all this money and effort into something that isn't even a one in a million shot? They are virtually guaranteed to fail.
Holy crap, Robert Locke reads slashdot? Why did you never reply to that email I sent you with my huge, detailed rebuttal? Or are you just a damn, dirty plagiarist trying to pass off something Robert Locke wrote as your own?
The regulations you speak of are those of 'home owners associations' and are not government-related at all. Since people volunteer to buy into neighborhoods that have HOAs, and HOAs themselves are private entities, it would be nonsensical for libertarians to crusade against groups of private individuals mutually agreeing to certain parameters for their neighborhoods. Needless to say, MOST detached residential properties in the US do not have HOAs.
Global warming is treated like a religion and whoever doesn't buy into it is a heretic. That's antithetical to the spirit of science. There are climatologists who disagree with the so-called consensus, and rather than examining their data, methods, theories, and conclusions, they are dismissed as the 'fringe'. Some like Mark Albright and George Taylor have been outright fired simply because they dissented. The politicized issue has turned science into a witch hunt. (Dr. Tim Ball has received death threats regarding his skepticism. Who again is the fringe and who is the mainstream? People who threaten veteran scientists with violence because their ideas are unpopular?) There are even many in the vaunted IPOCC 'consensus' that disagree with the IPOCC's conclusions, but this false consensus is so important that Dr. Paul Reiter had to threaten the IPOCC with legal action to have his name removed. (You might watchthese.)
Global temperature trends are not negotiable. Anybody can read those numbers. However it's still not warmer than the medieval warm period, and it sure as hell isn't as hot as the holocene climate optimum. The only way current temperatures look extreme are when they are put into an artificially narrow context, which is easily available because less than two centuries ago was the lowest global temperature in the last ten thousand years. Is there a warming trend? Yes. Is it anthropogenic? Partially, and probably a very small part. Human produced carbon emissions are a single digit percentage of all carbon emissions, which in turn are a single digit percentage of the mix of green house gases. What reasonable person is going to believe that anthropogenic effects in a range narrower than eight tenths of a percent of the whole are steering the whole ship? And all these bogus computer models saying that if only we reduce these already extremely minute emissions we can have some kind of effect? Please. We're not going to win a fight with the sun, not even if we shut down all of civilization.
Ayn Rand notoriously hated libertarians because she too made the common mistake of viewing libertarianism as a philosophy of life instead of a political system (which doesn't work because libertarianism does not believe in legislating morality, which when expanded from a purely political application to a system of living, appears amoral).
I get very tired of this view that people who believe in deregulation are all 'castle in the sky' idealists who think they will all be Warren Buffet someday. Far more analgous is the old maxim, 'I may not like what you say, but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it.' I may never be a billionaire, I may even think that some billionaires are complete jerks, but that doesn't mean I'm going to accept pure theft as a punishment of success just because I may not like them as people. It's really funny to watch politicians try to nail down who the 'rich' are (which is effectively a thought experiment about when theft is suddenly ok). I come from a lower middle class family, my wife is solidly middle class, and we're gradually through very hard work building our way up. We won't ever be billionaires, but it sure as hell is a bitch to find out what every gross raise becomes in net. I can't wait to find out how much of OUR product gets stolen when we reach some political block's definition of 'rich'.
Ugh, again the common mistake of trying to view libertarianism through a moral lens. Libertarianism in general tries to avoid legislating morality, which is why it tries to "grab whatever liberty it can". It should not be up to the government to morally judge what I do. If I want to spend all my money on hookers instead of donating to the Red Cross, that's my damn business. Instead, today, spending money on hookers is criminalized and donating to the Red Cross is incentivized. It's blatant social engineering, and libertarianism is antithetical to such engineering. The foundation of libertarian social theory is that only provable, direct harms should be targets for criminalization, and until people actually harm others, they should be given the benefit of the doubt. That is the only way a society can be truly free, and not just play lip service to a hyper-regulated distortion of freedom.
Do you know why the free market works where a command economy falls short? Because each interest acting for itself better understands the needs and limits of micro-economies within their markets. Governments are never as interested, and even if they were, are torn in too many directions by too many interest groups to make the BEST decision in a million different divisions of markets.
Every time some twit in congress thinks they can simply legislate the price of something, you get things like fuel shortages causing lines of cars at gas stations. Markets are too complex for the kinds of simple controls that governments can effect. Things like price ceilings royally mess things up, as do quotas.
You're conflating pure economics with a broad political system (almost as bad as conflating a libertarian system of government with a philosophy of life/ethics, the most common mistake). Not only do you assume libertarianism to grow directly from early free market ideas (it does, but not as a totality), but that those ideas should remain intact and unchallenged, that no improvement or refinement should have taken place in centuries. No matter how sound a foundation may be, blind acceptance is a dangerous and illogical path.
I say all this as a minarchist-capitalist myself, in the more modern Nozick-based tradition. Adam Smith's work is important, illuminating, and mostly correct, but neither he nor anyone else is God incarnate (anybody brings up JC, screw you, I'm an athiest).
I too agree that there is nothing inherently incompatible between libertarianism and FOSS.
How many lawyers are modding today? Whoever is modding this down is in denial. I've worked for a law school, a law firm, and independent lawyer, and a state bar association, and I can vouch that the parent is absolutely correct. Lawyers are good at arguments, not book keeping.
Apple's market share is increasing because Microsoft's is decreasing. Now is the perfect time for Google to swoop in and get market share from both of them with a broad, integrated set of competing products. This is exactly what they are doing, challenging IE (and Safari) with Chrome, iPhone (and Windows Mobile) with Android, iTMS with Audio, etc. Recessions are when people with resources have the best opportunities to lay the foundations for growth in the next cycle, and Google seems to be hatching all its eggs at the right time and in the right way.
SupCom a 1:1 copy of TA? Have you played these games? Back in the day I was a rabid TA fanboy (this included trolling StarCraft forums, because they were the boorish enemy). I played TA regularly for years, messed with the thousands of 3rd party units, worked for TA community sites, and like most harbored the hope that some day Chris Taylor would make some kind of sequel. Naturally when SupCom was announced, I followed the development religiously, and it goes without saying that when it finally came out I really, really wanted to like it.
However the games were actually too different in style. SupCom had a lot of positive improvements, most significantly the strategic zoom, but also the formations, speed matching and coordination, path modification, etc. But IMO the super units, while fun, did kind of intrinsically unbalance the gameplay. In TA, turtling/porcing was a very valid play style, but just try doing it in SC. Without 3rd party units it isn't as easy and definitely not as fun. The lack of good 3rd party stuff for SC compared to TA also really surprised me.
Maybe I'm just a weaksauce n00b, but I also find SC to be too big and too fast. The resource curve seems a little too steep, and eventually I'm just not able to utilize it efficiently. SC is built for really dynamic and dramatic conflicts on a scale that makes TA look like a backyard snowball fight.
lol n00b, SupCom supports two screens that you can independently zoom to different positions. I usually have one as a giant map overview and use the other for the close in work. However the two screen configuration only works with a single card with dual heads, not multiple card setups.
It's pretty common for emerging research to be talked about in tentative terms. After all, it takes a lot of time and money to reproduce studies, and in the world of science 'facts' and 'laws' are merely those things which have been tested so many times that they are believed to be true. However that doesn't mean they're never overturned. Point being, in science, everything is a matter of 'may' only the degree is debatable.
Apparently you've never heard of albinos or vertiligo. A 'black' man can be born 'white' or 'turn white' over time. Eventually, pre-natal genetic selection will allow phenotypes to be chosen, and gene therapy will probably eventually allow people to change some pre-existing phenotypical states.
My position is and has been that marriage is not a natural right
Like I said before, if there are no natural rights to marriage, that makes it a legal right only, therefore we are dealing with something being given and taken away. I really don't know why you keep bringing up natural rights anyway, because R-71 is a legal issue from beginning to end. (I find it funny how often to people in this discussion you keep mentioning freedom as natural right, but then deny that people are free to marry who they want or to define marriage in their own way.)
You're not putting it together. If I put together a contract that says, for instance, 'I will give X to Mr. Y in exchange for $Z' and sign it, that gives both me and Mr. X legal rights. There is no need for a 'license' and in court that contract will be enforced. In that instance the government has a (valid) role, but no initial, potentially preclusive decision-making power.
Marriage should be the same way, a decision made between individuals that will be later honored in good faith when necessary by the government. Whereas currently unlicensed marriage is only recognized after an amorphous period of time as a 'common law' marriage.
Slashdot Mirror
Nevermind the fact that credit default swaps were made possible by the Clinton administration's passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Of course everything is Bush's fault.
I don't like most George W. Bush's policies much either, but he is not the grand scapegoat that so many people have made him out to be.
The Bush tax cuts increased tax revenue through increasing the volume of assets flowing through the economy as well, and they must have had some positive effect on domestic jobs to keep unemployment around 4-5% all those years.
Manufacturing isn't the only game in town, though it might be more profitable if unions didn't stand in the way of more automation. Thankfully a relatively free market has kept us from trying too desperately to remain in a market space where we are simply no longer competitive. Ironically, the first wave of Asian industrial manufacturing growth is now transitioning to the next wave of cheaper manufacturing in places like India. Of course they're whinging about it in an almost American fashion. Economies simply have to adapt. If you try to hold on to old modes artificially through things like protectionism, the tariffs simply make the cost of living for the whole population higher.
However I do agree that the US armed forces need to stop policing the world. If anything, foreign governments should be defraying the costs if we're to protect their shipping as well as ours. I would support closing most overseas bases and using carrier groups as the primary means of worldwide force projection. And we also need to stop dumping billions of dollars in 'aid' to nations all over the globe. My tax dollars shouldn't be flowing directly into corrupt dictators pockets.
The taxed always hate taxes if they're sane. You do realize that the American War of Independence was in many ways a tax revolt right? This country was born hating taxes. Thankfully it does too, or we'd probably be tossing even more of our product down the government toilet.
Apparently you're not aware that half-baked, emotionally-driven random people from the internet know better than panels of researchers and industry experts with years of experience.
This is true. I mean I look at the LP candidates for President every four years and think, man, what kind of guy puts all this money and effort into something that isn't even a one in a million shot? They are virtually guaranteed to fail.
Holy crap, Robert Locke reads slashdot? Why did you never reply to that email I sent you with my huge, detailed rebuttal? Or are you just a damn, dirty plagiarist trying to pass off something Robert Locke wrote as your own?
The regulations you speak of are those of 'home owners associations' and are not government-related at all. Since people volunteer to buy into neighborhoods that have HOAs, and HOAs themselves are private entities, it would be nonsensical for libertarians to crusade against groups of private individuals mutually agreeing to certain parameters for their neighborhoods. Needless to say, MOST detached residential properties in the US do not have HOAs.
Global warming is treated like a religion and whoever doesn't buy into it is a heretic. That's antithetical to the spirit of science. There are climatologists who disagree with the so-called consensus, and rather than examining their data, methods, theories, and conclusions, they are dismissed as the 'fringe'. Some like Mark Albright and George Taylor have been outright fired simply because they dissented. The politicized issue has turned science into a witch hunt. (Dr. Tim Ball has received death threats regarding his skepticism. Who again is the fringe and who is the mainstream? People who threaten veteran scientists with violence because their ideas are unpopular?) There are even many in the vaunted IPOCC 'consensus' that disagree with the IPOCC's conclusions, but this false consensus is so important that Dr. Paul Reiter had to threaten the IPOCC with legal action to have his name removed. (You might watch these.)
Global temperature trends are not negotiable. Anybody can read those numbers. However it's still not warmer than the medieval warm period, and it sure as hell isn't as hot as the holocene climate optimum. The only way current temperatures look extreme are when they are put into an artificially narrow context, which is easily available because less than two centuries ago was the lowest global temperature in the last ten thousand years. Is there a warming trend? Yes. Is it anthropogenic? Partially, and probably a very small part. Human produced carbon emissions are a single digit percentage of all carbon emissions, which in turn are a single digit percentage of the mix of green house gases. What reasonable person is going to believe that anthropogenic effects in a range narrower than eight tenths of a percent of the whole are steering the whole ship? And all these bogus computer models saying that if only we reduce these already extremely minute emissions we can have some kind of effect? Please. We're not going to win a fight with the sun, not even if we shut down all of civilization.
Ayn Rand notoriously hated libertarians because she too made the common mistake of viewing libertarianism as a philosophy of life instead of a political system (which doesn't work because libertarianism does not believe in legislating morality, which when expanded from a purely political application to a system of living, appears amoral).
I get very tired of this view that people who believe in deregulation are all 'castle in the sky' idealists who think they will all be Warren Buffet someday. Far more analgous is the old maxim, 'I may not like what you say, but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it.' I may never be a billionaire, I may even think that some billionaires are complete jerks, but that doesn't mean I'm going to accept pure theft as a punishment of success just because I may not like them as people. It's really funny to watch politicians try to nail down who the 'rich' are (which is effectively a thought experiment about when theft is suddenly ok). I come from a lower middle class family, my wife is solidly middle class, and we're gradually through very hard work building our way up. We won't ever be billionaires, but it sure as hell is a bitch to find out what every gross raise becomes in net. I can't wait to find out how much of OUR product gets stolen when we reach some political block's definition of 'rich'.
Ugh, again the common mistake of trying to view libertarianism through a moral lens. Libertarianism in general tries to avoid legislating morality, which is why it tries to "grab whatever liberty it can". It should not be up to the government to morally judge what I do. If I want to spend all my money on hookers instead of donating to the Red Cross, that's my damn business. Instead, today, spending money on hookers is criminalized and donating to the Red Cross is incentivized. It's blatant social engineering, and libertarianism is antithetical to such engineering. The foundation of libertarian social theory is that only provable, direct harms should be targets for criminalization, and until people actually harm others, they should be given the benefit of the doubt. That is the only way a society can be truly free, and not just play lip service to a hyper-regulated distortion of freedom.
Do you know why the free market works where a command economy falls short? Because each interest acting for itself better understands the needs and limits of micro-economies within their markets. Governments are never as interested, and even if they were, are torn in too many directions by too many interest groups to make the BEST decision in a million different divisions of markets.
Every time some twit in congress thinks they can simply legislate the price of something, you get things like fuel shortages causing lines of cars at gas stations. Markets are too complex for the kinds of simple controls that governments can effect. Things like price ceilings royally mess things up, as do quotas.
I have yet to see a society that is not, at its heart and soul, essentially an oligarchy.
You're conflating pure economics with a broad political system (almost as bad as conflating a libertarian system of government with a philosophy of life/ethics, the most common mistake). Not only do you assume libertarianism to grow directly from early free market ideas (it does, but not as a totality), but that those ideas should remain intact and unchallenged, that no improvement or refinement should have taken place in centuries. No matter how sound a foundation may be, blind acceptance is a dangerous and illogical path.
I say all this as a minarchist-capitalist myself, in the more modern Nozick-based tradition. Adam Smith's work is important, illuminating, and mostly correct, but neither he nor anyone else is God incarnate (anybody brings up JC, screw you, I'm an athiest).
I too agree that there is nothing inherently incompatible between libertarianism and FOSS.
With noble souls like these, who needs corruption?
Now it's time for you to turn in your geek card. Seriously.
How many lawyers are modding today? Whoever is modding this down is in denial. I've worked for a law school, a law firm, and independent lawyer, and a state bar association, and I can vouch that the parent is absolutely correct. Lawyers are good at arguments, not book keeping.
Find 3TB of movies of a better looking porn star?
Apple's market share is increasing because Microsoft's is decreasing. Now is the perfect time for Google to swoop in and get market share from both of them with a broad, integrated set of competing products. This is exactly what they are doing, challenging IE (and Safari) with Chrome, iPhone (and Windows Mobile) with Android, iTMS with Audio, etc. Recessions are when people with resources have the best opportunities to lay the foundations for growth in the next cycle, and Google seems to be hatching all its eggs at the right time and in the right way.
Mod parent up.
SupCom a 1:1 copy of TA? Have you played these games? Back in the day I was a rabid TA fanboy (this included trolling StarCraft forums, because they were the boorish enemy). I played TA regularly for years, messed with the thousands of 3rd party units, worked for TA community sites, and like most harbored the hope that some day Chris Taylor would make some kind of sequel. Naturally when SupCom was announced, I followed the development religiously, and it goes without saying that when it finally came out I really, really wanted to like it.
However the games were actually too different in style. SupCom had a lot of positive improvements, most significantly the strategic zoom, but also the formations, speed matching and coordination, path modification, etc. But IMO the super units, while fun, did kind of intrinsically unbalance the gameplay. In TA, turtling/porcing was a very valid play style, but just try doing it in SC. Without 3rd party units it isn't as easy and definitely not as fun. The lack of good 3rd party stuff for SC compared to TA also really surprised me.
Maybe I'm just a weaksauce n00b, but I also find SC to be too big and too fast. The resource curve seems a little too steep, and eventually I'm just not able to utilize it efficiently. SC is built for really dynamic and dramatic conflicts on a scale that makes TA look like a backyard snowball fight.
lol n00b, SupCom supports two screens that you can independently zoom to different positions. I usually have one as a giant map overview and use the other for the close in work. However the two screen configuration only works with a single card with dual heads, not multiple card setups.
No, I'm Spartacus!
Apparently you've never heard of albinos or vertiligo. A 'black' man can be born 'white' or 'turn white' over time. Eventually, pre-natal genetic selection will allow phenotypes to be chosen, and gene therapy will probably eventually allow people to change some pre-existing phenotypical states.
My position is and has been that marriage is not a natural right
Like I said before, if there are no natural rights to marriage, that makes it a legal right only, therefore we are dealing with something being given and taken away. I really don't know why you keep bringing up natural rights anyway, because R-71 is a legal issue from beginning to end. (I find it funny how often to people in this discussion you keep mentioning freedom as natural right, but then deny that people are free to marry who they want or to define marriage in their own way.)
They are both genetic.
You're not putting it together. If I put together a contract that says, for instance, 'I will give X to Mr. Y in exchange for $Z' and sign it, that gives both me and Mr. X legal rights. There is no need for a 'license' and in court that contract will be enforced. In that instance the government has a (valid) role, but no initial, potentially preclusive decision-making power.
Marriage should be the same way, a decision made between individuals that will be later honored in good faith when necessary by the government. Whereas currently unlicensed marriage is only recognized after an amorphous period of time as a 'common law' marriage.
it was the courts who decided this right, which never existed before was somehow always there
So, in your mind then, Loving v. Virginia was judicial activism, and bans on inter-racial marriage are ok?