I doubt very much we have that much. The average life expectancy of a species is 10 million years - we'are already there (depending how you define 'human'). But a billion years ? Highly unlikely. A few species that old exist, but they are the one or two out of hundreds of millions - the odds are definitely against us.
That does raise the suggestion that - when this happens, as it starts at least, the animals that replace us will evolve for this ever hotter climate. It's not entirely unreasonable to think there will be life here until the sun swallows the earth up entirely - or not too long (relatively speaking) before. Human life - doubt it.
And... how many other people among your relatives were living in similar conditions ? Your parents ? All your life ? When you're second or third generation poor person - you've been raised by people who had limited choices and even more limited finances - and thus had neither the means nor the possibility of learning good financial planning. You can't teach your children things you do not know yourself.
Sure, maybe better financial planning would help the poor - maybe it's possible to save tiny bits even on their incomes and be able to uplift themselves... but for that to be a possibility the skillset involved needs to be taught. If there is any truth to the idea - then the argument that follows is that financial planning should be a public school subject in every grade from K through 12 to teach these skills. Even though I suspect you are extrapolating from anecdote and it's just not true for most poor people, I would still favour that as it can only help (I doubt it is a cure, but it may help make a cure easier to reach).
So maybe ask yourself - why isn't it ? Why is there hardly a public school on earth that teaches the subject of financial management at all ? Why do we not teach people how interest works - and how evil credit cards are, how to do sound financial planning and staggered buying and how to tell good debt from bad ? Could it be because if we did - there wouldn't be a ready supply of desperate people willing to work for cheap and unable to negotiate anything in their contracts to their favour because there are 500 other hopefuls wanting the job ? Could it be because, without that resource, the elites would make rather less money ? I'm not even sure that's true, cheaper labour does save a business money - but it also costs it income. Every low paid worker in the world is one less potential customer for whatever you're selling.
Hell, I refuse to believe we're the best EARTH can do. If the best didn't exist in the 4.3 billion years before we showed up - it will exist in the expected 5-billion odd years after we're long gone.
That is correct, meerkat is a loanword in English from Afrikaans (there aren't many but this is one of the few - others include zebra and veld), KAT was the first, tiny stage of the array, and 'meer' is the Afrikaans for 'more' (also for 'lake' for some reason) - meerKAT then is, indeed, a cute and clever name.
And the control code to keep all those dishes synchronized (critical for arrays), and the code to analyze and combine the signals and... oh every other piece of code they have - is all written in Python.
It's been tried. Before his presidential run in this election Lessig tried it in the last one. He created a crowdfunded superpac with the idea of having that superpac donate only to politicians who would commit to campaign finance reform. It didn't manage to make enough to actually buy any politicians though.
Bernie did much better with crowdfunding though (he outperformed Hillary financing wise) - so it could just be that Lessig had a great idea without great execution ?
That was sort of my point. Food theft from stores are harshly prosecuted. Food theft from residences are not so we dont actually know how common they are. They probably are less common but only because its easier to enter a public store than a private residence.
Don't be so sure. To maintain current average economic growth - our energy requirements would skyrocket so much that, even if we can eventually get all our machines at thermodynamic theoretical maximum efficiency) the total energy from the sun could not power it - how long would that take ? Less than 100 years.
I would argue that there are two reasons for it: Firstly, few individuals report a theft of food. You're unlikely to get it back even if they do catch the guy and most of us don't begrudge a hungry person that much for doing what they had to, to stay alive. Hell I had food stolen out of my freezer yesterday, and I never called the cops. I am looking at improved security because I do not like the idea of people breaking into my home - the next one may have more than some frozen meat in mind, but I didn't do anything to catch them.
Secondly - when they do get caught, they tend to go to jail. In fact, it's far more likely to get a long term jail sentence for stealing a loaf of bread than for stealing 90% of a bank's money. This is because the only people who can steal 90% of a bank's money are the executives - and they can afford super fancy lawyers and pocket politicians.
Finally - once gone to jail, food and shelter are no longer a problem. There are lots of other problems and prison is hell and anybody who claims otherwise has no idea what they are talking about, but starvation is no longer a risk. For many people - well fed hell beats hunger in paradise.
>People making choices about their own lives do in fact frequently fall into short-term thinking
The poor - generally - have no choice either way. Your capacity to do long term planning is directly dependent on the state of things right now. If your available income can barely put a roof over your head and food in your stomach, you don't have anything left to save for a rainy day. If the only choices you can afford to make in the short term are between a can of baked beans or a can of sweetcorn for dinner (which cost the same at the bargain end of the shelf) then you have no capacity to plan beyond that. Simply put, it only becomes possible to do long term planning when short-term survival is near guaranteed.
And a cheaper replacement. Most of the cost of social services is spent on the supporting bureaucracy to filter out who should and should not get the money. None of that bureaucracy is needed with a basic income since there isn't anybody who shouldn't get it.
Not all historic patterns repeat and NONE repeat indefinitely.
Just because "it always happened that way before" does not mean it will happen that way this time - it NEVER means that. You have to look at the facts of every case individually and see how the forces on the system have changed to make a reasonable prediction about whether the same outcome is likely to happen again. History can only tell you what would happen ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL - when it's a long time pattern, you can get a very broad list of things that didn't change the outcome - where there are multiple cases where contra-movements in those things never changed it, you can start ruling them out from analysis.
Yes, in the past automation has always ended up creating more jobs than it took. But there are a lot of really good reasons to doubt that pattern will happen this time. It is also worth noting that major economic restructuring has never happened painlessly - it usually involves a whole lot of dead people as wars, revolutions and plain old famines grow out of the desperation of the masses who cannot adapt as fast as the economy. If anything the rate at which economic shifts can happen have accelerated while the rate at which people can adapt have decreased (we need far more - and thus longer - education to learn a new career now). So we can anticipate that the growing pains of this shift will be far larger and bloodier than in the past. Having anticipated that- the question becomes: what do we do about it ? Do we declare it inevitable and just hope to live through it (libertarians would not see the problem with this - since they assume they will not only live through it but end up on top of the pile after) ? Do we try to establish mitigating policies to help ease the transition ? Do we try to slow the rate of transition (this seems to be the route governments are currently taking - kicking back against things like minimum wage increases is mostly motivated by deliberately trying to keep the cost of labor as low as possible [even if you then have to subsidize working people with wellfare] in order to make the economic advantages of automation less extreme and encourage companies to do it slower) - or do we see it as an opportunity to actually use this wave to build something even better than what would have naturally come out of it ?
And all that is true REGARDLESS of whether the long term pattern holds or breaks.
that we keep trying the same policies that have failed to achieve this for over 2 centuries. In politics, consistent failure is never a reason to abandon a policy - that's why we still have austerity policies despite 2 centuries during which every time it was implemented it utterly failed to achieve it's stated goal (austerity makes deficits worse and debts higher - because it decreases income more than it can ever decrease expenses. It's the national economic equivalent of burning your paycheck to save on your heating bill).
>1)It wasn't a separate vote, it was a UK vote. The result was the result like it or not for the UK. If you lose a vote you can't just pick up you ball and go do whatever anyway. It doesn't work like that.
You should tell Texas that - they threaten secession every time a democrat wins the white house. The difference of course is that, unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland - there isn't a pre-existing and well defined protocol that allows for Texas to leave the union and form an independent country if enough Texans support it. The last time states tried to do so - it led to a civil war. It's unlikely that if Scotland chose to leave the UK they UK would start a war to force them to stay and not only because the UK's nukes are all in Scotland and the Scots would obviously cease them if a war happen and basically get to say "End the war or London is a glass parking lot". After centuries of war and conquest the system of today was formed - which makes Scottland's membership of the UK voluntary and they still have their own parliament, laws and their own legal system (which is markedly different from the English one). If they wanted to leave the UK entirely (which would basically come down to replacing the Queen with a President or something and no longer being subject to English foreign policy or treaties) they have the legal right and means to do so. There are areas where becoming sovereign is an easy option to allow you to avoid being forced into something voted for by others - and areas where it is not. But your claims is a major oversimplification of reality at best, an outright lie at worst.
>2)The PM wasn't ousted he quit because he didn't want to deal with this mess he got us into. Well he was a terrible PM, getting rid of him is a good thing - but her track record suggests the BEST we can hope for is for May to be AS BAD as he was.
>3) When such a big decision comes out so close to a 50/50 split and pretty much all of the experts agree the 'wrong' side won, not least because of massive lies told during the campaign that were admitted to be lies on result day and the protest vote factor it's not quite as definitive as some people might like to imply. If there is something key missing from modern day representative democracies it is a way to instantly punish failures to follow through on election promises. Imagine if - as part of the campaign a party had to publicly publish draft legislation for each election promise they made - and all of this automatically got agenda'd in parliament/congress if they won. Where it could get amended (but not so it fails to fulfill the promise - which a court challenge could judge) or lose but there would simply be no option NOT to introduce it. And if you walk back a promise after a vote the vote is automatically invalidated. The first brexit promise to be walked back happened less than an hour after the results - by the end of the weekend they had walked back every promise they made, with zero intention of making any of them happen. That alone ought to invalidate the result. Now it's possible that leave could win without those lies - but I strongly doubt it, failing to implement (or at least table legislation) to achieve a promise made should invalidate the election and lead to an automatic revote.
>Picking between the UK and US electoral systems is like narrowing yourself to a choice between Stalin and Hitler as your leader when you could instead go with a 3rd option and just have Churchill.
While I thoroughly agree with your post - your choice of a 'good' third choice was terrible. Churchill was one of the worst leaders in world history. He willfully starved over 3 million children in India and when called out for it said 'let the Indians learn to take care of themselves, like we did' - which ignored that they HAD. The Indian government had over thousands of years developed a system to protect themselves from famines during that part of the monsoon cycle where you get several years of consecutive drought (which comes around ever few decades). They mandated a minimum percentage of crops be storeable crops (grains generally) which were kept in central storage locations and handed out in times of drought. It was Britain who dismantled this system - the empire demanded cash crops like cotton over storeable food crops like grains, and didn't store anything for droughts. When drought inevitably came - it came with famines. The one under Churchill was merely the last one - in total the British dismantling of India's food security program killed close to 20 million people (mostly children) over numerous famines. He was also the first head of state to ever use chemical weapons - and he used them on civilians.
In short - Churchil was a truly terrible person, he only looks good because the guy opposite him is literally Hitler.
That's an interesting scenario - but it may not strictly violate either. A reimplementation is generally deemed not to violate copyright or constitute plagiarism. This is one reason why Stallman argues (and I agree) that we need more refined copyright laws that differentiates between different types of information and works. It doesn't make sense to apply the same rules to a novel, a painting, a technical manual, an engineering schematic and a software program. They all have entirely different economics, different ways in which copying and creating derivatives change the social-good and usefullness and commercial value.
There is no reasonable reason, for example, to allow derivative works of editorial articles - if anything such could be used to utterly misrepresent the original author's ideas and actually cause a social harm, on the other hand they are definitely something which SHOULD be subjected to satire.
It is entirely possible to commit plagiarism without copying anything - but it's not possible to violate copyright law without copying something. Using a source in your thesis is not copyright violation - especially if you don't quote it directly but merely restate what you learned as part of your new argument, but it can still be plagiarism if you fail to cite the source. You may or may not face criminal charges for that - but you sure as hell can expect to get kicked out of university if you're caught.
Then, on top of this, there is the fact that both copyright and plagiarism laws are extremely inconsistently enforced. If they weren't Rand Paul would have been charged - he was caught, and the evidence is easily visible, with multiple occasions of flagrantly copying other people's work and presenting it as his own for commercial and political gain, which is clearly both plagiarism and copyright violation.
I understand that most places do not have criminal sanctions for plagiarism - but that doesn't mean it's legal or not a crime, it just means it isn't punished. This is not unusual. Portugal has effectively legalized all drugs yet there isn't a single one of the drugs in the UN anti-drug treaty (of which Portugal is a signatory) which is not against the law - it's just that they do not punish you. If you're caught with any drug you are requested to attend an (entirely voluntary) counselling session. Should you choose to go - they will give you a questionaire and ultimately categorize you as 'addict', 'recreational' or 'one-time' user. Depending on the categorisation they will recommend a follow up - from excellent rehab programs to just saying 'be careful - it's better if you don't use it again'. But again - the follow ups are also voluntary. Rehab is free for addicts if you choose to go, nobody will force you. No jail sentence. No threats. It's even all done anonymously so your employment cannot be put at risk (interestingly it's been remarkably successful - since instituting the program Portugal cut heroine abuse by 90% - from one of the worst heroine problems on earth to one of the lowest). Which is all a really elaborate example of how something can be a crime without carrying any criminal sanctions or penalties. If the aim of the law is to discourage some kind of behaviour - then punishment is not always the most effective way to do that. In the case of plagiarism actually jailing or fining people is probably not the most effective way to discourage it. Firstly universities will usually kick out students caught plagiarising, and publishers generally fire people who get caught doing that - so there's already a pretty strong disincentive in society, it's debateable if criminal sanctions would add anything significant to that. Laws can get even more complex - copyright is a criminal offense in some cases and in some jurisdictions and a purely civil offence in others, ditto plagiarism. In South Africa you can be criminally prosecuted and fined for plagiarism but non-commercial copyright violation is a purely civil offense. In some places plagiarism is part of the same law, in other places it's a separate law entirely. But to the best of my knowledge - nowhere is it a legal activity.
That I have no problem with, at least if it's sufficiently minimal so as to not be a de facto slave labour force. 2 years should be an upper limit. Germany has such a system and it works fantastically - young kids perform service (at a low but decent pay) in areas of their interest and walk away with some real work experence between graduating school or university and hitting the job market. A German friend of mine who is now a programmer did his service in the government IT department for example. But the military is a different beast altogether and I have issues with forcing anybody into that. The US allowed exception to the forced combat during the draft years only for people who were from pacifist religions generally. Amish and Quakers and such would become messengers or radio operators instead - which was still military but at least didn't pull triggers themselves. I'm not entirely sure what the US laws around conscientious objectors were - but as far as I can tell if you were an atheist pacifist like me you were fucked.
The draft got them soldiers - but taxes put bullets in their guns, fuel in their tanks and food in their stomachs.
For that matter - the draft is yet another thing only the government can do. When corporations do that we call it slavery.
>one major improvement (IMO) in the last 50 years has been the abolishment of compulsory military service in the US. Maybe that won't last, but I do think it's worth a few extra tax dollars to not have to give up an arbitrary number of children to "the front lines," and we should try to keep it that way.
I absolutely agree. Compulsory military service is an abomination. Nobody should ever be forced to kill - even legally with government sanction - who did not volunteer to bare the terrible burden that entails.
>Maybe we can just "recruit" them with Call of Duty EULA clauses now? With the degree of crony capitalism and public private partnerships in the US... this is a frighteningly real possiblity.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt very much we have that much. The average life expectancy of a species is 10 million years - we'are already there (depending how you define 'human'). But a billion years ? Highly unlikely. A few species that old exist, but they are the one or two out of hundreds of millions - the odds are definitely against us.
That does raise the suggestion that - when this happens, as it starts at least, the animals that replace us will evolve for this ever hotter climate. It's not entirely unreasonable to think there will be life here until the sun swallows the earth up entirely - or not too long (relatively speaking) before. Human life - doubt it.
And... how many other people among your relatives were living in similar conditions ? Your parents ? All your life ? When you're second or third generation poor person - you've been raised by people who had limited choices and even more limited finances - and thus had neither the means nor the possibility of learning good financial planning. You can't teach your children things you do not know yourself.
Sure, maybe better financial planning would help the poor - maybe it's possible to save tiny bits even on their incomes and be able to uplift themselves... but for that to be a possibility the skillset involved needs to be taught. If there is any truth to the idea - then the argument that follows is that financial planning should be a public school subject in every grade from K through 12 to teach these skills.
Even though I suspect you are extrapolating from anecdote and it's just not true for most poor people, I would still favour that as it can only help (I doubt it is a cure, but it may help make a cure easier to reach).
So maybe ask yourself - why isn't it ? Why is there hardly a public school on earth that teaches the subject of financial management at all ? Why do we not teach people how interest works - and how evil credit cards are, how to do sound financial planning and staggered buying and how to tell good debt from bad ? Could it be because if we did - there wouldn't be a ready supply of desperate people willing to work for cheap and unable to negotiate anything in their contracts to their favour because there are 500 other hopefuls wanting the job ? Could it be because, without that resource, the elites would make rather less money ? I'm not even sure that's true, cheaper labour does save a business money - but it also costs it income. Every low paid worker in the world is one less potential customer for whatever you're selling.
Hell, I refuse to believe we're the best EARTH can do. If the best didn't exist in the 4.3 billion years before we showed up - it will exist in the expected 5-billion odd years after we're long gone.
That is correct, meerkat is a loanword in English from Afrikaans (there aren't many but this is one of the few - others include zebra and veld), KAT was the first, tiny stage of the array, and 'meer' is the Afrikaans for 'more' (also for 'lake' for some reason) - meerKAT then is, indeed, a cute and clever name.
Douglas Adams begs to differ.
And the control code to keep all those dishes synchronized (critical for arrays), and the code to analyze and combine the signals and... oh every other piece of code they have - is all written in Python.
It's been tried. Before his presidential run in this election Lessig tried it in the last one. He created a crowdfunded superpac with the idea of having that superpac donate only to politicians who would commit to campaign finance reform. It didn't manage to make enough to actually buy any politicians though.
Bernie did much better with crowdfunding though (he outperformed Hillary financing wise) - so it could just be that Lessig had a great idea without great execution ?
I'm a man. So if I'm a homosexual and a motherfucker... that makes your mom a man too.
That was sort of my point. Food theft from stores are harshly prosecuted. Food theft from residences are not so we dont actually know how common they are. They probably are less common but only because its easier to enter a public store than a private residence.
Don't be so sure. To maintain current average economic growth - our energy requirements would skyrocket so much that, even if we can eventually get all our machines at thermodynamic theoretical maximum efficiency) the total energy from the sun could not power it - how long would that take ? Less than 100 years.
Here's the detailed maths from the source:
Required pre-reading
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
And on to the economics:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
I would argue that there are two reasons for it:
Firstly, few individuals report a theft of food. You're unlikely to get it back even if they do catch the guy and most of us don't begrudge a hungry person that much for doing what they had to, to stay alive. Hell I had food stolen out of my freezer yesterday, and I never called the cops. I am looking at improved security because I do not like the idea of people breaking into my home - the next one may have more than some frozen meat in mind, but I didn't do anything to catch them.
Secondly - when they do get caught, they tend to go to jail. In fact, it's far more likely to get a long term jail sentence for stealing a loaf of bread than for stealing 90% of a bank's money. This is because the only people who can steal 90% of a bank's money are the executives - and they can afford super fancy lawyers and pocket politicians.
Finally - once gone to jail, food and shelter are no longer a problem. There are lots of other problems and prison is hell and anybody who claims otherwise has no idea what they are talking about, but starvation is no longer a risk. For many people - well fed hell beats hunger in paradise.
>People making choices about their own lives do in fact frequently fall into short-term thinking
The poor - generally - have no choice either way. Your capacity to do long term planning is directly dependent on the state of things right now. If your available income can barely put a roof over your head and food in your stomach, you don't have anything left to save for a rainy day. If the only choices you can afford to make in the short term are between a can of baked beans or a can of sweetcorn for dinner (which cost the same at the bargain end of the shelf) then you have no capacity to plan beyond that. Simply put, it only becomes possible to do long term planning when short-term survival is near guaranteed.
And a cheaper replacement. Most of the cost of social services is spent on the supporting bureaucracy to filter out who should and should not get the money. None of that bureaucracy is needed with a basic income since there isn't anybody who shouldn't get it.
Not all historic patterns repeat and NONE repeat indefinitely.
Just because "it always happened that way before" does not mean it will happen that way this time - it NEVER means that. You have to look at the facts of every case individually and see how the forces on the system have changed to make a reasonable prediction about whether the same outcome is likely to happen again. History can only tell you what would happen ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL - when it's a long time pattern, you can get a very broad list of things that didn't change the outcome - where there are multiple cases where contra-movements in those things never changed it, you can start ruling them out from analysis.
Yes, in the past automation has always ended up creating more jobs than it took. But there are a lot of really good reasons to doubt that pattern will happen this time. It is also worth noting that major economic restructuring has never happened painlessly - it usually involves a whole lot of dead people as wars, revolutions and plain old famines grow out of the desperation of the masses who cannot adapt as fast as the economy.
If anything the rate at which economic shifts can happen have accelerated while the rate at which people can adapt have decreased (we need far more - and thus longer - education to learn a new career now). So we can anticipate that the growing pains of this shift will be far larger and bloodier than in the past. Having anticipated that- the question becomes: what do we do about it ?
Do we declare it inevitable and just hope to live through it (libertarians would not see the problem with this - since they assume they will not only live through it but end up on top of the pile after) ? Do we try to establish mitigating policies to help ease the transition ? Do we try to slow the rate of transition (this seems to be the route governments are currently taking - kicking back against things like minimum wage increases is mostly motivated by deliberately trying to keep the cost of labor as low as possible [even if you then have to subsidize working people with wellfare] in order to make the economic advantages of automation less extreme and encourage companies to do it slower) - or do we see it as an opportunity to actually use this wave to build something even better than what would have naturally come out of it ?
And all that is true REGARDLESS of whether the long term pattern holds or breaks.
that we keep trying the same policies that have failed to achieve this for over 2 centuries. In politics, consistent failure is never a reason to abandon a policy - that's why we still have austerity policies despite 2 centuries during which every time it was implemented it utterly failed to achieve it's stated goal (austerity makes deficits worse and debts higher - because it decreases income more than it can ever decrease expenses. It's the national economic equivalent of burning your paycheck to save on your heating bill).
>The vote in Scotland and Northern Ireland was bordering on 50% too
Only if you combine them - which doesn't make any sense. By itself Scotland OVERWHELMINGLY voted remain - closer to 60%.
>1)It wasn't a separate vote, it was a UK vote. The result was the result like it or not for the UK. If you lose a vote you can't just pick up you ball and go do whatever anyway. It doesn't work like that.
You should tell Texas that - they threaten secession every time a democrat wins the white house. The difference of course is that, unlike Scotland and Northern Ireland - there isn't a pre-existing and well defined protocol that allows for Texas to leave the union and form an independent country if enough Texans support it. The last time states tried to do so - it led to a civil war. It's unlikely that if Scotland chose to leave the UK they UK would start a war to force them to stay and not only because the UK's nukes are all in Scotland and the Scots would obviously cease them if a war happen and basically get to say "End the war or London is a glass parking lot".
After centuries of war and conquest the system of today was formed - which makes Scottland's membership of the UK voluntary and they still have their own parliament, laws and their own legal system (which is markedly different from the English one). If they wanted to leave the UK entirely (which would basically come down to replacing the Queen with a President or something and no longer being subject to English foreign policy or treaties) they have the legal right and means to do so.
There are areas where becoming sovereign is an easy option to allow you to avoid being forced into something voted for by others - and areas where it is not. But your claims is a major oversimplification of reality at best, an outright lie at worst.
>2)The PM wasn't ousted he quit because he didn't want to deal with this mess he got us into.
Well he was a terrible PM, getting rid of him is a good thing - but her track record suggests the BEST we can hope for is for May to be AS BAD as he was.
>3) When such a big decision comes out so close to a 50/50 split and pretty much all of the experts agree the 'wrong' side won, not least because of massive lies told during the campaign that were admitted to be lies on result day and the protest vote factor it's not quite as definitive as some people might like to imply.
If there is something key missing from modern day representative democracies it is a way to instantly punish failures to follow through on election promises. Imagine if - as part of the campaign a party had to publicly publish draft legislation for each election promise they made - and all of this automatically got agenda'd in parliament/congress if they won. Where it could get amended (but not so it fails to fulfill the promise - which a court challenge could judge) or lose but there would simply be no option NOT to introduce it. And if you walk back a promise after a vote the vote is automatically invalidated.
The first brexit promise to be walked back happened less than an hour after the results - by the end of the weekend they had walked back every promise they made, with zero intention of making any of them happen. That alone ought to invalidate the result.
Now it's possible that leave could win without those lies - but I strongly doubt it, failing to implement (or at least table legislation) to achieve a promise made should invalidate the election and lead to an automatic revote.
>Picking between the UK and US electoral systems is like narrowing yourself to a choice between Stalin and Hitler as your leader when you could instead go with a 3rd option and just have Churchill.
While I thoroughly agree with your post - your choice of a 'good' third choice was terrible. Churchill was one of the worst leaders in world history. He willfully starved over 3 million children in India and when called out for it said 'let the Indians learn to take care of themselves, like we did' - which ignored that they HAD. The Indian government had over thousands of years developed a system to protect themselves from famines during that part of the monsoon cycle where you get several years of consecutive drought (which comes around ever few decades). They mandated a minimum percentage of crops be storeable crops (grains generally) which were kept in central storage locations and handed out in times of drought. It was Britain who dismantled this system - the empire demanded cash crops like cotton over storeable food crops like grains, and didn't store anything for droughts. When drought inevitably came - it came with famines. The one under Churchill was merely the last one - in total the British dismantling of India's food security program killed close to 20 million people (mostly children) over numerous famines. He was also the first head of state to ever use chemical weapons - and he used them on civilians.
In short - Churchil was a truly terrible person, he only looks good because the guy opposite him is literally Hitler.
Don't you still have it for talking during the movies ? Is there no justice in the world ?
That's an interesting scenario - but it may not strictly violate either. A reimplementation is generally deemed not to violate copyright or constitute plagiarism. This is one reason why Stallman argues (and I agree) that we need more refined copyright laws that differentiates between different types of information and works. It doesn't make sense to apply the same rules to a novel, a painting, a technical manual, an engineering schematic and a software program. They all have entirely different economics, different ways in which copying and creating derivatives change the social-good and usefullness and commercial value.
There is no reasonable reason, for example, to allow derivative works of editorial articles - if anything such could be used to utterly misrepresent the original author's ideas and actually cause a social harm, on the other hand they are definitely something which SHOULD be subjected to satire.
It is entirely possible to commit plagiarism without copying anything - but it's not possible to violate copyright law without copying something. Using a source in your thesis is not copyright violation - especially if you don't quote it directly but merely restate what you learned as part of your new argument, but it can still be plagiarism if you fail to cite the source. You may or may not face criminal charges for that - but you sure as hell can expect to get kicked out of university if you're caught.
Then, on top of this, there is the fact that both copyright and plagiarism laws are extremely inconsistently enforced. If they weren't Rand Paul would have been charged - he was caught, and the evidence is easily visible, with multiple occasions of flagrantly copying other people's work and presenting it as his own for commercial and political gain, which is clearly both plagiarism and copyright violation.
I understand that most places do not have criminal sanctions for plagiarism - but that doesn't mean it's legal or not a crime, it just means it isn't punished. This is not unusual. Portugal has effectively legalized all drugs yet there isn't a single one of the drugs in the UN anti-drug treaty (of which Portugal is a signatory) which is not against the law - it's just that they do not punish you. If you're caught with any drug you are requested to attend an (entirely voluntary) counselling session. Should you choose to go - they will give you a questionaire and ultimately categorize you as 'addict', 'recreational' or 'one-time' user. Depending on the categorisation they will recommend a follow up - from excellent rehab programs to just saying 'be careful - it's better if you don't use it again'. But again - the follow ups are also voluntary. Rehab is free for addicts if you choose to go, nobody will force you. No jail sentence. No threats. It's even all done anonymously so your employment cannot be put at risk (interestingly it's been remarkably successful - since instituting the program Portugal cut heroine abuse by 90% - from one of the worst heroine problems on earth to one of the lowest).
Which is all a really elaborate example of how something can be a crime without carrying any criminal sanctions or penalties. If the aim of the law is to discourage some kind of behaviour - then punishment is not always the most effective way to do that. In the case of plagiarism actually jailing or fining people is probably not the most effective way to discourage it. Firstly universities will usually kick out students caught plagiarising, and publishers generally fire people who get caught doing that - so there's already a pretty strong disincentive in society, it's debateable if criminal sanctions would add anything significant to that. Laws can get even more complex - copyright is a criminal offense in some cases and in some jurisdictions and a purely civil offence in others, ditto plagiarism. In South Africa you can be criminally prosecuted and fined for plagiarism but non-commercial copyright violation is a purely civil offense. In some places plagiarism is part of the same law, in other places it's a separate law entirely.
But to the best of my knowledge - nowhere is it a legal activity.
>Plagiarism may be a moral offense, but is it a legal offense? In your jurisdiction?
If your jurisdiction is a signatory to the Berne Convention then yes, it's a legal offence there.
That I have no problem with, at least if it's sufficiently minimal so as to not be a de facto slave labour force. 2 years should be an upper limit. Germany has such a system and it works fantastically - young kids perform service (at a low but decent pay) in areas of their interest and walk away with some real work experence between graduating school or university and hitting the job market. A German friend of mine who is now a programmer did his service in the government IT department for example.
But the military is a different beast altogether and I have issues with forcing anybody into that. The US allowed exception to the forced combat during the draft years only for people who were from pacifist religions generally. Amish and Quakers and such would become messengers or radio operators instead - which was still military but at least didn't pull triggers themselves. I'm not entirely sure what the US laws around conscientious objectors were - but as far as I can tell if you were an atheist pacifist like me you were fucked.
Perhaps - but contracts can be sold... that just means you have no idea WHO will be collecting your firstborn.
Could be anything from a Thai brothel to ...gasp... microsoft !
For once this programmer joke is actually a very valid observation and piece of political humour as well.
Good form, Sir.
The draft got them soldiers - but taxes put bullets in their guns, fuel in their tanks and food in their stomachs.
For that matter - the draft is yet another thing only the government can do. When corporations do that we call it slavery.
>one major improvement (IMO) in the last 50 years has been the abolishment of compulsory military service in the US. Maybe that won't last, but I do think it's worth a few extra tax dollars to not have to give up an arbitrary number of children to "the front lines," and we should try to keep it that way.
I absolutely agree. Compulsory military service is an abomination. Nobody should ever be forced to kill - even legally with government sanction - who did not volunteer to bare the terrible burden that entails.
>Maybe we can just "recruit" them with Call of Duty EULA clauses now?
With the degree of crony capitalism and public private partnerships in the US... this is a frighteningly real possiblity.