How many sexual harassment lawsuits are filed by women in the work place vs lawsuits filed by men? Specifically, how many sexual harassment lawsuits are filed by women in the work force against their own employer, while the harassment came from some other employee? This is just one example, and it's a result of government policy. Same with governments interfering with contractual agreements on items like maternity leave, etc.
Re:i never understood this thinking
on
Sexism In Science
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· Score: -1
affirmative action... corrective hiring policies... progressive tax rates... why are they so hostile to these ideas?
destruction of individual freedoms and destruction of fairness (there is nothing fair or Free about income related taxes, there is nothing free about government telling a person who he must hire, how he must hire, who he cannot hire, etc.) This is all immorality and theft that eventually leads to growth of government power and flight of capital thus leading to economic collapse.
Women cost more to employ in totality and thus their salaries will be lower because of it. Women cost more to employ, they are a special protected class with various entitlements in the system, all mandated by governments and thus they cost more. Just the liability costs alone are infinitely higher for women than for men based on number of lawsuits brought up against employers, when in fact it is some other employee at work who may (or may not) have acted in a way that was deemed good enough to file a lawsuit.
Women cost more historically as well, as they tend to spend more time on things other than work, taking time from work to tend after children, things of that nature. Women cost more to employ and as long as that holds true their wages have to take this into account.
I don't know if self-driving cars will "never" swerve, that's a bold statement for you to make, you don't know what real life conditions can do to all that equipment and programming.
People are generally stupid, mostly ignorant and irrational creatures. However while it's rational not to trust humans in general, you cannot argue for trusting automated driving anymore than you can trust humans.
First of all automated driving is also designed and implemented by humans, secondly even the dumbest, most ignorant human out there will most likely beat a self-driving system under conditions that are not taken into account by the designers and developers of self-driving cars.
Also realise that we have to trust people on daily basis. You mostly trust that the food that you'll buy and eat in a store or a restaurant won't kill you, you mostly trust that somebody doing construction on a street won't drop a wall on you, you trust that you won't get shot in the head by most people you are going to meet in your life, etc.
Basically you are talking about statistics here, and if you take your issue of not trusting human drivers to its logical conclusion, you shouldn't trust any humans around you to do anything at all. Yet there you are, sitting in front of a computer, trusting that it won't explode into your face and won't burn your house down, etc.
1. Hong Kong 2. Singapore 3. Australia 4. New Zealand 5. Switzerland 6. Canada 7. Chile 8. Mauritius 9. Ireland 10. USA
The problem for USA is not even the ranking itself, it's the direction that it is taking. In 2008 USA was number 5 on that list, today it's number 10. I am certain that just 4 decades ago USA would have been way above everybody else on that list and 100 years ago comparing it to other countries would have been simply impossible, there was nobody with similar freedoms at all.
Unless there is a government somehow helping you, then your competitors have to compete with you on the merit of your and their business model.
If your competitors cannot compete with you while you are not getting any preferential treatment by the government, then congratulations, you are providing the market with excellent goods and services at excellent prices, so that creates a barrier to entry possibly that is too high for any new entries into that industry at that point in time but it doesn't mean that there won't be any new efficiencies found later on that would allow others to compete. A government involvement does mean that.
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What you are missing is that artificial "competition" created by laws such as this 'anti-trust' nonsense is not about helping you. It's not about helping consumers, clients, customers, whatever, it's about helping some special interest.
Why should a new competitor be necessarily successful? If they can't provide the market with a better offer, why should they succeed? There is no reason for it, the customers are not there for their offer, so they shouldn't be wasting scarce resources, the resources should be allocated for something more useful, that's what the market says.
The gov't says: no, we want this artificial competition, which WILL end up raising prices and lowering quality for the consumers, customers, clients, users.
You don't think so? Again, Standard Oil is an example, same with Alcoa Aluminium, all these examples that the 'left' likes to use to make a case in favour of the anti-trust laws, they are oblivious to the fact that the people who suffer from them are the actual end customers and it's done by gov't.... for the purpose of? Money. Who gets the money, the contributions, the bribes, everything that is known as corruption.
The reality of if of-course is that it is just a power-grab by the governments, nothing else.
Google cannot be a monopoly without governments of the world protecting it from competition. Google can be a large scale business, an economy of scale, but it is not a monopoly until it can get laws on its side to destroy competition, be it via licensing, be it via different tax code loopholes, be it via gov't just nationalising it, whatever. Any kind of advantage that a company gets due to gov't interference creates either a monopoly or some form of oligopoly.
As to Google giving its own services preferential treatment - it's up to users to decide whether to use Google, whether its results are trust worthy or not. This type of attitude that government must be able to control business is destructive to the market. So if Google gets fined a huge amount, who does this really help?
Trace the money. The money will end up in some politicians' pockets directly or indirectly and there will be various special interests involved.
Actually this is a perfect example of why gov't shouldn't be allowed to interfere with the marketplace, it's very similar to Standard Oil, which was an economy of scale but was not a monopoly. By 1911, when it was broken up, there were 150 competitors in the field. Standard Oil had only 4% of market in 1869, the price for a gallon of refined oil was 30 cents. Standard Oil consistently pushed prices lower and lower by finding efficiencies, by investing in new technologies.
By 1899 the price of a gallon of oil was already 5.9 cents.
Once Standard Oil was broken up, the prices never went down again. The government helped a bunch of special interests to enter the field, claiming that it was a victory for 'fairness' I guess, but what it did not tell anybody is that the gov't destroyed a very successful economy of scale and gave a way to a few more companies in the field but it also set a price floor basically under oil by doing it, none of the smaller companies could afford the economies of scale needed to take prices even lower.
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Google is too visible, it's too wealthy and thus the politicians of the world see it as a great target for its Mafiosi type of a move - governments are in a racketeering business, that's all it is.
The DHS and other government agencies are doing just fine, killing the free market, they don't need more reasons to do it. Their main reasons are that they want to control everybody's lives completely so that the population can be used as a pool of slaves to feast upon for the political elite.
Of-course it's part of nature, humans are part of nature, but actually I don't even mean to say that market is only about humans.
Free market is about humans as much as it is about any other living creatures OR not living things. It is about living things, that's Darwinism - survival of the fittest given the current environment.
You see, there is no government that decides how a creature would adopt to the changing environment, it happens automatically and randomly, the selection process is amoral, there are no decisions made on any moral grounds, it's all about who is fit best for the conditions.
In terms of non-living things, you can say it's just entropy. Chemically and physically speaking, again, there are no morals attached, no judgement, it's only about the minimum expenditure of resources and there isn't even any particular goal.
The difference, I think, between the humans and other such systems is that humans do have a goal in mind - more leisure, less work, more entertainment, less effort, more things that allow us to enjoy life I would say and fewer things that prevent us from enjoying life.
We have a goal - more enjoyment of life. That's the goal. For different people it means different things, for somebody it means pursuit of knowledge and for somebody else it means pursuit of... I don't know, pussy?
So we have goals, we set goals, that's the difference. But how we achieve our goals is again, laws and mechanisms that nature provides: we try to use the minimum effort, the minimum amount of resources to get the best outcome.
Anybody trying to put in more resources for outcomes that are not even desired by the people is interfering with this process. The law is that they will cause misery and failure, they will raise the pries, reduce the quality, they will prevent and destroy efficiencies.
Basically government interference with the market is government interference with the natural law of thermodynamics, if that law had a purpose. As humans we do have our purpose: more enjoyment in life. Thermodynamics in physics doesn't have any 'purpose', it just is.
It's a false claim by the story and Richardson 'academic' that government decreased cost of something, the true story is that government was overpaying for He for decades, creating a stockpile that it ended up not using. The gov't stole the tax payer money and then stole the resource that the market was providing from the same people by buying the gas at inflated (no pun) prices.
Eventually the gov't decided it had a commodity that it couldn't actually use for much of anything and allowed the market to set the price, which immediately fell. So it's not the case that gov't initially caused the prices to be lower, quite the opposite, in order to prevent the market from using all that Helium and to build up that resource, it way overpaid for the gas.
It is nonsense that prices are kept artificially low by government, they were kept artificially high by US gov't until 1996, when US gov't decided to stop gov't intervention in He production and storage. Just like most people, who don't understand economics, you and the 'academic' in question are talking about natural gas mining AS IF it is subsidised by gov't, it's not.
In FACT the prices for natural gas fell sharply in USA over the decade. Here is an interactive graph, set the scale to 10 years. It's a hard to store and transport commodity, many companies went out of business. There is NO shortage of Helium, that's what the market says. The market in USA also says that there is (right now) no shortage of natural gas.
Here, I'll make it easier for you (I don't know if you can understand the easier version either, but hey, I'll try).
Helium is almost fully extracted from natural gas, which is mined for its other uses (like fuel production), and so if He is not collected from natural gas production, there won't be almost ANY supply of He available at any price.
So by creating an artificial price floor for He all you are going to accomplish is this: the consumption will be much lower and production will mostly cease to exist, which means Helium is going to be RELEASED INTO THE ATMOSPHERE and that's it, it's gone. The entire process of He extraction may be scrapped and there will be no way of getting any of it. So your MRI costs will go up, enjoy.
So these 'academics' then should buy all the helium and preserve it if they are worried, because at this point the price for He is low and the market sets the price.
This Richardson person wants the market to artificially increase the price of He by a factor of 20. Who is this dude that he thinks he can dictate to the world how it must use its resources?
Let me put it this way, if the market decided to blow up the planet, nobody could prevent it, it would just happen. Using He for balloons may just mean that the planet will blow up later on because of more wars, who knows, but it's not up to anybody to dictate to all people how they should live and die.
I like your sarcasm, but let me answer your comment AS IF you were making a serious one, so don't take it the wrong way, but I am going to pretend you wrote a serious comment.
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Getting the government to agree that shutting down all the coal burning power plants is impossible, but that doesn't mean that cannot be shut down by force.
- and then what? So you shut down all the coal and oil power plants in USA, then what are you going to do for electricity exactly? Some houses use oil or coal even for heating.
Nuclear power has to be the goal, the gov't has to relax regulations around all things nuclear.
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Similarly, getting the government to decide "no more cars" would be impossible, but destruction of some bridges would make car commuting next to impossible and therefore decrease the use of cars overnight.
- finally, getting gov't out of infrastructure would be helpful in the sense, that it would be done privately with much more thought in terms of meaningful infrastructure that generates profits.
However look at you, you are like Krugman, he wants a war (or an alien invasion), he thinks it will save the economy. You think DESTROYING ASSETS is going save the planet.
News for you: if you destroy assets, you'll create a worse situation. You think destroying bridges is going to stop people from driving? HA! It will only stop them from driving on those bridges, but also it will create more pollution, because there will be ferries, and even more ppl will idle their cars waiting for ferries.
As far as the government is concerned, the most environmentally friendly thing that could be done would be a war with China.
- and just like Krugman, who thinks a war will help the economy, you think war will help the environment.
Stop all shipments of stuff from China immediately. The end result would be a lot less CO2 emissions. I do not think this is likely.
- the result would be MUCH MORE CO2 emissions, because with China you are getting products that are produced by the economy of scale with all the modern tools created and bought with the most capital available.
USA doesn't have capital, the QE3 announcement by the Fed includes provisions to buy 40Billion USD per month in MORTGAGES (just directly buying mortgages, packaged by banks or maybe by pension funds, whatever, it's not even about guarantees anymore, it's about buying up mortgages) and it will be done with counterfeit money.
So this means USA has nothing, there is no production there is also no credit. Restarting serious production in USA that is currently done in China will take an extraordinary effort and it WILL BE VERY ENVIRONMENTALLY DESTRUCTIVE.
What did you think? The manufacturing process is very much front-loaded with various environmental hazards, toxins, poisons, CO2, whatever. It's front-loaded, because at first, when you have no savings, you are going to start from scratch. You like burning coal for steel production instead of using electric arc furnaces? That's the way it's going to go down at first. USA will produce much more pollution when it will restart its production (and it will have to) than China will be producing at that same period of time, because China is going to be much further on in terms of capital investment.
Capitalism and free market move from dirt and pollution towards cleaner industry, that happens as the economy improves and wealth grows.
As the economy gets destroyed and wealth shrinks, you go back to the dirty ways of doing whatever it is you are doing.
Well, what can be done is the government could relax various regulations surrounding the nuclear power. It could give a go ahead to building nuclear power plants, if anything can be done by humans, it's this.
I will never get tired of repeating this (though right now I am very tired, I had to be up all night, not work related).
Copyrights and patents must be abolished, there is no question about it.
Next thing you know, you are going to "buy" a DVD and it's going to be a blank screen with a sentence in it describing that you didn't really buy anything (which is basically true then).
He should be careful advertising this way, he is going to get a nasty visit from some folks with FDA badges, and they will shut him down, they will require years of study of this that or other, they will want him to buy licenses and to pay for studies, they will screw him over big time. If anything he buys comes across state lines, it could be even worse. I wish him luck, he should expand and become the next Walmart of Seaweed.
The carriers are expensive, they are expensive to build but they very expensive to operate. Carriers are the modern version of the ancient Roman armies marching and fighting for years at a time.
Just like those armies could not be sustained by the dying economy of the ancient empire, same will be true of these aircraft carriers. They are too expensive and that will be the weapon that will take them down. Not missiles, not submarines - money.
No, unions do not increase market efficiency, every employee is a separate case, everybody's employment contract needs to be negotiated individually for highest efficiency. However an employer that has a union forming in his business can choose to negotiate with the union, it's his choice, he also has the right to association.
This breaks down completely once the laws are set up in a way that prevent employer from being able to dis-associate himself from that union.
You want to set up a union in your work-place, you have that right. But the employer must still be able to fire you, because he may not want to deal with the union. Once the gov't gets involved, it's usually on the side of the employee, and then laws are created that turn unions into monopolies for labour, that's what I am talking about.
If you are a public sector worker. Nice going, taking my comment out of context.
I have no problem with PRIVATE sector unions, as long as they don't get the special entitlements from the government that force special obligations upon the employers.
So for example, AFAIC you DO have a right to unionise, that's your right of association, but only if you are working in the private sector. However the employer has the right to refuse to deal with the union. The employer still must have the right to fire everybody he wants, nobody has a right to a job to be provided at the expense of some employer.
However if you are a public sector worker, you are not working in the free market, you are already part of the monopoly system set up by the government, and just like in the army, they lose some right while they are working there.
The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service, wrote in 1937 to the head of the National Federation of Federal Employees. In the private sector, organized employees and the employer meet across the bargaining table as (theoretical) equals. But in the public sector, said FDR, "the employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress." Allowing public-employee unions to engage in collective bargaining would mean opening the door to the manipulation of government policy by a privileged private interest.
Unions are monopoly on labour, and government does not crack down on their illegal practices clearly, especially government unions, that shouldn't even exist. If you are a government monopoly, you shouldn't have the right to unionise but even if you do have a public sector union, then you shouldn't be able to hold people hostage with a strike.
Teachers do not want to be evaluated based on performance, that's what unions are afraid - to allow teachers to be graded (just like they grade students, nice hypocrisy right there).
Slashdot Mirror
How many sexual harassment lawsuits are filed by women in the work place vs lawsuits filed by men? Specifically, how many sexual harassment lawsuits are filed by women in the work force against their own employer, while the harassment came from some other employee? This is just one example, and it's a result of government policy. Same with governments interfering with contractual agreements on items like maternity leave, etc.
affirmative action ... ... ...
corrective hiring policies
progressive tax rates
why are they so hostile to these ideas?
destruction of individual freedoms and destruction of fairness (there is nothing fair or Free about income related taxes, there is nothing free about government telling a person who he must hire, how he must hire, who he cannot hire, etc.) This is all immorality and theft that eventually leads to growth of government power and flight of capital thus leading to economic collapse.
Women cost more to employ in totality and thus their salaries will be lower because of it. Women cost more to employ, they are a special protected class with various entitlements in the system, all mandated by governments and thus they cost more. Just the liability costs alone are infinitely higher for women than for men based on number of lawsuits brought up against employers, when in fact it is some other employee at work who may (or may not) have acted in a way that was deemed good enough to file a lawsuit.
Women cost more historically as well, as they tend to spend more time on things other than work, taking time from work to tend after children, things of that nature. Women cost more to employ and as long as that holds true their wages have to take this into account.
I don't know if self-driving cars will "never" swerve, that's a bold statement for you to make, you don't know what real life conditions can do to all that equipment and programming.
Humans on the other hand will swerve.
- however this part is definitely true.
I don't trust them at all. I'd feel much safer if manual driving was illegal.
- I know exactly what you mean.
People are generally stupid, mostly ignorant and irrational creatures. However while it's rational not to trust humans in general, you cannot argue for trusting automated driving anymore than you can trust humans.
First of all automated driving is also designed and implemented by humans, secondly even the dumbest, most ignorant human out there will most likely beat a self-driving system under conditions that are not taken into account by the designers and developers of self-driving cars.
Also realise that we have to trust people on daily basis. You mostly trust that the food that you'll buy and eat in a store or a restaurant won't kill you, you mostly trust that somebody doing construction on a street won't drop a wall on you, you trust that you won't get shot in the head by most people you are going to meet in your life, etc.
Basically you are talking about statistics here, and if you take your issue of not trusting human drivers to its logical conclusion, you shouldn't trust any humans around you to do anything at all. Yet there you are, sitting in front of a computer, trusting that it won't explode into your face and won't burn your house down, etc.
Obviously it's about freedom.
Here is the ranking
1. Hong Kong
2. Singapore
3. Australia
4. New Zealand
5. Switzerland
6. Canada
7. Chile
8. Mauritius
9. Ireland
10. USA
The problem for USA is not even the ranking itself, it's the direction that it is taking. In 2008 USA was number 5 on that list, today it's number 10. I am certain that just 4 decades ago USA would have been way above everybody else on that list and 100 years ago comparing it to other countries would have been simply impossible, there was nobody with similar freedoms at all.
I see that as a very valid reason to move.
Unless there is a government somehow helping you, then your competitors have to compete with you on the merit of your and their business model.
If your competitors cannot compete with you while you are not getting any preferential treatment by the government, then congratulations, you are providing the market with excellent goods and services at excellent prices, so that creates a barrier to entry possibly that is too high for any new entries into that industry at that point in time but it doesn't mean that there won't be any new efficiencies found later on that would allow others to compete. A government involvement does mean that.
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What you are missing is that artificial "competition" created by laws such as this 'anti-trust' nonsense is not about helping you. It's not about helping consumers, clients, customers, whatever, it's about helping some special interest.
Why should a new competitor be necessarily successful? If they can't provide the market with a better offer, why should they succeed? There is no reason for it, the customers are not there for their offer, so they shouldn't be wasting scarce resources, the resources should be allocated for something more useful, that's what the market says.
The gov't says: no, we want this artificial competition, which WILL end up raising prices and lowering quality for the consumers, customers, clients, users.
You don't think so? Again, Standard Oil is an example, same with Alcoa Aluminium, all these examples that the 'left' likes to use to make a case in favour of the anti-trust laws, they are oblivious to the fact that the people who suffer from them are the actual end customers and it's done by gov't.... for the purpose of? Money. Who gets the money, the contributions, the bribes, everything that is known as corruption.
The reality of if of-course is that it is just a power-grab by the governments, nothing else.
Google cannot be a monopoly without governments of the world protecting it from competition. Google can be a large scale business, an economy of scale, but it is not a monopoly until it can get laws on its side to destroy competition, be it via licensing, be it via different tax code loopholes, be it via gov't just nationalising it, whatever. Any kind of advantage that a company gets due to gov't interference creates either a monopoly or some form of oligopoly.
As to Google giving its own services preferential treatment - it's up to users to decide whether to use Google, whether its results are trust worthy or not. This type of attitude that government must be able to control business is destructive to the market. So if Google gets fined a huge amount, who does this really help?
Trace the money. The money will end up in some politicians' pockets directly or indirectly and there will be various special interests involved.
Actually this is a perfect example of why gov't shouldn't be allowed to interfere with the marketplace, it's very similar to Standard Oil, which was an economy of scale but was not a monopoly. By 1911, when it was broken up, there were 150 competitors in the field. Standard Oil had only 4% of market in 1869, the price for a gallon of refined oil was 30 cents. Standard Oil consistently pushed prices lower and lower by finding efficiencies, by investing in new technologies.
By 1899 the price of a gallon of oil was already 5.9 cents.
Once Standard Oil was broken up, the prices never went down again. The government helped a bunch of special interests to enter the field, claiming that it was a victory for 'fairness' I guess, but what it did not tell anybody is that the gov't destroyed a very successful economy of scale and gave a way to a few more companies in the field but it also set a price floor basically under oil by doing it, none of the smaller companies could afford the economies of scale needed to take prices even lower.
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Google is too visible, it's too wealthy and thus the politicians of the world see it as a great target for its Mafiosi type of a move - governments are in a racketeering business, that's all it is.
The DHS and other government agencies are doing just fine, killing the free market, they don't need more reasons to do it. Their main reasons are that they want to control everybody's lives completely so that the population can be used as a pool of slaves to feast upon for the political elite.
Of-course it's part of nature, humans are part of nature, but actually I don't even mean to say that market is only about humans.
Free market is about humans as much as it is about any other living creatures OR not living things. It is about living things, that's Darwinism - survival of the fittest given the current environment.
You see, there is no government that decides how a creature would adopt to the changing environment, it happens automatically and randomly, the selection process is amoral, there are no decisions made on any moral grounds, it's all about who is fit best for the conditions.
In terms of non-living things, you can say it's just entropy. Chemically and physically speaking, again, there are no morals attached, no judgement, it's only about the minimum expenditure of resources and there isn't even any particular goal.
The difference, I think, between the humans and other such systems is that humans do have a goal in mind - more leisure, less work, more entertainment, less effort, more things that allow us to enjoy life I would say and fewer things that prevent us from enjoying life.
We have a goal - more enjoyment of life. That's the goal. For different people it means different things, for somebody it means pursuit of knowledge and for somebody else it means pursuit of... I don't know, pussy?
So we have goals, we set goals, that's the difference. But how we achieve our goals is again, laws and mechanisms that nature provides: we try to use the minimum effort, the minimum amount of resources to get the best outcome.
Anybody trying to put in more resources for outcomes that are not even desired by the people is interfering with this process. The law is that they will cause misery and failure, they will raise the pries, reduce the quality, they will prevent and destroy efficiencies.
Basically government interference with the market is government interference with the natural law of thermodynamics, if that law had a purpose. As humans we do have our purpose: more enjoyment in life. Thermodynamics in physics doesn't have any 'purpose', it just is.
It's a false claim by the story and Richardson 'academic' that government decreased cost of something, the true story is that government was overpaying for He for decades, creating a stockpile that it ended up not using. The gov't stole the tax payer money and then stole the resource that the market was providing from the same people by buying the gas at inflated (no pun) prices.
Eventually the gov't decided it had a commodity that it couldn't actually use for much of anything and allowed the market to set the price, which immediately fell. So it's not the case that gov't initially caused the prices to be lower, quite the opposite, in order to prevent the market from using all that Helium and to build up that resource, it way overpaid for the gas.
It is nonsense that prices are kept artificially low by government, they were kept artificially high by US gov't until 1996, when US gov't decided to stop gov't intervention in He production and storage. Just like most people, who don't understand economics, you and the 'academic' in question are talking about natural gas mining AS IF it is subsidised by gov't, it's not.
In FACT the prices for natural gas fell sharply in USA over the decade. Here is an interactive graph, set the scale to 10 years. It's a hard to store and transport commodity, many companies went out of business. There is NO shortage of Helium, that's what the market says. The market in USA also says that there is (right now) no shortage of natural gas.
Here, I'll make it easier for you (I don't know if you can understand the easier version either, but hey, I'll try).
Helium is almost fully extracted from natural gas, which is mined for its other uses (like fuel production), and so if He is not collected from natural gas production, there won't be almost ANY supply of He available at any price.
So by creating an artificial price floor for He all you are going to accomplish is this: the consumption will be much lower and production will mostly cease to exist, which means Helium is going to be RELEASED INTO THE ATMOSPHERE and that's it, it's gone. The entire process of He extraction may be scrapped and there will be no way of getting any of it. So your MRI costs will go up, enjoy.
So these 'academics' then should buy all the helium and preserve it if they are worried, because at this point the price for He is low and the market sets the price.
This Richardson person wants the market to artificially increase the price of He by a factor of 20. Who is this dude that he thinks he can dictate to the world how it must use its resources?
Let me put it this way, if the market decided to blow up the planet, nobody could prevent it, it would just happen. Using He for balloons may just mean that the planet will blow up later on because of more wars, who knows, but it's not up to anybody to dictate to all people how they should live and die.
Yeah, just wait until some fool talks about 'free market' in Russia and 5 other fools moderate him up from 0 to +5 Insightful.
I like your sarcasm, but let me answer your comment AS IF you were making a serious one, so don't take it the wrong way, but I am going to pretend you wrote a serious comment.
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Getting the government to agree that shutting down all the coal burning power plants is impossible, but that doesn't mean that cannot be shut down by force.
- and then what? So you shut down all the coal and oil power plants in USA, then what are you going to do for electricity exactly? Some houses use oil or coal even for heating.
Nuclear power has to be the goal, the gov't has to relax regulations around all things nuclear.
--
Similarly, getting the government to decide "no more cars" would be impossible, but destruction of some bridges would make car commuting next to impossible and therefore decrease the use of cars overnight.
- finally, getting gov't out of infrastructure would be helpful in the sense, that it would be done privately with much more thought in terms of meaningful infrastructure that generates profits.
However look at you, you are like Krugman, he wants a war (or an alien invasion), he thinks it will save the economy. You think DESTROYING ASSETS is going save the planet.
News for you: if you destroy assets, you'll create a worse situation. You think destroying bridges is going to stop people from driving? HA! It will only stop them from driving on those bridges, but also it will create more pollution, because there will be ferries, and even more ppl will idle their cars waiting for ferries.
As far as the government is concerned, the most environmentally friendly thing that could be done would be a war with China.
- and just like Krugman, who thinks a war will help the economy, you think war will help the environment.
Stop all shipments of stuff from China immediately. The end result would be a lot less CO2 emissions. I do not think this is likely.
- the result would be MUCH MORE CO2 emissions, because with China you are getting products that are produced by the economy of scale with all the modern tools created and bought with the most capital available.
USA doesn't have capital, the QE3 announcement by the Fed includes provisions to buy 40Billion USD per month in MORTGAGES (just directly buying mortgages, packaged by banks or maybe by pension funds, whatever, it's not even about guarantees anymore, it's about buying up mortgages) and it will be done with counterfeit money.
So this means USA has nothing, there is no production there is also no credit. Restarting serious production in USA that is currently done in China will take an extraordinary effort and it WILL BE VERY ENVIRONMENTALLY DESTRUCTIVE.
What did you think? The manufacturing process is very much front-loaded with various environmental hazards, toxins, poisons, CO2, whatever. It's front-loaded, because at first, when you have no savings, you are going to start from scratch. You like burning coal for steel production instead of using electric arc furnaces? That's the way it's going to go down at first. USA will produce much more pollution when it will restart its production (and it will have to) than China will be producing at that same period of time, because China is going to be much further on in terms of capital investment.
Capitalism and free market move from dirt and pollution towards cleaner industry, that happens as the economy improves and wealth grows.
As the economy gets destroyed and wealth shrinks, you go back to the dirty ways of doing whatever it is you are doing.
Well, what can be done is the government could relax various regulations surrounding the nuclear power. It could give a go ahead to building nuclear power plants, if anything can be done by humans, it's this.
People are stupid, news at 11.
There is a reason that USA wasn't founded as a direct democracy but instead as a representative Republic.
Of-course the failing of the Constitution was that it allowed for further expansion of government by not explicitly prohibiting it in every sentence.
I will never get tired of repeating this (though right now I am very tired, I had to be up all night, not work related).
Copyrights and patents must be abolished, there is no question about it.
Next thing you know, you are going to "buy" a DVD and it's going to be a blank screen with a sentence in it describing that you didn't really buy anything (which is basically true then).
He should be careful advertising this way, he is going to get a nasty visit from some folks with FDA badges, and they will shut him down, they will require years of study of this that or other, they will want him to buy licenses and to pay for studies, they will screw him over big time. If anything he buys comes across state lines, it could be even worse. I wish him luck, he should expand and become the next Walmart of Seaweed.
The carriers are expensive, they are expensive to build but they very expensive to operate. Carriers are the modern version of the ancient Roman armies marching and fighting for years at a time.
Just like those armies could not be sustained by the dying economy of the ancient empire, same will be true of these aircraft carriers. They are too expensive and that will be the weapon that will take them down. Not missiles, not submarines - money.
The cloud is not even cloudy enough.
Don't you know? Technology is about sitting on your ass in front of a glowing screen and typing some script or whatnot. That's technology.
Anything that requires you to get off your chair to do something even slightly more physically demanding is sport.
No, unions do not increase market efficiency, every employee is a separate case, everybody's employment contract needs to be negotiated individually for highest efficiency. However an employer that has a union forming in his business can choose to negotiate with the union, it's his choice, he also has the right to association.
This breaks down completely once the laws are set up in a way that prevent employer from being able to dis-associate himself from that union.
You want to set up a union in your work-place, you have that right. But the employer must still be able to fire you, because he may not want to deal with the union. Once the gov't gets involved, it's usually on the side of the employee, and then laws are created that turn unions into monopolies for labour, that's what I am talking about.
As to public sector, it should not have unions, as I said in another comment, FDR was also of that exact opinion. He was right about that.
If you are a public sector worker. Nice going, taking my comment out of context.
I have no problem with PRIVATE sector unions, as long as they don't get the special entitlements from the government that force special obligations upon the employers.
So for example, AFAIC you DO have a right to unionise, that's your right of association, but only if you are working in the private sector. However the employer has the right to refuse to deal with the union. The employer still must have the right to fire everybody he wants, nobody has a right to a job to be provided at the expense of some employer.
However if you are a public sector worker, you are not working in the free market, you are already part of the monopoly system set up by the government, and just like in the army, they lose some right while they are working there.
Actually FDR agreed with this as well, quote:
The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service, wrote in 1937 to the head of the National Federation of Federal Employees. In the private sector, organized employees and the employer meet across the bargaining table as (theoretical) equals. But in the public sector, said FDR, "the employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress." Allowing public-employee unions to engage in collective bargaining would mean opening the door to the manipulation of government policy by a privileged private interest.
Unions are monopoly on labour, and government does not crack down on their illegal practices clearly, especially government unions, that shouldn't even exist. If you are a government monopoly, you shouldn't have the right to unionise but even if you do have a public sector union, then you shouldn't be able to hold people hostage with a strike.
The people in the private sector are hit pretty hard. First of all every time a union gets a pay raise, that's an involuntary pay cut for the private sector workers, most of who do not even make as much money as these public sector union employees. Interestingly enough, the proportion of people who send their kids to private schools is higher among the public school teachers, teachers are twice as likely to send their kids to private schools than the rest of the parents! They are more familiar with the system, so they understand that the value is just not there for the kids.
Teachers do not want to be evaluated based on performance, that's what unions are afraid - to allow teachers to be graded (just like they grade students, nice hypocrisy right there).