Well, seems only fair, considering the world bank has estimated the true total subsidies that fossil fuels receive globally at around 5 trillion dollars a year. That's well over 10% of the entire world's GDP spent on fossil subsidies.
I think the other energy companies can get rather a *lot* more before they get anywhere close to parity. Of course, unless there *is* parity, the market cannot possibly be said to be "free". Since this is decidedly not the case - the real way to look at it is how impressive it is that renewables are doing so well when they get so LITTLE subsidies compared to the competition. The only plausible explanation is that they are literally numerous orders of magnitude better for consumers - and that's today.
The very fact that you use phrases like "alternative" and "traditional" to describe energy sources destroys any credibility your argument may have had. Energy sources are a matter of engineering - tradition has no place in the discussion except as something to avoid like the plague. Engineering is an excercise in progress - literally the thing that "tradition" exists to impede.
Because the actual policies they pursue is important.
In this context - there is a huge difference between "Tax cuts for the rich" and "let's raise the minimum wage and expand earned-income tax credits".
Now you can argue about how likely democrats are to actually *do* that since they too are beholden to donors and think that makes you very clever but different donors have different goals so there is still a difference in the resulting policies pursued.
If that is really your concern though - then skip Clinton and vote for Sanders - the only guy who isn't taking any money from big donors and therefore won't owe any of them any favors. Trump claims to have the same virtue but in fact, he is the ultimate example of money controlling politics - he is just cutting out the middleman. Why buy politicians from the government when you can buy the government itself - that's his thinking.
State socialism failed because of dictatorship, the economy had nothing to do with the lack of freedom. Libertarian socialism produced a fantastic, industrial economy - and the most free society there has ever been. It was called Andalusia and it existed from 1920 until the start of World War 2 - even during the depression it was one of the few countries where nobody was starving. George Orwell called it "the most just and egalitarian society I have ever visted". Ultimately the war destroyed it and the region became part of Spain under a brutal dictatorship - but many larger and more powerful countries fell in that war so that says nothing about Andalusia.
On the other hand libertarianism gave us Tortuga and Somalia - the only outcomes you can ever get from it. Do you think the people of Somalia are free ? Not even slightly - because they got exactly the only thing you can EVER get if you do not have a strong government - a bunch of warlords enslaving them. That is exactly what would have happened in Tortuga if it hadn't been destroyed first - but it was already headed there when it was destroyed.
Libertarianism is a free pass to the worst kind of dictatorship of them all - multiple dictators fighting each other and using everybody else as cannon fodder. Even if it somehow worked - even if the libertarian wet dream came true and you got the industrial revolution you would soon regret it. The industrial revolution was great for a few people - for everybody else it was among the worst hell humanity has ever experienced. In London where it began - it led to the worst poverty in the entire history of that country (note: that's roughly ten times longer than American history - people in the middle ages on average lived far better than the average 19th centruy londoner did - and longer too).
Without a strong government - you are doomed to fodder for the rich, die at their whim whenever they can profit from your corpse and nobody can protect you. Your water would be undrinkable, what little food you could afford barely edible, and you'd have to share your tiny house with 50 other people and a lot of rats and roaches since killing them would be beyond your means - and that's the BEST case scenario.
Which is why, as an ACTUAL libertarian - I believe in anarchist-style direct democracy, the biggest government of all - one so big that literally nobody in the entire country is NOT involved in every law. True freedom is never, ever having to live under a law you did not get to vote on. Anybody who has to obey a law in which they had no say is not free.
And in such a world - socialism isn't achieved by force, force isn't needed - everybody votes for the socialist outcomes because they benefit everybody. The few people whom you think it may harm - well I don't care about them since their intent is to harm everybody else. Preventing harm is not anti-liberty, it's what liberty consists of.
Get it through your thick skull. The definition of libertarianism you know is wrong. Nobody outside America thinks it means what you think it means. The original meaning predates your idea by centuries.
Your claim about liberals and liberty has less virtue than what I am telling you about libertarianism. And only a complete idiot could think that without economic equality anybody will ever have any freedom at all.
Now you must be really stupid. Nobody takes a gun to take back property they already own. By your own reasoning its impossible to return land to "original owners" so your critique of the GP actually ends up being against the same people he was criticising.
Nope. Even if your idiotic reasoning was not idiotic it would not lead to the conclusion you cite. It would lead to the conclusion that the very concept of an "original" owner is ridiculous and invalidate the claims of the people you are defending just as much as you claim it invalidates the claims of native Americans. Very simply put - it would mean that the only ownership that exists at all is whoever the deed says it belongs to at this moment.
When those sacred cows are running rampant through town killing people - if you leave them alone you're an asshole and if you are angry at teh man who rounded them up and penned them you're an idiot asshole...which is why only idiotic assholes get office in the republican party these days where you can't survive unless you can manage the stink of the asshole in chief Cruz.
I didn't compare it to the distant past (and ancient never applies to anything less than 100 years old - America is centuries away from HAVING an ancient past). I compared it to the entire American history - which includes recent presidents. Reagan had 3 times as many executive orders as Obama, both bushes and Clinton had more than twice as many.
That was pretty much the essence of the request. There was another factor in my case though. Kongoni was FSF certified as fully free. Slackware is not. By mirroring - I could remove the sources for non-free pieces included with slackware.
Libertarian was coined by the French philosopher Fourier to describe his anarcho-socialism philosophy at a time when Napoleon had banned "anarchist" literature. The term literally means anarcho-socialist. The fundamental premise of libertarianism is that whenever one person wields power over another that is an act of evil which violently brutalizes them both and that economic power is no less evil than political power. Indeed most would go so far as to say that without economic equality it is impossible to ever suggest people are equal before the law.
That philosophy has centuries of history. What you Americans think the term means has less than 50 years. There has actually BEEN a libertarian socialist country (and it's economy worked fantastically thanks for asking) but the only countrys that have ever been capitalist libertarian have been such dissmal failures that libertarians desperately pretend they weren't ! It's better to have no experiment than two desperate failures. Not coincidentally both found that their populations rapidly resorted piracy in order to survive. When you're economy is devoid of any kind of safety net - those who fall on hard times will find a way to survive, and many will not be above slitting a few throaghts to do it.
You're an ignorant and uneducated fool if you think American greed worship is libertarian.
What makes you say that ? Obama has, if anything, been the least authoritative president the US has ever known. Now how much of that is due credit and how much is the result of being a lame-duck president faced with both a senate and a congress which flatly refuses to go along with anything he says - even when he is suggesting THEIR OWN IDEAS you can debate.
But the fantasy obama the republicans believe in doesn't exist. Among other things, auritarianism is simply not there. For example the only president who has ever passed *less* executive orders than Obama was William Henry Harrison and that's because he died in office barely a month after his inauguration. Even James Garfield had more and he was killed in office barely 4 months into his term.
And why I refuse to call non-socialists "libertarian".
That knife cuts both ways, but you Americans mostly don't even know that the term is centuries old and has meant anything but absolute hatred for capitalism for only the last 40 of those and even *then* almost exclusively in America.
The only *real* libertarians in America are Noam Chomsky and Bill Maher.
No politicians is perfect. None will give you *everything* you want, so I think considering how much better he is on every other policy, one I don't like is manageable. Politics is always a case of choosing the "least evil" - if you think that's cognitive dissonance then you don't know what the word means.
That said, Sander's race policies were weak at the start of the campaign, but he seriously paid attention to what activists were saying (activists which represent a minority group, and specifically the minority least likely to vote for him anyway on the basis that until he announced his candidacy most of them hadn't known he existed). Clearly he is at least relatively willing to listen to what people are telling him (an almost unbelievably rare occurrence in a politician I know)... so I would also not give up hope that if a few of the organized groups who are particularly focused on the encryption debate like the EFF and the ACLU were to make some representations to his campaign - then there is a real chance he would change his position.
Contrary to the media - I don't think it's a bad thing when a politician changes his mind. The term "flip-flop" is not a perjorative in my vocabulary, changing your mind - especially in light of new information (and "the voters hate this idea" is among the most important new information there can be) is not a bad thing - it is, in fact, the sign of wisdom and of a person who approaches life rationally. Damn America could really do with some rational politicians !
Which is why I say Donald Trump is a genius. He is actually engaged in a classic pattern of economic efficiency improvement by cutting out the middle-man. Why buy politicians from the government, when you can just buy the government itself.
My hope is that enough Americans will see through his "pander to the crazies" marketing plan to refuse to sell it to him.
Follow the money ? Well the vast majority of 9/11 Attackers were Saudis, Saudi Arabia is America's great friend despite being one of the least free countries on earth with one of the worst human rights track records. Frankly the Saudi government makes the Cuban government look positively benign by comparison - yet the latter had decades of sanctions and the former is considered a trusted friend and ally. But the money trail hasn't ended. One of America's most royal families, who happened to have provided the president at the time of the attacks, has massive holdings in the country, and Saudi's in turn are major investors in their companies.
There's your money following... 9/11 response was misplaced into two insane wars including with a country that had nothing to with it whatsoever because the one country the US really COULD have had a just war with over those events was somebody who made some very powerful politicians very, very rich.
Leopold the 1st of Belgium. His death-toll was just short of twice what Hitler did after all.
So I propose an Ammendment to Godwin's law: In the event that somebody who actually knows the history of Leopold were to bring him up in a discussion that was about NAZIs in the first place, Godwin's law will apply.
It also applies to this post in which the idea was first suggested.
> the original manuscripts were never actually published until a critical scholarly edition came out in 1986. That doesn't actually matter. Copyright is automatic, and exists from the time of creation - not the time of publication. That's a Berne Convention standard so no signatory country's laws (and that includes all of Europe) can fail to comply with it.
As it stands, the diary as it is generally read in the US is severely abridged. Frank's original included significant discussion of all the other things that a girl going through puberty tends to experience - including sex drive and masturbation (and how this is affected by the kind of conditions she was living in).
Those bits are usually left out of the version used in schools, which is the only version most Americans have ever read - which is a bloody tragedy.
Then again - I bet most anti-refugee republicans have read the book while attending school, and I also bet none of them know that the Frank family had applied for refugee access to the USA before the war and been denied... I don't think they realize the irony of having once felt such sympathy with that young victim while now actively campaigning to create a whole new generation of her.
The few who do would probably think it's hillarious to say something "like thank goodness for people like us then since clearly being a xenophobic asshole leads to the creation of rare and exceptional literature".
Staying out of the discussion but I just want to point out that trusting Microsoft on anything at all is an extremely risky endeavor, up to and including their dictionary.
CO1 is inherently unstable and will bond with oxygen to form CO2 fairly rapidly. That's why we don't have a major CO1 air polution problem - CO1 is basically the past tense of CO2. It's also why carbon monoxide is more toxic than CO2. CO2 will choke you but at least it doesn't accelerate the process by absorbing the oxygen you breathed in with it before you can.
>So if pretty much every manufacturer is doing this, how is this not equal to a kind of mass civic protest?
Well, if Bernie Madoff were to resist arrest - and then every other convicted fraudster in the US resisted incarceration or tried to escape all at once... would you also consider *that* an example of legitimate civic protest ?
Sure you *can* protest for the right to harm others - but that doesn't mean your protest deserves anything but scorn from those others or lawmakers. At best this is "protest" in the same way that the South's seccession to preserve slavery and actively oppose states-rights (the claim that it was defending states rights is flagrantly ahistorical bullshit - it was in fact opposing the rights of states like Maine to *not* respect their slave-laws and not feel compelled to return runaways) was a civic protest - it still deservedly got suppressed.
Your rights end where mine begins. All pollution intrudes on my rights, we may grant a license for some on the basis of wanting the outcomes of the polluting process but you never get a *right* to do it because you are harming others, you get a limited license granted under specific conditions to minimize the harm suffered by the allowance. If you overstep those limits by any degree whatsoever you are the enemy of freedom - no matter what republican politicians say.
Slashdot Mirror
Molten Salt did ultimately find a place though - just not in nuclear, the best tech we have for large scale centralized solar is molten-salt towers.
Well, seems only fair, considering the world bank has estimated the true total subsidies that fossil fuels receive globally at around 5 trillion dollars a year. That's well over 10% of the entire world's GDP spent on fossil subsidies.
I think the other energy companies can get rather a *lot* more before they get anywhere close to parity. Of course, unless there *is* parity, the market cannot possibly be said to be "free". Since this is decidedly not the case - the real way to look at it is how impressive it is that renewables are doing so well when they get so LITTLE subsidies compared to the competition. The only plausible explanation is that they are literally numerous orders of magnitude better for consumers - and that's today.
The very fact that you use phrases like "alternative" and "traditional" to describe energy sources destroys any credibility your argument may have had. Energy sources are a matter of engineering - tradition has no place in the discussion except as something to avoid like the plague. Engineering is an excercise in progress - literally the thing that "tradition" exists to impede.
You forgot Lemmy - that's 3 already.
Because the actual policies they pursue is important.
In this context - there is a huge difference between "Tax cuts for the rich" and "let's raise the minimum wage and expand earned-income tax credits".
Now you can argue about how likely democrats are to actually *do* that since they too are beholden to donors and think that makes you very clever but different donors have different goals so there is still a difference in the resulting policies pursued.
If that is really your concern though - then skip Clinton and vote for Sanders - the only guy who isn't taking any money from big donors and therefore won't owe any of them any favors.
Trump claims to have the same virtue but in fact, he is the ultimate example of money controlling politics - he is just cutting out the middleman. Why buy politicians from the government when you can buy the government itself - that's his thinking.
State socialism failed because of dictatorship, the economy had nothing to do with the lack of freedom.
Libertarian socialism produced a fantastic, industrial economy - and the most free society there has ever been. It was called Andalusia and it existed from 1920 until the start of World War 2 - even during the depression it was one of the few countries where nobody was starving. George Orwell called it "the most just and egalitarian society I have ever visted".
Ultimately the war destroyed it and the region became part of Spain under a brutal dictatorship - but many larger and more powerful countries fell in that war so that says nothing about Andalusia.
On the other hand libertarianism gave us Tortuga and Somalia - the only outcomes you can ever get from it. Do you think the people of Somalia are free ? Not even slightly - because they got exactly the only thing you can EVER get if you do not have a strong government - a bunch of warlords enslaving them. That is exactly what would have happened in Tortuga if it hadn't been destroyed first - but it was already headed there when it was destroyed.
Libertarianism is a free pass to the worst kind of dictatorship of them all - multiple dictators fighting each other and using everybody else as cannon fodder. Even if it somehow worked - even if the libertarian wet dream came true and you got the industrial revolution you would soon regret it. The industrial revolution was great for a few people - for everybody else it was among the worst hell humanity has ever experienced. In London where it began - it led to the worst poverty in the entire history of that country (note: that's roughly ten times longer than American history - people in the middle ages on average lived far better than the average 19th centruy londoner did - and longer too).
Without a strong government - you are doomed to fodder for the rich, die at their whim whenever they can profit from your corpse and nobody can protect you. Your water would be undrinkable, what little food you could afford barely edible, and you'd have to share your tiny house with 50 other people and a lot of rats and roaches since killing them would be beyond your means - and that's the BEST case scenario.
Which is why, as an ACTUAL libertarian - I believe in anarchist-style direct democracy, the biggest government of all - one so big that literally nobody in the entire country is NOT involved in every law.
True freedom is never, ever having to live under a law you did not get to vote on. Anybody who has to obey a law in which they had no say is not free.
And in such a world - socialism isn't achieved by force, force isn't needed - everybody votes for the socialist outcomes because they benefit everybody. The few people whom you think it may harm - well I don't care about them since their intent is to harm everybody else. Preventing harm is not anti-liberty, it's what liberty consists of.
Get it through your thick skull. The definition of libertarianism you know is wrong. Nobody outside America thinks it means what you think it means. The original meaning predates your idea by centuries.
Your claim about liberals and liberty has less virtue than what I am telling you about libertarianism. And only a complete idiot could think that without economic equality anybody will ever have any freedom at all.
Now you must be really stupid. Nobody takes a gun to take back property they already own. By your own reasoning its impossible to return land to "original owners" so your critique of the GP actually ends up being against the same people he was criticising.
Nope. Even if your idiotic reasoning was not idiotic it would not lead to the conclusion you cite.
It would lead to the conclusion that the very concept of an "original" owner is ridiculous and invalidate the claims of the people you are defending just as much as you claim it invalidates the claims of native Americans.
Very simply put - it would mean that the only ownership that exists at all is whoever the deed says it belongs to at this moment.
When those sacred cows are running rampant through town killing people - if you leave them alone you're an asshole and if you are angry at teh man who rounded them up and penned them you're an idiot asshole...which is why only idiotic assholes get office in the republican party these days where you can't survive unless you can manage the stink of the asshole in chief Cruz.
I didn't compare it to the distant past (and ancient never applies to anything less than 100 years old - America is centuries away from HAVING an ancient past). I compared it to the entire American history - which includes recent presidents. Reagan had 3 times as many executive orders as Obama, both bushes and Clinton had more than twice as many.
That was pretty much the essence of the request.
There was another factor in my case though. Kongoni was FSF certified as fully free. Slackware is not. By mirroring - I could remove the sources for non-free pieces included with slackware.
Libertarian was coined by the French philosopher Fourier to describe his anarcho-socialism philosophy at a time when Napoleon had banned "anarchist" literature. The term literally means anarcho-socialist. The fundamental premise of libertarianism is that whenever one person wields power over another that is an act of evil which violently brutalizes them both and that economic power is no less evil than political power. Indeed most would go so far as to say that without economic equality it is impossible to ever suggest people are equal before the law.
That philosophy has centuries of history. What you Americans think the term means has less than 50 years. There has actually BEEN a libertarian socialist country (and it's economy worked fantastically thanks for asking) but the only countrys that have ever been capitalist libertarian have been such dissmal failures that libertarians desperately pretend they weren't ! It's better to have no experiment than two desperate failures. Not coincidentally both found that their populations rapidly resorted piracy in order to survive. When you're economy is devoid of any kind of safety net - those who fall on hard times will find a way to survive, and many will not be above slitting a few throaghts to do it.
You're an ignorant and uneducated fool if you think American greed worship is libertarian.
What makes you say that ? Obama has, if anything, been the least authoritative president the US has ever known.
Now how much of that is due credit and how much is the result of being a lame-duck president faced with both a senate and a congress which flatly refuses to go along with anything he says - even when he is suggesting THEIR OWN IDEAS you can debate.
But the fantasy obama the republicans believe in doesn't exist. Among other things, auritarianism is simply not there. For example the only president who has ever passed *less* executive orders than Obama was William Henry Harrison and that's because he died in office barely a month after his inauguration. Even James Garfield had more and he was killed in office barely 4 months into his term.
Mea culpa. Memory aint what it used to be I guess.
And why I refuse to call non-socialists "libertarian".
That knife cuts both ways, but you Americans mostly don't even know that the term is centuries old and has meant anything but absolute hatred for capitalism for only the last 40 of those and even *then* almost exclusively in America.
The only *real* libertarians in America are Noam Chomsky and Bill Maher.
No politicians is perfect. None will give you *everything* you want, so I think considering how much better he is on every other policy, one I don't like is manageable. Politics is always a case of choosing the "least evil" - if you think that's cognitive dissonance then you don't know what the word means.
That said, Sander's race policies were weak at the start of the campaign, but he seriously paid attention to what activists were saying (activists which represent a minority group, and specifically the minority least likely to vote for him anyway on the basis that until he announced his candidacy most of them hadn't known he existed).
Clearly he is at least relatively willing to listen to what people are telling him (an almost unbelievably rare occurrence in a politician I know)... so I would also not give up hope that if a few of the organized groups who are particularly focused on the encryption debate like the EFF and the ACLU were to make some representations to his campaign - then there is a real chance he would change his position.
Contrary to the media - I don't think it's a bad thing when a politician changes his mind. The term "flip-flop" is not a perjorative in my vocabulary, changing your mind - especially in light of new information (and "the voters hate this idea" is among the most important new information there can be) is not a bad thing - it is, in fact, the sign of wisdom and of a person who approaches life rationally. Damn America could really do with some rational politicians !
Which is why I say Donald Trump is a genius. He is actually engaged in a classic pattern of economic efficiency improvement by cutting out the middle-man. Why buy politicians from the government, when you can just buy the government itself.
My hope is that enough Americans will see through his "pander to the crazies" marketing plan to refuse to sell it to him.
Follow the money ? Well the vast majority of 9/11 Attackers were Saudis, Saudi Arabia is America's great friend despite being one of the least free countries on earth with one of the worst human rights track records.
Frankly the Saudi government makes the Cuban government look positively benign by comparison - yet the latter had decades of sanctions and the former is considered a trusted friend and ally.
But the money trail hasn't ended. One of America's most royal families, who happened to have provided the president at the time of the attacks, has massive holdings in the country, and Saudi's in turn are major investors in their companies.
There's your money following... 9/11 response was misplaced into two insane wars including with a country that had nothing to with it whatsoever because the one country the US really COULD have had a just war with over those events was somebody who made some very powerful politicians very, very rich.
Leopold the 1st of Belgium. His death-toll was just short of twice what Hitler did after all.
So I propose an Ammendment to Godwin's law:
In the event that somebody who actually knows the history of Leopold were to bring him up in a discussion that was about NAZIs in the first place, Godwin's law will apply.
It also applies to this post in which the idea was first suggested.
> the original manuscripts were never actually published until a critical scholarly edition came out in 1986.
That doesn't actually matter. Copyright is automatic, and exists from the time of creation - not the time of publication. That's a Berne Convention standard so no signatory country's laws (and that includes all of Europe) can fail to comply with it.
As it stands, the diary as it is generally read in the US is severely abridged. Frank's original included significant discussion of all the other things that a girl going through puberty tends to experience - including sex drive and masturbation (and how this is affected by the kind of conditions she was living in).
Those bits are usually left out of the version used in schools, which is the only version most Americans have ever read - which is a bloody tragedy.
Then again - I bet most anti-refugee republicans have read the book while attending school, and I also bet none of them know that the Frank family had applied for refugee access to the USA before the war and been denied... I don't think they realize the irony of having once felt such sympathy with that young victim while now actively campaigning to create a whole new generation of her.
The few who do would probably think it's hillarious to say something "like thank goodness for people like us then since clearly being a xenophobic asshole leads to the creation of rare and exceptional literature".
Staying out of the discussion but I just want to point out that trusting Microsoft on anything at all is an extremely risky endeavor, up to and including their dictionary.
CO1 is inherently unstable and will bond with oxygen to form CO2 fairly rapidly. That's why we don't have a major CO1 air polution problem - CO1 is basically the past tense of CO2. It's also why carbon monoxide is more toxic than CO2. CO2 will choke you but at least it doesn't accelerate the process by absorbing the oxygen you breathed in with it before you can.
>So if pretty much every manufacturer is doing this, how is this not equal to a kind of mass civic protest?
Well, if Bernie Madoff were to resist arrest - and then every other convicted fraudster in the US resisted incarceration or tried to escape all at once... would you also consider *that* an example of legitimate civic protest ?
Sure you *can* protest for the right to harm others - but that doesn't mean your protest deserves anything but scorn from those others or lawmakers. At best this is "protest" in the same way that the South's seccession to preserve slavery and actively oppose states-rights (the claim that it was defending states rights is flagrantly ahistorical bullshit - it was in fact opposing the rights of states like Maine to *not* respect their slave-laws and not feel compelled to return runaways) was a civic protest - it still deservedly got suppressed.
Your rights end where mine begins. All pollution intrudes on my rights, we may grant a license for some on the basis of wanting the outcomes of the polluting process but you never get a *right* to do it because you are harming others, you get a limited license granted under specific conditions to minimize the harm suffered by the allowance. If you overstep those limits by any degree whatsoever you are the enemy of freedom - no matter what republican politicians say.